This week we started out debating the poor performance of the England Rugby team compared with Ireland who had hitherto failed to beat a team in the top ten, but were still likely to go through to the quarter final stage of the world cup (thanks largely to the vagaries of the draw).  While Blue and Pink finished their pizza Magenta, the Dobble Queen, schooled everyone else in a quick round of Dobble, before we split into two groups.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor msaari

The first group played Grog Island.  This is an unusual game that it quite hard to get your head round because a lot is going on.  The theme centers on retiring pirates who are trying to work out how to spend their ill-gotten gains. The game is played on a board that represents the five peninsulas of “Grog Island”, which is where pirates that have survived to retirement can go to invest their spoils by buying pirate-like properties.  The key feature however is the innovative bidding mechanism.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

On their turn, the active player rolls five coloured dice, and then places their first bid.  Bids are placed by selecting any number of the dice with the value of the bid equal to the sum of the number of pips on the upper-most face of the dice.  The bid must be less than the players total amount of gold.  The clever part of the bidding is that the dice that form the bid are placed in descending order, with each dice placed in one of the five available spaces, starting on the left with the highest value dice. If they can afford it, the next player may increase the bid, by increasing the total number of pips visible on the dice.  To do this they can add dice, replace dice, even completely rearrange the order of the dice, so long they do not change the number on any die and the dice remain arranged in descending order starting from the left.  The position and colour of the dice have a number of consequences, both for the eventual winning bidder, and for players who withdraw from the round early.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Wout

The player who eventually wins the bid gets to carry out the actions associated with the dice according to their final position.  These include placing pirates on the island and blocking spaces on the island, but the peninsula is restricted to the colour of the die placed in the location associated with that action.  Pirates’ positions on the island are important, because these are the primary way players get points during the game, but since those points depend on the victory cards handed out at the start, everyone has a different combination of goals.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor PZS69

Losing a bid can be useful too, however, as players who drop out of the bidding early get resources corresponding to the colours of the dice in the current bid.  Thus, if the current bid is comprised of the yellow, blue and green dice, the player receives lemons (yellow), fish (blue), and coconuts (green).  These resources can then be used to carry out one of the options on the shipping track.  Black and Purple had played the game before, though always with four players.  Red on the other hand was new to it and felt a bit overwhelmed trying to get her head round everything that was going on.  For this reason, while Black and Purple began collecting victory point cards and planning a strategy, Red kept it simple and played tactically, gathering resources and using them as best she could.  It was really close and it went right down to the wire, Red finishing with thirty-three, with Black and Purple two and five points behind respectively.  The discussion at the end suggested that different tactics might be necessary with different player counts.  On the other hand, the winner was was the player who had no idea what she was doing last time we played too, so maybe keeping it simple is the way forward with this game.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Wout

Meanwhile, everyone else played the “Feature Game”, Tokaido.  This is a game where players take the role of pilgrims crossing the Japanese “East sea road”, meeting people, tasting fine meals, collecting beautiful items, discovering great panoramas, and visiting temples.  It had been Pink’s choice as he lives so far away that he rarely makes it to games nights and was able to come this time as he was on his way to Essen.  He chose the game because he had played it a couple of times with two and wanted to see how it played with more as he felt it was probably very different.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

The game is quite simple with fairly straightforward actions, but despite this there is a surprising amount to think about.  The idea is that players are travelling along a path, but only one player can stop on each space.  Each space allows the active player to carry out a predefined action which will usually give them some combination of money and/or victory points.  Since the player at the back goes first they have to choose whether to move to the closest available space and get the maximum number of moves, or whether to pick a space for its action, either to improve their own position or to obstruct someone else’s plans.  In practice of course, it is inevitably a compromise but one that is often based on marginal decisions.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor kilroy_locke

