Boardgames in the News: HandyCon Games Theft

HandyCon is a board game convention that takes place, roughly quarterly, in Milton Keynes. Unlike other board gaming events like UK Games Expo and SPIEL, HandyCon is not a trade fair, but a convention where hundreds of people meet to play games together. While many people bring their own games, one of the highlights is the Games Library which included over five hundred games and expansions. The last event took place two weeks ago, 17^th-19^th January, but last Monday night while, he was playing football in Luton, the organiser, Paul Frohnsdorff-Harris had his car broken into and £700-800 of games stolen. As is often the case with theft, the replacement value is one thing, but more important is the sentimental value.

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The games were all from Paul’s collection but were used as part of the HandyCon Games Library, and therefore almost all have HandyCon stickers on the lid. The missing games comprise a wide variety, everything from classics like Dominion, Takenoko and 7 Wonders to new games like SETI, Shackleton Base, and Arcs. There are also some rarities, like one of the first copies of Misheard Lyrics which was the first published game credited to Paul Frohnsdorff-Harris himself. This morning the theft featured on BBC Beds Herts & Bucks Radio with an accompanying article on the BBC News website. Although it is unlikely, it would be great if gamers could find these games and reunite them with their owner (and maybe even catch the thief in the process).

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Next Meeting, 21st January 2025

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 21^st January 2025. 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 is doing food, and the table is booked from 6.30pm for those that would like to eat first.

In a change to previous plans, this week, the “Feature Game” will be Heat: Pedal to the Metal (rules, review, how to play video), which is a car racing game in a similar vein to other popular games in the group like Flamme Rouge and Downforce.

– Image by BGG contributor danimonto

And speaking of racing…

Joe and Jeff chatting about the new F1 season.

Jeff commented that he’d been to visit the Williams Team in Grove.

“I had a great time,” he said, “And I made lots of useful suggestions that they sounded really interested in.”

“What were they then?” asked Joe.

“Well,” continued Jeff, “I suggested they could remove a wig, some lipstick and a couple of chicken fillets off the wings.”

Joe looked puzzled, “How would that help?”

Jeff answered, “I think it would significantly reduce the drag…”

7th January 2025

Blue and Pink were early for a change and had mostly finished their supper when everyone else arrived. The “Feature Game” was to be Concordia Venus which is a reimplementation of Concordia, but can also be played with an upgrade-expansion to the original game. Concordia is a strategy game of economic development in Roman times and although the rules are relatively simple, the game has a lot of depth. Plum had been super-keen to play this, and, as it turned out, there were several others who were also very keen to give it a go, so as a result, there were soon two games underway.

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The first of these involved Plum, Sapphire and Teal, playing with Burgundy‘s copy of the original Concordia with the Venus expansion. This was one of Burgundy‘s favourite games and many people in the group fondly remember being taught it by him. Game play is super-simple: each player has a hand of cards, so on their turn, they play one and do what it says. And that is all there is to it. Players start with a hand of seven Personality Cards which provide a simple array of actions: move Colonists and build, produce Resources, trade Resources, use another player’s most recently played Card, buy more Cards, recycle their Card deck.

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Players use their Consul card to buy more Personality Cards during the game. As well as providing more and increasingly powerful options, they are also key to scoring. Each card is related to an ancient god who rewards its owner with victory points according to different scoring criteria. This reward is then multiplied by the number of Cards the player has that are dedicated to that god. For example, Saturnus rewards players for having buildings in different provinces. If a player has built in seven different provinces and has four cards dedicated to Saturnus, they receive twenty-eight points.

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The game ends either after a player purchases the last card from the display, or after one player builds their fifteenth house after which everyone else completes their final turn before scoring. One of the things that is very clever about the game is how much variety is achieved from very little variation. Players all begin with the same starting cards and the same resources; the only change from game to game is the order the Cards appear in the market and the distribution of City Resource tiles at the start of the game which dictate which cities produce what. With these small variations the game can change hugely as players fight to control the area that gives the most lucrative cities during the game and when combined with their Cards to give the most points.

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There is even more variation to be had with alternative maps, but the reimplementation of Concordia, Venus, introduces an eighth Card to the starting hand (the Magister, which allows a player to repeat their previous action), the addition of the Minerva scoring Cards (which give players extra points for each city of the type indicated by the specialist), as well as three new maps (Cyprus, Hellas and Ionium). These can also be added to the base game using a combination of the Venus expansion and the Balearica / Cyprus expansion; this was was the version Plum, Sapphire and Teal played, which meant they started by sorting out what they needed to play the game.

