Author Archives: nannyGOAT

Next Meeting – 12th July 2016

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 12^th July, 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 Puerto Rico, which is an older game, and in many ways the archetypal Euro game. The idea is that players assume the role of colonial governor on the island of Puerto Rico with the aim of amassing victory points by constructing buildings and shipping goods to Europe. This game was first demonstrated at Essen fifteen years ago in 2001 and for many years occupied a seemingly unassailable position at the top of the rankings on the BoardGameGeek website.

– Image used with permission of BGG reviewer EndersGame

And speaking of shipping…

Once upon a time there was a famous sea captain. This captain was very successful at what he did and for years he guided merchant ships all over the world. Never did stormy seas or pirates get the best of him. He was admired by his crew and fellow captains. However, there was one thing different about this captain. Every morning he went through a strange ritual. He would lock himself in his captain’s quarters and open a small safe. In the safe was an envelope with a piece of paper inside. He would stare at the paper for a minute, and then lock it back up. After, he would go about his daily duties.

For years this went on, and his crew became very curious. Was it a treasure map? Was it a letter from a long lost love? Everyone speculated about the contents of the strange envelope.

One sad day the captain died at sea. After laying the captain’s body to rest, the first mate led the entire crew into the captains’ quarters. He opened the safe, got the envelope, opened it and turned pale. After a moment, he showed the paper to the others. On it were just four words:

Port Left
Starboard Right

28th June 2016

Blue and Red arrived first, so once they had ordered food, they settled down to a quick game of Mijnlieff (pronounced “Mine-Leaf”). This is basically Noughts and Crosses or Tic-Tac-Toe with a bit of added strategy and some beautiful wooden pieces. We’ve played it a couple of times before on a Tuesday, but as it is an independently produced game (by Hopwood Games), it is difficult to get hold of and Blue had taken the chance to pick up a copy at Expo. The aim of the game is to form lines of three or four, but the different types of pieces force your opponent to control where you can play. For example, when a Greek cross (or “+” symbol) is played, the next player must place their piece on an empty square in an orthogonal line from the piece just played. Similarly, playing a saltire (or “×” symbol) forces the next player to place their piece in a diagonal line from the piece just played.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor thepackrat

Unfortunately, Blue forgot to mention that if there was nowhere a player could go, they were forced to pass giving their opponent a free move, so when this arose, Red cried “foul” and Blue offered to concede the game. It didn’t really matter much anyhow as Burgundy had arrived and so had food, so everyone’s attention was drawn elsewhere. As other people arrived, we moved on to the inevitable post-Brexit referendum discussion: the group consists of several continental European Union gamers (Denmark, Poland and Ireland), so we have a natural pro-Europe stance. Consequently, the group as a whole has been pretty horrified at occurrences of the last week, and its long term consequences (not least of which is the increase in the cost of games!). Before we depressed ourselves too much, however, we decided to play something to take our mind off it. Since we were unsure of who was coming and with Pine wanting an early night, we decided to begin with something short, and with two possible games it seemed appropriate to have a quick referendum on the subject… Saboteur went the way of the “Remain” campaign and lost by a tiny margin as we decided to turn the evening on its head and begin with 6 Nimmt! a game which we often finish and one that is guaranteed to cheer us all up.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game lived up its usual standard of chaotic fun, with Burgundy, Black, Pine and Green vying to collect as many high cards as possible. After our usual two rounds, Purple finished with eight, but Blue took it with just six nimmts, all garnered in the first round. With the fun over, it was on to the serious game and Pine left as he was “cream-crackered”. The rest of us split into two groups for our “Feature Game”, Concordia, a strategic game of economic development in Roman times. The game takes at least half an hour per person and with set-up and teaching, it was always going to take most of the rest of the evening. Played on a beautiful map, Concordia is a game of resource production and exploration. Notable cities which are connected via land and shipping routes, each produce one resource (indicated by tokens placed on the map allowing for variable set-up). Each player begins with a hand of Character cards and six colonists and a handful of resources. Everyone begins the game with the same set of cards; on their turn, the active player chooses a card to play, and then carries out the associated action.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Space Trucker

