When Blue and Pink arrived, Crimson and Cyan were already there on their first visit, finishing their supper and playing a game of Molehill Meadows.  This is a new game by the designer of Zuuli, that they had picked up at the UK Games Expo (meeting the designer Chris Priscott and his delightful family in the process).  In Molehill Meadows, players take on the personality of Mika the Mole, who has an affinity for shiny things, a hunger for juicy worms and an innate desire to dig  A flip-and-write game, players dig tunnels using polyomino shapes to carefully expand their molehill home.

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Their game was somewhat interrupted as people arrived and were introduced and they were surrounded by the general chatter of arrival and Blue and Pink munching their pizzas.  Crimson and Cyan carried on playing, flipping polyomino cards and then drawing the shapes on their map.  Extending their tunnel to find Worms gave both players four “Worm Powers”, and fining treasure gave them points.  Cyan collected twice as much treasure and picked up more than twice the number of bonus points than Crimson (for collecting all of the two sets of flowers on the Objective Cards) and thus was the eventual victor by something of a landslide (or should it have been a tunnel collapse?).

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Then, while everyone else generally gossiped and caught up with the events of the last week or so, Jade and Sapphire joined Crimson and Cyan for a quick couple of rounds of the trick-taking, climbing game, SCOUT.  We’ve played this a few times on a Tuesday and everyone has always enjoyed it.  The game is simple in that on their turn, the active player either plays a set of cards to beat and replace the set on the table (a run or a meld), or take one card from either end of the set on the table and add it to their hand.  The round ends if a player plays the last card in their hand, or if it is a player’s turn and they played the current active set of cards on the table.

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At this point, player score for cards in their scoring pile (cards they have beaten during the round), for “chocolate bars” (rewards given when another player takes a card from their active set), and deducts a point for every card left in hand.  The clever part of the game is that, like Bohnanza, cards cannot be rearranged in hand, this with the fact that cards have different values depending which way up they are make this little card game really clever.  In the interests of time, the group only played two rounds, and although the scores can be very disparate, this time it was really tight with only five points between first and last and Sapphire taking the honours one point ahead of Crimson.

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By this time, Blue and Pink had just about finished eating and everyone else had mostly finished chatting, so with twelve, the group split into three groups of four, starting with Pine, Sapphire and Cyan who joined Jade in the “Feature Game“, Happy Home.  This is another polyomino game, with similarities to games like New York Zoo and Bärenpark, but with a theme of home decorating rather than building an animal park.  Like New York Zoo (or indeed Jokkmokk), the game has a central market, in this case representing a Store, which players move their Meeple round.

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On their turn, the active player moves their Meeple (or should that be Muman?) to an available space, takes the card and matching tile and then adds it to their home.  When all the cards are used up, players instead place a “Welcome Mat” on their doorstep to show they are ready to welcome visitors.  When everyone has finished , the game is over and players score their Home for Furniture, Colours, Pot Plants, their Welcome Mat and Design Objectives, losing points for any scratches still visible and not covered up by Furniture.

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There was a wee bit of misunderstanding on how the scoring worked even though Jade had done his best to explain it at the beginning.   Each Room scores one, three or six points if it has one, two or all three different core pieces of Furniture in it, and each Pot Plant is worth a point plus a bonus point for each empty space orthogonal to it.  That wasn’t where the problem was however, that was with the Colour scoring. Essentially players need to have the same Colour across at three different rooms to get two points and across four rooms to get five points, but somehow, this caused more confusion than it should have done.

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The group also made life more difficult for themselves by shuffling the cards and removing twenty-four cards as per the rules for the four-player game, but somehow the bulk of those removed seemed to be Furniture for just one of the rooms, the Bathroom.  It was a good learning game as the value of Rugs, for example, became evident later on—players were a bit confused as they don’t score in their own right, but they add Colour to a Room and thus can score at the end of the game.

