Category Archives: Games Night

12th Movember 2024

The evening began with Plum explaining the “Feature Game” to Indigo and Navy, despite the fact they had already decided they were unlikely to play it. Still, there was time to fill as people finished eating and the stragglers, and that was as good a way as any. The game in question was Underwater Cities, which is a sort of worker-placement and network-building game. Although the game is quite complex, the underlying mechanism is quite simple: players start their turn with a hand of three Cards and, on their turn choose an Action space and pay a Card to use it. The Action spaces and the Cards come in three different colours, green, red and orange.

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If the colour of the Card played matches the colour of the Action space chosen, then the player gets to activate the Card, most of which have an instant effect (though for some, the effect is delayed). In general, the orange Action spaces are quite powerful and the green Action spaces are weak, whereas the green Cards have powerful effects and the orange cards are weaker, thus the Cards and Actions together are balanced. Each Action space can only be activated by one person per round and the game takes place over ten rounds (though the group used the Quick Start variant from the New Discoveries expansion which replaces the first round) with each player taking three actions per round and production phases after the fourth, seventh and final rounds.

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The aim of the game is to build a network on players’ personal player board, connecting Cities together with Tunnels and adding and Upgrading Buildings to provide production capabilities. There are four Resources, Kelp, Steelplast, Science and Biomatter together with money, or Credits; these are produced by Farms (Kelp), Desalination plants (money) and Laboratories (Steelplast and Science). Biomatter is essential for building symbiotic cities and can also be a universal building material (can be used instead of Kelp or Steelplast), but is a rare Resource that can only be acquired through Cards, Actions and by connecting some Metropolises to a player’s network.

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Players score points during the game and in the production phases after the fourth and seventh rounds, but most of the points are scored at the end of the game after the final production phase. At this point, players score for the number of different Buildings next to each connected city in their network, for any end-game scoring cards, for their final scoring Metropolis and for any Resources they have left. Indigo and Navy showed some appreciation as Plum explained, but ultimately decided it wasn’t for them, and were replaced by Cobalt and Ivory, both of whom had an idea of how the game played from watching run-through videos.

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The Quick Start gave everyone an Enhanced Assistant so Plum started with the ability to get Biomatter on production, so she was able to build purple Symbiotic Cities (which score more points) right from the beginning. Cobalt’s also helped him when building Cities, giving him one Credit or Steelplast discount, although he didn’t really take advantage of this until the final Era. In contrast, Ivory focused on the end-game scoring from his Metropolis which required him to build seven Cities to get the maximum number of points. By the first production phase, he had already built three and connected them to his network with Tunnels, but all those people needed a lot of feeding which was costly and slowed him down a lot.

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Plum focused on building a robust food engine with two upgraded green Buildings attached to one City (her end-game Metropolis also gave points for sets of upgraded structures) while Cobalt focused on getting his engine online and started on his objective to connect all his Metropolises and Cities with Tunnels in the second and third Eras. He was aided by an ongoing ability that triggered whenever he used an Assistant (draw a Card and gain a Point), which he used heavily, getting four Assistants early in the game and activating them all in every Era. The extra Card draw ensured he was always able to play a matching coloured card with every Action which also helped.

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Plum pointed out that a friend who she plays with and often wins says, “Don’t always let me get the Special Cards—they are powerful!” So after the first production phase, there was a focus on the special cards in middle, all of us grabbing some quite powerful abilities. Ivory got an additional tile that gave him points every production phase and Plum got a heavily discounted City. Cobalt’s engine was working very effectively by this time giving him lots of Resources and discounted Actions. Despite her Special Cards, Plum was struggling as the main upgrade slot which she needed for her end-game Metropolis was denied to me when she had the Resources to use it. Instead she ended up focusing on Symbiotic Cities and ended up with only the one regular City.

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After the second production phase, there was a big focus on how to maximize points. Ivory took a risk, taking the end game scoring card that gave twelve points for the player with the most upgraded Tunnels. When he took it, he had the most upgraded Tunnels, but it was clear that Cobalt could challenge this. Cobalt on the other hand had grabbed a couple of Special Cards giving three points per upgraded Tunnel plus one point per Card in his tableau. For Ivory to score his Card it was critical that he denied Cobalt the ability to upgrade in the last turn and Ivory was able to make sure he took his first in the final round—this was fairly ironic as the majority of the rounds he had been the last player!

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This scuppered Cobalt’s plans and gave a twenty-four point swing in Ivory’s favour, but since he had increased his hand limit to four and was drawing multiple cards, he was able to pivot and build a City sharing two upgraded Farms and us Cards that provided points when played. This also produced quite a few resources in the final production phase. Plum was struggling towards the end of the game as she couldn’t get the final Resources she needed to build the last two Tunnels to connect her end-game scoring Metropolis. Despite it failing to score, it had still been a good focus for her game as the upgraded structures had given her extra production during the game and those Metropolis points would only be critical if the game was close.

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And close it was. Plum had a slight lead going into the end game scoring and and-game scoring cards gave points fairly evenly too. Cobalt and Ivory had the same number of Cities with three different Buildings, slightly more than Plum, but she more than made up for it with her Cities with her Cities with two different Buildings. The Metropolis she failed to connect proved critical in her scoring though and although she just edged Ivory by two points, Cobalt ultimately took victory, also by just two points as he finished with ninety-seven. It had been a very thinky game, and with three players was reasonably tight with people taking Actions others wanted. It was very enjoyable when players were so evenly matched which was reflected in the scores despite very different strategies.

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Black and Blue had been interested in joining the game of Underwater Cities, however, as it was, it was the last game to finish by some mile and would have taken a lot longer with a fourth player. There wasn’t a sixth player interested in making a second game, so in the end, Black joined Pink who was very keen to give Teal’s new acquisition that he’d been toting about since Pink and Blue had brought it back from Essen for him. This was the Grand Tour expansion to Flamme Rouge. This is a cycle racing game where players move their two riders forward by drawing and playing cards from that riders specific deck, depleting it as they go.

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As in real cycle races, players use slipstreaming to avoid exhaustion, in the game, these are cards that block up players’ hands making dealing with obstacles and moving through the peloton more challenging. A large part of the new expansion is a campaign mode and there was only time for one game, however, there are some additional features, including some new hilly track and a double right-angle hairpin bend. These added more interesting features to the parcours. Like all race games, players usually do best if they can start fast and stay at the front of the pack. In Flamme Rouge, this is mitigated by the fact that once a card is played it is discarded so players have to make their good cards last the duration of the race while avoiding too much exhaustion.

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Teal managed to crash both his bikes, while Black and Purple crashed one each. Indigo and Navy led for most of the game while Pink tried to maintain a position in the front four or five. Navy faded as the sprinters wound up for a lunge for the line, with Indigo as Marcel Kittel and Pink as Mark Cavendish. This time, victory went to the German and the Manx Missile with just piped into second with Navy rolling home in third. The game had been a lot of fun and the general consensus was that the Grand Tour expansion added some nice new features even when multiple games for a campaign weren’t appropriate. It hadn’t out-stayed its welcome either, and although Teal headed home, there was time for everyone else to play one more quick game.

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The game of choice was Coloretto—something of an old favourite. This is a really quick game to teach and start playing, with players taking it in turns to either draw a card and add it to one of the trucks, or taking a truck and adding the Chameleons on it to their collection. The clever part is that largest three sets score positive points following the Triangular series, while any other sets score negative points. Purple drew the Golden Joker which was picked up by Pink, while Black took the other Joker. The game was really tight, well, amongst the top three anyhow. Navy managed to only score positive points, but his thirty-four points was one less than Indigo who took second and who, in turn, scored one point less than the victor, Black.

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The final table consisted of Pine, Blue, Jade and Sapphire. After a bit of chit-chat, this group settled on playing Akropolis. This is a fairly light abstract tile laying game in a similar vein to Taluva or NMBR 9, where tiles placed on higher levels score more points. In this game, players take a tile from the Market and place it in their City. The first tile in the market display is always free, the one after costs one stone (the only resource in the game) the next one two stone and so on. The tiles comprise three conjoined hexes each either a Quarry (which provide Stone when built over), a Plaza, or a District tile. Tiles can be placed on top of others, but must cover more than one other tile and cannot leave gaps.

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At the end of the game, tiles that meet the scoring requirements for that colour are multiplied by their height. As in Kingdomino where the area is multiplied by the number of crowns in it, this District score in Akropolis is multiplied by the number of Plazas in that colour; these totals are added together to give a final total. This time, Blue scored heavily for her Houses and although Jade almost matched her with his Barracks, he didn’t score much for anything else and Blue had picked up a lot of points for her Markets too. Together these gave her a bit of a landslide with a total of one hundred and nineteen. Sapphire and Pine that by the end they had got the hang of things, and fancied giving it another go.

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The game was punctuated by a discussion about orange juice and lemonade, which is apparently called a “Henry” in these parts though nobody but Jade was aware of it. Pine commented that where he came from it was more likely to be used to order cocaine. This time, Blue tried a totally different strategy this time focusing entirely on Houses. Sapphire’s Markets gave him forty points and Pine’s gave him thirty-four. These were dwarfed by Jade’s Gardens that gave him sixty points, but they all paled into insignificance compared to Blue’s Houses which gave her one hundred and eight. Sadly though, with nothing else but a pile of rocks, this left her with exactly the same score as last time—and a tie with Jade, while Sapphire, the most improved player finished in third, just four points behind.

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Learning Outcome: The underwater world has a lot of potential.

29th October 2024

The evening began with everyone admiring Plum’s spooky cardie and wish Black a happy birthday, before people settled down to play spooky games. To mark Halloween, the “Feature Game” will was Ghosts Love Candy Too (the sequel to Ghosts Love Candy). This is ostensibly a quick little card game where players haunt kids to steal their sweeties, however, in practice, it took rather longer than expected to get to grips with. The idea is that players simultaneously choose a card from their hand (of nine) Ghost Cards and then reveal which card people played to decide turn order. Starting with the player who revealed the highest value card, players then take it in turns to place their card one one of the Kid Cards, to “haunt them”.

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The player immediately takes any Treat Tokens on the Kid Card and then activates the Kid’s special ability. Any Kids whose courage has been exceeded are then collected by the active player and the Kid Card is replaced. Players score points for some of the Kid Cards (some positive, but most are negative), and for Treats they have collected according to their personal, secret, Craving cards which mean that Treats score differently for each person. Thus, while one player may score five points for, say, Licorice, another another player, Licorice will only be worth one point. for some reason, there was a bit of sussing out of the rules as, although Blue had done her homework, somehow it didn’t quite fit together in practice.

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Between them, however, Teal, Pink, Ivory, Cobalt and Blue worked it out in the end. Ivory began, and his favourite was Chocolate, while Cobalt who went second was after peppermints. From early in the game, it was apparent that Teal was collecting Gummy Bears, and seemed to have little competition, but then, it appeared that Blue was collecting Candy Corn, but that was all she could get her hands on and she really wanted Licorice. In the end it was a tie between Teal and Pink, who did really well on his Treats, especially his favourites, Lollipops, but picked up ten negative points from his huge pile of terrified Kids. Victory went to Teal on the tie-break, however, as he had the most of his favourite Treats (that pile of Gummy Bears).

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Meanwhile, on the next table, Jade was leading Black, Purple and Green in a game of Potion Explosion, which is sort of “Candy Crush the board game”, played with Marbles. Players take an Ingredient Marble from the dispenser causing other Marbles to fall. If that causes Marbles of the same color to connect and form rows or columns, they “explode” and players can take them take as well. They then use the Ingredients to make potions and then drink them to give special magical powers. The winner, however, is the player who brews the most valuable Potions with the least Help and the most Skill.

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This time, Purple took the least assistance and finished with no Help tokens at all, however, a little Help can go a long way if you make the most of it. Green got a Lot of help which cost him eight points but this was more than offset by the fact he had the most valuable Potions, worth fifty-seven points, and the most Skill giving him another twelve and a total of sixty-one points and substantial victory margin. Black just pushed Jade into third—although Jade had considerably more valuable Potions, Black had more Skill and had needed a lot less Help, giving him a total of fifty-one points, two more than Jade.

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On the third table, Plum had been keen to give the Ghost Train version of Ticket to Ride a go, however, before they got round to that, they played a couple of games of the rather more tenuously Halloween themed Nova Luna. This is an abstract tile laying game that uses the mechanism from the slightly older, animal-themed game, Habitats. On their turn, players choose a tile from the Moon wheel to add to their array. Each new tile brings a new task to fulfill which are completed by placing colors in a specific arrangement which in turn bring more new tasks. Each time a task is completed, the player may places one of their Markers and the first to place all of their Markers is the winner.

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Plum was joined in Nova Luna by Sapphire (as it is one of his favourite games), Byzantium and Mint on her first visit. The group played two games—the first of which was really close. Plum and Sapphire tied one seventeen and were beaten by a single point by Mint. The winner was Byzantium, however, with a two point lead and finished with twenty points. The game was slightly less tight, though Byzantium, the master of consistency, was also the victor with twenty points. Second place this time went to Plum with sixteen who was one point ahead of Sapphire who, in turn, was one point ahead of Mint.

