Blue and Pink were joined for food by Jade, Plum, Byzantium and Sapphire.  As they finished, Pine, Green and Purple showed up (leaving Black under the patio, again), followed by Ivory and a team of Sherpas toting his massive Complete Collection of Everdell.  There were quite a few possible takers for the Pearlbrook expansion, the night’s “Feature Game“, but eventually, after a lot of discussion, Ivory was joined by Plum and Jade and they took themselves over to the other side of the pub and started setting up, which was no small task, though Everdell is functionally a fairly simple game.

– Image by boardGOATS

Everdell is a dynamic tableau building and worker placement.  On their turn players can do one of three things: place a Worker and carry out any associated actions; pay any associated cost to play a card from their hand, or prepare for the next Season.  The game is played from Winter through to the onset of the following Winter, so each player has four Seasons, though because players can prepare for the next Season whenever they want to, players’ Seasons have different lengths and start their Seasons at different times.  This means one player who takes fewer turns could finish their game much sooner than another player.  At the end of the game, when everyone has finished, the player with the most points is the winner.

– Image by boardGOATS

The Pearlbrook expansion adds an extension to the board, which displays River Destination cards and the new Pearl resource that give the brook (and thus the expansion) its name.  The basic event spaces are covered up as these are not used and are replaced by two new Wonder spaces.  Everyone also gets a couple of adornment cards at the start of the game and on their turn can pay a Pearl to play one of these as an action.  The don’t take up any space in the player’s city, but give an instant bonus action and points at the end of the game.  Players also start with a Frog Ambassador which they use to visit the Pearlbrook either to get Pearls or to activate the River Destinations.

– Image by boardGOATS

The River Destination spaces have a requirement printed on the board (e.g. three production cards in the City) and a player’s Frog Ambassador can only visit, if the player has achieved it and it is unoccupied.  The River Destination cards start the game face down with a Pearl on top and the first player to visit each one takes the Pearl and turns over the card.  Another player can’t visit the Destination until it has been vacated which typically happens at the end of the occupying player’s Season.  The Shoal space allows players to exchange two resources and two cards for a Pearl, but this space is unlimited.

– Image by boardGOATS

Ivory charged out of the starting blocks, leaving Plum and Jade for dust.  Jade struggled to get his engine going because his starting hand needed three different types of resources.  Plum and Jade commented that it was nearly impossible to get a Pearl in the first Season, Winter, so Ivory made it his business to prove them wrong.  Once he’d got his Pearl, he used it to play his first adornment card giving him more resources and, as a result he was still in winter when Plum and Jade had moved on and were well into Spring.  That meant Ivory didn’t take his Platypus workers back leaving them blocking spaces the others would have liked to use.

– Image by boardGOATS

As a result Plum and Jade had progressed their Spring before Ivory played his Frog Ambassador, which they hadn’t been able to use at all during Winter.  It was a long time since Jade had played and he was out of practice optimising his seasons, consequently his Spring achieved less than he would have liked.  As the game progressed, the River Destinations were opened up and everyone started to use them, giving everyone more Pearls.  Plum (obviously playing with Kitty workers) had built up quite a pile, so both Ivory and Jade raided her stash by playing Pirate Ship cards which take up space and don’t score points.  That meant she could use one herself in an attempt to wreak her horrific revenge later, though it wasn’t as fruitful.

– Image by boardGOATS

Both Jade and Plum then played Pirate cards, gambling with discarding cards and hoping to draw cards with a sum of value of seven cards to get another Pearl, but both failed.  Although Plum and Jade had built up a large pile of Pearls, Ivory took the first, and largest monument, the “Light House”, due to his huge pile of resources.  The others weren’t far behind though, taking the “Sunblaze Bridge” and the “Mistrise Fountain” respectively.  Ivory also put his enormous wood pile to good use claiming the first event (“An Evening of Fireworks”).  That triggered Plum to spot that she had already completed “X Marks the Spot”, so she grabbed that quickly followed by Jade who took “Ministering to Miscreants” shortly after.

