Author Archives: nannyGOAT

Next Meeting – 20th October 2015

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 20^th October, 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 Bellz!, which is a game picked up from the Game Fair last week in Essen. A manual dexterity game, it is not the usual sort of game we play, however, its very quick and is really just a place-holder for all the games brought back from Essen.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor SpeedD

And speaking of bells…

As Church Warden, Jeff was interviewing for a new bellringer for the cathedral carillon. After observing several applicants demonstrate their skills, he decided to call it a day when a lone, armless man approached him and announced that he was there to apply for the bellringer’s job.

Jeff was incredulous, “But you have no arms!” he exclaimed.

“No matter,” said the man, “Just observe…”

He then began striking the bells with his face, producing a beautiful melody on the carillon. The bishop listened in astonishment, and a crowd had gathered outside the cathedral drawn by the beautiful music. Then, suddenly, rushing forward to strike a bell, the armless man tripped and plunged headlong out of the belfry window to his death in the street below.

Jeff was horrified and ran down the stairs to the cathedral square, and rushed to the man’s side. As the crowd parted, one of them voiced the thoughts of them all and asked Jeff, “Who was this man?”

“I don’t know his name,” Jeff replied sadly, “But his face rings a bell.”

The following day, despite the sadness weighing heavily in his heart following the unfortunate death of the armless campanologist Jeff continued his interviews for a new bellringer.

The first man to approach said, “I am the brother of the poor, armless wretch who fell to his death from this very belfry yesterday. I pray that you honor his life by allowing me to replace him in this duty.”

Jeff immediately agreed to give him an audition, and the armless man’s brother stooped to pick up a mallet, and then began to create the most wonderful melodies. When he had finished, he turned to Jeff, suddenly groaned, clutched at his chest and dropped dead on the spot.

The vicar who was in the nave, hearing the Jeff’s cries of grief at this second tragedy, rushed up the stairs to his side. “What has happened?” he asked breathlessly, “Who is this man?”

“I don’t know his name,” sighed Jeff, distraught, “But he’s a dead ringer for his brother!”

6th October 2015

This week we started out debating the poor performance of the England Rugby team compared with Ireland who had hitherto failed to beat a team in the top ten, but were still likely to go through to the quarter final stage of the world cup (thanks largely to the vagaries of the draw). While Blue and Pink finished their pizza Magenta, the Dobble Queen, schooled everyone else in a quick round of Dobble, before we split into two groups.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor msaari

The first group played Grog Island. This is an unusual game that it quite hard to get your head round because a lot is going on. The theme centers on retiring pirates who are trying to work out how to spend their ill-gotten gains. The game is played on a board that represents the five peninsulas of “Grog Island”, which is where pirates that have survived to retirement can go to invest their spoils by buying pirate-like properties. The key feature however is the innovative bidding mechanism.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

On their turn, the active player rolls five coloured dice, and then places their first bid. Bids are placed by selecting any number of the dice with the value of the bid equal to the sum of the number of pips on the upper-most face of the dice. The bid must be less than the players total amount of gold. The clever part of the bidding is that the dice that form the bid are placed in descending order, with each dice placed in one of the five available spaces, starting on the left with the highest value dice. If they can afford it, the next player may increase the bid, by increasing the total number of pips visible on the dice. To do this they can add dice, replace dice, even completely rearrange the order of the dice, so long they do not change the number on any die and the dice remain arranged in descending order starting from the left. The position and colour of the dice have a number of consequences, both for the eventual winning bidder, and for players who withdraw from the round early.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Wout

The player who eventually wins the bid gets to carry out the actions associated with the dice according to their final position. These include placing pirates on the island and blocking spaces on the island, but the peninsula is restricted to the colour of the die placed in the location associated with that action. Pirates’ positions on the island are important, because these are the primary way players get points during the game, but since those points depend on the victory cards handed out at the start, everyone has a different combination of goals.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor PZS69

Losing a bid can be useful too, however, as players who drop out of the bidding early get resources corresponding to the colours of the dice in the current bid. Thus, if the current bid is comprised of the yellow, blue and green dice, the player receives lemons (yellow), fish (blue), and coconuts (green). These resources can then be used to carry out one of the options on the shipping track. Black and Purple had played the game before, though always with four players. Red on the other hand was new to it and felt a bit overwhelmed trying to get her head round everything that was going on. For this reason, while Black and Purple began collecting victory point cards and planning a strategy, Red kept it simple and played tactically, gathering resources and using them as best she could. It was really close and it went right down to the wire, Red finishing with thirty-three, with Black and Purple two and five points behind respectively. The discussion at the end suggested that different tactics might be necessary with different player counts. On the other hand, the winner was was the player who had no idea what she was doing last time we played too, so maybe keeping it simple is the way forward with this game.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Wout

