Category Archives: Games Night

6th May 2014

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

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

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

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

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

22nd April 2014

This was our first meeting back at the Jockey after the fire, so some of us met up before the start to try their new menu. The first to arrive we’re early, so played a quick game of Hive. This is a game we’ve messed about with before, but not actually played within the group (though the players this evening were quite experienced). The game is often compared to Chess because the pieces are Black and White and different pieces have different characteristics in the way they move. Although much of the thinking is similar, the theme is insects and there is no board, so it is perfect for transporting and playing in the pub. The first game was won by Black, so a rematch was called for. This time the Ladybug expansion was added, but the result was the same – a second win for Black.

By this time, more people had arrived so orders were placed and food arrived and duly consumed to everyone’s satisfaction. We were still expecting more people, so after food we had a quick game of Marrakech. This is a strange little game about carpets, played on a board made of a grid with coloured strips of fabric representing carpet. Basically, on their turn, players can choose to rotate the wooden character called Assam by 90 degrees, before the roll the die and move Assam the appropriate number of squares. Players then lay a piece of their coloured fabric covering two squares, one of which must be adjacent to Assam. When Assam moves, if he lands on a square covered with carpet, then the active player pays the owner of the carpet; the amount paid is dependent on the contiguous area covered by that colour. The nature of the game means it swings to and fro, however, it felt quite tight, so much so that when two players finished with the same score, it seemed they must share victory, until Blue reported her score that is…

Next up was Mammut. This is a funny sharing game that (amongst other things) features the incongruity that is the sabre-tooth duck. The idea is that on their turn players can either take any number of prey tiles from the central pool or take all the tiles from one other player, retuning at least one to the centre. Thus, you have to be careful what you take because if another player thinks you have been greedy or you have tiles they want, they may get stolen! The round ends when everyone has tiles and there are no tiles left in pool, and players score points depending on who has the most or least of the different types prey. Yellow and Blue made a good early showing, but Blue soon struggled and Red, Green and Purple all began to compete strongly. Coming into the final round Yellow was clearly in a good position with Green and Blue languishing at the back. With the final round of scoring, Blue surged forwards only to be overtaken by Purple who picked up a lot of points. Despite her valiant efforts though, Yellow just pipped her to the win by just one point.

The last game of the night was our “Feature Game” which was Mascarade. This is a relatively short game of bluffing that also challenges the memory. Each player is initially dealt a character card face up. Players study the cards and try to remember who has which card before they are all turned face down and play begins. Players take it in turns to either swap cards with another player, look at their own card, or declare their character in a bid to perform the associated action. Since swaps are done in secret under the table, all certainty quickly goes, so when a player declares their character it is not always obvious whether they are right. If a player is unchallenged, they perform the associated action without revealing their card. If, on the other hand, another player thinks the declaration is incorrect, they may claim they are that character instead, in which case, the cards belonging to all claimants are revealed and anyone who is wrong pays a fine.

This was a new game to all of us, but once we got going it was a lot of fun with a lot of confusion as cards were swapped (or not). At one point, Green bought Yellow’s dummied swap for Blue’s “Cheat” card and decided he also fancied the “Cheat” so traded with Yellow. Blue then traded with Purple, so when Green declared he was the Cheat, Purple challenged – the confusion on Green’s face was a picture! In the confusion, Blue capitalised and collected the last three coins she needed to win.

Mascarade

Learning Outcome: Don’t try to cheat a Cheat!

25th March 2014

While we waited for people to arrive we started out with a quick duelling card game set in feudal Japan, called Tessen. The tale goes like this:

“Many years ago, in feudal Japan, disagreements and feuds were common among the clans. Fantastic battles were fought for control of resources, land, and supremacy. Tiring of all the bloodshed, the Shogun declared a plan to minimize the violence… All disputes would be decided by a Tessen challenge – a competitive hunt for eight types of elusive mystical animals that roamed the land. Whichever clan’s samurai were able to capture and bring back the most animals would be declared the victor, and the dispute would be ruled in that clan’s favour. The samurai warriors from each clan would certainly attempt to sabotage the opposition’s efforts and capture their animals. The only weapon the Shogun would allow was the Tessen, a war fan used for both attack and defence. While the Tessen could still be deadly, there would be far less bloodshed than if the samurai were allowed to use swords.”