– Image by boardGOATS

There was quite a bit of congestion and Jade in particular found Plum and Ivory grabbed spaces just before he could get there.  Throughout the game, Ivory managed to eek every last ounce out of each Season, but in the end, although Ivory dragged out Winter and Spring, after he’d achieved the event and got his Monument, he ran out of things to do.  As a result, everyone finished very close in both time and scores and it was far from the landslide that might have been predicted earlier in the game.  Plum’s prosperity gave her an edge, but that was offset by Jade’s left over Pearls and higher scoring event.  It was Ivory who was the victor, however, with eighty-two points just six ahead of Plum in second.

– Image by boardGOATS

With Ivory, Plum and Jade playing Everdell, that left seven people to decide what they were going to play and how they were going to split the group or even if they were going to divide into two.  And then Lime arrived, but while that made splitting into two group more sensible, there still wasn’t any consensus about what to play and nobody seemed to want to commit to a group until they knew what was going to be played.  So, in the end Blue made an executive decision and, much to Green’s delight, decreed that one of the games would be Dice Hospital.  Purple, Byzantium and Pine joined him and they started setting up.

– Image by boardGOATS

Byzantium and Green had both played this before, so together, they explained the rules to Pine and Purple.  The idea is that each player is the owner of a hospital and starts with an administrator which gives them a special power, three nurses, and three patients—dice drawn at random from a bag.  The colour of the dice represents their illness and the number,  its severity:  six indicates the patient is healthy, but if the number falls below one, the patient dies.  At the start of each round, players take an ambulance with new patients—if there aren’t enough beds available, another patient must make space by moving to the morgue (where each body-bag is a negative point at the end of the game).

– Image by boardGOATS

Players can then improve their hospital by adding specialist medics and wards and finally, their medics can visit each patient and improve their health.  Different specialisms can only “heal” certain colours or numbers.  Any patients not treated are “neglected” and their health deteriorates with any that fall below one moving to the morgue while anyone who exceeded six is discharged.  The more that are discharged at the same time, the more points the player scores.  The game ends after eight rounds and the player with the most points is the winner.   The key to the game is knowing which specialists to get and which ambulance of patients to take.

– Image by boardGOATS

There was some confusion about what the symbols on the Specialists and Wards meant. The little help cards seemed to cause more confusion as they did not list all the symbols, so in the end, the rule-book was handed out which fixed the problem.  Green had played the game a few times on line, but less often in real life, so needed to keep checking the rules for the set-up and the order of who chose when and did what, but eventually the game got started.  The first round was a little slow with a few restarts as people took a little time while to work out how the game worked and what they could actually achieve.

– Image by boardGOATS

During the second round after everyone had finished their “Healings”, Pine was still working his out, but had ended up with one less discharged patient than he expected.  Unfortunately real life doesn’t have a “reset” button like the game on line and you can’t always remember what the hospital looked like before starting healing people.  So in the third round, everyone else kept an eye out for Pine to help him, before sorting out their own hospitals.  Unfortunately, the suggestions, though intended to be helpful were distracting, and as a result, Pine struggled to work out what he was trying to do. By this time everyone was really finding it difficult to discharge patients.

– Image by boardGOATS

Byzantium was struggling because he had gone heavy on green Doctors and Wards while Green had lots of red Dice and Doctors, but had ended up with Patients which didn’t quite match what they needed.  And so, there were the first fatalities—the Hospitals were in crises! Nothing new there, then…  By the end of the game, Pine and Purple were getting the hang of things. Despite his struggles, Pine did well and came second with thirty-eight points, only beaten by Byzantium who score forty-three.  Even though he did quite well for a first game, Pine did not warm to Dice Hospital and the overall conclusion was that it is a game that plays better on-line as it deals with all those complicated set-up and order issues, as well as having that extremely useful “turn reset” function.

– Image by boardGOATS

With everyone else finally sorted out, that just left Blue, Pink, Lime and Sapphire to decide what to play.  Pink suggested Azul: Queen’s Garden, but the only problem was that he’d never played it.  Sapphire had though, so the group nominated him to teach them because, how hard could it be since everyone was very familiar with the original Azul?  Well, as it turned out, quite hard, since in terms of difficulty Queen’s Garden is more on a par with the second and third editions (Stained Glass of Sintra and Summer Pavilion), which are both a very marked step up from the original.

