Tag Archives: Crappy Birthday

4th October 2022

To mark the tenth anniversary of our first meeting, this week was a bit of a party. We started with a fish and chip supper (courtesy of Darren at The Happy Plaice) and followed it with cake, complete with “marzimeeples”. There was also a special “solo game” of Carcassone, where everyone chose a tile, wrote their name on it and stuck it on a board to be framed as a keepsake to mark the occasion. Unfortunately, Lilac was unwell and not able to come, and the chaos on the A34 (due to a burst water main on the Oxford ring road and an accident) conspired to delay Black, Purple, Orange and Lemon. Everyone else made it though, and after a quick round of Happy Birthday and some cake, the group moved on to play the now traditional “Feature Game“, Crappy Birthday.

– Image by boardGOATS

Crappy Birthday is a party game where players give each other comedy birthday presents and the recipient has to decide who gave the best and worst gifts. We house-rule the game to play a year so that everyone has one birthday, so on their turn, they receive a gift from everyone else. They then look through the gifts and choose the best and worst, and the givers of those gifts get a point each. The winner is the player with the most points at the end of the year. Written like this, the game sounds very dry, but there are three things that make the game a lot of fun.

– Image by boardGOATS

Firstly, the gift cards are fantastic; the pictures are great and the texts that accompany them are just enough to give a flavour while also allowing interpretation. Secondly, the way we play, the Birthday Boy or Girl goes through the gifts reading them out. It is not so much this, as the disgust, excitement or other response as people “open their gifts” that makes everyone smile. Playing board games can be very impersonal—for many people this is a good thing as it allows people who are shy or private to control what they reveal about themselves because everyone focuses on the game. As a result, gamers often don’t really know an awful lot about each other. In playing Crappy Birthday, however, players reveal just a little bit more of their likes and dislikes, helping everyone to get to know each other that little bit better.

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Finally, we only play Crappy Birthday once a year. This is really key, as without this constraint, the cards would get repetitive and the element of surprise would be lost. In terms of game play, it isn’t a very strategic or challenging game, so playing more frequently would likely mean it would quickly outstay its welcome. As it was, Pink started (his birthday was soonest), and he set the tone for the year. As usual, we discovered lots of interesting things about people in the group. Pink surprised everyone with his delight at receiving some Monopoly money toilet paper, though it was a close-run thing between that and a road trip across the Sahara as he’d always fancied participating in the Paris-Dakar Rally. He was much less impressed with the bungee-jump however.

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Pine was next and this time didn’t get his usual pile of equine and meat flavoured gifts. His choice of a giant lobster sculpture for his front yard was also unexpected, and he explained that it would be interesting to see where it ended up when the kids and drunks in the village decided to move it. On Plum’s turn we discovered that she liked the idea of a one-armed bandit and Chess lessons (no cheating, obviously), but preferred Flying lessons. Pink proved he knew Blue best when she picked a non-electric iron as her favourite gift, while Ivory was disappointed that when Teal eschewed his generous gift of a trip on the first trip to Mars. We discovered that Teal used to play the bagpipes, and that Lime was quite disgusted by the thought of a giant baby sculpture for the front of his house (to be fair, it looked quite hideous and not a little creepy).

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Leaping off or out of things seemed to be generally quite unpopular, with a parachute jump being Black’s least favourite gift, though he was delighted by tickets to a live metal music gig. Ivory complained that he kept drawing perfect gifts for people just after their birthday. On his birthday, Pink thought he had a winner when he gave Ivory a snow machine, and everyone else felt the same knowing how much he loves Christmas, but surprised everyone by choosing a space walk as his best gift and a permanent barbed wire fence as his worst. Pine showed his approval when Lemon picked bird watching as her choice gift, and most people could see her point when she ranked her deer-foot lamp as her least favourite.

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There was more surprise on Purple’s turn when she chose a custom chopper as her best gift, but her dislike of a trip on a submarine was less of a shock. The final birthday of the year was Orange who picked throat rings as his best gift. There was a lot of taxidermy-based gifts so it was perhaps fitting that his less surprising choice of worst gift was a good luck bat (not particularly good luck for the bat if the picture is anything to go by). Not that it really mattered, but everyone knew who the winner was long before the end of the year, as Lemon had managed to get a point in half of the rounds and finished with five points. The race for second place was much closer though with three people taking two and Black and Purple tying with three points apiece.

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There was a lot of chatter, some tidying up and more chatter, before Lime and Teal wished everyone else a good night and enjoyable rest of the party, and those remaining tried to decide what to play. Everyone was very indecisive, so eventually Blue made the executive decision that one group would play New York Slice while the others played Ticket to Ride, and Pink went out to the car to collect the rest of the games that had been left in the car when everything else was brought in. After some four-player, five-player, no definitely four-player shenanigans as Lemon shuffled from one game to the other, Ivory, Orange, Plum and Pink eventually got going with New York Slice.

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New York Slice is a re-implementation of …aber bitte mit Sahne, a game we’ve played a couple of times over the summer. Having enjoyed the pizza version last month, it definitely deserved another outing. The idea is that one player makes the pizza and cuts it into segments equal to the number of players, then players take it in turns to choose one of the segments. When a player takes a segment, they can either eat the individual slices or store them for later. Those they will eat are worth points at the end of the game with the score dependent on the number of pepperoni slices on top. The pieces players keep are scored depending on who has the most of each type at the end of the game.

