Next Meeting, 21st March 2023

Our next meeting will be Tuesday 21^st March 2023. As usual, we will start playing shorter games from 7.30pm as people arrive, until 8pm when we will start something a little longer. For those who want to eat, the table is booked from 6.45pm.

This week, the “Feature Game” will be the Visit from the Rhine Valley expansion for one of the group’s most popular games, Viticulture (review; tutorial video; rules). This is a very small expansion, just a replacement deck of visitor cards, but it has a reputation for changing the game quite significantly.

Viticulture: Visit from the Rhine Valley

– Image by boardGOATS

Speaking of the Rhine Valley…

Jeff was touring the Rhine Valley and had booked himself into a lovely old castle that had been converted into a hotel. When he arrived, he entered the foyer and suddenly had the creepiest feeling come over him, like there was a presence that made a shiver run down his spine.

Feeling more than a little uncomfortable, he approached the lady at the reception desk and said, “Excuse me, do you know if this hotel is haunted?”

The lady laughed and replied, “Well, I have been here for three hundred years and I’ve never seen a ghost!”

7th March 2023

Plum and Blue were first to arrive and, by the time they had finished their enormous rack of ribs (or given up and had a doggy bag made up), almost everyone else had arrived. There were a few people missing, but still enough for two games of four. The first was the “Feature Game“, but nobody really wanted to commit to that until they knew what the other game was going to be. As he had done the last couple of times, Green suggested Terraforming Mars. Unlike previously, this time Ivory, Plum and Teal felt up to it, leaving Blue, Black, Purple and Lime to play their preferred choice of New York Zoo.

– Image by boardGOATS

New York Zoo is a tile laying game by Uwe Rosenberg, designer of Agricola, Bohnanza, Patchwork and many other well-known games. The idea is that players are building pens in their zoo, populating them with animals, and building attractions. This is one of several polyomino, Tetris-like, tile-laying type games (including Cottage Garden, Spring Meadow, Indian Summer and Patchwork), but what makes this one unique and interesting is the Market. Players move the Marker Elephant one to four spaces round the Market, landing either on an Enclosure tile space (taking the top one and adding it to their zoo) or on an animal space (taking one or both of the animals depicted). Enclosure tiles can be placed anywhere in the player’s Zoo, then one or two identical Animals from elsewhere in their Zoo must be moved to occupy the Enclosure.

– Image by boardGOATS

Each Enclosure can only hold one type of Animal, meercats, snow-foxes, kangaroos, penguins or flamingos, but when moving Animals, no pen can be left empty. There is an advantage to pens having two or more Animals in them too—the Market also features breeding spaces, and when the Marker Elephant passes these, up to two pens containing two or more matching Animals get an extra one. When a player moves the Elephant onto an Animal space, they take one of either or both the Animals depicted into Enclosures containing matching Animals (moving another from Storage if they can), or into the Storage space. Moving animals is important, because when an Enclosure is completed the player removes all the animals putting one into Storage if they have space, and then takes an Attraction tile of their choice and adds it to their Zoo.

– Image by boardGOATS

Attraction tiles are useful because they fill additional spaces, and at its heart, New York Zoo is a race game—the winner is the first to fill all the spaces in their Zoo. Black and Purple had played this a few times, and once Black had explained the rules to Lime and Blue, Purple started. Black and Purple prioritised completing Enclosures to get Attractions. The Market is stacked so there are large tiles, heptominoes, on the top of each tile space, with hexominoes, then pentominoes and finally tetrominoes at the bottom of each pile. Black and Purple prioritised getting breeding pairs of animals and as the Market dwindled, getting smaller enclosures because small Enclosures are easier to complete than large ones.

– Image by boardGOATS

Blue, who had not played the game before, started off getting large Enclosures and fitting them tightly together. As the game progressed, however, she realised her mistake as everyone else’s Animals were breeding and she didn’t have pairs because she was taking one out every time she added another Enclosure. This had the additional consequence that she was starting to run out of Animals too, so she prioritised getting breeding pairs for a couple of rounds before continuing to take the biggest Enclosures she could get away with. It was a tight game—Purple seemed to take an early lead, but it looked like Black and Lime over-took her towards the end and were in a tussle to finish the game first.

– Image by boardGOATS

With everyone else concentrating on filling pens and taking Attractions, nobody was watching Blue. So they were taken by surprise when her kangaroos bred filling their pen and she took her first Attraction. That left one space which she promptly filled taking the only Enclosure that fitted, perfectly, and ended the game. With everyone else so close to finishing, however, the rest of the group played on to see who would place where. In the event, Black finished just ahead of Lime. The group were just dissecting the different strategies when Pine arrived, fresh from his meeting teaching “cubbish-sized scouts” about waste. Terraforming Mars was still going on, so the hunt was on for a five-player game, and the group settled on Kingdomino.

– Image by boardGOATS

Native, Kingdomino is a four player game, however, with the Age of Giants expansion, it plays five. The base game is simple enough, but it had been a while since most people last played it, so there was a quick run through of the rules. On their turn, players add a terrain domino to their Kingdom; each domino comprises two squares of terrain and when placed at least one end must be adjacent to the same terrain type. Like New York Zoo, the interesting and clever part of the game is the Market. In Kingdomino, there are two parts, current and future—when a player takes their domino from the current market, they choose their next domino by placing their marker on it.

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At the end of the game, players score each terrain region with points equal to the area of each region multiplied by the number of crowns on it. The clever part is the timing of the Market. The tiles are drawn at random from a set numbered from one to forty-eight. The low numbers generally being the less desirable ones, those without crowns or those for terrain types where crowns are more scarce. Since players take the tiles in numerical order (low to high), taking a low value tile in one round gives a better choice in the next. Similarly, taking a high value tile means there will be less (or maybe no) choice in the following round.

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The Age of Giants expansion firstly adds twelve extra tiles (enough for a fifth player), six labeled with letters A to F and six numbered forty-nine to fifty-four. These are ranked below one for the letters and after forty-eight for the high numbers, with the low ranking tiles featuring a Giant, and the high ranking ones featuring Footprints. Players taking dominoes with a Giant on them, also take a Giant-eeple and place it over a crown in their Kingdom so that it doesn’t score. Taking a Footprint domino allows the player to move a Giant from their Kingdom to a crown in someone else’s and this increase their score, making these tiles potentially very valuable.

