Tag Archives: Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra

18th April 2023

Blue and Pink were joined for food by Jade, Plum, Byzantium and Sapphire. As they finished, Pine, Green and Purple showed up (leaving Black under the patio, again), followed by Ivory and a team of Sherpas toting his massive Complete Collection of Everdell. There were quite a few possible takers for the Pearlbrook expansion, the night’s “Feature Game“, but eventually, after a lot of discussion, Ivory was joined by Plum and Jade and they took themselves over to the other side of the pub and started setting up, which was no small task, though Everdell is functionally a fairly simple game.

– Image by boardGOATS

Everdell is a dynamic tableau building and worker placement. On their turn players can do one of three things: place a Worker and carry out any associated actions; pay any associated cost to play a card from their hand, or prepare for the next Season. The game is played from Winter through to the onset of the following Winter, so each player has four Seasons, though because players can prepare for the next Season whenever they want to, players’ Seasons have different lengths and start their Seasons at different times. This means one player who takes fewer turns could finish their game much sooner than another player. At the end of the game, when everyone has finished, the player with the most points is the winner.

– Image by boardGOATS

The Pearlbrook expansion adds an extension to the board, which displays River Destination cards and the new Pearl resource that give the brook (and thus the expansion) its name. The basic event spaces are covered up as these are not used and are replaced by two new Wonder spaces. Everyone also gets a couple of adornment cards at the start of the game and on their turn can pay a Pearl to play one of these as an action. The don’t take up any space in the player’s city, but give an instant bonus action and points at the end of the game. Players also start with a Frog Ambassador which they use to visit the Pearlbrook either to get Pearls or to activate the River Destinations.

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The River Destination spaces have a requirement printed on the board (e.g. three production cards in the City) and a player’s Frog Ambassador can only visit, if the player has achieved it and it is unoccupied. The River Destination cards start the game face down with a Pearl on top and the first player to visit each one takes the Pearl and turns over the card. Another player can’t visit the Destination until it has been vacated which typically happens at the end of the occupying player’s Season. The Shoal space allows players to exchange two resources and two cards for a Pearl, but this space is unlimited.

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Ivory charged out of the starting blocks, leaving Plum and Jade for dust. Jade struggled to get his engine going because his starting hand needed three different types of resources. Plum and Jade commented that it was nearly impossible to get a Pearl in the first Season, Winter, so Ivory made it his business to prove them wrong. Once he’d got his Pearl, he used it to play his first adornment card giving him more resources and, as a result he was still in winter when Plum and Jade had moved on and were well into Spring. That meant Ivory didn’t take his Platypus workers back leaving them blocking spaces the others would have liked to use.

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As a result Plum and Jade had progressed their Spring before Ivory played his Frog Ambassador, which they hadn’t been able to use at all during Winter. It was a long time since Jade had played and he was out of practice optimising his seasons, consequently his Spring achieved less than he would have liked. As the game progressed, the River Destinations were opened up and everyone started to use them, giving everyone more Pearls. Plum (obviously playing with Kitty workers) had built up quite a pile, so both Ivory and Jade raided her stash by playing Pirate Ship cards which take up space and don’t score points. That meant she could use one herself in an attempt to wreak her horrific revenge later, though it wasn’t as fruitful.

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Both Jade and Plum then played Pirate cards, gambling with discarding cards and hoping to draw cards with a sum of value of seven cards to get another Pearl, but both failed. Although Plum and Jade had built up a large pile of Pearls, Ivory took the first, and largest monument, the “Light House”, due to his huge pile of resources. The others weren’t far behind though, taking the “Sunblaze Bridge” and the “Mistrise Fountain” respectively. Ivory also put his enormous wood pile to good use claiming the first event (“An Evening of Fireworks”). That triggered Plum to spot that she had already completed “X Marks the Spot”, so she grabbed that quickly followed by Jade who took “Ministering to Miscreants” shortly after.

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There was quite a bit of congestion and Jade in particular found Plum and Ivory grabbed spaces just before he could get there. Throughout the game, Ivory managed to eek every last ounce out of each Season, but in the end, although Ivory dragged out Winter and Spring, after he’d achieved the event and got his Monument, he ran out of things to do. As a result, everyone finished very close in both time and scores and it was far from the landslide that might have been predicted earlier in the game. Plum’s prosperity gave her an edge, but that was offset by Jade’s left over Pearls and higher scoring event. It was Ivory who was the victor, however, with eighty-two points just six ahead of Plum in second.

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With Ivory, Plum and Jade playing Everdell, that left seven people to decide what they were going to play and how they were going to split the group or even if they were going to divide into two. And then Lime arrived, but while that made splitting into two group more sensible, there still wasn’t any consensus about what to play and nobody seemed to want to commit to a group until they knew what was going to be played. So, in the end Blue made an executive decision and, much to Green’s delight, decreed that one of the games would be Dice Hospital. Purple, Byzantium and Pine joined him and they started setting up.

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Byzantium and Green had both played this before, so together, they explained the rules to Pine and Purple. The idea is that each player is the owner of a hospital and starts with an administrator which gives them a special power, three nurses, and three patients—dice drawn at random from a bag. The colour of the dice represents their illness and the number, its severity: six indicates the patient is healthy, but if the number falls below one, the patient dies. At the start of each round, players take an ambulance with new patients—if there aren’t enough beds available, another patient must make space by moving to the morgue (where each body-bag is a negative point at the end of the game).

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Players can then improve their hospital by adding specialist medics and wards and finally, their medics can visit each patient and improve their health. Different specialisms can only “heal” certain colours or numbers. Any patients not treated are “neglected” and their health deteriorates with any that fall below one moving to the morgue while anyone who exceeded six is discharged. The more that are discharged at the same time, the more points the player scores. The game ends after eight rounds and the player with the most points is the winner. The key to the game is knowing which specialists to get and which ambulance of patients to take.

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There was some confusion about what the symbols on the Specialists and Wards meant. The little help cards seemed to cause more confusion as they did not list all the symbols, so in the end, the rule-book was handed out which fixed the problem. Green had played the game a few times on line, but less often in real life, so needed to keep checking the rules for the set-up and the order of who chose when and did what, but eventually the game got started. The first round was a little slow with a few restarts as people took a little time while to work out how the game worked and what they could actually achieve.

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During the second round after everyone had finished their “Healings”, Pine was still working his out, but had ended up with one less discharged patient than he expected. Unfortunately real life doesn’t have a “reset” button like the game on line and you can’t always remember what the hospital looked like before starting healing people. So in the third round, everyone else kept an eye out for Pine to help him, before sorting out their own hospitals. Unfortunately, the suggestions, though intended to be helpful were distracting, and as a result, Pine struggled to work out what he was trying to do. By this time everyone was really finding it difficult to discharge patients.

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Byzantium was struggling because he had gone heavy on green Doctors and Wards while Green had lots of red Dice and Doctors, but had ended up with Patients which didn’t quite match what they needed. And so, there were the first fatalities—the Hospitals were in crises! Nothing new there, then… By the end of the game, Pine and Purple were getting the hang of things. Despite his struggles, Pine did well and came second with thirty-eight points, only beaten by Byzantium who score forty-three. Even though he did quite well for a first game, Pine did not warm to Dice Hospital and the overall conclusion was that it is a game that plays better on-line as it deals with all those complicated set-up and order issues, as well as having that extremely useful “turn reset” function.

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With everyone else finally sorted out, that just left Blue, Pink, Lime and Sapphire to decide what to play. Pink suggested Azul: Queen’s Garden, but the only problem was that he’d never played it. Sapphire had though, so the group nominated him to teach them because, how hard could it be since everyone was very familiar with the original Azul? Well, as it turned out, quite hard, since in terms of difficulty Queen’s Garden is more on a par with the second and third editions (Stained Glass of Sintra and Summer Pavilion), which are both a very marked step up from the original.

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In the original Azul, take all the pieces of one colour from a market and add the rest to the central pool or take all the pieces of one colour from the central pool. In Queen’s Garden, the Tiles come with different colours and different patterns and the Markets come out gradually through each of the four rounds. So, instead of taking pieces of the same colour from one market, players can take as many different the pieces of the same colour or with the same pattern from anywhere as long as they are are all different (maximum of six). Additionally, when a Market is empty, it is turned over and becomes a Garden Extension which players can also take on their turn.

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Garden Extensions are hold seven tiles—the player mat has space for six Tiles printed on it, but once that is full, players need Extensions to place more. Each Extension has a single tile printed on it, so once a Market has been emptied and turned over, it can be taken by the active player along with any Tiles matching the colour or pattern. Like Summer Pavilion, the Tiles and Extensions are then stored before they are added to their Garden display. Unlike Summer Pavilion however, the amount of storage space is limited, so instead of taking Tiles/Extensions from the market, players can place a Tile or Extension in their player area, or Garden.

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When placing a Tile in their Garden players must pay. The price is dictated by the pattern: trees cost one, eagles cost two, butterflies three and so on. Like Summer Pavilion, the cost is made up of the Tile placed and Tiles that match the colour or the pattern of the Tile placed, which are dropped into a Tower for recycling later in the game. Also like in in Summer Pavilion, when a player surrounds marked spaces they get a bonus, in this case, “Wild Tiles” which can be used to match any colour or pattern when paying to place other tiles. These are essential for some of the higher value patterns, which are very expensive to place and it can be hard to get enough tiles that match, however, Wild Tiles also take up space in storage.

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When tiles are placed, if they are adjacent to a tile, either the colour or the pattern must match. Alternatively, Tiles can be placed so they aren’t next to another tile. At the end of each round, players score all the pieces currently in their Garden, with different colours and patterns scoring points at the end of each round as per the rondel (trees, green and blue tiles scoring at the end of the first round for example). At the end of the game, players score for each Group of three or more tiles where the colour or the pattern match. Colour Groups score for each pattern present in it (trees score one point, eagles two and so on), but each pattern can only be included in each Group once giving a maximum Group size of six.

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Pattern Groups also score for the pattern (so a Group of trees will score one point per tiles), but in these groups each colour can only feature once, so again there is a maximum size of six. If any Group has reached its maximum size of six, the player also gets an extra six bonus points. However, any left-over tiles that have not been placed give negative scores which can be very, very costly indeed. The group were just getting underway when Jade came round with some birthday cake—pieces cut from an absolutely amazing “Lego Cake” made by the amazingly talented Jason Smith. Everyone, on all three tables, was very much distracted by the remarkable, solid chocolate Lego bricks and very fine chocolate cake, but eventually attention returned to the games.

