A couple of weeks ago a brand new games café opened in Oxford, called Thirsty Meeples. Everyone is talking about it and even non-gamers have commented that it looks “really cool”. This week Thirsty Meeples has featured in the Oxford Mail, on BBC Oxford News and BBC Radio Oxford.
The BoardGOATS are planning a visit very soon, however, at the moment it seems so popular we don’t think we’d get a table!
Following the fire at the Jockey, our next meeting on Tuesday 6th August will be held in a private house in Stanford. Please get in touch if you would like to come along and would like directions. As usual, we will be playing shorter games from about 7.30pm as people arrive, until 8pm when we will start something a little longer.
This week the “Feature Game” is Guillotine, which is a light card game where the players are trying to behead the least popular nobles. We’ve chosen this as it is a quick game and then we can play something appropriate to the people who come on the night.
And talking of the Guillotine…
A priest, a thief and an engineer are all slated to be executed by guillotine.
The priest is to be dispatched first and the executioner asks him, “How do you want to face on the guillotine?”
The priest responds, “With my face up, looking toward heaven.”
The executioner accedes and the priest is laid face up on the guillotine. The executioner pulls the cord, the blade drops, and then miraculously stops within mere inches of the priest’s neck. The gathered witnesses gasp in astonishment. Everybody agrees that it is a miracle and sign of divine intervention and the priest’s life is spared.
The thief is next. When the executioner asks how he’d like to be positioned the thief responds, “With my face up, looking toward heaven.”
The executioner complies, and the thief is laid down face up. The cord is pulled. The blade falls, and, as with the priest the blade stops inches from the thief’s neck. Again the witnesses gasp. They can understand a miracle occurring with the priest but with a thief! Nonetheless, they take it as a sign from god, and release the thief.
Finally, it’s the engineer’s turn. Like the other two he wishes to be executed face up, looking toward heaven.
The executioner lays him down, but before he can pull the cord the engineer yells out, “Stop! Stop!”
The executioner pauses, and the engineer, looking up at the guillotine says, “I think I can see the problem…”
This week we started with our “Feature Game”, Vasco da Gama. Some of us played this few months ago so we decided to give it another go. As discussed previously, it is a worker placement game, with an element of risk management. Players recruit workers, start projects, build ships and sail new commercial routes to eastern Africa and India, to earn money and glory.
The game comes in three phases: worker placement, then worker actions, and finally ships sailing. Players take it in turns to choose one of four areas for their workers: buying ships; captaining and manning ships with sailors; “schmoozing” some influential characters to win valued favours; and finally, launching boats. The clever part of the game is that when players place their workers, they also choose a counter to go with it. The counters are numbered from one to twenty and the actions are carried out starting with the lowest working up to the highest – a bit like the deli counter at the supermarket. However, here, the low numbers cost cost money while the higher ones are free. The snag is, you don’t know exactly where the free ones start, only the range of possible values, and the further you are below the cut off, the more it is going to cost you to carry out the action.
So, people take it in turns to choose a counter and place one of their four workers in the four areas. Then, once all the workers have been placed, in number order, players choose whether or to carry out the action (paying if appropraiate) or whether to pass and take money in lieu of an action (just to make things more interesting, the lower numbers get less money). Once a ship has been bought and has a full crew, the ship can be launched, and this is where it gets tricky. You get an immediate reward for launching a ship, but you also get rewards for each ship still sailing at the end of the round, and these rewards are increased if the row the ship is in is also full. The snag is that before the next round starts, each complete row of ships moves on to the next row, however, if there is no space in the next row the ship is lost and with it any future possibility of rewards. Thus, the position of ships is really critical and can make or break your chances of doing well.
Black chose to fight for the attentions of one of the characters, Bartolomeu Dias. This character is particularly generous as he gives players two victory points when they offer to host him as well as two more victory points at the end of the round AND means you go first at the start of the next round. Meanwhile, Yellow and Red decided to buy ships and Blue tried to sail the line between bankruptcy and profit. It is very clear that it is an advantage to have seen the way the ships move as it is a complex process and appears quite chaotic at times with the best laid plans falling apart because someone places a ship unexpectedly or they simply can’t count! Before long, ships were sinking all over the place and Black had a massive lead, however, before long, Yellow and Blue started making in-roads too. Yellow ran out the eventual victor, but only a couple of points ahead of Black.
We only had time for one other game and as time was tight, we chose an old favourite that we’d all played lots of times before, Bohnanza. This is a fun, trading card game, where players are collecting beans to become the most successful bean farmer. Players have to play cards in the order they are in their hand and are not allowed to rearrange them, so the game is all about controlling the order of the cards trading. Everyone was feeling very generous and deals were rarely hard bargains. In contrast to the first game, it was very close and the game was tied with the winners on thirty-three and everyone within four points of each other.