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Then the group moved on to play the Ghost Train version of Ticket to Ride. This is really a re-implementation of the introductory version of the game Ticket to Ride: First Journey, but what makes it special is the gorgeous board and large train pieces. It still uses the same basic mechanism as all the Ticket to Ride games with players collecting parade Float Cards and using them to claim routes on the main board. Each player starts with a couple of “Ticket” cards showing locations they have to connect. In this version, when a player completes a Ticket, they reveal it and draw a new one. If a player can’t complete a ticket, they can take a turn to discard both their cards and redraw.

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There are also bonus Tickets available for connecting a location of the Dark Forest region in the top left corner of the board to a location in the Seashore region in the bottom right and bonus Float Cards for connecting Town Hall to the Crypt. The winner is the first player to claim their sixth Ticket or the player with the most Tickets when someone places their final Train piece on the map. The game was a bit of a landslide, with Sapphire stealing a march on the others and quickly taking the lead, rapidly collecting his six tickets before anyone else had got anywhere. Mint took second with two Tickets and and Byzantium and Plum tied for third.

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Pink was somewhat surprised when Mint expressed an interest in his bottle of his favourite Blood Orange cider. Initially he was reluctant to part with it as it wasn’t empty, but once it was pointed out that they needed it for their next game and Pink could just poor the rest into his glass, everyone was happy and Mint began setting up her birthday present—Cards vs Gravity. This is a silly, but fun party game where players balance cards on a platform attached to the top of a bottle that has the feel of Jenga, but with cards. The idea is that players have to add cards to the tree without collapsing it. Byzantium was obviously on a bit of a roll, and followed up his two victories at Nova Luna with two victories against Gravity (and the others of course).

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With everyone pretty much finished, some headed home, but the remaining ten managed a couple of rounds of the old favourite, and totally not Halloween themed, 6 Nimmt!. In this game, players simultaneously choose a numbered card from their hand and then reveal them at the same time. These cards are added to four rows of cards in the centre of the table, starting with the lowest card, adding each one to the row that ends with the highest number that is lower than the card. Where the card would have been the sixth card, instead the player takes the five cards as their scoring pile leaving their card as the first in the new row. The player with the lowest final total is the winner. The catch is where players play a card that is lower than all the end cards, and as a result takes the row of their choice.

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This has the potential to completely upset everyone’s plans. The plans are not the thing here though, it is the tension and anticipation as people wait to see who is going to pick up that brightly coloured, high-scoring set of cards… This time, Cobalt top-scored in the first round with twenty-seven, slightly more than Jade. Pink, Ivory and Purple all finished in single digits, but it Pink was the victor with one solitary point. In the second round, Green took the biggest pile giving him thirty-three points, but Jade managed to take thirteen points from just three cards. Ivory was the only one to stay in single digits, and was therefore the winner with a total of eight points.

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Learning Outcome: Even apparently silly children’s games can be fun when the occasion is right.

15th October 2024

There were quite a few people eating this week, but the earliest arrivals were finished when Green turned up for the first time in months toting his copy of Lost Ruins of Arnak. Jade was already preparing to lead the “Feature Game” which was to be Castle Combo, and he was joined by Sapphire, Pine and Lime. This is a game that was released to coincide with Essen, but like many of the most popular games was sold out within a couple of hours. The essence of the game is tableau-building where players draft cards from two markets creating a three-by-three square of people interacting with each other triggering instant effects and end-of-game bonuses.

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The two markets consist of Castle Cards and Village Cards. At the start of their turn, players can pay a Key to to carry out a special action, before they buy a Card from whichever market the Messenger token is currently located in and place it in their Tableau. Some card abilities grant a permanent discount when purchasing cards of a specific location (Castle, Village, or both). If a player can’t afford any of the cards (or choose not to pay for them), they can always take a card without paying its cost, and place it face down in their tableau. In doing so, they ignore its ability, its end game points and any other information printed on it, but immediately gain six Gold and two Keys in compensation.

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Each card after the first must be placed orthogonally adjacent to at least one other card in a player’s Tableau and at the end of the game, their Tableau must be a three-by-three grid of Cards. In this way, the final position of the cards in the array is fixed as the game progresses. Once it has been placed, the ability of the Card is applied. Some abilities affect opponents (all other players), while others affect a player’s neighbour (they choose which one). Finally, if the Messenger icon is depicted on the card played, the active player moves the Messenger Token, either to the Castle or to the Village, as appropriate, before refilling the market and ending their turn.

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The game ends when everyone has nine Cards in their Tableau and everyone adds up their scores. This time, Sapphire went first as he’d played before. The game plays very quickly and smoothly as everyone began building up their displays. It turned out that playing before wasn’t a great deal of help, however,, as Pine gave everyone else a bit of a trouncing as his final Tableau was worth ninety-six points, seventeen more than Jade who took second place a handful of points ahead of Sapphire in third. Meanwhile, on the next table, Blue and Byzantium were leading a game of Stamp Swap at the request of Pink who had missed out last time.

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This is another fairly straight forward game, albeit one that takes a bit longer than Castle Combo, though it plays just as smoothly. There is a lot of simultaneous play, which is nice because it minimises down time. First, players take it in turns to choose items from the central Pool, then simultaneously divide them into two piles of offerings. The player with the first player token, chooses and takes one of the piles offered by their opponents. The opponent keeps their other pile and then chooses a pile from one of their opponents and so on. Once everyone has two piles, players arrange the Stamps in their Album and then choose which of the four available end of round cards to score this time.

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After three rounds, players score the end of game objective card and the player with the most points is the winner. One of the clever parts about this game is how much difference the objective cards make to the way players arrange their Stamps. This was very obvious last time when there were two parallel games and one scored Finale Contest gave for points for Stamps completely surrounded by other Stamps, while the other gave points for each empty region. The former gave lots of Albums where the Stamps were clumped together, while the latter gave spread out Stamps in a lattice-type pattern. This time, the Finale Contest gave ten points for each completed edge, so players began the game working along the borders of their Album page leaving a hole in the middle that they only filed in later in the game.

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The end of round scores allowed players to score points for the number of stamps they had in one colour, the number of large square Stamps they had, the number of cancelled Stamps and the number of Stamps in their second most abundant theme. This artificially increased the value of large square Stamps, which was something that Pink failed to take into account early on. It led to Blue taking what Pink felt was his obviously less valuable pile and giving her a surprise Special Stamp with a sad face from him. Still, that was replaced with a big grin when he stole one of Blue’s hidden Stamps later in the game and it turned out to be the one with the Giant Panda on it.

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The first event card was Generous Gifts where players choose one of their Stamps to score and then pass on—always a difficult decision, but more-so at the start of the game. Slim Pickings was the second event giving players fewer items from the Pool at the start of the round, while Hands to Shake was the final event which made more Attendee Cards available, although by this time, it was too late to really take advantage of them. That said, Byzantium had made collected quite a few Attendee Cards, using them to great effect to gain extra points and Stamps and took one in the final round as well.

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Aside from the Panda, Purple seemed to collect nearly all the Animal Stamps, while Pink did a good job of collecting Flowers. The game is a bit of a “Point Salad” though, with points coming in little aliquots from lots of different places, and it perhaps pays not concentrate too much on one aspect. Byzantium got a fast start and took an early lead, which he just managed to maintain to the end, beating Blue into second place by ten points, for the second time, which Pink taking third. While packing up, everyone agreed that they really enjoyed the game for its smoothness, and the only part that “jarred” was setting out the starting Pool which was a little laborious. Discussion online later, however, suggested a away to improve this, so that’s something to try next time.

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By the time Stamp Swap finished, Castle Combo had already come to an end and Jade, Sapphire, Pine and Lime had moved on to play Courtisans. We first played this a few weeks ago, shortly after UK Games Expo. This is a clever little card game from the same stable as Castle Combo and Faraway, where players are manipulating card values by where they play them. On their turn, each player receives and plays three coloured Family cards. One card is played at the Queen’s table to sway a Family’s influence in a positive or negative way depending on whether it is placed above the table or below. At the end of the game, those Families with more cards below than above will have “Fallen from Grace”.

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One of the other two cards is played in the player’s own Domain and the other in an opponent’s Domain. At the end of the game, each card a player has from an “Esteemed” Family is worth a point, while each card from an Family that has “Fallen from Grace” loses them a point. Thus, players are trying to increase the value of the cards they have, while decreasing the value of the cards their opponents have. The first game was a game of two parts, Jade and Pine tied for victory with nine points, while Sapphire and Lime also tied with four points.

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As is often the case with this sort of game, after the first play, once he’d seen how the game works, Lime requested a second game. This second game was higher scoring with players getting more “Esteem” and fewer Families that had Fallen from Grace. Both Jade and Lime completed both their objectives as well. Lime’s massive Esteem scoring of twelve, gave him clear victory with a total of sixteen points, while Jade, who finished with eleven points, just pipped Pine to second by a single point. There was a bit of chatter with everyone discussing the games, but nobody really had the inclination to play anything else before going home.

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On the next table, while Blue took a little time out, Pink, Purple and Byzantium played a quick game of the sixteen card filler, Love Letter. This is a sort of multiplayer dueling game where players have a hand of one card, draw a second from the face down deck and then choose one to play, with the aim of being the last player standing, or the player with the highest value card if in the event that the deck runs out first. The trio only played two rounds, but Byzantium managed to get knocked out first turn both times. It was a tie between the other two though, with Purple taking the first round and Pink the second when he knocked out Princess Purple.

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After two rounds, the trio got bored and moved on to playing Sushi Go!. Sushi Go Party! had had a mention earlier in the evening, but as none of them were familiar with the rules changes, they stuck with the smaller, original version. This is a simple, and one of the purest card drafting games where players start with a hand of cards, keep one and pass the rest on. The cards are Sushi and players are trying to get sets, or pairs, or as many as possible depending on the Sushi on the card. The group played the full three rounds, with very mixed outcomes. At the end of the game, the player with the most Pudding cards gets extra points, but as all three tied so nobody got any. The winner was Byzantium, with a massive fifty-eight points, seven more than Pink in second in what was a high scoring game.

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Byzantium was waiting for Plum to finish on the other side of the room, so Blue rejoined the group for a quick game of something silly—an old game that Blue and Pink acquired at Essen, called Why First?. The premise of this game is, what’s so important about being first, maybe the winner should be the person who is second. So in this game, players start with a hand of five number cards and simultaneously, chooses a card to play before, on the count of three giving it to someone. This player’s piece is then moved that number along the race track. The round ends after five cards, the last of which must be used to move the payers’ own piece.

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At the end of the round, only the player who is second scores, and that depends on their location on the track. In the first round, Blue came second (and therefore won the points) and Pink won the second. Byzantium won the third, but as he finished on the start line, he scored no points, much to his chagrin. Blue and Purple tied for second in the fourth round so both took a single point, before Purple took the final round. The winner of the game is, obviously, the player who comes second overall. Despite a lot of effort by Blue who ultimately finished first and therefore lost, this was Pink who was therefore the winner.

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By this time, the table on the other side of the room had finally finished and were packing up. Green had clearly arrived wanting to Lost Ruins of Arnak, and Ivory and Plum had kindly joined him. This had an outing about six months ago, when Green and Plum were also involved. By this time, however, Green had acquired The Missing Expedition expansion and, having played the game quite a lot solo, wanted to include it to add interest. The basic game combines deck-building and worker placement with resource management. Players start with six cards in their deck, two Money, two Compasses and two Fear cards (which just clog up players’ hands), and draw five of these to play.

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Players then have two meeples each that can be sent to locations on the map, to either discover or use an action Location which generally give Resources plus some extras. Each new site has a Creature guarding it, which, if beaten, will give points and a small one-time bonus. Players can use resources to move up the Research Track giving different rewards. Players get one action each per turn, until everyone has passed signalling the end of the round, and the game finishes after five rounds. The Missing Expedition expansion is modular, but this time the group added the Waterfall Temple and the extra encounter cards. The Waterfall Temple has a couple of steps whose cost changes each time someone Researches past them which can make it a bit unpredictable, though there is a sneaky shortcut to the top of the temple for players prepared to pay the steep cost.

Lost Ruins of Arnak: The Missing Expedition

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The first round went very quickly with everyone having limited options. Green and Plum began moving up the Research track, looking to gain an Assistant as soon as possible, where Ivory focused on gaining coins and an additional card. Ivory grabbed the Recovered Plane card (from the expansion) that allowed him to recall his explorers and using them again, which felt quite powerful. In the second round, Plum and Green both got their Assistants. They also started getting additional cards with Plum getting the Unreliable Compass card that gave her the benefits from the bottom tile of the exploration track and Green got the Army Knife which gave him flexibility when gaining Resources. Ivory began Exploring, uncovering the first new worked spot, slowly followed by Plum. Ivory managed to use his Plane card to avoid the Guardian, whereas Plum didn’t have that option and gained a Fear card at the end of the round.

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In the following rounds, Ivory begin focusing on the research track, catching up with Green and Plum and eventually overtaking them. He reached the part of the track where he could gain the Resources on a set aside exploration tile and got one that gave me an Explore card from the expansion which gave him the choice of something now or something latter. As the third and fourth rounds progressed, the Research track became a core focus Ivory managed to reach the top the first. Everyone continued exploring, and Ivory was also the first to explore a level two tile, gaining additional idols and resources and then subsequently able to recall his explorer to avoid the Guardian and Fear card.