– Image by Jade

With the group feeling their way somewhat, people started without long term plans. A few rules got missed, the group forgot to score a point for each Pavilion and nobody paid much attention to the option of drawing face-down Garden Extensions because of the six point penalty. The biggest rules malfunction, however, was that nobody realised that Lime had a duplicate tile in his large dark purple group of tiles in the centre of his garden, giving him a slightly illegal set of seven. The group let that slide and everyone concentrated trying to find a way of getting points from their gardens.

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Everyone seemed to have slightly different strategies, collecting different colours or different patterns and covering different areas of their gardens. While nobody had thought anyone was going to need their “I’ve been round the track already” token, and obviously, nobody was going to have to touch their two-hundred and forty point token, everyone did make it round once and claimed their sixty point tokens. It was all very, very tight and there were even slight recounts, but in the end, it Blue claimed victory, by just two points (or maybe even one) from Lime who was just two (or maybe three) points ahead of Pink.

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There was a lot of chatter as everyone packed away. Pink commented that he liked Queen’s Garden—not as much as the original Azul, but at least as much as Summer Pavilion (nobody talks about Stained Glass of Sintra, which Sapphire politely described as a bit of a “mis-step”). And then everyone wandered over to spectate the great count up and pack-away of Everdell. It was all a bit rushed and Ivory was definitely going to have some homework to do in terms of sorting it all out, but there was still just enough time to share a few pictures of cake, parties and kitties—it seems they are quite fond of Bitoku…

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Learning outcome: Goats, like cats, love to play games, and eat cake.

10th February 2022

It was just Blue and Pink for food, so while they waited, they killed time with a very quick game of Ticket to Ride: London. The little, city versions of Ticket to Ride make great appetisers, and this one is no exception. The game play is essentially the same as in the full-sized versions (collect coloured cards and play them to buy routes), except they have fewer pieces, a much smaller map and take a lot less time to play. In terms of strategy, there usually isn’t really time to do much, so it’s typically a case of doing one thing and doing it well.

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This time, Blue decided to really challenge herself. The London game gives bonus points for connect for players that collect certain locations together. Blue worked out that if she managed to complete her longer ticket (Buckingham Palace to Brick Lane), going via the “ring road”, she could also complete her shorter ticket (Hyde Park to St Paul’s), and pick up lots of bonus points too, with just one bus left over. Unfortunately for her, Pink managed to end the game just one turn too soon, leaving her with a gap between Regent’s Park and King’s Cross, no bonuses, no tickets and almost no points. When it came to sparing her blushes, food couldn’t arrive too soon.

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With Green bringing his parents (Saffron & Sapphire), the “Feature Game” was a light, hand-management, double-think fox and chickens game that we’ve played a few times before, called Pick Picknic. It looked like three games were going to be needed, so Pink suggested Altiplano (in lieu of Orléans which didn’t quite make it last time), and took it to the other side of the room along with Ivory, Sage and Teal. Pick Picknic plays six, but with eight foxes to fight over the chickens, two games of four seemed the best way to set things up. Green suggested breaking up his family unit, so Blue instigated a trade and swapped Lilac and Sapphire for Lime and Purple.

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So, after a quick game of Musical Chairs, Green, Saffron, Lime and Purple settled down to play Pick Picknic. At the start of each round, the six coloured farm yards are seeded with a random corn (worth one, two or three points). Players then simultaneously choose a card from their hand and play it. If their card is the only card of that colour and is a chicken, it gets all the corn. If there is more than one chicken of that colour, they can either come to an agreement to share the corn, or fight for it. If there is a fox amongst the chickens, the fox has a good feed and the corn remains till the next round. If someone plays a fox card and there are no chickens, the fox goes hungry.

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The game started in an amicable manner sharing out the corn instead of fighting for it when the need arose, until half way through when Lime decided he no longer wanted to share. He won, but the scene was now set and squabbles broke out over corn more often. In the meantime, Lime’s foxes were getting fat from eating everyone else’s birds and corn was building up, uneaten. The others’ foxes were usually not so lucky, and Purple’s foxes were hungriest of all. Towards the end of the game peace finally broke out once again and sharing was order of the day once more. In the final tally, Lime proved the wiliest of us finishing first with fifty points and Saffron and Green close behind with forty-four and forty-five respectively.

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On the neighbouring table, Blue, Lilac, Black and Sapphire were a little slower to get going as they had to choose a game, but eventually decided on Coloretto. While we’ve played it a lot, it was new to both Lilac and Sapphire so there was a recap of the rules first. Blue explained that on their turn players have a simple decision: turn over the top card in the deck and choose a “cart” to add it to, or take the cards from one of the carts. Lilac commented that it was similar to Zooloretto, which of course it is, as Coloretto was it’s predecessor and they share the same basic mechanism.

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Players are trying to collect sets of the coloured chameleon cards, but there are two clever features. Firstly, the largest three sets score positively and scores for the others are subtracted from a player’s total. Secondly, for each set, the first card is worth a single point, but the second is worth two, the third is worth three and so on (up to a maximum of six cards). Thus, it is better to get six cards of one colour, rather three in each of two suits. Sapphire, took this to heart, focusing solely on red and green, and often taking nearly empty trucks as a result.

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Lilac was more adventurous and pushed her luck a bit, ending up with a bit of a rainbow, but with a couple of strong suits and a few bonus point cards. Blue commented that, although players need to avoid negative points, players who don’t take cards generally don’t do well, and promptly took lots of cards and ended up with lots of negative points as a result. Black, very experienced at this game, played smart and took an early lead which he held right until the last round when Blue got lucky and drew cards in her longest suit and with it, took victory, pushing Black into second. Lilac and Sapphire were not far behind and separated by a single point.

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Pick Picknic and Coloretto finished at much the same time. Purple then requested a game of Azul, so we preceded it with another quick game of Musical Chairs as Blue swapped places with Green. Then, after a little discussion, Green, Lilac, Black and Sapphire chose to play Draftosaurus. This is a fun little drafting game like Sushi Go!, but instead of drafting cards, players are drafting little wooden dinosaurs. The dinomeeples are placed on the player’s board with different areas on the board scoring points in different ways. For example, the “Meadow of Differences” can only hold one of each type of dinosaur, but will score twenty-one points if it contains all six (using the same scoring scheme as Coloretto).

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The game is played over two rounds (drafting clockwise and then anti-clocwise), before all the parks are scored. Players also score an extra point for each Tyrannosaurus rex they have in their park, as well as extra points if they have if they have the most dinosaurs of the type they put in their “King of the Jungle” pen. Everyone knows there is only one King of Jurassic Park and Black was looking like the winner with his T-rex strategy. He not only got several bonus points for pens with T-rex’s he also got seven points for having the most T-rexes too. However it was Green’s more general approach to his dinosaur park that pipped Black to the post.

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All the scores were close though: Green finished with thirty-seven with Black in second with thirty four, and Lilac and Sapphire were just behind. As everyone else was still playing, the group carried on together and moved on to the fun little push-your-luck game, Port Royal. This (like its little cousin “Unterwegs“) is a very simple game: on their turn, the active player chooses to “twist” and turn over the top card of the deck, or “stick” and keep the current card set. The deck of cards consist of coloured ship cards and character cards. The first decision is to decide whether to risk a “twist” because if second ship card of a colour is drawn the player goes bust and their turn ends.

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If a player “sticks” they can take a ship and add its treasure to their stash, or they can use their gold to buy the support of characters. These give players victory points and special powers, but also can be used to claim contracts and give more points. The cards are double-sided like those in San Juan or Bohnanza, so in the same way, keeping an eye on the discard pile and the money in players’ hoard is key. Once the active player has taken a card, players round the table can take a card too, but they must pay the active player for the privilege. The game ends when one player has twelve points or more, that triggers the end of the game and the winner is the player with the most points.

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Black, once again, got off to a fighting start, collecting arms to help him ward off the pirates while Lilac had her eye on the contract symbols. Sapphire went for the Admiral, which gave him a bonus for drawing at least five cards and would give others an increased chance to buy and pay him even more. Green started out with Green Trader bonus, but then got consistently hit by the black pirates before he could barely draw any cards, so his game was hampered from the very start. With his fighting force at strength, Black was able to haul the cards out and start raking in the points. Lilac managed to convert high value contracts before anyone else, gaining her more coins to buy more cards.

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Sapphire built up a “Jack of all Trades” hand, but it only steadily gained him points. Green managed to finally rid himself of the scourge of the black pirates by stopping draws early, and started collecting symbols, but it was too late as Black reached the twelve points before anyone else. Everyone had one more turn, and Lilac was able to convert her final contract to also reach twelve. Both Lilac and Black managed one more purchase to finish on thirteen points each, but Lilac won took the tie break by virtue of having one more coin left than Black. Sapphire and Green were also tied on points (on nine-points), but Sapphire completed the podium places with four coins more.

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Meanwhile, Blue, Saffron, Purple and Lime were playing Azul. We’ve enjoyed the recent versions of these (Stained Glass of Sintra and Summer Pavillion), but this time the original was the game of choice. All three use the same market mechanism where players either take tiles of one colour from one of the small markets and put the rest in the central pool, or take all the tiles of one colour from the central pool. In this original version of Azul, players add these tiles to the channels on the left of player board, and at the end of the round if any of these are full, they move one tile to their mosaic and recycle the rest.

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Players score points for placing tiles such that they are part of a row and/or a column in the mosaic and at the end of the game, players score bonus points for completed rows and columns and also for placing all five tiles of any one colour. There is a catch, however. When a player takes tiles, all the tiles must go into a single tile channel, and must be of the same colour as any that are already there. Any left overs score negative points and, as the more left over tiles a player has, the more negative points each one will score. This has the potential to leave one player picking up lots of tiles and scoring lots of negative points.

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This time, that player was Lime. Having scored a few points during the first round, he was unimpressed when all his negative points at the end of that round pushed him straight back to zero. This wasn’t the only time that happened though, to the point that it became a bit of a running joke, especially as he made it a point every round to take the first player token (which counts as another negative tile). One of the key tactics of the game is to try to complete tile channels at the end of the round because these are then emptied leaving the maximum amount of flexibility for the next round.