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Unfortunately (especially for Lime and Blue who ended up with all the Giants), the Footprints seemed hard to come by in this game. The other part of the Age of Giants expansion are the Quests. The base game comes with two Quests, arrangement targets that give points. These are “Middle Kingdom” and “Harmony” which respectively give ten points for a castle in the centre of a player’s Kingdom and five points for a complete five-by-five territory with no discarded tiles. This time, the Quests drawn essentially at random were “Bleak King” and “Four Corners of the Kingdom”. The first of these gave five points for each five square of terrain with no crowns while the second gave players five points for placing cornfields on all four corners of the five-by-five grid that defines their Kingdom.

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Although the Quests had been included in game play several times before, the Giants have only had an outing once and didn’t go down all that well. Still, with five players all the extra tiles were needed and their values would have been unbalanced without including Giants, so the group thought they’d give it another try. This time Blue and Purple had a really hard time getting crowns and things were so bad for Blue that she resorted to picking up twenty points, more than half her total, from the “Bleak King” Quest. Black built a lot of sea and pasture, while Lime scored heavily for his mountains and Pine picked up lots of points for his large woodland.

– Image by boardGOATS

It was very close between the top three and both Lime and Pine scored forty-five points for their highest scoring terrain—Lime for nine crowns spread over five spaces, Pine for five crowns spread over nine spaces. There were just two points between Lime and Pine in the end, but Pine’s sixty-eight points just edged Lime into second with Black four points behind that. It had been a good game. However, the group felt that the Giants took a positive constructive game and added a negative aspect. Those that had been stuck with them hadn’t found that aspect particularly enjoyable, especially as it was easy to get lumbered largely through no fault of their own, so it is unlikely they’ll get another outing very soon.

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, on the next table, Green, Ivory, Plum and Teal were still playing Terraforming Mars. To speed up the game they played with the Prelude start cards and also removed the Corporation cards—that turned out to be a good choice as the game only just finished before the pub closed. In this game, players play corporations sponsored by the World Government working together in the terraforming process, but competing for victory points. These are awarded not only for their contribution to the terraforming, but also for advancing human infrastructure throughout the solar system, and doing other generally commendable things.

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The players acquire unique Project cards by buying them into their hand; these can represent anything from introducing plant life or animals, hurling asteroids at the surface, building cities, to mining the moons of Jupiter and establishing greenhouse gas industries to heat up the atmosphere. The Projects can give immediate bonuses, as well as increase production of different resources. Many cards also have requirements and become playable when the temperature, oxygen, or ocean coverage increases enough. Buying cards is costly, so there is a balance between buying cards (three MegaCredits per card) and actually playing them.

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The game ends after the terraforming is complete when the three global parameters, temperature, oxygen, ocean have all reached their goal. Players then score for their Terraform Rating with any other points they might have accrued. This time, Green made his presence felt on the surface of Mars in the early stages with his initial starting forest, which grew a little, and seeded the oceans. He was the only one for a while. Plum played a blue card which gave her a couple of extra Credits every time someone built a city. This one really paid for itself in the four-player game as everyone wanted to build more than one city. Green was first, but had mis-read the card and found himself colonizing Phobos instead.

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So, Teal was the first to actually build a city on the surface of Mars. He opted for the equator but on the other side from Green’s forests. Later he played a blue city bonus card that gave him a Credit production bonus for each one. Although several cities had already been built by then, several more followed and he was able to enjoy the benefit of extra cash in later rounds. Ivory meanwhile had made a different start to the game than his normal opening gambit (building a city), and completed the first Milestone: the Ecologist. However his cities did follow later as he extended down towards the south pole. Teal claimed the second milestone: the Specialist, helped on by his city Credit production bonus.

– Image by boardGOATS

Plum was the last to claim a Milestone: the Generalist, as she was able to pay to increase her production one step each round. She did not claim it straight away, but noticed it after Teal had claimed his, and thought she had better get in there quick. Green was not able to claim any milestones, but instead was the first to fund an Award. A quick check around the player boards suggested he should fund Celebrity as he had three high value cards to Teal’s two, but neither Plum or Ivory had any cards over the value of twenty Credits. Later on Teal funded the second award and went for Estate Dealer as he clearly had more tiles next to oceans at this point (having planted his forests northwards around the oceans.

– Image by boardGOATS

At the end of the game Green pulled out his wallet once more and funded Benefactor since he was ahead on the Terraform Rating track. Ivory was only one behind, but Green had a couple of options he could play on his last turn for a couple of extra Terraform Rating points. This prevented Ivory from funding the Dessert Settler award for which he had been building. Green decided to go for outworld domination and also built Deimos city. During the second half of the game Green realised he had forgotten his company bonus of a two MegaCredits reduction for each brown, Industrial tagged card. He had built three, so put six Credits aside to be used in the event of a tie, (although had he remembered to claim them at the time, he may have been able to play more and better cards).

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In the final scoring it was very close indeed, although during the game Mars was regularly bombarded with meteors and nuclear bombs, so it was a wonder any one survived at all! Ivory and Green tied for second with fifty-nine points. Even with his extra six Credits, Green still lost the tie to Ivory, who had more Credits left over from the final production. At this point, Green realised he again had misread a card thinking he would get one point per ocean tile in the game for his capital city, but that would have given him a guaranteed nine points and would have been way too powerful. In the end, it was Teal who triumphed, but only just, with sixty-one points, in well deserved victory.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Mama’s taking us to the zoo tomorrow, zoo tomorrow, zoo tomorrow… We can stay all day!

Next Meeting, 7th March 2023

Our next meeting will be Tuesday 7^th March 2023. As usual, we will start playing shorter games from 7.30pm as people arrive, until 8pm when we will start something a little longer. For those who want to eat, the table is booked from 6.45pm.

This week, the “Feature Game” will be New York Zoo (review; tutorial video; rules), a tile laying game by Uwe Rosenberg (designer of Agricola, Bohnanza and Patchwork and many other games). The idea is that players are building pens in their zoo, populating them with animals, and building attractions.

– Adapted from image by BGG contributor aldoojeda

Speaking of zoos…

The kangaroo kept escaping from his enclosure at a zoo. The zookeeper, Jeff, decided the way to fix it was to make the wall higher, so increased its height by a meter.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work, and the next day, the kangaroo escaped again. So Jeff added another two meters to the wall. That didn’t work either though, and the following morning the kangaroo had got out again. It was clear to Jeff that the wall just wasn’t high enough so this time he added another three meters to its height.

But the kangaroo escaped again and again. When the kangaroo had been brought back for the tenth time, his friend, the elephant asked, “When are you going to stop?”