So, players each have their own deck containing animal and samurai cards. Players can draw cards, place them in one of five “cages” in their play area, or attack with a samurai card, but although actions are performed simultaneously, they must be discrete actions. If attacked, the victim must stop immediately to either concede defeat so that the attacker can move the animals to one of their cages, or repel the attack countering with a samurai card of their own. Each cage can only contain one type of animal and when it has three or more, the animals can be “banked” and moved into storage freeing up the cage for more animals. The round ends when one player runs out of cards, so they are frenetic affairs which take only a couple of minutes each. The first round was a bit of a landslide in favour of the Atika Clan, but the Nambu improved significantly on the second round to level the game. The third round was close with the Nambu starting very aggressively, but the Atika caught up and ran out of cards first preventing the Nambu from banking her final four deer and winning the game. By this time the others had arrived, so exhausted, we left it as a best of three…

Next we played our “Feature Game” which was Sushi Draft!. This game is similar to 7 Wonders in that it is based on “card drafting”, however, the aim is far less complex. The story goes that the children are having a competition to see who can eat the most of one type of sushi at a Japanese family feast. Mother, however, wants the children to eat a balanced diet, and will give pudding to the one who eats the most varied meal. Therefore, the aim of the game is to try to do both. Players start with a hand of six cards and then simultaneously play one before passing all but one of the remaining cards on to the next player. Play continues until everyone has played five cards at which point the scores are evaluated and players with the most of each type get a corresponding token and the player with the most different types gets a token. If there is a draw, then the next highest player gets the token. About half-way through we realised that some sushi were more valuable than others which changed the game somewhat, but the damage was already done and the winner had already collected the highest value tokens.

After some considerable debate, next we decided to play Settlers of Catan. Nearly twenty years old, this is often credited with being one of the first modern boardgames. As such, it has largely been usurped by more recent and fashionable games. However, although we were all quite familiar with it, it was a while since most of us had played it, so we decided to blow off the dust. The game is played on a modular board made up of hexagonal tiles corresponding to resources (wood, clay/brick, sheep, wheat/grain and ore), each of which gets a number. Turns come in two parts. First the player rolls two dice, adds the numbers together and anyone with a settlement on the edge of the corresponding hexagon, gets that resource. However, if a seven is rolled, then the active player moves the robber onto one hexagon (preventing allocation resources from that hex) and then takes a card from an owner of one of the settlements surrounding it.

The second part of a turn is trading and building, where the active player can trade resources with other players at any rate they can negotiate, or with the Bank at a predefined rate. Settlements (which score points at the end of the game) must be connected to at least one of the players other settlements by roads, and players start by placing two settlements on the board (in the player order 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 3, 2 , 1). Unquestionably the game has its faults, one of them being that the starting positions are really very critical. While this is unquestionably true, it is not always obvious which positions are the best, and with the random nature of dice, sometimes double six will come up far more frequently than the statistically more likely combined totals of six or eight.

Since we started out with a random tile lay out we had a very, very distorted map with a lowland region containing all the sheep pasture and wheat fields in big regions with a more mountainous area of with forests and hills. Even worse, all the clay (used to make bricks) was located on the low probability numbers (two, eleven and twelve), meaning that in theory, these would be difficult to come by. Initial settlements were predominantly round the sixes and eights with players trying to maximise the variety of resources they had access to. Blue settled in the highland area while Green, Orange and White tried to get a bit of everything, especially the rare clay.

It seemed Green had the best placement as he was the first to build a third settlement and followed it quickly with a fourth, meanwhile Blue was getting plenty of ore (which is useless at the start) but struggling to obtain bricks and ended up building a lot of road just to get something built, joined her two settlements and picked up the Longest Road in the process. Two and eleven seemed to be rolled with peculiar regularity and Green was the main beneficiary as he had multiple settlements that qualified, while Orange and White also picked up the occasional hod-full. Blue’s long road partitioned off an one corner of the board blocking both Orange and White in the process and when Green beat them to a couple of settlements, that left both Orange and White very tight for space to build and it was a race to the finish.

