Category Archives: Games Night

31st December 2019

Burgundy was the first to arrive and he was quickly joined by Purple, Black and Lime. As the first to arrive, together, they began to set up the “Feature Game“, the now traditional, car-racing game, PitchCar. When Pine joined the party, discussion turned to the “Monster Games” session which featured Bus, Ecos: First Continent and the very silly Happy Salmon, all of which had been very enjoyable in their own way and most of which will come out again soon. Before long, an exciting-looking racing track was set up around an obstacle course of snacks and drinks.

– Image by boardGOATS

As we’ve done a few times recently, instead of a circuit, we set up a single section track with separate start and finish lines. This year we included the new Loop (which got it’s first outing at Pink’s sPecial Party in October) and Upsilon expansions as well as the bridge from the first expansion. As usual, much fun was had by all concerned, especially with the new challenge that the Loop added. There is clearly a knack with this: it is essential to hit the puck hard and in the middle, but some have the skill naturally, while others apparently just don’t. Lime is one who clearly does, and as a result, his car traveled the furthest in the “flick-off”, so started at the front of the grid and finished way out in front too.

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Pine, Pink and Purple, clearly don’t have the knack, and we never really found out about Burgundy either, as someone helped him largely avoid it, resulting in him to taking second place. Elsewhere, having successfully escaped from the Loop, Black shot round the chicane and made the bridge look easy, inspiring Pink to comment that we always used to get stuck at the bridge, but now we have the Loop, the bridge is easy! That said, stopping over the line without falling off the end of the track proved to be quite challenging. So much so, that after half a dozen mini-flicks, Black was in danger of getting caught by Pine, who eventually made it round in fourth place.

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That just left Pink and Purple, taking it in turns to try to get round the Loop. Eventually, Purple hit the sweet spot and started off towards the finish. Unfortunately, after a superb single shot that took her round the ring, she ended up pointing in the wrong direction and tried to go round the Loop backwards. Pink meanwhile was still stuck and thanks to the way the track looped back on itself creating an intersection, managed to very effectively obstruct Purple in her quest to get to the end.

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As Purple’s and Pine’s antics entertained, everyone else consumed crudites, Devils on horsebacks, stuffed mini peppers, and large quantities of pigs in blankets (Lime commented that he now knew why JD Wetherspoon had a shortage). When Purple and Pink finally crossed the line, it was time for supper – spicy vegetable chili, beef chili, rice and corn on the cob. As people finished dinner we realised we’d forgotten the crackers and Christmas pressies. Unusually, this year there was desert too, so Black was given a special rolling-pin shaped knife to “cut” it, leaving everyone to wonder, before Pink delivered a Christmas pudding-shaped chocolate piñata.

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The “Pud” resisted all Black’s initial blows, until he decided a side-swipe might have more effect. Eventually a dent became a crack and the crack became a hole revealing the sweets inside. As everyone picked at the chocolate, we decided to start another game, Ca$h ‘n Guns, because there’s nothing better at Christmas than pointing foam guns at each other. This is a very simple, but very fun party game where players are gangsters dividing up their loot by a sort of controlled Russian Roulette.

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Each player starts the round by loading their gun with one bullet from their deck of eight bullet cards, or “clip”. Each bullet can be used only once during the game, and three are live, while the other five are blanks. Once everyone has chosen their bullet card, the Godfather counts to three and everyone points their weapon at someone. The Godfather can then use his privilege to ask one player to point their gun away from him (there was some discussion as to whether a real gangster would use “please”), then there is a second count of three. This time, players can back out, which means they won’t get shot, but they also won’t get any loot.

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All the remaining players then reveal their bullet cards and anyone who is shot picks up a plaster and also won’t get any loot at the end of the round. This leaves a hard-core of gangsters to take it in turns to collect cards from the loot pool that was revealed at the start of the round. In each round, all the loot cards are taken, so when it is a particularly brutal round, players can take several cards. The loot includes diamonds, artworks and cash, as well as the occasional medipack or additional bullet and the opportunity to become the Godfather. Unusually, this final option was taken several times so the Godfather changed hands quite frequently, with Burgundy, Pink, Lime, Blue, and Pine all taking the role at some point.

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Blue was Boris, so Pink suggested that she should be the target. This is fairly usual in this game, so Blue rarely wins. However, it seems people didn’t like being told what to do by Pink, even if he was the Godfather, so remarkably, she survived the first round. After a couple more rounds she’d still only picked up one plaster, while Pine, had acquired two so a third would put him out of the game. As he had pointed out at the start, an injury tends to make you a target, but somehow, Pine managed to get himself a medipack. Burgundy and Purple, however, were not so lucky and bought it in round six.

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Going into the final round, Black commented on how many painting cards Blue had picked up—the first is worth $4,000, but these score an ever increasing amount so a player with ten scores $500,000. At that point, Blue didn’t feel she had enough, but as Pine’s final bullet proved to be a blank, she was able to stay in for the final round and pick up a couple more. It surprised even her when she counted up and found she had seven paintings giving a total of $250,000 when her cash was added in. Black took the $60,000 bonus for the most diamonds and with it, second place with $133,000, and not a scratch, just ahead of Pink ($110,000) who was also unharmed.

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With midnight fast approaching, we replaced the guns with glasses to toast the New Year and watch the fireworks (in both London and the village). And then we had the very important decision to make: what to play for the first game of 2020. In the end, we decided to go for our old favourite, 6 Nimmt!. Everyone knows how to play this by now: players simultaneously choose a card from their hand and then, starting with the player that revealed the lowest value card, players add their cards to one of the four rows. The player who adds the sixth card to a row, instead takes the first five into his scoring pile, where the number of bulls’ heads indicates the score. The winner is the player with the fewest “nimmts”.

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We played with our usual variant where a game takes two rounds, each played with one half of the deck. In the first round, Pine top-scored with twenty-two closely followed by Lime with eighteen, while Pink kept a clean sheet and Purple remarkably (especially for her), had only the one card with just a single “nimmt”. So, going into the second half, it was all to play for. As is usually the case, those that do well in the first round typically do badly in the second. That was exactly the way it panned out for Pink who picked up the most “nimmts” in the second round with twenty-five, almost catching up with Pine and Lime. Purple, however, managed to buck the trend, and pulled out a clear round giving her a final total of just one and with it, clear victory—the first of the new year.

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Lime suggested a second game, and as the only other game being suggested was Bohnanza, apathy from everyone else meant we played 6 Nimmt! again. Again, Pink ended the first round with “zip”, followed by Black and Burgundy with five; again Pine had the highest score of twenty-four. Also again, Pink failed in the second round, taking more than anyone else and finishing with a total of twenty. Blue managed a zero in the second round, but had picked up too many points in the first to do better than second place. It was consistency that won the game though, and Burgundy, the only one to say in single figures for both rounds, finished with thirteen and took first place.

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By this time was well gone 1am, and there was some chatter before Lime decided that it was past his bedtime and left everyone else to it. With six, there were slightly more options, and when Pink appeared with For Sale, nobody objected. This is an older game, that we haven’t played in the group since it was the “Feature Game” nearly seven years ago, but it is a bit of an “ever-green” game that still pops up on recommendation lists from time to time.

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The game is very simple: players buy properties in the first part of the game and then sell them in the second half, and the player who has the most money at the end wins. Buying properties is through auction. Players start with $14,000 to last the whole game and take it in turns to bid for one of the property cards available on the table. These have a nominal rating of one to thirty with fantastic pictures that reflect their value. In each round, the bidding is continuous with players either increasing the bid by at least $1,000 or passing. When a player passes, they take the lowest value property card and pay half their bid. Thus, the winning player gets the highest value card, but has to pay the full amount bid.

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In the second part of the game, cheque cards with a value of $2,000 to $15,000 (or void) are revealed and players simultaneously select a card to play and then reveal. The property card with the lowest numerical value takes the cheque with the smallest value. This time, the property cards came out in bunches so it was mostly a case of players trying to avoid getting the real rubbish, and some inevitably failing. It was such a long time since we had played the game, that it took a couple of rounds for players to really get the feel of valuing the properties and the best way to bid, by which time, in some cases, the damage had already been done.

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It also took a round or two to get the hang of selling properties as we weren’t sure exactly how the money on the cheques was distributed. In addition, the cheques came out with low values first, then high values and finally, both voids in the last round. This meant that although Blue took the maximum return for her Space Station, she didn’t take out any of the other high value buildings. It also meant that Burgundy and Pink got saddled with the voids in the final round.

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Despite this, it was a very close game. In the final accounting, Black won with a total of $50,000, just ahead of Burgundy in second with $47,000, the void possibly making all the difference. By this time, it was gone 2am and although nobody was keen to leave, it was definitely pumpkin-o’clock. So everyone headed home to bed for the first time in 2020.

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Learning Outcome: Thick chocolate is surprisingly hard to break.

24th December 2019 – “Unofficial boardGOATS” on Christmas Eve

It being Christmas Eve, with many people away or having other plans and already having held our Christmas Party, we decided to have a quiet, “unofficial” meeting for those who fancied it. As a result, there was no “Feature Game“, and just four to respond positively to a Doodle Poll. So, Pine and Lime joined Blue and Pink (newly arrived from Radio Oxford) for food and a chat before settling down to play some light games. The first of these was Azul, winner of the Spiel des Jahres and Deutscher Spiele Preis in 2018, a game we played a lot when it first came out at Essen in 2017, but has more recently been largely superseded by the newer versions (Stained Glass of Sintra and Summer Pavilion).

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Azul is very light and simple to play, but with surprising staying power. Despite Azul being so popular with the group, Lime had somehow missed out so we had a run-down of the rules first.Players take coloured tiles from a central market and add them to rows on their player board next to their mosaic. The rows are different lengths and can only hold one colour at a time. For any rows that are complete at the end of a round, one of the tiles is moved into that players mosaic and the row is emptied for the next round.

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The clever part of the game is the tile market. There are a number of “stalls” in the market, each holding four coloured tiles. On their turn, the active payer can take all of one colour from one of the stalls moving the rest to the central pool, or alternatively, they can take all the tiles of one colour from the central pool. Once all the tiles are gone, the round ends and tiles in the rows are moved across to the mosaic then the market is restocked from the draw bag. Scoring occurs during the game when tiles are added to the mosaic, and bonus points are awarded at the end of the game for completed rows, columns and any colours which appear in each row/column.

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Pink put all his efforts into trying to get bonus points for placing a full set of red tiles monopolising them early on and making it really hard for everyone else to get any. It was a really, really tight game, and Lime put in an excellent show to take second place against much more experienced opposition. He was just pipped by three points by Blue, who finished strongly taking bonus points for two completed columns. Lime had enjoyed his first play and likes playing games twice so suggested a replay. With the relaxed atmosphere, everyone else was happy to go along with it.

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The second game wasn’t as tight as the first. Pink collected more red tiles, annoying everyone else, again, and Blue was forced to take an eight point penalty which she thought was going to put her out of the game. She made up for it by picking up bonus points for one complete column and a set of blue tiles and once again sneaked ahead of Lime. Everyone was trampled into the dirt by Pine, however, with an enormous score—his first ever over a hundred. As we were packing away, we discussed how he did it, and concluded that it was all about the scores from tile placement, and the bonus points really were, just that: a nice bonus, but not really something to aim for.

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The night was still young and everyone fancied playing something else. In keeping with the relaxed nature of the evening, a pair of comfy slippers seemed in order, in this case, Ticket to Ride: London. This is a trimmed down version of the popular modern classic, Ticket to Ride. All the game play is much the same: on their turn the active player, takes coloured cards into their hand or plays coloured cards to place pieces on the map trying to complete route cards they received at the start of the game. In the original game, the cards and pieces were carriages, in this cut down version the cards depict other forms of transport and the pieces are buses, and players have fewer of them.

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Points are placing trains on the map with the longest sections scoring more heavily. In this cut down version, there are also bonus points for connecting stops in certain regions. The biggest factor is usually the tickets however, as completed tickets score points, while incomplete tickets give negative points. The active player may forfeit their turn, instead taking additional tickets, which adds an element of jeopardy: taking more tickets can add to the score, but if they aren’t fulfilled by the end of the game, it can be costly. Pine started the game with two tickets giving long, roughly parallel routes that he thought he would be able to make work. However, as is often the case with the cut-down versions of Ticket to Ride, the game started fast and Pine quickly realised he would be lucky if he could finish one and end with a positive score, never mind complete both.

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It was really tight around central London, and almost everyone struggled as others upset their plans. This made for another tight game. Blue finished the game by reducing her stock of buses to two first, and ended up with a winning score of forty largely thanks to a couple of fortunate tickets picked up late in the game. Lime likes playing games more than once and suggested a rematch. Pine, having had a really rough time the first time round was keen to improve on his first attempt and Pink and Blue were happy to go along with it.

