Author Archives: nannyGOAT

1st July 2014

Pizza was the order of the day, so while we were waiting for it to arrive, we played a quick game of Walk the Plank!. This is a very short game of kamikaze pirates that we’ve played a few times before and is great fun so long as everyone plays it in the right spirit. We started by shortening the plank, so everyone had no choice… Very quickly, most people had lost a pirate and the plank was only one square long. Red had all three of her pirates perched precariously on the end of the plank when the inevitable happened and in they all went and out went Red. Yellow quickly followed, then Green, leaving Orange and Blue to fight it out with their last remaining pirates (although the rules say the last two players share the victory, we play hard-core and stick it out to the end). Blue had the advantage of going first, but with both Pirates on the ship one remaining piece of plank between them and certain doom, it needed a bit of thought before she could finally secure victory.

By this time, pizza had arrived and so had more players, so we decided to play our “Feature Game”, Spanish Bohnanza which we could do while munching. We’ve played this a lot before and always enjoy it, even though it sounds really unpromising when you explain it. With two players new to the game, we played nicely and before long everyone was happily planting “Judías” and trading “Cafeterías” for “Hippies” and “Bills” for “Booms” – and we had all thought the names were funny in English! It was a very tight game with Blue finishing only one point ahead of Black and Red who were joint second. Whenever there are new players in a game, we usually let the experienced players go first as it takes the pressure off a little and means that they get to see how it is done. Unfortunately, this meant that the last two players, who were also new to the game got one fewer turn which could have made quite a large difference given how close it was and, on reflection, it was an effect that was exaggerated with so many players. So, if we remember, perhaps we’ll house rule it in future and turn over the draw pile one last time and make sure everyone gets the same number of turns.

An early start for work the next day meant a few players left early and the rest played Ivor the Engine. This is a clever little game that features the iconic art-work from the Ivor cartoons as drawn by Peter Firmin. We’d not played it before in the group, although several players had played it at the UK Games expo where it was first released and we talked about it a few of weeks ago. 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…

Once the game had been set up and sheep sprinkled liberally over the Welsh hillside, players carefully chose the starting points for their waggons. Within two turns however, the first event card came out and moved everyone to Tewyn. As almost nobody had any sheep, most of us had no choice, much to the chagrin of Green who had chosen to start in Tewyn and, by the time his turn came round, all the sheep had gone and everyone else’s waggons were in his way. Nevertheless, Green started well with a couple of very lucrative errands, followed by Black. Purple meanwhile, was the only player who had been able to avoid the enforced relocation to Tewyn, and was making good progress in the “Grumbly” area of the board. Blue was feeling more than a little hard-done-by, when she found herself stuck in Ivor’s shed by a nasty, vindictive move from Green, who helped himself to a couple of “lost sheep she’d been eyeing up at the same time. He couldn’t afford to stick about for long though, and eventually Blue managed to cash in three errands, finally getting going at last.

As the game progressed it became clear that the excellent start made by Green was gradually being eroded by Black who, with extra experience, was clearly the player to beat. Purple picked up a very lucrative event card giving her lots of extra sheep at the end of the game and Blue carried out a couple of errands and Mrs. Porty’s House, keeping them both in the game. Green meanwhile got in Black’s way and managed to prevent him from picking up his critical twenty-fifth sheep, thus prolonging the game for an extra round, giving everyone else a chance to play that last card. That last turn made the game very close, but Green and Blue failed to catch Black and who won on a tiebreak. Next time…

Learning Outcome: Spanish judías and German böhns are funnier than English beans.

Next Meeting – 1st July 2014

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 1^st 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 Bohnanza. This game is about bean farming which sounds very uninspiring when it is described, but is great fun and a game we’ve played a lot before and always enjoy. We are playing it again because one of us has a new copy in Spanish, and we fancied playing it in a different language!

And talking of beans…

Jeff loved baked beans, but unfortunately they always had a somewhat lively effect on him. After he met the woman of his dreams, he made the supreme sacrifice and gave them up because he couldn’t imagine subjecting his new wife to his beastly emissions.

On his birthday, his car broke down, so he called his wife and told her he’d have to walk home. On his way, he walked past a cafe and the wonderful aroma of baked beans overwhelmed him. Since he was still a couple of miles from home, (and it was his birthday after all), he figured he could indulge, then walk off any ill effects. After three large portions, he walked home, jet propelled.