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Each piece of pizza has a number on it which tells players the number of that type in the game and also what the player with the most will score at the end of the game. Some of the pizza slices have anchovies on them and any that are visible at the end of the game are worth minus one. Each pizza is also served with a Special—a side order bonus tile with rule-breaking powers which accompanies one of the portions. These can be good or bad, and add something to the decision making all round. This time, the game was very close with just four points between first and last.

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As often happens, most people didn’t compete for the majority in the lucrative Meat Feast pizza, instead gobbling up the pepperoni straight away giving Orange the eleven points relatively cheaply. The most valuable pizzas were collected by Orange and Ivory, whereas Plum made most of her points from her Specials: “The Everyone-Else Diet” and “Seconds”. The Everyone-Else Diet” was handy because it gave negative points to everyone else for every two slices eaten. It was perhaps “Seconds” that just gave her the edge though, as it allowed her to eat one set of slices just before scoring, enabling her to see what she wasn’t winning and eat that. As a result, she finished a single point ahead of Ivory with Orange taking third.

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Meanwhile, on the next table, Blue, Black, Purple and Lemon settled down to a game of the new Ticket to Ride: San Francisco. This is the latest in the Ticket to Ride series and is making its debut at Essen this year. The games all follow the same basic pattern: on their turn players draw coloured cards, or spend them to place trains on the central map. They score points for trains placed, but also for completing any tickets they kept at the start of the game or picked up and kept during it. One of the smaller games, Ticket to Ride: San Francisco only plays four and has fewer pieces so games are shorter.

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Like all the other versions of the game, however, San Francisco also has a small rules tweak: when players make a connection to a tourist destination, they can collect a token. They can only collect one per turn and one from each location. Each tourist destination has different tokens, and players score bonus points at the end of the game for each different token they have collected. These points are significant, varying from nothing to twelve, with the number of points increasing exponentially as players add more to their collection. Otherwise, the map is different and instead of trains, players have cable tram-cars to place, but otherwise it is similar to the other versions of Ticket to Ride.

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Black’s starting tickets both went north-south, but one was on the east side and the other the west side. So he picked one and immediately went fishing for a more. Everyone else was slightly better off, and although Blue’s were better aligned they were fairly low scoring so once she had made a little progress she also took more tickets. Black and Purple went for the potentially lucrative Tourist tokens, while Lemon kept forgetting to pick them up and ended up collecting a handful at the end. Although the more a player has, the more they are worth, it turns out that getting the last couple is really difficult, and they are the ones that are worth the most points.

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Blue tried to claim the long route from Fort Mason to the Golden Gate Bridge, but couldn’t get the multi-coloured-wild or the last yellow card she needed despite the draw deck apparently being stuffed with them. In the end, she ran out of time as Black brought the game to a swift end. In the end, it was a really close. Black had the most points from placing trains on the board, closely followed by Purple, who was also very close to running out. Blue had the most completed tickets though so it all came down to the Tourist tokens which meant Black edged it by a single point from Blue with Purple just a couple of points behind that.

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Ticket to Ride was still going on when people had finished their pizzas, so although Ivory headed home, Plum was tempted to stay for one last game of Draftosaurus. This was new to Orange, so while Pink set up, Plum explained the rules. Draftosaurus is similar to games like Sushi Go! or Go Nuts for Donuts except that instead of drafting cards, players draft wooden dino-meeples, which players then place in their Dino Park. Unfortunately, Orange wasn’t familiar with either of those games, so Plum explained that drafting is where players start with a handful of dino-meeples, take one and pass the rest on.

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So, in Draftosaurus, each player begins the round with a handful of wooden dino-meeples and a player board for their dinosaur amusement park. Everyone chooses one meeple from their handful to place in their park and passes the rest to the next player. Each turn, one of the players roll a die which adds a constraint on which pens players can place their dinosaur in. The different pens have different scoring criteria and some also have restrictions. The game is played over two rounds, with players passing meeples clockwise in the first round and anti-clockwise in the second, ending with twelve meeples in their park.

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The parks boards are double-sided, but this time the group played just one round on the summer side. The game rocked along quite nicely, though Plum struggled to find mates for the dinosaurs in her Prairie of Love, while Pink and Orange had fun with the Forest of Sameness and Meadow of Differences (which have to have either all the same or all the different dinosaurs in them). A few scaly beasties ended up being thrown into the river because of the dice restrictions, but everyone did a good job of picking the right King for their Dino Park. Orange was king of the King of the Dinosaurs with the most Tyranosaurus rex, but he wasn’t the king of Draftosaurus—that was Pink who finished with thirty-nine points and a lot of Hadrosaurs.

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Learning outcome: It’s great to be ten, but bring on eleven!

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.

– Image by Lilac

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.

– Image by boardGOATS

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.

Next Meetings, 6th & 7th October 2021

After much discussion, in August, we moved our meeting to Thursdays. However, the Horse and Jockey have recently brought back their quiz on the first Thursday of the month, so this week we will be meeting on WEDNESDAY 6^th October 2021. As usual, we will start playing shorter games from 7.30pm as people arrive, until 8pm when we will start something a little longer (table is booked from 6.30pm for those who would like to eat first).

Some of the group are also keen to do the Quiz on Thursday 7^th October. So, we have booked a table from 6.30pm for those who would like food, and we’ll be playing games until the quiz starts at 9pm.

Last weekend was our nineth birthday, so as is now traditional, the “Feature Game” on Wednesday will be Crappy Birthday. This is a silly little filler/party game that we can mess about with while people are eating cake allowing us to play something longer once everyone has arrived and finished food.

