The situation regarding Covid-19 is now developing very rapidly and as of yesterday Government advice was “Avoid pubs … and other such social venues”. With this in mind, it would irresponsible to continue formal advertised GOATS meetings. That said, if the Horse and Jockey remains open, people are of course free to turn up at the usual time for food and games.
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| – Image from imperial.ac.uk |
After a short, but sweet battle over who wasn’t going to have the last lamb pie and mash, Burgundy and Blue settled down to eat. They were soon joined by Pine, Lime, and then Black and Purple bringing news of their new black and purple car. When Ivory and Green arrived, the key players were in place for the for the “Feature Game”, the Hellas map from the Hellas & Elysium expansion to Terraforming Mars.
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| – Image by boardGOATS |
In Terraforming Mars, each person takes the role of a giant corporation, sponsored by the World Government on Earth to initiate projects to make Mars habitable. This is by raising the temperature, increasing the oxygen level, and expanding the ocean coverage. The Hellas map presents a new areas of Mars to explore, in particular, the Mars south pole and the enormous seven-hex Hellas crater that just begs to become a giant lake. Building around the pole gives placement bonuses in the form of heat and possibly even water.
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At the start of each round, players draw four cards, keeping as many as they like, but paying 3M€ per card. Since the cards are so critical to the game-play, there is a variant where the cards are drafted, letting players see more of the cards available, but making the decisions more critical. Players then take it turns to take one or two actions from seven possible actions. At the end of the round, players simultaneously produce, turning any energy into heat, taking finance according to the combined total of their Terraforming Rating and their M€ production level, and finally receiving all other resources according to their production levels.
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The game ends once all three Global Parameters are met: all of the Ocean Tiles have been placed, the Temperature has reached 8°C, and the Oxygen Level is at 14%. The game is driven by the cards, but the guts of it are the actions. These include: play a card; use a Standard Project; use an Action Card; convert eight plants into a greenery tile and raise the Oxygen Level; use eight Heat to raise the Temperature; claim a Milestone, and fund an Award.
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Each card has a set of requirements, for example, Grass cannot grow at very low temperatures, so the Grass Card can only be played when the Temperature is above -16°C. Other cards may require the player to spend energy, or other resources. They also have a financial cost, though some can be paid for using Steel and/or Titanium as well. There are three types of cards: red Event Cards, Green Automatic Cards and Blue Action Cards. Green and Blue cards have an effect that occurs when they are played. Red Event Cards have an action that takes place once and are turned face down once they have been played. Blue Action Cards also give the player a special ability that can be activated many times during the game, but only once per round.
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| – Image by boardGOATS |
In addition to the actions on the cards, players can also carry out actions associated with Standard Projects. These can be used several times per round and mostly involve spending money to increase the Temperature, add tiles to the board, or increase the player’s Energy Production. Players can also sell cards at a rate of 1M€ per card, an expensive option as it’s less than they cost to buy, and it costs an action, but needs must when the Devil drives. Finally, players can claim milestones (if they have played enough cards with Tags that qualify) or fund an award. These cost money, but give Points at the end of the game.
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| – Image by boardGOATS |
This is the basic game play, but there are a lot of expansions and variants, so setting up was slow as the group tried to figure out which cards came from which expansion and what bits they actually needed to use. They got there in the end and chose to add in a few extra corporations to the standard set. Only Ivory received one of them, but still chose an original corporation, Ecoline, which gave him Plant production and reduced the number of plants he needed for a new Forest tile from eight to seven. Green went for Inventrix, which gave him three extra cards at the start of the game and reduced the restrictions on the environmental requirements. Burgundy chose Teractor, which allowed him to play cards with Earth Tags more cheaply.
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Ivory made an early play to plant a city amongst the northern green belt. He knew it was an unusual opening move and a bit of a gamble, but one he hoped would pay dividends later. Burgundy also planted a city in the first round, nearer to the large potential ocean area in the Hellas crater. Green waited a little longer for his first city, but broke away from the others to plant it near the southern polar region, hoping to expand upon the unique scoring potential for this new board.
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Like most games of Terraforming Mars this one progressed gradually and slowly as everyone built their “engines”. Ivory was clearly working on a Forest growth strategy, and also looking for the bonus end game awards. Burgundy was trying to build cities next to oceans for bonus money and also keeping the sides of his cities next to Forests for end game scoring. Green tried to use his relaxed environmental requirements to his advantage by playing cards early, but in the process failed to do anything with his southern city goal.
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Ivory made the first Milestone claim, taking the Energizer, for increasing his Energy Production to six. He was about to claim the second too, Diversifier, for having eight different tags played, but then realised that he couldn’t use the Red Event cards and so couldn’t claim it after all. Very soon after Green took it instead, much to the annoyance of Burgundy who was also on the verge of taking it, and would have done so on his next turn. Ivory later claimed the third Milestone, Tactician (five environmentally restricted cards), which both he and Burgundy had noticed Green could have claimed earlier and made noises to that effect, but weren’t specific. Green, however, had forgotten what it was awarded for and hadn’t noticed he qualified.
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As for the Awards, Ivory again funded the first one to activate the Cultivator, obviously key to his strategy as as it rewarded most Forests. Ivory also wanted Space Baron in play (for most Jovian tags) and Burgundy paid for the final Magnate Award, which rewards the player with the most green cards. In the end though, Burgundy won all three awards, with Ivory taking second place in two and Green just pipping Ivory to second by one card for the Magnate Award. When it came to the scoring, the Terraforming Ratings were quite close with Ivory just ahead of Burgundy as he had been for most of the game. Burgundy took a lot of points for the awards though and scored heavily for his cities. The overall winner was therefore Burgundy with eighty-three points, sneaking ahead of Ivory who took second place.