Orange judiciously used a monopoly card to steal sheep from everyone and then slaughtered the whole flock to build a city and a lot of road. Meanwhile White used her impressive skills breading and exporting sheep to great effect to extend in the only direction available to her. Blue’s productive ore and wood supplies in the mountains, together with the “ore harbour” and “wood harbour” finally started to pay dividends making up for her complete lack of any source of wheat or brick. Green meanwhile, used his vast grain empire to build cities and collect development cards in an effort to build the Largest Army. With Blue one point from winning with the cards she needed to build one last city in hand, Green needed just one more Soldier to get the Largest Army and bought a development card. Although it turned out that three of the next four cards were Soldiers, Green was unlucky and Blue took the win.

Learning Outcome: Some of the old classic games are classics for a reason and should not be neglected.

11th March 2014

So you can’t keep keen gamers down, and some of us decided that as it was games night, we were going to play some games anyhow. First up was a Dixit which was was the first game of the new year, played in the early hours of New Year’s Day. In this game, the “Story Teller” chooses a card from their hand and uses a word, phrase, noise or even action to describe it. Everyone else chooses the card from their hand that they feel best matches the “clue”. These are shuffled together with the Story Teller’s “answer” card and turned over, before players choose which one they think was correct, i.e. the Story Teller’s. Points are awarded to players for guessing correctly, to players who’s cards were picked by other players, and to the caller if some people (but not all) managed to guess the correct card.

Red fell behind initially, but after Blue had taken her place at the back she managed to rejoin the pack, moving into second place. It didn’t stay that way for long, however, and as the group closed up everyone (except White) took their turn at the rear of the group. With two rounds to go the rabbits were all lined up one behind the other with only only three points between first and last place. Red was the first to slip up and failed to score in the penultimate round, followed by Green in the last round, which left White and Blue to move ahead, with Blue taking it by a nose.

Red had to leave, and the rest of us played another game of Tobago as two people had missed out last time. This is a very pretty treasure hunting game where players take it in turns to play clue cards that successively narrow down the location of the treasure. Players can then try to position their vehicle in such a way that, once the location of the treasure has been uniquely identified, they are the first to get to it. Treasure is then distributed amongst those who played clue cards and the player who found it, but beware! There are two “cursed treasures” which as well as damaging the current treasure also cause unprepared players to discard their most valuable treasure. In this game we had fun finding the “Grey” treasure as all the clues were very non-specific and it required seven clues to locate it. Despite all that effort, however, the first treasure card revealed was cursed and nobody got anything! In contrast, the other nasty treasure also required a lot of clues, but it was the last card revealed and nobody had passed so nobody missed out. As the game was nearing the end, it was Green’s turn and only one treasure had any clues, both of which were his. With the aid of an amulet, he managed to locate the treasure and travel to it collecting keeping all the treasure for himself. As before, we ran out of treasures making it necessary to take cards from the discard deck. This time, the cursed treasure was not drawn though and Green picked up a massive 14 points, giving him a clear win with 46 points in a game that had been very close with only a few points in it until the final turn.

Learning Outcome: Beware of the Cursed Treasure: A lot of hard work can be wasted!

25th February 2014

Thanks to people leaving, moving and catching lurgy we were really short of players – what a come down from a few weeks ago when we had two parallel games and were struggling to find chairs for everyone! For this reason, we abandoned the “Feature Game” (Sushi Draft!), as it plays better with more people and started out with a quick game of Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small. This is a smaller version of one of our more popular “worker placement” games, Agricola. In this game players are medieval farmers and the idea behind it is that players start with a small number of workers and carry out actions to build up their farm by fencing off pasture, buying animals, ploughing fields and growing corn and vegetables, all the time trying to make sure that workers have enough food. At the end of the game, players score for a range of things including how large their house is, and how big their family is.

In the smaller version, the focus is concentrated on the animals and players primary aim is to develop their stock with a secondary aim of expanding their property and making good use of the new land. In general, a lot of the basic rules are the same: You collect resources to build anything and your animals must be kept in an enclosed space (either a building, tied to a drinking trough or in a fenced pasture); any animals that you have more than two of will breed at the end of the round to give another. In contrast to its big brother, in this game there is no facility for increasing your family from the three you start with, there is very limited facility to upgrade your cottage, food is provided by some other means outside the game (clearly the workers are not going to starve), and minor/major improvements and occupations are provided by buildings. We had played this before (though not on a Tuesday), so we included four random buildings from the expansion, More Buildings Big and Small, specifically, the Ranch, Dog House, Rearing Station and Barn Floor Manufacturer.