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This time the Design Objective was “Bigger is Better”, so players lost a point for each empty floor space in their Room with the most empty spaces.  The lack of Bathroom fittings, meant Pine didn’t have a loo in his house and had to resort to “wafflestomping“, but he did have what looked like two pink ironing boards furnishing his Lounge.  Next door, Sapphire filled his Living Room with a pink sofa and an enormous matching pink widescreen TV (that was the same size as the sofa!).  In the end, the victor was a bit of a runaway winner.

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In spite of his lack of toilet facilities, Pine finished with twenty-four points, some seven ahead of Sapphire in second, with Jade taking the last place on the podium.  Before the game, Pine had said he wasn’t sure about it from the description, but in the event he really enjoyed it, as indeed did everyone else.  Meanwhile, there were two other games underway.  The first of these was Keyflower—a very popular game with certain members of the group, but one that hasn’t had an outing for a long time, in fact the last time the group played it was online in 2020, and the much-missed Burgundy was involved.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

This time, the four players were Blue, Pink, Black and Ivory, all of whom had played Keyflower before (albeit a while ago).  The game is fairly simple in terms of concepts, but like many good games, challenging to play well.  Each round, players take it in turns to bid on a tile, or activate a tile.  The clever part of the game is that both bidding and activating is done with red, blue, yellow or occasionally green Keyples (Meeple-shaped workers).  In each of the four rounds (or Seasons), a set number of tiles are put out for players to bid on.  Players take it in turns to bid or activate and when everyone passes in succession, any tiles won are added to the winner’s village, any losing bids and any Keyples used for activating return to their owner.

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At the end of each round, a boatload of new Keyples arrive in each village (players can bid to get the one of their choice), before the tiles for the next Season are set out.  In general, tiles are drawn at random, and in the first season, Spring, mostly provide Resources with Summer and Autumn tiles providing special powers and Autumn and Winter tiles providing scoring opportunities.  The Winter tiles are different to those for the other Seasons in that instead of being drawn at random at the start of the Season, they are dealt our to each player at the start of the game.  Then, at the start of Winter, players choose from their pile which ones they want to make available—in this way, the Winter tiles act as sort of objective tiles.

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The Keyflower box also contained The Farmers expansion and the question arose whether to include it or not.  Blue, Pink and Ivory were on the fence until Black said he’d never played with the Farmers, so of course that was a problem they had to urgently fix.  In the base game, the different tiles are connected by roads which are used for transporting goods to places where they can be used to upgrade tiles or score points.  In The Farmers expansion, these roads now define fields where animals can be left to graze and with each occupied field scoring points at the end of the game.

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Additionally, The Farmers expansion introduces wheat as a new resource, which can be used to add distance/quantity to the movement action, enabling players to move more animals and resources further.  There are several ways to set up the game with The Farmers expansion, but this time the group used The Farmers Variant, where all the tiles from the expansion are used and the number made up with tiles from the base game.  After setting up and explaining the additional rules to Black, Ivory went first, taking the waving purple start-player Keyple, and began the bidding.

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In Spring, Blue failed to get anything useful at the start of the game (or so she thought) taking just the Key Mine tile which gives Coal and didn’t match any of her Winter tiles.  Pink started off taking the Sheep Fold which gave him a source of sheep and the Paddock which gave him more Movement and upgrade ability together with some Wheat.  Then, he took the Workshop which gave him one resource of his choice from Wood, Coal or Stone, upgradeable to three resources, one of each, which matched his Winter tile, the Mercer’s Guild.  Ivory won the Quarryman, which gave him some very useful gold, and in Summer took the Shepherd’s Hut which gave him Wheat and Sheep and then embarked on a concerted breeding and movement programme.

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Black picked up a few tiles early in the game, which ultimately led to a lightly sprawling Village by the end of the game.  These included the Wheatfield in Spring and the Tavern, the Smelter and Boat 3a in the Summer.  By this time, Pink had decided that the sheep weren’t doing it for him so moved on to pigs, with the Pigsty.  Blue, having missed out on the Tavern which converts one Keyple into two, instead took the only tile that generated green Keyples, the Store which went well with one of her Winter tiles, the Key Market, but gave the added power of preventing other players from following if she was the first to Bid with Green, as they were highly unlikely to have any.