These cards allow players to move colonists and build settlements, trigger production for all settlements in a given region, introduce more colonists etc., however one of the cards enables players to buy extra cards from the market (a face up display). The cards are played into a personal discard pile where they remain until the player plays their Tribune card to get all their cards back. Each player also has a warehouse of a fixed size which will hold a maximum of only twelve items, which at the start of the game includes four of their six colonists (two ships and two “Elvis-meeples”). So, managing resources and finances is one of the key parts of the game and it is essential that players have the right resources when they need them as there isn’t space to store excess. Another “pinch-point” is the cards; players can only play each card once before picking them all up. They also get income when they play their Tribune card to recover their cards, but as it is dependent on the number of cards they pick up, it is in the player’s interest to play as many cards as possible before collecting them all again – this also needs planning.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Space Trucker

The most difficult part of the game is the scoring, however, which is tied up in the Character cards. In addition to a name and an action, each card is dedicated to a Roman God. Each God rewards the card’s owner with victory points at the end of the game. For example, Mars delivers points for colonists placed on the board. Each Character dedicated to Mars gives two points per colonist, so a player with all six colonists on the board at the end of the game and five Characters devoted to Mars will score thirty points. Thus, since the cards are effectively multipliers, in general, the strategy is to try to excel in one area rather than try to do a little bit of everything, but that is something that is definitely easier said than done.

– Image by boardGOATS

With two copies of the game available and everyone keen to play it, we decided to split into two groups, both playing Concordia and both adding the Salsa expansion. This is “Salsa” as in “Salt” rather than the Spanish “Sauce” or the Latin dance, so in addition to the standard resources of brick, wheat, tools, wine and cloth, we also had salt. Salt is “wild”, so can be used as anything and adds some peculiarities to the scoring, but otherwise doesn’t make a huge difference to the game. Both groups also chose to use the new Hispania board which includes the Iberia peninsula as well as the North Africa and Italian coast. The biggest change to the base game, however, was the introduction of the Forum and associated Forum tiles. These tiles come in two flavours, blue, which are perpetual, and green, which offer an instant, one-off reward. Each player can choose one from a starting hand of two at the beginning of the game, but otherwise, these are taken when players play the Tribune card. Since players have a larger choice of available cards if they are picking up more cards, and these Forum tiles can be quite powerful, this is another driver towards efficient use of Character cards.

– Image by boardGOATS

Burgundy, Blue and Red got going first. Burgundy chose the Claudius Pompeius Forum tile (which gave him an extra opportunity to sell whenever he was playing the Prefect card); Blue chose Gaius Mercellus (who yielded an extra sestertii for every item she sold), and Red kept Titus Valerius (who enabled her to exchange any other commodity for salt when she played her Tribune card). Burgundy went first and moved one of his colonists inland north-east settling in a brick producing city. The close proximity of the two nearest brick sources meant that this made it very difficult for anyone else to get into brick production. Consequently, when Blue went next, she headed north-east into Gallia, where there was wine and cloth to be had, and eventually brick, though that would take a few turns. This left Red to head towards the sun in the south of Spain.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Blue started out with lots of cash, but no idea what to do with it, on the other hand, Burgundy knew exactly what he wanted to do but couldn’t find the money to do it. Red and Blue were relatively unfamiliar with the game so opted for the scatter-gun approach, while Burgundy was picking up as many cards as he could. Before long Red and Blue got away from the congestion of the Iberian peninsula, with Red taking over North Africa and Blue spreading to Corsica and Sardinia and across to the Amalfi Coast. This race to place settlements eventually dried up when Red found more fun activating Africa to pick up lots of goods. Since one of the end game triggers is a player running out of “houses”, Blue had to decide whether to end the game early by placing her last few “houses” or whether to try to push forward on other frontiers. Something told her that she was too far behind in collecting cards, so she decided to take a break from building and try to maximise points elsewhere, starting by buying as many cards as she could and then getting all her colonists onto the board.