Jeff’s wife met him at the door and seemed somewhat excited. She exclaimed, “Darling, I have the most wonderful surprise for you for dinner tonight!”

She blindfolded him, and led him to his chair at the head of the dining room table, making him promise not to peek. He sat down, but just as she was about to remove the blindfold, the telephone rang and she went to answer it. While she was gone, he seized the opportunity to relieve the build-up of wind – it was not only loud, but ripe as a rotten egg. He gasped and felt for his napkin and fanned the air about him. He had just started to feel better, when another urge came on.

This one sounded like a diesel engine revving, and smelled even worse. He tried flapping his arms, to clear the air. But another one snuck out, and the windows rattled, the dishes on the table shook, and a minute later, the flowers on the table were dead.

When he heard his wife ending her conversation, Jeff neatly laid his napkin on his lap and folded his hands on top of it. He was the picture of innocence when she walked in. Apologizing for taking so long, she asked if he had peeked at the dinner. He assured her he had not, so she removed the blindfold and yelled, “Surprise!!!”

To his shock and horror, there were twelve dinner guests seated around the table for his surprise birthday party.

he swing doors of the Wild West saloon crashed open and in came Little Pete, black with fury. “All right!” he raged, “all right! Who did it? What goldarned varmint painted my horse blue?” The huge figure of Black Jake, notorious gunfighter and town baddie rose from a chair by the door. “It was me, shrimp,” he drawled, bunching his gigantic fists, “what about it?” “Oh, well, er,” stammered little Pete wretchedly, “all I wanted to say was. . .when are you going to give it another coat?” – See more at: http://www.funnymail.com/jokes/swing-doors-wild-west-saloon#sthash.TruYgllK.dpuf

17th June 2014

Well, some of us had food at the pub first, others stopped off for food on the way and then we had a bit of a gossip about what games are high on our “want to play list”, the end result? We started late again! We were all keen to play the “Feature Game”, Snowdonia though, and agreed it was way too long since its last outing. This was amply demonstrated by the number of rules we’d forgotten – despite the fact that we’d all played it before, running through the rules and setting up took at least half an hour and even then, Blue didn’t have a clue what was going on.

Snowdonia

In summary, the game is a worker-placement game about building the rack-railway up Mount Snowdon. Players have two labourers each and take it in turns to choose which of the following actions they will carry out in the round: A) Collect resources from the stockyard; B) Excavate and remove rubble to create trackbed; C) Go to the building works to convert iron into steel or rubble into stone; D) Lay track on excavated trackbed; E) Build a station or an engine; F) Go to the site office and collect a new contract, and G) Move your surveyor further up the mountain. Once everyone has placed all their labourers, the actions are performed in order A to G (thus, any special actions on a Contract card cannot generally be used in the same round).

As in real life, the weather on Mount Snowdonia can be a real pain, work slows when the rain comes and trackbed cannot be excavated and track cannot be laid at all when the fog sets in. Although these are random events, the weather forecast is unusually reliable and you can see the bad weather coming and plan accordingly. At the end of each round, the resources in the stockyard are replenished by drawing them blind from a bag. This is very clever as it adds a small amount of randomness but, as there is a limited number of each type available, if there is a glut of stone, there will be a shortage in the bag making it more likely that other resources will be drawn. In addition to resources, “Events” can also be triggered: although the sequence of events is known in advance, the timing is uncertain as they only occur when a white cube is drawn from the bag. These events affect almost all aspects of the game, including laying track, completing stations and excavating trackbed. Scores are calculated at the end of the game and points awarded for track laid and contributions to stations, however, the largest points are awarded for any contracts fulfilled.

Yellow and Purple were most familiar with the game so went first, and Yellow started by snapping up a nice, tasty contract rewarding him for collecting rubble. Purple then visited the stockyard and started hoarding coal and iron while Green started surveying. Blue still had no idea what she was doing, so in the first few turns collected a couple of contract cards, foolishly choosing them based on the special action rather than the end-game points.

Snowdonia

Yellow then added a contract to build track to his contract for rubble and made a concerted effort to excavate and build while the weather was nice. Purple and Green decided to use their hard earned iron to build an engine while Blue faffed about and collected yet more contracts. As soon as Purple and Green had built their engines however, an event cube was drawn and engine maintenance was due. As Green could not pay, he had to return his engine to the shed unused, effectively costing him the both the resources and the actions, all for no gain. To add insult to injury, Blue pounced on Green’s engine, with it adding 9 points to her final score.