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While the Terraforming Mars group began setting up, everyone else took a slightly more relaxed look at the options available, and after some discussion, the group settled on Isle of Skye. This won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2016 and is a game most of the group have played before and really enjoyed. The best way to describe it is a bit like Carcassonne, but with individual play areas and a very clever auction for the tiles.
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The idea is that players start with three tiles drawn randomly, and place them in front of their screen. Behind the screen they use their own money decide the price of two of the tiles and choose one to discard. Once everyone has revealed their prices and discards, the first player chooses a maximum of one tile to purchase from the offering. They cannot choose one of their own, and they pay the amount shown to the owner of the tile. Once everyone has made their purchase, players then buy any remaining tiles in front of them, paying with the money the used to indicate the price.
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This auction is very clever for lots of reasons. Firstly, the player with the best tiles, does not necessarily get them. If they think they have something valuable, then they can give it a high price and will either end up keeping it (paying the money to the bank), or end up getting a lot of money for it. For this reason, the key thing is getting the value right—over-pricing a tile risks it failing to sell and getting landed with it at a heavy cost. This was Ivory’s comment from the next table. There is a more subtle aspect to the auction, however.
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Although they have the widest choice, if the first player prices their tiles too high, they may not have sufficient funds to buy anyone else’s, worse, nobody else will buy their tiles which means they will end up having to pay for them themselves, leaving them short of cash in the next round as well. On the other hand, because the money paid for tiles and the money used to indicate their cost go straight into the seller’s hand, players later in the turn order, may have less choice, but will likely have more available cash. In this way, the advantage of turn order is self-correcting and everyone has difficult decisions to make and probabilities to consider, though the decisions are different for each player.
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Once the tiles have been bought and paid for, players add them to their kingdom. Like Carcassonne, the terrain type on the edges of the tiles have to match up (though roads do not), and the tiles have features that are used for scoring. There are more different features than in Carcassonne, however, and the scoring is very different. In each game there are four scoring conditions, and each one is used three times during the game (five rounds for the five player game). Additionally, there are also tiles that feature scrolls which are personal scoring conditions that take effect at the end of the game.
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As Lime was new to the game, the group decided not to include the main components of the Journeyman or Druid expansions. All the tiles went into the bag though, including those from both of the large expansions and the several mini expansions (the Adjacency Scrolls, both Tunnelplättchen, the Themenplättchen and the Kennerspiel des Jahres Promo), and anywhere the main feature required one of the main expansions were just rejected when they were drawn.
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Pine got a flying start in the first round getting five points for his Broch/Lighthouse/Farm combo and a couple of points for a completed mountain range. As the game progressed, more buildings fell into his lap and the points kept coming. Black tried to collect Broch/Lighthouse/Farm sets, but couldn’t get any Brochs, so gave up and concentrated on getting diagonals instead. This is not as easy as it looks because every tile added to a diagonal requires the fixed placement of two tiles. Each round, players get a maximum of three tiles, so this is very restrictive.
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It was a hard game: Lime failed to complete and score any mountains and Purple struggled as there were two rounds when she failed to get any points at all. Blue started off trying to build in a diagonal, but ended up picking up points for Barrels connected to her Castle by road, mostly at Lime’s expense. She was aided when Pine drew a Barrel tile that Lime really fancied and had lots of money to pay for. Not wanting to give away his plans, Lime told Pine he didn’t want the tile, so Pine, who believed him, chucked it away, leaving Blue a clear run.
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Pine maintained and grew his lead, though the others did threaten to catch up towards the end. His Brochs and enclosed scroll giving him two points for each one made all the difference though and he finished with sixty-nine points ten ahead of second place. The battle for that was much closer with three players within six points of each other. It was Blue who sneaked in front though, just ahead of Lime who put in a very creditable performance on his first attempt.
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Terraforming Mars was still going on the next table, so although it was getting late the group decided to play something short, and considered Coloretto, but in the end settled on No Thanks!. This is a really quick and simple “push your luck” reverse auction game. Everyone starts with eleven chips and on their turn, either takes the card on offer (and any chips on it) or pays a chip to pass the problem on to the next person. The aim of the game is end up with the lowest card total, subtracting any chips they have left. The catch is that if a player has a run of cards, only the lowest is counted, however, at the start of the game nine cards are removed from the thirty-three in the deck…
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This time, Black won a relatively uneventful first round with twenty, while Purple “top scored” with fifty-three. It was quick and Terraforming Mars was into another round, so Lime suggested another round and everyone else concurred. This was more remarkable. Blue was first to take card. Since the player who takes a card then has first dibs on the next card, when the next was close the the first, she took that too. This continued with only a couple of breif interludes for cards she really didn’t want. In the end, she had a remarkable run of fifteen cards from the twenty-four in play.
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Unfortunately for her, as they were mostly low value cards and cards she needed, she had been unable to milk them to get chips from the others. So she finished with a very reasonable thirteen, but in forth place behind Lime with twelve and, remarkably, Black with minus three and Pine who took the game with minus four, winning by virtue of the fact he played later in the round. The Terraformers were just finishing, so the cards were shuffled for a third and final time. This time, Lime tried the collecting cards trick, but he was not as lucky as Blue and ended with a card total of ninety-nine (and twenty-three chips). Black and Blue both finished with a more normal nine, and tied for the win. With everyone finished, but time was marching on, so everyone decided to say “No Thanks!” to another game and went home.