Red started and began collecting horses, meanwhile, Blue built a Dog house that allowed her to keep one sheep in each unfenced pasture not adjacent to the forrest. Red then built a stall and some feeding troughs and started breeding horses and pigs while Blue tried to expand her property and built a Ranch as the flock of sheep carried on growing. In the dying stages of the game, Red managed to gather together enough sheep to avoid a penalty, but failed to completely cover his second expansion board; Blue had to allow a couple of animals to escape as she couldn’t find space to house them despite completely covering all three of her expansion boards. Blue ran out the winner with 51 points to Red’s 43, largely thanks to her large flock of sheep.

Next, we played Tobago, which is a Christmas game that we’d played before (though again, not on a Tuesday). This is a very beautiful game of treasure hunting on the island of Tobago. The board is divided into segments of different terrain, forest, beach, mountain, river etc. The idea is that players take it in turns to play cards that successively narrow down the location of the treasure. Thus, if the first player plays an “in the forest”card, the next might play a not “next to the river” card reducing the number of available spaces that can hold the treasure to those wooded spaces out of earshot of the river. Each player also has an All Terrain Vehicle (ATV) that they can move instead of playing a card, and use to collect treasures. When an ATV arrives at the treasure space (or the treasure location is unambiguously revealed as a location where there is a vehicle), treasure cards are revealed to the players, with one per card per clue and an extra for the player who found the treasure. The cards are then pooled, shuffled and the top one turned over. The last player to place a clue card gets first choice of and can either choose to take the card, or pass (waiting for the next card), and let the next player choose. Each treasure card has a different value and as players who placed a lot of clue cards will have seen a lot of them, they are in a better position to decide whether it is a good idea to take a treasure or to pass, the more so since there are two “cursed treasures” which prevent any further treasures being revealed as well as causing players to discard their most valuable treasure card. Once the treasure has been distributed, amulets are distributed around the island; players who collect these can exchange them for an extra turn or use them to prevent treasure loss when the cursed treasure is revealed.

Red placed his ATV in the middle of the island next to a lake, so Blue placed hers on the other side of the water and immediately realised that Red had the optimal position. Red started laying clues, so Blue carefully stalked him matching every clue he placed. The first treasure was located in such a way that Blue could make it there first giving her the majority of treasure cards. Placing second meant that Blue had first choice and was able to keep the most lucrative treasures. This pattern was repeated for the first few treasures and Blue managed to get a nose in front. Red made tried to collect amulets so he could regain control of the game, but the final damage was done when the cursed treasure cards appeared and in both cases Blue collected more treasures than Red. As the game came to an end, Red had amassed a fine collection of amulets, but it was too late to make a real impact and Blue won, 73 points to 43.

The last game we played was Morels, which we’ve played before, but was new to one of the players. This is a fairly traditional set collecting game, but is a very nice rendition with lovely art-work and some hand made forage sticks provided by the designer. The idea is that you can collect the readily available mushrooms “at your feet” for free, or you can choose a less accessible fungi and pay the difference in forage sticks, the game’s currency. Once you have a set of three or more mushrooms you can cook them, and add cider or butter if appropriate to add extra points at the end of the game. Red started again as he hadn’t played it before and made a point of collecting some forage sticks by trading a pair of “Hen of the Woods” for six forage sticks early on. Meanwhile, Blue picked up a couple of basket cards and couple of night cards, but was unable to get a nice set worth cooking. Red picked up a couple of Porcini cards and Blue collected a couple of Morels and both players waited for the third card to make up the set. Red cooked a handful of Tree Ears flavoured with some cider and Honey Fungi, while blue cooked some Shitake with butter and some Lawyers’ Wigs. As the supply of fungi started to dwindle, Blue finally managed to pick up the third Morel and cook it, but Red took the last pan card preventing her from playing the Chanterelles. Despite this, Blue took the game by 38 Mushroom Varietal Points to 29, giving her a hat-trick of wins for the evening.

Learning Outcome: It is nice to come back from a loosing streak with a bit of a bang.