The kangaroo replied, “When Jeff closes the door of my enclosure, I guess.”

21st February 2023

With this set to be our last meeting before The Horse and Jockey changed hands, a lot of people turned up early to enjoy the Thai special (a preview of the Thai Night the following day). As the last of the food was consumed the final couple of people arrived, and then it was all about deciding who was going to play what and how we were going to split up the group of thirteen. In the end, Ivory took a group of five to play the “Feature Game“, Verdant, while Pink and Lime led a group of four to play Cascadia, and Green gave his copy of Wingspan with all the expansions (Europe, Oceania and Asia) an outing.

– Image by boardGOATS

The “Feature Game“, Verdant is a card game where players are trying to match plants to rooms and grow luxurious foliage to give them the most points at the end of the game. The game is played over fourteen rounds with players taking it in turns to take cards from a central market. In a similar way to Cascadia where hexagonal tiles are paired in the market with animal tokens, in Verdant, the cards are paired with object tokens. However, where, in Cascadia players just have to choose which pair to take, in Verdant the decision is a little more complex. Instead of taking a card and it’s token, in Verdant each tokens is paired with two cards (a room and a plant) and players choose one card to take with the associated token.

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Players then add the card to their three by five array, with plants placed next to rooms and visa versa to form a chequerboard-type arrangement. Whenever a plant is placed next to a room with matching lighting conditions, it gets a verdancy token; plants which achieve target verdancy are completed and gain a fancy pot (some of which give bonus points) and then score points at the end of the game. Players then add and/or spend their object tokens. The objects come in two types, Furniture/Pets and Nurture tokens. Furniture/Pets are either added to a room or placed their one storage space. Nurture tokens are particularly useful as they can be spent to add extra verdancy to plants.

– Image by boardGOATS

At the end of the game, as well as scoring points for completed plants, players also score for each room with adjacent plants that match their type—one point for each plant, two for each if the room contains an object with a colour that matches the room. Finally, players are rewarded for any residual verdancy and receive bonus points for having a complete set of each plant type, for having a complete set of each room colour and an increasing number of bonus points based on how many unique Furniture/Pets they have in their home.

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Blue started, and with no idea what she was doing, took a high verdancy plant and passed the problem on to Teal whose turn it was next. There was quite a lot of “try something and see what happens” going on in the early part of the game, but before long Pine voiced everyone else’s thoughts when he asked of Ivory, “How come you’ve got two pots already?” Then, as everyone shrugged, Pine added, “Oh, I see, you have cheap plants…” Ivory looked, if not exactly disgruntled, some way from being actually gruntled, and replied, “You make it sound like I got them from a garage on the way here!” And so the game continued with players taking cards and adding them to their arrays with as much verdancy as possible.

– Image by boardGOATS

About halfway through the game, Pine shared a new post on The Jockey Facebook page which said the current business owner would now be leaving in two weeks but Dan (the current manager) would be responsible for the pub for the next couple of months. So, while there’s still some uncertainty, it seems there WILL be a meeting in two weeks time. By this time, people were getting into their strides a little, though most people’s main strategy just seemed to be taking Nurture tokens whenever they had the chance, something which Pine and Indigo seemed to get a lot of and Blue didn’t have until her final tile (which she picked up with a Panda Plant, much to Pink’s delight from the next table).

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And that just left the scores. A bit of a point salad, it seemed like points came from everywhere. The bulk of everyone’s points came from completed plants though and rooms scored surprisingly well too. Most people thought Ivory was going to win, and so it proved, but much to her surprise, Blue was only a couple of points behind his seventy-nine, and took second. It was really tight for third with everyone else within a couple of points of each other, but it was Pine who just made it onto the podium ahead of the others. Although the game had taken quite a bit longer than expected and was more of a head-scratcher than its brother Cascadia, Verdant had been universally enjoyed and deserves another go.

– Image by boardGOATS

Speaking of Cascadia, Pink, Lime, Black and Jade were giving last year’s Spiel des Jahres Award winner another outing. In this game, similar to Verdant, on their turn, players take a terrain tile and animal token from the market and add them to their array. In this game however, players score points for their largest terrain of each type and also for animals in a specific arrangement. There is a lot of replayability in the game as each animal has several different scoring motifs on cards with one of each drawn at random at the start of each game. This time Bears scored for each group not surrounded by bears with larger groups scoring more; Salmon scored for long chains, and Elk scored for groups of one, two, three or four tiles in a particular layout.

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There was some discussion surrounding the scoring of Foxes, but they scored for each unique animal pairs surrounding them. The Hawk card was from the Tantrum House Promo Set and gave points for each Hawk that had a direct line of sight with both an Elk and a Fox. And this proved challenging for most people as Pink spent the first half of the game by taking all the Elks in what was later referred to as “The Great Elk Shortage”. The others soon got their revenge, however, when Pink was after Bears and everyone else took them just before he could. The game progressed quite quickly and before long, it was time to score.

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Despite the Elk and Bear based tussle, the scores for the Wildlife were very close with Jade just three points ahead of Black and Pink. In this game though players ignore the largest areas at their peril, but these need quite a lot of planning to make them work. With bonus points available to the player with the largest of each type of terrain, going heavily into one or two not only scored per tile, but also an extra three points. This tactic gave Pink eight more points than anyone else for his Habitats which ultimately gave him a comfortable victory, eight points clear of Black in second.

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Cascadia was the first game to finish and the group looked around for something quick to play that everyone knew, and quickly settled on Sushi Go!. This is the archetypal card drafting game, where players are dealt cards, keep one and then pass the hand to their neighbour. Played over three rounds, players are collecting different types of sushi. This game was closer than Cascadia and a bit rushed. There was a big debate as to whether players could play wasabi on top of wasabi and score nine points—the initial response was “that would be silly”, but it was confirmed with a rules check.

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The group played with the Soy Sauce Promo which gave points for having lots of different types of sushi, and variously pretty much everyone had a go at making them score. Almost everyone eschewed the Chopsticks, which allow players to take two cards instead of one later in the round, but that assumes there is an opportunity to use them later. Pink gave them a go, but without much real success. The final round had no Puddings, so there was a three-way tie for Desserts giving each player two points, except for Pink who missed out completely and lost six points. With a deficit of eight points in such a tight game that probably gave victory to Jade, who finished two points ahead of Pink in second and five ahead of Black in third.