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Learning Outcome: Getting a lead is good, but you have to be able to keep it.
Over the last decade, Asmodee has swallowed most of the big names in modern family board games, including the likes of Ticket to Ride, Settlers of Catan, Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures, 7 Wonders, Dominion, Agricola, and Pandemic amongst others. This has been through the relentless acquisition of the companies that produce these titles, in particular, Days of Wonder, Fantasy Flight Games, Z-man Games, Mayfair, Lookout Spiele, and Repos Production. This monopolising of the market cannot be a good thing for gamers, indeed the effects are already being felt with the introduction of Minimum Advertised Pricing (MAP) and now the loss of customer servicing for all Asmodee products.
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There is perhaps a glimmer of hope, however. Three years ago, the German publisher and distributor Heidelberger Spieleverlag was acquired by Asmodee, with the publishing part splitting off to form the Asmodee Studio, HeidelBÄR Games. Last year, however, ownership and with it the nucleus of the HeidelBÄR team, was transferred back to the previous manager, Heiko Eller-Bilz. The resulting enterprise is much smaller than it was, but the most important asset, the people, are in a position to develop new titles.
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| – Image from plaidhatgames.com |
More recently, Plaid Hat Games have made a similar, slightly slower, journey. Around five years ago, Plaid Hat Games was bought out by Canadian company F2Z Entertainment, then the parent company of Z-Man Games, Filosofia Éditions and Pretzel Games (now known as Asmodée Canada). However, earlier this year it was announced that Plaid Hat Games had been reacquired by Colby Dauch, the original founder, albeit without the rights to some of their biggest products, including Dead of Winter, Aftermath, and Mice and Mystics, which remain with the Asmodee Group. Plaid Hat Games retained the rights to Summoner Wars though, and are currently developing a new product, Forgotten Waters, which will be the first game released by Plaid Hat after their Great Escape.
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| – Image from plaidhatgames.com |
The way boardgames are published and sold has changed massively over the last few years. The development of Asmodee is one of the main stories of the last decade: it has grown from a small company (primarily known for clever little kids games like Dobble), into an industrial conglomerate swallowing up the likes of Days of Wonder, Fantasy Flight Games, Z-man Games, Mayfair, Lookout Spiele and most recently, Repos Production. There have been other significant shifts too however. Changes in the way “hobby gamers” learn about and acquire games has been hugely influenced by the internet and with it, the rise of crowdfunding, in particular, KickStarter.
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To give an idea of the impact KickStarter has had: last Easter, they announced that more than one billion US dollars had been pledged by over three million backers, funding nearly seventeen thousand games projects since the platform started a decade earlier. This growth occurred in tandem with a huge expansion in the hobby which has seen modern boardgaming move from the shadows of a dingy corner of geekdom towards the sunny uplands of the mainstream. For the last five years, there have been more games released than any year previously. Despite this growth, the dominance of Asmodee and KickStarter, have increased the squeeze on the smaller players in a relatively niche market.
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These smaller players also flourished as the market grew, but maybe a corner is now being turned. Last year, Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG), producers of games including Smash Up, Love Letter, Cat Lady, Dice City, Thunderstone, and more recently, Ecos: First Continent, announced that after twenty-seven years in the industry, they will be making fewer games. From their press release:
“There is a reason why there are so many games coming. It is a great time to be making games, maybe the best ever. That does not mean it is easy. In fact, it is also the most challenging time to be making games that I can remember. The bar to get noticed and have any kind of staying power is higher than it has ever been.”
AEG are not the only company affected. US Publishers, Winsome Games (producers of train games like TransAmerica, Chicago Express, Age of Steam, Railways of the World and the 18xx family of games) have announced they will no longer be presenting new games at Essen. Part of this is due to owner and developer John Bohrer “aging (dis)gracefully”, but changes in the market have also no doubt taken their toll.
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Other companies also seem to be feeling the pinch; last year, Steve Jackson Games (perhaps best known for games like Munchkin, Ogre and Cthulhu Dice) reported that gross income for 2018 was slightly down, the fourth year in a row. In their 2017 report, they stated that “the current market is more a periodicals business than one that encourages growing and nurturing single games”. In the 2018 report they observe that “things only got worse … as fewer and fewer copies of new titles were sold into distribution” and as a result, they “were forced to let some talented and hardworking staff go”. As a company, they have expanded their use of KickStarter, observing that “over the last few years, our core hobby market has changed dramatically”.
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| – Image from fantasyflightgames.com |
Even the massive behemoth that is Asmodee is not unaffected. About eighteen months ago, Asmodee was bought from Eurazeo by PAI Partners, a European private equity company, and it seems they are now consolidating and streamlining their assets. Earlier this month, Timothy Gerritsen, Head of Studio announced the closure of Fantasy Flight Interactive (FFI). FFI was an independent subsidiary within Asmodee Digital with the remit of adapting tabletop games and creating new digital experiences based on Fantasy Flight Games’s best loved brands. One of the highest profile of these was the Lord of the Rings: Adventure Card Game, but unfortunately it was not as successful as the Lord of the Rings Living Card Game it was based on.
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The cuts at Asmodee were wider reaching though, with the initial closure of the Fantasy Flight Customer Service department followed by reports of redundancies elsewhere in the company. This has been more recently followed by a withdrawal of Customer Services for products all products from Asmodee, Fantasy Flight Games, Days of Wonder, Catan, Plaid Hat Games and Z-Man. This change in policy is apparently due to “the number of quality titles in Asmodee USA’s growing library” which is making “maintaining an independent stock of elements of each game … more difficult”. This may, or may not be true, but it is clear that as the market is growing, things are changing for everyone: gamers and publishers, both big and small.
Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 3rd March, at the Horse and Jockey pub in Stanford-in-the-Vale. As usual, we will be playing shorter games from 7.30pm as people arrive, until 8pm when we will start something a little longer.
This week, the “Feature Game” will be the Hellas map from the Hellas & Elysium expansion to Terraforming Mars. In Terraforming Mars, each person takes the role of a giant corporation, sponsored by the World Government on Earth to initiate projects to raise the temperature, the oxygen level, and the ocean coverage until the environment on Mars is habitable. The Hellas map presents a new areas of Mars to explore: the Mars’ south pole and the enormous seven-hex Hellas crater that just begs to become a giant lake. Building around the pole gives placement bonuses in the form of heat and possibly even water.
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| – Image used with permission of boardgamephotos |
And speaking of Mars…
Jeff got off the space ship to start the first day of his holiday on the red planet. Looking around he decided he could really do with a drink, so headed for the nearest bar.
Waiting in the queue to be served, he picked up a bar towel and started chewing the corner. The barman looked a bit concerned, so asked, “Are you all right sir? Maybe I could get you a beer instead…?”
“Oh,” replied Jeff, “That’d be great”. And he ordered a pint, found a table, and sat down to enjoy his beer.
After a bit he started gnawing on the back of one of the chairs. Eventually, the barman came to the conclusion he had to do something; after all, Jeff was beginning to worry the other customers. He approached Jeff and asks what on earth (or perhaps Mars) he thought he was doing?
Jeff looked bemused. “I’m really sorry,” he said, “I thought this was a Mars Bar…”
Food was a little delayed, so we decided to start playing something. Food was clearly on our collective minds though, because we opted for a starter of Point Salad. This is a very simple set collecting game where players take cards from the market. The cards are double sided with brightly coloured vegetables on one side and scoring conditions on the other. The market consists of three piles of cards showing the scoring condition sides, and six cards showing the reverse, the vegetable side. The number of cards a player can take depends on where they take it from: one scoring card or two vegetable cards.
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Each pile of cards feeds one pair of vegetables. So, when a vegetable is taken, a scoring condition card is turned over to reveal its vegetable side, and that scoring condition is no longer available. Players can also, once per turn, turn over one of their scoring cards so it becomes a vegetable, but they may never turn over a vegetable to make it a scoring card. The game is over when all the cards have been distributed, and the scores have been totaled. One of the more unusual things about this game is that both vegetable and scoring cards can be used more than once. So, a player with a card giving points for sets of onion, cabbage and carrot (i.e. coleslaw), can score it as many times as they have sets. Furthermore, if they also have a card that scores for pairs of carrots and lettuces (i.e. rabbit food), they can reuse the carrot cards and count them a second time.
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Pine began collecting lettuces, an obsession with green things that ended up lasting the whole evening. Burgundy was more obsessed with red things, specifically tomatoes, so Mulberry, Black and Purple took great delight in snaffling them first, even when they didn’t help. Blue only needed mayonnaise for her coleslaw as she collected onions, cabbages and carrots and generally made a nuisance of herself with Mulberry, sat to her left. Food arrived before the game finished, and with people getting distracted by pizza and chips (always more appealing than salad) it is possible there were some missed opportunities. It was tight finish at the front with only six points between the winner and third place. Sadly, despite everyone else’s best efforts, Burgundy top-scored with fifty-six, ahead of Mulberry and then Blue.
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Once everyone had finished eating, it was time to decide who would play what. The “Feature Game” was The Isle of Cats, a tile-laying game where players are rescuing cats and packing them onto their ship. There were a lot of takers, none of which were keen to back down (even though Mulberry misunderstood and thought it was called “Pile of Cats” which, on reflection, does sound very exciting). The game is not terribly complicated though we did make a bit of a meal of it. It is played over five rounds, each of which starts with card drafting. Players are dealt seven cards and keep two passing the rest to their neighbour; this is repeated until they receive only one single card.
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The cards come in five different colours: blue, green, yellow, brown and purple. Blue cards are Lesson cards which are really just Objective cards, but these come in two types, personal and public. Yellow cards depict some combination of “Boots”, “Cat Baskets” and “Broken Baskets”. Boots are useful because they dictate where you come in the turn order, while Baskets are needed to used to “pay” to rescue Cats. Yellow cards are treasure cards, brown cards are special “Oshax” cat cards and purple cards are instant effect cards that can be played at any time.
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At the start of every round, each player receives twenty Fish which are used to pay for both cards and Cats. So, once the cards have been drafted, players choose which ones they want to buy. with prices varying from free to five Fish. The rest are discarded. It is imprudent to over-spend, as Fish are also needed later in the round to lure cats off the island and onto the players’ ships; some cats are easier to lure than others, with cats on one side of the island costing three Fish and others costing five Fish.
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Once everyone has paid for their cards, they must play any blue Lesson cards they kept in the round. Any Public Lessons are revealed while Private Lessons are kept to one side face down. Players then play their green cards—this is the guts of the game. Players do not have to play all their green cards straight away, some can be kept for later rounds. The number of Boots played are counted up, and the turn order is adjusted according to the number of Boots played so that the player with the most goes first and so on. Player then take it in turns to spend one of their baskets and the appropriate amount of Fish to take one of their Cats and place it on their ship.