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Plum was also Exploring, though at the lower level, but unfortunately the Guardians that she was drawing meant they were very difficult to defeat and she picked up more Fear cards. Green was Exploring less, but was using the engine that he assembled with his Assistants and cards to explore and defeat quite a few Guardians, adding to his engine whilst also gaining points. Towards the end of the game, the question for everyone was how to be most efficient and make the most moves up the Research track. Green joined Ivory at the top, and additionally gained enough Resources to grab an eleven point temple tile. Ivory was looking for an additional Resource to move my notebook up one more step and then remembered he hadn’t gained the bonus tile for reach the top of the Research track, gaining him that valuable Resource.

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Plum was also pushing up the Research track, looking to squeeze as much value as possible. Ivory also had accumulated quite a few coins, which allowed him to buy lots of cards during the final round just for their points. With everyone passing in the final round there was just the small matter of the scores. Points for Exploring, Research and Idols were pretty much level. Green’s engine which allowed him to gain the eleven point temple tile and defeat four Guardians (as opposed to Ivory’s and Plum’s one) ultimately gave him victory with seventy-seven points. Ivory’s Artifacts and Item cards gave him second ahead of Plum who had struggled with her Fear (bordering on Terror!) throughout the game.

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Learning Outcome: Princesses don’t want to live in Ruined Castles.

8th October 2024

As it was our twelfth birthday party, lots of people arrived early for pizza (or an amazing Mixed Grill in the case of Lime and some lovely veggie curry and fiery chilli for Pine), followed by GOAT cupcakes. While everyone waited for food, arrivals from Essen were handed out, including Nucleum, Faraway and Flamme Rouge expansions; Let’s Go! To Japan and Cascadia mini expansions, and Die Wandelnden Türme (aka Wandering Towers), Keyflower and Dixit promotional items. There was a lot of chatter too, about flooding, pot holes, the 34 road closure, full car parks and water leaks, as well as Essen. Indigo and Navy weren’t eating, so had a play with Villagers while the others entertained themselves. This is a card game where players “Draft” Villager cards from a market (called the Road) and then add them to their Village.

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Some Villagers have prerequisites before they can be “Built”. These are cards that must exist in the player’s Village before the Villager can be added on top to make a chain, cards that must be unlocked by paying money to other Villagers in their own Village, someone else’s Village or the Bank. Some cards allow players to draft extra cards, while others enable players to Build extra Villagers and Special Villagers give powerful special actions. Twice during the game there “Market” Phases when players get income from their cards, and the player with the most money at the end of the game is the winner. Somewhere along the lines, Indigo and Navy had a bit of a rules malfunction, and as everyone else had already started the now traditional birthday “Feature Game“, Crappy Birthday, they abandoned Villagers.

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Crappy Birthday is a party game where players give each other comedy birthday presents and the recipient has to decide who gave the best and worst gifts. We play a slight variant of rules as written, where we play a single year of birthdays with each gamer getting one turn to receive gift cards from everyone else from their hand of five cards. With lots of players the pile of gifts can get quite substantial and this time everyone was getting thirteen gifts to decide which was the best and which was the worst. The players who gave these then received a point for knowing the recipient so well and the player with the most points at the end of the year is the winner.

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One of the reasons this game is so fun is that we learn a bit about each other. Pink went first as his real birthday was next. He liked the idea of an Easter Island Mo’ai for the garden (not that Blue was so impressed with the idea), but disliked the idea of cave scuba diving. Plum chose a haunted castle as her favourite (because she loves castles), but pulled a face at the idea of earlobe stretching rings. Purple had the matching neck rings, but these weren’t her least favourite gift, that was a giant swing ride, while she loved the idea of a penguin collection. Byzantium showed his environmental credentials by picking a Global Warming Study as his favourite, while eschewing Jade’s wing suit dive gift.

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Teal felt that trees were quite beautiful enough without being carved, but really liked the idea of a ride-on bike mower. Jade wasn’t a fan of Cobalt’s offering of Polka lessons, but loved the idea of trip to Mars from Sapphire, while Sapphire felt “perkiness training” wasn’t something he really needed, but the thrill-seeker loved the reciprocal gift from Jade, a roller-coaster ride. Lime fancied a three day festival trip, but wasn’t keen on a week eating nothing but Spam. Blue didn’t fancy the creepy baby sculpture to go with the Mo’ai, but fancied Pink’s gift of a Safari (provided she had time to train for the walking element). Ivory didn’t feel his life would be improved by a free satellite TV dish, but always one to send his meeples into space in Tapestry, grasped the opportunity to join them with a space walk.

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It turned out that Navy has a problem with bees, so Teal’s gift of a bee keeping which he personally would have loved, didn’t go down well, but much to Pink’s surprise, his gymnastics camp was received really well. Indigo was quite abrupt in her negative response to the idea of paparazzi following her about, but liked the idea of exploring a volcano while Cobalt didn’t feel he needed his soul to be searched, but fancied flying lessons. The final birthday of the year was Pine, who didn’t get his usual pile of horses and meat, instead getting the opportunity to run with the bulls, which having known someone who had done it and been gored, wasn’t something he fancied. Pine’s favourite was Larry the Lobster (not that he has space in his garden for him), one of the Big Things of Australia, that Pink and Blue happened to see on their visit there last year.

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Lime was the last to break his duck and was very pleased not to end the game without scoring any points, indeed, nobody finished with the dreaded bagel, which was nice. The runniest of run-away winners was Teal though, with five successful (or unsuccessful) gifts, with Pink and Cobalt joint runners up with three. It was interesting though, this time there were quite a lot of gifts that people gave “in error” where as Teal commented, he “Gave pressies he thought people would like, but they all hated them!” With the birthday formalities dealt with, there was time for something relatively short. First up was Jade who was very keen to give his new Faraway expansion, Le Peuple du Dessous (aka The People Below).

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Faraway is a fairly simple little game, but one that really messes with your head: players play cards from their hand of three, adding them to a row of cards, left to right, but at the end of they score the eight cards from right to left. The Peuple du Dessous expansion adds just seventeen cards, but these include the Guides and the Three-Eyed Ones, two new Peoples with more opportunities to score, as well as giving enough cards to play with seven people. This time there were only five though, with Sapphire, Byzantium, Indigo and Navy joining Jade. Navy and Indigo were new to the game and, as usual, it took a little bit of getting used to. That said, the both did really well with Indigo ending up with seventy-seven points, four more than Sapphire in second with Navy taking third, just one point behind.

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Navy and Indigo headed off and took an early night, but the other three had to wait for Plum who’s game on the other side of the room was ongoing. Faraway is a fun little game though and the expansion adds a little more, so the trio decided to give it another go. This time, Byzantium was the victor with seventy-three with Sapphire the runner up again. Meanwhile, Blue, Pink, Pine and Teal, got out Bohnanza. This is a game that is generally popular with the group, though Teal had somehow only managed to play it the once almost six months ago. This is a very simple card game, albeit slightly convoluted and very unpromising when explained, but the key is that players must not rearrange the cards in their hand.

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On their turn, players must plant the first card in their hand in one of their two been fields and may plant the second if they choose. They then turn over two cards from the deck, which must be planted before the player can move on. Fields can only contain one bean type, but beans can be traded, or even gifted, and it is the trading and negotiation that makes the game such fun. Once the two cards on the table have been planted, players can trade from their hand, but again all traded cards must be planted. Players can harvest Fields at any time with some of the bean cards dug up becoming money and larger Fields giving more money and at a better rate.

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Blue took some high valued Garden Beans and then sold them off to buy a third Bean Field, causing a lot of confusion for Pink who couldn’t believe it when they kept appearing even though there were only six in the deck. Teal scored well from his Chilli and Wax and Soy beans, while Pine and Blue ended up in competition for Green Beans. This time with just four, the scores were a little more varied, but Blue was the clear victor with twenty-five Bohn Thaler, five more than Pine who came second. The final game of the evening was Villagers, which was getting another outing on the other side of the room with Cobalt leading Ivory, Purple and Plum.

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After a reminder of the rules, Purple started and grabbed the Carpenter then Cobalt went next taking the Blacksmith. Both of these guaranteed their owners an income of coins (and hence points) at the expense of other players paying to use them. However, this did mean that they fell behind on building an engine to Draft and Build more cards (which Plum and Ivory focused on). From there, the first half of the game went quite quickly with everyone focusing on building their engine. Ivory managed to get a Wine Trader using a Monk as a Graper, as well as playing a Scavenger, enabling him to take slender lead after the first scoring, although the scores were all very close.

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In the second half of the game, Purple and Cobalt were beginning to have to make tough choices, being unable to play as many cards as they would like and not having the building cards they needed, which were also hard to come by. However, they continue gaining coins from all players. Purple had to discard quite a few cards to get starter cards which slowed her down a little, though Plum and Ivory were able to quickly get to the position to Draft and Build the max number of cards allowed; Plum in particular seemed to always have a fist full of cards. As the game progressed, more people began taking cards that others might want, with Cobalt taking Wool cards that might have been of use to Purple or Ivory. Ivory, however, was actually more focused on getting a second Vintner, already having a second Wine Trader in hand.

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Towards the end of the game, there was face down Grape card which Ivory debated taking a gamble with, but decided not to take the risk. Inevitably, when it was flipped over it turned out to be Vintner and Plum grabbed it. Ivory got very lucky during his next draft though, taking a face down Special card that was Monk, which he could then play as Vintner. Elsewhere, Purple played some Wool cards, getting two Weavers, Plum picked up some good end-game scoring cards in the Locksmith and Freemason. Cobalt focused on Solitary cards and Silver end game scoring, doing well from his Priests, Agent and Blacksmith combo. Ivory ended up focusing on the Hay cards, which scored well and that plus the two Wine Traders (and a second Scavenger), gave him a hundred and twenty-six and a two point victory over Cobalt.

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Learning Outcome: Getting old is not necessarily a bad thing.

17th September 2024

After the usual chatter and some food, the interested parties staked their claim to play the “Feature Game“, Stamp Swap. This is a game where players take on the role of stamp collectors at a convention collecting, trading and then scoring their stamp album. All the reviews claim it is a light game, but while it is not hugely complex, there is more to the game than appears at first glance. At its core is the “I cut, You Choose” mechanism that is used in games like Isle of Skye and …aber bitte mit Sahne, but Stamp Swap is nothing like either of these.

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The game takes place over three rounds each with three phases: Collect, Swap and Show. In the collect phase, an Event card is revealed and then players take turns to take an item from the central pool. Once everyone has six items, everyone puts one item aside to Reserve and then splits the rest into two piles for the Swap phase. Some “I cut, You Choose” games struggle work across a range of player counts, for example, San Marco, really only plays well with three players where one splits the cards into three sets and the others choose. While the game might work with two, the decisions would be too trivial (though there are variants with a dummy player).

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In contrast, dividing a pile into four would require too many cards and make the decision complex as well as make the game potentially quite “swingy”. Thus, although the game officially plays three to four players, the mechanism really only works with three. Stamp Swap avoids this problem with a snake-like mechanism that also negates the need for valuing the hands or the use of money as an intermediate (as in Isle of Skye). The first player chooses one set and the owner of that set keeps their other set and chooses one from another player. That player keeps their second set and chooses a set from another player and so on.

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Players then place the stamps in their album and score in the Show Phase. There are four Goals in each game and each player can score one of these per round, but can only score each only once. These Goals are different in each game giving a lot of variability, especially as thy combine together in different ways. At the end of the game, players additionally earn points for the face value of each Stamp, for any Specialist cards they may have, for Stamps that match their personal Theme, and for their achievement in the Finale Contest, while receiving bonus points their place in the Forever Stamp competition.

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The unexpected complexity arises from the stamps themselves. They come in five different colours, themes and size/shapes. Some of these stamps are “Cancelled” (and have no face value) and some are “Faded” (and have a negative face value, but may be useful for claiming the Goals). There is are special gilded Stamps with their own Chocolate theme and a high face value, but cannot be reserved at the end of the Collect phase. Finally, there are the “Forever” Stamps. These are Square and are the only Stamps available in the smallest size and have no face value, but are useful for filling tiny holes (should that be required for the Goals) and give bonus points at the end of the game (in much the same way as Pudding do in Sushi Go!).

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It turns out that the game takes quite a lot longer with more players, which was a bit of a surprise given that much of the game is played simultaneously. This time Ivory led a group of five with Plum, Sapphire, Jade and Teal, while Blue led a group of four comprising Byzantium, Purple and Black. Ivory’s group were quick off the mark and first to get going after the rules explanation. Their Goals gave points for: Stamps of one Colour in one Group; sets of all five Theme Stamps; Large square Stamps, and Cancelled Stamps not on the edge, while their Finale Contest gave points for the number of Stamps completely surrounded by other Stamps. Ivory’s personal scoring objective was Space Themed Stamps, Plum’s were Animals, Sapphire’s were Vehicles, Jade’s were Monuments and Teal’s were Flowers.

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Everyone began by feeling their way a bit, especially as the first round added additional Specialists—cards that give extra powers for the rest of the game. Plum made a “bee line” for these, while Jade and Teal focused on the Large Square Stamps, scoring the related bonus, and giving them an early lead. Jade also managed to “hide a gold stamp (face down)” and ended up with it in his collect as no one took it. Plum scored for the Cancelled Stamps first, as she had picked up a lot of them. As nobody chose his set, Ivory ended up with all his own Stamps, which he thought was great at first, but then had second thoughts as he ended the first round at the back of the pack.