– Image by boardGOATS

With only a couple of cards left in the market, Blue placed her final houses and triggered the end of the game. As suggested in the rules, we went through each of the Gods in turn, though with Burgundy’s enormous pile of cards, it all looked like it was going to be more a measure of how much he was going to win by. As we added together the totals, every time Blue picked up points, Burgundy took more and Red languished at the back. Before long, Burgundy had what appeared to be an insurmountable lead. When Mercurius was scored Blue’s large number of settlements began to tell, and with a lot of Character cards devoted to Mars and all six colonists on the board, Blue finally took the lead. With only Minerva to go, Blue looked to have taken it, then we all realised how many Specialist cards Red had. With all her high scoring Specialist cards and a lot of settlements in high value production cities (inc. lots of Salt which counted for each of them) it looked like she would take it the lead. In that final scoring phase Red picked up a massive thirty-nine points, but sadly it wasn’t quite enough, and with Blue taking the extra seven points for placing all her settlements, she was the clear winner, though there was just four points between second and third place.

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, on the next table, set-up and rules explanation took a little longer, but they were soon under way too. Coincidentally, two of the Forum tiles chosen were the same – Claudius Pompeius (chosen by Burgundy and Green which gave them an extra opportunity to sell goods) and Gaius Mercellus (chosen by Purple and Blue and which gave an extra sestertii for every item sold). Black, on the other hand, took Appius Arcadius which gave him the ability to move three spaces instead of two – potentially very powerful, especially in the early part of the game. Purple began followed by Black, leaving Green with a much more restricted choice, but gradually all three began their expansion across the board producing and trading as they went.

– Image by boardGOATS

In contrast to the game on the next table, the players used their Forum tile powers only rarely. Green made good use of his bonus tile several times early in the game, but he used it much less later on, when having the goods was more important than having the money. Purple used her bonus only a small number of times and Black did not use his bonus tile until almost the very end of the game, but then he used it to good effect to jump two spaces and build in a city that Green had his eye on. The game was probably about two thirds through when Green moved his ship and, unintentionally he claims, blocked Purple. And there he left it until the end of the game as his card collection action enabled him to buy a new ship which was much better placed to move efficiently to the other side of the board.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Green took every opportunity to encourage his “Elvis-meeples” to leave the warehouse, but while Purple occasionally added colonists to the board, black persisted with only his starting two throughout the entire game. Eventually, Green ended the game by buying the remaining character cards. While Purple found she could do nothing in her final turn to increase her score, Black pulled a master stroke and used a special card to buy all four of his remaining colonists in one go, thus increasing each of his Mars scoring cards by eight, and since he had three of them this gave him a massive twenty-four points more from just one turn. It wasn’t enough though; the scores were all close, but Green finished twenty-four points ahead of Black largely thanks to the fact that he’d managed to get a settlement in each region and had plenty of scoring cards to go with it.

– Image by boardGOATS

While Black, Purple and Green put everything away, Burgundy, Blue and Red began the inevitable discussion of the game. We all enjoyed the game, but Concordia is probably one of Burgundy’s all-time favourites, as a result he has played it quite a bit. There is no question that this familiarity helped when choosing which character cards to buy and when,. This is unquestionably an advantage as it is clear that the only real strategy in the game is to try to match the Character cards to the cities and perhaps specialise in one direction. That said, there are many ways that this can be done and in practice, it is really quite difficult to it do well. Although for Blue theme is not the most important factor in a game, she feels it should be there to help players remember the rules. In Concordia, however, Blue felt that the scoring was a little arbitrary making the game feel just a little bit abstract. Red also enjoyed the game, but felt that the game was slow to get started and with such a beautiful map, it seemed a shame that it took so long before really exploring it. On the whole though, we were all in agreement that it was a very good game that needed playing several times, and we were all very willing to give it another go soon.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Sometimes experience pays, sometimes less so.