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And this is exactly what Saffron did. Despite never having played the game before, by focusing on completing her tile channels she was always able to dig herself out of any difficulties. Although the game was longer than Draftosaurus, it didn’t seem like very long before Purple triggered the end of the game by completing a row, the only one to do so. It was quite close, but Blue just edged it from Saffron who took an excellent second. With that, Lime headed off (before the drawbridge was raised) and Blue left Purple and Saffron chatting while she went to watch the last few rounds of Altiplano on the other side of the room.

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Altiplano is a much longer game and one that we are very fond of in the group. Indeed, it was the first winner of the Golden GOAT award (in 2018), though we haven’t really been able to get it to the table since then. For a while, it had been in the plan to play The Traveler expansion, however, we wanted to play the base game again first and with both Teal and Sage new to the game only the Sunny Days mini expansion was included. The basic mechanism of the game is quite simple: on their turn, players carry out the action based in the location their meeple is in, and optionally, moves their meeple either before or after, if they can.

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The game is a “bag building” game, so a bit like its predecessor, Orléans, or even deck builders like Dominion, players need the correct resources to be available when they carry out the actions. So, at the start of each round, players draw resource disks out of their bag and place them on their player board to be used in the locations they plan to visit. Mostly the game trots along quite merrily as this stage of the game is carried out simultaneously and everyone does their planning at the same time so the action phase is quite rapid. Pink explained what all the different locations did and that there were two main sources of points: Contracts and Resources.

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At the end of the game, the resources give points with the amount depending on what it is: primary resources score one point (wood, stone, fish etc.) while advanced processed materials (like cloth and glass) can score up to three or four points. These will score even more points if they are stored in the Warehouse. When a resource is used it is places into the players recycling box and goes back into their bag when their bag is empty. In this way, instead of relying on probability/luck as in Orléans where used resources are returned straight to the bag, all resources are used before they are recycled.

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Players can leave unwanted resources on their player board, but this can obstruct their plans, so another option is to move them to the Warehouse. Once in the Warehouse, they cannot be removed, but each full shelf (which can only store one type of resource), gives more points at the end of the game. Only completely full shelves score in this way, which cost Pink some valuable points when he realised Ivory had pinched the last available fish just before he got there.

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The other main route to scoring points is through completing Contracts. Players can only have one on the go at any one time, but when complete, they are worth points and also provide the player with a corn which goes straight in the warehouse and can act as a space-filler too. As well as getting resources from the Wood, Mines, Seafront etc., players can also buy Contracts, build Carts (to provide them with additional travel options), build Boats or Huts (which provide resources and increase their resource scoring), or buy Board Extensions which give them enhanced abilities. These Extensions also act as a timer triggering the game end.

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The game was really tight and despite the fact that all four protagonists employed different strategies, a postage stamp would have covered the final scores. Pink, despite having carefully explained the importance of Contracts as a means to get points, decided to see how he could do by avoiding them completely—the only one to do so. He concentrated instead on getting resources, especially high value ones, and storing them in his Warehouse. Teal’s strategy was driven by the fact he started with the Woodcutter which allowed him to turn food into wood, so he concentrated on building Canoes, lots of Canoes. This was not a strategy anyone had seen before, but it provided him with a lot of resources.

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Ivory went for Contracts in a big way, taking a massive fifty-five points for them alone. Since resources on Contracts don’t score in and of themselves, however, this meant he scored fewer points elsewhere. Sage went for a more “all round” strategy, picking up a lot of points for his contracts too, but also building a lot of Huts to enhance his resource score. As the game came to a close there was the inevitable checking what the final Extension tiles and then everyone took their shoes and socks off for the complex final scoring. The winner, on his first time out was Teal, his unconventional Canoe strategy netting him eighty-six points. Pink finished second with eighty-three and Ivory was just one point behind that, in what had been a very tight game.

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Learning outcome: Teach a man to fish, and he’ll swap them for a pile of stones.

21st October 2021

The evening began with a little play-testing while people waited for their food to arrive. The two-player game currently goes by the name of Brain Grabbers and, though simpler, has a mechanistic similarity to Sprawlopolis or Honshū. The game was designed by one of Pink’s work colleagues, so Pink explained the rules, and then proceeded to lose, first to Blue, then to Pine, failing to take a single point to their combined total of fourteen. The consensus was that it could be successful as a family-level game, but we weren’t fans of Cthulhu, so spent the next ten minutes coming up with exciting ways to re-theme it.

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As people finished eating others began to arrive, though there was some question about whether Purple and Black would make it thanks to a serious accident on the A420. We were discussing the treacherous nature of the A420 and its accident black spots when Purple and Black rocked up, and Purple surprised everyone by joining Green, Ivory and Burgundy to play the “Feature Game“, Endeavor: Age of Sail with the extras from the new Age of Expansion. Endeavor is a game we have played quite a bit over the years, initially in it’s original form and, more recently, in the new edition. The expansion came out last year and, sadly, got lost in the mists of the endless “Roll and Write” games we were playing online.

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The original game is actually not terribly complicated and during play is almost completely luck-free—all the variation is in the set up. The game is played over eight rounds, each consisting of four basic phases: Build, Populate, Payment and Action. There are four technology tracks roughly corresponding to each phase, which dictate what a player can do during that phase. For example, how far along the building track a player is dictates what they can build: the further along they are, the more buildings they have to choose from.

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Similarly, a player who is further along the population (or culture) track, can move more people into their harbour for use in the Action phase. Payment also increases the number of people available as it moves population markers from the action spaces into the harbour. More importantly, however, it makes the action spaces available again for use later in the round. The first phase consists of passing round the tray of buildings rather like a box of chocolates although in truth, at this point of the game players have very little choice. Despite that, the decision is crucial to how players do.

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After the Building phase, the second and third phases (Population and Payment) are more or less carried out simultaneously. The guts of the game, however, is the Action phase, when players can place population markers on their buildings to activate them and carry out one of the five actions: Colonise, Ship, Attack, Plunder Assets, and Pay Workers. The actions are generally based round the central board which is divided up into seven regions representing the seven continents. Each continent comprises several cities, a shipping route and a deck of cards.

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At the start of the game there is a Trade token on each city and each shipping space, but also on many of the connections between cities (these are taken if a player occupies both cities either side). Players cannot Colonise a city until they have a presence in a region, which they can do by Shipping. In this case, they activate their building that provides the shipping action by placing one population marker on it, then place a second population marker on the shipping track. Thus, players need to have two markers available to be able to Ship.

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The second population marker is placed in the furthest unoccupied space from the deck of Asset cards in the region of their choice, and the player takes the Trade token on that space. Most trade tokens add to one of the four technology tracks, though a small number provide one off actions instead. Players also need two population markers to Colonise (one for the action and one to occupy the city) and three if they are going to attack an already occupied city (one is collateral damage). Once a player has a presence in a region they can take an Asset card, so long as the number of the top card is not higher than the number of population markers that player has in the region.

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After eight rounds, players add up scores for each track and for the cities they control and the player with the most points is the winner. The new Age of Expansion adds several new components that completely mix up the game. First there is a completely new set of buildings, many of which have actions as well as boosting the players’ economies while others have more choice. Similarly, the first, second and fifth cards in the region decks now have more powerful and unique cards. These are now more desirable creating more competition for them.

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The new buildings also introduce three new concepts: Trade, Fortify, and Conscription & Mobilisation. Trade allows players to swap one Trade token from their play area with one on the central board, while Fortify allows players to increase the protection in a city they occupy causing others to lose an extra casualty should they decide to attack. Conscription enables players to acquire extra population which can then only be Mobilised as part of an action that has been activated in the usual way (e.g. used as a casualty during an attack, or to Settle).

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Additionally, a single Prominence tile drawn at random can be added to the game. These provide players with new ways to gain presence in a more-competitive Europe and each one provides difference benefits and ways to score. This time the Prominence tile was “Changing Alliances” which allows players to set up an alliance, where players cannot attack each other within Europe, in exchange for points at the end of the game.

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The game took a little while to set up, and although everyone had played it before, we needed a refresher of the rules and run down of the new expansions. In addition to the new Age of Expansion updates, the group also included the Exploits from the original Age of Sail, the mini Charter Company buildings and two additional micro-expansions from Age of Expansion (Seize your Fate & Level 6 region cards), making it a mega-game. Overall, it took about an hour for set-up and rules explanations.

Endeavor: Age of Sail - Charter Companies

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The Seize your Fate Expansion provides each player with a unique starting set-up. Ivory was The Kingdom of France so started with a city in Europe; Purple was The Ottoman Empire, so started in the open sea of India; Green was The Kingdom of Spain so started with a city in South America; Burgundy was Great Britain and started in the open seas of North America and the Caribbean. Coincidentally, each player was sat near the part of the board where their starting places were, so that set the stage for players’ strategies.

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Ivory quickly started taking cities in Europe and was open to a Prominence Alliance. Green was taking Fleets in Europe so joined him. No-one else wanted to form any alliances leaving Ivory to dominate Europe with and Green (to a lesser extent). However, due to a rules malfunction, this was under the false impression that as part of the winning alliance they would score four points for each disc in the region when it was actually four points for each disc in the Alliance. Since he was concentrating on becoming the power house in Europe Ivory left his Seize the Fate actions for much later in the game, and only expanded out of Europe to the Far East and later on Africa.

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He did however make good use of the Dutch East India Company exploit (once it was open) to upgrade his seaside buildings. Meanwhile, Purple concentrated mostly on India and Africa, but suffered early on with not having enough population in her harbour or enough bricks to build better buildings. The game was long though, and she managed to Seize her Fate (Round the Cape). She also made use of the Dutch East India company in the latter rounds, and although scores weren’t calculated until the end of the game, she probably made up good ground with these latter stages.

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Elsewhere, Green was concentrating on the Caribbean, and making connections with his Fleets in Europe. He managed to amass a large population early on, but let it slip so that by the end of the game, Ivory and Burgundy had much more population to spare for attacks, even on fortified cities. Green kept an eye on Burgundy’s progress to keep a presence in South and North America. He was the first to Seize his Fate (Form the Great Armada) and used The Transit of Venus exploit, shipping up to Tahiti and using his money to increase his population.

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Burgundy concentrated on the America’s, and although he opened the Republic of the Pirates exploit, he never used it (and neither did Green who could also have done so). This was because he said he did not really understand it and it didn’t seem that useful. Which was a shame, as it meant the beautifully crafted big black plastic pirate ship didn’t make it onto the board. What Burgundy did do, however, was to make heavy use of Conscription buildings, which really helped him ship to almost everywhere. Unfortunately for him, in the final round of the game there was no shipping left and he discovered that he didn’t have enough other actions to make use of the population he had.