Snowdonia

Engines allow players to pay one lump of coal per turn to entice one labourer out of the pub to work for one turn. So, in a sudden flurry of activity, Blue used her engine to provide an extra worker for the next round and sent all three to the stockyard, which with a special action that provided two extra resources for that round, set her up with enough iron for the rest of the game. Meanwhile, Purple used her stockpile of coal and her engine to great effect and Green followed suit once he’d managed to get the resources together to buy a replacement engine. Yellow carried on organising his rubble collecting and track laying round the vagaries of the Welsh weather while Green’s Surveyor continued up the mountain. By this time, Blue was just about starting to get to grips with the aim of the game and was belatedly trying to contribute to enough stations and build a bit of track in order to fulfill two of her contracts. Having a large number to choose from helped here, as it meant she could match the contracts to what was achievable.

The game has a tendency to end rather suddenly, as the number of resources in the bag drops so that the frequency of the events increases. This game was no exception and Yellow was scrabbling to complete all the track he needed for his contracts, while Blue would have been completely scuppered without her last station contribution. As she was losing badly, Blue decided to gamble that the events would not end the game, and collected resources and laid track, rather moving her Surveyor. She got lucky and in the last turn, Purple picked up the last of the Rubble and moved her Surveyor up the mountain, Yellow did a little retrospective surveying and Blue used one of her special actions to great effect to take 14 points by contributing two iron bars to the final station, making her final score presentable. In contrast the extra turn did nothing for Green as he couldn’t build anything and his Surveyor had been at the top of the mountain for several turns. With his careful planning and efficiency throughout, it was no surprise that Yellow ran out the winner, however, it was initially surprising that he was only two points ahead of Purple. On closer inspection it became apparent that Yellow had done it without the use of an engine and had relied on careful planning and a targeted strategy. In contrast, Purple had made good use of her engine and the extra worker it had provided and scored lots of points in each aspect of the game.

Learning Outcome: Two very different strategies can sometimes give very similar scores.

Next Meeting – 17th June 2014

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 17^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 Snowdonia. This game is one we’ve played before and is a worker-placement game about building the rack-railway up Mount Snowdon. As in real life, the weather of the board game Snowdonia can be a real pain, so we are all looking forward to a summer’s evening of rain and fog…

And talking of Mount Snowdon…

A Russian spy was dropped by parachute on Mount Snowdon with instructions to contact a Mr. Jones who lived in Llanberis at the base of the mountain and give him the code message, “The tulips are blooming well today.”

On landing, the Russian followed the railway into town and asked a small boy where Mr. Jones lived. The child directed him to a small cottage at the end of the village where he knocked at the door.

The owner emerged and the Russian asked, “Are you Mr. Jones?”

“I am,” the man replied.

The Russian trotted out his prepared lines, “The tulips are blooming well today.”

Mr. Jones stared at him in amazement and then smiled. “Ah, you must have come to the wrong house – it’s Jones-the-Spy you want!”

3rd June 2014

This week, we started late partly due to illness and delayed arrivals and then we got side-tracked by the latest haul from the UK Expo over the weekend. These included The Little Prince: Make Me a Planet, Tsuro of the Seas (an expanded version of one of our favourites, Tsuro), a little card game called Dodekka and most exciting of all, a new game based on the old childrens’ classic, Ivor the Engine, complete with the original artists drawings.

We decided to start with Dodekka, as it had been played at the show. This is a short card game played with five different suits, Fire, Earth, Air, Water or Ether each numbered 0-4. The game starts with three random cards placed in a line from the draw deck. On their turn, a player may choose to take the card closest to the deck into their hand or take a new card from the deck and add it to the end of the row. Players score the total face value of the highest set, minus one point for each additional card and the highest score wins. As long as the row totals twelve or less (or the new card is the same number as last one) everything is fine, but if the active player chooses to “twist” and goes “bust”, then they must take all the cards on the table into their hand and this can lead to a lot of negative scores! The game started fairly evenly, but White was the first to succumb to the bust. It seemed that every time it came round to White, she had to choose between taking a card she didn’t want or taking a chance that she would not go bust from 11! So yes, the inevitable happened again and just as we were beginning to wonder if this game was flawed, Red went bust and shifted the cycle. Green (who had not played it before) somehow managed to hang on till the end of the game without going bust and won with the handsome score of 9.