Next Meeting – 28th June 2016

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 28^th June, 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 Concordia, which is a strategic game of economic development in Roman times where players must rely on their advanced planning and consideration of opponent’s moves rather than luck of dice rolling or card draws. A longer game where time is strongly dependent on the number of players, we have several copies within the group, so we can play multiple games simultaneously if there is demand.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor jsper

And speaking of Romans…

Jeff was still working in the bar when, much to his surprise a Roman soldier walked in in full regalia. He stood at the bar and stiffly waited until Jeff had finished serving and asked him what he would like.

“A Martinus please,” replied the Roman.

“You mean a Martini don’t you sir?” Jeff asked a little confused.

The Roman answered, “If I wanted a double, I would have asked for it!”

14th June 2016

It was a quiet night and Blue was late, so everyone else got on with a quick game of Love Letter. Played with just sixteen cards, this is a great little game to play while chatting and doing other things (like eating). The idea is that each player starts with a card on on their turn, draws a second and chooses one of them to play. Each card has a number (one to eight) and an action; players use the actions to try to eliminated each other and the player with the highest card at the end, or the last player remaining is the winner. This time, we played Green’s Lord of the Rings themed version which comes with a pile of tiny magical rings, which certainly had an effect on Pine. Almost every round he had the highest value card, Smaug. While this can be an advantage, it can also be a curse as it can make you a target, but only Magenta managed to profit at all. Pine ran out the winner taking three rounds with Magenta taking the other two and everyone else failing to win any at all.

– Image by boardGOATS

With everyone fed, we moved onto our “Feature Game” which was Pi mal Pflaumen. This is a German game where the name is a play on the expression “Pi mal Daumen”, which roughly translates as “rule of thumb” or “roughly”. In this game, players are not interested in thumbs, but plumbs and other fruit. The game is a trick taking game with elements of set collecting and lovely artwork. The idea is that each card features a fruit, a number and most also have some sort of special action. Each player begins with a hand of cards and, starting with the start player, everyone takes it in turns to play one card. Then, the player who played the highest value card chooses one of the cards which they place face up in front of them, before they carry out the action associated with the card.

– Image by boardGOATS

The action could be steal a card from another player; take the “watchdog” card (which guards against other players stealing cards), or take three “pi” cards. Instead of an action, some cards indicate a scoring condition and the points awarded for achieving it. These are of the form of, for example, ABC or AAA, indicating three different fruit or three identical fruit respectively. The more fruit involved and the more similar the fruit, the more points they are worth. When a player owns both the scoring card and the matching Fruit cards, they are all removed from their display and put to one side to score at the end of the game. The game is played over three rounds and winner is the player with the most points at the end.

– Image by boardGOATS

We started off a bit tentatively, but by the end of the first round we were getting the hang of it and some people were just starting to get an appreciation of how clever the game is. Burgundy collected a huge pile of cards and Pine starting the stealing and then getting a lot stolen from him. In the end, it was a very close game with almost everyone finishing with thirty-one points, except Green, who much to his surprise was two points clear. The game, on the other hand, received a mixed response: Pine and Magenta really liked it, while Green, despite his win was largely unimpressed. No doubt it will get another outing and we’ll see if opinions change.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pi mal Pflaumen had taken much longer than expected, and Magenta fancied an early night, but felt she’d be able to squeeze another game in so long as it wasn’t too long. After a quick debate, Green’s eye fell on Port Royal, which we’ve played a few times now and were all convinced we’ve played several times in less than half an hour, certainly way less then the fifty minutes maximum the box claimed. In the end, the fifty minutes proved quite accurate and we decided that the time was probably dependent on the number of players…

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor msaari

The game is a fairly simple combination of “push your luck” and strategy, the idea being that players reveal cards until there is something they want, or they go bust. The active player can keep turning over cards until either they choose to stop or they draw a second ship card that they cannot repel. Assuming they choose to stop, they can then take a ship card or buy a character card before the remaining cards are offered round the table with players paying the active player one doubloon if they choose to buy/take a card. The clever part is the dual use of the cards as money and ships/characters, which means the distribution of cards changes for each game giving variety. The key to the game is the character cards though, as they are what enable players to build an engine and get an advantage over the opposition.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor bovbossi