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In the end, after a re-evaluation of the scores due to the Alliance misunderstanding, Ivory was declared the winner with eighty-one. Burgundy was the runner-up with seventy-three, three points ahead of Green in what turned out reasonably close game. But what of all the expansions? The exploits can always be relied on to add an interesting dynamic (with a couple of duds) and it is likely these will continue to feature. The Charter companies seem to help in four and five-player games when Level five buildings have the potential to disappear quickly (especially with the Exploit we used this time), and apart from space around the board don’t intrude too much anyway.

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The Level six cards seem to be intended to be played with the Age of Expansion every time, as Slavery is Abolished on the Europe Level 6 card, whereas in the Age of Sail base game it is abolished on the Europe Level five card. This time, none of the Level six cards actually got played. Again, they don’t intrude, but give additional options, so are also worth playing with. The benefits of the “Seize your Fate” was perhaps less clear. Having different starting positions certainly helped the start and gave players a steer as to strategy. Remembering the actions were available was a problem and the extra scores were quite small (about four points for those who used them). Including this module would probably depend on the group.

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The new Conscription action seemed to open up more of the board, which counters a common complaint about the game, that in order to get a region open, players have to neglect a couple of other areas and can lose out if they made a start in them early in the game. However, the danger seems to be in overusing Conscription. In this game there was a lot of Fortification, and in many ways it seemed a little too much. The bonuses on the new cards were interesting and add variety to the main game, but the expansion certainly doesn’t make the Age of Sail options obsolete as they could be very valuable if a less competitive game was wanted.

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While Purple was exploring India and Africa, Black, Pine, Lime, Blue and Pink were exploring Japan with Tokaido. This is a highly tactical game, that straightens out the market mechanism at the heart of Glen More and makes it the centre of a set collecting game. During the game, players are travelling from the ancient capital Kyoto, to Edo (now Tokyo) via the Tōkaidō road. This was one of the five centrally administered routes, the Gokaidō, that connected the capital of Japan with the outer provinces during the Edo period (1603–1868).

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As players travel, they experience the wonders of Japan sampling food and scenery, talking to the colourful characters en route, buying souvenirs and giving thanks at the temples they pass. The game board consists of a long track with locations marked—each location can only be visited by one player. Players line up along the path and the player at the back goes first (in this case Pink). They move their piece to an empty space and carry out the associated action, before the next player at the rear takes their turn.

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In each case, the primary decision is simple: move to the space with the most interesting action to maximise points, or move to the first available space to get the most turns. In most cases, once that decision has been made, players simply take money or a card from the appropriate pile, the three panoramas, the hot springs, or Characters. Panoramas and Hot Springs simply give points while Characters give other bonuses. Stopping at a temple allows players to genuflect and pay tribute, while visiting a Village gives player the opportunity to buy souvenirs. Both of these cost money, however.

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Money is really tight and there are few chances to get more, and an important source of points is sampling the varied food, but food can be expensive. There are four stops to eat and players have to stop and wait at these. The first person to arrive gets to choose their meal from a handful of cards—they do not have to buy food, if they choose not to or cannot afford it, but each meal is worth six points at the end of the game. Food comes at different prices though, so arriving early means players get to choose a cheaper meal. Each meal a player takes must be different, however, so waiting to the end can end up being costly, either financially, or in points lost.

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At the end of the game, there are bonus points for almost everything: the player who donated most to the temples, the player who spent the most on food, the player who completed each of the panoramas first, and the players who visited the most Hot Springs, met the most visitors and bought the most souvenirs. The player with the most points at the end is deemed to have had the best journey and wins.

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Players start by choosing their character from a pair drawn at random. Blue was Kinto, Lime was Hirotata, Pink was Zen-emon, Pine was Mitsukuni and Black was Umegae. Each of these gave a special power, for example, picking Kinto meant Blue paid one Ryō less for food each time she stopped to eat. Similarly, every time Lime stopped to pay tribute at a temple, he was able to donate an extra Ryō, taking it from the main supply scoring an extra point straight way, and putting him in pole position for picking up the ten point bonus for being the most devout.

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The special powers aren’t all financial though—Mitsukuni gives an extra point at the end of the game for every end-game bonus the player wins. Most of them do involve money on some level though even if it is not directly. Zen-emon’s special power, for example, activated when Pink visited a Village to buy souvenirs. When buying souvenirs, the active player draws three souvenir cards and can choose to buy one, two or all three. Whenever Pink bought one souvenir, Zen-emon enabled him to buy one souvenir for one Ryō (regardless of its marked price) and as many others as he wished at full price.

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Souvenirs are a great way to get points. They come in different types and players are collecting mixed sets with the first card in a set being worth one point, but later being worth more—a full set gives sixteen points. The special powers give players a steer as to which strategies might be beneficial. To take advantage of Zen-emon’s special power, Pink needed to visit the Village as often as possible, however, there were two problems: firstly, souvenirs are expensive, and secondly Pine kept getting there first.

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Pine got extremely lucky on his card draws when he visited the Villages too, picking up lots of cheap souvenirs and getting lots of points in return. As if that wasn’t enough, Pine seemed to be able to harness his “inner Burgundy” and every time he visited the Hot Springs, he found monkeys and with them an extra point. To rub salt in Pink’s wounds, he ran out of cash and found he couldn’t afford to eat, and thus he haemorrhaged points.

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Meanwhile, Black as Umegae, kept meeting people and every time he did so he gained an extra point and a Ryō. This occasional top-up of cash meant he wasn’t as strapped as everyone else, but further, the New Encounter mini-expansion Cards were also included in the deck, and some of these are quite powerful. Pine picked up Itamae, the especially powerful itinerant cook (who cooked him an extra meal for just one Ryō), but Black took Takuhatsuso, for example, the old priest who gave him four points in exchange for just one Ryō.

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As the players approached Edo, Pine was way out in front, though Black and Blue (thanks to spending a lot of time admiring the views) were not far behind. There were a lot of points available from the bonuses though and it wasn’t a forgone conclusion by any means. Lime took the ten point temple bonus, but it wasn’t really enough. Black finished one point behind Blue, until the recount when Black finished one point ahead. That was just enough to give Black second place, but Pine picked up enough bonuses and with the extras provided by Mitsukuni he finished seven points clear.

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Pine and Lime went for an early night, but Endeavor was still going so Black had to wait for Purple which meant a game of Azul with Blue and Pink. We’ve played this a lot within the group, but having effectively had over a year off has rejuvenated many of our old favourites. The series of games use a very simple, but very clever market mechanic where players take all the tiles of one colour from a market and put the rest into a the centre, or take all the tiles of one colour from the centre. The three different games, Azul, Stained Glass of Sintra, and Summer Pavilion, all differ in what players do with the tiles once they’ve taken them.

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In the original Azul, as soon as they have taken the tiles, players add them to one of the rows on their player board. At the end of the round, one tile in each full row is moved into their mosaic. The game ends when one player completes two rows of their mosaic. Players score points when they add tiles to their mosaic (one point for each tile in the row and column it forms), and receive bonuses for completed rows, columns and any completed sets in their mosaic. The catch is that each feeder row can only contain one colour and and if there are left-overs when they add to it, these score negative points. Further, each row in a player’s mosaic can only have one tile of each colour.

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And that was where Pink got caught, first with seven negative points taking him to zero and then a massive eleven negative points. Black and Blue managed to avoid that pitfall though and the game was progressing well when suddenly, Blue brought it to an abrupt end by completing two rows. Black failed to spot it was on the cards because Blue’s finished rows, were the second and third, rather than the easier first row. Inevitably, having his game cut short stymied him somewhat, and Blue’s final score of a nice round hundred put her some way ahead of the others.

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Endeavor was coming to a close, but there was just time for one final quick game while they finished up. The game the trio settled on was Coloretto, the cute chameleon collecting game that provides the core mechanism that underpins the better known game, Zooloretto. This is really a really simple game: on their turn, players either draw the top chameleon card from the deck and add it to a truck, or take a truck. The aim of the game is to collect sets of one colour, but only the largest three sets give positive scores, while the others score negatively. The clever part is the set scoring, which uses the Triangular Number Series.

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Each additional card in a set is worth one more than the last card added with the first worth a single point, but the card that completes the set is worth six points. As usual, there was stiff competition for the multicoloured chameleon cards, but also for the bonus point cards. Blue went from “Azul Hero” to “Coloretto Zero” picking up too many cards of in too many different colours early on. It was closer between Pink and Black, though Pink’s large collection of orange cards made the difference giving him victory by eight points. And with Endeavor finally packed away, the evening came to a close.

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Learning Outcome: Don’t spend all your money in the souvenir shop – food is important too.

6th October 2021

For the first time, the group were meeting on a Wednesday to avoid clashing with the Quiz on Thursday. As Blue and Pink waited for food they decided to squeeze in a quick game of NMBR9 to celebrate our ninth birthday. This is a quick little tile-laying game that has almost zero setup time, so is very appealing as a filler in this sort of situation. The tiles are poly-ominos roughly shaped like the numbers zero to nine and there is a deck of cards featuring each number, zero to nine, twice. Players take the appropriate number from the box following a flip of a card, and add it to their personal play-space.

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Tiles have to be placed in layers with tiles on higher layers being more valuable as the number on the tile is multiplied by the “storey” it is on. Tiles must be placed adjacent to another tile on the same layer and, when placing tiles on higher layers they must not be wholly over one other tile and must be completely supported (no bridging gaps or overhangs). This time, Pink managed to make it to four layers putting a seven on the top layer, his third “storey” to give twenty-one points. As a result he was sure he was going to win.

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Pink had fewer tiles on the second and, particularly third levels, though, where Blue had concentrated her efforts. The effect was very similar, so much so that there was only one point in it, but much to his disappointment, even several recounts couldn’t put the deficit in Pink’s favour. He was cheered up by the imminent arrival of his pizza though and they were still eating when Green, Lilac, and then Teal turned up. Since Green and Lilac had missed last time, they introduced themselves to Teal and there was some general chit-chat as everyone else turned up.

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Appropriately, as we were celebrating our ninth birthday, there were nine of us to play the traditional birthday “Feature Game“, Crappy Birthday, as we ate meeple decorated chocolate cupcakes. Crappy Birthday is a silly little party game but is a surprising amount of fun. As we explained the rules to Teal, we reminisced about last year, when we played it over two sessions (one wrapping our parcels and one giving them) in order to be able to play it online. Lime expressed his astonishment that it was a year ago, and everyone concurred that it didn’t feel like a year.