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In the second round, the event was “Rewarding finds” giving two points immediately for taking a face down Stamp, which everyone was keen to do, especially Plum, who quickly caught up with Jade and Teal as a result. Plum made good use of her “Swap one for three face down Stamps before splitting your collection” to grab extra Stamps. Teal managed to hang on to the First Player token for most of the game and also took a lead on the Forever Stamps. Sapphire grabbed an exhibitor for Yellow Stamps and proceeded to take Stamps to match wherever possible (both from the pool and from other peoples piles). Ivory made a point of collecting a full set of five different Theme Stamps, scoring nine points, as well as managing to keep a valuable face-down Gold stamp.

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Going into the final round, Ivory was still trailing significantly behind everyone else who were bunched tightly together. This time the Event gave bonus points for taking Stamps that matched the Theme of their neighbours, which made the game slightly meaner as everyone was taking Stamps others wanted. Plum was again using the additional Stamps she was getting from her Specialist to shape what she was going to end up with, managing to get three complete sets for twenty-seven points. Jade also managed to score well for this in the final round, as well as for the coloured Stamp cards he collected. Sapphire was similar with his vehicles and Yellow stamps, as well as scoring scoring for Large Square Stamps.

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Teal fell a little behind, taking fewer points for the Cancelled Stamps on the edge and he also failed to collect any of the Flower Stamps he needed as everyone kept taking them during the swap phase (in order to get complete sets). Ivory meanwhile focused on getting as many Large Square Stamps adding to the three he already had, giving him a massive fourty-two points taking him from behind and giving him a significantly lead. In the final scoring, Teal took the bonus for the most Forever Stamps giving him ten points while and everyone but Plum tied for second with a single Forever Stamp, giving six points.

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Everyone managed to get at least one gold stamp, but Ivory had the most valuable total face value. Plum scored most for specialists, although most people had at least one, so this made little difference to the scores. Everyone scored well for the Finale Contest, especially Jade, and Plum, but it was not enough to overhaul Ivory’s lead. He finished with a total of a hundred and forty-eight, ten more than Plum who took second place, who was a handful of points ahead of Sapphire in third. On the next table, Blue took longer to explain the rules, but once they got going, they soon caught up with the first group and ended up finishing just before.

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Their first Event card was “Generous Gifts” so after the Collect phase, players choose one collected items to score and then pass on to their neighbour. Everyone quickly chose their highest scoring Stamp, then realised that meant they would lose it, so had a bit of a re-think. It was then that the group began to really appreciate the quandary at the centre of the game: it was all very well taking nice tiles, but they were no use if someone else took them. This tension was particularly obvious in the final round of the first game where the “Mine not Yours” Event gave points for taking Stamps that matched a neighbour’s theme—while players lost the opportunity to pick up Stamps they wanted in the Collect Phase, they had the chance to take them in the Swap phase.

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The Events in the second and third rounds were “More to See” and “Stamps Forever”. These had a much smaller impact on the game play, or at least it felt like that, though the Forever Stamps were all collected in the final round. The Finale Contest was “Empty Regions” which gave three points for each empty region. Black showed everyone how to to maximise this and from the end of the first round, everyone’s collections began to look like every-expanding checker boards. Comparing the final album boards between the two games, the layouts were completely different with compact groups for the first game and gappy sprawling displays for the second game.

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Black picked up the bonus for having the most the Forever Stamps, and Byzantium, who by his own admission had been “pants during the game” picked up loads of points in the dying stages. Purple had done the best with her personal Goal—Flowers, while Blue had a plethora of rare, valuable Stamps. During the game it had been unclear who was really in the lead as the scores seesawed a bit, but Byzantium’s lunge for the line gave him the lead when it mattered and he finished with a hundred and forty-six points, seven more than the runner up, Blue. All in all, everyone had enjoyed the game, though the overwhelming feel was that there was much more to the game than the reviews claimed, but that’s a good thing.

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Cobalt was the only person with a strong aversion to playing Stamp Swap, but Pine, Lime and Pink were all keep to play one of their favourite games, Zoo Break, another game that wasn’t really his type. In he end, Cobalt graciously joined in the keepers of Bedlam Zoo, trying to keep the animals under control. The game is a cooperative game, where players take it in turns to roll a die to determine how many actions they get, take the actions like acquiring
supplies, capturing animals, locking enclosures etc., before cards are drawn to see what animals escape and then move towards the exit. The aim is to get all the animals back into their cages and lock them before five animals or anything dangerous gets out.

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The group chose to use the standard difficulty (two “Phew” cards), but with the “Faulty Lock” variant. This is where players roll to see if the lock holds when one of the locked up animals tries to escape; it adds a but of interest to the end of the game, however, unfortunately this time, the group didn’t get that far. They managed to lock up the Elephants, Tigers and the Rhino, but the mischievous Pandas remained rogue until the end of the game. They weren’t the problem, however, that was the Snakes. Three harmless Garter Snakes got out, but they were followed by a Viper, and as it left, so did the group’s zoo license…

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With Bedlam Zoo sadly closed prematurely, the group moved on to a couple of quick fillers. The first of these was No Thanks!, a really clever little “cards with numbers” game. The idea is that players either take the face up card or pay a chip to pass the problem on to the next player with the aim being to be the player with the lowest total at the end. The clever part is that if a player has a run, only the lowest value card counts, but the deck also has some cards removed at random. This makes it a proper gambling and “push your luck” game. This time, Cobalt was the top scorer, but the winner with eighteen was Pink.

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There was just time for one more game, Coloretto. This is another simple and clever card game, this time the essence of the core mechanism in the bigger game, Zooloretto. The idea is that players either draw a card and add it to a truck, or take a truck and add its contents to their collection. At the end of the game players score their three largest sets positively, with negative points for any other sets. The clever part is the use of the Triangular number sequence which means the first card in a set is worth one point, while the sixth is worth six. There were the usual questions about Joker cards which resulted in questions being called across the room, but in spite of taking all three Jokers in the deck, Pink was just second by three points behind Lime’s total of forty.

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Learning Outcome: A game about Philately can be more than just Stamp Collecting.

20th August 2024

Cobalt was first to arrive. Pink and Blue weren’t far behind though, and had just ordered their supper when Indigo and her son Navy arrived followed by Jade and Sapphire, then Ivory, Purple, Black, Pine and Teal. While the others chatted and got drinks, Cobalt began teaching Indigo and Navy Akropolis. This is a quick little game where each player is building their own acropolis. On their turn, players first take a tile the market. The first tile in the market display is always free, the one after costs one stone (the only resource in the game) the next one two stone and so on. The tiles comprise three conjoined hexes each either a Quarry (which provide Stone when built over), a Plaza, or a District tile.

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Plazas and District tiles are in different colours, representing Houses, Markets, Barracks, Temples and Gardens. Tiles are freely added to the player’s display, either on the base layer or on top of other tiles, so long as any Districts meet the their conditions and as long as there is a matching Plaza present. At the end of the game, players score for the largest District of each type—each visible hex scores a point for the level it is on (one point for the base layer, two for the first floor etc) multiplied by the number stars shown on the Plazas they have visible. The game is a sort of cross between Taluva and Cascadia, taking the conjoined triple-hex tiles and layered stacking from Taluva and the tile-placement and individual tableau from Cascadia.

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The game was quite tight between Cobalt and Navy, but Navy had the edge, winning his first game in the group with a hundred and eighteen points to Cobalt’s hundred and five. As the game came to an end, the rest of the group began trying to work out who was going to play what. In the end, there were two groups setting up to play the “Feature Game” which was Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails. This is a variant of the popular train game, Ticket to Ride, but with a considerable step up in complexity. In the original game, players take it in turns to carry out one of three actions: take train cards, pay train cards to claim Routes on the map by placing train pieces, or take Tickets. Points are scored for claiming Routes and for successfully connecting the two places shown on their Tickets with negative points scored for failing to complete Tickets.

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In Rails & Sails, however, players build two connected networks, one on land and one on sea covering the whole globe. Players build these with two separate sets of train cards, giving them two hands to manage, making it a more complex version of the game. In addition to the usual four possible actions, on their turn, players can also build a Harbour into a city that they have already claimed a route into. To do this, players spend two Train cards and two Ship cards that are all the same color and all have Harbour symbols on them. At the end of the game, players gain points for each Ticket that lists their Harbour, with players scoring for each Harbour when more than one features on their Ticket.

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Another thing that adds to the complexity is the tension between Ships and Trains: at the start of the game, players have a set total number of Ship and Train pieces, and choose choose how many of each they will have. During the game, instead of a normal turn, they can exchange Ship pieces for Trains or vice versa, but at a cost of one point per piece swapped. There are two different maps in the game, one covering the Great Lakes, and the other covering the whole World—the total number of Ships/Trains players have depends on which of these is used. This time, both groups used the World map. In addition to these major rules changes, there are also a couple of minor tweaks.

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For example, there are Double cards in the Ship deck, which allow players to place up to two Ships per card. There are also Tour Tickets, which feature more than two destinations—these will score a higher number of points if the locations are connected in the right order (and of course, will score negatively if one of the destinations in not connected at all). On the World map, there are Pair Routes too. These require the player to place two train cards of the same colour per space, but the whole Route doesn’t have to be the same colour. There are the usual Double Routes as well, which come into play with four or five players, and multi-colour “Wild” cards which can be used as either Ship or Train cards of any colour.

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Jade, Ivory, Sapphire and Pine made up the first group. In their game, Jade and Ivory started by focusing on Trains while Pine and Sapphire began with Ships giving them both taking an early lead with Ships generally giving more points. Sapphire went to the front and stayed there for the majority of the game. There was an initial scrabble in Asia/south east Asia as well as along the east coast of north and central America, and apart from some early commitments from Pine and Sapphire in the latter, in general there was no major “blocking” and everyone at least tried to play nicely. That said, by the end of the game the board was very congested, perhaps due to the wrap around nature where Routes could fall off one side and come back on on the other.

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Ivory was the first to take more Tickets and it was some time before Jade joined him. Ivory went for Tickets considerably more times than anyone else and by the end of the game, he had significantly more completed Tickets than anyone else, though his were of lower value. Pine in particular started with much more ambitious Tickets and happily declared that he had finished his first ticket about half through the game. That was until Jade pointed out a potential gap in his track which Pine then hurried to fill. Sapphire was following a similar strategy to Pine with bigger, higher risk Tickets and also focused on long Routes (hence his throughout the game). It looked like he was going to trigger the end the game, but in the end, that was Pine.

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Jade and Ivory both had shorter scoring Routes, but with more Tickets, predominantly located in Asia, whereas Sapphire and Pine were mapping the rest of the World. Everyone except Ivory had to take advantage of the Ships/Trains swap and although this cost points and a turn it didn’t feel like it had a large impact on the game. Both Jade and Ivory had cards at the end allowing for a late grab of high scoring Shipping lanes, but the game ended a little early for Sapphire. That said, everyone completed all their tickets, including a very complex and high scoring Tour Ticket. Pine and Sapphire eschewed Harbours, while Jade built just one. Ivory, on the other hand, went built all three in the south east, despite the fact they were challenging to place.

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After placing the Ships/Trains and scoring the Tickets, the scores were fairly even, but those extra Harbours really made a difference. Sapphire and Pine took a twelve point penalty for not having any while Jade picked up twelve (an eight point penalty for not using two and twenty points for having one Ticket ending in his Harbour. Ivory, however, scored a massive ninety points from his, with each of his three Harbours having two of his Tickets finishing in them. This ultimately give him a total of two hundred and seventy-five eighty-five more than Pine who took second place. On reflection, there was a minor rules malfunction—when the group recounted the Route scoring, they failed to take account of the penalties for swapping Ships for Trains, but this was only a handful of points and wouldn’t have affected the final standings.

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The game on the next table was not as highly scoring, but there was still quite a large spread in the scores. While Black reacquainted himself with the rules, the others chatted and counted pieces, eventually they got going though. Pink started in Australia because he liked it there when he visited almost exactly a year ago. Then, he traveled north to east Asia, visiting exotic places like Bancock, Jakarta, Hong Kong and Tokyo, before crossing the Pacific to Winnipeg. As the game came to a close, he also traversed the south Pacific to Valparaiso and took the southern coastal route to Rio de Janeiro. Black also more or less circumnavigated the globe traveling from the UK, east across Europe to Tehran then on to Mumbai.

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From there, he crossed the Pacific to Lima from where he traveled north, around the top of South America also making it to Rio before crossing the Atlantic to Cape Town. Part of the reason for Black and Pink choice of Routed (aside from their Tickets of course) was the fact that Teal was monopolising the Atlantic crossings, making it no fewer than five times! From his Atlantic ports, he spread into North America and across Africa to Dar es Salaam. Purple in contrast, focused her efforts on a single extended trip across the USA, found one of the few Routes across the north Atlantic not taken by Teal, journeyed across Europe following Black through Iran to the far East.

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There was an unfortunate “Rules malfunction” when it came to scoring Harbours, which would have had quite a large impact on the game, but as everyone played by the same rules, it was at least fair. Instead of scoring for each Ticket into each Harbour, they simply scored ten points for their first Harbour, twenty for the second and so on. With this scoring, Pink, with his eight completed Tickets was the victor with two hundred and five points, fifteen points ahead of Teal in second and Black in third. Both groups had really enjoyed the longer and bigger challenge of Rails & Sails. The mix of boat and train cards did cause more grumbling than usual about the wrong colours being available, especially when there was an imbalance in favour of trains over boats or vice versa, but that’s just Ticket to Ride.