Learning Outcome: Bartolomeu Dias is a very powerful guy.
Following the fire at the Jockey, our next meeting on Tuesday 23rd July will be held in a private house in Stanford. Please get in touch if you would like to come along and would like directions. As usual, we will be playing shorter games from about 7.30pm as people arrive, until 8pm when we will start something a little longer.
This week the “Feature Game” is Vasco da Gama, which we played a few months ago and is a resource management game, with an element of risk management. Players recruit workers, start projects, build ships and sail new commercial routes to eastern Africa and India, to earn money and glory.
And talking of sailors…
A young sailor called Jeff was on his first assignment, guard duty, when he was approached by the Captain, taking his dog for a walk.
Jeff nervously snapped to attention, made a perfect salute, ” Good Evening, Sir!”
The Captain, who was out for some relaxation, returned the salute and said “Good evening, beautiful night, isn’t it?”
Well it was horrid weather, but Jeff knew enough not to disagree with his Captain, so the he saluted again and replied, “Yes, Sir!”
The Captain continued, “You know there’s something about a stormy night that I find soothing, really relaxing. Don’t you agree?”
Jeff didn’t agree, but then he was just an ordinary seaman, so he responded, “Yes, Sir!”
Then the Captain, pointing to his dog said, “This is a Golden Retriever, the best type of dog to train.”
Jeff glanced at the dog, saluted yet again and said “Yes, Sir!”
The Captain continued, “I got this dog for my wife.”
Jeff simply said, “Good trade, Sir…”
This was our first meeting after the fire at the Jockey, so was the first meeting in someone’s home and therefore had a slightly different feel.
While we waited for people to arrive, we had a mess about with Hive. This is a little two player game that some have compared to Chess. This similarity comes from the fact that the pieces are Black and White and different pieces have different characteristics in the way they move. Although much of the thinking is similar, the theme is insects and there is no board. We had hardly started when everyone else arrived, so we left the teaching game for another occasion and decided to start something bigger.
In honour of the Jockey, we considered playing Flash Point: Fire Rescue, however, we thought this could be considered bad taste so we decided to stick with our original plan to play our “Feature Game”, Agricola. This is a game we played a few weeks ago, about farming in the middle ages. Each player starts with a two room wooden hut and farmer and his wife. In each round, players take it in turns to send the members of their family out to work. The problem is that each action can only be taken once, by one player in each round. In addition, there are only fourteen rounds and at intervals there are Harvests when all members of the family must be fed or the family has to go begging. Last time we played the “basic game”, but as everyone had played it before (though some had only experience of the “basic game”), this time we decided to add a layer of complexity by playing with the “E-Deck” of “Minor Improvement” and “Occupation” cards.
We had a bit of a debate about whether we should just deal out the cards or whether we should “draft”. Drafting is where everyone chooses to keep a card from their hand and passes the rest of their cards to the player on their left; they then choose a second card from the hand they receive from the player to their right, before passing the rest on, and so on until all the cards have been shared out. This has several purposes. Firstly it means everyone knows what cards are in play, which allows for a deeper level of strategy where players can deliberately play to obstruct other people’s game. Secondly, in theory, it means that nobody ends up with a really good hand while someone else ends up with all the rubbish cards. Finally, it also means that players can choose cards that work well together, however, this can result in a bit of an “all or nothing” game depending on whether the plan works or not. We decided against drafting as two players had never played with the cards and felt that they wouldn’t know what a good card or a good combination of cards was. Although this was undoubtedly the right decision in the circumstances, unlike many games, the cards are not carefully balanced and there are definitely some cards that are better than others, so it would certainly be something to try another time.
After carefully tiling the boards to make them fit on the table, we dealt out the cards and Red won the start player lottery. Everyone made a dash for occupations before the players began to develop their different strategies. Red had a occupation cards that made upgrading his wooden hovel into a stone palace cheaper, so decided to prioritise that, while Green decided to expand his family and went in for agriculture and fishing. Meanwhile, Blue enclosed a massive pasture and Turquoise engaged in vegetable farming. Each strategy appeared to have its good points and bad points, for example, Blue covered a lot of the space available, however, she spent the early part of the game flirting with starvation; in contrast, Green had plenty of food available, but struggled to make use of all the land.
In the last few rounds, everyone made the obligatory dash for points. Red finally managed to upgrade his five bedroom mansion to stone, but at the expense of everything else except one solitary field; Blue added a stable to her pasture and invested in the next generation; Turquoise built three large pastures and crammed three children into his three bedroom brick house, and Green optimised his final harvests and enclosed a pasture for a couple of cows. Turquoise ran out an easy winner with over forty points having managed to participate in a little bit of everything except sheep. Blue and Green came in joint second with twenty-nine points apiece.