/tr>

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, on the third table, a rather epic game of Wingspan was underway. This is one of the group’s favourite games and seems to be popular with almost everyone. The game is a kind of action based card-driven, engine-building game. Players take it in turns to take one of four actions: take food; take bird cards; pay food to place bird cards, or lay eggs on bird cards. Since we enjoy Wingspan and play it a lot, we have all the current expansions within the group, though none of the people playing this time had experienced Oceania or Asia (except solo), so the group decided to put in as much content as they could. This meant using all the bird cards available, creating three huge stacks.

– Image by boardGOATS

There were so many cards that they piled way up beyond the top of the card holder, and by the end of the game, they were still over the top! The group added the round bonus chits from the European and Oceania expansions to the base game ones, but ended up only pulling out one from Oceania (birds pointing left) and none from Europe. And of course the group used the nectar (replacing the original set of dice too), and lots of different coloured eggs from the different sets. The only parts of the expansions the group weren’t able to use were the two player components and the six/seven player components from Asia as there were four in the group, Green, Plum, Byzantium and Sapphire.

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The group only needed to refer to the rules a couple of times for clarification on how the birds interacted. Byzantium’s Snowy Owl, did not point left or right, so he could not count it towards the end of round goal, which meant he only tied with Sapphire for first place in round two. For most of the game there was little egg-laying, but the group managed to fill their boards with lots of birds (ten to thirteen each). Only Green and Sapphire went on an egg laying frenzy in the last couple of rounds, but they still only managed ten and thirteen in total respectively. Plum and Byzantium both managed to collect an almost unheard of total of four bonus cards each.

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Although this helped Byzantium towards an extra twelve points from the bonus cards, it was still shy of Sapphire’s thirteen from two cards (seven points of which he gained on his very last turn with a lucky bonus card draw). Plum, however, really made good with her bonus cards for a whopping total of twenty-five. This was to prove the clincher for her as she won the game with ninety-six points, some way ahead of Sapphire’s eighty-eight giving him second and Green five points behind in third. Of the expansions, everyone in the group used lots of Nectar (another aspect where Plum managed to outscore everyone else) and a good smattering of birds from each expansion, except for Asian birds.

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Only Sapphire placed an Asian bird card with the group using twenty base game birds, ten from the European expansion, fifteen from Oceania and the single Asian bird. Green did manage to get two “flitting” birds and regularly made use of them to flit between habitats. During the after game discussion, the group agreed that they really wanted to try the two player and the large group versions. Having played Wingspan with six last summer without the Asia adjustment, it was clear what needed tightening up, and that seemed to have been done. As a result, the group all agreed that they looked forward to a Mega-Wingspan game soon.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Some board games are prickly and others more succulent.

Boardgames in the News: The Best Game EVAR?!?!

BoardGameGeek is the largest and most comprehensive website dedicated to board and card games, with a database comprising nearly a hundred and fifty thousand games. These games have a ranking based on ratings submitted by account holders. While these rankings are obviously skewed by the characteristics of the contributors, the number one ranking game clearly has significance. In the twenty-two years that the rankings have been in place, there have been just ten games to achieve the top rank, but as of today, there is an eleventh, with Brass: Birmingham taking the top spot from Gloomhaven.

– Image from boardgamegeek.com

Of these now eleven games, three held the top rank briefly, for a day or two only. The first of these was The Game of Life, and it’s top rank was the result of a software bug when on 25^th February 2006, a User gave it a rating of sixty-five thousand five-hundred and thirty-five out of ten. Just over a year later, as an April Fool, another User encouraged his friends to give Monkey Auto Races a rating of ten. With just three hundred ratings, this game went from unranked to number one overnight, only to plummet back down the rankings just a day or so later. Three years later, the site owner pulled his own April Fool stunt and set the ranking equal to the data base number, making Die Macher number one for a day.

The list of eight genuine Number One Games and the date they first achieved the top ranking are:

Paths of Glory (August 2001)
Tigris & Euphrates (February 2002)
Puerto Rico (June 2002)
Agricola (August 2008)
Twilight Struggle (January 2011)
Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (January 2016).
Gloomhaven (December 2017)
Brass: Birmingham (February 2023)

– Image by boardGOATS

Next Meeting, 21st February 2023

Our next meeting will be Tuesday 21^st February 2023. As usual, we will start playing shorter games from 7.30pm as people arrive, until 8pm when we will start something a little longer. The Horse and Jockey will be holding a Thai night, so for those who want to eat, the table is booked from 6.45pm. As this is likely to be quite popular, please let us know in advance if you would like to come and whether you would like food so we can give the pub an idea of numbers.

This week, the “Feature Game” will be Verdant (review; overview video; rules), a card game where players are trying to match plants to rooms and grow luxurious foliage to give them the most points at the end of the game.

– Image by BGG Contributor kalchio

Speaking of plants…

Recently, Jeff had started gardening and he was proudly showing his friend Joe his new plants.

“I like plant all my herbs in alphabetical order,” Jeff explained. “That way I know where they all are and can easily find what I want when I am cooking.”

“That’s really impressive,” mused Joe. “It must take you ages to sort it all out though, especially when you buy something new and everything needs to be moved. How do you find the time?”

“Oh,” answered Jeff, “That’s easy, it’s next to the sage.”

7th February 2023

Blue, Jade, Plum and Byzantium were first to arrive and started by ordering food and then settled down for a chat. Pine soon joined them, followed by Teal, Green, Black, Purple and Ivory. With Lime tucked up in bed fending off his lurgy, and Lilac away for work, it was just Pink who was trapped on the motorway system somewhere between The Jockey and the Frozen North. So, while food was being finished the others wanted a short game for the other end of the table. Teal had brought along The Lost Expedition and Cottage Garden. Both were apparently at least thirty minutes which probably meant nearly an hour, so we settled on a short one everyone knew, NMBR 9.

– Image by boardGOATS

This is a super-quick little game, but what really makes it special is that it has almost zero set-up time. The idea is that one player turns over cards, and these indicate which of ten tiles should be played on that turn. Players take the tiles straight from the box and add them to their tableau with players making sure edges touch and when placing tiles on higher layers, there must be no overhangs and tiles must cover at least two other tiles. Players score for the number on each tile multiplied by the “story” or “floor” (thus a nine placed on the third layer (second floor) scores eighteen points). The player with the largest total is the winner.

– Image by boardGOATS

Everything started reasonably well with some low numbers to start, including the zero, to help players build a base. The first nine came out in time for most people to have built a base to place it on, but it was after this that it all started to go wrong. Everyone seemed to struggle to fit the numbers coming out anywhere higher than the bottom layer, and even then players discovered they had blocked themselves from the best base places. Players were were struggling to get much on their second layer, let alone the third, so by the time the last two numbers were drawn (six and one), most people had barely managed a third layer.