11th February 2014

One of our regulars is moving pastures new, so as this was probably her last week, we played games she said she liked. We started off with Parade, which is a little card game with an Alice in Wonderland theme where you add cards to a row, but the cards that you place dictate what cards you pick up. In general, cards score their face value and the object of the game is to have the lowest score, however, for the person who has the most of a colour, that colour scores only one for each card. So, the game starts with everyone trying to minimise what they pick up and then, once the writing is on the wall, everyone scrabbles to pick up as more cards than everyone else. We first played it a few weeks ago and our leaver came second by just one point, so this had an element of a re-match. The winner from last time was quickly forced out of the running and ended up with twenty-eight points, and the battle was between our leaver and the player who came last in the previous game. Sadly, our leaver once again finished in second place with twenty points after being forced to pick up a couple of tens, but, with fourteen points, the win went to someone who claims he always looses “little games”.

Next we started setting up the “Feature Game” which was Keyflower with the Farmers expansion and then a couple more people arrived. Keyflower is one of our most played games, but there is one player who usually wins, so the rest of us made a point of ensuring that Green didn’t have it all his own way this time. Like the last time we played with the expansion, we used all the farming tiles. Winter tiles were doled out and the rules were passed round as people checked and double checked what they had. Spring tiles were then revealed and Red and Blue went for the sheep tiles. Red and White won them, but Blue had placed a couple of workers on the tiles before the end of the round giving her a breeding pair. By the end of the summer both Red and Blue had a large flock of sheep and it was only then that Blue dissolved into fits of giggles as she realised that sheep weren’t pink and she had been collecting the wrong animal…

Meanwhile, Green had been acquiring resources, Yellow had been trading tiles getting two for one on each occasion, and White had been busy building up a healthy stock of green meeples and pigs. In the last round, the winter tiles were revealed. The Hillside tile came out and it suddenly became apparent why Green had such a strange shaped village, so Yellow took it off him. The only other animal tile that came out was the cow tile which Blue made a play for to try to redeem her earlier spell of colour blindness. Red pointed out a couple of turns in that it was worth a lot and promptly started to bid for it too. In revenge for “stealing” his Hillside, Green took the Scribe which rewards players for collections of skill tiles, so Yellow took the Windmill which rewards players for collecting resources…

Despite Red’s efforts, Blue managed to sneak under the radar and nabbed the Keythedral (which is worth twelve points). The collective efforts of Yellow, White and Red had succeeded in preventing Green from winning. However, despite having a chronic shortage of meeples throughout (due to squandering them on sheep in the first two seasons) and therefore a very small village, and almost no points from anything else, the combination of a heard of cows, the Keythedral and the damage the other players had done to each other, meant Blue finished with seventy-one points, seven ahead of Yellow in second and twelve ahead of Red in her last, quite epic game with us.

Learning Outcome: Beef is very nourishing!

28th January 2014

This week was memorable for a number of reasons. Firstly, the non-playing member of the group, had been to the vet for the first time in about fifteen years and she didn’t like what they did to her (in fairness, she started it by taking a chunk out of the vet, but it is certain both she and the vet won’t forget the day quickly). Secondly, nearly every current member turned up, the first time this had happened since the fire at the Jockey, and with the added bonus of a new member, we were just a bit pushed for space. It is a very nice problem to have though, especially since this time last year we were really struggling.

People arrived gradually, so we started with our “Feature Game”, the filler Zooloretto: The Dice Game. This is closely related to the tile laying game, Zooloretto, which we’ve played before. Both use the “Coloretto mechanism” which is a variant of the “I divide, you choose” mechanism that children sometimes use when sharing a cake. Basically, the idea is that players take it in turns to roll dice (or draw tiles or cards depending on the game) and choose which “truck” to place them in. When they see a truck they like, they can choose to take the contents instead of rolling (then they sit out of the rest of the round). In the case of the dice version, players are collecting custom animal dice; the idea is to have as many as possible up to a given limit and exceeding the maximum incurs a penalty. The first two people to arrive were about half way through when two more turned up and joined in for a second game.

After the second game we had a quick game of “extend the table, rearrange the furniture and hunt for extra chairs” and were just finishing as the last group arrived. After some discussion, we decided to split the group into two and the first group played Montego Bay. This is a game that we played last year and all felt that it was quite enjoyable, so we decided to give it another outing. In summary, players control two figures, a large docker and a small docker who are travelling round the warehouses collecting barrels of rum to place on ships before they sail. There are two aspects to the game, the first is the priority given to filling boats because, when a boat sails, the player with the largest number of barrels on board scores the most points. Secondly, everyone chooses how far to move their dockers simultaneously at the start of the round, however, players take their turns in a prearranged order which leads to an interesting juxtaposition of chaos and “double-think”. In this game, Orange came back from the dead with optimal use of “Lazy Jack” to win by four points.