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Meanwhile, the remaining group of four, Cobalt, Indigo, Navy and Blue, should really have been playing Azul (!), but after some dithering, Cobalt encouraged them to try The Artemis Project. This is a game where players are trying to develop colonies on Europa. The idea is that players roll dice and place them on action spaces to carry out actions. There are seven Regions and players take it in turns to place their dice in them. They are: Basecamp, Vents, Quarry, Gantry, Doorstep and Outfitter. At Basecamp, players go on Expedition to earn Expedition Badges and other Rewards. These are a bit like the Quests in the game Lancaster, and like the Squires in that game, dice can be augmented by Colonists.

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Also similarly, Expeditions are unsuccessful if a certain number of pips isn’t reached, which leaves players without their desired Rewards. In such cases, players don’t come away with nothing, instead they move their Token along the Relief Track and pick up a lesser reward. However, there is a fixed number of spaces available along the Relief Track for each person, so when they are gone, they are gone. The Vents and the Quarry provide players with Energy and Minerals respectively. The level of the action depends on the value of the dice, however, the dice are activated from the lowest to the highest. So, for example, placing a high value die like a six, will yield six Minerals, but if there are only ten available and two other players place fives, these will be activated first leaving nothing.

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The Gantry provides Buildings, which provide players with long term benefits during the game and points towards the end of the game. Players bid for these and if they win, they must pay the bid amount in Minerals (the value of dice placed), to build them. Both the Doorstep and the Academy deal with Colonists. The Doorstep provides players with Colonists, but like the Vents and the Quarry, players who bid high, go last and may not get what they want (or even anything) while the Academy allows players to upgrade their Colonists if required. Finally, the Outfitter allows players to gain Toolkits which grease the wheels a little by allowing players to alter the values of their dice. Once all the dice have been placed, these different Regions are activated in order.

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Thus, for example, Minerals collected can be used later in the same round to build Buildings, however, it is wise not to rely on that as another player can play a lower value die, easily scuppering plans. In this way, the game can be quite aggressive with intentional and unintentional conflict when players get in each other’s way. It is played over six rounds marked by Event cards associated with the Regions which are resolved before the relevant Region is activated. At the end of the game, it is a bit of a “point salad” in that players score for left-over Energy and Minerals, for Fully Staffed Buildings, for the number of Buildings, for each complete set of four different Colonists, for any Colonists not part of a set, for Expedition Badges and for having the most unused Toolkits.

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Indigo clearly found the number of Regions a little bit bewildering and was keen to learn by playing, but The Artemis Project is not really a game that lends itself to that. Indeed, in spite of understanding what each Region does, there is still an element of learning by playing in order to see how things fit together. As the only one who had played it before, Cobalt stole a march by targeting the Basecamp early and grabbing one of the Expeditions, and because nobody joined him, taking both Rewards. Navy opted for the sensible choice and went for Buildings in order to get an engine going. Blue and Indigo weren’t so quick off the mark and took a little longer to work out how to put a strategy together.

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As the game progressed, Indigo became the Queen of the Resources gathering piles and pales, making god use of the multiplier tokens. Blue made her way up the Relief Track after rolling some higher numbers and not using them well. This was a problem made worse by Cobalt trying to muscle in on one of her Expeditions leaving her to walk away with nothing, leaving him with nothing too. As the game came to a close, Navy had more buildings than anyone else and, as Blue and Cobalt both made a bit of a mess of things, he sailed gracefully into the lead finishing with sixty-eight points, while Blue just pipped Cobalt to second place.

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Learning Outcome: Who needs Planes when you have Ships and Trains?

6th August 2024

Blue and Pink were just finishing their supper when Pine arrived, soon followed by the rest of the posse. Despite missing Ivory, Teal and Cobalt, we still made it into double figures and everyone was particularly pleased to welcome back Green who has been missing in action for most of the year. Jade had declared an interest in giving the France map for Ticket to Ride a go. Ticket to Ride is always popular, so he quickly gathered Sapphire, Pine, Lime and Pink to make an enthusiastic group of five. He explained the rules differences, to comments of, “Lizen very carefully, I shall say zis only once!”

Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 6 – France & Old West

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Ticket to Ride is well known in the group and the basic rules needed no explanation (take cards from the market, or use them to claim routes while trying to complete Tickets). All the maps have their own little unique tweak to the rules. In the case of the France map, most of the tracks on the board start “uncoloured”. Whenever anyone draws cards, they take a colored tile that’s two to five train cars long, and place it onto an uncoloured track bed. After that, any player can claim that route in the usual way (by paying the appropriately coloured cards from their hand).

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Although anyone can claim a route “coloured” by another player, this time, in practice, most people didn’t build on tracks placed by others. This was partly because messing with someone else’s plans is usually at the expense of your own, but also because of the “mutually assured destruction” effect—that is to say, interfering with someone else is likely to encourage them to do the same in return. So on the one occasion when Pine DID “steal” a route that Sapphire had set up, everyone (especially Sapphire) was really shocked! Pine and Sapphire both picked up tickets in the very closing stages of the game and both got very lucky with the tickets matching the routes they had already built.

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The game was quite close and relatively high scoring, with all five finishing in a twenty point range, but that was before bonuses. With the France map, there are two bonuses: ten points for the longest continuous route and fifteen points for the player with the most completed tickets. With seven, Pine had the most tickets and leap-frogged Jade and Pink (who was playing with his pink “Cancer Awareness” train set), into third place. That left Lime and Sapphire, but with Sapphire taking the longest route bonus, he finished with a hundred and twenty-nine points, extending his lead over Lime to fifteen points to give him a comfortable victory. It had been a really enjoyable game, however, so much so that Jade and Sapphire added it the France map to their wish list.

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At the other end of the table, that left Blue, Plum, Green, Byzantium, Purple and Black. Nobody seemed keen to play the “Feature Game” (which was to be Montmartre), partly because that would have required splitting into two groups. Instead, inspired by the Olympics, the group opted for the Heptathlon variant of Reiner Knizia’s Decathlon. Decathlon is a print-and-play game consisting of a series of ten different, mostly push-your-luck, dice games loosely themed around the ten sports featuring in the Olympic event. The Heptathlon Variant is slightly shorter and is based on the women’s equivalent.

Reiner Knizia's Decathlon (Heptathlon Variant)

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Normally both variations are played with a maximum of four, but this time, the group played the “Championship Variant” where players play together and the winner of an event scores three points, the runner up gets two points and the person placing third gets one point. The rules say that tied players get the better rank, but the group used count-back to break ties in the first instance. Blue had brought an enormous pile of printouts and Las Vegas, from which the group got the dice, and started, slightly tentatively with the 100 m Hurdles. In this game, players have two sets of three dice and throw one until they are happy then throw the other with a total of seven tries. The catch is that each “one” that is re-rolled scores minus one.

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Green went first and achieved a total of twenty-three. By the time he had finished though, everyone had got bored watching someone else roll dice and had got on with their own. It was then that the group realised that, as the 100 m Hurdles was a race, rolling simultaneously was more in keeping with the theme. Blue crossed the line first (with twenty eight) followed by Byzantium and then Green. And it was on to the High Jump, a much simpler game where players rolled five dice together to achieve an ever increasing total (with three attempts at each height). Purple was the first out, failing to achieve eighteen, followed by Blue at the next height.

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The “springiest” was Plum, who sailed over twenty-two, but failed at twenty-four. She actually tied with Green, but beat him on count-back, with Byzantium taking third. Next was the Shot Put, where players roll eight dice, one at a time, with a one being a fault. Players can stick whenever the like, but because of a rules malfunction, the group only played with a maximum of six dice. The best score after three attempts was again Plum with Black in second and Blue in third. From here the games got a bit more complex, starting with the 200 m Sprint, which was played with eight dice rolled in a group of four dice, followed by two rolls of two. Players have a total of eight throws and sixes count negatively.

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Plum tripped over her own feet (or maybe Byzantium tied her laces together), but Green demonstrated a remarkable turn of speed to cross the line first, followed by Blue and then Purple. More than half-way through, it was a three-way tie between Blue, Green and Plum and others not far behind. So, the second day started with the Long Jump, a five dice game played in two parts. First there was the run-up, which dictates how many dice the player gets to use for the actual jump. For the run-up, players roll all five, freeze at least one and roll the rest, but if the total exceeds eight, it is a foot-fault. Then, for the jump itself, players use the frozen dice and roll all of them, again freezing at least one per throw.

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The best total after three attempted jumps was Byzantium’s twenty-seven. Green’s turn of speed obviously helped him as he came second while Blue and Plum tied for third, but Plum took the honours thanks to her second longest jump. Staying in the field, the next and penultimate event was the Javelin. This six dice game involved players freezing at least one die per turn, but this time only odd dice could be kept. Green’s first throw threatened to skewer one of the stewards, and things didn’t get much better from there. Black faulted on his first throw, but was consistent with his second and third taking third with twenty-two.

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First and second went to Purple and Byzantium (respectively), with both failing to improve on an excellent first attempt. So, going into the final event, the 800 m Race, most people were going for Gold, while everyone was in with a chance of a medal. This race was an eight dice game with players rolling two dice, then two dice and then the four remaining dice one at a time. Players have a total of eleven rolls (i.e. just five re-rolls) and the player with the highest total wins, but with the catch that sixes count negatively. It was a tight race, but Blue crossed the line first which put her in gold medal position, just until Green crossed the line in second and overtook her. Purple took third, but for her it was too little, too late.

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So, stood on top of the final podium with his gold medal round his neck, Blue with silver and Byzantium who took bronze just ahead of Plum and then Purple, stood either side. It had been a lot of fun though, and as people often say, it is the journey that counts. The games have a bit of a feel of Ganz Schön Clever/Doppelt So Clever/Clever Hoch Drei, but sort of stripped back to their raw essence. The individual events were quite simple and with a sheet each, players could keep their own score and recheck the rules as required. The questions, “Do I stick or keep going, what have other people done, and do I need to gamble to win?” in a large group add interest, and everyone enjoyed it so much that there was no difficulty getting people to take home the left-over sheets.

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From there, the group of six split into two groups of three and everyone moved from athletics themed games to Paris themed games. With the best will in the world, there wasn’t time to play Paris, so Blue promised to bring it again another time, and they opted instead to stick with “Roll and Write” type games in the form of Next Station: Paris. This is the latest variant on Next Station: London, a simple little route planning game with a really clever twist. The idea is that each station has one of five symbols; a card is turned over depicting one of these symbols and players must extend their route by connecting one end to a station with this symbol without crossing an existing track and following the grid shown on the map.

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At the end of each round, players score for the number of Districts visited multiplied by the number of Stations in the most visited District. At the end of the round players get bonus points for Interchange Stations (where two or more lines meet). However, like the Ticket to Ride maps, each each city comes with a slight variation to the rules as well as a different arrangement of stations. In London, players score points for crossing the Thames and for the total number of Visitor Attractions visited during the game. In Paris, these are replaced with scores for visiting Parisian Monuments at the end of each round and using the level crossings marked on the map.

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The clever part of the game is the fact it is played over four rounds, but each round is played with a different coloured pencil with players swapping pencils between rounds. This means that while everyone gets the same cards in the same order, they start in different places so are forced to do different things (unlike for example, NMBR 9, where players often play the first few rounds the same). The Paris version is supposed to be easier than the London variant, but as nobody had played it before, everyone struggled at the start. The trick though, is, for each line, players need to try to get the same number of Districts as Stations in the most visited District.

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This is similar to the mechanism in Orléans, where players receive victory points equal to their position on the Development Track multiplied by the number of Trading Stations they have on the map plus the number of Citizen Tiles they have collected. In both cases, players want these numbers to be as large as possible to give the biggest total. It is more important that both are significant, however, rather than having one large and one small. For example, a two times three gives more than one times four, thus it is important to concentrate on both parts equally and not neglect either one of them.

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Although nobody had played a “Next Station” game before, Blue explained the rules and had got her head round this element of the scoring, where it took the others a little time to get to grips with it. The game suited Plum’s puzzle brain and she liked trying to see where she might get to the level crossings and so on. By the third line, both she and Byzantium were beginning to get the hang of thing (or perhaps the cards just came out better) and then for the final round everyone found their space was more restricted. It was very close, but Blue’s consistency throughout just gave her the edge and victory by a mere five points.

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Meanwhile, Green, Black and Purple opted for a quick game of the Paris version of Ticket to Ride. This is the newest of the smaller, city versions of the game, and one that had not been played within the group hitherto. In general, these play exactly the same way as the bigger ones, but have fewer pieces and shorter tracks (so play a lot quicker) and have a little rules tweak to keep people interested. There had been a little bit of chat about it as people arrived and Blue, who had only read the rules was quite scathing about the new rule which felt very bolted on, and as there are now several of these little games, there were comments about the sound of barrels being scraped.

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The new rule is that when players claim a red, white, or blue track, they get a card, when they get all three colours they get four “Tricolore” bonus points—this didn’t feel terribly imaginative. After the game, however, Green commented that it was much better than it sounded. After he had completed his starting Tickets, he realised they only gave low points, so rather than taking more, he opted to go for Tricolore bonus points instead as the red, white and blue Routes are all short making them easy to get (one, two and one carriage long respectively). Simpler to achieve than extra Tickets they give an extra four points, though Green only got a total of two Tricolores.