As the theme of the evening was new games and old favourites, next we played Alhambra, but with a couple of new, unplayed modules: the Characters and Military Encampments from the City Gates expansion. We’ve played Alhambra a few times as well as its predecessor, Stimmt So!. Basically, on your turn, you buy coloured tiles with different coloured money cards and add them to your Alhambra. If you can pay with exactly the correct amount, you can buy another tile, but if you over-pay, you get no change and your 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 means that it is possible to get yourself backed into a corner later in the game. The Military Encampment tiles are placed alongside and outside the Alhambra walls and score points dependent on the number of tiles within that row. The Characters can do a variety of things: some help end-game scoring, some provide a one off bonus, and others give a bonus of some sort every turn. These cards are in the money deck and are immediately auctioned off when they appear.

The game progressed steadily through to the first scoring round, with White and Green matching tile for tile and Red just a couple behind. After totting up at the first scoring round, Red was only two points. As the second round progressed, things began to get interesting as the characters started appearing. Red picked up the first two, which enabled him to swap exchange a tile on the market board if he wanted, or get extra money if he got low. Green got the third Character, which was a tie breaker for one tile colour at scoring. White then got in on the action with a card which would increase her wall score, and since her wall was looking good already, seemed like a wise investment. Meanwhile, Red’s Alhambra was looking good for the high scoring tiles and the wall, although building was going to become more challenging. White was also getting a little boxed in to the west, but built up a few camps improving her score. Green did not have the long wall, but was really boxed in due to the hap-hazard nature of his city. So, when the next character card to appeared gave an additional city re-arrangement action for placing a new building, Green did everything he could to get it, and fortunately for him, the others did not try very hard to stop to him.

In the second scoring round Green’s tie breaker character gave him a boost and White’s wall bonus gave her a few extra points, but it was all to no avail as Red soared into the lead. Moving into the third round and the game picked up intensity as Ruth left the building (i.e. the game became “Ruth”-less!). The final character to appear enabled the player to get a money card if he bought a high value tile, although looking at what was already on the table there did not seem to be many (if any) left and only Green thought it was worth money.

Alhambra

So the fight was on, White was trying to make her wall as long as possible and added camps as often as she could. Green and Red fought to get the most of the highest scoring, purple tiles, while Green frantically set about re-arranging his city, turn by turn, often over-paying simply to buy a tile and unlock the re-arrange action, so that he could to get more tiles in. Red won the battle for purple and green tiles, Green just about got his city re-arranged and nabbed a couple of white buildings at the last to give him the lead in that class. In the scoring, Green then used his tie breaker to take the lead in brown tiles ahead of White, adding them to the lead in red tiles, meanwhile, Red sneaked ahead in the lowest scoring blue tiles. Both White and Red scored well for camps and walls, but Green had managed to pull his city together and link up his walls to give a respectable score. In the end, the game was quite close, but Red won the day with 146 points, just seven points ahead of Green in second. We all agreed that the character cards really added an interesting twist to the game, and will likely remain a feature of our Alhambra games from now on.

This game had taken a very long time, and, even though it was only supposed to be only an hour, according to the game cube timer it had taken over an hour and a half excluding setting up and auctioning! There was still time for another crack at Dodekka though and this time Green went bust very early on, while Red remained card-less and White went bust next. Red did not survive and right at the end, Green took a gamble and went bust to finish the game. As we’d found earlier this is a generally low scoring game and this was no exception, with Red running out the winner on 1 point! Even so it was agreed that this was a good game, worth playing again… and again… and again…

Learning Outcome: To win you don’t always have to score highly!

Next Meeting – 3rd June 2014

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 3^rd 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 Boomtown. This game is one we’ve played before and is set in the Wild West, where players are prospectors bidding for mining concessions. We’ve chosen this because we were going to play it last week, but ran out of time. It is a fairly quick game, which should give us plenty of time decide what longer games we would like to play once everyone has arrived.

And talking of the Wild West…

The swing doors of the Wild West saloon crashed open and in came Jeff, black with fury. “All right!” he raged, “All right! Who did it? What darned varmint painted my horse bright blue?”