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And speaking of birthdays…

It was Joe’s birthday, and his mum wanted to do something special. She called him on the phone, but his housemate, Jeff, answered. When Joe’s mum said she wanted to bring round a cake, Jeff was very excited.

“Oh, Mrs. Wilson,” Jeff said, “What a lovely idea – that would be great!”

That afternoon, Joe’s mum drove to the house and rang the doorbell. Jeff answered the door, but when he saw the cake, his face fell.

“Oh,” he said, clearly very disappointed. “I thought you said ‘keg’.”

Goats in the News: Goats on Zoom Make a Mint

Back in October, boardGOATS celebrated our 8^th birthday. We always have a bit of a party and play Crappy Birthday, but the current situation meant that this year it had to be held online. So, to make it a bit more memorable, we had a special guest: Elizabeth from Cronkshaw Fold Farm. As well as entertaining people with yoga, Elizabeth and her friends from Rossendale in Lancashire are TV stars from The Great Staycation.

– Image from cronkshawfoldfarm.co.uk

Back in April, when everyone was stuck at home and so many meetings moved online, Cronkshaw‘s Chief Goat-Wrangler, Dot McCarthy, came up with the idea of hiring out members of the flock to “butt in” on conference calls. What started off as a joke has now resulted in thousands of calls, all over the world, earning over £50,000. When so many people have been furloughed, this has enabled the farm to keep on two employees full-time. And the goats have brought a little bit of much needed fun into so many people’s lives; certainly, Elizabeth made a valued contribution to our birthday celebrations.

13th October 2020 (Online)

The evening began slowly, with people signing in and confirming they had their parcels and had not yet opened them. There was a bit of chatter about isolating, and about Green and Lilac’s new house (which had very similar decor to the previous one). Pink had acquired yet another Panda and proudly had it on display.

A Panda not crossing, with details of a Panda Crossing

– Image by boardGOATS

From there the conversation took a bizarre turn on to the subject of Panda Crossings, which really did exist (along with the other “Animal Crossings”), in the 1960s. It was no surprise they were phased out after just five years, though, given how complicated they were, and the fact that safe operation relied on the difference between a “Pulsating” Amber and a “Flashing” Amber…

– Image from cronkshawfoldfarm.co.uk

At 8pm, the Special Guest arrived; Elizabeth and some of her buddies from Cronkshaw Fold Farm in Lancashire joined the meeting. Elizabeth is very talented and has a particular penchant for yoga. So much so, in fact that she and her friends have been the subject of a half hour documentary filmed last summer. As Elizabeth and friends galloped about and showed us their delightful home, everyone sang “Happy Birthday” and then opened their boxes.

– Image by boardGOATS

The boxes were part of the celebration of our eighth birthday. As is now traditional, the “Feature Game” was Crappy Birthday, a silly little filler/party game that is great fun when played very occasionally (and about once a year is perfect). The idea is that each player takes it in turns to receive gifts from everyone else and then they choose the best and the worst; the players who gifted the selected presents get a point. So in this game players are aiming for extremes making it almost the opposite of games like Dixit or Just One where players are aiming for the centre-ground.

– Image by boardGOATS

With the current challenge of “remote gaming” we had to play Crappy Birthday a little differently this year. So, everyone “wrapped their parcels” last time we met and this time everyone took it in turns to unwrap them. While people ate their treats, names were drawn out of the Crappy Birthday box lid and everyone took it in turns to “open their gifts”, while everyone else ate their cake, biscuits and chocolate.

– Image by boardGOATS

Blue went first to show those that hadn’t experienced a GOATS birthday party how to play. As always, it was a learning experience all round. This time, we learnt that Blue would quite like a trip to the middle east (complete with riding camels), but that Monopoly toilet paper might block her drain and everyone else was concerned about the possibility of paper cuts. Green and Lilac both dislike smoking and have been to a Star Wars wedding and Lilac would like a ferret. Black quite fancied unicycle lessons and Purple thought a giant fake bear rug would really add to the ambience in their living room. Although Black likes fish, a hundred pounds is a lot especially when raw, but as he could put it in the freezer, he decided that the persistence of his own Mariachi band would be worse.

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Ivory disliked the sound of “Organ Holiday by Ethel Smith”, and would not be swayed even by Pine’s hurt protest that it had pride of place in his collection. Then he saw the hideous living room tapestry, and although he loves the game (and had really enjoyed playing it with the Plans and Ploys Expansion and Pink and Blue recently), he said it was also not for him. Since the LP would be for just a year and the tapestry was permanent, the wall covering was therefore rejected as his least favourite.

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A lot of people seemed to think that Burgundy would really appreciate physical extreme sports but the one he rejected was bungee jumping. Unlike everyone else who seemed to reject any long term, life-changing experiences, his Burgundy’s preferred gift was a an eagle as a life-long companion, though Blue was concerned it might interfere with Games Night.

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Mulberry calling in from California fancied a fighter jet ride and rejected a bus ride to Florida, and not only because it was such a long way away. Meanwhile, animal gifts were quite popular and although Pine would have loved the opportunity to be licked by a giraffe or go on an African safari, those gifts were received by Violet, calling in from Aberystwyth. She accepted the safari, but, not being a child of the 70s, was unimpressed by the fluffy dice.