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Each player starts the game with one “Permanent Basket” which they can use once per round, aside from this, the other Baskets usually come from the cards played or other Permanent Baskets acquired later in the game. The Cats come in five different colours and are depicted on polyomino tiles which are placed on the players’ Ship-player boards. At the end of the game players score points for grouping Cats of the same colour together in Families: the larger the Family the more points. So, a group of three Cats of the same colour will score eight points, while a Family of ten Cats scores a massive forty points. In addition, players lose one point for each rat they have failed to cover with a cat, and lose five points for each room they fail to fill.
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Thus, perfectly tessellating Cats is the aim of the game, but additional points are also available from the Lesson-objective cards. It would be quite a challenge to perfectly tessellate tiles while keeping cats of the same colour together and conforming to the arbitrary objectives given in the Lessons, however, there are a couple of things to help grease the wheels. Players who cover Scrolls on their Ships with a Cat of the same colour can add a Treasure tile to their ship for free—these are small tiles that are very useful for filling in holes. There are only five scrolls though, one of each colour.
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Additionally, however, once everyone has run out of Baskets, they can also play their Rare Treasure, yellow and brown cards. The yellow cards enable players to place more Treasure tiles while brown cards allow players to place the very rare Oshax Cats (or “Oh, shucks!” Cats as we mostly called them). These are very friendly Cats and will join any Cat Family of the player’s choice, though they have to pick the colour when they place it. The cards are quite rare and very expensive, but a couple of these can be a really good way to boost the size of a Family.
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In addition to Baskets on cards, each player starts with one Permanent Basket which they can use once per round. Blue started the game quickly, by playing two lesson cards followed by a special card which enabled her to swap them for a second Permanent Basket. Everyone looked on agog, envious of the advantage that would give, however, it had cost a lot of Fish, and she spent the rest of the game trying to recover. Mulberry struggled to get some useful cards, but eventually managed to get a Permanent Basket of her own while Burgundy managed to get a couple of his own and he concentrated on trying to make sure there were no gaps round the edge of his boat to fulfill Lesson 113 to give him twelve points.
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Pine meanwhile, continued his obsession with green and hogged all the green cats. Since cards are drafted most of the cards are seen by some of the other players, so when he said he wasn’t sure how one of his Lesson cards worked, Blue and Burgundy knew exactly what his problem was. The Lesson in question was Card 222 which gave ten points for each row of twelve containing at least twelve cats of the same colour. Green’s queries concerned whether the row had to be continuous or whether they could be broken up by treasure, and whether Oshax cats counted. We said they didn’t have to be continuous and Oshax cats counted so long as they were the right colour. As a result, Pine’s green car family continued to grow, now forming long rows, lots of them.
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It was in the final round that Mulberry turned nasty playing Public Lesson Card 235 which meant anyone who didn’t have seven treasures would lose five points, which inconvenienced Blue quite a bit. When it came to scoring, it turned out that we weren’t quite right with the rule for Card 222—the rows should have been continuous. That might have cost Pine ten or even twenty points, though of course had he known that, he would likely have been able to offset that a little. It wouldn’t have mattered anyhow as finished with ninety points and a huge lead. Over thirty points behind, it was close for second, but Burgundy, who just managed to ensure there were no gaps at the edge of his boat, pipped Blue, by two points.
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There are a number of really nice things about The Isle of Cats. Firstly the production quality is stellar and there are some really, really nice touches. The cat artwork is fantastic and the fancy screen-printed cat-eeples from the deluxe upgraded version are quite special. Unquestionably, we made a mistake playing with five the first time round—we were slow, with a lot of people spending a lot of time checking whether tiles would fit and that made the game even slower. Mulberry commented that she disliked variable turn order as a mechanism: it is common in lots of games, but tends to encourage a lot of pauses followed by queries about whose turn it is. The are other little things like the fact the purple and brown cards could have been more distinct. Overall, it definitely deserves another chance, but it might be hard to get some of the players from the first time to give it a second try.
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Meanwhile, on the next table, Ivory, Black and Lime, started off with Key Flow. This was particularly sad for Blue to see, because Key Flow is a sort of card game of Keyflower, one of her favourites. That said, Key Flow had been played at our sister group, the Didcot Games Club, just a few days previously, so she consoled herself with the memory of that and concentrated on The Isle of Cats. Although Key Flow has a lot in common with Keyflower, it has a very different feel. Where Keyflower is really an auction game (using meeples as currency), Key Flow is a card drafting game. So, in Key Flow, players start with a handful of cards, simultaneously choose one and place it face down, passing the rest on.
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Players then simultaneously reveal their card and add it to their village before picking up the hand they’ve just been given, selecting another card and so on. Like Keyflower, the game is played over four seasons, and like Keyflower players receive some of the Winter offerings at the start of the game which they can then use to drive their strategies. The iconography is very similar too, so a player who is familiar with Keyflower generally feels at home with Key Flow. The cards come in three flavours: village buildings, riverside buildings and meeples. Village cards are placed in a player’s village, in a row extending either side of their starting home card. Riverside tiles are placed in a row below, slightly off-set.
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Meeple cards are used to activate Village cards by placing them above the relevant building. As in Keyflower, buildings provide resources, skill tiles, transport and upgrades. They also provide meeple tokens which can be used to increase the power of meeple cards or activate a player’s own buildings at the end of the round. Arguably the clever part is how the meeple cards work. At the centre of each card there are a number of meeples which dictate the power of the card. A single meeple card can be played on any empty building; a double meeple card can be played on an empty building or one where one other card has already been played.
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If two cards have already been played, a triple meeple card is required to activate it a third and final time. Alternatively, a lower power meeple card can be played with one of the meeple tokens, which upgrade a single meeple card to a triple meeple card. Double meeple cards can also be upgraded, but each building can only be activated a maximum of three times per round. The really clever part is that the meeple cards have arrows on them indicating where they can be played: in the player’s own village, in the neighbouring village to the right, the village to the left, or some combination.