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The one came out and was generally placed on top for a whopping three points for most and then the six could only go on the second layer. Everyone felt they just hadn’t managed things very that well this time—all except Black that is. He had been quietly getting on with things in the corner, building his third layer and a final fourth layer for his last number. The end result was that Black ended up with a score that was one of the group’s highest ever for this game and nearly twice that of second place Teal with Green not too far behind in third. With that done, it was time to decide who would play what.

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Most people seemed to want to give the “Feature Game“, Flamecraft a go. That was OK, as we had two copies of that available, but the question was what the third game might be. Green failed to find any takers for Terraforming Mars, so in the end Pine and Teal joined him giving the Pennsylvania map for Ticket to Ride a go. The Pennsylvania map is part of Map Collection Volume 5 and is the reverse side to the United Kingdom board. All the Ticket to Ride games are built round the same basic idea: on their turn, players either take carriage cards from the market or use carriage cards to pay to place trains on the map connecting cities together. Players score points for placing pieces on the map and for completing tickets (connecting two places on the board).

Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 5 – United Kingdom & Pennsylvania

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Each map has special rules and or mechanisms that are unique to it. In the case of the Pennsylvania map, this is the ability to acquire Shares. Each time a player completes a route, they claim a Share token for one of the companies depicted next to that route. At the end of the game, whoever holds the most Shares in each company receives points. The trio entered into the game without much thought of how it might be best played, so started out doing their best to complete tickets, with the Shares just an added bonus. Pine was the first to place a train, from Johnstown to Altoona, while Green and Teal continued to collect cards. Teal was second to place trains, a long route on the eastern side from New York to Philadelphia and Green was a little later in the north west.

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There wasn’t much else going on except card collecting, and there didn’t seem to be any Locomotive cards in the deck. When Pine extended his single train westwards to Pittsburg, there was a groan from Green—he had just been unable to get the colours he needed for the same track and now had to go the long way round. Adding to Green’s woes, Teal then took the three train route in from Towanda to Scranton, that he’d wanted for his two point ticket. Annoyingly, it didn’t have a specified colour, so he could have placed something there almost any time, but had been concentrating on getting the colours for the routes into Johnstown for his bigger value ticket.

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When Pine then claimed the final entry into Johnstown to completely block Green out, he was convinced his game was over, with two failed tickets before it was even half way. With a handful of train cards and no-where else to go, Green was the first to take new tickets, keeping just one. After placing trains along the northern edge of the state and into Canada, Green had another go at taking tickets, this time keeping two. With there being a big fifteen point bonus for the most completed tickets and no bonus for longest continuous string of train pieces, this version of Ticket to Ride encouraged everyone to place trains on almost any route.

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And this was without the Shares—everyone had been been quietly collecting them. Pine seemed to be going for a lot of the highest value, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, although that was mostly because he kept forgetting he had them. Teal was collecting a variety, but was the first to take Shares in a lot of the lower value companies (which had fewer Shares available). In fact he was so entranced with the share collecting, he was placing his trains on routes to collect shares and forgetting about his ticket completion, which was to be his downfall.

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Pine brought the game to a close with just two trains left leaving Green and Teal to place one more two train route each, though Pine was unable to place any more trains for one last Share. Not terribly surprisingly, Pine eschewed Teal’s suggestion of taking tickets. He’d taken some earlier and although in this game players get four tickets and only need to keep one, he still felt they looked awfully difficult to do. Plus with trains all over the board, it seemed very unlikely that a route may have already been completed, much more so than in some of the other versions of the game where it sometimes feels like it is worth a shot.

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The final scoring was to prove interesting: scores for just placing train pieces on the board were all relatively close. Everyone had to get their fingers and toes out to score the Shares, but in the end found the scores were all very close on these as well, even though everyone had had different approaches towards them. It was the tickets that were to be the deciding factor. As mentioned, Teal had largely forgotten about his routes, and although he had managed two of them, the last was incomplete and counted against him, giving him a ticket score in single digits. Pine had completed four tickets with most of them being good scorers. Green had also managed to complete four tickets, but this score was off-set by his two failures from the early part of the game.

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The tie for the most ticket bonus was “friendly” so they both scored it, but those failed tickets cost Green a total of around forty points, roughly Pine’s winning margin. As the group packed away, they discussed the Pennsylvania map and agreed it was quite good. Although the Shares score was fairly even, the fact that the bonus was for tickets and not the longest continuous set of trains, meant everyone tended to build all over the board rather than focusing on a connected set. The feeling was that playing again people might well go for even more of the short routes to gain more Shares, rather than the long high scoring routes—food for thought from a very worthy Ticket to Ride expansion.

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By this time it was nearly 10pm, but Teal wanted to try out the cooperative game, The Lost Expedition. The box suggested thirty to fifty minutes, but Teal assured the group that it was unlikely to take that long and everyone would probably die fairly quickly. He had played it solo a few times and always died, so was keen to try it with a team. The idea of the game is that they take the role of a team of three in search of the lost legendary explorer, Percy Fawcett. The game has really nice artwork a little reminiscent of Tin Tin style and large, easy to read cards. Teal explained the rules, but it wasn’t until play started that Green and Pine really understood how it worked and it wasn’t really that difficult.

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Each player started with a hand of four cards and took it in turns to lay one forming a route, with the numbered cards increasing in value. This was creating a path for the explorers to travel, with some loses and some benefits, and several cards which also allowed them to skip or swap other cards on the track. This meant that if there was a particularly bad card the players could try and place it after one that allowed following cards to be skipped, and therefore not have to deal with it at all. In the first “Morning” round, the group each played two cards from their hand. Once that was done, they then started down the path, deciding what to do with each one.

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There were usually several choices: some had compulsory things to do, others were optional. For example, for the Panther card the group had to decide on whether to use one of the three bullets the team start the expedition with (leading Pine to comment on how stupid it was to enter a several day jungle adventure with only three bullets!) in order to gain three food, or to lose a health token to skip over the card. Once the first path was completed, the group progressed onto the next part, the “evening”, building a path from the remaining cards in the order of placement (the face value on the card was irrelevant now).