Meanwhile, everyone else played the “Feature Game”, Tokaido. This is a game where players take the role of pilgrims crossing the Japanese “East sea road”, meeting people, tasting fine meals, collecting beautiful items, discovering great panoramas, and visiting temples. It had been Pink’s choice as he lives so far away that he rarely makes it to games nights and was able to come this time as he was on his way to Essen. He chose the game because he had played it a couple of times with two and wanted to see how it played with more as he felt it was probably very different.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

The game is quite simple with fairly straightforward actions, but despite this there is a surprising amount to think about. The idea is that players are travelling along a path, but only one player can stop on each space. Each space allows the active player to carry out a predefined action which will usually give them some combination of money and/or victory points. Since the player at the back goes first they have to choose whether to move to the closest available space and get the maximum number of moves, or whether to pick a space for its action, either to improve their own position or to obstruct someone else’s plans. In practice of course, it is inevitably a compromise but one that is often based on marginal decisions.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor kilroy_locke

There are a number of possible actions, some of which involve drawing cards from one of the available piles with players scoring more for collecting sets. Players can also donate money to at the temple in return for victory points, but as money is quite scarce, this can be quite difficult. At intervals along the route there are also inns, where players have to try to buy a meal, which are worth six points, however, each meal must be different. The first player to arrive draws a hand of meal cards which have varying costs, and they get to select which meal to buy giving them the chance to to make live very difficult for everyone else.

– Image used with permission of BGG
contributor changeling

At the start of the game, each player draws a character card: Burgundy took Sasayakko; Pink got Zen-Emon, Magenta took Umegae and Blue got Eriku. Since nobody could work out what Eriku did (he was a promotional item and came without rules), Blue drew a second card and ended up with Hiroshiga. Sasayakko and Zen-Emon both had special powers allowing the cheaper purchases of souvenirs from the village, which meant that Burgundy and Pink were fighting for the same spaces on the path. Umegae allowed Magenta to take an extra point and coin every time she drew an encounter card, while Hiroshiga gave Blue a free panorama card at the three intermediate inns, which ultimately gave her two of the panorama bonuses.

– Image by BGG contributor asdoriak

Since the character cards drive the strategy, Burgundy and Pink both started out collecting souvenirs while Blue went for panoramas. Magenta was the only one who was completely new to the game and, as it is very different to anything else we’ve played, she struggled to find a strategy in the first few turns. As Umegae ensured that she had an extra source of money, Magenta managed to avoid getting into financial difficulties and quickly built up an unassailable lead at the temple and, by buying the expensive meal cards, managed to secure that bonus too. Money was much more of an issue for Blue as she started out with less than everyone else and really struggled to ensure she had enough to buy a meal at each of the inns. Burgundy also had a bit of a cash-flow crisis as he was buying souvenirs at every possible opportunity, but at least he was doing well picking up points.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Pink didn’t escape financial worries either and, as he was losing out to Burgundy for the village spaces, he wasn’t picking up as many points. The game finished with a clear win for Burgundy who’s souvenir buying strategy clearly paid off giving him a lead of ten points over second place. It was much closer than it had looked earlier in the game however, and only two points separated Pink in second and Blue at the back. It was a game we all enjoyed though, and it does indeed play very differently with two and “lots”, for two main reasons. Firstly, with two players, controlling the dummy player is a key part of the game, but he is not used with three or more people. Secondly, with more than three, some of the spaces have a sort of “siding” that can be used by a second player. This second player is remains behind the first person to arrive, which messes with the turn order and takes a little getting used to.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Tokaido finished first, so we played a quick game of Love Letter with the winner decreed as the person with the most points when Grog Island finished. The usual hilarity ensued as one player managed to take out another by shear blind chance using the guard, or occasionally by clever deduction. It was all level with one hand each, when Grog Island came to an end and it all came down to the last hand which was taken by Burgundy.