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Black and Purple only took one Tricolore each as they were using it as a bonus rather than a target, so missed out on a few opportunities by laying trains on a colour they already had a card for. In the dying moments of the game, Purple took Tickets—of course she had no way of knowing that Green was about to trigger the final round, but even Black commented that it was a brave move. And Green ended the game on his very next turn, leaving poor Purple with a couple of uncompleted Tickets. That extra four point Tricolore bonus Green had taken made all the difference in the final scoring as that was the margin of his victory over Black.

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As Green went home (along with Jade, Sapphire, Byzantium and Plum), they passed the copy of Ticket to Ride: Paris along the table to Lime, Pine and Pink who also fancied giving it a go. They concurred that the Tricolore Bonus was much better in practice than it sounded. This game was also quite tight with six points between the first and last. Lime was particularly peeved however, as Pink edged him out by a single point. With that, and some residual chatter, it was time for home and everyone slowly drifted off.

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Learning Outcome: When you take away the sport, you still have France.

23rd July 2024

Blue and Pink were still eating when everyone else rolled in and seemed quite content to chat. It took Blue two attempts to get the first game rolling, with Jade leading Cobalt, Crimson and Plum to the other side of the room. Pink moved to join Pine who wanted to play his new acquisition with Black and Purple, which left Blue and Lime to lead Byzantium, Sapphire and Cyan in the “Feature Game“, the Alpine expansion for Forest Shuffle. This is was chosen to mark the announcement of the Spiel des Jahres Awards, as Forest Shuffle, featured on the recommended list and has been popular with the group.

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Blue made a bit of a meal of explaining the rules, but really they are very simple. On their turn, players either take two cards from the market and add them to their hand (with a hand limit of ten), or play a card from their hand into their tableau. There are three different types of cards. Tree cards are the central cards around which Critter cards are played. Then there is the first set of Critter cards which are divided into two, left and right with an animal on each half. Finally, there are Critter cards which are divided into two, the canopy at the top and the undergrowth at the bottom. The Critter cards are half-tucked under the Tree cards, so only one animal, flora or fauna is visible.

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The difficult part of the game is getting the cards to work together efficiently to give extra actions and, ultimately, points. The Alpine expansion doesn’t change the game significantly, just adding more variety to the cards, adding more opportunities for scoring. For example, it adds an extra Butterfly which give players more points if they have a complete the set. This time, Blue started with a hand full or Hares, making her initial strategy obvious. Sapphire was less fortunate, so Blue and Lime suggested that starting with Trees was always a good way to go as players can’t do anything without them. He also had some Butterflies, so that was where he went next.

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Lime built up a collection of Birds, and since he advertised his strategy to the group, everyone else was able to take cards he wanted. This is a key part of the game: some cards give points for the number of something you have, so having more of both multiplies the score. For example, Hares give one point for every Hare a player has. Thus, one Hare gives one point, but Blue’s seven Hares mean that first Hare scored seven points. More to the point, every other Hare also scored seven points giving her forty-nine points just for her Hares. Meanwhile, Byzantium was going Bats, and Cyan was experimenting with Deer.

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The game ends when the third Winter card is drawn from the deck, so after the second, everyone got very nervy as they tried to complete all their plans and play all the cards they wanted to. Each time someone drew a card from the deck, it was with bated breath. The final stage seemed to last forever, and although the third Winter card wasn’t the last card in the deck, it was close, and when it was drawn the game ended immediately. And then it was time for the scores: everyone assumed that Blue’s husk of Hares would give her victory, but it was actually quite much closer than they thought. Although Blue finished with a hundred and sixty-five, Byzantium was only twenty points behind.

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Byzantium was ready to leave, but for everyone else there was just time for something really quick. So as everyone else was still playing, the remaining four decided on a quick game of Coloretto. This is an old game, but one that was on the Spiel des Jahres Award “Recommended List” in 2003. Remarkably, Cyan and Sapphire were new to it, but it is a super easy and quick game to play, but with tactical decisions to make. It is also one that can essentially be taught as you go: either turn over the top Chameleon card and add it to one of the Trucks, or take one Truck. Each Truck can contain a maximum of three Chameleons and once everyone has taken a Truck, the round ends.

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At the end of the game, players score each group of coloured Chameleons, with the largest three groups giving positive points and any others scoring negatively. There are a small number of cards that just give straight points and balancing these with Chameleons is part of the challenge. The end is triggered when the end of game card is drawn and then the round is played to completion. This time, everyone kept their negative scores down, while Cyan went for the pure point cards, collecting fourteen points, more than half his score, by that route. The winner was Lime, however, who was imperious and won by some distance with a total of thirty-three.

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Meanwhile, on the next table Jade was teaching Cobalt, Crimson and Plum the Spiel des Jahres 2024 nominee, In the Footsteps of Darwin. The premise of this is that players are naturalists aboard the Beagle helping Charles Darwin finish his book On the Origin of Species, studying animals, carrying out cartographic surveys, publishing their findings, and developing theories. On their turn, players study an animal or take inspiration from a character by choosing one of the three tiles in the row or column marked by the Beagle, and placing it onto their naturalist’s Notebook. This may be an animal to study or a character from the Beagle’s previous journey and will give an immediate bonus or a scoring bonuses.

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After placing the tile, the Beagle is moved round the market, with the distance dependent on the tile chosen and a new tile is drawn to fill the empty space on the journey board. At the end of the game, the player who contributed the most to On the Origin of Species wins. At it’s heart, In the Footsteps of Darwin is a fairly simple set collection and “make the most of what’s available” game. Players obtain an additional scoring objective when they place a tile on top of a previous one, covering up any icons, so a key part of the game is the conflict between points being gained verses points being lost.

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There’s also quite a bit of luck invoiced, as a player may need one or two specific tiles that don’t come out, or that get taken by someone else before they have the opportunity to do so. The group found it was very quick to play, taking just forty minutes including teaching. Plum’s starting goal was points for tiles in the upper right quadrant, but in the absence of tiles that fitted that criteria she focused instead on collecting Charts and Compasses as these score points equal to the number of these multiplied together.

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One advantage of these is that once a Compass has been collected, the tile can be covered without loosing any points. Cobalt didn’t worry about that at all, covering loads of tiles to get more Theories banners which give points. Ultimately, everyone’s score was pretty similar at the end of the first game but Jade took victory as he was most effective with the Chart/Compass scoring. As it was so quick, the group decided to give it a second try—this the scores all improved. This time the victor was Crimson, who was again the most effective with the Charts/Compasses, but also scored well in other areas, as did Cobalt who came second again.

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From there, the group moved on to a game of Looot, which is too recent a release to have been acknowledged in the Spiel des Jahres awards. It has been popular amongst the members of the group that have played it so far, however, and may well get an award next year. In this game, players gain points by gathering resources and capturing buildings to try to develop their Fjord, fill their long ships and complete buildings. The winner is the player with the most riches and is crowned Jarl of the Vikings. The game is played over several rounds until each player has played all their Vikings, giving a maximum of thirteen turns, each with a simple structure.

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Players start by placing their Viking on a Resource tile on the central board adjacent to another Viking of any colour. They then take the associated Resource and place it on their personal board. If possible, they then use their Resources to capture a Building and place that on their board, take a Long Ship and also place it on their board, use a Shield, or complete a Construction Site and finally grab a Trophy. Looot is quite a light game, but with enough decision space to be interesting. Last time was a three-player game, but this time, with four, players get another map area, which the group arranged to give a wide play area.

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The board layout made it easier to get to more areas of the map relatively early in the game, but there was still plenty of competition for the Towers. Like last time, Plum decided not to worry about all the home tiles and focused on gold, which was good, but not enough on its own. Cobalt scored massively for Castles by getting plenty of them plus the equivalent Long Boats. Cobalt started on that strategy largely by accident, before he had got a real understanding of game-play and a full appreciation of how they increased the Castle scoring and matched the requirements he could fulfill.

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Crimson had a nice balance of increased score for Towers and Houses, while Jade built up a huge pile of Wood. Unlike last time, things didn’t just come together at the end for Plum, and nobody else could compete with Cobalt’s Castles and he took victory with one hundred and twenty-one, fourteen points ahead of Crimson in second. It had been a good game though, and as players become more experienced, they will be increasingly able to determine the best scoring opportunity from the start and how to optimise the mini game that is building their Fjord. With experienced players, this could be quite ruthless with players trying to block each other and prevent objectives.

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In the third group, meanwhile, Pine was introducing his new acquisition, the old game, Tonga Bonga, to Pink, Black and Purple. This is a sailing race game a bit like the 2008 Spiel des Jahres recommended Jamaica. In Tonga Bonga, players pilot their ship around the archipelago with the goal of visiting four of the five remote islands and returning to Tonga Bonga Bay. Each player has room for three sailors on their ship, each of which represented by dice and indicate how fat the ship will move. At the start of the round, players decide how much they are prepared to pay for the sailors who will serve as their captain and first mate that round (the Cabin Boy always works for nothing).

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Players then simultaneously roll their dice, and take it in turns assign their dice to the other players’ ships, in return for the money offered. In a mechanism vaguely reminiscent of that in the really rather vicious game, Vanuatu, if a player tries to place a higher value die where someone has already assigned a die, the lower value one is displaced and bumped to a lesser and usually less lucrative role. Thus, all things being equal, the ship offering the most money will get the highest value dice and the most moves, though of course, players can work together to disrupt this behaviour. One side of each die has a Seasick Sailor (effectively zero), so the maximum value dice are five.

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Once all the dice have been assigned, players move their ships racing to reach the islands, leaving one of their tokens there. Landing on an island, earns $25 from the bank, but the player has to pay $5 to each player who landed there ahead of them. Pine explained the rules and before long, everyone was sailing. Pink got a bit of a lead by using his winnings to buy more moves and visit more islands. He had been feeling that the game was maybe a bit “broken”, but as is usually the case when a game feels like that, it was all down to the “rules malfunction”, but it wasn’t until the final round that the rules were “clarified”.

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Instead of the winner being the player to cross the line first with any left over money used as a tie-breaker, once a player has visited four islands they return to Tonga Bonga Bay and trigger the game end—and whoever has the most money wins. Pink crossed the line and claimed the moral victory, as he was playing by the original rules. Everyone else was quite happy with the “updated rules” though, which left Pine the victor with Purple in second and Black just behind. Pink blamed “Evil Pine” for the mishap, but was eventually won round with a bottle of dubiously flavoured cider.

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Although the debate had been audible by the players at the neighbouring tables, ultimately it was all taken in good part and the game had been a lot of fun and showed its age less than Lifeboats that was played a few weeks back and was only five years older. From there though, the group moved on to a game of the 2021 Spiel des Jahres winner, Kingdomino. This is a clever little game where players are building a kingdom made out of double-headed, domino-like tiles. As in Dominoes, the ends of the tiles have to match, or at least it has to match with one tile tile already in the player’s kingdom.

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The really clever part of the game is the double market, where the tiles are taken in reverse order of value. The double market means that when a player takes the tile for the current round, they choose which tile they will get in the next round. Thus, taking the lowest value tile this round means they will have first choice next round. Players score for each contiguous area of Terrain—the number of points is equal to the number of squares multiplied by the number of Crowns featuring in it. This time, Pink concentrated on Wheat Fields and Sea, Pine focused on Sea and Meadow while Black concentrated on Woodland with a smattering of points from Marsh, Mountain and Wheat fields.

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In contrast, Purple prioritised her four contiguous areas forfeiting the “Harmony” and “Middle Kingdom” bonus points for using all the tiles to give a square kingdom with a central castle. Pine took victory with a massive seventy-three with Pink and Black tying for second with sixty points. This group wasn’t done by any means and swiftly moved on to a quick game of Sushi Go!. This is one of those games that takes a mechanism that is a relatively minor part of other games and distills it into its purest form in the game. Coloretto does the same for the central market mechanism used in the 2007 Spiel des Jahres winner, Zooloretto, and Sushi Go! does it for the card drafting mechanism in the 2011 Kennerspiel des Jahres winning game, 7 Wonders.

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In Sushi Go!, players start with a hand of cards, keep one and pass the rest on, repeating until all the cards have been distributed. As well as being a core mechanism in 7 Wonders, this “Card Drafting” is also often used to try to reduce the luck of the draw at the start of games like Terraforming Mars and Agricola (both also acknowledged by the Spiel des Jahres committee). In Sushi Go!, players are using the card drafting to collect sushi and, most importantly Pudding! The game is played over three rounds, with cards drafted to the left, then right and then left again, scoring points at the end of each round.

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This time, Pink and Black tied for the high-scoring first round, with Pine just behind. Pine made up for it on the second round by taking it convincingly, however, with everyone else scoring very badly. The third round was more even again, this time won by Black with Purple taking second. That resulted in a three-way tie between Black, Pink and Pine, but at the end of the game, the player with the most Pudding cards gains six points, with the one with the fewest losing six points. Unusually for Pink (as he has quite a sweet tooth), he had eschewed Puddings, while Black had the most giving him what ended up being a quite convincing victory.

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There was just time for a single round of Love Letter (a game from the 2014 Spiel des Jahres recommended list). This is a sixteen card game where players start with a card, draw a second and then play one. The idea is to try to be the last play in or the player with the highest value card when the deck runs out. The theme is all about getting as close as possible to the Princess card, which has the highest value. This led to a discussion about real princesses and how close people had been to them. It turns out that Purple has met a real one, Princess Nina who lives in a massive house in Cheltenham. During the game, Pink was the Princess, but was spotted and knocked out, leaving Black to take another win.