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Fortunately, the group had a couple of skips and swaps (allowing them to switch the position of two cards on the path), and by the end they had taken several steps on the main route through the jungle towards their goal. The group had taken a few health hits along with the way, but their three characters still seemed to have at least two or three of their initial four health points remaining. The next day everyone again started with four cards and by the end of the morning phase the team were only two steps from the goal, but their health was beginning to look a little poor. With the evening placements the group somehow managed to make those final two steps with the first two cards of the path before anything bad happened.

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The team had beaten the game, however, it was with the easy setting which has only seven spaces on the main route through the jungle—the standard game has nine! Nevertheless, Teal was pleased to have finally beaten the game and Green and Pine had enjoyed it too. It is a clever little co-operative game that really encourages discussion and doesn’t let one player dominate. With the hand of cards it also provided an element of individual game play and decision making, further preventing the “alpha gamer” problem that often blights cooperative games. As a result, this game might well appeal to those who do not normally enjoy them and this one could well get another outing.

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Meanwhile, the other two tables were playing the “Feature Game“, Flamecraft. This is a game where players take the role of Flamekeepers, gathering items, placing dragons and casting enchantments to enhance the Shops of the town with the aim of finishing the game with the most Reputation points. A sort of worker-placement game, players take it in turns to firstly move their dragon to one of the Shops and then either Gather resources from it and optionally play a dragon into the Shop, or spend resources to Enchant or upgrade it so it provides more resources. This sounds very simple and not terribly exciting, but the interplay between the actions on the dragon cards and the large pile of available Shops is what makes the game interesting.

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When a player Gathers resources they can also activate or “Flame” one dragon and the special ability for the Shop (if it has one). In contrast, a player that Enchants a Shop, they can activate all the dragons in the Shop, but cannot activate any special ability associate with the store. There are six different types of Artisan Dragon and, although every card has a unique name and artwork, the actions are the same for any one type. For example, all Diamond Dragons allow the active player to take three gems from the supply, and all Bread Dragons allow them to take another Artisan Dragon card from the market or face down deck.

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Players get Reputation points for Enchanting Shops: they pay resources to buy one of the face up cards from the Enchantment market and add it to the Shop they are at which must match the Resource type. There are other ways of getting Reputation though. For example activating a Plant dragon allows a player to gift another person any resource and in return get two Reputation points. Some of the Shops also give Reputation points, but perhaps one of the best source is through Fancy Dragons. These are special dragons which are effectively Goal cards.

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Players start the game with two Fancy dragons and choose one to keep and add to their hand. These come in two types—day and night. Daytime Fancy dragons (marked with a sun) can be completed at any point during the player’s turn and give points in exchange for Resources or manipulating the game so certain conditions are met. In contrast, nighttime Fancy dragons are evaluated at the end of the game giving points, for example, for being the player with the most of one Resource or for each Resource of which you have an odd number.

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Both groups began with the slightly simpler, purple enchantment deck and without the special helper cards (which are an optional addition to the game that provide a one-time special ability to each player). Just as Byzantium, Ivory and Blue were about to start, Pink rocked up and joined the game so after the set up had been adjusted and the rules were explained they got going. Blue started by collecting Resources. On the first play, Flamecraft has a tendency to feel a little bit aimless, but as soon as the special (non-start) Shops started to come out, things get a little more interesting. Although there are only six different types of Artisan dragons, the interplay between them and the Shop powers is much more interesting than it seems at first glance.

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Ivory was quick to get a feel for things and soon scored some points, as was Byzantium, who was the only one around the first table that had played it before. Pink and Blue were a little slower to get off the ground, but soon started to improve their Reputation as well. There was a bit of a rules glitch towards the end when they realised they had forgotten to put out at least one new Shop, but otherwise play proceeded very smoothly to the end of the game. None of the Shops with the wild icon came out, but there was an awful lot of iron available from early in the game.

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There was also a bit of a general shortage of Bread dragons, which is significant as activating them allows players to take another Artisan dragon card, and the few that were played were moved all over the board by people playing Potion dragons. It was a close game though with lots of to-ing and fro-ing, but when Blue had the chance, she triggered the end of the game by taking the last of the Artisan dragons, giving everyone one last turn which they tried to use to their best advantage. Blue just got her nose in front with Ivory a point behind, but there were still nighttime Fancy dragons to add on and points from dragongeld too.

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Unfortunately for Ivory, his extras exactly matched Blue’s so her single point lead remained, with Byzantium taking third. The second Flamecraft group were slightly slower to get started and were still very much underway with both the Ticket to Ride/Lost Expedition and first Flamecraft groups finished. Pine, Teal and Ivory headed home, so while the second Flamecraft group finished and Byzantium watched, Pink, Green and Blue played a quick game of the filler, No Thanks!. This is one of our old favourites and is very simple with players either taking the face up card on their turn or paying a chip to pass the problem on to the next player.

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The player with the lowest face up total wins, so eyebrows were raised when Green started collecting cards in the thirties. If players get a run, only the lowest of the set count to their final score, but since nine of the thirty-four cards have been removed from the deck it is dangerous to bank on building long runs. Pink picked up the four as almost the first card of the game, and managed to build quite a long run over the course of the game. All was going well until he ran out of chips and was forced to take cards he didn’t want. This also screwed up Green’s plans as he wasn’t able to make the most of his high value cards and force Pink and Blue to give him chips.

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Worse, Pink took a couple of cards Green really wanted. Blue, who started collecting cards in the high teens extended her run into the low twenties. The final card she needed, the seventeen was the final card in the deck and she snaffled it at her first chance to end the game and give her a run from fifteen to twenty-one. After a couple of recounts, Pink and Green finished in a tie with a massive sixty-nine points, more than twice Blue’s winning score.

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The second game of Flamecraft was just coming to an end, but unfortunately, they had a slight rules malfunction and were playing that emptying either the Fancy dragon or Enchantment deck triggered the endgame, when it is the Artisan dragon or Enchantment deck according to the rules as written. Usually, it is Blue that makes these sort of rules errors, so despite having read the rules at least three times in the last few hours, she panicked and checked them yet again, just in case. The second group had a shortage of Bread dragons as well, though for a slightly different reason.

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The selection of Artisan dragons in the face up market was almost entirely “Toast” for most of the game—Black shuffled so they blamed him. This meant players spent most of the game taking Artisan dragons blind from the top of the face down draw deck. As a result, players didn’t have Bread dragons in hand, so only a couple of Bread dragons were placed in Shops and they just got pulled from pillar to post for the whole game. The Shop shuffling was slightly better though and there were some that came out that were new Plum and Jade (who had both played before), which was nice. The game was also close, with Jade taking victory by a single point from Plum with Purple taking third a few points behind.