– Image by BGG contributor thatmadgirl

Red and Magenta were preparing to leave, but we managed to persuade them to stay for a quick game of one of our current favourite fillers, 6 Nimmt!. This is such a silly game: clearly there is more to it than just chance, but none of us can really work out what, which is why it continues to keep us intrigued. We usually play this in two rounds, each with half a deck, and typically, whoever does really well in the first round (generally Burgundy) does appallingly badly in the second. Everything went according to the script with Burgundy winning the first round taking just the one “nimmt”, and then starting the second round picking up cards. However, that’s where it stopped and Burgundy finished with just eight, the clear winner.

– Image by boardGOATS

With the departure of Red and Magenta, and Blue and Pink wanting an early night because they were travelling the next day, we decided to play another short game and opted for one of our current “go-to fillers”, The Game. We’ve played this a lot recently, but only actually won once. This time we started very, very badly indeed with nobody really having any very high or very low cards. Then the inevitable happened and about half of us only had very high or very low cards. We’ve known for some time that this game is a lot more difficult with more players and with five it is especially challenging. Nevertheless, despite doing so appallingly badly at the start, the end result was not as bad as we expected and we finished with three cards left.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Learning Outcome: Some games play very differently with different numbers of players.

Boardgames in the News: Bridge is not a Sport, Yet…?

A review began last month following the funding body, Sport England‘s decision not to class Bridge as a sport, and the High Court ruling was announced today. Mr. Justice Dove declared he was “satisfied that the defendant’s adoption of the definition of “sport” contained in the European Sports Charter was in line with both a proper interpretation of the 1937 Act and also a proper construction of the objects and powers contained with in their Royal Charter”. He concluded that “the claimant’s application for judicial review must be dismissed.” The English Bridge Union (EBU) are reported to be “very disappointed”, however, since the organisers of the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo have invited both Contract Bridge and Chess to apply for inclusion, this argument may not be over yet.

– Image from goodsamchurch.wordpress.com

Autumn 2015 Oxford Meeples Big DoG

On Saturday, November 7th, Oxford Meeples is opening the doors of Wolvercote Village Hall to the general public once more and inviting people to join them for another Big Day of Gaming. As usual, the Oxford Meeples will be bringing a large number of their games, but everyone is welcome to bring their own too. Gaming starts at 10:30 am and will be going until late. Entry is free, although donations towards rent of the hall and refreshments will be appreciated. Children are welcome when accompanied by an adult. These are great events, however, whether or not (m)any GOATS are there, will depend on other commitments as usual.

– Image from oxfordmeeples.org

Essen 2015

October is the time of year when a boardgamer’s thoughts turn to Germany, specifically, Essen. Essen is the ninth largest German city and most people in the UK have never heard of it. Most people who are not gamers that is. In German, the word “Essen” means “food”, but to gamers it means “Spiel”: the largest games fair in Europe and, arguably, the world, The Internationale Spieltage is held every year in Essen. The fair runs for four days every year and is the one of the largest and most significant of all the boardgame conventions. As such, many of the manufacturers plan their biggest releases for October with their debut at the Fair. This year, there are lots of exciting new games, including Richard Breese’s new game, Inhabit the Earth, Favor of the Pharaoh, and the highly acclaimed games Codenames and The Voyages of Marco Polo. There are also a number of expansions for some of our favourite games including Castles of Mad King Ludwig, Evolution, Istanbul, Colt Express etc. Only two of us are going this year, however, they will almost certainly bring back lots of exciting new toys to share with everyone.

– Image from merz-verlag.com

Next Meeting – 6th October 2015

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 6^th October, 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 Tokaido, which is a game where players are pilgrims crossing the Japanese “East sea road”, meeting people, tasting fine meals, collecting beautiful items, discovering great panoramas, and visiting temples.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

And speaking of pilgrims…

Two pilgrims were going hunting. One of them, Joe, was struggling under the weight of the two blunderbusses he was carrying. After a while, his companion, Jeff, asked, “Why are carrying two guns?”

Joe explained, “I usually miss the first time I shoot. By taking a second gun I have a better chance of hitting it.”

Jeff thought about this for a while and then said, “Why not just take the second gun, and only shoot once?”

22nd September 2015

It was a quiet night and, like last time, while we were waiting for people to arrive, we started off with the cooperative card game, The Game. This time it was only a three-player game and we had a terrible start when Blue’s initial hand had nothing below forty or above sixty. Things got worse when, a few rounds later she was left with little between ten and ninety. We struggled on manfully, but we finished with a total of twelve unplayable cards left at the end – we were not even close to matching our recent success.