This time we included the Gambler promotional cards that were being given away by the manufacturer at the UK Games Expo at the start of June. This card allows the active player to take a gamble by turning over four cards at the same time and, if they don’t go bust, they can choose to take an extra card. Unfortunately, the Gambler didn’t seem worth the gamble, so nobody gave it a try which was a shame as the cards kept coming up. Despite this, the game was a tight one, with several layers in the running in the going into the final round. Burgundy had started the game and it was he who triggered the final round. Green went next, but couldn’t quite make the cards work for him. Pine and Blue followed, but had too much ground to make up. Magenta went last and drew level, but Burgundy had plenty of money left and was able to take the lead back finishing with fourteen points, one ahead of Magenta.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

Learning Outcome: Little card games can be just as much fun as big boardgames.

Boardgames in the News: What does Brexit mean for Eurogamers?

On Thursday, after a long and miserable campaign, the UK public voted to leave the EU. Boardgamers are a friendly bunch, so what does the imminent divorce mean for us? Obviously there’s lots of speculation and scare stories, but the most immediate and obvious effect is undoubtedly the cost and potentially the availability of boardgames in the UK. A copy of Ticket to Ride: Europe bought from Germany using Amazon.de would have cost €43.92 including postage, which would have been about £33.45 on Thursday evening at 10pm. At 5am the following morning, this had risen to £35.94, an increase of £2.50 in just seven hours. The same game bought from the USA from Amazon.com costs $64.69 (including shipping and tax waivers etc.) which was about £43.21 at 10pm on Thursday rising to a staggering £48.25 at 5am the next morning – an increase of over £5! The exchange rates will probably improve over time, however, it will be a while before they achieve pre-referendum levels and there will no doubt be more uncertainty to come too, no doubt.

– Image by boardGOATS

Next Meeting – 14th June 2016

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 14^th June, 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 Pi mal Pflaumen, which is a trick-taking card game with elements of set collecting and lovely artwork. Players simultaneously play cards and then claim one of the played fruit cards based on the strength of the card that they played. Each card depicts a fruit, and a scoring pattern or a special action. At the end of the game players tally their points based on completed contracts and whoever has the highest score wins.

– Image by boardGOATS

And speaking of fruit…

Jeff was working in a bar when a duck walked in and asked, “Got any grapes?” Jeff, very confused by this, told the duck that no the bar didn’t serve grapes. The duck thanked him politely and left.

The next day, the duck returned and again said, “Got any grapes?” Again, Jeff politely explained that no, the bar did not serve grapes, never had served grapes, and, furthermore, probably never would serve grapes. The duck, a little ruffled, fluffed his feathers slightly. thanked him and left.

After a week of this, Jeff was beginning to lose patience. So, one day, when the duck came in, before it could say anything, Jeff started, “Listen, duck, this is a bar: we do not serve grapes! If you ask for grapes again, I will nail your beak to the bar, got it?”

The duck was silent for a moment, and then asked, “Got any nails?” Totally confused, Jeff replied, “No…” Before he could get any further, however, the Duck continued, “Good. Got any grapes?”

31st May 2016

For the first time since he and Cerise’s new arrival, Grey turned up. Everyone was really pleased to see him, and as he fancied a “nasty” game, he joined the group playing the “Feature Game” which was Vanuatu. On the face of it, this is a fairly straightforward role-selection and worker placement game, but with more than the usual amount of interaction. The aim of the game is to obtain prestige in the archipelago of Vanuatu, by moving tourists and goods, fishing, and drawing sand pictures. The game structure is simple enough: players start by choosing a character, then they choose actions they would like to carry out, before the actions are resolved. There are one or two nasty elements that became more apparent as the game progressed.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