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The group chose to use the Ionium map from the Venus expansion as it plays well with three. Sapphire had a positively storming game—he was perhaps helped by the fact that Teal and Plum started the game by heading east leaving Sapphire to explore the west unopposed, but he still had to make it work for him. And make it work he did, with two turns in which he claimed four cities. Later in the game, he made good use of his Diplomat Card to copy the Consul Plum had used. Sapphire had a couple of Provinces to himself so Prefecting in those areas helped only him. Teal and Plum had both built in a couple of Cloth-rich areas, but Plum wasn’t always able to make the best of hers and on two occasions her storage are was full when she could have received goods.

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In the end game scoring, Sapphire led in the Jupiter, Saturn and Venus scoring and jointly in the Mars scoring. To top that, he also triggered the end of the game giving him the Concordia Card (and seven points) as well as getting fifteen points for the Minerva scoring with his Smith card. As a result, he finished with a hundred and twenty-nine points, sixteen more than Teal who finished a very creditable third in a game where it is notoriously hard to to well in the first game. Meanwhile, Black and Byzantium were leading another game of Concordia, with Purple and Cobalt.

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As Cobalt was new to the game, this group played with the classic Imperium map and included the intermediate individual scoring for each player when they played their Tribune card for the first time. Black spread out over the board while Purple and Byzantium were more restrained, with Byzantium only spreading his tentacles at the end of the game Cobalt collected a lot of Cards, although Byzantium had most of the Colonist Cards. Despite the differences in approach, this game was really tight, so much so that Black and Byzantium tied for victory on one hundred and forty-nine points with Cobalt some fifteen points behind.

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As is always the case when there is a tie, there was a rummage in the rule book for a tie-break. In this case, the tie is won by the player owning the Præfectus Magnus Card, or by the tied player who would receive him next in the course of the game. This nominally went to Black, but it was agreed this was a rubbish tie-break rule as players can’t plan for this and just get given it when someone else plays their Prefect Card. While all this harmony was on-going, Jade was introducing Ivory to Fromage, with the help of Blue and Pink who had both played it once before elsewhere. This is a really cool worker placement game where the actions have a time component to them.

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This sort of thing is not new—Tzolk’in does something similar where players place workers on wheels which are turned at the end of each round and, the longer the workers stay, the more powerful the action they can do. In the case of Fromage, this is sort of reversed in that players do the action and, if they do a more powerful action, then their workers stay on the board for longer. The peril here is that, whereas in Tzolk’in players can always do a less powerful action and take workers off early if they have to, in Fromage players only have four workers and it is very easy to end up with all of them sat on the board leaving people unable to do anything at all. Fromage has proved popular since its release just before Christmas, and as a result, it is on its second Tuesday outing already.

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The actions are tied up in four “mini-games” which players take it in turns to participate in. It has proven quite a popular little game because once everyone knows how to play, there is relatively little down time and despite playing different areas at different times, quite a lot of interaction. Players simultaneously choose where to place their workers, in their quadrant of the board, and once everyone is done, the board is turned and then players retrieve any workers they can and then place workers on their next quadrant. Players score points for occupying tables in the Bistro quadrant, holding the majority in regions in the Villes quadrant, filling different tables in the Fromagerie quadrant, occupying contiguous areas in the Festival quadrant, and for fulfilling Orders.

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This time, the game was very close, especially between Ivory and Pink, despite there being a lot of different strategies at play. Pink, for example, scored very heavily for the Bistro getting forty-five points (more than half his total) from the one location. In contrast, Blue scored thirty points for her contracts and nineteen from the Fromagerie, but very little anywhere else, while Ivory and Jade scored much more evenly in the different categories. There was only one point between Pink and Ivory in the final reckoning, however, with Pink’s eighty-one just giving him victory. With the rest of the group remembering Burgundy while playing Concordia, it seemed only fitting that this group should move on to another of Burgundy’s favourites: Splendor.

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Burgundy was almost unbeatable at Splendor and at one point had a two-year unbeaten run on Tuesdays—so much so that others in the group would choose to play Splendor when he was occupied elsewhere, just to break the monotony! The game is quite simple: on their turn, players either take Gem-stone chips, or use them to buy Cards. The Cards act as a perpetual source of Gems. Thus, the aim of the game is to build a robust engine to enable players to buy the more expensive Cards that also give points, or allow players to collect Noble tiles for having sets of Cards associated with particular combinations of Gems. This was another close game with Jade looking like he was going to end the game for a couple of rounds and Blue and Ivory looking for a couple of large turns.