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Pine’s wildlife gifts were in the form of hairless cat, a weekend with some monkeys in a hot spring and the chance to hunt and and clean his own Thanksgiving turkey. Having had a landlady with a cat with galloping alopecia, Pine spurned the unfortunate moggy. Then, despite the fact the turkey was the vegetarian’s obvious least favourite, that was Pine’s preferred choice as there was nothing to say he couldn’t give it it’s freedom once it’d had a wash.

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After some rude comments about his taste in clothing, Pink explained that being on the reality show “Can America Disco” was his idea of a nightmare and that he quite fancied an Easter Island moʻai statue for his front garden. And then, the last player, Lime, also rejected publicity in the form of his own personal paparazzi posting hourly updates on his doings. Like Pink, he also chose the garden ornament, as Lime wanted a new patio and thought a giant chess board would be just the job.

– Image by boardGOATS

And with that, all that was left was the scores. This time, we found that Team Greeny-Lilac and Pink were particularly good at this game, but it was Lime who seemed to take a point every time, taking seven out of a possible eleven points. That said, it was remarkable how many people gave gifts they thought people would like that ended up winning a point for being the most disliked. That’s half the fun though. With the birthday celebration dealt with, we then moved on to playing other games. We are getting better at this, though our repertoire is still quite limited. There had been a few requests to play Railroad Ink again, however, so we started with that.

– Image by boardGOATS

Railroad Ink is a very simple “Roll and Write” route planning game. The idea is that four dice are rolled and everybody adds all four to their map. Three of the dice show straight and curved sections and T-junctions for road and rail. The other, the fourth die shows stations connecting road to rail, and a fly-over (crossing, but not connecting). The game is played over seven rounds, after which players score points for their longest road segments, their longest rail segments, the number of locations on the edge of the board have been connected, and the number of spaced in the central grid that have been filled.

– Image by boardGOATS

Having played it before, it didn’t take too long to get going and there was a sort of focussed silence as everyone concentrated, punctuated by occasional moans when the dice didn’t give people what they wanted. Sadly, these games are very much “multiplayer solitaire”, and we really only found out how people did when adding up the scores. This time, it was really close with just five points separating the top six players. Initially it looked like it was a tie between Blue and Pink, but a recount pushed Blue into second just ahead of Green and then Pine.

– Image by boardGOATS

Ivory and Lime followed Mulberry taking their leave, and everyone else settled down to something quick and light in the form of Second Chance. This is a very simple Tetris-style game where two cards are revealed and players chose one of the two shapes to add to their tableau. Players can add shapes anywhere and in any orientation. If they can’t use either of the shapes they get a second chance—another card is revealed, but if they can’t add that shape either, then they are eliminated.

– Image by boardGOATS

The winner is the player with the fewest unused spaces, so the winner is not necessarily the player that stays in the longest. This and the fact that the game is not over-long means that player elimination is not a huge problem. This time, all the large and awkward shapes came out first which meant there was sudden and catastrophic collapse as almost everyone crashed out together. As a result, the scores were really close. Lilac’s beautiful colouring earned her a worthy second place and she was unfortunate to be beaten by the very jammy Pink, who sailed through with several second chances and finished with just three unfilled spaces.

– Image by boardGOATS

By this time, it was starting to get late and people drifted off leaving just five for our, now regular, game of 6 Nimmt! on Board Game Arena. It is very simple: simultaneously, players choose a card, then starting with the lowest value, these are added to one of the four rows. The player who adds the sixth card takes the other five and the player with the most “nimmts” at the end loses. It is very random, but somehow gives the illusion of control, right until the wheels drop off…

– Image by boardGOATS

We play this so much because it is light and great fun, with no downtime. And with the “Professional Variant” that we now use where cards are added to both ends of the rows, the game has had a new lease of life for us. It works really well with fewer players too. This time, Black was first and second to pick up, and it didn’t get much better as the game wore on and it wasn’t a surprise when he triggered the end of the game leaving Burgundy to taste victory, just ahead of Green.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Then, Green said good night leaving just four. Having enjoyed several games of Sushi Go! last time, we decided to give it another try, this time with the Soy Sauce mini expansion. This is one of the simplest of the card drafting games—players have hand of cards, keep one and pass the rest on. With Sushi Go!, players are collecting sets with a sushi theme and trying to collect the most points over three rounds.

– Image by boardGOATS

This was another close game. Burgundy and Blue tied the first round, one devoid of puddings, but Black and Purple weren’t far behind. The second round was much less even though and was taken by Blue with a massive eighteen points. She wasn’t able to keep it up for the final round which Black took with sixteen points. It wasn’t quite enough, to overtake Blue though and she finished with a total of forty-three, just two ahead of Black, in a game where there just wasn’t enough dessert to go round.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

There was just time for one more game, so after a brief discussion, the group opted for another set collecting game, Coloretto. This is another very simple game where players have the simple choice: Take a card and add it to a truck, or take a truck and add the cards to their collection. Players score positive points for their three top scoring sets, and negative points for all the others. Normally, the scoring is according to the Triangular Number Series, where more cards score increasingly more points (one, three, six, ten, fifteen and twenty-one).

– Image by boardGOATS

This time we decided to play with the alternative, “Difficult” scoring, where small sets score the most and their value peaks at eight points for three cards, falling gradually for larger sets. This changes the game significantly, as taking a fourth or fifth card has the same impact on a player’s score as starting another set. And everyone has fewer points to play with… It took a couple of rounds for people to realise the implications of this change to scoring. Then players started taking trucks when they were almost empty and when a “+2” card came up it was taken straight away.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

As a result, there were more rounds and the game became one of avoiding things going wrong. And for most people, once it started going wrong, things generally went from bad to worse. First was Purple, then Black, then just before the end, Blue was landed with pile of cards she didn’t want. So, it wasn’t a huge surprise that Burgundy, who had managed to avoid falling off the precipice, finished with the most points. Purple was by far the best of the rest though having been most successful at stemming the flood of unwanted cards. Then it was time for the last of the birthday boys and girls to go to bed.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Learning Outcome: A gift’s worth is in the eye of the recipient.