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In Autumn, Blue discovered the value of the Key Mine tile she had picked up in the first round, when the Blacksmith tile appeared which gave points for each Coal on the tile at the end of the game.  She added the Ranch to this which gave Cows and Wheat, and then began mining Coal in earnest and hoarding large numbers of sheaves for a super-movement move later in the game to get everything where it was needed as efficiently as possible.  Black got the Goldsmith which went well with his Smelter which gave him the Gold he needed to upgrade it and get ten points, while Ivory and Pink continued their procreation programmes.

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As the game progressed there were several visits from the other gamers in the room, many of whom, much to the people who were playing it’s surprise, had not played Keyflower. It is, of course, Blue’s favourite game and was a favourite of Burgundy’s, as well as being generally very popular with almost all of the regulars pre-2020.  So as the game continued into Winter, it was clear it would have to get another outing or two reasonably soon to rectify the situation. There is also The Merchants expansion which has not been played with the group, so that might be the “Feature Game” in the coming months.

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Only eight out of a possible sixteen Winter tiles were introduced by the players and the Scribes, which Ivory commented usually ensured victory was not there (it turned out nobody had started with it).  Black took the Granary which gave him points for his Wheat and Pink got his Mercer’s Guild that he’d been working towards.  Ivory won the Cathedral giving him a straight twelve points; the Weaver giving two extra points per sheep field, and the Bakery giving four points for each set of a Resource, a Skills tile and a Wheat Sheaf.  Blue had lots of options, so concentrated on building her piles of resources before bidding for her end of game scoring.

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This required a lot of nerve as Ivory had there wherewithal to take some of the tiles she obviously wanted.  Ivory hummed and hawed over it and as Black and Pink passed, twice he had the chance to begin a war, but decided not to as “that’s not very nice” and it can also backfire spectacularly.  Instead he generated the odd Gold for a point (“in case it was close”) and waited and watched.  In the end he passed and then Blue passed and that was that bar the counting.  And as it turned out, it was close, very close, but Blue just took victory, by a mere three points, with a total of ninety-five.

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The jury is out as to whether it was Ivory’s kindness that cost him the game because Blue did, of course, have contingency plans if someone had tried to take some of the tiles she wanted, and she could have cost him a lot of points.  However, by the end, Blue had no Keyples left and Ivory had a couple that he could have used, so depending on how things had panned out, he might have just nicked it or still lost.  Instead, his kindness and generous good nature won him a lot more respect from his fellow gamers, especially given that everyone knew how fond Blue is of Keyflower successfully destroying her plans might have made her just a little bit sad.

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Finally, the third table began their evening with Azul: Summer Pavillion, the third in the series based on the essentially abstract game of tile collecting, Azul.  Crimson kindly obliged in offering to lead the game with Lime, Teal and Purple, none of whom had played this variant before.  This is more similar to the original than the second in the series (Stained Glass of Sintra), but is built on lozenge-shaped pieces that make up hexagons.  Like the original, players take tiles from a central market and add them to their player-boards claiming points as they do so.  In contrast to the original, players store the tiles and add them all to their board at the end of the round (taking it in turns to do so).

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After some initial confusion caused by the additional bag and player boards from the Objective Tiles and Glazed Pavillion expansions, the game got underway.  Unfortunately, there was a bit of a rules malfunction:  initially it was thought that every time a tile was placed it scored one point for itself, two for one next to it and three for a third one in sequence (totalling six).  The group soon realised this wasn’t right though.  So they then thought you scored at the end of the round after playing all the tokens, however, they soon realised there was no way anyone could remember when a new tile that round had been placed.

