Blue, Pink and Pine arrived early and while they waited for dinner to arrive, they had a quick game of Ticket to Ride Demo.  This is one of the “cut down” Ticket to Ride games which play in the same way as the full-sized versions, but are a lot shorter and often tighter.  As in the parent, players take it in turns to collect cards, or spend them to place trains on the board.  The Demo game has a double-sided map, but with events in Europe so much in the news, the Europe map was chosen.

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Pink and Pine began competing for the train-lines through the Benelux countries down to Bucharest, while Blue joined Warsaw to Madrid in the south east via a roundabout route. It was a really tight game, so much so that once the points for the tickets had been added, it was a three-way tie.  With just the Longest Continuous Path bonus to add, it was between Blue and Pine, with Blue just nicking it, to give her thirty-four points and victory.  There wasn’t time to dwell on it as Pine’s enormous platter of cheese had arrived and in that, he was definitely the victor.

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Sage was next to arrive, quickly followed by Purple and Black.  Expecting a quiet night (with lots of people away for half term) we were just deciding who was going to play what, when Lime arrived, so we split into two groups, a three and a four, with the larger group playing the “Feature Game“, PARKS.  The Nightfall expansion includes the seventeen National Parks cards that were omitted from the original base game, so these were added to the deck, though none of the other features were included in the game this time.  This is a game that Burgundy wanted to play, but sadly never quite managed to, so it we wanted to play it in his memory.

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During the game, players take on the role of two hikers as they trek through the countryside over four rounds, or “hikes”.  Whilst on the trail, the hikers take actions and collect memories of the places they visit.  At the end of each hike, players can trade them in for a visit to a National Park.  Each round is set up with six basic trail tiles (five with fewer players) and one advanced trail tile shuffled together and laid out to make a path from the trail head to the trail end.  Players can move either of their hikers towards along the trail to any unoccupied space and then carry out the action on that space.

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The basic locations are the mountains, forest, the valley, the sea, and a waterfall, visiting these give players wooden mountain, tree, sun or water tokens that can be exchanged for National Park cards at when their hiker reaches the end of the trek.  At the start of the round, the trail tiles are also seeded with additional tokens giving the first person to visit each one a bonus. The final basic location is the vista, which allows players to either take a new canteen card, or take the Camera token.  Canteen cards are special cards that players have that enable them to convert water into other resources or actions, once per round.

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The Camera allows people to take photos, which are worth a point each at the end of the game.  When initially taking the Camera, a photo costs two wooden tokens, but thereafter, photos only cost the holder of the Camera one token, and the player holding the camera at the end of the round gains an additional photo opportunity. There are a couple of other “rule-breaking” rules, for example, each player has a single opportunity per round (or “hike”) to join another hiker at a location by putting out their campfire (turning the token over).  Additionally, players can also buy camping gear cards which alter actions or provide discounts when buying National Park cards at the end of the round.

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There are additionally “Year Cards” which provide players with personal objectives, however, the group did not use these this time as Blue wasn’t making a great job of the rules explanation and it had taken quite long enough without adding more.  The round end is triggered when the penultimate hiker reaches the end of the trail.  The last hiker then moves directly to the trail end and, as usual can: reserve a National Park card from the market (and, if they are the first hiker to do so, take the First Hiker Marker); buy camping gear cards, or claim a National Park card (either from the market, or one reserved earlier in the game).  The game ends after four hikes, and players sum the total of their Parks points and photos to determine the winner.

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The game started slowly as somehow it felt a little unintuitive.  Although play seemed very simple, it wasn’t immediately obvious how to excel and score lots of points.  Although they aren’t the only source, most points come from National Park cards.  As each player has two hikers and Parks cards are acquired at the end of each round, players have only eight opportunities to buy them.  With such a limited number of cards available, players have to try to maximise their takings by going for the most valuable cards.  If these are not reserved, however, there is a risk that someone else will take a desired/planned for card.  This is particularly perilous, as it can leave a player without a possible option and unable to take one of their very limited opportunities to take a Park card.

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Pink started by asking what colour he was, and Blue pointed to the light purple campfire in front of him and explained it was the closest to pink.  Pointing to Lime’s “peach-coloured” pieces, he replied “Apart from the actual pink ones…”  And then there followed a heated debate as to which colour was “more pink”.  Eventually, Pine started tentatively, followed by Lime and then Pink (with his purple pieces) and finally Blue.  As the group felt their way, they realised that mountain tokens were valuable and difficult to come by.  So, after Lime had been unable to afford the camping gear card that gives a mountain discount, Blue snapped it up.  It took a while to understand the value of the Canteen cards, and some were definitely more useful than others.