The huge figure of Black Jake, a notorious gunfighter and town baddie rose from a chair by the door. “It was me, shrimp,” he drawled, bunching his gigantic fists, “What about it?”

“Oh, well, er,” stammered Jeff wretchedly, “All I wanted to say was… er… when are you going to give it another coat please?”

20th May 2014

This week we started out with our “Feature Game”, Walk the Plank!. This is a fun, light-hearted little game with a lot of chaos and not a few kamikaze pirates. The board is set up with a “ship”, three plank segments and “the sea” and each player starts with three pirate meeples on the ship. At the start of a round, everyone chooses three cards from their hand and places them face down, in front of them. Each card has an action: “Shove Anybody”, “Retract the Plank” and “Extend the Plank”, for example, enable a player to push another persons meeple closer to the sea, shorten and extend the plank respectively. Each round then consists of each player taking it in turns to turn over the top card and do what card says. Because players choose the cards and the order they will play them in at the start of the round, by the end of the round everyone is just trying to make the best of an increasingly worsening situation, and rounds often end with a lot of pirates perched on the end of the plank waiting for the last card to seal their fate.

– Image by BGG contributor TheBoardGameFamily

Blue and Green’s fate was sealed first in a manic pirate suicide pact, shortly followed by Red. With a two pirates to one advantage, newcomer Orange always had the advantage over Yellow. As Yellow shortened the plank, the end became inevitable and, although Yellow took one of Orange’s meeples with him, Orange chalked up her first victory.

– Image by BGG contributor onorc

After a lot of debate about what to play next, Blue suggested Ra, as she’d never played it and it is a classic and is supposed to be one of the best (if not the best) of the auction games available. Green said he’d played it once, a very, very long time ago and hadn’t liked it, but was happy to give it another go and see if that opinion was justified.

– Image by BGG contributor Stas

This game is an unusual and very clever auction game. Basically, players take it in turns to pull tiles from a bag and tiles can be good, bad, or they can be “Ra” tiles which start an auction. The auctions themselves are curious affairs: each player has three tokens that they use for bidding, each with a unique number. Thus, the person with the highest value can always win if they choose to, but once the auction is over, the token is placed in the middle and effectively becomes part of the stash for the next auction. The game comprises three rounds, each with ten to twenty auctions, however, each player can only win a maximum of three in each round (i.e one with each token).

– Image by BGG contributor blakstar

Those who had played it before had a better appreciation of the importance of the high value tokens. Blue didn’t and squandered the higher tokens she started with. With little or no choice in the auctions, she resorted to “turtling”, which in this context involved trying to minimise the effect of the higher tiles. Instead of drawing a tile from the bag, the active player can also call “Ra!” and start an auction and this is what Blue did. A lot. An awful lot. As the bidding starts with the next player, this meant blue would bid last, but Blue was committed to bidding if no-one else did. With some of the lowest tokens, she had little to lose if forced to bid, and set her sights low, going for a “try not to loose points” strategy coupled with a small number of river tiles and trying to stay ahead with green Pharaoh tiles.

– Image by BGG contributor Stas

Moving into the final round, Red was collecting monuments, Yellow had built up a sizeable river, Green was going for Civilisation tiles and Orange was trying to do a little bit of everything. Meanwhile, Blue was still calling “Ra!” at almost every opportunity, hoping to win something useful with her “one”. Thanks to Yellow failing to get a “flood” tile to activate his enormous river (there was one left in the bag at the end), Yellow didn’t accrue the massive score expected and surprisingly, Blue nearly made it. However, although her strategy had overall not been a bad one, on reflection, the game was probably ruined by Blue’s repeated small auctions. Although Green was slightly more enamoured by the game than he was the first time he played it, the overwhelming opinion seemed to be in favour of not playing it again soon.

– Image by BGG contributor usagi-san

We cheered ourselves up by finishing with an old favourite, Bohnanza. Also universally known as “The Bean Game”, we’ve played this quite a bit, so it was relatively quick to get started. Only Orange was new to it, and as the rest of us know it so well, it was a very close game. Blue started off strongly but slowed towards the middle of the game when Orange got the hang of it and Yellow and Red started trading efficiently. The game finished with only a couple of points between the places and Green ran out the winner, only one point ahead of Red and Orange who tied for second.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Sometimes an otherwise good strategy can ruin a game for everyone.