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At this point, they then read the rules and from that decided players score one point for the tile and one for each tile it was adjacent to, thus scoring from one to three points per tile as they were placed and this is how they continued to play.  Cyan immediately identified they had come a cropper when he looked at the low end-game scores. He explained that they should have scored one point for the tile placed and one point for each tile connected to that group, so potentially up to six points could be scored for some tiles!

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Although it wasn’t played by “the rules as written”, everyone had the same disadvantage, and the group resolved to give it another go again soon, but with the right rules next time.  As it was, it was a very close game with Crimson, beating Lime by a single point and Teal finishing some half a dozen points behind.  It is a very pretty game, and despite the issues, players had enjoyed making patterns and pushing the tactile bright tiles around, which was very therapeutic after a hard day at work.

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Keyflower was ongoing (and would be for the rest of the evening), but Happy Home had finished so there was a quick game of musical chairs and Purple began by leading Lime, Cyan and Pine in a game of the group’s currently popular filler, Rome in a Day.  This is a little tile laying game built round the “I divide, you choose” mechanism.  The idea is that players draw five land tiles at random and place two buildings on tiles one and two. They then divide the five tiles into two groups—a bigger and a smaller one (in any ratio), and add a Crystal Gem to the smaller land set before offering the choice to their neighbour.

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During the four rounds that the game is played over this neighbour alternates, right, left, right, left. So, each round, players choose a set from their neighbour and these and the tiles they were left with are added to their domain.  At the end of the game, any building that stands on or adjacent to land of its own colour will score for each tile in the group and then players score for the diamonds they have collected—the player with the most points is the winner.  The game has had a couple of outings recently after Black and Purple picked it up at UK Games Expo a few weeks back.  Pine, Lime and Cyan had not been part of those games, so Purple explained the rules.

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The game was a bit of a struggle, probably not helped by the fact that on both the previous occasions the rules have not been strictly adhered to.  This is partly because the rules are not the best written and partly because when the game was explained to Black and Purple at UK Games Expo they were different to those published online.  Although it wasn’t entirely clear to everyone during the game, it was actually very close.  In fact, Lime and Cyan finished tied for first place with forty-four points each despite quite different tactics with Cyan prioritising collecting Gems and Lime making hay in his Wheat fields and wine in his Vineyards.

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While the group were fighting their way through Rome in a Day and Keyflower was coming to an end, Jade led Sapphire and Crimson in the 2024 Spiel des Jahres recommended game, Harmonies.  This was described by Jade as a sort of cross between Splendor and Cascadia, with an Azul-type market.  On their turn, the active player takes three wooden Tokens from one of the spaces on the central player board and places them on their player board. These Tokens represent Mountains, Trees, Buildings, Water and Fields.  Some tokens can stack, others cannot: the reasons why are thematic (e.g. tall Mountains and Forests, no tall Rivers etc.), but otherwise Tokens can be placed on any empty space.

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Players may then take an Animal card from the central display—they can have a maximum of four at any one time and each has a number of Animal cubes on them.  Each time the pattern on an Animal card is fulfilled, one of these Animal cubes is removed and placed on the token indicated on the card.  At the end of the game, players score for the highest achieved Animal on each card and for each Mountain, Tree, Building, Field and River (or Island, depending on  which side of the board players are using).  Mountains are made of stacks of up to three Rock Tokens, while Trees are a green Leaf Token on zero, one or two Wood Tokens.

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Taller Mountains and Trees give more points (one, three or seven points), while Buildings (made of two Tokens, at least one Brick and a Wood, Rock or another Brick), and Fields (two adjacent Wheat Tokens) score five points each.  Finally, depending which side of the board is used, players score points for the length of their River, or five points for each Island they make.  This time, the group played with “Side A” which scores for Rivers.  It was a learning game for Crimson, but was quite close quite between Jade and Sapphire, but Sapphire’s one hundred and eight gave him victory in what is an interesting point-salad tile-placement game that deserves another outing soon.

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Learning Outcome:  You don’t need a toilet to have a Happy Home.