Tag Archives: Akropolis

UK Games Expo 2025

Friday was the first day of the eighteenth UK Games Expo at the NEC in Birmingham. It is bigger than ever, and it is rumoured that it is fifty percent bigger than last year. In truth, though it is difficult to tell, as the organisers had to move out of Hall 1 (apparently to accommodate Tesla who then cancelled), putting all the stands on a single level spread over a large, more or less continuous space. So this year, it just feels, very… large. Additionally, There are the now regular attendance of the Vikings and Romans camping by the lake, but fewer cosplayers, or maybe they are just more spread out…

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Although there are some new releases, the focus of UK Games Expo this year, as always, is the current games and open gaming (both in the halls and at the nearby Hilton). There are also organised play-testing and tournaments, with plenty of game-related geek-fare, like puzzles, furniture, clothing, jewelry, nick-nacks and other sundries. Indeed, there are more cool dice available to see and buy than most “normal” people would ever believe!

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Most games companies have a stand at UKGE, some with sales, some just demoing and many with both. A new innovation this year is the collectable pin badges. A variant of these is the live-action Catan game, where attendees can acquire a starter set of resource button badges to trade. Collecting a full set of five, enables the owners to claim a sixth from the stand. This game was remarkably evocative of a real game of Settlers, with players desperate to find wood for their large pile of sheep!

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There are lots of opportunities to play demo games, both old and new. New games include The Hanging Gardens and Critter Kitchen while slightly older games on display include Panda Panda, River Valley Glassworks and Harmonies. There are also expansions and variants of old favourites, including the Grand Tour expansion for Snowdonia, the upcoming expansion for Shackleton Base, the award winning Heavy Rain expansion for Heat, the Athena expansion to Akroplolis, the new Lodges expansion for Kavango, and the Correspondence expansion for In the Footsteps of Darwin.

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This year, about half of the boardGOATS are making the trip to the NEC in Birmingham, some for one day some for more, with others working on stands or at the Play Testing. The event is so vast now though that you can no-longer guarantee accidentally bumping into people you know, but SMS is a great way to communicate onsite. The event is great fun and well worth a visit. UK Games Expo continues at the NEC in Birmingham until 4pm Sunday 1^st June.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?).

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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.

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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).

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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.

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Learning outcome: GOATS love a Cracker!

Golden GOAT Award Winners – 2024

This week was the annual boardGOATS Un-Christmas Dinner including the voting to decide the winners of the GOAT Awards. There are two main awards: the Golden GOAT for our favourite game played during the year and the GOAT Poo Prize for our least favourite. Everyone had the usual three points to hand out for the Golden GOAT Award (plus a bonus if wearing Festive Attire), though a maximum of two points could be given to any individual game. Everyone could also nominate up to two individual games for the GOAT Poo Prize.

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This year, the unofficial “Marmite Award” went to Viticulture—something many people seemed to find quite a surprise as it is generally not a divisive game and one that few would usually take offense at. There had been a lot of fun throughout the year, but one of the more memorable moments was Pine getting the end game rule wrong for Tonga Bonga, so that Pink thought he’d won, but then didn’t. There were several nominations for the GOAT Poo Prize, including King of Tokyo, Rolling Realms and Ark Nova, but the winner was another surprise: Ca$h ‘n Guns—not a game the group plays often, indeed it doesn’t get played at all at the pub (for obvious reasons), so its only outing over the last year was at the New Year Party. It can be a lot of fun, but it is also easy to see how some might not like the game.

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Then finally, there was the Golden GOAT Award for the best game played in the year. Previous winners were ruled out, but there were plenty of other great games to choose from. The most popular of these were Akropolis, Kavango, Flamme Rouge and Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails. However, the clear winner was Stamp Swap. This is a new game, only released in September, but was an immediate hit, largely thanks to its silky-smooth game play. As one person commented, “I wouldn’t have thought a game about stamp collecting would be up my street, and yet…”

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Perhaps more remarkably, this is the third winner from Stonemaier Games after Tapestry last year and Wingspan in 2019—three very different games. This led to the perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the group should invite Jamey Stegmaier to visit so we could present him with the actual Golden GOAT in the manner of the Jules Rimet Trophy…

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12th Movember 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

20th August 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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