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That was until Pink did it for him by ending his turn with sixteen points and as he was last in the round, that meant nobody else got another turn. So Jade finished second with fourteen with Blue in third. Ivory decided to call it a night there, leaving Blue, Pink and Jade to play one last game, which ended up being Hiroba. This is a sort of area-control filler game, where players take it in turns to place one of their nine Stones in the nine-by-nine grid following some simple, Sudoku-like rules. Each Stone is numbered one to nine, but they are numbered on both sides such that the total adds up to ten.

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After players have placed their first Stone, others must be placed in the same row or column as one they have already placed, while ensuring that none of the Stones in any row, column or Garden has the same number. There are typically two Gardens on each of the nine, three-by-three tiles that make up the board and players are trying to win control of them. At the end of the game, the player with the highest total face value in each Garden will score points equal to the total size of that Garden. However, for each Koi Pond on the board, a “times two” token is awarded to the player with the lowest value orthogonally adjacent pebble.

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Players who are awarded one of these place them in any empty square in any garden on the board, where it will double the points scored for that garden. Thus, while players want to place the highest value stones to win control of Gardens this is tensioned by the desire to place low value Stones near Ponds in order to gain the multipliers and get a good score. This game was less close than the previous ones, well—it was close for second place, but Blue who had finally woken up manged to take a couple of large areas and winning a lot of “times two” multipliers, she finished with an unassailable total of thirty-seven points. This was some twelve more than Pink who won the battle for second.

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Learning Outcome: Burgundy had great taste in games.

boardGOATS – 1000 Posts

The idea of our little website, boardGOATS.org, was to create a medium to advertise up-coming games nights as well as log the games played. It has been around as long as the group, over twelve years now, and has just passed one thousand posts. Most of these posts are games-night related, but our series of news articles about games has also proved very popular further afield.

Some statistics…

The site has 1,002 posts (this will be 1,003).
It is not a high traffic site, but we have had 39,101 visitors with 58,054 views with 83 email subscribers.
The most popular links on our site are those to the Board Game Geek website (boardgamegeek.com) with 3,698 clicks. Internal links come next with 1,174 clicks.
16% of page views happen on a Monday and the most popular time of day to visit the site is around 7-8pm.
The most popular day was May 10^th 2016 thanks largely to a post about a record breaking Carcassonne game a few days earlier.
The most popular post was published in March 2019 and discussed counterfeiting of board games, and has nearly 6,000 views. Some eighteen months later, this was followed by a case study and another article covering a specific retailer.
Visits peaked between November 2020 and January 2021, probably due to increased interest in board games as a result of the global pandemic and people looking for ideas for Christmas games. In those three months the site was viewed nearly four thousand times.
The most popular category of post is “News” and the most popular tags are Terraforming Mars, Carcassonne and Wingspan, but the majority of our local gamers get the information by email through subscription—if you would like to receive emails through this channel and would prefer not to create a WordPress account, let us know through the contact form/email and we can add you manually.

We would like to thank everyone who has enjoyed reading.

Next Meeting, 7th January 2025

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 7^th January 2025. 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 is doing food, and the table is booked from 6.30pm for those that would like to eat first.

This week, the “Feature Game” will be Concordia Venus (rules, review, how to play video), which is a reimplementation of Concordia (and can also be played with an upgrade-expansion to the original game). Concordia is a strategy game of economic development in Roman times. Although the rules are relatively simple, the game is quite complex.

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And speaking of Venus…

Joe and Jeff were on a camping trip. After a hearty meal and a good bottle of wine, they settled down for the night.

Suddenly, in the middle of the night, Joe woke up and, shaking his pal awake too asked Jeff “What do you see?”

Rubbing his sleepy eyes, Jeff replied, “I see millions and millions of stars.”
Joe sighed, “Yes… and what do you conclude from that?”

Jeff thought for a moment and then answered, “Well, temporally I conclude it is about 03:30 am, astrologically I conclude that Venus is showing in the sign of Aquarius, astronomically I conclude that we are on a planet, orbiting the sun in a spiral arm of our galaxy, and religiously I conclude that God wants to use this this splendour to show us that we are but a small, insignificant speck of dust in the infinite grace of His creation. Is that what you mean?”

Joe answered, “No… I think somebody stole our tent.”

31st December 2024

Black and Purple were the first to arrive and for once in a way, Blue and Pink were ready with pigs in blankets already in the oven and all the other food as prepared as it could be. They still had to move the table and set up PitchCar though, a task which Black and Purple went at with a will. By the time Pine arrived, the track was built and the table was mostly laid with crudites, crisps, dips, and a cheese and pineapple hedgehog, with just cheesy mushrooms, pigs in blankets and devils on horseback to come. Purple started and began with a superb flick to take an early lead, somewhat in contrast to black who shot up the jump (from the first extension) and off the track.