Spiel des Jahres Nominations – 2014

Every year the a jury of German-speaking board game critics (from Germany, Austria, Switzerland), review games released in Germany in the preceding twelve months and award the best the German Game of the Year, or Spiel des Jahres. The criteria used include:

game concept (originality, playability, game value),
design (functionality, workmanship),
layout (box, board, rules),
rule structure (composition, clearness, comprehensibility).

Last year, the winner was Hanabi, and previous winners include, favourites like Ticket to Ride: Europe, Niagara, Zooloretto, Alhambra, and Carcassonne. The nominees for this year have just been announced and include (amongst others) Splendor, which we played last time we met.

Spiel des Jahres

Next Meeting – 20th May 2014

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 20^th 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 Walk the Plank! which is a quick piratical game of disorganised chaos and fun. As it is a fairly quick game, it will give us the opportunity to decide what longer games we would like to play once everyone has arrived.

Walk the Plank!

And talking of the pirates…

Long ago, when sailing ships ruled the waves, Captain Jeff and his crew were in danger of being boarded by a pirate ship. As the crew became frantic, the Captain bellowed to his First Mate, “Bring me my red shirt!”

The First Mate quickly retrieved the captain’s red shirt, which the captain put on and led the crew to battle the pirate boarding party. Although some casualties occurred among the crew, the pirates were repelled. Later that day, the lookout screamed that there were two pirate vessels sending boarding parties. The crew cowered in fear, but the Captain, calm as ever, bellowed, “Bring me my red shirt!”

Once again the battle was on. However, Captain Jeff and his crew repelled both boarding parties, though this time more casualties occurred. Weary from the battles, the men sat around on deck that night recounting the day’s occurrences when an ensign looked to the Captain and asked, “Sir, why did you call for your red shirt before the battle?”

The Captain, giving the ensign a look that only a captain can give, exhorted, “If I am wounded in battle, the red shirt does not show the wound and thus, you men will continue to fight unafraid.”

The men sat in silence marveling at the courage of such a man. As dawn came the next morning, the lookout screamed that there were pirate ships, 10 of them, all with boarding parties on their way.

The men became silent and looked to the Captain, their leader, for his usual command. Captain Jeff, calm as ever, bellowed, “Bring me my brown trousers…!”

6th May 2014

This week, we started out with our “Feature Game”, Splendor. This is a fairly simple game of gem (chip) collecting and card development. On a player’s turn, they have a choice of four options: They can collect three different gems (or chips); they can collect two identical chips (but only if there are four or more left); they can pay chips to buy a card, or they can reserve a card and get a gold chip for their troubles. Gold chips are “wild” and can be used to replace any other colour when buying cards. Each card also represents a gem and, once bought, can be used in any purchase thereafter. At the start of the game a set of “noble” tiles are revealed and these are awarded to players with sets of three types of gem cards and give points at the end of the game. In addition, some cards also give points at the end of the game and the game ends at the end of the round when one player has fifteen points. The game was very tight with Green edging it by one point.

Our second game was Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar a game we last played back in December last year. This is a worker-placement game with a difference: players place their workers on the wheels of a Mayan Calendar that actually turn at the end of each round. On their turn, players can either place workers on the wheels, or they can remove them from the wheels, but they can never do both. Players can place as many as they can if they choose, but the more they place, the more it costs. When workers are removed from the wheels, players perform the associated actions, however, generally, the longer the worker has remained on the wheel, the larger the rewards.

Each player gets to pick from a small number of starting advantages and Green chose to start with an extra worker. In contrast, Blue started out with a moderate supply of corn and spent her first few turns getting extra workers and a building to help her feed them. Green was making excellent progress and also had a building to help feed his workers, and then we realised that he hadn’t made sure he had three corn at the start of each round. The penalty (as for most things in this game) was angering the Gods, so he regressed down all three temples and we carried on, but unfortunately his rhythm was broken.

Green really struggled to feed all his workers and have enough corn to do anything. Blue stopped concentrating on what she was doing and Green stole the monument she had been working towards (which rewarded good positions on the technology tracks). In her confusion, Blue went a little overboard harvesting corn and ended up buying her way out while Green held back by his lack of corn. As there was no competition for placing skulls, Blue picked up a hat-full of points there, and with the bonuses provided by her positions higher up the temples, she inflicted brutal revenge for the single point defeat in the previous game.

Learning Outcome: Do not anger the Gods: they will have their revenge.