Getting into the mood for Saturday (St. Valentine’s Day), we started out with just a couple of quick hands of the old favourite, Love Letter.  Blue took the first hand and Grey the second, however, we were still expecting a few more, so we decided to play another quick game and after a little discussion, we went for Coup.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

This is a light little card game with a lot of similarities to Mascarade, which we played last time:  on their turn, players declare they are going to take an action and other players can either claim they are a specific character and counter or challenge the active player to prove that they are who they say they are.  Basically, the actions are either: take money in various different amounts (with different risks); spend money to assassinate or perform a coup, or trade a card with the deck.  Players have two character cards face down in front of them, and when challenged correctly or assassinated/subjected to a coup, they turn one face up.  When both of a player’s cards are face up, they are out;  the winner is the last man standing.

– Image by BGG contributor jerome75

Unfortunately, Blue, who had played it quite a bit in the past got horribly muddled with the rules, largely due to the similarity between this and Mascarade, so consequently, forgot a small but quite critical rule:  when a challenge is made and the challenge is unsuccessful, the player should exchange their card with one from the deck.  Although this obviously had an impact, since everyone was playing by the same rules, it wasn’t too drastic.

– Image used with permission of BGG reviewer EndersGame

Before long, Cerise and Grey were outed as Dukes and Indigo was claiming to be a Captain and was stealing from Cerise.  “Burgundy the Brave” kept challenging, but unfortunately was wrong more than right and was soon out of the game.  When Cerise claimed to be the yet another Duke nobody believed her.  Meanwhile, Indigo was building up quite a store of cash, so Green decided it was imperative that her money supply should be cut off and assassinated Cerise proving that she had been holding two Dukes at the start.  Green’s unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Blue (who was the Contessa) left just Indigo, Grey and Blue in the game.  Indigo’s successful coup was rewarded by a prompt assassination of her final character by Blue, leaving just Blue and Grey.  Grey, as a captain was trying to collect enough money for a coup, while Blue needed just one more coin for the assassination.  So, Blue kept taking two coins in Foreign Aid and Grey immediately stole them.   It looked like Grey had it, but since Blue still had two character cards, that gave her an extra chance to collect money the game ended when she mercilessly stabbed Grey’s captain in the back.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor nad24 and nonsensicalgamers.com

We then split into two groups with the first playing the “Feature Game”, Takenoko.  The back-story for this game is that a long time ago, the Chinese Emperor offered a giant panda bear as a symbol of peace to the Japanese Emperor.  Since then, the Japanese Emperor has entrusted the members of his court (the players) with the difficult task of caring for the animal by tending to his bamboo garden.  So the players have to cultivate the different plots of land, irrigate them and grow one of the three species of bamboo (Green, Yellow and Pink) with the help of the Imperial Gardener.  The winner is the player who grows the most bamboo, managing his land plots best while feeding the Panda.

– Image by BGG contributor woodenbricks

The play area starts with one single hexagonal “pond” tile with two characters on top:  the Imperial Gardener and the Panda.  On their turns players first determine the weather, then perform their actions.  The weather is determined by a roll of the weather die, which give the active player some sort of bonus.  For example, when the sun shines, the payer gets an extra action, and rain stimulates the bamboo of their choice to grow.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Oceluna

Once the weather has been determined, the player can perform two actions.  These must be different and the player can choose freely from the five available.  Firstly, the player can add a new bamboo plot, by drawing three hexagonal tiles from the face down stack and choosing one to place.  This tile must be placed next to the starting “pond” tile or adjacent to two plots already in play.  There are also “improvements” which are sometimes built into the plot, but can also be obtained by rolling the weather die and can be played at any time.  The second option is to take an irrigation channel.  These can be played straight away or stored for later use, but bamboo only grows on irrigated plots.  The main way to irrigate a plot is by connecting them to the pond via channels.

– Image by BGG contributor woodenbricks

Alternatively, a player can move one of the characters, either the Imperial Gardener or the Panda.  Both move over any number of plots, in a straight line, but when they reach their destination, their action is different.  The Panda cannot resist bamboo, so will eat one segment of bamboo from the plot he lands on (the pieces are stored on the player’s individual board); the Imperial Gardener encourages the bamboo to grow, and the bamboo on the plot he lands on grows by one segment as does every adjacent tile growing bamboo of the same colour (as long as they are irrigated).