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Pine again picked up Regent’s Square to Elephant & Castle, but pairing this with a shorter route made it much more achievable. This time, Blue really struggled to place trains, and looked to be in a lot of trouble with only seventeen points when Pink brought the game to an early end. Both Blue and Lime had nothing they could do on their final turn so were left with a decision: gamble on taking more tickets to try to get one that is already complete, or hope they had enough tickets already. Both thought about it, but chose to forgo the gamble, which turned out to be the right choice. In the final accounting, Blue picked up a massive twenty-three points from her tickets, to give her an unassailable total of forty (again—nothing if not consistent), dashing Pinks hopes, leaving him five points behind. With that, everyone wished each other a Very Merry Christmas and headed home to put their stockings up.

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Learning Outcome: While GOATS love a good party, a quiet night can also be really enjoyable.

10th December 2019

The evening started with people arriving in festive attire and snow, glitter and other detritus all over the table, as people pulled crackers and party poppers. While we waited for food everyone amused themselves writing “Secret GOAT Christmas Cards” and contemplating the voting possibilities for the Golden GOAT Awards (by far the most enjoyable poll of the week). In the interlude between courses, people completed and submitted their voting papers and Blue and Mulberry conducted the count. As the results came in, it was clear that there was only going to be one winner.

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Although Key Flow put in a very strong showing to come second, Wingspan, already winner of the Kennerspiel des Jahres and Deutscher Spiele Preis, took the most coveted award of the year, the coveted Golden GOAT. The GOAT Poo Prize was less clear cut – almost everyone said that for them there wasn’t a stand-out game deserving of the award. In the end it went to 7 Wonders, which is a bit of a Marmite game among the GOATS – some people are very fond of it, but nearly a third of the group nominated as the least enjoyable game of the year. Eventually, everyone finished dessert, but everyone was in festive mood and nobody seemed desperate keen on playing anything.

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Lime threatened to head off without playing anything as he had a long drive in the morning, but after some discussion about perhaps playing the Winter Edition of Carcassonne or repeating the snowy Nordic version of Ticket to Ride that we played last year, eventually, he joined Mulberry, Blue, Pink and Ivory to play the “Feature Game”, Christmas Penguins. This is a cute little game, with some interesting ideas, but proved to need more development and more complete, precise rules. The premise is that players are naughty penguins trying to steal gifts from under the Christmas Tree, while trying to avoid being captured by Santa.

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The rules for the second edition were only available in German and had been translated by Blue, so some aspects might have been missed, but the idea is that the round is started by Santa who rolls his die and moves accordingly, trying to catch one of the naughty Penguins. Then each Penguin takes their turn trying to get to the Christmas Tree to steal one of the presents under it. If they manage to steal a pressie, Santa moves the tree to another location. Penguins cannot pass through a space occupied by another Penguin, instead, playing a sort bumper-car game, they push the occupant onto an adjacent unoccupied space.

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If a Penguin lands on a space with an Event Stone, by design or because they were pushed onto it, they take the stone and keep it until they need it. Event Stones come in different colours which have different effects, but these primarily involve swapping places with other characters. To use an Event Stone, the player can call “Stop!” at any time and then carries out the action by spending the stone. Rolling a one, has the additional effect of invoking the Polar Bear, who moves one space at a time, but if he ends on a space with a Penguin it drops a parcel and runs away to an unoccupied adjacent space.

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One of the clever ideas is that when Santa captures a Penguin, the owner of the Penguin takes over the role of Santa and the player who had been Santa places their Penguin in Santa’s workshop. The turn order was a bit of a problem, however, and may have been one of the things that didn’t make it from the German translation, certainly it was one of the things that mean the game didn’t really gel for us. Another thing that our group found lacking was the fact that there was no mechanism for the Event Stones to return to play, which was a shame; perhaps we would house rule it that every time the Christmas tree was moved a stone would be left in its place.

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Ivory started out at Santa and we went at it with a will. Ivory quickly caught Lime, who looked most unimpressed. Unfortunately, thereafter, every time Santa caught a Penguin, the upset it caused to the turn order confused everyone. There was one other aspect of the game that we completely failed to use, which was the rivers—each player can place or remove one river piece per turn. These cannot be crossed by Penguins, Polar Bears, or even Santa himself and are clearly designed to add an element of strategy to the game. In practice though we just forgot they existed, only using them very occasionally.

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The game ends when the final parcel is taken from under the tree, in our case, by Blue, which just left the scoring. Even this was a little more complex than it needed to be: players get one point for each present they’ve stolen and bonus points are awarded in a Point Salad way to the player with the most parcels of each colour and the player with the most different colours. It is almost as if this game doesn’t know what it is meant to be, silly fun or strategic, which is a great shame because it feels like it should be a good seasonal game. So, over the Christmas period, we’ll have a go at house-ruling it to try to improve it for our group. This time, in the end, Blue and Ivory got a bit of a lead and Blue eventually put everyone out of their misery.

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It wasn’t clear how bonus points should be awarded in the event of a tie. In our first attempt, we decided that bonus points would only go to the person with more than anyone else, but this led to a three-way tie which was about as unsatisfying as the game. So we decided to try friendly ties, which did at least give us a winner, with Lime just sneaking into the lead. With that, Lime and Mulberry took themselves off leaving Ivory, Pink and Blue to play Christmas Lights, the game that was going to be the “Feature Game” until Pink had commented that he didn’t like it.

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Christmas Lights is a set collecting card game with a memory element. The idea is that players have a hand of cards that are “reversed” so players can see everyone else’s hand, but not their own, like Hanabi. Players are tying to make a string of lights by playing coloured light bulb cards in the correct order to match their cards. On their turn, the active player first trades a card of their choice with one from any other player. They then play one card, adding it to their string of lights. This can be the card they’ve just swapped, or one they’ve had in hand, but if it does not match their pattern card, they must discard it.

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Once they have played a card, the active player then turns over the top two cards and then either adds one to their string, or can trade one of the cards for the one-word answer to a question of their choosing. With just two players, it feels like the game plays itself, but with three or four players, its sweetspot, there is a more interesting interplay between planning, memory and navigating the event cards which can help or hinder. This time, Pink was first to complete his first target string, but found it difficult to play the plug card that he needed to connect his first string with his second. This was made worse by Blue, who stole his once he’d found one, and the fact that he had played a lot of broken bulb cards that needed replacing before he could continue.

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While Pink was struggling to sort out his plug, Ivory and Blue had both caught up and started work on their second string of lights. With two cards played per turn, it wasn’t long before all three were threatening the end of the game, but Blue got there first, just. Pink couldn’t quite finish his string and as Ivory had started first, he didn’t get another turn, leaving Blue to take victory without another tie-break. Meanwhile, on the next table, Green, Black, Purple and Pine were playing a slightly more conventional, tie-break free game in one of our old favourites, Snow Tails.

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Snow Tails is a husky sled-racing game where players have a deck of cards from which they draw a hand of five, playing one to three of these each turn so long as the cards played all have the same value. Each player also has a dog sled with two dogs and a brake. Forward movement is the sum of the dogs minus the value of the break, with a drift sideways of the difference between the two dog speeds (in the direction of the faster, stronger dog). Using this, players have to navigate the course avoiding colliding with obstacles including other sleds, saplings and, of course, the wall of the track.

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Corners are also a hazard, and players traveling too fast into them or hitting things they shouldn’t, pick up dent cards. These are added to the players’ hand and stay there for the rest of the game obstructing their planning and management reducing the number of cards they can draw. The track is modular and there is a “menu” players can choose from. This time, Lime, on the next table chose the board layout, and picked one of the two double hairpin tracks, albeit one without the sledge destroying saplings. It took us a couple of attempts to get the track right though, having to make sure there weren’t two red speed limit lines next to each other and adding a couple of saplings either side of the gorge to make it just a little more interesting.

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Using a random selection, Pine was in pole position, followed by Black, then Purple with Green starting last. There was a nice easy run to the first half bend, but those starting last had to make sure they did not crash into the back of the sledges in front. Within a couple of turns Green had nudged from last to be alongside Black and on the inside of the track so theoretically in the lead. Over the next few turns Green and Black vied for the lead while Pine and Purple were scrapping for third.

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Eventually, Green got a good position for the first hairpin and pulled into the lead. Although could have let the brake off at this point hurtle forward, he decided that the inevitable dents for breaking the speed limit would not be worth it, so instead slammed on the brake. This allowed Black to catch up, but his track position was not so good and soon found himself boxed in on the outside unable to get across the track fast enough, as a result picking up his first dent. At about the same time, Pine also found himself sliding too wide at the hairpin also taking a dent, while Purple was taking it slow and steady, avoiding damage.

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At the front Green used his inside track position to start to pull ahead of Black, and continue round the second hairpin, cutting in tight to the opposite half bend, for an easy dodge through the canyon and round the tree towards the finish line. Black in second place had to manage his damaged sledge through the last corners, but had a good lead on Pine and Purple and was able to easily slide home in second, taking one of the trees with him to the line.

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In the meantime, Pine found himself going too fast into the second hairpin and not only crossed the speed limit line too fast, he also crashed in the same accident black spot that had caused Black problems earlier. Pine’s sledge was so badly damaged that everyone else took pity on him and allowed him to only take a single dent card, although he insisted he should take the lot. At this point it looked like an easy third place for Purple, but she suddenly began to struggle as she didn’t have the right cards to do what she needed to do. As a result she was crawling along so slowly that Pine caught her up. It was looking like it might be rather tight for that third place, until Pine’s impossibly damaged sledge finally got the better of him and Purple crossed the line for third.

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Learning Outcome: GOATS love a good party!

26th Movember 2019

There were lots of people feeding and with a bit of a queue, so the non-eaters, Ivory, Mulberry and Lime, decided to play something while they waited. There were lots of options, but it was a long time since we’d played The Game and it ticked all the boxes, so unusually, a decision was made really quickly. This is a simple cooperative card game (in our case, played with a copy of The Game: Extreme, but ignoring the special symbols), but new to Mulberry and Lime. The team have a deck of cards from two to ninety-nine and they must play each card on one of four piles, two where the card played must be higher than the top card, and two where it must be lower.

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There are just three rules: on their turn, the active player can play as many cards as they like (obeying the rules of the four piles), but must play at least two cards before replenishing their hand, and players can say anything they like but must not share “specific number information”. Finally, there is the so-called “Backwards Rule” where players can reverse a deck as long as the card they play is exactly ten above or below the previous card played on that pile. This time, it went a bit wrong early on, but the trio managed to pull it back. Lime got stuck with fifty-six and sixty-four that he couldn’t play, and eventually the game came to a halt with six cards still to play.

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By the time The Game was over, the eaters had just about finished as well and the group split into two, one five to play the “Feature Game”, Mississippi Queen. This is an older game that won the Spiel des Jahres award in 1997, but has recently been re-released in a new edition having been out of print for many years. In this game, players race their paddle steamers down the Mississippi, picking up passengers along the way. Onboard, coal supplies are limited, so each ship’s acceleration and manoeuvrers must be carefully planned. The key to the game are the cool little plastic paddle steamers which have two numbered paddle wheels – one to track coal and the other to record the speed.

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The five riverboats start at jetties and then set sail along the river, which is made up of a hexagonal grid. At the start of their turn, the active player can adjust their speed by one and then move that number of hexagonal spaces, turning a maximum of once before, during or after the move. The player can increase or decrease their speed by more or make extra turns by burning coal. Everyone starts with just six coal though and there is no source of coal during the game, so when it’s gone it’s gone.

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The game has a lot in common with Powerships, a mad spaceship racing game we played about six months ago, but there are a couple of key differences. Firstly, each player has to pick up two passengers from the islands during the race, which means they must arrive at a jetty at a speed of one. There is a more subtle difference which is nevertheless important to the way the game plays. In Powerships, the map is modular, but is set out before the start of the game, where it is built as play progresses in Mississippi Queen.

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In Mississippi Queen, after the first turn, play proceeds according to position in the race (like PitchCar). The advantage of this is that players at the front don’t obstruct players moving up from behind, however, it can lead to a run-away leader problem instead. In Mississippi Queen though, the river is “built” as the game progresses; when the leader moves onto the final space, they draw a new river tile and roll the die to determine placement (left, right or straight ahead). The fact that the player in the lead has less time to plan has the additional effect of off-setting the advantage of less obstruction, helping to prevent the leader running away with the game.

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This time, Lime stormed into the lead, but overshot the first island allowing Blue to sneak in behind him and grab a passenger. There are plenty of islands though, so Lime had plenty of other opportunities. Unfortunately, he overshot the second island as well as he was going too fast. By the third island, Lime was starting to get desperate, but hadn’t got his speed and position right and ended up burning almost all his coal and doing a full circuit of the island to rectify things. This, and almost sinking gave everyone else a chance to catch up and Blue managed to snatch another passenger putting her in a position to make a run for the finish.

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Although she was able to move into the lead, Blue was hampered by an inability to plan and was forced to burn some of her carefully hoarded pile of coal. Mulberry wasn’t far behind, and had the advantage of being able to see slightly further down the river so was better able to plan and could therefore carry more speed. Purple and Pine got into a tangle over picking up a beautiful lady, delaying them both as Blue and Mulberry puffed off into the distance. Lime bravely fought his way back, but it was between Blue and Mulberry with Mulberry rapidly eating into Blue’s lead. Blue just managed to make it to the jetty burning the last of her coal to drift in gently, just ahead of Mulberry. Lime limped in next, leading the others in. Meanwhile, on the next table, everyone else was playing one of the archetypal card-drafting games 7 Wonders.