29th September 2020 (Online)

This week it was Ivory’s turn to share his pizza with everyone, while Blue and Pink shared ice creams with Purple and Black. With the food over, Blue explained how we were going to prepare for our birthday next time, by “wrapping parcels” for Crappy Birthday. This is a silly party game that we play every year to celebrate the anniversary of our first meeting in 2012. Basically, players take it in turns to have their birthday, and everyone else chooses a gift from a hand of five cards.

– Image by boardGOATS

Unfortunately, this doesn’t really lend itself to playing online, but as so many things have been cancelled this year, we didn’t want this to be one of them. So, to get round the difficulties, we decided to play it over two evenings: firstly wrapping cards, then opening them two weeks later. Each player had a set of electronic files containing cards. Everyone opened the first file and chose a card to give to the player whose name was drawn out of the box lid, making a note of what they were giving and to whom.

– Image by boardGOATS

When people had gifted two parcels, they closed the file and opened the next one which included the same cards as the first file and a couple of new ones, thus simulating drawing two more cards. Once everyone’s name had been drawn, everyone emailed the list of gifts to Blue for her to arrange delivery ready for next time. And then it was on to the “Feature Game” which was Welcome To….

– Image by boardGOATS

Welcome To… is another “Roll and Write” style game, though without the colouring-in element of some of the games we’ve played recently, and as a result is a bit more complex. In this game, players are planing and building housing estates in 1950s USA. This time, the player board depicts three rows of houses and a scoring table. The idea is that there are three decks of double sided cards with a house number on one side and an action on the other. At the start of each round, the top card is turned over to show the action side. Players then choose one of the three house number/action pairs to use.

– Image by boardGOATS

Players must write a house number on any one of the three streets, but the numbers can only feature once on each, and must be ascending from left to right. Players may then carry out the associated action, which could be building a fence, building a swimming pool or park, adding a number a second time (“Bis!”), modifying the number by one or two (using the Temping Agency) or increasing the value of houses on “Estates” of certain sizes.

– Image by boardGOATS

At the end of the game, players score points for building swimming pools and parks, having used the “Temping Agency” the most, and also for different sized “Estates”. An Estate is a continuous group of houses (i.e. no gaps) with a fence at each end. Estates of size one up to six score different numbers of points and one of the actions players can use is selectively increase the value of some of these.

– Image by boardGOATS

Additionally, players score points for completed “City Plans”. These are three cards revealed at the start of the game. which give points to people who complete their requirements. The catch is, a bit like Noch Mal!, the first person (or people) to be successful get more points, usually around double that of anyone who finishes them later in the game. This is also one of three “game timers”, with the game ending when someone completes all three Plans.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game also ends if someone manages to fill in all the houses in all three streets, which is not easy. More likely, players are going to find they cannot build any of the three houses being offered. If this happens, players player take a “Building Permit Refusal”—when someone takes their third, that also triggers the end of the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

There are lots of little rules that make the game more complex than most of the “Roll and Write” games we’ve played. For example, players can build fences anywhere, but parks must be on the street they built their house on, and pools can only be built in the garden of the house if it was on the plan. That said, it is not actually difficult, but there is a lot to think about and if players are going to score well.

– Image by boardGOATS

There were a lot of questions from the group, and people clearly found it difficult to understand, not helped by the difficulties of learning a game over MS Teams. Nevertheless, teaching and learning through a computer is a skill lots of school teachers, pupils, university lecturers and students have had to develop this year, and it turns out it is useful for gamers too. So eventually, Pink finished shuffling and turned over the first set of cards to start the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

Everything went quiet as people put their “Game Face” on and concentrated. It wasn’t long before the silence was broken by Burgundy sighing, Pine grumbling and Blue checking how people were getting on. To reduce the waiting and questions whether everyone was ready, we used the “hands up” function to indicate when players had finished writing. This was really helpful to keep track of things with so many people playing.

– Image by boardGOATS

The City Plans in play were all from the basic game (and we weren’t playing with roundabouts either), so all three were based on estate sizes: 1) two of size four; 2) a six and three ones; 3) a four and a three. Green was first to complete a City Plan taking number three, and was soon followed by Pink and Ivory taking the lucrative second Plan giving them eleven points each.

– Image by boardGOATS

Gradually, as the game progressed others claimed more City Plans and there was a feeling that the game was coming to a close. Increasingly, people found their choices were becoming more limited adding to the tension. This feeling was heightened when Purple became the first to be unable to play, and took a Building Refusal Permit. A few rounds later, and Mulberry ended the game by completing her third City Plan and everyone started adding up their scores.