– Image by boardGOATS

With the arrival of Black and Purple, we decided to move onto our “Feature Game”, Notre Dame. This is one of the first games published by the highly prolific game designer, Stefan Feld, who also designed some of our other favourite games including The Speicherstadt and Amerigo. Feld’s games are often referred to as “point salads” – i.e. games where players can build their score from lots of different sources and Notre Dame is one of these games. The round starts with the revealing of three character cards which can be hired at the end of the round. This is followed by drafting three action cards: each player draws three action cards from a personal deck of nine, keeps one and passes the other two to the player on their left. From the two they receive, they then choose another one to keep and pass the remaining card on so that everyone finishes with a hand of three cards, one card from each of the two players to their right.

– Image by boardGOATS

Beginning with the start player, there are then two rounds where each person plays one card, discarding the third. One way of looking at this is as worker placement where the card drafting is just a novel way of restricting choices. The actions include things like collecting victory points, collecting money, moving the players carriage and so on. However, in order to be able to carryout the action, players must place a “worker” (called influence cubes in this game) on the corresponding sector of their map. The clever part is that the reward yielded (i.e. how many victory points they get, how much money they receive or how far the carriage can move etc.) depends on the total number of influence cubes in the sector. Thus, for placing the first cube in the banking sector, a player will get one coin, but if they later add a second cube, they get two coins, and so on.

– Image by boardGOATS

At the end of the round, players can then hire one of the characters for the fixed cost of one coin. Finally, once everything else has been dealt with, everyone increases their rat population according to the number of rats shown at the bottom of the character cards (which were first displayed at the start of the round). If a player exceeds nine rats, then nasty things happen including loss of influence cubes and victory points. Every third round, the cathedral is scored. This is an area of the board that everyone can place an influence cube in, in exchange for a donation to the church. When it is scored, a set number of points is divided amongst the players depending on how many influence cubes they have in the Cathedral area. For example, in a five-player game, twelve points are up for grabs; when four of the players each have one cube in the cathedral, they will get three points a piece, but if there is only one player with a presence in the cathedral, that player will take all the points.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

Like most good worker-placement type games, players always want to do more things than they can. For example, if a player does not have sufficient cubes in their personal supply, then they can move them from somewhere else. That means the original action has one influence cube less, however, and consequently will yield less reward. So, one of the actions is to get additional influence cubes. For this reason, players have to try to make sure that they maintain a sufficient supply of cubes by carrying out the corresponding action. With only two actions per round though, this is difficult. Similarly, without money players cannot hire one the characters and at the end of the round, the rat population increases so it is essential that players stay on top of that too. Meanwhile, the winner is the player with the most points at the end of the game, so players also have to try to collect victory points whenever they can.

– Image used with permission of BGG reviewer EndersGame

Everyone started out a little unsure of what to do, but we got the hang of it quite quickly. Black started out best, having played before he had an idea of what all the actions could do and how the game would develop. At the end of the third round, the Cathedral points were shared evenly between Burgundy, Blue, Green and Black. Meanwhile, Burgundy was trying to collect messages with his carriage with the idea that they would allow him to get points as well as maintain his cube supply and control his rat population. However, this plan backfired and he got stuck without money which meant he couldn’t hire characters. Green had a plan to try to alternate between picking up cubes and money, but somehow couldn’t quite make it work. Blue was just picking up what she could when she could, and then got lucky picking up all the Cathedral points at the end of the sixth round.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor GogTad

Totaling up the scores showed that the game was much tighter than we all thought, but ultimately difference was caused by the Plague. Blue and Green invested heavily in keeping their rat population under control, ensuring the plague never broke out and did best. There were only eight points between second and last. Being the sole beneficiary of the second batch of Cathedral points put Blue eight points clear of Green in second which annoyed him as he felt he could have shared the points if he’d spotted it (or listened to Black who had pointed it out just before his last turn). We all really enjoyed the game, finding it a bit different with very tight choices, especially at the end. Definitely a game to try again sometime soon.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

We finished the evening with a quick game of one of our current favourite “push-your-luck -fillers”, Om Nom Nom. Burgundy won the first round with fifteen by taking a whole bunch of carrots unchallenged. Green declared that he disliked this sort of game because it was far too luck dependent. The second round was much tighter; Green decided to try a new strategy – choosing two cards playing the one he least liked, but although this sort of worked for the first card or two, it didn’t after that. Blue was the clear winner of the final round with sixteen, thanks to a swarm of flies. This gave her a total of thirty-two, eight more than Burgundy in second and a clean(ish) sweep for the evening. Green finished last – Luck? What luck…?