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Black began the game by adding the Key Mine to his village which provided him with iron (wooden, black octagonal prisms). In summer he added the Smelter which added more iron producing capacity (converting skill tiles), but he quickly upgraded this to give gold instead as it is more versatile and can be used instead of any other resource and any left overs are worth a point each at the end of the game. Ivory also had resource providers in the shape of the Workshop which provided him with a wood, an iron and a stone every time it was activated. He then added an Apprentice Hall which generated skill tiles.
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Meanwhile, Lime built a village strong in gold production, with the Gold Mine and Brewer and potentially the Carpenter too if he could upgrade it. To his village, Black added a flock of sheep on his river bank while Ivory added a heard of pigs; Lime was more of a mixed farmer though with a bit of everything. As the game progressed into the scoring rounds, Ivory added a Truffle Orchard which gave him four points for each pig and skill tile pair, allowing him to put all his pigs to good use netting twenty-four points.
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Lime and Black pulled in similar points tallies with their Emporium (four points for each green meeple and gold pair) and Traveller’s Lodge (points for transport and boats) respectively. With similar points for their upgraded buildings as well, it was close and the smaller contributors became really important. Ivory’s Trader which scored him fifteen points for stone and axe skill tiles, while both Black and Lime scored ten points for their Autumn stores (Stone and Timber Yards respectively).
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Perhaps it was the points he got from the meeples (Winter Fair and Craftsmen’s Guild), but there was only two points between first and second in the end. Black finished with a total of seventy-one points, just enough for victory—a couple of points more than Ivory, with Lime not far behind. It had been a hard fought game, and Ivory was impressed how the Scribe, which in Keyflower he felt was always a winner, had little effect. For him, this made the game more interesting, though he had really enjoyed the last time the group played Keyflower with the Farmers expansion, as that had also mixed things up.
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Given the recent game with the Didcot group it was inevitable that a comparison was going to be made. This time Black won, but he scored fewer points than he had the previous week when he had come second. Perhaps the most marked difference was how much quicker the three player game of Key Flow had been than the six player game a few days earlier. Where the six player game had taken all evening, there was still time for something small, and with Lime taking an early bath, Ivory and Black chose to play a head-to-head of Ticket to Ride: London.
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Ticket to Ride is a train game with an inexplicable alure, which everyone in the group loves and we’ve found that the small versions of the game, New York and London make excellent fillers. The rules and game play are very similar to the full versions, but the take half the time, and with just two players, that makes it a very short game indeed. On their turn, players take coloured cards or spend them to place their pieces on the map. Points are awarded for completing tickets, but critically, failing to connect two locations marked on a ticket will score negative points. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.
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This time, Ivory built a network connecting Brick Land and the Tower of London in the East with Hyde Park in the West, while Black joined Regent’s Park in the North with Waterloo and Elephant & Castle in the South. The crunch point came in the area around Covent Garden, but despite this, both players managed to complete all four of their tickets. This meant it was down to the length of the tickets and the number of pieces placed—Ivory had the edge on both of these. His revenge for the result in Key Flow was completed by a four point bonus for connecting all four in the St. Paul’s district resulting in a ten point victory. With that, Ivory headed home, leaving Back to watch the end of The Isle of Cats.
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Learning Outcome: Games take longer with more players.
One of the characteristics of modern boardgames is the number of pieces in the box: generally the more complex the game, the more pieces there are, and the more it costs. For many, part of the fun of acquiring a new game is checking, sorting and otherwise caressing these, often bespoke, pieces. It is very easy to lose or break a piece and an estimated 1-2% of new purchases arrive damaged or with something missing. One of the truly special things about the boardgame industry has been the general understanding of the sadness caused by a missing piece, and the support the manufacturers give when a game has become incomplete, even if it is not the manufacturers fault.
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For example, just over a year ago, one of the boardGOATS dropped a counter for No Thanks!. After an extended session of “Hunt the Game Piece”, we eventually found it nestling in a cushion of dust, just out of reach, exactly where it fell, having cleanly dropped through the gap between the pub floorboards. The game is inexpensive and readily available, but our copy is much played and much loved, and replacing it for the sake of one token seemed wasteful. Of course the missing token could be substituted with something else, a penny say, but that would have made us sad every time we played it. So, a quick email to AMIGO Spiele offering to purchase a couple of spares, and one week later a small handful of red counters arrived in the post—exceptional Customer Service from a superb company.
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The remarkable thing is that this is not the only example: similar service has been received from Zoch Verlag (Auf Teufel komm raus), NSKN Games (Snowdonia: Deluxe Master Set), Queen Games (Kingdom Builder), Ferti Games (PitchCar), Tactic (Nollkoll), Z-man (Le Havre), Rio Grande Games (Torres) & Splotter (The Great Zimbabwe), to name but a few, sometimes their fixing a problem of their making, sometimes just helping out. This superb service (sometimes with a fee, but often without charge) builds a good relationship with the customer and encourages more sales—so not so much “No Thanks”, as “Yes Please”!
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Last week, however, Asmodee USA closed its Customer Services Department to the public, and announced that all games with missing pieces should be returned to the vendor (as yet there is no comment on who should pay for returns of online purchases, or what happens with gifts that arrive with a piece missing). Worse, the FAQ adds that when buying a second-hand copy, they “encourage you to make sure that all components of a game are present and intact before purchasing” as they “cannot offer replacements for products that were not purchased directly from our USA retail partners or webstores”. Their justification for this is:
“With the number of quality titles in Asmodee USA’s growing library, maintaining an independent stock of elements of each game becomes more difficult. We believe offering the customer service through the store they have purchased the game from will be a better experience.”