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor lacxox

Finally, the active player can draw an objective card and add it to their hand;  there is a hand-limit of five and these are the only way to score points.  There are three types of objectives, those related to Plots, the Gardener and the Panda.  Plot objective cards yield points to players when certain plot configurations are irrigated; Gardener cards are achieved when bamboo of given height are grown in the right spaces and points for Panda cards are awarded when a player has managed to encourage the Panda to eat the requisite number of coloured bamboo segments.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor ObeyMyBrain

When a player completes one of their objectives, they show everyone and the card is placed face up in front of them.  They can complete as many objectives as they like on their turn and end of the game is triggered when one player full-fills a set number of objectives, after which, everyone gets one last turn.  The game was really tight from start to finish and every time one player got a nose in front, the others seemed to catch up and over-take, only to be leap-frogged themselves.  The game finished with just three points separating first and last place, with Burgundy just pipping Indigo.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

While half the group were Playing with Pandas, Green persuaded everyone else to give Lancaster another go.  This is a longer game which embodies a few very clever ideas and that we played for the first time a few weeks ago.  The basics of the game are that players take it in turns to place their knights in the shires, in their castle or send them off to war.  They then vote on and evaluate “the Laws” which give players a benefit.  They then get their their rewards for knight placement.  After five rounds, the player with the most points wins.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor kilroy_locke

One of the clever things about the knight placement is the way that players can usurp a knight that has already been placed, by supplementing him with a number of squires.  So, a knight of level two can be replaced by a night of level one with two squires.  However, squires are “single use”, so should the original player decide to respond with a level four knight, the other player’s squires are lost.  This is a very clever way of speeding up the bidding.  For example, in Keyflower, two players can keep bidding in increments of one which means it may take several turns for the outcome to be resolved.  In Lancaster, a failed bid that is repeated at a higher level may turn out to be considerably more costly than bidding higher the first time round.  This encourages players to be a smarter about their bidding and changes the dynamics a little too.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

One of the key parts of Lancaster is “the Laws” and managing them.  On our previous play, we didn’t really get to grips with them at all.  Although it is now clear to us how important they are, we are still only just getting to grips with them.  The game starts with a set of three Laws, with three to be voted on during the round.  Since there is a conveyor-belt system, it is possible that some Laws will remain in place for several rounds.  This means even if a particular Law does not reward a player during the round it becomes active, they may benefit in subsequent rounds.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor kilroy_locke

This game was quite different to the last:  firstly, as a group, we had a better idea of rules, and secondly, there were only three of us compared with five before.  Blue was too busy worrying about the game on the next table to concentrate on the rule-reminder, and paid for it in the first round when her plan relied on the rewards coming before the Laws.  Green tried to increase his force and then generate benefits by fighting the French, however, with fewer players, it is much more difficult to win the battles which means your knights are tied up for a lot longer.  Having screwed up the first round, Blue didn’t bother trying to increase all her knights to full force and tried to be a bit more canny about how she used them instead and pick up upgrades by other means.  Meanwhile, Grey, who had not played the game before, tried to build up his stack of noblemen and played the laws.  Blue and Green were far too bothered with their own games to notice, but Grey managed to get the eight point Law for having three knights in the shires voted in.  More importantly, he managed to keep it there, and this combined with a respectable number of nobles and a few uncontested visits to Somerset (giving him six victory points each time) eventually gave him the game by a sizeable margin from Blue.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

Meanwhile, the Panda Players had finished so Burgundy and Cerise squeezed in a quick two player game of Coloretto.  Cerise and Burgundy had played this last month with Blue and Indigo, but it is not generally thought of as a good two player game.  Nevertheless, they gave it a go and found it much more enjoyable than expected.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Bizowikc

With Grey and Cerise’s departure, that left just time for one last, shortish game, Taluva. This is a fairly simple tile laying game with a surprising amount of depth.  The idea is that on their turn, players place their tile, then place a building then replenish their hand.  This procedure is to that of Carcassonne, but that is where the comparison ends.  The tiles are a strange dodecagon made of three hexagonal regions or fields, one of which is always a volcano.  When placing tiles, they can be adjacent or on top of other tiles so long as the volcano sits on top of another volcano (the tile must also cover more than one tile and there cannot be an overhang).

– Image by BGG contributor Purple

Buildings can be placed anywhere, provided that they obeys certain rules.  Unfortunately, although the game is beautiful, the theme is a bit sparse making these rules appear very arbitrary which has the consequence that they are quite difficult to remember.  A hut can be built on any unoccupied level one terrain that isn’t a volcano.  On the other hand, an existing settlement can be expanded by placing huts on all adjacent terrains of one type, with more huts placed on the higher levels (two on the level two etc.).  There are also three temples and two towers to place which can only be added to existing settlements:  temples must be added to settlements covering at least three fields, while towers must be placed on a level three field adjacent to a settlement of any size.

– Image by BGG contributor Moviebuffs

The game ends when there are no tiles left and the winner is the player to have placed the most temples at the end of the game.  In case of a tie, the number of towers built counts and then the number of huts.  However, if a player succeeds in building all buildings from
two out of the three different types before the game end, then he immediately wins the game.  On the other hand, any player who squanders his building pieces and is unable to build any more is immediately eliminated.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

We played this a while ago as a two player game, so it was interesting to see how it played with more.  As last time, we had a thorough going through of the rules with all the weird exceptions and special cases (e.g. players cannot build a temple in a settlement that already has one, however, it is OK to join two settlements with temples together; you can place a tile on top of huts, but not towers or temples etc.).  The game was very close and it looked like Blue was going to make it, however, Green and Burgundy ganged up on her and Green managed to sneak the win with the last tile.

– Image by BGG contributor Moviebuffs

Learning Outcome:  Two three-player games are sometimes better than one six-player game.