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Purple carried on with her quality flicking, while Black continued jumping off the track and/or landing upside down (costing him stroke and thus returning him to the start line each time). Eventually, Purple got a little stuck, and Black finally managed to remain rubber-side down for a few flicks, as Pink began an ominous move through the field, eventually taking the lead. Everyone seemed to find the fork-in-the-road (back to back “Upsilons“) challenging, variously getting stuck in the corners or ending up more in the wrong lane than the right one. Blue who started last also began to progress through the field though she struggled with the narrow sections on the inner loop (from the No Limit extension), on one occasion ending up with her car sitting in a dish of raw vegetable sticks.

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She made it into second place eventually though and starting to chase down Pink, however, he had a substantial lead and shot round the fast section of the course to complete his first lap well in front. As the enchiladas weren’t ready though, the group decided to push on for a second lap. By this time Pink was in front with Blue in second. Towards the end of the first lap, Black who had been some way behind was just starting to catch Purple and Pine who, hitherto, had been fighting it out for third. As the cars rocketed into the second lap, Purple tried to rocket her car into orbit off the bridge, ceding third place to Pine and then fourth place to Black in the process.

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It remained mostly tight for the first half of the second lap, however, with Black, Pine and Purple generally getting in each other’s way, allowing Pink to increase his lead and Blue, who had been caught up, eventually pulled clear in second place. Every now and then Purple managed to pull out a truly fantastic flick, but then got stuck again, while the others were generally a little more consistent and edged in front. Coming out of the inner loop, Pink shot onto the fat section chased by Blue, who managed to catch and bumper-shunt him, but alas, not overtake, as he cruised over the line in first. Blue followed leaving what looked like a tight race for third until Black broke free.

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In the end, Black was some way clear in third before Pine eventually broke free from his race-long tussle with Purple. Purple finished much as she started with some spectacular long, fast flicks, interjected with a couple of “off-track incidents”, as the track was pulled up just behind her because supper was ready. After veggie and non-veggie enchiladas followed by Traffic-Light jellies, Pink excitedly got out his Christmas present: Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West. This is an epic game based on the original Ticket to Ride game play, but where the cards and boards are changed during the twelve game campaign. Pink had eyed it up at Essen in 2023, but the box size and price, which are both also epic had put him off getting it. Santa had been more generous however…

Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West

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The idea is that, in the usual Ticket to Ride way, players collect coloured train cards and spend them to place trains on the board with the aim of connecting the cities shown on their Tickets. Unlike the base game, players don’t score points instead they receive money when they complete certain tasks, like successfully completing Tickets at the end of the game, but also when some Event cards are drawn during the game. Spoiler alert—hover HERE to see details. After each game, players fill out a Bank Slip with their earnings and place it in their “Vault” so their winnings can be totaled at the end of the game.

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Playing with five, was always going to make the games tight, but the first game was still a bit of a baptism of fire. Nobody seemed happy, even Pine who picked up loads of money and lots of Tickets during the game, seemed to think he wasn’t doing well. Spoiler—hover HERE to see details. Blue was blocked at least three times trying to get from Knoxville to New Orleans and was beginning not to enjoy herself, so decided the best solution to all her problems was to end the game as quickly as possible. This she did quite successfully and fairly abruptly leaving Pink with one incomplete Ticket worth eleven dollars, and Pine with two worth a total of fifteen!

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The night was still young, and it was some time before midnight, so everyone filled in their Bank Slip and the first “Pause” card read. Spoiler—hover HERE to see details. With this finally resolved, the group began their second game. This time, the battleground was along the eastern seaboard, specifically between the large cities of Boston, New York and Philadelphia. First one player would claim one of the three tracks, then the next player would panic and claim one before the third was also claimed. In this way, it took barely three rounds for all nine spaces to go. Pine again took more Tickets, as did Pink and Black.

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In the second game, Black took victory, with Blue in second. Spoiler—hover HERE to see details. By this time New Year had been and gone, and although Blue pointed out midnight with plenty of advanced warning, everyone was far too engrossed in the game to give more than a cursory Happy New Year toast (most with empty glasses!), before continuing to play. There was quite a lot of chit-chat as players set things up for the next game and munched Lebkuchen while Blue put together “Doggy Bags” of enchiladas to make sure nobody starved in the coming cold snap. With that, and a formal bidding farewell to 2024 and hello to 2025, Pine, Purple and Black headed out into the dark night.

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Learning outcome: Small parties can be as much fun as large ones.