It was initially thought that this would only affect USA customers, however, it seems that is not the case. Asmodee UK have passed the buck: according to their website, for replacement pieces for Asmodee, Fantasy Flight Games, Days of Wonder, Catan, Plaid Hat Games or Z-Man Games, “please visit http://parts.asmodeena.com/”, which in turn simply says:
“As of February 18, 2020, if a game is purchased in the US that has damaged or missing components, please return to where you originally bought the game for assistance.”
This change in policy may or may not make business sense in the short term, but for the gamer it is a very sad loss of what always felt like friendly support, and something that made boardgaming special.
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Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 18th February, at the Horse and Jockey pub in Stanford-in-the-Vale. As usual, we will be playing shorter games from 7.30pm as people arrive, until 8pm when we will start something a little longer.
This week, the “Feature Game” will be The Isle of Cats, a tile-laying game where players are rescuing cats and packing them onto their ship.
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| – Image by BGG contributor kalchio |
And speaking of Cats…
Jeff was at the cinema watching the new release of Jane Austin’s “Emma”, when he noticed what looked like a cat sitting next to him.
“Are you a cat?” asked Jeff, surprised.
“Yes,” the cat replied.
“What are you doing at the cinema?” asked Jeff.
“Well,” replied the cat, “I liked the book…”
Blue and Pink were first to arrive and, while they waited for others and their pizzas to arrive, they tried to squeeze in a quick game of Ganz Schön Clever (a.k.a. That’s Pretty Clever). This is a “Roll and Write” game, that is to say, players roll dice and use the values they roll to fill in spaces on their score sheet. So, it is an abstract game where the active player, rolls all six coloured dice and chooses one to keep and use, discarding all dice with lower pip values. They then roll any remaining dice, again keeping and using one and discarding the rest before rolling the rest one last time keeping and using one final die. The other players can then use one of the discards, before play passes to the left.
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Filling in some of the boxes gives a bonus action, enabling players to fill in other boxes or gain the opportunity to re-roll their dice or even use an extra die. The player who wins is therefore the player who makes the best use of the dice they roll and usually, the player who manages to build the most combinations to take advantage of the bonuses available. This time both Blue and Pink started off slowly, but as they were coming to the last couple of rounds, both food and people arrived and their focus drifted a bit. Pink managed to keep it together better though and as a result finished with a nice round hundred and fifty, some twenty more than Blue.
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As they finished eating, Green, tried to organise players in an effort get a group together to play Terraforming Mars. It was quickly clear that it was not going to happen, as Burgundy, Black, Pink, Pine and Mulberry expressed an interest in playing the “Feature Game”, Fast Sloths. This is a race game where players are sloths travelling around a holiday resort on the backs of other animals. The rules are quite straight forward: on their turn the active player takes cards from the face up piles that make the market; optionally play cards, and then discard down to conform to the hand-limit (which varies depending on how players are progressing). When taking cards, they must all be different animals, and the number they can take depends on their position in the race.
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The game is a pick-up-and-deliver type of game, but unusually the sloths are the cargo being delivered. Movement on the central board is the heart of the game and each player must try to optimize their movement to win. When playing cards, they must all be of the same animal – the player then moves the animal corresponding to the cards played towards their sloth, so they can pick it up and drop it somewhere else on the map. Each animal has their own characteristics, the type of terrain they can cross and how they move etc.. The aim of the game is to collect leaves and the first sloth that can gather eight leaves wins.
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Burgundy got off to a flying start – by both playing first and (even though he was last to pick) securing a good corner tree as his starting location, with a ready-made parade of ants he could bounce over on his way to the next tree. It was a very tight game, which, after the first few turns while people built up their hand of cards, progressed rapidly with players aiming for a new leaf every turn, or at worst every two turns.
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There was much discussion about the accuracy of the terrains allocated to each transport animal. Donkeys, for example – in Fast Sloths they can’t travel in the mountains or through water, but surely the reasons why donkeys make such good pack animals is that they are great at climbing mountains and wading rivers? Pink suggested that as this was a “game” perhaps such comparisons weren’t relevant? However, this suggestion was not received well and went down like a donkey in a river… Attention then turned to “how true to life” was the representation of unicorn transport.
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The game carried on, with only an occasional call of “Summon the Eagles!” from Mulberry (just imagine Brian Blessed in the film Flash Gordon). Despite being the first time most people had played the game, all players had clearly got to grips with the mechanism and made speedy progress through the forest – a compliment to the designer it was felt. In the end, with everyone so closely matched, it came down to marginal differences and Burgundy, after his initial flying start, stayed out in front to win after collecting eight leaves. Hot on his heals were Mulberry, Black and Pine with seven.
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Meanwhile, on the next table, Green and Ivory had settled on Wingspan, and were eventually joined by Purple and Blue. Since it won the Kennerspiel des Jahres award last year, this has proved a very popular game within the group. The copy belonged to Burgundy, and he had integrated the European Expansion and Swift-Start Cards, as well as “pimped his bits”; the artwork on the cards is beautiful and the additional pieces just add to the aesthetics. The game is functionally very simple, though playing well requires planning and just a little bit of luck.
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On their turn, the active player can place an action cube to do one of two things: pay food to play a bird card from their hand, or activate one of their three habitats and all the birds in it. The three habitats, allow players to collect food, lay eggs or add more bird cards to their hand. At the end of each round there are bonus points available for players who are most successful with the targets set out; at the end of the game players score points for each bird card they’ve played (value dependent on the bird), food and eggs on their cards, and flocking birds. The difficult part is to efficiently build combinations of birds with synergistic special powers that will ultimately yield the best score.