Meanwhile, the second group played 7 Wonders, which we played at New Year. Played in three rounds, this is a card drafting game where players take one card from their hand and then pass the rest on, then repeatedly do the same with the cards they receive until there are none left. The idea of the game is to build an civilisation and complete their “wonder”. For the last game there were seven of us and it was over-long and completely disorganised chaos. This time there was a much more manageable number and it worked much, much better. One player had played it many times before and it showed in the score with him winning with fifty-two points, five ahead of second place. The other group were only about halfway through their game though, so that gave an opportunity for a rematch. Revenge was duly served as the game finished with the winner of the second game fifteen points clear of a tight pack which included the winner of the first game.

For the last game we got back together as a large group and finished with a game of Saboteur. We played this nearly a year ago, but again didn’t have an optimal number of players. This time, with more than twice as many, the game played much, much better. The idea is that players are digging for gold by laying cards to form tunnels. Everyone is either a “Dwarf” or a “Saboteur” and at the end of the game, points are given to the Dwarves if they extend the tunnel to find the gold, and Saboteurs if they succeed in stalling the Dwarves so much that they fail. In addition to extending tunnel network, players can also play cards that inhibit the digging ability of others, or alternatively remove an impediment someone else has played. The first game everyone was watching our “Habitual Saboteur” and waiting for him to do something suspicious, meanwhile, another player moaned about the nature of his hand, and kept discarding cards and everyone else seemed to get on with digging. The Dwarves were about halfway there when one player declared she was a Saboteur and played a very obstructive card and immediately received a hail-storm of broken tool cards. It was only after the Dwarves had run out of cards that the “discarder” showed his true colours as a Saboteur and the Habitual Saboteur wasn’t (this time).

In the second round, our Habitual Saboteur made up for his good behaviour in the first round and teamed up with the Saboteur Queen. It looked like the dwarves might just make it when another Saboteur jumped out of the shadows throwing broken tools at all the Dwarves and putting the gold definitively beyond their reach. Going into the final round, the Saboteur Queen (who ended up obstructing in all three rounds) had what was thought to be an unassailable lead with six points to a maximum of three elsewhere and a third failure for the Dwarves would have given her a landslide victory. However, this time she only had the one team-mate which made it much more difficult for her to obstruct the tunnellers and, in due course, it was the Habitual Saboteur (who once again, surprisingly, wasn’t) who laid the final card and found the gold. He managed to take a total of four points from the last round and just pipped the Saboteur Queen to the win.

Learning Outcome: Don’t believe anyone when you know there is a Saboteur in your midst!

14th January 2014

As we weren’t too sure about who was coming it took a while to get going, but first up, we decided to play our “Feature Game”, Parade. This is a set collecting card game with an Alice in Wonderland theme. Basically, there is a “parade” of characters in the form of a row of cards. Players take it in turns to add a card from their hand to the parade and depending on the number and colour of the card they play, they then remove cards from the parade and place them in suits in front of them. So, if a player places a red five, the five most recently played cards are “protected” and the player takes all the red cards and any cards numbered five or lower and places them in their area. The aim of the game is to finish with the lowest accumulated total. The clever part is the scoring: if a player has the most cards of a given colour, all the cards score one regardless of the face value; all the remaining cards score their full value. So, a set of high scoring cards can suddenly score a lot less because that player has the largest number of cards in that suit. The other key part is that at the end of the game, each player adds two cards from their hand to their sets on the table. Thus, the last two cards can have a dramatic effect on the game as they can change who has the majority in the colour suits and if you get it wrong it can have a catastrophic effect on your end score. Two players started off well, picking up only zeros and ones, while another was forced to pick up a few high cards straight away so decided to try to collect the most cards in these suits. He was doing a good job when the everyone else was forced into taking a couple of high scoring cards each and started competing. Despite initial appearances, the game was very tight, with the winner just one ahead of second with sixteen points, and slightly different card choices at the end could have completely changed the placings.