– Image used with permission of boardgamephotos

Players start each round with a hand of cards, and everyone simultaneously chooses one and plays it. The remains of the hands are then passed on to the next player who chooses a card and plays it. Play continues like this until each player has two cards at which point one is discarded. The game is distinguished from simpler card-drafting games like Sushi Go! by the civilisation and engine building aspects. In 7 Wonders, the players are the leader of one of the seven great cities of the Ancient World. They use the cards to gather resources, develop commercial routes, and affirm their military supremacy. Some cards have immediate effects, while others provide bonuses or upgrades later in the game. Some cards provide discounts on future purchases, some provide military strength to overpower your neighbors and others give nothing but victory points.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

After three rounds (or Ages), the player with the most points has the most advanced city and is the winner. The player boards are chosen at random at the start of the game. In this case, Green got Halicarnassus, and chose Side B so would be looking to build extra cards from the discard deck in the second and third rounds. Black got Ephesus and also went with Side B and so was only going for victory points and extra money. Ivory got Babylon and again Side B was favoured, giving him the second tier bonus of being able to build both his final two cards. Red received Alexandria and was also going to use Side B which would provide her extra resources and victory points.

– Image used with permission of boardgamephotos

Green’s game was one of building resources in order to build the pyramid enabling him to build the extra cards. He started building up his military, and although he was joined at the same level by both his neighbours (Ivory and Black), he began to pull ahead of Ivory after the second round and by the end of the third round had amassed an unassailable army. In the process though, he had neglected green science cards and purple guilds. Building extra cards from the discard pile is perhaps not as helpful as it might seem as the cards in the discard pile are there because they are the least useful cards. Maybe with more players there would be more to choose from and this bonus would work more favourably, on thee other hand, it might just end up with more duplicates.

– Image used with permission of
BGG contributor punkin312

On the opposite side of the table was Red. She, in contrast (and not under threat from the growing armies of Green) mostly ignore the fighting, but still managed to win one battle. With the extra resources available from her pyramid she did not need as many resource cards and decided to concentrate on the other cards. She invested heavily in the yellow bonus cards and also managed to get a full complete set of science cards. These she managed to combine with the purple guild which gave her an extra science symbol of her choice. She also managed to build a second purple guild, which gave her extra points for all brown, grey and purple cards. She also managed to acquire a very large pile of money which netted a fair few points too.

– Image used with permission of boardgamephotos

Ivory’s game was built around trying to get to the second pyramid level quickly, so initially he took a lot of resource cards. Unfortunately he didn’t get to the second level until the end of the second round, but having looked at the card he then decided the extra money would be more useful. He managed to build both his last cards in the final round, but like Green found, that extra card is not always that useful. He did manage to collect some high scoring blue cards, but although he tried, he failed to get a full set of science cards. He did get a couple of purple guilds though with one scoring the yellow cards belonging to neighbours, Red and Green who had both gone quite heavily into those. The other gave him points for every battle lost by his neighbours. He got nothing from Green for this, but scored quite nicely from Red. His resource heavy early game meant that he was left trying to catch up on the other later cards and abandoned his attempts to build a strong army and just took the beating.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

Black’s game was concentrated on the blue victory point cards and his pyramid build. A smattering of yellow bonus cards aided his end game score because he scored for all the brown cards built by both himself and his neighbours (Green and Red). He collected some science, but not a complete set. Although beaten by Green in the final battle, he avoided defeat in the first two and took a clean sweep of victories over Red. So although everyone had had a strong game in one area, these were more than offset by less strong elements elsewhere. It turned out that the strongest games were had by Black and Ivory who finished level on fifty-one, some way ahead of Red in third. The tie break was won by Black who had the more money at the end of the game.

– Image used with permission of boardgamephotos

Mississippi Queen was still going, but coming to an end so something quick was needed and Ticket to Ride: London hit the spot. This is one of the new, smaller versions of the popular route-building game, Ticket to Ride. These are reduced in size and designed be quicker to play although the game play is very similar. Players take it turns to draw coloured cards or use them to place pieces, but in this version the Train pieces are replaced by Routemaster Buses. As usual, players also start with a selection of ticket cards and successfully fulfilling these give more points, but woe betide any player who fails to complete a ticket as the points become negative, which can be very costly indeed. In addition to these features, this new light version of the game also gives bonus points to players who manage to connect all the locations in an area.

– Image by boardGOATS

The action started around central London, (Covent Garden, Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar square) as Red, then Black and Ivory laid buses around the area, all concerned that the other may block their paths. Green went further out to Kings Cross and Regents Park. As the game progressed, Ivory, Red and Black continued to challenge each other around central, East and Southern London. Green happily laid his buses round to the East unopposed.

– Image by boardGOATS

Black, who had only kept one ticket, was the first to complete his ticket and go for more. He was closely followed by Red (who had also only kept the one), and then Ivory (who had kept two). Green never took new tickets, concentrating on his two and connecting all the stations in the five point district. Black, Red and Ivory continued to take new tickets, but it looked like Green might end the game as he was soon down to only three buses. Ivory checked around the table to see who had buses and how many cards they had left and decided that he had time. Even though he had missed the fact that Green had only a single card in hand, he still managed to lay his last buses first; one turn too early for Green who had to settle for a two length route instead of the three he was aiming for (and close to getting).

– Image by boardGOATS

Black placed one last bus, but Red decided to gamble on new tickets as she had nothing she could claim. Ivory still had one final turn, but with no more buses to lay, he decided against the ticket gamble. In the final scoring, Ivory was way ahead of everyone else, due to claiming four “long” routes (threes and fours) and completing some high scoring tickets. Red, Black and Green were all within two points of each other. Red’s final ticket gamble failed and cost her a clear second place, and Green’s gamble on connecting all the stations in the five point district (and the stations in the two point district as well) did not pay off either.

– Image by boardGOATS

Some left for an early night and those that were left decided to play one last quick game. Pine was adamant that Bohnanza and Las Vegas weren’t “quick” so in the end, 6 Nimmt! got the nod. This is one of our most popular games, and frequently gets played in circumstances like this. It is very simple and there is something almost magical about playing well: simultaneously everyone chooses a card from their hand and places it face down in front of them. Once everyone has picked a card, they are all revealed and, starting with the lowest card, the cards are added to one of the four row, the row where the end card has the highest value that is lower than their card. The point is that the row a card is played on changes as players place cards.

– Image by boardGOATS

The player who places the sixth card, takes the five cards and scores the number of bulls’ heads shown. The winner is the player with the fewest bulls’ heads. We play the game in two rounds, and this time the first round was mostly pretty even with everyone taking twelve to fifteen Nimmts except Blue who somehow scraped a clear round. This meant it was all to play for in the second round, especially with the tendency for a good round to be followed by a bad one. Unusually, nobody had a terrible game: Pine top scored with forty, followed by Purple with thirty-one, and everyone else was quite closely grouped. Blue’s clear first round gave her a head-start and she finished with fourteen, just two ahead of Ivory and three ahead of Black in what was an unusually close game. And with that, it was home-time.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Neglect end game bonuses at your peril.

12th Movember 2019

The combination of Illness, work and jet-lag meant we were really low on numbers, despite having a new player, Emerald. Blue arrived first followed by Pine and both ordered food. Green arrived shortly after and ordered the mushroom tagliatelle as he was suffering with toothache and he thought it would be nice and soft. Blue’s scampi arrived lightening fast, quickly followed by Green’s tagliatelle, much to Pine’s chagrin. Despite his head-start, Green was still last to finish, partly due to his toothache making him eat slowly, but mostly because he was busy texting. When called out on it, he explained that it was important – he was helping some friends at a quiz.

– Image from google.com

Green denied it, but that didn’t stop everyone from was roundly chastising him for aiding and abetting cheaters. That was until Ivory pointed out that it was strange anyone would choose to ask Green when it would be just as easy to ask “Mr. Google”, and “Mr. Google” would probably be better! Eventually, as Green mopped up the last of his sauce, Blue suggested people started shuffling seats so games could be started. Blue, Pine and Lime had all had a fairly long week and fancied an easy night, and the “Feature Game”, The Voyages of Marco Polo which Green was leading, was always going to be right up Ivory’s street, and it turned out, Emerald’s too. So after a little prompting, the groups sort of formed themselves.

– Image by boardGOATS

Although we’ve played The Voyages of Marco Polo a couple of times before on a Tuesday, the last time was over a year ago. In the game, players recreate the journey from Venice to China undertaken by seventeen year-old Marco Polo, his father and older brother. During their voyage, they travelled through Jerusalem and Mesopotamia and over the “Silk Road” until they reached the court of Kublai Khan in 1275. In the game, each player has a different character and special power. The game is played over five rounds with players rolling their five personal dice and using each one to perform one action per turn with them.

– Image by boardGOATS

The actions include: gathering resources, gathering camels, earning money, buying purchase orders and travelling. The game ends with players receiving victory points for arriving in Beijing, fulfilling the most purchase orders, and having visited the cities on the secret city cards that each player gets at the start of the game. With only three people playing the group decided not to use the Agents of Venice, but did use the New Characters mini-expansion. It took quite a while to set up and explain the game as it is one of those where the rules explanation is far heavier than the game itself: after only a round or two it all becomes quite clear how to play. However, the trick is to work out what are the best actions to take and when.

– Image by boardGOATS

The main game board is divided into two parts with the upper part showing a map of Marco Polo’s travels from Venice to Beijing. On the routes there are oasis-spaces as short stops and fourteen cities. When a traveller stops at a city, they mark that with a trading post and may use the special action of that city for the rest of the game (these are allocated during setup). The first player reaching a city also gets an additional bonus. Travelling costs a varying amount of camels and money depending on the route taken and whether it is over land or sea.

– Image by boardGOATS

The bottom part of the board shows the five main actions, which are triggered by the placing of dice. Each player has five personal dice in their player colour and may purchase one additional black die per turn. The actions are the guts of the game. The first action is purchasing Resources/Camels and the table on the board indicates how many dice must be placed for different numbers of a given resource. Players need Camels to travel, and Gold , Silk and Pepper to fulfil orders. The first player at each Resource gets them for free, with each subsequent player paying as much as the lowest result he placed next to the table. For the next action, Players can instead take one Resource of their choice and two Camels, and again, each player sets the cost for subsequent players.

– Image by boardGOATS

The next action is getting money: the first player can take five coins in exchange for any die, but the later players must also pay the dice value for doing so. As an action, Players can also purchase Orders. These are placed on six “double dice” spaces at the beginning of each round. The value of one die unlocks the orders up to that number (shown on the spaces) and allows the player to buy one or two of those orders. The Orders are refreshed and replaced at the beginning of each round. The orders are placed on the player’s individual player board and can be fulfilled at any time as an additional action by returning the resources needed back to the supply. The completed Order cards are then turned face down and placed in the player’s “drawer”, and the player gets victory points, money, camels, another order, etc. as a reward.

– Image by boardGOATS

Finally, players can travel. To do this, they place two dice are to “unlock” the distance they want to move on the map. Each traveller starts in Venice and can decide between several possible routes eastward, towards Beijing. Each player also gets two “city cards” with two cities on each of them, which they keep secret. At the end of the game, they get additional victory points depending on how many of these cities they have visited by the end of the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

This is one of those games where players want to do lots of things but can’t do everything, need lots of Resources way more than they have, and therefore want to be first to do all the actions, but can’t. Despite the dice, the luck factor is relatively low; high rolls are usually better, but low ones are also usable in many ways. With city cards, Orders and attractive special actions in the cities, players usually have clear primary and secondary targets as well as an overall strategy. At the same time they have the freedom to do what they want.

– Image by boardGOATS

The winner is usually the player who makes best use of their character’s special ability, however, so it is this that usually drives strategies. The characters are very different, for example, with one character the player doesn’t roll their dice, instead turning them to the result they need before each placement. With another, the player always gets one of the resources from the supply, whenever another player purchases any resource. As a result of these differing abilities, each player generally follows a totally different path with a very different approach.

– Image by boardGOATS

Following the group’s usual policy of the player with the least experience of the game going last, Emerald took that position, but that meant choosing his character first. Fortunately, he only had four to choose from and they did not take much explaining. Emerald chose Johannes Carprini which allowed him to jump between oasis points on the travel map; handy to get to those hard to reach bonuses. Ivory then chose Alton Ord (from the New Characters mini-expansion) which gave him extra cumulative bonuses every time he placed a trading station. This had the potential to become quite lucrative if he could get around the map fast enough. This left Green with a choice of two. He didn’t favour the extra trading posts, so went for Matteo Polo which gave him a new contract and resource at the beginning of every round; clearly the contract strategy was the way to go for him.