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Crappy Birthday doesn’t sound like much: the game is played over one “year” and each player takes it in turns to have their birthday, with everyone else choosing a card from their hand as a “gift”. The birthday boy or girl then chooses their favourite and least favourite gifts and the givers of these each get a point. As such, those gifting are trying to avoid the mediocre , in a similar way to Dixit, but “not as good” as Purple opined. While most people around the table would agree that Dixit is the better game, this group tend to get more fun out of Crappy Birthday because of the really silly gifts on the cards.

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The silliness of the gifts would get stale if we played the game more frequently, but we only play Crappy Birthday once a year and we usually only use around half the cards, so most cards only come out once every two years. It is a great way to find out about people though, so being new to the group, everyone thought Teal would be at quite a disadvantage. This year we found out that Pink was unimpressed by 100lb of raw fish, Lilac quite fancied a trying out a wingsuit and Blue would overcome the creepiness of 3am in the Paris catacombs as apparently they were hard to get to visit. Ivory, was torn between the opportunity to sing the National Anthem before a Major League Baseball game and getting his earlobes stretched, but went for the latter as his least favourite as it was more permanent.

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We discovered that Teal likes to keep his feet on the ground, so he eschewed a flight in a fighter jet, but really liked the idea of a Viking helmet. It was about this point that we were joined by one of the former bar staff who stuck about to help Pink with his gift selection. It seemed she didn’t really help a lot though as he completely failed to get any of his gifts picked as best or worst.

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From there, Purple nearly ended up instigating divorce proceedings when she received a set of camera scales from Black (a gift nobody else would have been prepared to give to anyone). Instead of fully justified revenge, however, Purple gave Black’s his favourite gift a campervan. Lime having just moved house eschewed recycled newspaper wallpaper, instead opting to decorate his new home with some modern art after some classes. DIY seemed to be in the air, as Green chose a house that needed renovation, though he volunteered Lilac to fix the roof.

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As usual, Lime’s amazing gift-giving skills meant he did well, but this time he was beaten into third place by Purple and, remarkably, Teal who tied for first place, with four—it seems Teal knows us all surprisingly well after just a couple of weeks! As people counted their scores and decided what to play next, the group put together a special selection of gifts for Pine who was running late thanks to a group of over-enthusiastic cubs whom he had been showing round his work. This special selection was tailor-made for a vegan who doesn’t like horses.

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From there, the group split into three, one led by Lilac who wanted to play Thurn und Taxis, one led by Ivory who wanted to play Key Flow and one led by Green to play with something short that Pine could join in with when he arrived. Thurn und Taxis is a slightly older, Spiel des Jahres winning game where players build postal routes connecting cities across Bavaria and surrounding regions. Routes are built city to city to city, so that each city is adjacent to the next city on the route and there is a road connecting these two cities.

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Players are building routes by collecting cards and playing them in front of them. Every turn, the active player takes a city card from the face-up display (or blind from the top of the deck) and then plays a card for a city connected to either end of their existing route. The card played, must connect to their route, otherwise they have to discard their route and start again. Then they can score their route if they choose, but each route must consist of at least three cities and players may build only one route at a time.

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If after adding to the route, the length of the route is at least three cities, the player may declare it finished and score it. Players start with a supply of twenty post offices in their colour, each of which is worth minus one at the end of the game. When they score a route, players place post offices in cities on the board, but they have a choice. Each city is in a region and each region has a colour, when a route is scored, the active player can either place one post office in one city in each of the region their route visits, or in all the cities on one of the regions their route goes to.

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When a route is scored, the active player can take a cart card. These give points, however, in the general case, the cart card must be one more than the previous one and the route must be longer than the cart number. Thus, if someone is scoring a six leg route, they can only take a level six card if their previous cart was a level five card. If they enlist the help of the Wainwright, however, if they have a level five card, they would be able to take a level six card with a route of only four legs. Once a route is scored, the city cards of that route are discarded, and the player begins a new route on their next turn.

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The Wainwright is not the only special character in the game: the Postman, Bailiff and Coachman are all there to offer help, allowing players to take a second card, refresh the card market and play a second card respectively. Players can only enlist aid once per turn though, so they must choose who they call on carefully. When a player exhausts their supply of post offices or acquires a value seven carriage, the end of the game is triggered with players continuing the round—the player with the most points wins.

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In addition to points for cart cards, there are also bonus points available for players to connect all the cities in a region or to have a post office in every outer region, as well as for players completing longer routes and for the player who triggers the end of the game. In general, bonuses score most for the first player to make the achievement with diminishing returns thereafter. This is therefore a consideration players must take into account, but the fact that players must add at least one city to their route each turn or lose the whole route is probably the most important aspect of planning in the game.

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Although Thurn und Taxis is an older game, Purple had not played it before, and it took her a while to get her head round it. She got to grips with it eventually, however, it was later in the game and Black and Lilac had already got a head start. It was very close between them though with the scores neck-a-neck until the last. Lilac triggered the end of the game by taking a level seven cart card and with it took what turned out to be the decisive bonus point, pipping Black with twenty-seven points to his twenty-six.

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On the next table, Teal had looked in the game bags and decided Azul was one he’d like to play. Green, Lime and Teal had just started without Pine when he inevitably arrived a couple of turns in. He politely eschewed their kind offers to start again, instead concentrating on his healthy supper of crisps and cake and choosing his gift. In Pine-like fashion, he chose to redefine the rules and decided his favourite gift was a hunting expedition as long as the subjects of the hunt were the people delivering the perkiness training in his other “choice” gift.

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We have played a lot of Azul and its derivatives (Stained Glass of Sintra and Summer Pavilion) over the last three years, but the original is probably still the favourite across the group. It is really very simple, and despite being an abstract game, the pieces are really nice. On their turn, the active player either takes all the tiles of one colour from one of the “markets” putting the rest in the centre, or they take all the tiles of one colour from the central pool. They then add the tiles to one of the rows on their player board. The catch is that all the tiles placed in any row must be the same colour and if they over-flow, they score negatively. Additionally, each colour can only score in each row once.

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Only complete rows are removed and scored, and then only at the end of the round (when all the tiles in the market and central pool have been taken). Thus if a player has a nearly complete row at the end of a round, they carry that through to the next round leaving them with less free space to work with. When a row is scored, one tile is moved to the player’s mosaic and scores for the number of tiles it forms a continuous row/column with. The game ends when one or more players complete two rows. This time it was a game of two halves, or rather two games. It had been a while since we played the original version (or any version for that matter), but it wasn’t long before Teal, Lime and Green were happily playing, filling their boards.

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Lime and Teal took an early lead and were soon well ahead of Green as he had concentrated on filling his grid from the bottom up, whereas they had been working from the top down. As the game progressed Green began to catch up. It was then that he realised that he’d forgotten what the game end trigger was. He’d thought it was when the markets could no-longer be refilled, but checked the rules to be sure. Only to find that two full completed rows had happened two turns earlier! The group decided to finish the round and make it the last. It was very close between Lime and Teal, with Lime just taking victory by three points. The other games were still going and it was not yet late, so the group decided to give it another go, and this time finish the game correctly.

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In the second game, Green built his grid from the top down and the scores remained fairly similar, until around half way through when Teal began to pull away. It was at about this point that Green noticed that one row had tiles of a colour he’d already scored for that row. No-one was quite sure how it had happened, but the mutual decision was that he’d move these tiles down to the next row. That turn didn’t go quite as expected, but at least it wasn’t a complete disaster. The following round, he discovered he’d done the same thing again. This time he worked out what he’d done: he’d had failed to clear the remaining tiles when he moved one across to the pattern board. So, on the previous turn, instead of moving tiles, he should have removed them. It didn’t really matter though as Teal won by a landslide.

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Meanwhile, Ivory, Blue and Pink had revised the rules, completed card set up for Key Flow, and had started playing. Key Flow is the card game of one of the group’s favourite games, Keyflower. In both games, players are building villages and activating the buildings in their villages by playing meeples (or rather Keyples) to generate resources and score points. The games have a lot in common including the artwork, the iconography and the fact both take place over four rounds or seasons. Fundamentally, the underlying game mechanism is different, however, with players acquiring tiles by auction in Keyflower and by card drafting in Key Flow.

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Once the card decks have been sorted out, Key Flow is quite straightforward to play, though doing well is a different matter. Players who start with a hand of cards, choose one and pass the rest on. They then add their chosen card to their village. There are three types of card: Village cards, Riverside cards and “Keyple” cards. Village cards are buildings that can be activated by playing Keyples above them, while Riverside cards provide instant resources and skill tiles.

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The cards have to be “connected” together and location can be important. Buildings for example are more productive if they have been upgraded, but upgrading needs resources and the resources need to be located on the building being upgraded. Similarly, in autumn there are some buildings which score points for resources they are holding. Therefore, it is helpful if the building producing the resources is near to the one being upgraded or used for scoring as moving resources can be expensive and sometimes difficult.

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At the start of both Keyflower and Key Flow players get some winter tiles/cards which can act as objectives to guide players’ strategies. Whereas in Keyflower these are just added to the tile draw, in Key Flow, players get to keep one of their winter cards with the rest going into the draft. At the end of the game, at the end of winter, players score for any autumn cards, any buildings with upgrades as appropriate, any winter cards and finally one point for any otherwise unused gold.

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One of the biggest differences between Key Flow and Keyflower is the way Keyples work. In Key Flow, they are cards and come in singletons and pairs. Each card has a small Keyple at the bottom of the card, and the number of Keyples needed to activate a building is one more than the number of small Keyples already there. So if there is one small Keeple already there, a pair would be needed to activate that building. Further, only one card is can be played each round, so if two small Keyples are already present, the Keyple card must be augmented with a Keyple token (obtained as a bonus with some cards or from some buildings).

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Further, the Keyple cards also feature arrows which indicate where they can be played. Some can be played either in a neighbour’s village or the player’s own village. Other cards can only be played on one side or cannot be played in their own village. This is why three players is arguably the sweet-spot for Key Flow—with more players there is at least one village players cannot use, adding a level of randomness that it is difficult to deal with. With three however, everything in play is accessible, though perhaps at a cost.