– Animation by boardGOATS

Despite people finding it difficult at first, the scores were surprisingly close with a winning score of ninety-five and most of the group not far behind. It is definitely a game that rewards a little experience especially as it is quite different to the other games we’ve been playing recently, so it wasn’t surprising that Pink ran out the winner. Green ran him close though, with an excellent ninety-two. There was a bit of chatter while some said their “good byes” and the rest of the group decided to play Saboteur on Board Game Arena.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game is easy to play and everyone knows what they are doing, so it is always quick to get started. Each player has a hand of cards and take it in turns to either play a tunnel card, or play an action card. The aim of the game is to help the team build a tunnel to whichever of the three terminal cards holds the gold. Unless you are a Saboteur of course, in which case, your aim is to hinder the efforts made by everyone else, but without being spotted…

– Image by boardGOATS

Saboteur is usually better with more players, but the group had sort of decided they were going to play it before they realised how many people there were left. With just six there were either one or two Evil Saboteurs and the rest were Lovely Dwarves. This makes it hard for the Saboteur team and they have to get their act together quickly to make the most of what little time they have.

– Image by boardGOATS

In the first round, Pine made it very clear he was going to make the most of his time and bluntly said he thought Blue was a saboteur and broke her pick axe for her, preventing her doing any tunnelling. This was apparently in response to her playing a map card in her first turn which he decreed was “A very Saboteury Move”. Everyone else felt that Pine’s move was much more “Saboteury” and jumped on him in response. Everyone except Purple that is, who ran to his aid.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

It wasn’t long before Purple’s true colours were flying when she joined Pine and blocked the tunnel with dead-ends. However, the Dwarves, now knowing there wasn’t a traitor hiding in their midst, got their act together, dealt with the blockage and headed for the gold. Before long, it was 1-0 to the Dwarves.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

The Evil Saboteurs were a little more cagey in the second round. Purple looked at the bottom card and indicated it was Gold. After last time, nobody trusted her so first Pink and then Pine double checked and all concurred. The Dwarves were one card away from an easy run to the Gold when Burgundy’s rockfall card told everyone else which side he was on. It was too little too late, however, and nothing he or his partner in crime, Black, could do could prevent the Brave Dwarves repainting the tunnel and finding the gold.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Early in the third and final round, Burgundy started by looking at the middle card which he claimed was coal. By this time, suspicion was a currency everyone was rich in, so Pink double-checked and concurred, then checked the bottom target card. Burgundy claimed suspicion and immediately verified that they’d found Gold. Purple announced that she thought Pink was behaving suspiciously and broke his pickaxe for him—an extremely Saboteury move!

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Burgundy attempted to redeem his behaviour in the previous round by repairing Pink’s tools, while Black repaid Purple by smashing Purple’s lamp. Although Purple was able to fix it herself, it looked like the Dwarves were home safe and sound until Pine’s turn. As discussed with the team, he played a card between the middle and bottom cards, but when it connected the carefully dug tunnel to the middle, coal, everyone was sure that they’d found the second Saboteur.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Pine protested that it was incompetence rather than malice that meant he’d put the card in upside down. The Dwarves had to fix his “mistake” though, and their cards were running out. Black discarded a card and Blue had no choice but to smash some more of Purple’s tools, leaving it down to Pink to finish things.

– Image by boardGOATS

In the end, it turned out that the Saboteurs were Black and Purple, and Pine just had a sausage-finger-moment. That left Blue as the “winner”, but the scoring is very random and highly dependent on turn order, so really all that can be said is that it was 3-0 to the Loyal Dwarves. There was time for something else before Pink’s bedtime, and given the shortage of time, the group bowed to the inevitable and moved on to 6 Nimmt!.

– Image by boardGOATS

This has become one of our favourite games, especially since we’ve been forced to play online as it is light and fun and fast to play, and helps us to forget the current situation. The game is so simple, and yet so much fun, with almost no downtime. Players simply choose a card and Board Game Arena does the rest. Of course, everyone like to think they have control and their strategy is working, right up until it isn’t.

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The idea is that the card chosen is played on the end of one of four rows, with players trying to avoid placing the sixth card as that means the points on the other five cards are deducted from their total. So the aim of the game is to try to second-guess what everyone else is doing and stay safe. Recently, we’ve been playing the “Professional” variant which allows players to add cards to either end of the rows, adding more “strategy” and more chaos, and a whole lot more fun.

– Image by boardGOATS

Things started to go wrong Blue first, when she cheered thinking she’d got away without a pick-up, only to discover she’d got nine “nimmts”. Purple picked up nine in the same turn, however, while Blue managed to stabilise her game, Purple’s went from bad to worse when she managed what might be a new record, picking up nineteen nimmts in a single turn!

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Fairly inevitably, Purple triggered the end of the game, but the other end was less clear. That was until the end of the game, when Blue, who had somehow managed to avoid picking up anything else, just pipped Burgundy to the win. With that, Pine and Pink bade everyone else good night and the remaining foursome looked for something else to play.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

There were a few options, but they were limited by the fact that nobody wanted to play anything long or too intense. In the end, they decided to give Sushi Go! a try. This is a game we’ve all played before, but nobody had played on Board Game Arena. is a pure card drafting game: players start with a hand of cards and keep one and pass the rest on. The aim is to collect cards in combinations to give them points.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

In Sushi Go!, it is all about collecting the right cards at the right time. For example, three Sashimi cards are worth ten points, but two are worthless. There is also a significant “hate drafting” aspect though. This is where players take cards to inconvenience others rather than to benefit one’s own game. This is mostly because Maki Roll and Pudding points are awarded to those with the most cards, but can also be because causing another player to finish with worthless cards can sometimes be as effective as scoring points oneself.