– Image by boardGOATS

As ever in this (and many) game resources were tight, camels all too rare and players could never get the dice rolls they needed. Emerald quickly got the hang of it and was doing his best to move around the travel map while also keeping an eye on completing contracts. Even with the oasis hop, it still took him a few rounds to get to the far side of the board and the triple action city, but once there, he started using the extra actions to his advantage. Ivory also went travelling and managed to place a number of trading posts and so collect more and more bonuses on the way. The small city bonus card which allows a player to choose any other small city bonus at the beginning of each round was located near to Venice. So this was an early target for Ivory and Emerald who both got there early and used it to broadened their options and give them room for manoeuvre.

– Image by boardGOATS

Green hardly travelled at all, and found himself somewhat at a dead-end which was compounded by making a free move in the wrong direction, so he only managed to place two trading posts in total. This wasn’t his game plan anyhow though, and he mostly stuck to the bottom part of the board, hoovering up contracts and hunting down resources to complete them: not bothering with travelling gave him extra dice to do it all with. He also made use of the favours two or three times and by the end of the game had a huge lead and a pile of completed contracts far higher than either of the other two. Ivory, in particular, had a lot of bonus points to come from his travels though.

– Image by boardGOATS

Everyone thought it would be a tight game, and indeed it was. When all the points were in, Ivory and Green tied on sixty-seven points with Emerald not far behind. A quick check of the rules for tie breakers gave it to Green thanks to the fact he had two Camels left over. meanwhile, on the next table, while Ivory and Emerald helped set up Marco Polo and Green began his rules explanation, Pine pointed out the long and unpronounceable title of “Weltausstellung 1893” on the German box. So, before long Blue was explaining the rules to World’s Fair 1983.

– Image by boardGOATS

This is a fairly simple little game that is now a few years old and flew under the radar a bit at the time. Reviews generally seemed to be complimentary though, referring to it as a bit of a “Hidden Gem”. So, having been on the look out for it at a reasonable price for nearly three years, Blue and Pink had finally picked up a German copy at Essen. The game is a set-collecting dame with an area majority mechanism where players are proposing exhibits for the fair in the five different areas (Fine Arts, Transportation, Manufacturing, Electricity and Agriculture). The game is played on an eye-catching, modular, Ferris-wheel shaped board surrounded by sections for each of the five areas.

– Image by boardGOATS

The actions are simple enough, making the decisions that players have to take theprimary focus of the game. On their turn, the active player places a Supporter cube on one of the five coloured areas, taking all the cards in the area. They then place three cards drawn from the top of a deck around the wheel, the first going in the now empty area the player chose, and one going in each of the next two areas round the wheel. There are three types of cards: Exhibit cards associated with each of the five areas, Medway tickets and Influential People. The Medway Tickets are the timer, with the Ferris wheel turning one step each time a Ticket is taken. The round ends after the Ferris wheel has made one full revolution.

– Image from google.com

At the end of the round, the Tickets are cashed in for a dollar each and the player with the most gets a couple of dollars bonus. Each area is also evaluated, and the player with the most supporters in that area gets a monetary reward worth three dollars in the three-player game. In addition the winner is also able to exchange three exhibit cards for that area, for tokens. The player who comes second receives a smaller remuneration and can exchange one card for a token of the same colour/area. The game ends after three rounds, and sets of tokens scored, with larger sets worth increasing numbers of points.

– Image by boardGOATS

Perhaps the thing that makes the game is the Influential People cards. These must be played the turn after they are taken, after the player places their influence token, but before they take the cards. If a player has more than one influential person card on their turn they have to play them all at this point too. These allow players to mess with the distribution of Supporter cubes slightly, either by adding an extra one in a given space, or moving one. As a result, these add a thin layer of complexity to the decision space, making it that bit more interesting. Thought processes go something along the lines of, “Placing a Supporter here will give these cards, but this person card means this Supporter can be moved giving the majority in that area, but there’s little point in winning that without any cards of that colour, so perhaps it would be better to try something else…”

– Image by boardGOATS

Although the game is not terribly difficult, Blue had only played it once and was a bit flaky with the rules, but it wasn’t long before the game got going. Half-way through the first round, Blue had a pile of tickets, Lime had a pile of Exhibit cards, and Pine had worked through a pile of Influential Person cards. Blue took the Medway Ticket bonus, but Pine turned a lot of his now substantial pile of Exhibit cards into a significant pile of coloured tokens. Blue picked up a few, but Lime took a round to really get the hang of things. The second round when much the same way with Blue and Lime struggling to edge out Pine.

– Image by boardGOATS

The third round was a tight affair with everyone needing certain colours to get full sets of five in order to be even vaguely competitive. The key was having enough cards as well as gaining the majority in the necessary area. As the game drew to a close, Lime decided to go for Fine Arts letting Pine place his Supporter in the Electricity area, take a Medway ticket, get the majority he needed, and end the game as well. In truth, the writing had been on the wall from the start—it was clear this had been a game that had just clicked for Pine and he romped home with eighty-five points leaving Blue and Lime some way behind fighting it out for second.

– Image by boardGOATS

As World’s Fair 1983 was coming to an end, The Voyages of Marco Polo was only just beginning and it was becoming clear that it was going to last most of the night, so Pine suggested a game of Ticket to Ride: New York. Like the London version played a few of weeks ago, this is one of the new, smaller versions of the popular route-building game, Ticket to Ride. These are reduced in size and designed be quicker to play although the game play is very similar. The New York version is set in the city, with players placing Taxis instead of train carriages.

– Image by boardGOATS

Players also start with two ticket cards (which they must keep one of) and successfully fulfilling these give more points. Similar to the original games, on their turn, the active player can take coloured cards from the market or play cards to place Taxis. There is no end-game bonus for the longest route, most completed tickets or similar, instead, bonus points are awarded for each of the landmarks a player builds a route from.

– Image by boardGOATS

Lime started and claimed one of the double track route from The Empire State Building to Gramercy Park. Pine went next and took the other track leaving Blue stymied before she had even taken a turn, specially given the tiny number of taxis each player had to place. Not one to give up, she started a detour, very glad that she had decided to keep only one of her starting tickets. Matched step for step by Pine, she built a route from The Empire State Building to Brooklyn via Chelsea. Pine on the other hand was building what he later referred to as the “Beckham” route going from Chelsea to Brooklyn.

– Image by boardGOATS

Blue was the first to pick up tickets and, after checking she had enough Taxis, decided to gamble, keeping both, as she had only kept the one from her starting pair. Lime quickly followed and also kept his, as did Pine, who then drew another second set. Lime claimed two tracks going from Central Park to Gramarcy Park, then suddenly looked crest-fallen having just realised he didn’t have enough Taxis to do what he wanted to. It wouldn’t have mattered anyhow, as Blue promptly triggered the end of the game. That only left the scoring.

– Image by boardGOATS

These little versions of Ticket to Ride are always really tight affairs where things can go horribly wrong. In this case, Blue scored most for claiming routes. Pine would have scored most for tickets except he’d just failed to complete an eight point ticket from The United Nations Building to Wall Street giving him a brutal sixteen point swing. Lime discovered that he’d not made the mistake he’d thought he had, as he’d actually gone from Midtown to Central Park by the long route, via Gramarcy Park.

– Image by boardGOATS

In the end, the opening play from Lime and Pine taking the two sides of the single Taxi double route from The Empire State Building to Gramercy Park might have been critical. In forcing Blue to take a detour, she had been able to visit almost all of the eight tourist destinations giving her a very valuable seven points. This coupled with completing all three of her tickets (including two long ones) and placing all fifteen of her Taxis gave her a final score of forty-four, five more than Lime in second.

– Image by boardGOATS

By this time, The Voyages of Marco Polo were progressing, but it was clear it wasn’t going to finish soon. With Pine flagging after his trip up to Edinburgh, and Blue and Lime fending off colds, Blue suggested Coloretto as a light game that didn’t take too long or need a lot of thought. Although it’s been played a lot within the group, it was new to Lime, so Blue gave him a run-down of the rules while Pine shuffled. The game is really simple: on their turn, the active player either takes a coloured chameleon card and places it on one of the trucks, or takes a truck.

– Imageby boardGOATS

Each truck has a maximum of three chameleons, and there is one truck per player. Once a player has taken a truck, they are out of the game until everyone has taken a truck and the next round starts. At the end of the game (when the deck is mostly depleted and the end of game card is drawn), players score sets of chameleons. The three largest sets are scored positively and everything else gives negative points. The clever part is the triangular number sequence (one point for the first card, three points for two cards, six points for three cards etc.), which means that one more card in a large group is worth a lot more than a singleton or the second card in a pair.

– Image by boardGOATS

Lime picked it up quickly, but not quite quickly enough given that Blue and Pine had played the game many times before. Served two wild Joker cards by Pine, Blue was able to put together two sets of six, giving her a total score of forty-eight, a healthy advantage over the other two. Lime had enjoyed playing though, and suggested a second game as it would save getting something else out. With lethargy playing its part, Pine and Blue were very happy to give it another shot. This time, Lime was quicker out of the blocks this time, as Blue started to go off the boil. He wasn’t quite quick enough though, and Pine took the second game with forty-four points, seven ahead of Lime.

– Image by boardGOATS

Lime doesn’t give up easily, however. As The Voyages of Marco Polo was finally coming to an end, and Coloretto is quite quick, Lime suggested a third game. This time, Lime started very strongly with obvious determination. Ultimately Lime made a killing picking up a massive fifty-three points, more than ten points clear of Blue in second.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: You can never have too many camels.

29th October 2019

Blue and Pink were first on the scene, armed with special deliveries from Essen and some new exciting toys to play with. Burgundy, Pine, Lime and Green weren’t far behind and soon those that hadn’t eaten earlier were tucking in. Inevitably, the conversation was all about the games fair in Essen and how much it had grown – this year, according the organisers, there were over 209,000 participants, ten percent more than last year. There were also one thousand two hundred exhibitors from fifty-three nations, occupying six large halls, around twice the hall space when Green last went.

– Image by boardGOATS

As people arrived, they received their consignments. Purple and Black got their sadly rather squished copy of the new release, Fast Sloths complete with Expansion and Chameleon promo, a copy of the new portable set of Settlers of Catan (“Catan Traveller“) and a several bags of German lebkuchen biscuits. Burgundy got his annual Concordia expansion (the Balearica/Cyprus map) and the European Birds expansion for Wingspan. This last game was one of the sell-out games at Essen, and Blue and Pink had been at the front of what became a very long queue to get it. That said, the length was probably more to do with the fact that it was also the queue to get a hand on one of the fifty English language copies of Tapestry at the show. Given the fact that Wingspan is very popular at the moment and it would need very little learning, the new expansion was “Feature Game” for the night.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game is relatively simple, with players collecting birds for their reserves. On their turn, the active player chooses one of four actions/habitats, and then starting with the card furthest to the right in that habitat, activating each card in turn. The actions associated with the habitats are spending food to play cards; getting food; laying eggs, and more drawing bird cards. Players start with eight possible actions per turn, which gradually reduces to five over the course of the four rounds of the game. All the bird cards in the game have actions that fit with their real-life behaviour. For example, the food needed to play cards closely resembles their diet, the number of eggs each bird has in their nest is proportionately correct and bonus actions are associated with birds that flock and birds of prey.

– Image by boardGOATS

The European Expansion adds more birds that mostly do more of the same thing, but includes birds that have new end of round powers. There were enough copies for everyone to play, so we set up two games in tandem. Blue, Green and Pink helped Burgundy christen his new copy, while Black, Purple, Ivory, Pine and Lime gave Blue and Pink’s copy it’s first outing. After making sure all the new cards were thoroughly shuffled into the deck, Burgundy’s group were first to get started. The end of round objectives were particularly awkward as the final round rewarded players with the most birds without eggs on nests (one of the new objective tiles).

– Image by boardGOATS

Blue started off very well, but then her game stalled as she struggled to find useful cards. Burgundy wasn’t far behind and his very hungry Griffon Vulture seemed to be very effective when it came to catching mice. Blue’s Barred Owl was also successful on almost every occasion it went hunting while Green’s Northern Harrier repeatedly went hungry. Meanwhile, Pink was building a very fine reserve with lots of high value birds, although he felt they didn’t give him such effective actions. With Blue struggling to get anything she could play and Green muttering about not understanding the game, it was left to Pink and Burgundy to fight it out. In the end, although Pink had far more interesting birds, Burgundy did much better with his personal objectives and end of round objectives, giving him a total of seventy-three points, nine more than Pink in second place.

– Image by boardGOATS

On the neighbouring table, everyone started off slowly. Black grabbed one of the new European birds that allowed him to steal food which he used to great effect. Black and Lime also took one of the new end of round bonus cards each which allowed them both to tuck cards. Pine played a Long-tailed Tit, one of the new double space birds, allowing him to get lots of food. Ivory focused on cards with activation powers and in the second round, he and Lime built egg laying engines, with Lime making good use of his Fish Crow which allowed him to exchange eggs for food. Purple struggled due to the lack of fish, clearly having an eye on the last round objective (most birds in wetlands).