Learning Outcome: Living in a stone mansion does not make you a good farmer.
Following the fire at the Jockey, our next meeting on Tuesday 9th July will be held in a private house in Stanford. Please get in touch if you would like to come along and would like directions. As usual, we will be playing shorter games from 7.30pm as people arrive, until 8pm when we will start something a little longer.
In honour of the Jockey, we considered changing the “Feature Game” to Flash Point: Fire Rescue. However, we thought this could be considered bad taste so we decided to stick with our original plan of Agricola, which is about farming in the middle ages. It is a game we played a few weeks ago, but we wanted to give it another go.
And talking of farming…
A few months ago a farmer was harvesting his crops. He was driving his combine harvester through his field when he accidentally ran over a drunken asleep amongst the wheat.
There was blood, sovereign rings, Kappa tracksuit and Burberry all over the place. It took him ages to sort the wheat from the chav…
As has been widely reported, there was a serious fire at the Horse and Jockey pub at 9 pm on Saturday night. Fortunately, nobody was hurt, but although the building appears to be structurally sound, there is extensive smoke, fire and water damage and it will undoubtedly be some time before the pub reopens.
Undeterred, boardGOATS will continue, for the time being in people’s homes. So, if you want to come along, get in touch to find out where we will be meeting.
This week, we started off playing a slightly neglected old favourite, No Thanks!. It seemed like ages since we played it last, but it turned out that it was less than two months ago that it last got an outing. Since it is a quick card game where rounds take just a few minutes, it was ideal to play until everyone had arrived. Next we, we played the “Feature Game”, Incan Gold, which is another game we’ve played previously. In this game players are going down a mine and trying to get out with as many gems as possible before it collapses. One player made a bit of a killing in the opening round, but she failed to hang onto the lead and was pipped by just two gems at the very end.
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| – Image by BGG contributor joshie |
It was a bit of an evening for games we’ve played previously, as next we played Alhambra (which was a “Feature Game” at the end of last year). This is a tile laying game where players have to collect sets and score points for having the most in any one set. Scoring takes place twice during the game and once at the end, and each time the number of points increases. This time, Blue (who won last time), got a terrible run of the cards and Red who had missed it last time, had an amazing game winning by a very large margin.
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| – Image by BGG contributor EndersGame |
Racing fish may not seem like an obvious choice for a game theme, but it turns out that it actually works really well. We played Salmon Run just two weeks ago and although we enjoyed it, we were all a bit tired, so we decided to give it another go this week. For variety, however, we changed almost all the boards, using S2, 3M, 4E, 5E & F2. This time, Black got going much quicker than everyone else and headed left followed by Red while White went right. Black decided not to worry about fatigue cards and just run for it, while Red and White were more cautious. Black’s tactics seemed to pay off, however, as he made it to the spawning pool first and nobody else could quite make it in time.
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| – Image by BGG contributor kilroy_locke |
Our final game game was Forbidden Desert which we also played last week, however it is a new release this year and it was a very close game last time, so we felt it deserved another outing. This time we didn’t have a Water Carrier, but we managed to make good use of the tunnels and the Navigator’s ability to move other players three spaces for the cost of only one action. These with the Archeologist’s ability to clear extra sand meant we ran out comfortable winners. We’ll have to ramp up the difficulty next time!
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| – Image by BGG contributor henk.rolleman |
Learning Outcome: Doing well the first time you play a game doesn’t mean you’ll do well the second time…
The next meeting is on Tuesday 25th June playing shorter games from 7.30 pm as people arrive, until 8 pm when we will start something a little longer.
This week the “Feature Game” is Incan Gold, which is a light “push-your-luck” card game where players are going down a mine and trying to get out with as many gems as possible before it collapses. We’ve chosen this game as it is not too long, very accessible and we should be able to play two or three others suited to whoever turns up.
And talking of mining…
Jeff bought a Thermos flask for working down the pit because he was told it kept hot things hot, and cold things cold.
He proudly took it to work the next day and when they took a break his mate noticed the flask. “What’ve you got in there Jeff? I could just do with a drop of tea!”
“Sorry,” Jeff said, “I’ve only got coffee and ice-pops in it…”
This year, in order to raise our profile in the village, we will have a stall at the Summer Festival on Sunday (weather permitting). We are planning to have a “Dobble Against the Clock” competition, Turf Horse Racing and a small table with people playing Army of Frogs.
We will be starting at 2pm on Sunday afternoon, hopefully on the village green in front of the church, as long as it’s not raining…
boardGOATS 