23rd December 2024

Being an extraordinary Monday meeting and only two days before Christmas, we didn’t really know who or what to expect, so didn’t have a “Feature Game” planned. In the event, almost everyone expected turned up and we played some of our all-time favourite games. Pink was first out of the traps, and persuaded Black, Lime and Pine to join him in a game of his favourite race game, Downforce. This is a fun car racing game where players bet on cars as well as try to win the race. What makes it special is that players play cards, but, whereas in other race games players can only influence their own car, in Downforce, the cards can be used to play anything from only the player’s own card, to every car on the track (depending on the card).

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This time, the group played with the Aloha Sands track from the Wild Ride expansion which features water jumps. Cars can use these ramps if they are moving fast enough which lets players pass other cars and move more efficiently. Thus, hand management to take full advantage of the different speed cards is crucial. The game begins with an auction of cars. This is after players have been dealt their hand of cards, and this time, the blue car was popular and went to “determined” Lime, who outbid “cunning” Pink. With six cars on the grid, and four players, there is the possibility of some getting more than one vehicle—although one car (green) went unclaimed, Lime ended up with orange as a second.

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The Aloha Sands only has two betting lines, and the group chose to use the first two featuring on the betting variant score sheet. In this “odds” variant, players get better “odds” for a car that is at placed less well than one that is currently winning. The red car, owned by Pine took an early lead, but by the time the cars made it to the second (and final) betting line, it had dropped to third. Pink had a fist full of cards that favoured to the blue car, and although he had been outbid for it, he had decided to push it along anyhow and bet on it. As a result, with both Lime and Pink favouring it, the blue car moved through the field (aided by some double jumps) and crossed the finishing line first.

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Second place went to Black’s little black car with Pine’s red roadster completing the podium. Betting and car costs have a huge impact on the final scores though, as can the initial outlay for the vehicle. In this case, despite paying for two cars at the start, the fact that Lime owned the winning car and had also bet on it, meant he had an unassailable twenty-one million dollars, eight million more than Pink in second place. With the race over, the quartet chose to move onto a more festive game, Jokkmokk—a cute little set collecting game that went down really well when it got its first outing last year.

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In this game, players move one of their two family members, the one furthest back, to an empty space and claim the associated card before resoling its effect and refilling the empty space. Some cards score points in the middle, others only at the end, so the sets of cards used can really change the game. As this was the second game, the group chose to use the “Second Game” set, featuring the Fika (a Swedish custom of enjoying a coffee and a treat with friends), Aurora Borealis, Snowflake, Patchwork, Mystery Box decks. Of these, the Snowflake cards scored during the game giving Black and early lead with fifteen points, five more than Pine in second.

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The mid-game points were chicken-feed compared to the end game scoring, however, with lots of points available for Fika and Patchwork scoring and for the face value of the cards themselves. The winner was Pine with a total of one hundred and twenty-eight, eight more than Pink in second and eighteen more than Black in third. Everyone had enjoyed the game so much, that when Lime inevitably suggested playing again, everyone else agreed. This time the group used the “Gift of Giving” set of cards, including the Donation, Bell, Sparkler, Snowflake, Mystery Box and Presents decks.

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The game followed a similar pattern to the first, with Black and leading at the midpoint with Pine in second and Pine taking overall victory. This time, Lime was the runner-up, however, with Black taking third again. Meanwhile, on the next table, Blue, Plum, Byzantium and Purple were playing Blue’s favourite game, Keyflower. This is it’s second outing of the year, but Plum and Byzantium had missed out last time. They had played it before, but had felt that it didn’t shine with two players and were keen to see how it played with more.

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Keyflower is an auction and worker placement, with elements of set collection and even network building. Although everyone had played it before, Blue went through the rules. The idea is that players use meeples to bid on tiles, but can also use them to activate tiles to gain their benefit (usually Resources, Skill tiles or the ability to move resources around their Village). At the end of each of the four rounds players add the tiles they have won to their Village and get any meeples back that were used to activate tiles in their own village.

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One of the key aspects of the game is the colour of the meeples, as players have to “follow” when bidding or activating a tile. As a result controlling the number of blue, red and yellow meeples they have is a key part of the game. More, green meeples, which are special and can only be acquired by activating specific tiles, can be really valuable. Blue had a Winter tile that gave points for having green meeples at the end of the game, so started bidding on the Peddlar which came out in Spring. Byzantium had other ideas, however, and outbid Blue. In fact, that was just the start of a tight game where there was a lot of competition for many tiles.