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This time, Blue started by playing a White Wagtail in her Wetland, which gave the opportunity to place a bird card at the end of the round so long as she had activated all three habitats and placed a card during the round. She still had to pay the food needed, so she concentrated on making sure she had all the bits required to make it work for her every round. Ivory focused on first playing his Savi’s Warbler and then using it to acquire a lot of cards, many from the face-down draw pile, hoping to draw something good. Green struggled a bit from the start, partly because he was arguably the player with the least experience, but the fact he was distracted by a bird of a different sort tweeting by phone certainly didn’t help. Purple on the other hand, quietly concentrated solely on her game, and made excellent use of her Double-Crested Cormorant which allowed her to tuck two cards in exchange for one fish.
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As the game progressed, Green increasingly needed prompting to take his turn, and explained that he was getting side-tracked because Blue, playing immediately before him, was taking so long on her turn. While it was true that Blue’s turns were getting longer, this was almost entirely because the number of birds in her reserve was increasing faster than anyone else’s, largely thanks to her White Wagtail which she was busy putting to good use. The contrast was quite stark Green’s rather meager reserve and Blue’s, although by this time, both Ivory and Purple, also had a good sized reserves. As the game entered the final round, Fast Sloths was coming to an end and those players wondered over, so the last few turns were played with an audience.
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At this point, the Wingspan players were putting the finishing touches to reserves. Green kept commenting how he knew he was coming last and it was clear who had won, but Ivory was not so sure. In the final accounting every bird in Purple’s reserve had a good point value adding to her points from the tucked birds and Ivory did best in the end of round goals. Blue had the most birds giving her the same amount of points as Purple (though the individual cards were not as good) and she scored slightly fewer points that Ivory in the end of round goals. In every other area, however, Blue led the pack giving her the lead overall with ninety-eight points. Ivory was twenty points behind, and just pipped to second place by Purple.
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Mulberry, Pine and Ivory Ieft to get an early night, leaving everyone else to play something short; the game that fitted the bill and was on the top of the pile was For Sale. This is a very clever property auction game that we played for the first time in years at New Year. The game comes in two parts: buying properties and then selling them. So, each player starts the game with $14,000 to spend on property cards. There are thirty properties, numbered to reflect their relative value and these are auctioned in groups equal in size to the number of players. The clever part of the auction is that when a player passes and withdraws, they pay half the value of their final bid and take the property with the lowest value; the winner takes the most valuable property, but pays their final bid in full.
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In the second part of the game, cheque cards equal in number to the number of players are laid out, with values from zero to $15,000. Each player then chooses one property card from their supply and everyone reveals them simultaneously: the highest value property earns the highest value cheque with the second most valuable property earning its owner the second largest cheque and so on. The winner is the player with the highest total from the sum of their cheques and any left-over cash. This time, Black took the most valuable property, the space station and with it, on of the $15,000 cheques while Burgundy took the other.
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At the other end of the scale, Pink took both the void cheques, but despite this still managed $33,000 for the rest of his properties. This was nothing compared to the winner, Green, who finished with $53,000, $2,000 more than Burgundy in second. The night was still young, however, and there was still time for one of our favourite games, 6 Nimmt!. Although this is often derided as a game of chance, it is clear that it is not pure luck. The idea is that everyone has a hand of cards from a deck numbered one to a hundred and four. Simultaneously, everyone chooses a card from their hand, and, starting with the lowest value card, these are then added to one of the four rows of cards.
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Each card is added to the row with the highest end card that is lower than the card they have played. If the card is the sixth card, they take the five cards in the row and their card becomes the first card in the new row. Each card has a number of bull’s heads on it—this is the number of points they score. The player with the fewest points at the end of the game wins. We play with a variant that half the cards are dealt out for the first hand and the rest for the second, which gives us a score at half-time.
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This time Burgundy and Black were in the lead at the half-time with a single nimmt, with Blue a couple of points behind. Pink set the competitive high score of thirty-one. Black picked up a handful of cards in the second half, indeed, only Purple, Blue and Burgundy managed to keep their second half scores to single figures. In the end, it was Blue who just had the edge, beating Burgundy by three nimmts. At the other end, however, Pink had no competition finishing with a very respectable high score of forty-five, not a record, but a substantial total nonetheless, and a good end to a fun evening.
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Learning Outcome: Donkeys are not as versatile as you might think.
Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 4th February, at the Horse and Jockey pub in Stanford-in-the-Vale. As usual, we will be playing shorter games from 7.30pm as people arrive, until 8pm when we will start something a little longer.
This week, the “Feature Game” will be Fast Sloths, a race game where players are sloths. The game is a pick-up-and-deliver type of game, but unusually the sloths are the cargo being delivered.
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| – Image used with permission of boardgamephotos |
And speaking of Sloths…
A sloth named Jeff was walking through the forest one day when a gang of snails approached him and beat him up. Jeff was left at the bottom of a tree with many cuts and bruises and was feeling very sorry for himself. Several hours later he gathered up enough strength to go to the local police station. It was immediately obvious to the desk-officer that the sloth was in some distress, so the officer invited him into a quiet room straight away.
“What happened to you?” the officer asked.
“A gang of snails beat me up,” Jeff replied.
The officer took out his notebook and pencil, “Can you describe what they looked like please?”
“I don’t know,” the sloth said, “It all happened so fast…”
boardGOATS 