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It had been a while since Key Flow had been given an outing, so although game play is functionally straightforward, it took Blue, Ivory and Pink a while to remember the little features and how to make the game work for themselves. Pink started off early with an obvious strategy of generating stone, stone and even more stone from his Keystone Quarry. It was very clear, even to Pine who joined in to spectate about halfway through, that Pink had a winter card that would score for stone. And so it proved when he produced the Trader in the final round.

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Things were less clear-cut for Blue and Ivory, however. Blue started by just playing the cards in her hand, which meant she ended up with a lot of cows (just because). In summer, Ivory picked up a boat that allowed him to convert sheep into pigs and pigs into sheep, which went nicely with his animal scoring winter cards. Blue, on the other hand, very out of practice with this sort of game, just played tactically, and played for points. Her Workshop went well with the Mercer’s Guild she had in her winter cards, but the Well and Goldsmith, both fully upgraded gave her thirty-five points alone.

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Ivory had a bit of a nightmare and was unable to make the game work for him this time. This was made worse by a rule we only spotted towards the end which meant each Keyple card could only be used towards one goal and the fact he made a mess of things when he put a Riverside card in the middle of his village and had to make it work retrospectively. As he said sadly, although he had remembered how to play, he’d forgotten how to win. Pink, with his massive pile of stone thought he was in with a good chance, but they were actually only worth one and a half points each, so although he had a huge pile, it only gave him thirty-nine points and had taken a lot of work to get them.

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Pink was a little bit stymied by the fact he was banking on also getting a a sheep scoring card in winter, but Ivory took it before it got round to him. Blue on the other hand had lucked out when she picked up a lot of Keyple scoring cards that nobody else seemed interested in giving her over a hundred points and a comfortable victory. With that, Ivory left, as did Lime and Teal, leaving Green, Pink, Blue and Pine waiting for the conclusion of Thurn und Taxis, and time to play a couple of rounds of Love Letter. In the end, it really was just a couple of rounds and ended with a round a piece for Green and Pink, as the pub was closing and it was time to leave.

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Learning Outcome: While camera scales may seem like a good gift idea, in reality the giver will probably end up sleeping on the couch.

Boardgames in the News: Asmodee’s Plan B

When Asmo d ee acquired F2Z/Filosofia/Z-Man Games etc. in 2016, the then owner of F2Z, Sophie Gravel, activated her “Plan B” and set up a new company, Plan B Games. This company was successful almost straight away, winning the Spiel de Jahres Award & Deutscher Spiele Preis just two years later, with Azul. Since then, Plan B has released the follow-up games Stained Glass of Sintra and Summer Pavilion which, although not as popular as the original, were still very successful in their own right.

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Plan B were also responsibly for the three Century Games (Spice Road, Eastern Wonders and A New World) which were all variously successful, and the more recently released games, Beez and Alma Mater. In 2017, Plan B Games acquired German publisher Eggertspiele, the publisher responsible for many well received heavier, strategy games including Great Western Trail, Mombasa (Deutscher Spiele Preis winner), and Village (Kennerspiel des Jahres & Deutscher Spiele Preis winner), as well as the lighter Spiel des Jahres winner, Camel Up.

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Given the quality of all these games, almost inevitably, just five years after they acquired F2Z, this week Asmodee announced they have now acquired Plan B and their subsidiary brands (Eggertspiel, Next Move Games and Pretzel Games). This time Asmodee are absorbing the whole team including Sophie Gavel, perhaps avoiding the necessity of acquiring her Plan C in five years time…

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17th March 2020 – “Unofficial boardGOATS”

There were people around the bar from 6pm, but we had the back room to ourselves, just the four of us. The feel was similar to the Sunday after the fire, when people turned out and sat in the garden partly to help drink the smoke and water damaged stock, but largely to show support for a valued amenity, knowing that they would have to do without it for a while. There was sadness, a sharing of news, some gossip, a certain amount of gallows humour, and for us, lots of desserts and Azul: Summer Pavilion.

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The game uses the same market mechanism used in the original Azul and the re-implementation, Stained Glass of Sintra. The idea of this is that there are several markets (nine in the four player game) arranged in a circle and each with four coloured tiles. On their turn, players either take all the tiles of one colour and put the rest in the centre, or take all the tiles of one colour from the centre. Summer Pavilion differs from the other versions because each round has a special colour: tiles of this colour are “wild” and can be used to replace any other when placing. Additionally, only one tile of this colour can be taken from a market or the centre, and then as a bonus with other tiles.

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The structure of the game is also different with two phases; players take it in turns to take tiles, then they take it in turns to place tiles (rather than taking and placing straight away). Perhaps the most obvious difference is the shape of the tiles though—rhombus shaped instead of square and the individual placement mats are built round pretty six-fold symmetric “flowers”. When placing a tile, players have to match the colour on the mat, and the number on the space throwing the leftovers into a red tower—the build-quality of this is distinctly superior to the one in Stained Glass of Sintra, in fact, the build-quality of pretty much everything is better than in the first re-implementation.

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Players score according to the size of the segment after addition, thus adding a piece to connect two other single pieces would score three points. Enclosing special features on the board gives bonus tiles which are added to the players pile of tiles to be placed. The game takes six rounds (one for each colour) and players get end-game bonuses for completing flowers and for filling all seven spaces with the same number. The player with the most points is the winner.

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Although Blue was the only person who had played it before, it was quickly clear that everyone liked this version more than the last, but found it more challenging than the original adding a new level of complexity. Purple went first, and Lime quickly got his nose in front. Every time someone threatened to catch him, he put on another spurt and increased his speed to maintain his lead at around ten points. That left it down the bonuss and the question was whether anyone had enough to catch him.

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Blue took the most points in the end game scoring, but starting at the back, she also had the most ground to make up; Lime took the least and starting at the front he had the most to lose. Purple was the closest to catching Lime and looked to be in a good pace taking twenty-four points in bonuses (as many as Blue), but sadly had three tiles she had been unable to place. That made all the difference as she finished three points behind Lime, with seventy seven points to his eighty.

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Lime suggested playing again, something only he ever does—not that this is a bad thing at all, it’s just particularly unusual within the group. Not that anyone minds playing games more than once, but he is the only one to ever suggest it. This time, most people seemed to think they could do a better job the second time round, so the suggestion was really well received.

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The second time round, Black and Blue started out with a different strategy, going for some of the expensive tiles first to maximise the extra tiles they could take early on. Lime started as he had before taking an early lead and trying to keep it. This time he found it much more difficult though. Blue weathered his early spurt and kept with him, eventually overtaking him and sneaking into the lead. This time everyone did better on the bonuses, as they knew what to look for, indeed everyone did better overall, though Lime said it didn’t feel like it.

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Blue had the lead going into the final round and with two completed stars finished twenty point ahead of second place. It was really tight for that though, with only a handful of points between second and fourth. Despite a three point penalty at the end, Lime just managed to hold off Black, beating him into second place by a single point. And that was it, the end of what is likely to be the last game for the group for what could be a very long time. Everyone sadly said goodbye to the landlord, Charles, and we all wish him and all the staff at The Jockey our very best for what will, no doubt, be an extremely difficult few months for them.

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Learning Outcome: You only fully realise what you’ve got when you are about to lose it.

24th December 2019 – “Unofficial boardGOATS” on Christmas Eve

It being Christmas Eve, with many people away or having other plans and already having held our Christmas Party, we decided to have a quiet, “unofficial” meeting for those who fancied it. As a result, there was no “Feature Game“, and just four to respond positively to a Doodle Poll. So, Pine and Lime joined Blue and Pink (newly arrived from Radio Oxford) for food and a chat before settling down to play some light games. The first of these was Azul, winner of the Spiel des Jahres and Deutscher Spiele Preis in 2018, a game we played a lot when it first came out at Essen in 2017, but has more recently been largely superseded by the newer versions (Stained Glass of Sintra and Summer Pavilion).

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Azul is very light and simple to play, but with surprising staying power. Despite Azul being so popular with the group, Lime had somehow missed out so we had a run-down of the rules first.Players take coloured tiles from a central market and add them to rows on their player board next to their mosaic. The rows are different lengths and can only hold one colour at a time. For any rows that are complete at the end of a round, one of the tiles is moved into that players mosaic and the row is emptied for the next round.

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The clever part of the game is the tile market. There are a number of “stalls” in the market, each holding four coloured tiles. On their turn, the active payer can take all of one colour from one of the stalls moving the rest to the central pool, or alternatively, they can take all the tiles of one colour from the central pool. Once all the tiles are gone, the round ends and tiles in the rows are moved across to the mosaic then the market is restocked from the draw bag. Scoring occurs during the game when tiles are added to the mosaic, and bonus points are awarded at the end of the game for completed rows, columns and any colours which appear in each row/column.

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Pink put all his efforts into trying to get bonus points for placing a full set of red tiles monopolising them early on and making it really hard for everyone else to get any. It was a really, really tight game, and Lime put in an excellent show to take second place against much more experienced opposition. He was just pipped by three points by Blue, who finished strongly taking bonus points for two completed columns. Lime had enjoyed his first play and likes playing games twice so suggested a replay. With the relaxed atmosphere, everyone else was happy to go along with it.

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The second game wasn’t as tight as the first. Pink collected more red tiles, annoying everyone else, again, and Blue was forced to take an eight point penalty which she thought was going to put her out of the game. She made up for it by picking up bonus points for one complete column and a set of blue tiles and once again sneaked ahead of Lime. Everyone was trampled into the dirt by Pine, however, with an enormous score—his first ever over a hundred. As we were packing away, we discussed how he did it, and concluded that it was all about the scores from tile placement, and the bonus points really were, just that: a nice bonus, but not really something to aim for.

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The night was still young and everyone fancied playing something else. In keeping with the relaxed nature of the evening, a pair of comfy slippers seemed in order, in this case, Ticket to Ride: London. This is a trimmed down version of the popular modern classic, Ticket to Ride. All the game play is much the same: on their turn the active player, takes coloured cards into their hand or plays coloured cards to place pieces on the map trying to complete route cards they received at the start of the game. In the original game, the cards and pieces were carriages, in this cut down version the cards depict other forms of transport and the pieces are buses, and players have fewer of them.

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Points are placing trains on the map with the longest sections scoring more heavily. In this cut down version, there are also bonus points for connecting stops in certain regions. The biggest factor is usually the tickets however, as completed tickets score points, while incomplete tickets give negative points. The active player may forfeit their turn, instead taking additional tickets, which adds an element of jeopardy: taking more tickets can add to the score, but if they aren’t fulfilled by the end of the game, it can be costly. Pine started the game with two tickets giving long, roughly parallel routes that he thought he would be able to make work. However, as is often the case with the cut-down versions of Ticket to Ride, the game started fast and Pine quickly realised he would be lucky if he could finish one and end with a positive score, never mind complete both.