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Keyflower is a game that typically rewards players who keep their options open, but this time, Blue found her options quickly narrowed and ended up going for sets of three Skills tiles. This can be lucrative, but can also be difficult to make work, so like many things in Keyflower is a bit of a gamble and with all her eggs in the one basket, she had no choice but to ensure she won the Scribes tile by ensuring she went first in the final round and had a large pile of red meeples to back it up. Tension mounted as players fought for the tiles they needed. The Keythedral changed hands several times, and the Jeweller, the Village Hall and the Watermill were all strongly contested.

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In the final scoring, it was clear that the Scribes tiles made all the difference, with Blue finishing with eighty-six points, fifteen more than Byzantium in second with Plum taking third. As the tiles were packed away, there was some discussion about the game, with Plum and Byzantium commenting that the balance of tiles is less swingy in four-player Keyflower than with two While they were packing up, the second of two games on the next table was coming to an end. In the first of these, Jade led Sapphire and Cobalt in the hot-off-the-press game, Fromage, a worker placement game about cheese-making in France.

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This is a clever game with a “time” element, similar in feel to Tzolk’in. In both these games, workers left on the board for longer give more valuable actions, however, in Tzolk’in, players place their workers and the options become better the longer they stay on the board with players making the decision as to what they get when they remove workers from the board. Players can also only place workers or remove them, not both. In Fromage, there is more flexibility, and the action is carried out when the workers are placed and then remain on the board for longer for the more valuable actions.

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Game play is simultaneous, with all players placing their workers at the same time working on their quarter of the board. Once everyone has finished, the board is rotated, and any workers who have finished their spell on the board are returned to their owner to be placed again in the next round. Workers can stay on the board for one, two or three turns, so a key part of the game is planning and with only three workers, making sure that players don’t end up with all of them stuck on the board. This was another tight game with players scoring fairly evenly in the four areas of the board, the Bistro, Festival, Fromagerie and Ville.

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Cobalt just edged it on Fruit and Orders, however, giving him a four-point victory over Jade in second with Sapphire not far behind. There was just time for one last game and the choice was another recent popular game, Looot. This is a clever management game, using a double placement mechanism where Vikings conquer territory on the central player board, allowing players to gain resources, buildings and objective tiles while they build their village on their personal board using tiles from the common board to gain victory points. This was another tight game, especially between first and second place.

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It was backwards and forwards between Cobalt and Jade and finished with just two points between them. Once again though, Cobalt just had the edge, his hundred and six points just pushing Jade into second again. It had been a good night though and a fitting end to the evening, and the last meeting of the year at the pub. As the last Christmas cards were handed out and final Season’s Greetings shared, people headed off into the darkness and with just two sleeps till the big day.

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Learning outcome: You don’t have to play Festive games at Christmas to have fun.

10th December 2024

Everyone had already arrived and was waiting in anticipation when Blue and Pink arrived with piles of gamers crackers, Christmas tree decorations, party poppers, paper parcels, mince pies, festive cakes (with carrot meeples on top) and GOAT Award voting forms. Food quickly followed along with a volley of noise as people tried to pull their crackers and party poppers first so the contents didn’t land in their supper. As people munched, there was some discussion about the games played and voting forms were filled in. In the absence of Green, Pine kindly offered to act as returning officer and collate the statistics.

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While cake and mince meat parcels were shared round, toasts were offered by Lime to the organisers, and in the memory of Burgundy. He is much missed and will never be forgotten, but we always make a special point of remembering at this time of year, especially as the Un-Christmas Dinner was his last games night with us. The GOAT Awards were then announced. Moment of the Year was when Pine got the end game rule wrong for Tonga Bonga, so that Pink thought he’d won, but then didn’t. The GOAT Poo Prize for the least popular game of the year went to Ca$h ‘n Guns—not a game the group plays often and its only outing over the last year was at the New Year Party.

– Image by boardGOATS

Then it was time for the Golden GOAT. Previous winners were ruled out, but other contenders included Akropolis, Kavango, Flamme Rouge and Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails. The clear winner of the 2024 Golden GOAT Award, however, was Stamp Swap. There was much discussion about how this was the third winner from Stonemaier Games (after Tapestry last year and Wingspan in 2019) and how we should invite Jamey Stegmaier, to collect the award in person. Email correspondence over the following few days suggested that while it was unlikely he would be able to come to GOATS, he will be in the UK next year and just might make it as far as Oxford. In the meantime, he has highlighted the award on his website.

– Image by boardGOATS

With the festive business over, the group broke into three to play some games. Pink, Blue, Black and Jade began with the “Feature Game“, Courses De Rennes (aka Reindeer Races), a fun little game where players control a team of four reindeer, racing along four different tracks to try to get the highest-scoring tiles. On their turn, each player can either draw two cards (with a hand limit of seven) or play as many cards of the same type as they can to move one reindeer along one of the tracks. The cards are numbered and have suit that corresponds to one of the tracks (or are Elfy, and “wild”). If two and a three of Gifts is played, the player may move one of its reindeer along the Gift track.