The way the actions are chosen and then resolved is particularly unusual. Starting with the Start Player, players take it in turns to place one or more of their action selection tokens. Everyone starts with five tokens and can place tokens on any single action space. Players cannot pass, but if they don’t place all their tokens on their first pass they get another turn to place one or more tokens, and play continues in this fashion until everyone has placed all five tokens. The actions are then resolved with players choosing which actions to take. In order to carry out an action, however, the player must have the most tokens on the action space (with ties resolved using turn order as a tie-breaker). In the event that the player doesn’t have an eligible action to take, they must remove their tokens from a space without taking the action. This makes it particularly nasty as, where a player has multiple options available to them, they can use this to delay other players from taking actions and sometimes cause them to miss actions altogether. In extreme cases players can end up doing nothing for a whole turn.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

In the first round, Blue showed how to score points, garnering a massive fifteen points by using the Collector to enable her to pick up extra beef which she was then able to ship immediately completing a vessel that Burgundy had started. Unfortunately, this left her with no money which meant her game then stalled such that four rounds later she had failed to even double the score she’d had at the end of the first round. Burgundy had watched some video reviews and had a good idea of how the game played, as such, he was the only one who really appreciated what an unusually large haul Blue had managed to take in that first round. Despite the massive deficit, he began to steadily ship visitors and buy huts, something everything else made the mistake of letting him get on with. Black on the other hand, was discovering first hand just how nasty the game can be and really struggled to string actions together and turn them into points. Meanwhile, Blue and Grey engaged in an extended scrap over some fish. Blue came off worst since Grey had a spell as the start player, though he didn’t exactly come off unscathed either.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

In the closing rounds Black finally managed to build himself a hut; Blue finally managed to get her fish, sell them and then took the start player. This enabled her to disrupt Burgundy’s plans by first nicking the character he wanted (Diver) and then pinching the high value treasure from under his nose. It was all way too little and much too late. Although Black had found himself pushed out in the first half of the game and Blue struggled to make good on her early promise (crippled by the exhausting fish wars and a lack of money), the game was quite tight between first and second. In the event, the deciding factor in the game was an almost missed moment when Grey bought resources and shipped allowing Burgundy to follow suit and also pick up the bonus for completing the vessel. With a small difference between first and second (by our scoring) that could easily have given Burgundy the game. In the final scoring, Grey liquidated his huge pile of treasure, though it didn’t yield quite as much as expected leaving Burgundy the winner, six points ahead of Grey.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Delivering tourists to islands is fundamentally very important in this game, which is something we didn’t really appreciate until we got to the final rounds. The rules state that each player scores “two prosperity points for each of their stalls, for every tourist pawn present on their island”. The example in the text clarifies that a player with two stalls on an island where there are four tourist pawns scores eight points per stall, or sixteen points in total. We hadn’t appreciated the extra multiplier, so we evaluated the scores twice using the rules and our original understanding. In the event, it had no effect on the placings, just increasing Burgundy’s majority. It did give us a better understanding of how tough the game is though. The harshness also leads to a lot of “analysis paralysis”, since each move is so very critical. That said, we all enjoyed the game and, by the end could really see how clever it is. An unusually nasty game, this is definitely one to try again soon and is well deserving of its new release.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Meanwhile, the other table were playing Ivor the Engine. This is a great little game that Purple had been itching to play for some time and, since Pine likes sheep, Green was happy to join in. The idea is that players are travelling round Wales collecting sheep and the person with the most sheep at the end of the game is the winner. A single sheep can be collected whenever you start your turn on a town or village with sheep in it, however, more sheep can be collected if you are in a town or village with NO sheep and perform a task to “help Ivor”. Helping Ivor comes at a price, however, as in order to do this you have to play one of the dual-purpose cards from your hand, which means you cannot use it to help you in other ways. At the end of your turn you add one card to your hand from the face up displayed cards, however, when the chosen card is replaced from the draw-pile, the game has a sting in the tail: mixed in with the errand cards are event cards, and these can be nice, or nasty…