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Learning Outcome: The Spiel des Jahres committee may reward lighter games, but they are good games.

9th July 2024

When Blue and Pink arrived, Crimson and Cyan were already there on their first visit, finishing their supper and playing a game of Molehill Meadows. This is a new game by the designer of Zuuli, that they had picked up at the UK Games Expo (meeting the designer Chris Priscott and his delightful family in the process). In Molehill Meadows, players take on the personality of Mika the Mole, who has an affinity for shiny things, a hunger for juicy worms and an innate desire to dig A flip-and-write game, players dig tunnels using polyomino shapes to carefully expand their molehill home.

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Their game was somewhat interrupted as people arrived and were introduced and they were surrounded by the general chatter of arrival and Blue and Pink munching their pizzas. Crimson and Cyan carried on playing, flipping polyomino cards and then drawing the shapes on their map. Extending their tunnel to find Worms gave both players four “Worm Powers”, and fining treasure gave them points. Cyan collected twice as much treasure and picked up more than twice the number of bonus points than Crimson (for collecting all of the two sets of flowers on the Objective Cards) and thus was the eventual victor by something of a landslide (or should it have been a tunnel collapse?).

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Then, while everyone else generally gossiped and caught up with the events of the last week or so, Jade and Sapphire joined Crimson and Cyan for a quick couple of rounds of the trick-taking, climbing game, SCOUT. We’ve played this a few times on a Tuesday and everyone has always enjoyed it. The game is simple in that on their turn, the active player either plays a set of cards to beat and replace the set on the table (a run or a meld), or take one card from either end of the set on the table and add it to their hand. The round ends if a player plays the last card in their hand, or if it is a player’s turn and they played the current active set of cards on the table.

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At this point, player score for cards in their scoring pile (cards they have beaten during the round), for “chocolate bars” (rewards given when another player takes a card from their active set), and deducts a point for every card left in hand. The clever part of the game is that, like Bohnanza, cards cannot be rearranged in hand, this with the fact that cards have different values depending which way up they are make this little card game really clever. In the interests of time, the group only played two rounds, and although the scores can be very disparate, this time it was really tight with only five points between first and last and Sapphire taking the honours one point ahead of Crimson.

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By this time, Blue and Pink had just about finished eating and everyone else had mostly finished chatting, so with twelve, the group split into three groups of four, starting with Pine, Sapphire and Cyan who joined Jade in the “Feature Game“, Happy Home. This is another polyomino game, with similarities to games like New York Zoo and Bärenpark, but with a theme of home decorating rather than building an animal park. Like New York Zoo (or indeed Jokkmokk), the game has a central market, in this case representing a Store, which players move their Meeple round.

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On their turn, the active player moves their Meeple (or should that be Muman?) to an available space, takes the card and matching tile and then adds it to their home. When all the cards are used up, players instead place a “Welcome Mat” on their doorstep to show they are ready to welcome visitors. When everyone has finished , the game is over and players score their Home for Furniture, Colours, Pot Plants, their Welcome Mat and Design Objectives, losing points for any scratches still visible and not covered up by Furniture.

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There was a wee bit of misunderstanding on how the scoring worked even though Jade had done his best to explain it at the beginning. Each Room scores one, three or six points if it has one, two or all three different core pieces of Furniture in it, and each Pot Plant is worth a point plus a bonus point for each empty space orthogonal to it. That wasn’t where the problem was however, that was with the Colour scoring. Essentially players need to have the same Colour across at three different rooms to get two points and across four rooms to get five points, but somehow, this caused more confusion than it should have done.

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The group also made life more difficult for themselves by shuffling the cards and removing twenty-four cards as per the rules for the four-player game, but somehow the bulk of those removed seemed to be Furniture for just one of the rooms, the Bathroom. It was a good learning game as the value of Rugs, for example, became evident later on—players were a bit confused as they don’t score in their own right, but they add Colour to a Room and thus can score at the end of the game.

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This time the Design Objective was “Bigger is Better”, so players lost a point for each empty floor space in their Room with the most empty spaces. The lack of Bathroom fittings, meant Pine didn’t have a loo in his house and had to resort to “wafflestomping“, but he did have what looked like two pink ironing boards furnishing his Lounge. Next door, Sapphire filled his Living Room with a pink sofa and an enormous matching pink widescreen TV (that was the same size as the sofa!). In the end, the victor was a bit of a runaway winner.

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In spite of his lack of toilet facilities, Pine finished with twenty-four points, some seven ahead of Sapphire in second, with Jade taking the last place on the podium. Before the game, Pine had said he wasn’t sure about it from the description, but in the event he really enjoyed it, as indeed did everyone else. Meanwhile, there were two other games underway. The first of these was Keyflower—a very popular game with certain members of the group, but one that hasn’t had an outing for a long time, in fact the last time the group played it was online in 2020, and the much-missed Burgundy was involved.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

This time, the four players were Blue, Pink, Black and Ivory, all of whom had played Keyflower before (albeit a while ago). The game is fairly simple in terms of concepts, but like many good games, challenging to play well. Each round, players take it in turns to bid on a tile, or activate a tile. The clever part of the game is that both bidding and activating is done with red, blue, yellow or occasionally green Keyples (Meeple-shaped workers). In each of the four rounds (or Seasons), a set number of tiles are put out for players to bid on. Players take it in turns to bid or activate and when everyone passes in succession, any tiles won are added to the winner’s village, any losing bids and any Keyples used for activating return to their owner.

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At the end of each round, a boatload of new Keyples arrive in each village (players can bid to get the one of their choice), before the tiles for the next Season are set out. In general, tiles are drawn at random, and in the first season, Spring, mostly provide Resources with Summer and Autumn tiles providing special powers and Autumn and Winter tiles providing scoring opportunities. The Winter tiles are different to those for the other Seasons in that instead of being drawn at random at the start of the Season, they are dealt our to each player at the start of the game. Then, at the start of Winter, players choose from their pile which ones they want to make available—in this way, the Winter tiles act as sort of objective tiles.

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The Keyflower box also contained The Farmers expansion and the question arose whether to include it or not. Blue, Pink and Ivory were on the fence until Black said he’d never played with the Farmers, so of course that was a problem they had to urgently fix. In the base game, the different tiles are connected by roads which are used for transporting goods to places where they can be used to upgrade tiles or score points. In The Farmers expansion, these roads now define fields where animals can be left to graze and with each occupied field scoring points at the end of the game.

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Additionally, The Farmers expansion introduces wheat as a new resource, which can be used to add distance/quantity to the movement action, enabling players to move more animals and resources further. There are several ways to set up the game with The Farmers expansion, but this time the group used The Farmers Variant, where all the tiles from the expansion are used and the number made up with tiles from the base game. After setting up and explaining the additional rules to Black, Ivory went first, taking the waving purple start-player Keyple, and began the bidding.

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In Spring, Blue failed to get anything useful at the start of the game (or so she thought) taking just the Key Mine tile which gives Coal and didn’t match any of her Winter tiles. Pink started off taking the Sheep Fold which gave him a source of sheep and the Paddock which gave him more Movement and upgrade ability together with some Wheat. Then, he took the Workshop which gave him one resource of his choice from Wood, Coal or Stone, upgradeable to three resources, one of each, which matched his Winter tile, the Mercer’s Guild. Ivory won the Quarryman, which gave him some very useful gold, and in Summer took the Shepherd’s Hut which gave him Wheat and Sheep and then embarked on a concerted breeding and movement programme.

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Black picked up a few tiles early in the game, which ultimately led to a lightly sprawling Village by the end of the game. These included the Wheatfield in Spring and the Tavern, the Smelter and Boat 3a in the Summer. By this time, Pink had decided that the sheep weren’t doing it for him so moved on to pigs, with the Pigsty. Blue, having missed out on the Tavern which converts one Keyple into two, instead took the only tile that generated green Keyples, the Store which went well with one of her Winter tiles, the Key Market, but gave the added power of preventing other players from following if she was the first to Bid with Green, as they were highly unlikely to have any.

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In Autumn, Blue discovered the value of the Key Mine tile she had picked up in the first round, when the Blacksmith tile appeared which gave points for each Coal on the tile at the end of the game. She added the Ranch to this which gave Cows and Wheat, and then began mining Coal in earnest and hoarding large numbers of sheaves for a super-movement move later in the game to get everything where it was needed as efficiently as possible. Black got the Goldsmith which went well with his Smelter which gave him the Gold he needed to upgrade it and get ten points, while Ivory and Pink continued their procreation programmes.

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As the game progressed there were several visits from the other gamers in the room, many of whom, much to the people who were playing it’s surprise, had not played Keyflower. It is, of course, Blue’s favourite game and was a favourite of Burgundy’s, as well as being generally very popular with almost all of the regulars pre-2020. So as the game continued into Winter, it was clear it would have to get another outing or two reasonably soon to rectify the situation. There is also The Merchants expansion which has not been played with the group, so that might be the “Feature Game” in the coming months.

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Only eight out of a possible sixteen Winter tiles were introduced by the players and the Scribes, which Ivory commented usually ensured victory was not there (it turned out nobody had started with it). Black took the Granary which gave him points for his Wheat and Pink got his Mercer’s Guild that he’d been working towards. Ivory won the Cathedral giving him a straight twelve points; the Weaver giving two extra points per sheep field, and the Bakery giving four points for each set of a Resource, a Skills tile and a Wheat Sheaf. Blue had lots of options, so concentrated on building her piles of resources before bidding for her end of game scoring.

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This required a lot of nerve as Ivory had there wherewithal to take some of the tiles she obviously wanted. Ivory hummed and hawed over it and as Black and Pink passed, twice he had the chance to begin a war, but decided not to as “that’s not very nice” and it can also backfire spectacularly. Instead he generated the odd Gold for a point (“in case it was close”) and waited and watched. In the end he passed and then Blue passed and that was that bar the counting. And as it turned out, it was close, very close, but Blue just took victory, by a mere three points, with a total of ninety-five.

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The jury is out as to whether it was Ivory’s kindness that cost him the game because Blue did, of course, have contingency plans if someone had tried to take some of the tiles she wanted, and she could have cost him a lot of points. However, by the end, Blue had no Keyples left and Ivory had a couple that he could have used, so depending on how things had panned out, he might have just nicked it or still lost. Instead, his kindness and generous good nature won him a lot more respect from his fellow gamers, especially given that everyone knew how fond Blue is of Keyflower successfully destroying her plans might have made her just a little bit sad.

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Finally, the third table began their evening with Azul: Summer Pavillion, the third in the series based on the essentially abstract game of tile collecting, Azul. Crimson kindly obliged in offering to lead the game with Lime, Teal and Purple, none of whom had played this variant before. This is more similar to the original than the second in the series (Stained Glass of Sintra), but is built on lozenge-shaped pieces that make up hexagons. Like the original, players take tiles from a central market and add them to their player-boards claiming points as they do so. In contrast to the original, players store the tiles and add them all to their board at the end of the round (taking it in turns to do so).

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After some initial confusion caused by the additional bag and player boards from the Objective Tiles and Glazed Pavillion expansions, the game got underway. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a rules malfunction: initially it was thought that every time a tile was placed it scored one point for itself, two for one next to it and three for a third one in sequence (totalling six). The group soon realised this wasn’t right though. So they then thought you scored at the end of the round after playing all the tokens, however, they soon realised there was no way anyone could remember when a new tile that round had been placed.

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At this point, they then read the rules and from that decided players score one point for the tile and one for each tile it was adjacent to, thus scoring from one to three points per tile as they were placed and this is how they continued to play. Cyan immediately identified they had come a cropper when he looked at the low end-game scores. He explained that they should have scored one point for the tile placed and one point for each tile connected to that group, so potentially up to six points could be scored for some tiles!

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Although it wasn’t played by “the rules as written”, everyone had the same disadvantage, and the group resolved to give it another go again soon, but with the right rules next time. As it was, it was a very close game with Crimson, beating Lime by a single point and Teal finishing some half a dozen points behind. It is a very pretty game, and despite the issues, players had enjoyed making patterns and pushing the tactile bright tiles around, which was very therapeutic after a hard day at work.

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Keyflower was ongoing (and would be for the rest of the evening), but Happy Home had finished so there was a quick game of musical chairs and Purple began by leading Lime, Cyan and Pine in a game of the group’s currently popular filler, Rome in a Day. This is a little tile laying game built round the “I divide, you choose” mechanism. The idea is that players draw five land tiles at random and place two buildings on tiles one and two. They then divide the five tiles into two groups—a bigger and a smaller one (in any ratio), and add a Crystal Gem to the smaller land set before offering the choice to their neighbour.

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During the four rounds that the game is played over this neighbour alternates, right, left, right, left. So, each round, players choose a set from their neighbour and these and the tiles they were left with are added to their domain. At the end of the game, any building that stands on or adjacent to land of its own colour will score for each tile in the group and then players score for the diamonds they have collected—the player with the most points is the winner. The game has had a couple of outings recently after Black and Purple picked it up at UK Games Expo a few weeks back. Pine, Lime and Cyan had not been part of those games, so Purple explained the rules.