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Learning outcome: Even dragons like a nice sandwich.

Next Meeting, 7th February 2023

Our next meeting will be Tuesday 7^th February 2023. As usual, we will start playing shorter games from 7.30pm as people arrive, until 8pm when we will start something a little longer. The pub will be serving food and, for those who want to eat, the table is booked from 6.45pm.

This week, the “Feature Game” will be Flamecraft (review; overview video; rules), a game where players take the role of Flamekeepers, gathering items, placing dragons and casting enchantments to enhance the shops of the town.

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Speaking of dragons…

The villagers down at The Jockey all looked very upset, so Jeff asked why people looked so sad.

“There is a huge dragon at the top of White Horse Hill. Every week, it comes down and eats one of our virgin girls,” one of the villagers replied.

Nobody was convinced, but Jeff promised to do what he could to help.

Three weeks later, the dragon starved to death.

24th January 2023

Blue and Pink were first to put in an appearance and availed themselves of the burger offerings at the Jockey before everyone else began to arrive. Ivory turned up cradling his enormous copy of the Collectors’ Edition of Everdell, complete with its Bellfaire expansion (as well as pretty much everything else available). And from then on, it was a matter of deciding who was going to play what. As Ivory began building the Evertree, Green commented that he’d really enjoyed playing it last time and would like to play it again, but wanted to give everyone else the opportunity. Everyone else similarly followed this gentlemanly gesture, but in the end Ivory took first Teal, then Green and finally Purple to the end of the table and started the mammoth task of unpacking.

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As they began setting up, the other four began deciding what to play. After suggestions that largely fell on deaf ears, Blue eventually began unpacking World’s Fair 1893. This is a clever little game that integrates area majority and set collecting mechanics. The idea is that players choose a segment of the board and place a population marker in it before taking all the cards in that section. Three cards are then added to the board, with the first added to the section cards have just been taken from and one each added to the next two segments. Cards come in three types: Character Cards, Midway Tickets and Exhibit Cards.

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Character cards can be used to move cubes about or add extra cubes and are played by the active player between placing their token and taking the cards from that section. When the Ferris wheel car has travelled all the way round there is an interim scoring stage. Midway tickets are exchanged for one point, with the player who has the most earning bonus points. Exhibit Cards are exchanged for tokens: each of the five segments of the board are evaluated and the player with the most population tokens gains a couple of bonus points and the opportunity to trade up to three exhibit cards for matching coloured tokens. The player who comes second also gets points and can exchange fewer Exhibit Cards for tokens.

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The tokens are combined into sets at the end of the game with the larger sets worth more points; sets containing all five different coloured tokens are worth fifteen points, with sets of four worth ten, and three, two and one worth six, three and one point respectively. Played over the three rounds, the winner is the player with the most points at the end of the game. Blue didn’t do a great job of explaining the point of tokens, so in the first round, Lime focused on collecting Midway Tickets, lots and lots of Midway Tickets taking lots of points and the bonus too.

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Pink, on the other hand, had played it before and better understood the relationship between Exhibit Cards, Tokens and points at the end of the game. That said, he seemed to have a bit of a mental block on how to use the his character cards (after placing a population token, but before taking cards). Bertha Palmer seemed to cause a particular problem and her function had to be explained at least three times before the message got through. Through the second and third round, Lime continued to collect Midway Tickets while Blue, Pink and Pine tried to manipulate the majorities in the areas for which they wanted tokens for.

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Lime kept doing well in the green Agricultural region, but was unable to get the cards to match. This is the catch with the game: in order to obtain tokens in a specific colour, players need the majority of population markers in that region, but also need to gain Exhibit cards to match, which quite likely are only available from other segments. Pine commented that he thought this game should be played with ties cancelling each other out like in Las Vegas—funny, that that would have left him in pole position in several key areas that he needed…

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As the game came to an end, the question was whether anyone would have enough sets of tokens to catch Lime with his huge pile of coins from his Midway Tickets. It looked like Pink might make it with his two sets of five giving him thirty points, but he fell two points short. Blue however did slightly better with sets of five, four, three and two and finished with sixty-two points, five more than Lime. When Pine asked how Pink collected so many tokens, Pink’s response was, “Never underestimate the value of coming second…”

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Everdell was very much still underway and although time was marching on, there was still time to play something else. So a decision was made very quickly as Blue got out Les Aventuriers du Rail Express. “Les Aventuriers du Rail” is the french name for Ticket to Ride, and this “Express” version originally released only in French and Italian, was a “light” version of the game, positioned somewhere between the “City” editions (like New York, London, Amsterdam etc.) and the full sized games. Thus it plays quicker than the full sized game, but is longer than the City editions, and has a maximum of four players like the smaller games

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The basic principle of all the games is the same however: on their turn players either take two coloured carriage cards from the market, pay sets of cards to claim a route and place plastic pieces on the map, or draw tickets giving cities that players need to connect to score points. Each edition has its own special rules and this one has a shared ticket: London to Istanbul. The first player to connect these cities gains twenty points with the second getting fifteen and so on.

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Additionally, instead of Locomotive (Wild) Cards being included in the Carriage Card market, they are always available from a separate face up deck with players taking one card on their turn instead of two). It didn’t take long before the group had checked they had the right number of trains and had identified the special rules for this version of the game. Blue went first, but Pine was the first to place trains on the map, at which point everyone else realised they were going to have to go hard and fast to compete.

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Blue also placed an early train, but Pink opted for the “expert strategy” espoused by Black, to pick up tickets early. The idea is that knowing the destinations you need to connect early is an advantage, but this is offset of course, by the fact that it gives everyone else an extra turn to claim some of the routes you might need. This time, unbeknownst to the others, Pink got lucky with long overlapping routes and, as a result picked up another batch of tickets. Pine tried to follow the ticket strategy, but got less lucky.

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Blue thought the London to Istanbul ticket was quite a good option as it was almost zero risk since it wouldn’t cost her if she failed to complete it, it was also relatively complementary to her starting tickets. This strategy meant she had to go through the middle of Europe and, as a result, got caught up in the three-way punch-up with Lime and Pine centred on Strasbourg. Pine came off worst, but unquestionably, Pink came off best as he eschewed central Europe, instead focusing on taking the route to Warsaw via Berlin which also included two slightly more lucrative five car connections.