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The first round was one of rediscovery since it was a very long time since anyone had played it. Blue rediscovered the perils of trying to collect Sashimi, when she got stuck with only two which scored her nothing. Burgundy, on the other hand, just before her in turn order, collected three and claimed ten points. Purple collected lots of Nigiri and Black made hay out of Maki Rolls. So, going into the second round it was pretty much a three-way tie with all to play for.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

In the second and third rounds, Black and Purple made a lot of points from playing Nigiri cards after wasabi cards which is a multiplier and can be very lucrative. Although Black was in the lead going into the final round, the fact Burgundy took two Wasabi/Nigiri combos meant he took a fine victory. The game plays so quickly though and the Board Game Arena rendition is so good that everyone fancied trying giving it another go.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

The second game was much closer, the competition for Wasabi and Maki Rolls got more intense with everyone now well aware of how lucrative they could be. Although it was very close, in the end, Burgundy just managed to keep his crown, beating Black into second place by a single point and everyone else just a couple of points behind. With such a tight finish, a third game was inevitable. Blue who had come last in the previous two games was determined not to this time. However, a grotty starting had meant she was forced to start with lot of puddings.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

By this time, everyone was looking more carefully at what they were passing on, so Blue finished with a bit of hate-drafting, ensuring that Burgundy couldn’t get a full set of Sashimi and that ensured she avoided the wooden spoon. Purple and Black started out with Wasabi and really managed to make their cards count. In the end, there were still only two points in it, but this time it was Black and Purple fighting out for first place, which Black just took. And then it was definitely time for bed.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Learning Outcome: Swimming pools are not as common as you might think.

1st October 2019

It was a bitty start with lots of chit-chat and eating, including Blue’s fantastic pizza with mushrooms growing out of it. A little bit of singing to celebrate the fact it was the eve of our seventh birthday was immediately followed by special meeple cakes. Eventually, when everyone had finally finished sucking the icing off their wooden meeples, we finally settled down to the now traditional birthday “Feature Game”, Crappy Birthday.

– Image by boardGOATS

Crappy Birthday is a very silly party game that most of the group would normally turn their noses up at, but love to play once a year. The idea is that each person has a hand of cards featuring silly things and chooses one to give to the active player as a birthday present. The Birthday Boy/Girl then chooses the best and worst gifts which score the giver a point. Players take it in turns to receive gifts and after everyone has had one go, the player with the most points is the winner. It is very simple, but the best part is really when the recipient has to sit and sort through all their gifts and justify their choices. It seems a really silly game, and indeed it is, but it encourages people to get to know each other a little better and in a different way too.

– Image by boardGOATS

This year, we discovered that Black would like a trip to the North Pole, Pine fancied two weeks in a swamp and Purple fancied a course on Mime Art. In contrast, Burgundy was not keen on getting his earlobes stretched, Blue wasn’t keen on a GPS (with or without an annoying voice) and Lime eschewed some “garden manikins”. Perhaps the most surprising thing we discovered was just how great Ivory would be as a day-time quiz host. Amongst the fun, the scores were largely incidental, but everyone picked up just one or two points except for Purple who scored three points and Black who just pipped her to the post, with four points.

– Image by boardGOATS

Since Blue and Ivory had both brought Roll for the Galaxy, it was clear that they were keen to give it a go and when Green said he’d play it, the only real question was which copy would get played. Since it can be quite a long game, Blue and Ivory got going quickly and left the others to sort themselves out. Although Ivory was keen to give the new Rivalry expansion a go, as it has been a while since we last played (and Green wasn’t totally familiar with it either), the trio decided to leave that for another day. Although a lot of the group seem to get in a bit of a mess with Roll for the Galaxy, it is not actually a complicated game. It is a “pool building” game, similar to deck builders like Dominion or bag builders like Orléans or Altiplano, except with dice.

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The idea is that at the start of the round, everyone simultaneously rolls all their dice in their cup and, depending on what faces are shown, secretly allocate the dice to the five possible phases of the game: Explore, Develop, Settle, Produce & Ship. One of the dice can be used to select which phase that player wants to “nominate”, i.e. guarantee will happen. Any die can be used for this, it does not have to match the chosen phase. Once everyone has assigned all their dice and chosen their phase to nominate, all dice are revealed and the active phases are revealed. The clever part is the element of double think that players have to use: a player can only nominate a single phase, so if they want to Produce and Ship they have to rely on someone else to nominate the other one. Guess right and both phases will happen, guess wrong and they will only get one of them, and if that relies on something else happening, they may find they end up doing neither.

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Thus, while there are a lot of other moving parts, fundamentally, a successful player must piggy-back on other players because it will give them more actions. Dice that are used then go into the players’ Citizenries, and unused dice go back into the players’ cups. Dice are extracted from the Citizenries and returned to the cups on payment of $1 per die, once all the actions have been carried out. Thus, the player with the most appropriate dice can turn the handle on their engine most efficiently. The aim of the game is to finish with the most points, which are obtained from settling and developing worlds and shipping goods to give points.

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So, the first action is Explore, which is taking world tiles from a bag. These are double-sided with a development on one side and a production or settlement world on the other. They go into either the Development or Settlement piles so that dice are placed on top of these during the Develop and Settle phases: when the cost has been matched by the number of dice, the world is added to the player’s tableau and they can use whatever special power it provides. Some of the worlds are production worlds which typically provide more, exciting dice to add to the system. In addition to extra, coloured dice, Production worlds also house dice played during the Produce phase. These can then be consumed for victory points or traded for cash, enabling more dice to be transferred from the player’s citizenry to their cup.