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Pink had a Canteen that gave him mountain tokens, which meant joining the battle for the mountain space wasn’t quite as necessary.  Lime had a canteen that allowed him to reserve Parks cards which was useful in terms of planning.  It also had the additional advantage of messing up other people’s plans, in particular, Pine’s who got caught several times.  During the second round, everyone started to get the hang of things, and began to work out what they were trying to do while keeping an eye on what everyone else was doing.  But then the “hand limit” of twelve tokens began to bite.  Some of the most valuable Parks cards need six or more tokens, so targeting these while keeping the ability to be flexible became increasingly difficult.

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By the third round, Pink was questioning how Blue had managed to get “so many” cards, implying she was doing something that the others, in particular Pink, weren’t.  She had just managed to take every opportunity though, where others had been less fortunate.  Lime had a canteen that allowed him to reserve cards, which was a good use for excess water tokens.  Unfortunately, didn’t quite get the rest of his tokens right to make the most of it, and finished with lots of reserved, but unfulfilled National Parks cards.  Pine was unlucky and had Parks cards he was targeting taken at the last moment.  Still he managed to get a card with a nice picture of a wolf on it, which delighted him at the time.

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It was close for second place with just two points separating three players—Pine, tied for second place with Pink, decreed that his lovely wolf card was the tie-breaker and gave him the edge.  There was no question that Blue was the winner though, with thirty-two points, eight more than Pine.  Meanwhile, on the next table, Sage, Purple and Black had been playing Puerto Rico.  This is a much older game, once ranked the best game on the BoardGameGeek website, but now often forgotten.  We’ve played it a few times, but not since the global pandemic hit, and Sage was keen to play it again.

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In many ways, Puerto Rico is the archetypal Euro game.  The idea of the game is quite simple in that on their turn, the active player chooses a “role” then everyone takes it in turns to carry out the action associated with that role.  Each role has a “privilege” which the active player gets which gives them a little bonus (as well as the opportunity to take the action first.  Once everyone has chosen a role, the remaining role cards are “improved” by the addition of money, the used role cards are returned to the pool and the start player (The Governor) moves one player to the left before the new Governor starts the next round.

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The aim of the game is to get victory points which are awarded for buildings and for shipping goods. However, to build, players need money, and before they can ship goods, players need to be able to produce the goods with a plantation (and where necessary process them in the appropriate building).  Each building/plantation has a special bonus, but for a player to receive this, the building needs to be occupied by a “colonist”. All these activities are carried out through the role cards. For example, the Builder enables players to construct a building, but the player who chooses the role gets the privilege of paying one doubloon less than they would have done otherwise.

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Other roles include the Craftsman (enables players to produce); the Captain (enables players to ship goods); the Trader (allows players to sell goods for money); the Settler (players can take a plantation tile and add it to their island); the Mayor (the ship of “colonists” arrives and they are divided amongst the players), and the Prospector (everyone does nothing except the person with the privilege who takes a doubloon from the bank).  The game ends when there are not enough colonists to fill the colonist ship, the supply of victory points is exhausted, or a player fills their twelfth building space in their city.

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Black was clearly an early front-runner, but while Sage was slightly slower to get his engine going, he was coming up fast on the inside rail when the game came to an end.  As a result, the end-game building scoring was critical.  Purple had built the Guild Hall giving her extra points for her production buildings while Sage built the Residence providing additional points for the plantations and quarries he had placed on his island.  Black had built and occupied a two large civic buildings:  a City Hall giving him points for his civic buildings, and a Customs House which increased his the victory points he had acquired during the game by twenty percent.

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Unfortunately for Sage, it turned out that the game had ended a few rounds too early for him to overtake Black who finished with sixty points, five more than Sage in second place.  It had been fun though, and demonstrated that while some older games show their age, others still have it.  Puerto Rico and PARKS finished at much the same time, and although Lime left to make sure he got across the river before the drawbridge was lifted (commenting he’d like to give PARKS another go some time), everyone else was keen to play something light and quick.

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Despite Blue’s inevitable enthusiasm, Pine ruled out Bohnanza as too long, and with six players, 6 Nimmt! was the obvious choice.  We played this loads online, but it doesn’t seem to have dampened our enthusiasm for it, though we’ve mostly played the simple version in person since.  The idea is that players simultaneously choose cards from their hand which are then added in sequence to the four rows on the table.  In the original version, cards are added to the end of the row with the highest card that is lower than the card played.  In the professional version, cards can also be played on the low end of rows, upsetting other players’ plans (if players can claim to have plans in this game).

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Although we all decided that it was too late for the complex maths that comes with the professional version.  Pine and Blue immediately commented that they regretted that decision when they looked at their hands.  It seemed most people struggled a bit in that round as everyone picked up points.  Blue and Pine were high scorers, but Pink managed twenty-seven nimmts off just nine cards, albeit very colourful ones.  Pink did better in the second half with a clear round, but the damage had already been done.  Purple and Blue top scored overall, with thirty-seven and thirty-nine respectively, but the winner was the very constant Black with just five from each round.

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Learning outcome:  Not all games are a walk in the PARK.