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Blue claimed the London to Istanbul route first and with it twenty points, followed by Lime who had completely forgotten about it in his tussle to make his other tickets. Blue was then left with a choice: pick up tickets or try to end the game quickly. Knowing Pink and Pine in particular had a lot of tickets to complete and with plastic trains beginning to run low, she opted for the latter. Unfortunately for her, Pink had already nearly finished his tickets and was able to complete his last one on his final turn. That just left the scoring, and it wasn’t really close with Pink finishing with eighty-two and Blue the best of the rest some fifteen points behind.

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On the next table, Ivory, Green, Teal and Purple played the “Feature Game“, the Bellfaire expansion to Everdell, the winner of the Golden GOAT just before Christmas. Everdell is a fairly simple game in principle, with players either placing a worker to collect resources or then using the resources to pay to play cards from their hand into their tableau. The game is very smooth to play, well balanced and has beautiful artwork. One of the things that makes it different to many other games is that when a player runs out of actions (or earlier if they choose), they can end their season and reclaim all workers and start again. This is important because some of the action spaces can only be occupied by one critter at any one time.

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The cards come in different types, but one of the key aspects is that critter cards can be played by paying their cost or as a bonus for playing the associated construction card. For example, if a player builds a Courthouse, they can play the Judge at the same time if they have it in their hand. Cards give players special powers, extra resources, actions and points at the end of the game. Each player’s tableau can only hold a maximum of fifteen cards; when a player cannot perform any more actions (or does not wish to) they pass and their tableau is completed. Everyone else carries on playing and the game continues until everyone has passed with the winner being the player with the most points.

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The Bellfaire expansion adds a little bit of variety to the game, in particular the Market, a Bonus for one of each card category, and a randomly selected Beauty Bonus for the most purple flower cards. The group also included the Extra! Extra! and Legends cards with the Corrin Evertail cards (from the Mistwood expansion). One of the joys of Everdell is selecting playing pieces. With sixteen different creature meeples to choose from there is something for everyone. Ivory was quick to nab the purple coloured Platypus, Teal selected grey Hedgehogs, Purple chose red Squirrels and Green wanted the green Lizards.

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On pulling out all the Lizards from the Box, Green declared that one of his meeples was disabled. It was missing the bottom half, its legs and its tail, poor thing! To give this one an easy ride green selected it for later use as part of the Autumn cache. As expected Ivory got off to a flying start. While Purple was the first to leave winter and head into spring, Green and Teal were not far behind. Ivory, however, seemed to be able to keep going in Winter for many turns after everyone else had left. He had been quite lucky with the card draw and was able to pair critters with his buildings to a much greater extent than everyone else.

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Teal noticed that Ivory had completed all the card categories and could claim the bonus tile, but he kept quiet and instead was the first to claim a bonus tile: for having three forest tags. A short while later Green also noticed that Ivory could claim the bonus, but he, perhaps due to silliness or perhaps innate honesty, did not keep quiet. Ivory had not noticed, so promptly claimed it on his next turn. No-one else was able to fulfill that requirement for quite some turns.

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The Bellfaire Market allows players to choose to either gain resources, or to trade them. When gaining resources, players choose one token, gain the resources and cards, then move that token to the “trade” side of the market. When trading, players pay resources and discard cards to gain three points and any two resources, before moving the token back to the “gain” side. This time, players used the market to collect initial resources, but once they had all been used, no-one seemed to show much interest in trading to bring them back into play. Trading did happen a couple of times later in the game, but no-one could really see the benefit of the trading versus collecting resources outright, especially since two of the randomly drawn extra forest spaces included the ability to trade cards or wood for “any” resource.

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The pattern of Purple going into the next season first and Ivory going last remained all the way through Spring and Summer. Ivory did slow down somewhat though, and did not enter Autumn much later than Teal and Green. By this time, most the group had managed to play at least one of their Legends cards and were beginning to use them to good effect. Green’s Ranger Strey Softpaw which enabled him to use two already used forest action spaces for one worker was generally remarked as a very useful legend card. Maybe that was how he was able to catch up a little, but one of the key challenges he struggled with was being able to get the Critter and Construction pairs.

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Once Autumn came round, it was time for the poor disabled lizard to play a part on Green’s behalf. That part was, to cries of being cruel, to go straight to the Cemetery so he could select a card to play for free—unfortunate critter! Although Ivory kept going longer than anyone, he already had all fifteen cards played, and found himself unable to do much else, even though he still had workers left. Purple finished early with a similar problem, although she was unable to afford any more cards even with gathering from her last worker.

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Eventually, everyone finished their final season and in the final scoring, Ivory scored big on the card totals. Green did quite well and finished a few points ahead of Teal, though Purple suffered as she had not been able to play as many cards. Ivory also scored well on other bonuses and Teal and Green were similarly matched with several bonuses, except that Teal managed to accrue more coins and score Journey points. As a result, Teal took second, though Ivory was way ahead of everyone else.

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Learning outcome: We’ll have to brush up the Everdell skills if we ever want a chance of beating Ivory in future.

Boardgames in the News: Dragons Play Paper Pop-up Games in the Den

Last week’s episode of Dragons’ Den featured the paper engineer, David Hawcock, looking to raise £40,000 for a 20% stake in his company.

– Image from hawcockbooks.co.uk

Hitherto, David Hawcock is perhaps best known for his gorgeous pop-up book that featured in the film Paddington 2, but last week, he showcased his new company, that makes pop-up playable board games. The first offering, the Pop-Up Chess Set consists of a Chess board made of paper that opens like a book and holds card Chess pieces that stay in place when the board is folded closed. While there many small, travel Chess sets, the pieces are often small and very fiddly to play with. In the Pop-Up Chess Sett, the pieces are essentially full-sized, making it easier both to manipulate them and to see the game evolve.

– Image from hawcockbooks.co.uk

Chess is not the only pop-up paper game David Hawcock has developed—he also presented Pop-Up Row of Four, which was clearly under development during the filming in “The Den”. This is clearly a very close relation to the well known game Connect Four. While it is often seen as bad form to publish a game that is so closely related to another, only the artwork, the written rules and the game name can be protected legally. Further, Connect Four is a mass-market game that has been around for many year and is itself a variant on Noughts and Crosses (aka Tic-Tak-Toe), which is very definitely public domain. These combined with the unique pop-up nature of this entirely paper offering mean it is more likely to be viewed in a positive light by the general public.

– Image from hawcockbooks.co.uk

The episode of Dragons’ Den featuring David Hawcock and his amazing pop-up board games is currently available on iPlayer.

– Image from hawcockbooks.co.uk