– Image by boardGOATS

The game features the iconic art-work from the Ivor cartoons as drawn by Peter Firmin and little wooden sheep. We have variously called the “square five sheep” pieces “flat pack” sheep or “squashed” sheep, however, Pine’s commented that if you get five sheep, you get enough to make a rug! With only three playing we began the game quite spread out. Green and Purple stayed near their starting location to collect the last sheep and thus pick up the lost sheep bonus (an extra two sheep), but Pine got caught out by a double space. He had thought it was only a single space with one sheep and was expecting a bonus which disrupted his plans. Aside from that, it was a fairly quick start and we had all gathered in a number of sheep. Pine was the first to use a card action on somebody else and with both Green and Purple having a similar number of sheep, he let chance decide who was to lose two of their flock. Unfortunate for Purple fate decided it was she who must lose. In the very next round, Green was able to claim his second Grumbly Town card for four more sheep, so perhaps Pine/chance chose the wrong player to kibosh.

– Image by boardGOATS

To compound this mistake, the first event card to turn up resulted one sheep being lost from every region. This left Pine and Purple in cleared regions (good for claiming the cards, but not good for claiming the two-sheep bonus). For Green, however, one sheep remained. This helped him to get the 2-sheep-bonus and the location card. From this point on it was another “Get Green” game. Unfortunately for Purple and Pine, they had little opportunity to do this and the events (which came all together) were fairly benign. Green had one more “nasty” action card to use, which he played on his nearest competitor (well it would be unfair to play it on the losing player), so Purple lost another two sheep. In the end Green claimed his twenty-fifth sheep with a five sheep town card. His event card bonuses brought his total up to thirty-three with Purple close behind with several end of game bonuses. Overall it was a bit of a baaa-rmy game…

– Image by boardGOATS

With the fishing wars still underway in the South Pacific, Purple, Green and Pine moved onto Alhambra, another of of Purple’s favourites and also new to Pine. This is a tile laying game where players are building their city. Basically, on their turn, the active player buy coloured tiles with different coloured money cards and add them to their Alhambra. If they can pay with exactly the correct amount, they can buy another tile, but if they over-pay, they get no change and their turn ends. While this all sounds simple enough, there is the little problem that most of the tiles have walls along one, two or three edges, and when placed, these must match up without partitioning the Alhambra. These walls are critical as poor play in the early stages can mean it is possible to get backed into a corner later in the game. We’ve played Alhambra a few times as well as its predecessor, Stimmt So!, so we decided to play with a couple of expansion modules: The City Gates, which can be placed where there are two adjacent parallel walls enabling the player to build behind the wall, and The Magical Buildings, which provide one tile extra of each type which can be placed in any orientation.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor EndersGame

Purple went for the Purple Towers. She was able to come so dominant in towers that Green was not able to attain any, and Pine only got 3. It seemed that whenever a tower tile came out the bag, it was just before Purple’s turn, and she was not averse to over-paying for them, though often she did not need to. It happened so regularly it was funny and she before long she had to buy the tile just to maintain the magic, even if it was detrimental to her actual game plan! Green went for the Green Garden tiles. He also quickly became dominant in them and was going to stop when he had the unbeatable majority, but when the Garden tile without a wall came out it was such a good fit for his Alhambra that he just had to go for it. Green also took the first two White Palaces, but was unable to get his hands on the others. Pine and Purple snapped them up to equal his two and Purple surpassed Green into the lead, which she then maintained, despite a last minute battle for the last couple of tiles.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor EndersGame

Red and Brown tiles were in very limited supply at the start of the game. Pine managed to collect a single one of each, and that was all he needed to maintain supremacy in these colours for quite some time. In the second half of the game everyone managed to get one red tile so the real battle for red did not happen till the final few turns. The final market board had three red tiles on it, so Green and Pine shared the category. The brown tiles were also loaded towards the end of the game, and Green took the lead briefly before Pine took it back again.
Blue tiles were fought over by Pine and Green. Both had two by the first scoring round and had to share one point (meaning they scored nothing); this was a tight battle, but Pine just clinched ahead at the end. Purple managed to place her Alhambra with some very long walls. She had a 17 point wall by the second scoring, but then had to do several re-designs as she found herself blocked with not enough gates to help her out. In the final scoring, Green romped home with nearly a hundred and fifty points, leaving Pine and Purple to fight it out for second place. For a while, it looked like Pine might take it, but Purple’s Towers and long wall clinched it in the end, in what had been a much tighter game than the scores suggested.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor EndersGame