There are a number of possible actions, some of which involve drawing cards from one of the available piles with players scoring more for collecting sets.  Players can also donate money to at the temple in return for victory points, but as money is quite scarce, this can be quite difficult.  At intervals along the route there are also inns, where players have to try to buy a meal, which are worth six points, however, each meal must be different.  The first player to arrive draws a hand of meal cards which have varying costs, and they get to select which meal to buy giving them the chance to to make live very difficult for everyone else.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor changeling

At the start of the game, each player draws a character card:  Burgundy took Sasayakko; Pink got Zen-Emon, Magenta took Umegae and Blue got Eriku.  Since nobody could work out what Eriku did (he was a promotional item and came without rules), Blue drew a second card and ended up with Hiroshiga.  Sasayakko and Zen-Emon both had special powers allowing the cheaper purchases of souvenirs from the village, which meant that Burgundy and Pink were fighting for the same spaces on the path.  Umegae allowed Magenta to take an extra point and coin every time she drew an encounter card, while Hiroshiga gave Blue a free panorama card at the three intermediate inns, which ultimately gave her two of the panorama bonuses.

– Image by BGG contributor asdoriak

Since the character cards drive the strategy, Burgundy and Pink both started out collecting souvenirs while Blue went for panoramas.  Magenta was the only one who was completely new to the game and, as it is very different to anything else we’ve played, she struggled to find a strategy in the first few turns.  As Umegae ensured that she had an extra source of money, Magenta managed to avoid getting into financial difficulties and quickly built up an unassailable lead at the temple and, by buying the expensive meal cards, managed to secure that bonus too.  Money was much more of an issue for Blue as she started out with less than everyone else and really struggled to ensure she had enough to buy a meal at each of the inns.  Burgundy also had a bit of a cash-flow crisis as he was buying souvenirs at every possible opportunity, but at least he was doing well picking up points.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Pink didn’t escape financial worries either and, as he was losing out to Burgundy for the village spaces, he wasn’t picking up as many points.  The game finished with a clear win for Burgundy who’s souvenir buying strategy clearly paid off giving him a lead of ten points over second place.  It was much closer than it had looked earlier in the game however, and only two points separated Pink in second and Blue at the back.  It was a game we all enjoyed though, and it does indeed play very differently with two and “lots”, for two main reasons.  Firstly, with two players, controlling the dummy player is a key part of the game, but he is not used with three or more people.  Secondly, with more than three, some of the spaces have a sort of “siding” that can be used by a second player.  This second player is remains behind the first person to arrive, which messes with the turn order and takes a little getting used to.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Tokaido finished first, so we played a quick game of Love Letter with the winner decreed as the person with the most points when Grog Island finished.  The usual hilarity ensued as one player managed to take out another by shear blind chance using the guard, or occasionally by clever deduction.  It was all level with one hand each, when Grog Island came to an end and it all came down to the last hand which was taken by Burgundy.

– Image by BGG contributor thatmadgirl

Red and Magenta were preparing to leave, but we managed to persuade them to stay for a quick game of one of our current favourite fillers, 6 Nimmt!.  This is such a silly game:  clearly there is more to it than just chance, but none of us can really work out what, which is why it continues to keep us intrigued.  We usually play this in two rounds, each with half a deck, and typically, whoever does really well in the first round (generally Burgundy) does appallingly badly in the second.  Everything went according to the script with Burgundy winning the first round taking just the one “nimmt”, and then starting the second round picking up cards.  However, that’s where it stopped and Burgundy finished with just eight, the clear winner.

– Image by boardGOATS

With the departure of Red and Magenta, and Blue and Pink wanting an early night because they were travelling the next day, we decided to play another short game and opted for one of our current “go-to fillers”, The Game.  We’ve played this a lot recently, but only actually won once.  This time we started very, very badly indeed with nobody really having any very high or very low cards.  Then the inevitable happened and about half of us only had very high or very low cards.  We’ve known for some time that this game is a lot more difficult with more players and with five it is especially challenging.  Nevertheless, despite doing so appallingly badly at the start, the end result was not as bad as we expected and we finished with three cards left.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Learning Outcome:  Some games play very differently with different numbers of players.