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It was really tight around central London, and almost everyone struggled as others upset their plans. This made for another tight game. Blue finished the game by reducing her stock of buses to two first, and ended up with a winning score of forty largely thanks to a couple of fortunate tickets picked up late in the game. Lime likes playing games more than once and suggested a rematch. Pine, having had a really rough time the first time round was keen to improve on his first attempt and Pink and Blue were happy to go along with it.

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Pine again picked up Regent’s Square to Elephant & Castle, but pairing this with a shorter route made it much more achievable. This time, Blue really struggled to place trains, and looked to be in a lot of trouble with only seventeen points when Pink brought the game to an early end. Both Blue and Lime had nothing they could do on their final turn so were left with a decision: gamble on taking more tickets to try to get one that is already complete, or hope they had enough tickets already. Both thought about it, but chose to forgo the gamble, which turned out to be the right choice. In the final accounting, Blue picked up a massive twenty-three points from her tickets, to give her an unassailable total of forty (again—nothing if not consistent), dashing Pinks hopes, leaving him five points behind. With that, everyone wished each other a Very Merry Christmas and headed home to put their stockings up.

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Learning Outcome: While GOATS love a good party, a quiet night can also be really enjoyable.

29th October 2019

Blue and Pink were first on the scene, armed with special deliveries from Essen and some new exciting toys to play with. Burgundy, Pine, Lime and Green weren’t far behind and soon those that hadn’t eaten earlier were tucking in. Inevitably, the conversation was all about the games fair in Essen and how much it had grown – this year, according the organisers, there were over 209,000 participants, ten percent more than last year. There were also one thousand two hundred exhibitors from fifty-three nations, occupying six large halls, around twice the hall space when Green last went.

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As people arrived, they received their consignments. Purple and Black got their sadly rather squished copy of the new release, Fast Sloths complete with Expansion and Chameleon promo, a copy of the new portable set of Settlers of Catan (“Catan Traveller“) and a several bags of German lebkuchen biscuits. Burgundy got his annual Concordia expansion (the Balearica/Cyprus map) and the European Birds expansion for Wingspan. This last game was one of the sell-out games at Essen, and Blue and Pink had been at the front of what became a very long queue to get it. That said, the length was probably more to do with the fact that it was also the queue to get a hand on one of the fifty English language copies of Tapestry at the show. Given the fact that Wingspan is very popular at the moment and it would need very little learning, the new expansion was “Feature Game” for the night.

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The game is relatively simple, with players collecting birds for their reserves. On their turn, the active player chooses one of four actions/habitats, and then starting with the card furthest to the right in that habitat, activating each card in turn. The actions associated with the habitats are spending food to play cards; getting food; laying eggs, and more drawing bird cards. Players start with eight possible actions per turn, which gradually reduces to five over the course of the four rounds of the game. All the bird cards in the game have actions that fit with their real-life behaviour. For example, the food needed to play cards closely resembles their diet, the number of eggs each bird has in their nest is proportionately correct and bonus actions are associated with birds that flock and birds of prey.

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The European Expansion adds more birds that mostly do more of the same thing, but includes birds that have new end of round powers. There were enough copies for everyone to play, so we set up two games in tandem. Blue, Green and Pink helped Burgundy christen his new copy, while Black, Purple, Ivory, Pine and Lime gave Blue and Pink’s copy it’s first outing. After making sure all the new cards were thoroughly shuffled into the deck, Burgundy’s group were first to get started. The end of round objectives were particularly awkward as the final round rewarded players with the most birds without eggs on nests (one of the new objective tiles).

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Blue started off very well, but then her game stalled as she struggled to find useful cards. Burgundy wasn’t far behind and his very hungry Griffon Vulture seemed to be very effective when it came to catching mice. Blue’s Barred Owl was also successful on almost every occasion it went hunting while Green’s Northern Harrier repeatedly went hungry. Meanwhile, Pink was building a very fine reserve with lots of high value birds, although he felt they didn’t give him such effective actions. With Blue struggling to get anything she could play and Green muttering about not understanding the game, it was left to Pink and Burgundy to fight it out. In the end, although Pink had far more interesting birds, Burgundy did much better with his personal objectives and end of round objectives, giving him a total of seventy-three points, nine more than Pink in second place.

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On the neighbouring table, everyone started off slowly. Black grabbed one of the new European birds that allowed him to steal food which he used to great effect. Black and Lime also took one of the new end of round bonus cards each which allowed them both to tuck cards. Pine played a Long-tailed Tit, one of the new double space birds, allowing him to get lots of food. Ivory focused on cards with activation powers and in the second round, he and Lime built egg laying engines, with Lime making good use of his Fish Crow which allowed him to exchange eggs for food. Purple struggled due to the lack of fish, clearly having an eye on the last round objective (most birds in wetlands).

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Both Pine and Lime struggled seeing and understanding the cards, but despite this, both managed to get effective engines going, particularly Lime. By the end, Black had lots of valuable birds and did well on his objectives and Pine missed out on a seven point objective bonus by just by one corn eating bird (getting three points instead). Black also did well on tucked cards, as did Lime. Everyone drew for the first end of round objective (most birds in any row), with Ivory followed by Lime for the second (most birds with “brown powers”). Lime managed to win the third round objective battle (most grassland birds), edging Ivory into second place, but the final round (most wetland birds), was a three-way tie between Ivory (again!), Pine and Purple who all had the maximum number of birds in their wetland.

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Although he did well on objectives, in the final round Ivory’s primary focus was on getting as many eggs laid as possible and he finished with a massive twenty-seven, a significant contributor to his final, winning score of seventy-nine, seven more than Black in second place and ten more than Lime in third. There was the inevitable comparisons between the two games, and when Ivory asked whether people felt the expansion had made much difference to the game, opinions seemed divided. Having birds he could see in his garden had made a big difference to Pine, though to those people who were less interested in our feathered friends and more interested in the game play, the expansion had made less of an impact. For those that have it though, the European expansion will no-doubt remain a permanent feature.

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The four-player game including Burgundy, Pink, Blue and Green finished first by some margin, giving them time to play something else. With Blue and Pink having exchanged last year’s variant on the 2018 Spiel des Jahres winner, Azul (Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra), for this Essen’s latest model, Azul: Summer Pavilion, this seemed a good time to give it an outing. All three games are based round a clever “market” mechanism: players take all the tiles of one colour from one of the stalls and put the rest in the central pool, or take all the tiles of one colour from the central pool. In the original game and in the second iteration, these are placed straight away in a tableau, with the original representing a mosaic and the second a stained glass window.

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In the new, Summer Pavilion variant, tiles taken from the market are put to one side for the second phase when players take it in turns to place them on their personal player board. Where the tiles in the first two versions are square (opaque and clear plastic respectively), in the new edition, they are rhombus-shaped. Instead of rows, each player’s tableau consists of stars made up of six rhombi. In this game, as they add pieces players score points for the size of the block. For example, adding a piece to an existing partial star consisting of two pieces gives three points. Thus, increasing the size progressively yields increasing amounts of points. Although this is an obvious difference, the biggest difference in the game play is the cost of placing tiles and the use of “Wilds”.

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Each space on a player’s tableau has a number on it: one to six. This is the cost to place a tile in that space. So, placing on a six-space means they place one tile on the board and five in the tile tower. The tiles must all match the colour being placed, however, every round, one of the six colours is “Wild” and this can be used as a substitute. The Wild colour affects the tile drawing phase too: Wilds cannot be chosen from the market, however, if there is are Wilds present in the market, one (and only one) must be taken as well. For example, if there are two blue tiles, a red and a green (which is Wild), the player can take the two blues and the green, or the red and the green, but cannot take the green alone.

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There are several bonuses, both in game and end game. Players who surround certain features on their tableau get to take extra tiles from a second, special market. This helps grease the wheels and makes the decision space a little more interesting too. At the end of the game, players get bonus points for completing stars and for covering all the “ones”, all the “twos” etc.. The stars give different numbers of points depending on the colour. Each tableau has one of each colour available and one central multicolour star in which every tile must be a different colour. At the end of the game, the player with the most points is the winner.

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Although Blue had found time to punch the pieces in advance, she had not been able to read the rules properly so did it on the fly – the rules are not long, nor are they complex. That said, this version certainly adds strategic depth compared with the original, without the fiddliness of the second version. Without any experience, there were no clear strategies. Blue targeted the bonus points for the must lucrative, purple star and the central star as “low hanging fruit”, while Pink went for the in-game bonus tiles and picked up the extras for completing all the “ones” and “twos”, but didn’t quite make the “threes”. Burgundy played for some of the less valuable stars and Green struggled to get anything to work at all. It was really close, with only one point between Blue and Burgundy, and Pink just a handful of points behind him.

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This was a brand new game, never played by anyone round the table, so inevitably, something got missed in the rules. In both the base game, Azul, and the follow-up, Stained Glass of Sintra, the first person to take tiles from the central pool in each round takes the first player marker and a penalty for doing so. The same is true here, but unlike the base game, the size of the penalty depends on the number of tiles taken with the first player token. Everyone played by the same rules, so nothing was “unfair” and nobody noticed any balance issues, however, in such a close game it is very likely to have made a difference. We’ll get it right next time!

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Learning Outcome: Essen is Awesome!

20th August 2019

It was ominously gloomy and empty in pub the when Khaki and Mulberry arrived. With Blue away for work, she had left the logbook with the landlord and it was sadly sitting on the table waiting for them. Fearing the repercussions of ignoring the demanding tome, they ordered food and took their places at the table. They were soon joined by Burgundy, Purple, Black, Lime and Ivory, making it a decent turn-out for a meeting that was very nearly cancelled.

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Once the feeding was over and done with, it was time to organise people to play games. Purple, Mulberry and Lime began with the “Feature Game”, Ivor the Engine. This is a great little game with fantastic artwork from the late, great Peter Firmin. Although it is designed round a the children’s cartoon, the cute artwork belies the viscous little teeth the game has. The idea is that players move their wagon round the board, playing cards to carryout errands which are paid in sheep – the player with the most sheep at the end of the game is the winner.