Next, we decided to play Agricola. This is one of our more popular games and we had just finished setting up when one of the players was called away with boiler trouble. We decided to leave it for another day and play Flash Point: Fire Rescue instead. This is a cooperative game where players take on the roles of fire-fighters trying to rescue people from a burning building. Players take it in turns to carry out actions and then dice are rolled to spread the fire. The addition of dice makes the game less predicatable than in some of the other cooperative games we’ve played where cards are used to simulate impending doom. The use of dice also means that there isn’t the same “ticking clock” that there is with cards: if you can stay on top of the fire, you can take as long as you like to get people out, on the other hand, if the fire gets out of control, it spreads faster and faster increasing the risk to the casualties and increasing the chance of explosions which cause damage to the building and suddenly the building collapses and everyone dies.

Since we had a player who was new to the game, we played Veteran level (three explosions, three hotspots and four hazardous materials) and used the reverse side of the base game board. We divided our labour so we had half the team fighting the fire and the other half rescuing people. There was a lot of fire in the centre of the board down the corridor, so Red went in first as the CAFS fire-fighter. Meanwhile, Blue entered via the side door as the Rescue Specialist and quickly saved the first casualty before riding the ambulance round to the other side and following Red in to rescue a couple more. Red dealt with the recurrent smoke in the shower cubicle while Blue enlarged the hole in a damaged wall and rescued a couple more. One of the new Points of Interest was placed rather unfortunately next to fire and we didn’thave time to deal with them before an explosion meant we had our first victim of the flames. Despite the loss, however, we had soon rescued the required seven people. Somehow, leaving casualties in a burning house seems wrong, so we continued to try to rescue everyone else. All the Points of Interest were now on the far side of the board, so the Rescue Specialist rode round the building in the ambulance and made a new more convenient entrance. Red helped reveal which of the Points of Interest were real people and then together Blue and Red carried the last two people out leaving only one Point of Interest behind, which was known to be a false alarm.

Learning Outcome: Where there’s smoke, fire will surely follow…

31st December 2013

The evening started with a quick two player game of “extend the table and try to find space for it”. Just as we were finishing, one of our regulars arrived with his family, including his dinosaur-pyjama-clad four year old – unquestionably the youngest GOAT to date!

As planned, we started off with our “Feature Game”, the gorgeous, dexterity car-race, PitchCar. The idea of this game is that, starting with the player at the front of the field in each round, players take it in turns to flick their small wooden car round the custom-made circuit. Since the game was new to so many of the players, we started out with a simple track with just one jump (from the first expansion) and smooth corners (from the second expansion). Despite their tender years, Black and Yellow demonstrated a remarkable aptitude, and Black ran in the easy winner.

The first game was such a hit that when three more people arrived, we built a second, slightly more complex track while pizzas were “prepped”. In this game, Blue (played by one of the new arrivals), quickly got half a lap ahead and managed to maintain his lead until the end. This was followed by a game of “hunt for enough chairs” by which time, the first of the pizzas were ready. By this time, despite it being two hours past his bedtime, “dinoGOAT” was still keen to play on, however, we managed to persuade him (with the aid of a mince pie) that it was bedtime and we’d play Dinosaur Race another time.

That left us with just enough people to give the first of our “Christmas Games” an outing. Waldschattenspiel is not, as you might think, a game about what bears do in the woods. It is actually a really unusual game, played in the dark, where one player (the designated adult!) operates a candle and the others are little dwarf meeples with felt hats. The idea is that that wooden trees cast shadows, and the dwarves, who start the game hiding in the woods, have to meet up together behind the same tree. The snag is that when they move, they must do so without being illuminated by the candle. Any photophobic dwarves caught in the light become “frozen” and are unable to move until they are rescued by other dwarves. The dwarves started out badly when Green got trapped, and then frozen, very early on. The rest of the dwarves managed to meet up, but in a failure of strategy, tried to rescue Green as a group. When they all got trapped and only Red was able to escape, the writing was on the wall and the Candle scored a win on the next move.

Next up was the second of our Christmas Games, 7 Wonders. This is a card drafting game, where each person picks one card from their hand to play, then passes their remaining cards on to the next player. The aim of the game is to build your civilisation by developing your science and technology and building one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. We played the ‘A’ side and with seven players, most of whom had never played it before, there was a lot of chaos, and the game was a bit of a mystery to a lot of us. However, the game was won by one of the new players, who, as well as successfully building the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, also had a strong army and had a well developed civilisation.