– Image by boardGOATS

Both Pine and Lime struggled seeing and understanding the cards, but despite this, both managed to get effective engines going, particularly Lime. By the end, Black had lots of valuable birds and did well on his objectives and Pine missed out on a seven point objective bonus by just by one corn eating bird (getting three points instead). Black also did well on tucked cards, as did Lime. Everyone drew for the first end of round objective (most birds in any row), with Ivory followed by Lime for the second (most birds with “brown powers”). Lime managed to win the third round objective battle (most grassland birds), edging Ivory into second place, but the final round (most wetland birds), was a three-way tie between Ivory (again!), Pine and Purple who all had the maximum number of birds in their wetland.

– Image by boardGOATS

Although he did well on objectives, in the final round Ivory’s primary focus was on getting as many eggs laid as possible and he finished with a massive twenty-seven, a significant contributor to his final, winning score of seventy-nine, seven more than Black in second place and ten more than Lime in third. There was the inevitable comparisons between the two games, and when Ivory asked whether people felt the expansion had made much difference to the game, opinions seemed divided. Having birds he could see in his garden had made a big difference to Pine, though to those people who were less interested in our feathered friends and more interested in the game play, the expansion had made less of an impact. For those that have it though, the European expansion will no-doubt remain a permanent feature.

– Image by boardGOATS

The four-player game including Burgundy, Pink, Blue and Green finished first by some margin, giving them time to play something else. With Blue and Pink having exchanged last year’s variant on the 2018 Spiel des Jahres winner, Azul (Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra), for this Essen’s latest model, Azul: Summer Pavilion, this seemed a good time to give it an outing. All three games are based round a clever “market” mechanism: players take all the tiles of one colour from one of the stalls and put the rest in the central pool, or take all the tiles of one colour from the central pool. In the original game and in the second iteration, these are placed straight away in a tableau, with the original representing a mosaic and the second a stained glass window.

– Image by boardGOATS

In the new, Summer Pavilion variant, tiles taken from the market are put to one side for the second phase when players take it in turns to place them on their personal player board. Where the tiles in the first two versions are square (opaque and clear plastic respectively), in the new edition, they are rhombus-shaped. Instead of rows, each player’s tableau consists of stars made up of six rhombi. In this game, as they add pieces players score points for the size of the block. For example, adding a piece to an existing partial star consisting of two pieces gives three points. Thus, increasing the size progressively yields increasing amounts of points. Although this is an obvious difference, the biggest difference in the game play is the cost of placing tiles and the use of “Wilds”.

– Image by boardGOATS

Each space on a player’s tableau has a number on it: one to six. This is the cost to place a tile in that space. So, placing on a six-space means they place one tile on the board and five in the tile tower. The tiles must all match the colour being placed, however, every round, one of the six colours is “Wild” and this can be used as a substitute. The Wild colour affects the tile drawing phase too: Wilds cannot be chosen from the market, however, if there is are Wilds present in the market, one (and only one) must be taken as well. For example, if there are two blue tiles, a red and a green (which is Wild), the player can take the two blues and the green, or the red and the green, but cannot take the green alone.

– Image by boardGOATS

There are several bonuses, both in game and end game. Players who surround certain features on their tableau get to take extra tiles from a second, special market. This helps grease the wheels and makes the decision space a little more interesting too. At the end of the game, players get bonus points for completing stars and for covering all the “ones”, all the “twos” etc.. The stars give different numbers of points depending on the colour. Each tableau has one of each colour available and one central multicolour star in which every tile must be a different colour. At the end of the game, the player with the most points is the winner.

– Image by boardGOATS

Although Blue had found time to punch the pieces in advance, she had not been able to read the rules properly so did it on the fly – the rules are not long, nor are they complex. That said, this version certainly adds strategic depth compared with the original, without the fiddliness of the second version. Without any experience, there were no clear strategies. Blue targeted the bonus points for the must lucrative, purple star and the central star as “low hanging fruit”, while Pink went for the in-game bonus tiles and picked up the extras for completing all the “ones” and “twos”, but didn’t quite make the “threes”. Burgundy played for some of the less valuable stars and Green struggled to get anything to work at all. It was really close, with only one point between Blue and Burgundy, and Pink just a handful of points behind him.

– Image by boardGOATS

This was a brand new game, never played by anyone round the table, so inevitably, something got missed in the rules. In both the base game, Azul, and the follow-up, Stained Glass of Sintra, the first person to take tiles from the central pool in each round takes the first player marker and a penalty for doing so. The same is true here, but unlike the base game, the size of the penalty depends on the number of tiles taken with the first player token. Everyone played by the same rules, so nothing was “unfair” and nobody noticed any balance issues, however, in such a close game it is very likely to have made a difference. We’ll get it right next time!

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Essen is Awesome!

15th October 2019

With food and Ivory both a little delayed, the “Feature Game”, Tapestry was starting to look a bit doubtful. Ivory and the food both arrived eventually though, and Burgundy made haste with his ham, egg and chips while everyone else decided what they were going to play. To fill in time while the eaters ate, everyone else decided to squeeze in a quick game of Ticket to Ride: London. This version of Ticket to Ride is reduced in size and is designed be quicker to play, which certainly proved to be the case. The game play is very similar, however, with players taking it turns to draw coloured cards or use them to place pieces, but in this version the Train pieces are replaced by Routemaster Buses.

– Image by boardGOATS

Although it is still high quality, the board is also smaller than in the full-sized versions, the players have fewer pieces and a maximum of four can participate. As usual, players also start with a selection of ticket cards and successfully fulfilling these give more points, but woe betide any player who fails to complete a ticket as the points become negative, which can be very costly indeed. In addition to these features, this new light version of the game also gives bonus points to players who manage to connect all the locations in an area. Not large numbers of points, but in a tight game it can make all the difference. And these games are often quite tight…

– Image by boardGOATS

Players started placing Buses very early in the game, and it wasn’t long before it became clear that everyone was trying to claim routes in the same “south of the river” area. Although Ivory eventually extended to the east, Lime broke ranks first and claimed a north west route. Pine completed his routes early and went for more tickets a couple of times. Then before we knew it, the game was over as Ivory placed his last bus. Placed Bus scores had Ivory way out in front as he had several of the long, four-bus routes, while Lime brought up the rear as he had been claiming mostly two-bus lengths routes.

– Image by boardGOATS

So it was looking like a bit of a “slam dunk” for Ivory. Everyone had managed to complete an area or two and pick up the associated bonuses, but Ivory had actually managed to get the four point area with all his long routes in the east. When the completed route scores were added in, Pine just pipped Green, but unfortunately for Lime he had failed complete his longest route causing him to lose eleven points. The clear winner was Ivory though, and managing to complete three high scoring routes just increased his already substantial lead giving him a dominant win.

– Image by boardGOATS

With food just about done and the first game coming to an end, there was some debate who would play the “Feature Game”, Tapestry. This is the hot new game from Jamie Stegmaier, designer of Scythe and producer of Wingspan, so everyone knew what they were getting – amazing production values in a very solid game. In this case, the game is quite simple in terms of the number of rules, however, they combine together to make a much more complex game. The idea is that on their turn, the active player simply either pay resources to progress their civilisation in one of the four directions (Science, Exploration, Military and Technology) and carries out the associate action, or they start a New Era for their people and collect Income. It is how these apparently simple options interact that leads to a complex and deep game however.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game is played over four Eras, with each player book-ending their game with an Income phase. Players choose when to take their own Income phases which has the unusual consequence that Civilisations can be in different Eras and even finish at very different times. Advancing their Civilisation can have a wide range of consequences because each step along the four tracks is different and, in general, the further along the tracks the more powerful the action is. For example, in the early stages of the game, a player taking the explore action might be able to place a tile on the central player board, which later may enable them to expand the are they control. Later in the game, however, a player who reaches the end of the Explore track can move away from terra firma and explore Space, which can be very lucrative.

– Image by boardGOATS

After the usual debate over who was going to play, Black joined the inevitable trio of Burgundy, Blue and Ivory. The game is asymmetric, so each player’s civilisation has a different special power. For example, Ivory’s civilisation, “Leaders”, were to allow him to progress along one of the tracks at the start of each Era. Black’s “Merrymakers” also granted a bonus at the start of each Era, but this time it’s according to three private progression tracks; the further up a track that the Merrymakers move, the more potent the benefit they receive. The bonus received by Burgundy’s “Chosen” would depend on his position on each of the four technology tracks at the start of each Era: where there were no players in front of him, he would pick up victory points equal to the number of other players in the game (three in this case).

– Image by boardGOATS

Not all civilisations give advantages during the income phase, however. For instance, Blue’s “Isolationists” gave her an advantage when colonising. The game features a central board which represents the colonies’ territories. At the start of the game, the colonies are well separated by unexplored land. The Explore action generally enables players to take tiles from the supply (though some are provided as part of the Income phase), and place hexes on the map next to territory they control. When carrying out a Military action, players can take control of a neighbouring, explored hex, by placing one of their coloured markers on it. If the tile is already occupied, it can be “attacked” with the second player simply placing one of their markers and tipping over the defeated player’s marker.

– Image by boardGOATS

Each hex can hold a maximum of two pieces, so there is no come-back. In general, players are also not able to place a second marker as a defense. This means that players are naturally reticent when it comes to expanding and controlling the border regions as expanding can leave their border regions vulnerable by providing a path for the opposition to attack. The Isolationists colony helps to prevent this by enabling the player to place a second marker on a small number of occasions. Occupying territory is one way of scoring points. Another is by improving a civilisation technologically. This is done by taking orange Technology cards.

– Image by boardGOATS

Technology cards give no immediate advantage, but they give a bonus when they are upgraded, either as part of the Income phase at the start of an Era or as an action. They also give points during the Income phase, but the number of points depends how developed their Capital is. Each player has a personal play area that includes a Capital City board as well as an area to place their Technology cards, a space at the top to store buildings and the Tapestry Cards that give the game its name. There are four types of buildings which start the game placed on four tracks that roughly correspond to the four types of advancement and yield resources: Markets (yellow), Houses (grey), Farms (brown) and Armourers (red).

– Image by boardGOATS

During the game, the buildings are moved to the players’ Capital Cities, revealing bonuses that the player will get during the forthcoming income phases. These bonuses include resources (money, people, mushrooms and power), but also victory points, additional terrain hexes, Tapestry cards and scoring multipliers. These multipliers are critical: players score points for the number of Technology cards, the size of the territory they control on the central map, and the number of completed rows and columns in their Capital. The more buildings a player moves to their Capital, the more of these multipliers are revealed and the more points a player gets.

– Image by boardGOATS

In addition to their personal buildings, players can also enhance their cities with large buildings which are awarded to to the first player to progress onto certain spaces on the development tracks. These special buildings are wonderfully over-produced and come pre-painted, really adding to the appearance and feel of the game. As they are only space fillers, there is no question – they could certainly be replaced with simple card tiles and would have been had the game been produced a few years ago. This is not a deluxe edition however; the added “bling” comes as standard and elevates the feel of the game above the ordinary (and unfortunately, elevates the price too). Unfortunately, these sculpts have very rounded corners which makes it a little hard to see what space they cover during play. They are really gorgeous though!

– Image by boardGOATS

The key to the game is probably the resources though as progressing along the four development tracks, Science, Exploration, Military and Technology need to be paid for. The price increases the further up the track the player gets as well, so running out of resources largely dictates when players will choose to start a New Era. That said, if a player moves into a New Era before their neighbours, they get additional resources which can be just enough to encourage players to move on early. Although it is clear that resources are important, the winner is likely to be the player that best leverages the advantages from their Civilisation. Like all good engine builders, however, there are always more things to do than resources available.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game started slowly, with Blue taking an early lead largely thanks to her Civilisation giving her points as she explored and expanded her territory. She was up against Ivory though, who was also progressing along the expansion track, though his progress was accelerated by his use of the Science development. In the early stages of this development track the action is to move one space along another track dictated by by a roll of the Science die, but without taking the action. This has the advantage of accelerating development (moving two spaces instead of one per turn), which increases the likelihood of obtaining the beautiful, big, special buildings and consequently makes filling rows and columns in the Capital easier.

– Image by boardGOATS

This is at the expense of increasing the cost of actions earlier in the game, on the other hand, the actions become more powerful and are therefore worth the price provided that the player can make the most of them. One additional consequence of Ivory making an early dart up the development tracks was the damage it did to Burgundy. Burgundy’s “Chosen” Civilisation gave him three victory points equal for every track he was ahead on. Ivory’s rapid progress, increased by the power of his “Leaders” Civilisation, essentially annulled Burgundy’s “advantage”. Burgundy’s game was further stymied by his struggle to get resources to move things along, a problem that only got worse as the game progressed.