With the knife-fight in a phone-box that was Vanuatu finally over and not enough time to play anything else really, we degenerated into chit chat. Blue commented that she really wanted to like Alhambra , but found that she preferred the game play of the simpler Stimmt So! and Black concurred though that was far from the majority opinion and the expansions certainly added a bit too. Green had taken two of the gatehouses and used only one as he had been very carefully building his Alhambra not to box himself in. Pine and Purple took and used only one each though Purple could certainly have used an second as she had several re-designs. She didn’t want to “waste” anymore actions “just” taking a gate though. Everyone used and loved the Magical buildings though, Pine got the most (three of them), while Purple used two and Green was only able to get his hands on one. In this game though, we found concentrating on only the highest scoring items is not always a guaranteed route to victory, but should stop you coming last! We finished with a quick discussion of our plans for the weekend, which included a visit to the NEC in Birmingham for several of us who were going to the UK Games Expo. Should be a good weekend!

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor EndersGame

Learning Outcome: Nice or nasty, tight games are the most fun!

Boardgames in the News: The Goat that wants you to Vote

What’s cute, funny and rhymes with votes? Why, GOATS of course! Which is why the latest gimmick in the Great EU Referendum Battle invokes our four-legged friends: “If you’ve got time to watch a goat gif you’ve got two minutes to register to vote.” Apparently, the plea was so successful that the voter registration website collapsed under the weight of applications, just before the deadline. Fear not, however, if you missed the deadline (midnight on 7th June), the government are considering special legislation to include people who registered after the cut off, so if you haven’t registered there may still be a chance.

– Image from http://www.gifgoat.party

UK Games Expo 2016

This weekend, 3^rd-5^th June, gamers will be converging on Birmingham for a three days of fun and games for the UK Games Expo (sometimes known as UKGE, or simply Expo). The event is focussed on gamers playing games and includes Euro Games as well as role playing games, miniatures games, and war games. In addition to tournaments there is lots of “open gaming” space and demonstration events for new designs. For the little people there is the “Family Zone” with activities specially designed for kids, and for bigger people there is a trade fair with all the latest games games and seminars presented by industry experts, panels and celebrity guests.

– Image from ukgamesexpo.co.uk

This is the tenth year of Expo and the event keeps growing and growing, so much so that this year, the event will be spread across two venues, the the NEC Hilton Metropole (comprising organised play and evening gaming) and Hall One of the NEC (trade, open gaming and the Bring and Buy). Since the focus is on playing rather than marketing, in general, there are fewer new releases than at some of the other conventions. One of the highlights of the event this year though will be the release of Tony Boydell‘s Guilds of London which had been planned for Essen last year, but was sadly delayed. Essen’s loss is Expo’s gain however, and everyone is looking forward to seeing it at last. Several of the GOATS are planning to go this year, some for just a day, others for the duration and it is certain that it will be a fun weekend.

– Image from ukgamesexpo.co.uk

Next Meeting – 31st May 2016

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 31^st May, 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 Vanuatu, in which players are striving to be the most prosperous islanders in the archipelago. The game is a mixture of role selection and worker placement with a couple of little nasty twists thrown in for good measure.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

And speaking of the Vanuatu archipelago…

Jeff was visiting the island of Gaua for a holiday. He had got up late and was looking for a mid morning snack when he saw a little local shop. Jeff walked and asked the cashier, “How much are your doughnuts?”

“Oh, they are only ten vatus, sir,” she replied smiling.

Jeff thought for a moment, looking round, “So what about the coffee?”

The cashier continued smiling, “Why, it is only five vatus and refill is free.”

Jeff paused as he considered the complicated maths, then, very pleased with himself, he took out a ten vatus coin and handed it to the cashier saying, “One doughnut and one refill, please.”