– Image by boardGOATS

If a reindeer lands on the same space as another reindeer, it slides forward a space. If that is occupied too, it continues to slide. If, however, the owner cries “Thump!” as it lands, the reindeer slithers an extra space forward. The first reindeer to arrive at the end of a track claims the highest value token. The game ends when two of the tracks have run out of tokens. Pink too the first points, and with it a strong early lead. A few rounds later, Jade took the last token from one of the tracks and with it ended the game. He got very unimpressed looks from Black and Blue as he gifted victory to Pink, so once this was pointed out, Jade revised his move and play carried on.

– Image by boardGOATS

Ultimately, however, it didn’t really change things as Pink still took victory with twenty-two points. He was long way clear of Jade who won the tight fight for second with fifteen just one point ahead of Black who, in turn, took third by a single point. Everyone else was still playing, so the group looked for something else to play. Black had won a copy of Ticket to Ride: Paris in the raffle and, although it wasn’t very festive, it seemed appropriate to give it an outing. Some of the GOATS had played this mini-city variant of the popular train game earlier in the year when we marked the Olympics with sport and France themed games. However, none of the current quartet had been part of that group.

– Image by boardGOATS

The rules are much the same as all the others (take two cards from the market; play cards to place pieces on the map; collect Ticket cards to score points at the end), but like all the variants, Paris has a special rule. When players claim a red, white, or blue track, they get a card, when they get all three colours they get four “Tricolore” bonus points. When the game first came out, there had been comments about how this felt very bolted on, but in practice, it was much more interesting than it sounded. This time, the in game scoring was quite tight, though Blue, with her trains across the city centre got her nose in front and led by six points. Tickets can make a huge difference to scores though, as they can give a lot of points, both positive and negative.

– Image by boardGOATS

Black, Pink and Jade all picked up similar points for their completed Tickets (ten, eleven and eight respectively), though Jade was unlucky and unable to complete his last one. Blue, however, made good use of concurrent routes and scored a massive twenty-four points for hers giving her something of a landslide victory with a total of forty-six. It was much closer for second which went to Pink who finished with twenty-nine, two points ahead of Black. Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, Purple was leading Ivory, Plum and Byzantium in one of her favourite Christmas themed games, Christmas Tree.

– Image by boardGOATS

This is a fairly simple little card-drafting game played over thee rounds, where players are “decorating their Christmas Tree” with diamond-shaped cards, where players score points for the Objective cards everyone contributed to a central pool at the start of the round. This time, the group played from the advanced set of Objective cards (including all three levels) although the first round, the cards were all levels one and two. These gave one point for each blue or “nobbly” ornament, four points for each pair of ornaments of the same colour and shape arranged in a vertical pair and six points for three specific shapes in a given arrangement.

– Image by boardGOATS

The first round started off slowly with everyone looking to fulfill some of the Objectives—everyone was successful, but Plum and Byzantium got off to a better start. Plum placed her first Gingerbread man and then concentrated on placing vertical pairs although she only managed that once. In the second round the Objectives were from the more complicated sets, including six points for three specific colours in a given arrangement, six points for the same three shapes or colours in a set pattern, or eight points for four ornaments with the same point value arranged in two set formations. This time, Byzantium significantly out scored everyone with multiple objectives scored multiple times and, as a result, built a big lead.

– Image by boardGOATS

Plum used one of her Biscuits to move baubles around to make a row of four contain the three colours of glass bauble.and thus scored well, whereas Ivory was focusing on picking up high value Sweets and surrounding his Gingerbread men. The final set of Objectives included six points for a set arrangement of certain point values, eight points for four ornaments with the same point value arranged in a particular arrangement and five points for each row in which the total points of the glass were above the given amount. Finally, there were two points for each Gingerbread man, with bonuses of six and three points for the player with the most/second most Gingerbread men.

– Image by boardGOATS

In the third and final round, Byzantium again out scored everyone, scoring multiple times for the set arrangement of certain point values. At this point, Ivory was full committed to Sweets and Gingerbread men, especially knowing he was putting in the Gingerbread man Objective, which he scored well for. Plum and Purple also scored well in the final round, with Plum following a strategy similar to Byzantium, whereas was Purple was collecting sweets like Ivory. It looked like Byzantium was going to win by a large amount, as he was fifty points ahead of everyone else and was scoring more than anyone else for Lights and Baubles too.