– Image by boardGOATS

As a result, Burgundy turned to Technology cards, but it took a while to get this alternative approach going. Black meanwhile, kept things simple, concentrating on making the most of his Merrymakers and trying to expand to the centre of the map first. In this, his life was made difficult by being sandwiched between Blue and Ivory who squeezed his options. Blue made it to the middle first, and used her special power to prevent anyone else taking it from her and picking up the points for getting there second. Black made good use of his Trap cards which he initially kept in case he was attacked, but then used instead of Tapestry cards to give him points.

– Image by boardGOATS

He started slowly as he built his engine, but it wasn’t long before Ivory started to edge in front. By the third era, he really started to push forward, Blue gave chase, but she was always chasing and when Ivory launched his Civilisation into space, the writing was on the wall. He didn’t quite manage to lap the players at the back and so spared their blushes, but he wasn’t far off, finishing with a very creditable one hundred and eighty-five points. It is clearly a game that needs multiple plays to understand and get the best out of, and everyone could see its potential, although Burgundy felt some of the Civilisations were more powerful than others.

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, on the neighbouring table, the others decided to play an old favourite, Jamaica. This was new to Lime and although Pine had played it once before, he couldn’t remember it. The game is a pirate-themed tactical race with beautiful artwork and quality pieces, where the winner is the player who best balances their position in the race with success at generally being a pirate doing piratical things. Each player always has a hand of three cards, and a personal board depicting the five “holds” of their ship, into which goods can be loaded during the game. Each round, one player is designated as “Captain” and rolls two dice, examines their cards, then announces which die will correspond to the “day” and which to the “night”.

– Image by BGG contributor verminose

Each player then simultaneously selects and places it face down in front of them. Each card has two symbols on it (corresponding to “day” and “night”). The symbols indicate either ship movement (forward or backward) or the loading of a type of goods. The cards are then revealed simultaneously and resolved clockwise one by one, starting with the Captain. When it is a player’s turn to resolve their card, first the “day” part, then the “night” part, multiplying the number of pips on the appropriate die by the icons on the card to either move forwards (or backwards) by a given amount, or to load goods.

– Image by BGG contributor verminos

When they take goods (gold, food or gunpowder), Players must have space to store them. If they do not, they must throw the contents of one hold (containing something different) overboard. When moving, players pay depending one the space they finish on: on a deep sea space the cost is food; in a port they must pay doubloons. At a pirate’s lair, the player can take a treasure token and draw a treasure card, (which can be good, or “stinky”, “cursed” treasure), and if they are sharing the space with another pirate ship, they must fight.

– Image by BGG contributor verminose

Battles are resolved with the attack die, but the attacker rolls first and adds to their total by discarding gunpowder. The defender then dies the same, though if either player rolls the special “star” it counts as a direct hit and that player wins outright and can take one holds worth of goods, a treasure card, or give away some “cursed” treasure. The game end is triggered when a player’s ship reaches the finish line, after completing one circuit of Jamaica when players receive different amounts of gold depending how far they were from the finish line when the race concluded. This is added to any gold gathered along the way and the player with the most total gold is declared the winner.

– Image used with permission of boardgamephotos

The race started very slowly (as is often the case) as players stayed in Port Royal and stocked up, but then everyone started moving forwards (and backwards) and fights very quickly broke out. With Gold and food changing ships and ships moving forwards and backwards, or in Green’s case, backwards and forwards: he crossed the finish line from the wrong direction – but no, he couldn’t win that way! Pine was the first one to claim a treasure and then a second; the map card enabling him to have an extra card in his hand to choose from, not that seemed to help him: he still complained that he had poor choice of options. Lime was next, and then followed a period when everyone ended up attacking each other, so much that at least one player ended up in two battles during the same morning move.

– Image used with permission of boardgamephotos

Once players had got around the first corner of the island things began to speed up (again, as is usual for this game). Lime led the way and round this part of the island, Chris started to hoover up the treasures and found himself with an extra hold. It wasn’t all good though, as became clear when he defeated a sneaky attack from Purple and took the opportunity of foisting a “stinky”, cursed treasure onto her (and the associated negative points. As the flotilla rounded the final corner, Lime was still out in front with everyone else not far behind. While everyone had full holds, Purple’s ship looked more like a take-away van on a Saturday night, and no gold!

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Toynan

Lime rolled a five and then a six when he was only three spaces away from Port Royal, but he played a double move anyway and finished the game. The rest of the salty sea-dogs were able to make use of that following wind and bring themselves across the red line into at least point scoring positions, but still some way off Port Royal. The final scoring was looking quite good for Lime, but he insisted that he didn’t think he would win, as he knew he had a minus five point “stinky” treasure.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Ceryon

Pine and Green had finished just one space apart, had a lot of gold on ships and treasure cards. Pine had the plus seven, and Green had three scoring treasures, but one was a minus three, so the scores were very close indeed. Purple, unfortunately was almost lost at sea, only creeping across the line with no gold in her hold and only a negative treasure. Otherwise, it was really close, but Green just beat Pine into second place with Lime just a couple of points behind. Once again this proved how good a game Jamaica is, well balanced and extremely fun.

– Image used with permission of boardgamephotos

With Tapestry still under way, the group moved onto another, this time more recent, favourite, Kingdomino, albeit one that we’ve not played for nearly a year. In this short game, players take a domino and add to the kingdom and then place a meeple on one of the dominoes on display for the next round. When placing the dominoes, one of the two ends must connect to terrain of the same type already in the kingdom, or connect directly to the start tile. Points are awarded at the end of the game by multiplying the number of tiles in an area of terrain by the number of crowns in the area. Although we have the Age of Giants expansion, this time the group used the base game so all dominoes must fit in a five-by-five space (or be discarded) and bonus points are awarded for successfully placing all tiles and finishing with the start tile in the centre.

– Image by boardGOATS

Sadly, Pine made an unfortunate placement decision partway through and thus created himself a single space gap which meant he was not complete a five-by-five kingdom with his castle in the middle. This was because hadn’t caught the rule that the whole kingdom needed to be square so he’d ended up choosing a tile which was not as good as he’d thought and thus created even more problems for himself. Everyone else completed their kingdoms so everyone got the full fifteen point bonus.

– Image by boardGOATS

Green went for a mixture of several smaller sections (including stone and sand), but none scored highly. Purple ended up with fewer, but slightly larger regions (wheat, water and forest) and a similar score to Green. Lime on the other hand, concentrated on a couple of larger regions, water and forest, each six or seven spaces and with three crowns each they gave a healthy score. On top of that Lime had a few low scoring space regions to top off a very good score and take the victory by twenty points. An excellent score, especially since it was the first time he’d played the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Game-play is very important, but component quality is important too.

1st October 2019

It was a bitty start with lots of chit-chat and eating, including Blue’s fantastic pizza with mushrooms growing out of it. A little bit of singing to celebrate the fact it was the eve of our seventh birthday was immediately followed by special meeple cakes. Eventually, when everyone had finally finished sucking the icing off their wooden meeples, we finally settled down to the now traditional birthday “Feature Game”, Crappy Birthday.

– Image by boardGOATS

Crappy Birthday is a very silly party game that most of the group would normally turn their noses up at, but love to play once a year. The idea is that each person has a hand of cards featuring silly things and chooses one to give to the active player as a birthday present. The Birthday Boy/Girl then chooses the best and worst gifts which score the giver a point. Players take it in turns to receive gifts and after everyone has had one go, the player with the most points is the winner. It is very simple, but the best part is really when the recipient has to sit and sort through all their gifts and justify their choices. It seems a really silly game, and indeed it is, but it encourages people to get to know each other a little better and in a different way too.

– Image by boardGOATS

This year, we discovered that Black would like a trip to the North Pole, Pine fancied two weeks in a swamp and Purple fancied a course on Mime Art. In contrast, Burgundy was not keen on getting his earlobes stretched, Blue wasn’t keen on a GPS (with or without an annoying voice) and Lime eschewed some “garden manikins”. Perhaps the most surprising thing we discovered was just how great Ivory would be as a day-time quiz host. Amongst the fun, the scores were largely incidental, but everyone picked up just one or two points except for Purple who scored three points and Black who just pipped her to the post, with four points.

– Image by boardGOATS

Since Blue and Ivory had both brought Roll for the Galaxy, it was clear that they were keen to give it a go and when Green said he’d play it, the only real question was which copy would get played. Since it can be quite a long game, Blue and Ivory got going quickly and left the others to sort themselves out. Although Ivory was keen to give the new Rivalry expansion a go, as it has been a while since we last played (and Green wasn’t totally familiar with it either), the trio decided to leave that for another day. Although a lot of the group seem to get in a bit of a mess with Roll for the Galaxy, it is not actually a complicated game. It is a “pool building” game, similar to deck builders like Dominion or bag builders like Orléans or Altiplano, except with dice.

– Image by boardGOATS

The idea is that at the start of the round, everyone simultaneously rolls all their dice in their cup and, depending on what faces are shown, secretly allocate the dice to the five possible phases of the game: Explore, Develop, Settle, Produce & Ship. One of the dice can be used to select which phase that player wants to “nominate”, i.e. guarantee will happen. Any die can be used for this, it does not have to match the chosen phase. Once everyone has assigned all their dice and chosen their phase to nominate, all dice are revealed and the active phases are revealed. The clever part is the element of double think that players have to use: a player can only nominate a single phase, so if they want to Produce and Ship they have to rely on someone else to nominate the other one. Guess right and both phases will happen, guess wrong and they will only get one of them, and if that relies on something else happening, they may find they end up doing neither.

– Image by boardGOATS

Thus, while there are a lot of other moving parts, fundamentally, a successful player must piggy-back on other players because it will give them more actions. Dice that are used then go into the players’ Citizenries, and unused dice go back into the players’ cups. Dice are extracted from the Citizenries and returned to the cups on payment of $1 per die, once all the actions have been carried out. Thus, the player with the most appropriate dice can turn the handle on their engine most efficiently. The aim of the game is to finish with the most points, which are obtained from settling and developing worlds and shipping goods to give points.

– Image by boardGOATS

So, the first action is Explore, which is taking world tiles from a bag. These are double-sided with a development on one side and a production or settlement world on the other. They go into either the Development or Settlement piles so that dice are placed on top of these during the Develop and Settle phases: when the cost has been matched by the number of dice, the world is added to the player’s tableau and they can use whatever special power it provides. Some of the worlds are production worlds which typically provide more, exciting dice to add to the system. In addition to extra, coloured dice, Production worlds also house dice played during the Produce phase. These can then be consumed for victory points or traded for cash, enabling more dice to be transferred from the player’s citizenry to their cup.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game ends at the end of the round when either, a player Settles/Develops their twelfth world or when the stock of victory point chips run out. The winner is the player with the highest score from their combined victory points and worlds. There are a couple of other minor rules (for example players can pay one die to effectively change the face of one other die), but essentially, that is all there is to it. Players start with a double tile comprising a complimentary pair of settlement and development worlds and a start world, together with a couple of tiles to add to their Development/Settlement piles. For the first game it is recommended that players choose the Development and World with the lowest cost to add to their piles, because that is easier to play. For later games, however, players can choose, which gave Blue a really tough decision.

– Image by boardGOATS

In the end she decided to go for it, and chose to start with the “Galactic Federation”, “6+” development world in her building pile. This would give her an extra one third of her development points at the end of the game, but more importantly two of the dice used for every development would bypass her citizenry, going straight into her cup. Green started with no fewer than three of the red, “Military” dice, which coupled with his “Space Piracy” starting development, gave him really a good source of finance. He looked very unimpressed with this combination, but Ivory and Blue felt it was a really nice combination of starting tiles. Ivory’s start tiles were also nice, but didn’t have quite the same degree of complimentarity, but he did get a nice purple, “Consumption” die. The starting tiles are only the beginning though; the game is all about building an engine made up of dice, Production Worlds, and Developments and then using it efficiently.

– Image by boardGOATS

In the case of Blue, her starting tiles led her towards a Development strategy, so she spent a lot of the early part of the game Exploring to try to find nice Development tiles to enhance that approach. Green and Ivory had a more conventional, “build the finances and the dice pool then Produce and Consume” strategy. The problem with this was they both frequently wanted the same phases, but ended up with either both of them choosing to, say, Produce, or both choosing Ship, when what they both really wanted was to maximise their dice by Producing and then Shipping. Blue, on the other hand, could mostly be fairly sure that neither Ivory or Green were going to what she wanted, so was able to focus on her own plan, and just piggy-back the actions of the others. Although the game has a reputation of being slow (with our group at least), this time, the game got going quite quickly and it wasn’t long before Ivory started his Production engine, Shipping his produce for victory points.

– Image by boardGOATS

Green soon followed, while Blue kept building her Developments and occasionally taking advantage of the “Produce/Consume” strategies of the others to provide enough finance to move her dice out of her Citizenry. Blue felt her game was really boring since all she did was Develop, but in the end, it was probably the fact that Blue was doing something different that was key. Blue triggered the end of the game placing her twelfth Development/World tile, which gave her the most points from building, slightly more than Green. Ivory Consumed the most victory points, with Green not far behind, and Blue not really troubling the scorer in that department. It therefore all came down to bonuses from the “6+” Developments, which is where Blue made up for other deficiencies taking fifteen points giving her a total of fifty-seven points, five more than Green who was just a couple ahead of Ivory.