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor msaari

Boardgames in the News: A Magic Proposal at Thirsty Meeples

Last week, at the boardgame café, Thirsty Meeples, Abigail Birdy used the universal language of Magic: The Gathering to propose to her partner, Chris Daniels. Abi managed to place a custom card on top of Chris’ Magic deck presenting him with an offer he couldn’t refuse – Awwww!

– Image from facebook.com/ThirstyMeeples

Save the Date: Mixing it in Wantage II

The Mix in Wantage town centre is a community space that can be booked for use by local groups, organisations, businesses and individuals for activities, fund-raising, meetings, workshops, and presentations etc. This spring, we held a drop-in gaming session there to try to inspire people to play games. With winter approaching (traditionally “the gaming season”) and Christmas on the horizon, it seemed an excellent time to do it again.

– Image from thewantagemix.wordpress.com

We will be there from 10.30 am until 2 pm on November 21^st 2015. There isn’t an awful lot of space so, as before, the idea is to encourage people to drop in and play a short game or two, so we will be bringing along some of most eye-catching games like PitchCar, Colt Express, Dobble, Turf Horse Racing, Cube Quest, The Great Balloon Race and maybe a few of our favourite winter themed games like Snow Tails, Carcassonne: Winter Edition and The Great Downhill Ski Game.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

Boardgames in the News: Is Boardgaming a Sport?

A judicial review of the status of Bridge, began earlier this week, following the funding body, Sport England‘s decision not to class the card game as a sport. Sport England have reportedly claimed that Bridge was no more a sporting activity than “sitting at home, reading a book”. In contrast, the English Bridge Union (EBU) contests that Bridge is a “mind sport” that exercises the “brain muscle”.

– Image from innontheprom.co.uk

Contract Bridge is a trick-taking card game for four players where the two teams bid for how many tricks they will win. Once the contract has been made, the hands are played out and if the number of tricks agreed is achieved, the team who made the contract win. The case against Bridge being classed as a sport depends on the definition of a sport: Sport England defines a sport as an “activity aimed at improving physical fitness and well-being, forming social relations and gaining results in competition”.

– Image from goodsamchurch.wordpress.com

The case for Bridge as a sport includes the fact that other EU countries (including the Netherlands, Ireland and Poland) recognise Bridge as a sport, and that Sport England include angling, model aircraft flying, quoits and rambling in their list of sports as well as popular pub games like darts and pool. Perhaps more importantly, sports are defined in the 2011 Charities Act as activities “which promote health involving physical or mental skill or exertion”. Lawyers for the EBU are reported to have told the High Court that Bridge was based on rules, fairness and competition – just like other activities classified as sports and Heather Dhondy, winner of three world and five European gold medals made the case in the Independent last year based on the stamina required for tournament play.

– Image from bbc.co.uk

The bottom line is that this is all about funding. If Bridge is classed as a sport they can apply for National Lottery Funding allocated by Sport England. Sport England has a finite pot and claim it is their job to get the nation fitter, but in reality they are probably concerned they will be heavily criticised by the media and the general public if they give money to a bunch of people “sitting about playing cards”. Of course, the courts cannot really decide if bridge is a sport, only whether it was reasonable for Sport England to have ruled it was not. To date, judgement has been reserved and at the end of the High Court hearing, Mr Justice Dove gave no indication as to when he would give his ruling.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor duchamp

The final say, however, will perhaps depend on the International Olympic committee (IOC). In 1999, the IOC said that Bridge and Chess should be considered “mind sports”. If this is taken to its logical conclusion, Bridge, Chess and perhaps other boardgames like Scrabble will eventually become Olympic sports and medals will be awarded every four years. Indeed, Chess and Bridge are among twenty-six sports that have applied for inclusion in the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Since Team GB are the Kings of “sitting-down sports” (cycling, sailing, rowing, equestrian etc.), it seems inevitable that these would be sports we should excel at. If there were even a small chance of increasing Britain’s tally of Olympic gold medals, Sport England would undoubtedly change their view.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Susie_Cat