A couple more players left and the rest of us played with the tower from Amerigo while we decided what the next game should be. Enticing though it was, it only played four, so, after much deliberation, we decided to play Dixit.

This is a clever, light card game, where the “active player” secretly chooses a card and uses a sound, word, phrase or sentence to describe it. The other players all choose the best card from their hand to match the sentence and secretly hand them to the active player who shuffles the cards and displays them to everyone. The players then try to guess which card was played by the active player with points being awarded for choosing correctly, having your card chosen by another player, and, as the active player, for being ambiguous enough to ensure that some players, but not all, chose their card. The artwork by Marie Cardouat is wonderfully surreal and the game produced some equally peculiar clues in what ended up as a close game. Blue took an early lead, but it couldn’t last and, everyone else closed, pausing for just a brief interlude to sing Auld Lang Syne and watch fireworks (it was raining, so we “wimped out” of setting off our own and just admired everyone else’s from the warm; one group were especially obliging and set off some very nice ones just outside the window!). White snuck ahead of Blue with the last point of the game, and took the first win of 2014 adding it to her last win of 2013. This was in contrast to Red who lost both the last game of 2013 and the first game of 2014!

Learning Outcome: Cold pizza isn’t that bad after all!

17th December 2013

We planned to start early and get in a quick game of the “Feature Game”, Morels, however, we had just finished going through the rules and were just about to start when the late arrivals arrived early. So, we left the mushrooms for another day and moved on to one of our favourites, Keyflower. The reason why we were all especially keen to play this, is that the expansion, Keyflower: The Farmers was released at Essen and we had been waiting since October for a good opportunity to give it an outing. There are two documented ways to integrate the expansion with the main game: you can choose tiles randomly from those available in the base game and the expansion, or you can use all the farming tiles and just use random base game tiles to “top up” the numbers. Since it was the first time any of us had played the expansion, we chose to use this latter, “Farmers Variant”.

The idea behind the expansion is so simple that it is really very clever, and it is hard to believe that it wasn’t designed at the same time as the base game (though according to the designer, it was not). In summary, the structure of the game remains the exactly same, but the new tiles give you access to animals which you place in the fields defined by the roads and the edge of the village. There are a handful of rules associated with the animals (they breed at the end of spring, summer and autumn, but not winter because its too cold; they don’t breed if they are sharing with other animals because they are too shy), and the expansion also introduces wheat (which can be used to entice animals from one field to another or to encourage the horse pulling the cart enabling it to move more resources), but otherwise the game is essentially the same. Or not…

As usual, we handed out our winter tiles and a handful of meeples (or Keyples as they are called in this game), before the spring tiles were laid out for everyone to look at. With the farmers expansion, sheep are introduced in spring, pigs in summer, and cows in autumn. So sheep came out first and Blue and Green got the key sheep producing tiles, and everyone with sheep tried to make sure they had at least two so that they could profit from the end of season breeding. Unusually, almost no resource production tiles came out as these were of course displaced by the animal tiles, and this was the way it stayed for the rest of the game. On the other hand, all the “green Keyple” tiles came out making them more abundant than usual.

In summer and autumn, Yellow tried to get into the animal husbandry business breeding pink cows and got into a tussle for it with Blue, who largely lost out and played most of the game with a village of just four tiles. Meanwhile, the other sheep-farmer, Green, eschewed pigs and cows and concentrated on expanding his flock to nearly epic proportions. By winter, Blue, with her hamlet and miniscule fields, was stacking pigs and cows in a way that would not have won favour from the RSCPA and Green (the shepherd) was trying to obtain the services of a weaver to increase the value of his flock. Meanwhile, Yellow was trying to expanded his cattle business and Red, the only player who had managed to get resource production tiles was mining for gold, employing a jeweller to maximise her the outcome from her gold and moving iron from one side of her village to the other. In the dying moves of the game, the Yellow outbid Blue for the dairy who in turn placed a large bid for the weaver which Green was unable to match. This cost Green somewhere in the region of twenty points and forced him to take the hillside tile and try to make the best use of it he could. Despite the inconvenience, Green still romped away with the win some twenty points ahead of Blue and Yellow who came joint second. Even so, somehow this didn’t seem quite as much of a white-wash as last time…

Learning Outcome: Trying to breed pink cows does not make you a better farmer!

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boardGames On Alternate Tuesdays in Stanford