– Image by boardGOATS

It had been a lot of fun, and next time we’ll have to give one of the modules form the Rivalry expansion a try. On the next table, their game was coming to an end too. Having been abandoned to sort themselves out, someone mentioned Ticket to Ride, and with everyone having a good idea how to play, that turned out to be most popular. The game is very simple and everyone has played it, in most cases, quite a lot, so we often play with expansion maps. This time, the Team Asia/Legendary Asia expansion was an option, but as we usually play with the Europe version of the game, the group decided to play with original USA map with the addition of the USA 1910 additional route cards.

– Image by boardGOATS

The basics of the game is that players start with a handful of train pieces and place them on the board to connect cities, paying with cards. Thus, on their turn a player can take two coloured train cards from the market (either the face up cards or blind from the deck) or play sets of cards of a single colour that matches both the number and colour of one of the tracks on the board. Players score points for the number of trains they place, but also for tickets. Players choose from a handful of these at the start of the game and can take more tickets on their turn instead of placing trains or taking train cards. These are risky though, because although they are a source of points, any tickets that are not completed at the end of the game give negative points.

– Image by boardGOATS

The original version of Ticket to Ride (with the USA map) is much less forgiving than the Europe edition that we more usually play. This is partly thanks to the layout of the tracks, but also due to the absence of Stations which can help alleviate some of the stress associated with failure to complete tickets. With five, it was always going to be a really hard game and likely to end up with a bit of a train-wreck for someone, and so it turned out. The eastern states were rough, really, really rough with Burgundy, Lime, Pine and Purple all fighting for routes in the same space. As a result, Black benefited from mostly staying out of the scrap.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pine, Lime and Purple managed to complete the most tickets, five each, but remarkable, all three were a long way behind Burgundy and Black who only completed three and four tickets respectively. This was partly due to negative points, but was mostly caused by the fact that the longer tracks give disproportionately more points and Black for example was able to pick up two of the long tracks around Salt Lake City relatively unopposed as he was mostly alone working in the west. Similarly, Burgundy did well in the north. As a result, it all came down to the longest route bonus, ten points, but with Black and Burgundy both in the running it gave a twenty point swing to Burgundy giving him a total of one hundred and thirty-five points, nearly twenty more than Black in second place.

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Ticket to Ride and Roll for the Galaxy finished simultaneously and only Green decided he needed an early night, leaving everyone else to play one of the group’s favourite game, Las Vegas. This is a simple game of dice rolling and gambling, where players use their dice to bet in one of the six numbered casinos. Each casino has one or more money cards and at the end of the round, the player with the most dice in that casino takes the highest value money card. The player who comes second takes the next highest value card and so on. When betting, players must place dice in one of the numbered casinos. The first catch is that they must place all the dice they roll that depict that number in the matching casino. The second catch is that any dice involved in a tie at the end of the round are removed, and it is this that makes it a great game.

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We have the original version of the game rather than the new edition, Las Vegas Royale, though we added elements from the Las Vegas Boulevard expansion, including the double weight “Big” dice and the Slot Machine. We also house-rule to only play three rounds instead of the four in the rules as written. This time, Ivory stole a march in the first round, when he was forced to place his last die as a losing singleton in “Casino Five”, only for Purple to roll a five with her final roll and take out both herself and the hitherto winner, Pine. As a result Ivory took the jackpot of $90,000 to go with his other winnings.

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It is not a game to give up on though, as anything can happen. The second round was relatively uneventful, but the deal for the final round left the last three casinos each with a single card of $100,000. This is highly unusual, but we decided to play on and see what happened. In the end, it had a bit of an “all or nothing” feel about it, with players going in early and in big. It was probably no coincidence that the three big jackpots were taken by the three highest scoring players. Pine thought he had come off worst, Black, who had done so well in the other two games took the wooden spoon. It was Ivory’s flying start that was key though, and together with his strong finish, his total takings were a massive $430,000, $40,000 more than Blue in second.

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Learning Outcome: Party games can be great when everyone is in a party mood.

17th September 2019

Blue and Pink arrived nice and early and so after ordering food, started a quick game of Ganz Schön Clever (a.k.a. That’s Pretty Clever). This is one of the first of the “Roll and Write” games from the last couple of years and, as it received a Kennerspiel des Jahres nomination last year, arguably one of the best. This type of game has been around for many years, with Yahtzee being one of the first, but the current trend was started by games like Qwixx. Qwixx came out seven years ago, but has since been followed last year by games like Roll to the Top!, Railroad Inc., Welcome to… and the Roll Through the Ages and Penny Papers Adventures series of games.

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These games all have different themes and different mechanisms, but the basic principle is the the same with players rolling dice (sometimes bespoke dice) and marking the results on a piece of paper, usually from a bespoke pad, or more recently a laminated card. Ganz Schön Clever is an abstract game using six coloured dice which are used to fill in boxes in five coloured areas of the individual player “boards” (the white die is wild). The active player, rolls all six and chooses one to keep and use, discarding all dice with lower pip values. They then roll any remaining dice, again keeping and using one and discarding the rest before rolling the rest one last time keeping and using one final die. The other players can then use one of the discards, before play passes to the left.

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The clever part is the way the dice are used, and the fact that filling in some of the boxes gives a bonus action, enabling players to fill in other boxes or gain the opportunity to re-roll their dice or even use an extra die. With just two, the game is played over six rounds, giving them just eighteen dice on their own turn with another six from their opponent’s turn and as many bonuses as they can get. The player who wins is therefore the player who makes the best use of the dice they roll and usually, the player who manages to build the most combinations to take advantage of the bonuses available. This time round, Blue was failed to get a good start and Pink took her to the cleaners, finishing with a hundred and ninety-two, a winning margin of twenty-six.

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Blue and Pink had only just started, when the others started rolling in, but unusually, there was no sign of Burgundy. By the time food had arrived, we were into double figures, but still no sign of Burgundy. People were starting to get worried until Blue borrowed a phone and checked her email to discover he wasn’t feeling well. There were still enough players for three games, and eventually, everyone else took themselves off leaving Blue, Pink and Green to play the “Feature Game”, West of Africa. This is a game set in the Canary Islands (which really are west of Africa, unlike Krakatoa which is famously not East of Java), and has a slightly nasty edge to it, making it almost like a “Vanuatu Light”.

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The game is quite simple with some very nice little elements. The basic flow of the game involves planting crops, selling crops, becoming Alcalde (or mayor) of islands and then building settlements. Each player has their own deck of cards which they use to carry-out their actions, with each card having a value. Players simultaneously choose up to five of their cards (the first four are free, the fifth comes at a cost), then each hand is evaluated and the lowest value hand is played first. This means there is a nice tension between choosing a low value hand and going first, or choosing higher value cards, giving other players the chance to carry out actions first, potentially meaning that those actions are no-longer available.

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There are two types of cards: islands and actions. Moving workers or boats are simple actions where players just move workers a given number of steps along the shipping lanes, however, some of the action cards need a location to be played. For example, planting crops needs to be played with an island card which indicates where the crop tokens are to be played. Similarly, selling crops and settling both need to be played with island cards, but the clever part is that island cards can be used for multiple actions and actions can be carried out at multiple islands an unlimited number of times. The round ends once all players have completed their actions, then any planted crops are automatically moved into the warehouses where they can be moved and/or sold in later rounds.

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The islands are split into east, west and central with islands in the different regions having different characteristics. So the western Canaries only have spaces for production, while the eastern islands only have spaces for settlements. Selling goods is more lucrative in the east than in the west, however, each lot selling for twelve gold, instead of six. So shipping goods eastwards can be lucrative, but that requires playing a card and only four (or five) can be played each round. Selling only provides gold, however, and players need points to win. The two players with the most gold at the end of the round get a point each, but this is not the main source of points.

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At the end of the round, the occupation of each island is evaluated and the Alcalde or mayor of each is assigned, with players getting a point for each island they control. This is not the main source of points either though, that is settling with each settlement giving three points. Settling is expensive though and gets more so as the cheaper plots get built on. Another of the clever little features of the game is that the number of settlements available in each round is limited which adds more pressure to the turn order. As this is so critical, ties have to be resolved, and are always in favour of the player with the most gold which increasing the importance of money, adding balance to the game.

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Pink had the lowest scoring starting hand so went first. This can be a substantial advantage as he knew he would be able to do what he wanted. Green went next and managed to interfere with Blue’s plans, though she had been aware of the risk and had managed to build in some extra options to help mitigate the effects a little. Pink took control of La Hierro and La Palma, and Green took La Gomera leaving Gran Canaria to Blue who also picked up Fuerteventura, with an eye to later in the game. Green got the best of the early rounds though setting up a small, but important lead, though more significantly, arguably better positioning. The game is not a long one, and there isn’t really time to build an engine, so it wasn’t long before Green, in particular, was threatening to trigger the end of the game by getting twenty-five points.

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It was then that Blue made her monumental mistake: when choosing which of two island cards to play she ended up playing both and not the sale action card to go with them. This, coupled with Green’s action which he took first, meant she was unable to do anything at all in the penultimate round. Green followed this by messing up his final round, also failing to play a sale action card which meant he didn’t have enough gold to build the number of houses he wanted to. He was still able to build one final settlement though, giving him a clear win with forty points. It was much closer for second with Pink’s thirty-two points just pipping Blue by a single point. It had been an enjoyable game, but despite the excellent balance and some really nice touches, none of the three players could put their collective finger on what was lacking and what the game needed to take it from “OK, but eminently forgettable” to “great”.

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Meanwhile, on the neighboring table, despite their reluctance to play it with two chemists, Pine and Lime had joined Red and Mulberry to play Periodic: A Game of the Elements. This is a recent KickStarter delivery, and seemed entirely appropriate for the International Year of the Periodic Table. On their turn, the active player either pays energy to activate trends (such as “Decrease Atomic Mass” or “Increase Atomic Radii”) to move their flask around the periodic table board in the direction allowed by the trend. If they finish a trend movement on an element that appears on the top, visible card of one of the four goal card decks, they can “discover” that element. Flasks can be moved up to five spaces, but activating the trend multiple times means the player’s flask can be moved further enabling them to “discover” multiple elements.

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The first activation costs one energy point and all additional trends costing two energy points with tokens spent in this way placed on a space associated with the trend used. Instead of paying to move, the active player can take all the energy accrued on that trend and move their flask according to a trend, but just once. Thus, the conservation of energy forces players to spend carefully and play efficiently. When someone discovers all the elements for one goal they take the associated card with a bonus action tile, and all the other players who discovered some of the elements on the card, get consolation points. Players can also discovering particular types of elements, as shown in by cards laid out around the edge of the board.

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Moving along a step along this “track” gives players academic achievement which is worth an ever increasing amount of points. The third and final source of points are from the agenda cards which give players personal objectives and are dealt out at the start of the game. The game ends when someone completes the research track or when a stack of goal cards is depleted and the player with the most points at the end wins. Unfortunately, due to a “rules malfunction”, the group were halfway through the third stack of goal cards when they realised the game should have ended so decided to carry on till all four piles were depleted in what they referred to as “Periodic: The Director’s Cut”.

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All in all, Pine and Lime needn’t have worried that Mulberry’s and Red’s chemistry backgrounds would give them a significant advantage. Although there were a lot of nice chemistry references that the scientists appreciated it was not necessary to understand these to play the game effectively. The strategies employed varied: Red and Mulberry concentrated on progressing on along the academic track, while Lime on his agenda cards and Pine focused on goal cards. In the end, it didn’t make a lot of difference and there was a three-way tie for second place with Red, “The Evil Chemist” finishing seven points ahead of the others, with a final total of seventy-one. Everyone had enjoyed the game though and would be happy to give it another go though they all agreed they would do things differently next time.

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On the other side of the room, Ivory was introducing Black and Purple to this year’s Kennerspiel des Jahres winner, Wingspan. Wingspan was our “Feature Game”, a few weeks ago and was always going to have another outing – in fact, this time we had a choice of two copies! Wingspan is a robust, card-based engine builder, with beautiful production and gorgeous artwork. The idea is that players are collecting birds for their reserves. On their turn, the active player chooses one of four actions/habitats, and then starting with the card furthest to the right in that habitat, activate each card in turn.

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The primary action associated with the habitats are spending food to play cards; getting food; laying eggs, and more drawing bird cards. Players start with eight possible actions per turn, which gradually reduces to five over the course of the four rounds of the game. All the bird cards in the game give bonuses that fit with their real-life behaviour. For example, the food needed to play cards closely resemble their diet. The designer and producer have paid attention to other details too. For example, the number of eggs each bird has in their nest is not accurate, but are proportionately correct and bonus actions are associated with birds that flock and birds of prey.

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This time the game was very tight, though different strategies were employed. Purple tried to maximise her food income, starting with an Eastern Phoebe which provided invertebrates , and later adding a Baltimore Oriole, a Red-Breasted Nuthatch, a Mountain Chickadee and an Indigo Bunting ensuring a lucrative food source giving her a wide variety too. Then she added a White-Faced Ibis and a Ferruginous Hawk both birds of prey that are triggered by other players actions and give points at the end of the game for each food they bring in.