– Image by boardGOATS

In the original Azul, take all the pieces of one colour from a market and add the rest to the central pool or take all the pieces of one colour from the central pool.  In Queen’s Garden, the Tiles come with different colours and different patterns and the Markets come out gradually through each of the four rounds.  So, instead of taking pieces of the same colour from one market, players can take as many different the pieces of the same colour or with the same pattern from anywhere as long as they are are all different (maximum of six).  Additionally, when a Market is empty, it is turned over and becomes a Garden Extension which players can also take on their turn.

– Image by boardGOATS

Garden Extensions are hold seven tiles—the player mat has space for six Tiles printed on it, but once that is full, players need Extensions to place more.  Each Extension has a single tile printed on it, so once a Market has been emptied and turned over, it can be taken by the active player along with any Tiles matching the colour or pattern.  Like Summer Pavilion, the Tiles and Extensions are then stored before they are added to their Garden display.  Unlike Summer Pavilion however, the amount of storage space is limited, so instead of taking Tiles/Extensions from the market, players can place a Tile or Extension in their player area, or Garden.

– Image by boardGOATS

When placing a Tile in their Garden players must pay.  The price is dictated by the pattern:  trees cost one, eagles cost two, butterflies three and so on.  Like Summer Pavilion, the cost is made up of the Tile placed and Tiles that match the colour or the pattern of the Tile placed, which are dropped into a Tower for recycling later in the game.  Also like in in Summer Pavilion, when a player surrounds marked spaces they get a bonus, in this case, “Wild Tiles” which can be used to match any colour or pattern when paying to place other tiles.  These are essential for some of the higher value patterns, which are very expensive to place and it can be hard to get enough tiles that match, however, Wild Tiles also take up space in storage.

– Image by boardGOATS

When tiles are placed, if they are adjacent to a tile, either the colour or the pattern must match.  Alternatively, Tiles can be placed so they aren’t next to another tile.  At the end of each round, players score all the pieces currently in their Garden, with different colours and patterns scoring points at the end of each round as per the rondel (trees, green and blue tiles scoring at the end of the first round for example).  At the end of the game, players score for each Group of three or more tiles where the colour or the pattern match.  Colour Groups score for each pattern present in it (trees score one point, eagles two and so on), but each pattern can only be included in each Group once giving a maximum Group size of six.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pattern Groups also score for the pattern (so a Group of trees will score one point per tiles), but in these groups each colour can only feature once, so again there is a maximum size of six.  If any Group has reached its maximum size of six, the player also gets an extra six bonus points.  However, any left-over tiles that have not been placed give negative scores which can be very, very costly indeed.  The group were just getting underway when Jade came round with some birthday cake—pieces cut from an absolutely amazing “Lego Cake” made by the amazingly talented Jason Smith.  Everyone, on all three tables, was very much distracted by the remarkable, solid chocolate Lego bricks and very fine chocolate cake, but eventually attention returned to the games.

– Image by Jade

With the group feeling their way somewhat, people started without long term plans.  A few rules got missed, the group forgot to score a point for each Pavilion and nobody paid much attention to the option of drawing face-down Garden Extensions because of the six point penalty.  The biggest rules malfunction, however, was that nobody realised that Lime had a duplicate tile in his large dark purple group of tiles in the centre of his garden, giving him a slightly illegal set of seven.  The group let that slide and everyone concentrated trying to find a way of getting points from their gardens.

– Image by boardGOATS

Everyone seemed to have slightly different strategies, collecting different colours or different patterns and covering different areas of their gardens.  While nobody had thought anyone was going to need their “I’ve been round the track already” token, and obviously, nobody was going to have to touch their two-hundred and forty point token, everyone did make it round once and claimed their sixty point tokens.  It was all very, very tight and there were even slight recounts, but in the end, it Blue claimed victory, by just two points (or maybe even one) from Lime who was just two (or maybe three) points ahead of Pink.

– Image by boardGOATS

There was a lot of chatter as everyone packed away.  Pink commented that he liked Queen’s Garden—not as much as the original Azul, but at least as much as Summer Pavilion (nobody talks about Stained Glass of Sintra, which Sapphire politely described as a bit of a “mis-step”).  And then everyone wandered over to spectate the great count up and pack-away of Everdell.  It was all a bit rushed and Ivory was definitely going to have some homework to do in terms of sorting it all out, but there was still just enough time to share a few pictures of cake, parties and kitties—it seems they are quite fond of Bitoku…

– Image by Plum

Learning outcome:  Goats, like cats, love to play games, and eat cake.