– Image by boardGOATS

Ivory’s focus on surrounding his Gingerbread men gave him over fifty points and with more than thirty for his sweets he finished with one hundred and seventy one points, pipping Byzantium to victory by just two, with Plume in third some twenty points adrift. The puzzly nature of the the game had gone down well and with the Christmas theme everyone had enjoyed playing Christmas Tree. On the next table, the festive link was much more tenuous, however. Teal, Pine, Sapphire and Indigo had chosen 6 Nimmt!, because there was a twelve in it, representing the Twelve Days of Christmas (or perhaps they had just wanted to play the game and if you can’t play a daft party game at Christmas, when can you?).

– Image by boardGOATS

6 Nimmt! is a popular game with the group at any time of year, though it is usually played with more than four people. Either way, the game is very simple to play, though tough to play well. Some say this is because there is a lot of chance in the game, but they are usually the people who do badly… The idea is that players simultaneously choose a card to play and these are then added, in order, to the rows of cards on the table. The player adding the sixth card, instead, takes the first five cards into their scoring pile. Usually, we deal out half the cards for the first round and the rest for the second and the winner is the player with the fewest “nimmts” (or points), at the end of the two rounds.

– Image by boardGOATS

This time, however, the group decided to play the multiple-hand variant where each hand has ten cards, and the game ends when someone’s score passes sixty-six. And that was Sapphire, who finished with an exceptional total of ninety-five. The winner was Teal with forty-four, however, who was just two points better off than Pine. The other games were still ongoing, but there was still time for one last game for this group (who were joined by Navy) before everyone went home warmed by the Christmas Gaming Spirit—and their choice of game was Coloretto (apparently this is a festive game because it includes red, green and gold Chameleons).

– Image by boardGOATS

This is another simple filler game, where players either take a card and add it to a truck, or take a truck. Each truck can take a maximum of three Chameleons, with players collecting coloured sets. The largest three sets score positive points (according to the Triangular Number Series), while all the others score negative points. In this way, the bigger the series the more additional cards will score, so the aim is to collect three large sets and ensure the others are as small as possible. This game was really tight, with Sapphire claiming victory with twenty-seven and Teal and Indigo tying for second on twenty-four. And with that, people began to drift off, many not to be seen until 2025.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning outcome: GOATS love a Cracker!

Boardgames in the News: A Monopoly on Monopoly?

The Christmas holidays are the time of year when many people who rarely play games get out something to play as a family. For for some, the tradition is Scrabble, Pictionary or Cluedo, but for many, the game of choice is Monopoly. This is one of the world’s best known games, and there are many thousands of different editions to choose from, including copies themed round different places, companies, events and even other games. Last year, Neil Scallan from Hayes (west London) had a visit from the folks at Guinness World Records who counted his four thousand three-hundred and seventy-nine copies and confirmed he holds the record for the Largest Collection of Monopoly Boards.

– from youtube.com

Although Monopoly is very well-known, it is a game that has a reputation for being overly long, often leading to family rows. This is largely because most families don’t play by the “Rules as Written”, instead playing by the family’s “House Rules“, which are usually passed from generation to generation by word of mouth. There is generally nothing wrong with “House Rules”, however, in the case of Monopoly, they are often responsible for all the perceived problems as discussed by games designer and curator of the Museum of Board Games in Newent, Tony Boydell. The interview with Kate Clarke for BBC Radio Gloucestershire, was broadcast on Boxing Day and can be found 2hrs 46mins in.

Kate Clarke on BBC Radio Gloucestershire

– Image from bbc.co.uk

Next Meeting – 31st December 2024

Once again be holding a party for New Year’s Eve. As usual, we will be meeting at a private house in Stanford with people arriving from 7pm with food served sometime around 8pm. Please get in touch if you would like to come along so we know how much food will be needed.

The plan is to start off with the “Feature Game”, which, as has become traditional at these events, will be the gorgeous, dexterity car-racing game, PitchCar. As there are relatively few people planning available this year we hope to follow it with the first outing of Ticket to Ride Legacy with a break to admire the village’s fireworks at midnight and toast the end of the old year and the start of 2025.

– Image by boardGOATS

And talking of cars…

A policeman sees an elderly woman driving incredibly slowly on the motorway, so he pulls along side and notices her knitting in the driver’s seat. She remains focused on the road and keeps knitting and driving.

He beeps his horn to get her attention, but she is oblivious and carries on.

Getting more frustrated, the policeman turns his siren on and, as she finally notices him, he signals for her to wind the window down.

After a time she finds the button and down goes the window.

Incensed, the cop yells, “PULL OVER!”

“Oh, no sweetie,” she replies. “It’s a scarf, see?”