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At the start of the game the board is randomly filled with lost sheep. On their turn, the active player begins by collecting a sheep at their current location, if one is available, receiving bonus sheep if they take the last sheep in a location. Then they play cards and move their wagon playing cards before or after they move. There is one free movement and others can be bought with coal. The active player can play as many or as few cards as they wish, but there is a tight hand-limit of four cards and only one card can be played at each location. The cards can be used in one of two ways: they can provide a special action (e.g. extra moves or moving sheep about), or if the active player is at a location where there are no sheep, they can use them to complete a “Job” receiving sheep as a reward. Finally, players take a card from the face-up display discarding a card if necessary.

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It seems very gentle at first glance, but there are a couple of things that make the game quite strategic. Firstly, only one player can be in a location at any one time, which can be surprisingly inconvenient for players who have built a plan and a hand of job cards only to be obstructed by another player squatting in the wrong place. With cards at such a premium it is also surprisingly irritating when another player takes a desired card. Managing these is key to being successful, but the nastiest part of the game are the event cards. At the end of a player’s turn, they draw cards from the deck to replace any they have taken and place them face up in the display.

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If an Event card is revealed, then the actions must be carried out by everyone – some are nice, some are slightly inconvenient, others are downright nasty. For example, some Events cause players to move their wagon to the other end of the board which can be very helpful or extremely frustrating depending on the player’s plans. Players can also be forced to forfeit sheep, or worse, hard won resources or Job cards. Like Job cards, Event cards are also dual purpose, and (once the Event has been resolved) can be taken from the “market” at the end of a turn, like Job cards. They are valuable though, providing a means to score more at the end of the game, so they must be bought using gold, which is very rare and difficult to come by.

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Purple explained the rules very thoroughly as there are a couple of slightly fiddly exceptions, for example, it costs two coal to move along the main line, but eventually the game got going. Everyone started on the same side of the board and got in each other’s way a bit. Lime struggled a bit in a game that can be quite unforgiving despite it’s cute graphics and child-friendly theme. Things improved for him as he picked up six sheep on his final turn. Mulberry’s game started well, but in contrast to Lime, fizzled out towards the end. Purple got lucky as she picked up sheep throughout and cards that were conveniently close to her current position. Purple’s experience ensured she capitalised on her good fortune, finishing five points ahead of Lime, with thirty-three.

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Meanwhile on the next table, “the boys” were playing Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra. This was released last year at Essen and uses the market mechanism from the 2018 Spiel des Jahres winner, Azul. The idea is of this is that on their turn, players take all the pieces of one colour from a market and place the left-overs in the middle, or, take all the tiles of one colour from the middle. In Stained Glass of Sintra, instead of placing these pieces in a row and moving them onto a grid, pieces are placed directly into the player’s window. This is modular consisting of the double-sided strips laid out at random so everyone has a different starting setup.

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There are restrictions on how the pieces can be placed though: tiles must be placed in the strip immediately below their Glazier meeple, or in a strip to its right. The Glazier is then placed above the strip the tiles were placed in,, so he gradually moves to the right. Instead of taking tiles, players can choose to reset the Glazier’s position, moving him back to the left most strip. Players get points when strips are completed scoring the sum of the score depicted below the strip and any strips to the right that have already been completed. There is also a colour bonus—each round has a colour drawn at random at the start of the game, and any tiles that match the colour for the round score extra.

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Once a strip has been completed, it is flipped over; after it has been filled a second time it is removed. Any left over tiles that cannot be placed are placed into the glass tower and yield a penalty with players moving along a negative score track which has small steps at the start that gets larger. When the market is empty the round ends and the round indicator tile is also dropped into the glass tower which is emptied when the . There are also end-game bonus points with two variants available, one colour dependent and the other rewarding completing adjacent strips.

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Kahki started, but was the only one new to the game and didn’t know what he was doing. Somehow though he managed to build a lead which kept growing. Black and Burgundy weren’t far behind although there was a lot of smashed orange “glass” when Burgundy was forced to pick up eight orange pieces but only had space for four. Ivory struggled and there was yet more broken orange glass when he picked up twelve orange pieces, only having space for two. As a result, there were a lot of penalty points at the end, and it was only a surprise to Kahki that he was the winner by some twenty points.

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The Ivor group had barely finished the rules explanation by this point, so the group moved on to play Splendor. This is one of our most popular games, but has largely degenerated into an exercise in trying to beat Burgundy as he wins every time. The game is a very simple engine builder, where players can either take “gem” chips on their turn, or use them to buy a card from the display. Cards then provide a perpetual “gem” allowing players to buy more expensive cards which give points. Points are also provided by “Noble” tiles which are revealed at the start of the game and are won by the first player to get a certain combination of gem cards.

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This time, all the Noble tiles needed rubies (red), but very few ruby cards came out. Ivory started well taking an early lead with a few low scoring cards before Khaki caught up him taking a three point card. Burgundy made a very slow start, reserving a couple of cards while Black picked up a few points here and there. Ivory took the first Noble and managed to fight his way to fourteen points, but then the inevitable happened. Burgundy’s game suddenly snowballed and a couple of rounds later he bought his last reserved card and, as the last player in the round, brought the game to an end. Burgundy finished on sixteen points, just two ahead of Ivory who took second place in what was a very tight game where Burgundy was pushed right to the wire, albeit with the usual result.

– Image by boardGOATS

By this time, Ivor was finally finished, and Khaki and Mulberry headed off for an early night, leaving everyone else to play Alhambra. This, the 2003 Spiel des Jahres winner, is a tile laying game where players are building their city. Basically, on their turn, the active player may take money from the open money market; purchase a building from the building market and either place it in their Alhambra or their reserve, or engage in construction and re-construction projects with buildings that had been placed in the player’s Alhambra or their reserve. The core of the game is the market, where players buy building tiles with coloured money cards and add them to their Alhambra. This key purchasing mechanism comes from its predecessor, Stimmt So!.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor EndersGame

There are four different currencies which come in different colours. At the start of a player’s turn, there are four tiles available, each in a different coloured market, which can only be purchased with the currency that matches the market’s colour. If the active player can pay with exactly the correct amount, they can buy another tile, but if they over-pay, they get no change and their turn ends. While this all sounds simple enough, there is the little problem that sets Alhambra apart from Stimmt So!: most of the tiles have walls along one, two or three edges, and when placed, these must match up without partitioning the Alhambra. The walls are critical as poor play in the early stages can mean it is possible to get backed into a corner later in the game.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor EndersGame

There are fifty-four tiles in six different types, each type in a different colour. They are Pavilions (Blue), Manors/Seraglios (Red), Mezzanines/Archades (Brown), Chambers (White), Gardens (Green) and Towers (Purple). Most tiles have one or more walls around the edges and each tile also shows numerical value from two to thirteen, which is their cost. Each of the six different building types in a player’s Alhambra score in each of the scoring phases, with players receiving points for having the most of each type in the first scoring round. In the second scoring round the player in second place also scores and in the final scoring round points are also available for third place in each building type. Points are also awarded in each scoring round for players’ longest external “wall” section within their complex.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor mothertruckin

The game ends when the building market can no longer be replenished from the building tile supply, and there is a final scoring, whereupon the player with the highest score wins. In this game, the distribution of tiles was very uneven, with all the Tower tiles coming out early and and the Manor and Garden tiles coming out late. Ivory took an early lead after the first scoring round having picked up a lot of the early Towers. It was not to last though. Alhambra is a game that rewards efficiency, and Black and Burgundy both made the most of paying exactly the right amount and taking extra turns, while Ivory and Lime fell into the trap of putting tiles into their reserve which cost them an extra turn to place them in their Alhambras.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor EndersGame

While Purple had the most Towers in the second scoring round, others had caught up by the third and final scoring round. As a result, Towers finished in a three-way tie, so nobody scored well. Lime finished with the longest wall taking a massive fifteen points in the final scoring phase, but unfortunately he did not have enough points elsewhere to trouble the leaders, Burgundy and Black. Burgundy also had a substantial wall, giving him twelve points, and with his Gardens and Pavillions, he took a creditable second place, but was some way behind Black who finished with over a hundred points thanks to having the most Chambers and coming second in many of the other buildings and generally being efficient throughout.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor EndersGame

Learning Outcome: boardGOATs can survive without Blue and Green as long as Purple is around.

Deutscher Spiele Preis 2019 – Time to Vote

Like every other sphere, boardgames also receive awards, the best known of which is probably the Spiel des Jahres. The Deutscher Spiele Preis, or German Game Prize, is slightly less well known, but arguably better reflects the slightly more advanced, “Gamers Games”. There is usually quite a lot of overlap with the recommendations, nominees and winners of the Spiel des Jahres Awards, but the Deutscher Spiele Preis typically rewards a slightly heavier game, often more in line with Kennerspiel des Jahres category. This is especially likely to be true this year as the family Spiel des Jahres award, or “Red Pöppel” nominees, are particularly light. The most recent winners of the Deutscher Spiele Preis include, Azul, Terraforming Mars, Mombasa, The Voyages of Marco Polo, Russian Railroads and Terra Mystica, with only Azul, last year’s winner, featuring strongly in the Spiel des Jahres awards (the first game to win both awards since Dominion in 2009).

– Image by boardGOATS

Game weight is not the only difference between the two awards: The Spiel des Jahres nominees and winners are selected by a committee with a clearly defined list of criteria, whereas the Deutscher Spiele Preis (which is awarded at the Internationale Spieltage, in Essen), is selected by a general vote which is open to anyone, players, journalists and dealers alike. The incoming votes are evaluated by an independent institute and only votes with details of the full name and address are valid (any duplicates are removed). All votes are treated the same with games placed first receiving five points, those placed second receiving four and so on.

– Image by boardGOATS

Only new games from the previous year are included in the ranking, so this year that’s games released since May 2018. Thus anything new at Essen last year or the Spielwarenmesse (Nürnberg) this year, is eligible. This includes Architects of the West Kingdom, Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra (the sequel to last year’s winner Azul), Dice Settlers, Endeavor: Age of Sail, Everdell, Key Flow, Newton, Reykholt, Solenia, and Teotihuacan: City of Gods, as well all the nominees and recommendations for the Spiel des Jahres award, like L.A.M.A., Wingspan and Carpe Diem.

– Image from spiel-messe.com

Voting is open until 31^st July and there are hundreds of free games and tickets for the International Gamedays at Essen to win. It’s not necessary to submit a full list, so why not take the opportunity to vote for your favourite release of the year?