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It’s arguable that the cards could have been shuffled better, and as a result birds that ate small mammals or fish and aquatics didn’t come out till later so she wasn’t able to take as much advantage of some of her food supplies as she might. In contrast, Black and Ivory went for a more egg-based strategy, with Ivory playing a Cassin’s Sparrow and a Brown-Headed Cowbird both of which laid eggs, the sparrow when activated and the Cowbird on other players’ turns.

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Black played a Yellow-Billed Cuckoo, which also activated on on other players’ turns and coupled it with a House Finch which enabled him to store a lot of eggs. The end result was really close, with only four points between first and third. Everyone had a similar number of “tucked” birds, bonus points and end of round points. Purple took more from her birds and finished with ten food on her cards from her predators. Although Black and Ivory had no stored food they had twice as many eggs as Purple and, on aggregate, Ivory pipped Purple, by just two points.

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With time marching on, some of the group decided to head off for an early night leaving Blue, Black, Purple, Pink and Pine to play “something short”. Pink determinedly eschewed the option of Bohnanza, and suggested “Sahne” instead, which was quickly accepted by the other four. This cute little game, correctly known as …aber bitte mit Sahne (a.k.a. Piece o’ Cake), is the archetypal “I divide, you choose” game. Played over five rounds, players take it in turns to be the “Master Baker”. They divide the eleven slices of the pie into pieces and each player takes it in turns to take a piece (leaving the Master Baker with whatever’s left).

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As players take their share, they can choose to keep slices or eat slices: eating a slice guarantees points (equal to the number of blobs of cream on top), while saving it gives the opportunity for more points if the player has the most of that type stored at the end of the game. Each slice has a number on it which is the number of points the player with the most uneaten slices of that type gets, but also how many are available (though a couple are always removed to add a little non-determinism). Thus, the most valuable cakes are also those with the most slices available but also those with the most cream.

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Purple started out collecting slices of strawberry tart, while Pine opted for what he insisted was gooseberry flan, but looked like it was made out of peas. He also went for the pizza (or possibly apricot?) and got into a tussle with Blue for that and cockroach (which Pine insisted on calling pecan, though in truth it could have been date too). Things kicked off when Pine offered Pink (sat to his left) a particularly favourable selection and when Blue pointed this out, was persuaded by Pink to be “nice”. However on Pink’s turn, when he had the option to be nice to Blue, he wasn’t.

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Learning Outcome: Clever mechanisms, a great game do not necessarily make.

3rd September 2019

There were a lot of people feeding and food was a little delayed, so we didn’t start until gone 8pm. At this point, people were keen to chat and almost everyone seemed interested in giving the “Feature Game”, Lords of Vegas, a go. Although it involves dice, it is totally different to our old favourite, Las Vegas, and in fact, very different to pretty much anything else we have played too. Although the game is very “rules-light”, it is still a bit of a “brain-burner” with the potential for inducing “analysis paralysis”.

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The idea of the game is that players are developers in Las Vegas in 1941. The board depicts Highway 91, what will become known as “The Strip”, and the blocks either side, each divided into plots. Players acquire these plots, build casinos, improve their casinos, take-over other casinos, and when desperate, gamble. At the start of their turn, the active player turns over a card which indicates one plot and one of the five casinos. The active player claims the plot by placing a clear plastic counter in their colour on it and then everyone receives income: every plot owner gets $1,000,000 per plot, and then every casino that matches the card pays out cash (in our case, in poker chips) and points.

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After everyone has received their income, the active player can do as many actions as they like, the only limit is what they can afford. The first action is build on a plot they own: they pay the amount of money listed on the board, chose a coloured casino tile and place it on the board together with a die of their colour showing the face depicted on the board. The number shown is important for many reasons, but initially it indicates the income that the player will get when that casino pays out: one million dollars per pip shown. The casino colour chosen can be the same as casino adjacent casinos, or different, which is a critical decision. If it is the same, the two (or more) casinos merge and the owner of the die with the highest face value becomes The Boss of that casino.

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The Boss gets victory points when that casino colour pays out, receiving points equal to the total number of plots the casino occupies. Since The Boss controls the casino, their are things they can do that others cannot. For example, they can choose to “remodel” the casino, changing the colour of all the tiles. There is a cost, of course, five million dollars per space, but it can be worth it to force mergers giving more points. The Boss can also “sprawl” their casino which means expand into neighbouring, unoccupied plots. This is both costly and risky, but can be worth it to give a short term benefit or to merge casinos. It is costly because the cost to build is twice the usual fee, and it is risky, because if the card that shows that plot is drawn later in the game, the player who draws the card replaces the die with one of their own.

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Merging casinos are a vital part of the game because unusually, increments in the score track progressively increase. So, at the bottom, the steps increase by a single point, but after eight, each step is two points, and after twenty the steps increase to three. Since the points are added casino by casino (rather than summing them and adding them all at the same time), it is critical to match casino size to the current increment. For example, two casinos of size “three” would add six points if the player were below eight points or above twenty. However, if they were between eight and twenty, the same casinos would only be worth two each as the remainder would be lost as each casino is added.

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Thus, with the merging and taking over, the game is highly strategic with a sprinkle of luck from the card draw. Perhaps the most important part of Lords of Vegas though are the gambling aspects. There are two: firstly, once per turn, the active player can gamble at any casino by rolling two dice. The odds are slightly in favour of The House, but it can be a good source of cash, as well as providing the opportunity to damage an opponent, as The Boss of that casino provides the pay out (though they can lay this off with the bank). More importantly, any player can choose to “Reorganise” any casino they have a stake in, by paying a million dollars per pip to re-roll all the dice in that casino with the chance of control changing hands.

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So the game is not especially difficult to understand, but small changes can have a large impact. As well as the mix of strategy, luck and gambling, there are a number of little things that really make the game sing. For example, almost anything can be traded for almost anything else at any time, which enables players at the back to gang up on a run-away leader and neutralise the effect of overtly bad (or good) draws and dice rolls. The quick description had most people interested in playing it, but Burgundy (who had played before) felt that it would be very chaotic with five, so in the end, Pine, Black, Red, Lime and Ivory left Blue, Burgundy, Mulberry and Purple to their visit to Nevada.

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The game started very slowly, with incomes small and investment correspondingly small. Blue tried to increase her income by building her number of plots. That probably wasn’t a good move, though she was able to build some cash and then invest heavily a couple of turns later. Despite the lack of rules complexity, the groups still managed to make a mess of it: when Reorganising, each die can only be rolled once per turn. It was perhaps a good thing the messed this up though as otherwise Purple, Blue and Mulberry would have been deprived the chance of seeing Burgundy attempt to Reorganise a single two and re-roll a two three times. Hilarity ensued when, a few turns later the casino had merged to form two-plot casino now with a two and a three and Burgundy chose to try Reorganising again, this time getting a two and a three and then a double three before finally settling for a one and a four!

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As the game progressed, the casinos merged and grew, with one particularly large “Sphynx Casino”, occupying five plots. Blue, Burgundy and Mulberry all had an interest and re-rolled the five dice many, many times during the game, but despite his lack of success elsewhere, Burgundy mostly retained control. The other side of Flamingo Road, Mulberry built a lovely casino, mostly uncontested. The “Vega Casino” cards came out a lot at the start and since some cards are removed at random, it didn’t look a good gamble. As a result, only Purple took the risk of investing and made a killing with her “Big Purple Casino” when the group kept drawing the Vega cards ending up with all nine putting in an appearance.

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Mulberry and Burgundy stole a slight early march, but when the steps in the scoring track increased it became clear that this was an illusion and it was in fact a very close game as the leader’s jersey kept changing hands. The balance of power was held by whoever was in charge of the Big Sphinx Casino, and Blue and Mulberry ganged up on Burgundy to try to break his hold on it. First Blue rolled the dice and gave control to Mulberry only for Burgundy to wrest if from her and Mulberry to then give control to Blue. In what turned out to be the final turn of the game, Blue gambled in Purple’s Big Green Vega Casino, won $10,000,000 and used it to remodel her small Sphinx Casinos and sprawl the Big Sphinx Casino into one extra space.

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This turned out to be critical, because the game ends when the “End of Game” card is drawn and all the casinos on the strip score for one final time. That final sprawl gave an extra three points for the Big Sphinx which was just enough to cross the boundary from twenty-nine to thirty-two, breaking what would otherwise have been a three way tie. Money is the tie-breaker, which meant that Burgundy just sneaked into second place $7,000,000 ahead of Purple, who would have been $20,000,000 better off if Blue had not won when she bet in her casino.

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All in all, it had been a lot of fun and everyone was agreed that they’d like to play it again, and that they’d play it differently next time. It had been a really slow burner though and while the foursome had been gambling property in Vegas, the others had had time to play two games and get up to date with the Brexit riots and discuss all the possible outcomes—some people even had time to check out the proxy voting and postal vote options and evaluate both options!

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The group had started the evening with Ticket to Ride, the original USA version, rather than the more usual Europe version or the relatively new, New York edition, which had also been also an option. It is relatively rare that the USA edition gets played because it can be quite unforgiving, this time though, everyone was quite experienced, and knew what they were letting themselves in for. The game rules are much the same as for every other version of Ticket to Ride: on their turn players can take any two two cards from the face up market or blind from the draw deck; place some of their plastic trains to score points paying for them with appropriately coloured cards, or draw more ticket cards which score points at the end of the game if completed.

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There are no tunnels, ferries or stations in the original USA version, and Locomotive cards can be used as wild under any circumstances, but only one face up Locomotive card can be drawn per turn. It was a very tight game with everyone obstructing each other a bit, though Red got the worst of it. Green prioritised trying to get the ten point bonus for the longest continuous set of trains, while Black was concentrated on completing his tickets from Los Angeles to Miami and Winnipeg to Boston. It was very clear it was going to be a close, high scoring game where completed tickets were going to be essential to the final scores.

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Pine completed his first two tickets and started on his third route, from Montreal to Vancouver. As the game came to a finish, everyone put the finishing touches to their plans: Green added a couple of trains to his longest route, and Pine just managed to complete his third route before the game ended. As players totalled up their extras, it turned out that Green had just managed to take the longest route bonus by a single carriage, and red had been Red totally stymied—someone was always likely get stuffed in a five player game that was so very, very close. In fact, in the final accounting there was just nine points between first and fourth place. Black topped the podium with a hundred and four points, a single point ahead of Green with Pine a few points behind him.

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There was a bit of debate as to what to play next, but as Ivory had never played it before, the group eventually settled on Carcassonne, with the River expansion. This is one of the most popular “gateway” game so it was quite remarkable that Ivory had managed to avoid it for so long. The rules of the game are really simple, though they generate a surprising amount of depth, especially when played with two. With five, there is less control, but it can still be a lot of fun. On their turn, the active player draws a tile from one of the available stacks and adds it to the central map, making sure that any features on the edge of the map are preserved. The active player may then place one of their Meeples on the tile they’ve just added to the tableau.

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The Meeple is placed on a feature – a Road, a City, a Monastery or Farm. The key rule, however, is that a Meeple cannot be placed on a feature that already has a Meeple on it. So if the tile is added in a way that means it extends an occupied pre-existing City for example, the player cannot place his Meeple on that City, though if it were unoccupied it would be fair game. Once the player has finished placing their tile and Meeple, any features that were completed are scored and the associated Meeples returned to their owner. When complete, Cities score one point per tile they occupy, double for every tile with a blue and white shield on it; Roads also score one point for every tile that contributes to them.

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Monasteries are rather different and when completely surrounded by eight tiles, score nine points. Farms are a little different, only scoring at the end of the game, giving three points for every city it supplies. These are usually a crucial source of points and the player who controls the biggest Farm usually wins. Again, a Meeple cannot be added to a farm if there is already a Meeple occupying it, so this aspect of the game is all about joining Farms together and sharing or ideally, taking control of other people’s Farms. Adding the River expansion helps to reduce the dominance of Farming by helping to prevent one single super-Farm forming, though Farms are still a very important part of the game and timing is crucial.

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This time, the game was played very quickly, especially given who was playing. As a result, poor Ivory, on his first experience, had no idea what was going and really struggled to follow some of the more subtle parts of the game. The game began as the Battle of the Cities, with Red and Ivory merging their Cities to increase their points haul,, and Black and Green sharing another City to do the same. At the end, however, it all came down to eating and praying, i.e. Farms and Monasteries, in what was also a very close game. Again, there was just one point between first and second and again the top two places were held by Black and Green, with Black once again pipping Green to the win. This time it was Red who took a very close third, just three points behind. Black’s comment as Ivory left, was that the game had been “Quite vicious,” and as the group waited for Lords of Vegas to finish and caught up on the votes in the House of Commons, that would be an appropriate description for the happenings in Parliament too.

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Learning Outcome: It doesn’t take many rules to make a really good game, just the right rules.