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The game was a bit of a struggle, probably not helped by the fact that on both the previous occasions the rules have not been strictly adhered to. This is partly because the rules are not the best written and partly because when the game was explained to Black and Purple at UK Games Expo they were different to those published online. Although it wasn’t entirely clear to everyone during the game, it was actually very close. In fact, Lime and Cyan finished tied for first place with forty-four points each despite quite different tactics with Cyan prioritising collecting Gems and Lime making hay in his Wheat fields and wine in his Vineyards.

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While the group were fighting their way through Rome in a Day and Keyflower was coming to an end, Jade led Sapphire and Crimson in the 2024 Spiel des Jahres recommended game, Harmonies. This was described by Jade as a sort of cross between Splendor and Cascadia, with an Azul-type market. On their turn, the active player takes three wooden Tokens from one of the spaces on the central player board and places them on their player board. These Tokens represent Mountains, Trees, Buildings, Water and Fields. Some tokens can stack, others cannot: the reasons why are thematic (e.g. tall Mountains and Forests, no tall Rivers etc.), but otherwise Tokens can be placed on any empty space.

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Players may then take an Animal card from the central display—they can have a maximum of four at any one time and each has a number of Animal cubes on them. Each time the pattern on an Animal card is fulfilled, one of these Animal cubes is removed and placed on the token indicated on the card. At the end of the game, players score for the highest achieved Animal on each card and for each Mountain, Tree, Building, Field and River (or Island, depending on which side of the board players are using). Mountains are made of stacks of up to three Rock Tokens, while Trees are a green Leaf Token on zero, one or two Wood Tokens.

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Taller Mountains and Trees give more points (one, three or seven points), while Buildings (made of two Tokens, at least one Brick and a Wood, Rock or another Brick), and Fields (two adjacent Wheat Tokens) score five points each. Finally, depending which side of the board is used, players score points for the length of their River, or five points for each Island they make. This time, the group played with “Side A” which scores for Rivers. It was a learning game for Crimson, but was quite close quite between Jade and Sapphire, but Sapphire’s one hundred and eight gave him victory in what is an interesting point-salad tile-placement game that deserves another outing soon.

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Learning Outcome: You don’t need a toilet to have a Happy Home.

25th June 2024

To mark the upcoming General Election, the “Feature Game” was to be Lifeboats, an older game which features lots of voting (as well as boating…). Blue and Pink were still eating as the others arrived, so those that wanted to join them staked their claim and waited and the others took themselves off to play something else, but it wasn’t long before the voting and boating was underway. Lifeboats is a fairly simple, if savage game, where players are trying to get their sailors from the sinking wreck of the Santa Timea to shore. Unfortunately, the lifeboats are old and leaky and as the water comes in and the boats begin to sink, players vote to decide which boats to move and who to throw overboard.

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There are three phases to each round in Lifeboats: firstly one boat develops a leak, then one boat moves forwards, and then finally, one seaman in each boat jumps overboard and then climbs back into a different boat. In the first phase, players vote to decide which craft develops a leak and a blue wooden disk is placed in an empty spot in that boat—if there isn’t an empty space, the occupants vote to decide who is going over the side. Once that has been resolved, players vote again, this time to decide which boat is going to move; it’s only three spaces to reach land, but that can seem an awfully long way.

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In the final phase of the round, beginning with the start player, players take it in turns to take one of their seamen from a boat into the water and then in reverse order the swimmer climbs into a different boat. And it must be a different boat—if there isn’t a different boat with space, the unfortunate sailor drowns in the attempt. All that is quite straight forward, but there are a some little tweaks that add interest to the game. Firstly, each player has two Officers and a number of Sailors: deciding who is going to be thrown overboard, players have one vote per Sailor in the boat and two per Officer. Seamen that make it to land score points, but Officers score more, all this also makes them a target though.

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Even though the Santa Timea is headed for Davey Jones’ Locker, the Captain is still in command. So, during any vote, players may invoke his name to get their way by playing a Captain’s Hat card. Players only have three of these though, and they are single use so must be used with care. Worse, if more than one player plays a Captain’s Hat, they cancel out, and a bit like ties in Las Vegas all the tied players lose out, so they also have to be well timed to be effective. The winner is the player to score the most points by getting their seamen back to land before the last boat sinks (and the different islands give different numbers of points for Sailors and Officers).

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A key part of the game is the negotiation before votes, so the group played with “The Stick Variant” whereby the Start Player controls how long players have for debate. The other advantage of being the Start Player is they have the casting vote in the event of a tie. This time, Ivory went first and began with the Start Token. As he was playing white, to maintain the election theme, he was representing Independent candidates. Blue played with orange who were therefore the Liberal Democrats; Lime had purple UKIP pieces; Pine directed the Greens, Black Labour and Pink the SNP.

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Nobody was quite sure what to do at the start, but Ivory’s Independent boat was the first to spring a leak. Although players have no control over boats of their colour, they are a tie-break at the end of the game where players finish with equal points. In the second round, Black opined that there were too many boats and rather than share the leaks around, the group should concentrate on sinking one boat. Everyone else obligingly agreed and the vote was carried, so before long the Independent boat was heading to the bottom of the deep-blue sea. In contrast, the Liberal Democrat boat danced over the waves making it to shore first, carrying two Green Sailors, and one Sailor each for UKIP and the Independents, all led by one SNP and one Independent Officer.

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From there, things got more savage as the spaces in the boats became more scarce and everyone realised that the SNP (Pink) was on course for a landslide. Ivory “spoiled his ballot” when he chose to throw his own Sailor overboard, and Lime was sufficiently confused by proceedings that he wound up voting to move a candidate forward when it had already withdrawn (by sinking). The last boat to go down was Labour, but by that point, it was already clear that the Greens (in the guise of Pine) had the majority with a vote share of thirty-two, six more than the SNP (Pink) in second and twelve more than the third party, the Liberal Democrats (Blue).

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It had been a lot of fun, if quite nasty, and as such, is a game with an older feel to it, as befits a game that is thirty years old. It wasn’t the only thing that was showing it’s age, as the Blackadder quote got several outings too (“Lord Nelson has a vote…” “He has a BOAT, Baldrick…”). There had also been an large element of gerrymandering leading to Pine’s victory which, as he said, would not have happened if Lilac had been there as she would have really enjoyed drowning all his seamen. As it was, he was the only player to get all his men to safety, so deserved his term in Parliament.

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The other games were still underway, so the group played a couple of quick rounds of the old favourite, No Thanks!. This is a super-quick filler, where players choose to take the face-up card, or pay a chip to pass the problem on to the next player. At the end of the game, players score for the lowest card in each run, minus the number of chips they have left—the player with the lowest total is the winner. In the first game, Black top-scored with forty-eight and the winner was Lime with nine, pipping Blue by one. In the second game, Pine finished with the highest total (though it wasn’t a patch on Black’s). Blue thought she had this one when her total came to just three, but much to her chagrin, Lime finished with two, again beating her by a solitary point.

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Ivory took his leave, and the remaining five managed one more game, this time of The Game. This cooperative effort used to be a popular filler in the group, though it is a few years since it last got an outing. The team have a deck of cards numbered from two to ninety-nine (in our case, from a copy of The Game: Extreme, but ignoring the special symbols), and play each card on one of four piles, two ascending and two descending. There are just three rules: the active player can play as many cards as they like, 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”.

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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. The game ends when, either all the cards have been played onto the four piles, or a player cannot play a card. As is often the way, things started to go wrong from the start and pretty much kept going wrong. The game finally cam to an end when, shortly after depleting the draw deck several people said there wasn’t anything they could play, and after the last possible card had been played the group had seventeen cards left.

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Meanwhile, Jade, Plum and Byzantium had started out playing one of Jade’s acquisitions from the recent UK Games Expo. Middle Ages (a reimplementation of Majesty: For the Realm) is a quick little game where players are the head of a fiefdom. The idea is that players use their Lord-eeple (or perhaps that should be lord-muman) to take tiles, placing them on their player board and gain its rewards, which change depending on the type of the piece. The game is based around a market, similar to that in Kingdomino, where tiles are arranged in ascending order with players taking tiles in that order and placing their Lord-eeple on their chosen tile from the next row. Thus, the player has to choose between an early choice in the next round and a low value tile, or a high value tile, with less or no choice.

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Players then carry out the tile’s special effect and take the associated income. The payout increases payout the more tiles of the same type a player has. Every four rounds, there is an event and the game ends after the sixteenth round when players lose ten points for each type of tile they don’t have in their city and the person with the most points is the winner. This time, Byzantium went all in for Windmills (players with fewer Windmill tiles had to give him two Coins) while Jade built some Barracks. The Barracks enabled Jade to attack everyone with fewer Rampart tiles than he had Barracks tiles forcing them to give him money. Plum opted for a more balanced approach that allowed her to improve her income stream significantly due to the Churches and Palace buildings she played.

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Plum’s Church gave her a coin bonus which she placed on a Village, which enabled her to repair a broken building. There was some discussion about whether that was voluntary or not, but it didn’t seem to be written like it was a choice. Although not planning for it, Plum did well out of the third Event, “Restoration”, giving her coins for having three broken buildings. Jade, on the other hand, had interpreted the rule as compulsory and had therefore mended his broken building a turn earlier so wasn’t able to benefit from the Event. It was close between Jade and Byzantium with Jade just edging it. Someway ahead, however, was Plum, who finished with one hundred and thirty-one points.

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Middle Ages is a quick little game, and the trio then moved on to another UK Games Expo game, the slightly meatier Looot. This is a game where players gather resources and capture buildings to develop their fjord, fill their longships and complete buildings to rack up victory points. The player with the most riches is crowned Jarl of the Vikings. Like Middle Ages, this was new to both Plum and Byzantium, so after teaching the group got down to the serious pillaging. The game is played over several rounds until each player has played all their Vikings, giving a maximum of thirteen turns, each with a simple structure.

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First, a player places their Viking on a Resource tile on the central board adjacent to another Viking of any colour and take the Resource and place it on their personal board. If possible, they then capture a Building and place that on their board, take a Long Ship and also place it on their board, use a Shield, complete a Construction Site and finally grab a Trophy. Plum felt she wasn’t going to be able to complete all three of her initial goal hexes, but hedged her bets and left space, just in case. She used the “occupy the same space as another” option fairly early on to make sure she connected at least two Towers—Towers were the more difficult requirements for the two easier home hexes.

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Byzantium’s higher scoring home hex needed two Castles. He failed to complete one of his hexes, but did achieve the most difficult one giving him only slightly fewer points than the other two for this aspect. Jade thought the others were likely to take the spots he was aiming for a few times, but he needn’t have worried as a closer look at the others’ boards would no doubt have told him. Byzantium got quite a good engine going early game with optimal placements of his first four to five Long Ships, which give bonuses for Resources and Buildings on the player’s map. In order to complete a Long Ship it needs to be adjacent to three specific resources, however.

– Image by boardGOATS

Each Long Ship taken and left incomplete leads to a five point penalty, so it is important not to over commit, but equally players don’t want to leave prime location Long Ships for their opponents either. Byzantium’s Long Ships made great use of the Looot he had pillaged, but for some reason he lost his way a little and ended up with a lot of low scoring Looot at the end of the game. It felt really close, but Jade thought he would just sneak it as he had increased his Castle scoring to seven points per Castle and had he three of them. In the end though, Plum ended up winning by quite a significant margin, her hundred and eleven were eight points more than Jades total for second place.

– Image by boardGOATS

It was an evening for playing games from Expo, as Teal led Purple and Sapphire in a game of Photosynthesis. This game is a few years old now, but Teal had been really delighted to find a copy for a very good price in the “Bring and Buy”. In Photosynthesis, players collect light points based on the trees they have on the board and the direction of the sun gaining light points for any of their trees that aren’t in the shadow of another tree. By collecting light, players can grow and further their species’ dominance over the forest. Each round, the sun moves creating the direction of light for the round. Players begin by placing two small trees on the board.

– Image by boardGOATS

Small trees collect one light point and cast a shadow over one space. Players can then spend light points to grow a tree, plant a new seed, and eventually harvest a tree once it has reached full size. As well as a unique spacial puzzle, the game is quite beautiful with mechanics that fit the theme giving simple but meaningful choices. Like a lot of puzzle-games, Photosynthesis can be quite hard to get one’s head round on the first play. This time the game was really quite tight between Teal and and Sapphire, but Sapphire just had the edge, beating Teal by one point with final total of fifty-four.

– Image by boardGOATS

Lifeboats and Looot were still going, so Purple pulled out another Expo special, that first got a run-out last time, a game called Rome in a Day. This is a cute little “I divide, you choose” game, where players draw five land tiles at random and place two buildings on tiles one and two. They then divide the five tiles into two groups—a bigger and a smaller one (in any ratio) and add a crystal to the smaller land set before offering the choice to their neighbour. During the four rounds the game is played over this neighbour alternates, right, left, right, left. So, each round, players choose a set from their neighbour and these and the tiles they were left with are added to their domain.

– Image by boardGOATS

At the end of the game, any building that stands on or adjacent to land of its own colour will score for each tile in the group and then players score for the diamonds they have collected—the player with the most points is the winner. It was a really close game, in fact, it was a tie for second place between Purple and Teal who both scored twenty-seven points. Sapphire did rather better, however, finishing with thirty-five points having concentrated on yellow Wheat Fields and green Olive Groves to the complete exclusion of blue-purple Vineyards and red Towns.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning outcome: Politics can be savage, but it is important everyone votes.