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The game ends at the end of the round when either, a player Settles/Develops their twelfth world or when the stock of victory point chips run out. The winner is the player with the highest score from their combined victory points and worlds. There are a couple of other minor rules (for example players can pay one die to effectively change the face of one other die), but essentially, that is all there is to it. Players start with a double tile comprising a complimentary pair of settlement and development worlds and a start world, together with a couple of tiles to add to their Development/Settlement piles. For the first game it is recommended that players choose the Development and World with the lowest cost to add to their piles, because that is easier to play. For later games, however, players can choose, which gave Blue a really tough decision.

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In the end she decided to go for it, and chose to start with the “Galactic Federation”, “6+” development world in her building pile. This would give her an extra one third of her development points at the end of the game, but more importantly two of the dice used for every development would bypass her citizenry, going straight into her cup. Green started with no fewer than three of the red, “Military” dice, which coupled with his “Space Piracy” starting development, gave him really a good source of finance. He looked very unimpressed with this combination, but Ivory and Blue felt it was a really nice combination of starting tiles. Ivory’s start tiles were also nice, but didn’t have quite the same degree of complimentarity, but he did get a nice purple, “Consumption” die. The starting tiles are only the beginning though; the game is all about building an engine made up of dice, Production Worlds, and Developments and then using it efficiently.

– Image by boardGOATS

In the case of Blue, her starting tiles led her towards a Development strategy, so she spent a lot of the early part of the game Exploring to try to find nice Development tiles to enhance that approach. Green and Ivory had a more conventional, “build the finances and the dice pool then Produce and Consume” strategy. The problem with this was they both frequently wanted the same phases, but ended up with either both of them choosing to, say, Produce, or both choosing Ship, when what they both really wanted was to maximise their dice by Producing and then Shipping. Blue, on the other hand, could mostly be fairly sure that neither Ivory or Green were going to what she wanted, so was able to focus on her own plan, and just piggy-back the actions of the others. Although the game has a reputation of being slow (with our group at least), this time, the game got going quite quickly and it wasn’t long before Ivory started his Production engine, Shipping his produce for victory points.

– Image by boardGOATS

Green soon followed, while Blue kept building her Developments and occasionally taking advantage of the “Produce/Consume” strategies of the others to provide enough finance to move her dice out of her Citizenry. Blue felt her game was really boring since all she did was Develop, but in the end, it was probably the fact that Blue was doing something different that was key. Blue triggered the end of the game placing her twelfth Development/World tile, which gave her the most points from building, slightly more than Green. Ivory Consumed the most victory points, with Green not far behind, and Blue not really troubling the scorer in that department. It therefore all came down to bonuses from the “6+” Developments, which is where Blue made up for other deficiencies taking fifteen points giving her a total of fifty-seven points, five more than Green who was just a couple ahead of Ivory.

– Image by boardGOATS

It had been a lot of fun, and next time we’ll have to give one of the modules form the Rivalry expansion a try. On the next table, their game was coming to an end too. Having been abandoned to sort themselves out, someone mentioned Ticket to Ride, and with everyone having a good idea how to play, that turned out to be most popular. The game is very simple and everyone has played it, in most cases, quite a lot, so we often play with expansion maps. This time, the Team Asia/Legendary Asia expansion was an option, but as we usually play with the Europe version of the game, the group decided to play with original USA map with the addition of the USA 1910 additional route cards.

– Image by boardGOATS

The basics of the game is that players start with a handful of train pieces and place them on the board to connect cities, paying with cards. Thus, on their turn a player can take two coloured train cards from the market (either the face up cards or blind from the deck) or play sets of cards of a single colour that matches both the number and colour of one of the tracks on the board. Players score points for the number of trains they place, but also for tickets. Players choose from a handful of these at the start of the game and can take more tickets on their turn instead of placing trains or taking train cards. These are risky though, because although they are a source of points, any tickets that are not completed at the end of the game give negative points.

– Image by boardGOATS

The original version of Ticket to Ride (with the USA map) is much less forgiving than the Europe edition that we more usually play. This is partly thanks to the layout of the tracks, but also due to the absence of Stations which can help alleviate some of the stress associated with failure to complete tickets. With five, it was always going to be a really hard game and likely to end up with a bit of a train-wreck for someone, and so it turned out. The eastern states were rough, really, really rough with Burgundy, Lime, Pine and Purple all fighting for routes in the same space. As a result, Black benefited from mostly staying out of the scrap.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pine, Lime and Purple managed to complete the most tickets, five each, but remarkable, all three were a long way behind Burgundy and Black who only completed three and four tickets respectively. This was partly due to negative points, but was mostly caused by the fact that the longer tracks give disproportionately more points and Black for example was able to pick up two of the long tracks around Salt Lake City relatively unopposed as he was mostly alone working in the west. Similarly, Burgundy did well in the north. As a result, it all came down to the longest route bonus, ten points, but with Black and Burgundy both in the running it gave a twenty point swing to Burgundy giving him a total of one hundred and thirty-five points, nearly twenty more than Black in second place.

– Image by boardGOATS

Ticket to Ride and Roll for the Galaxy finished simultaneously and only Green decided he needed an early night, leaving everyone else to play one of the group’s favourite game, Las Vegas. This is a simple game of dice rolling and gambling, where players use their dice to bet in one of the six numbered casinos. Each casino has one or more money cards and at the end of the round, the player with the most dice in that casino takes the highest value money card. The player who comes second takes the next highest value card and so on. When betting, players must place dice in one of the numbered casinos. The first catch is that they must place all the dice they roll that depict that number in the matching casino. The second catch is that any dice involved in a tie at the end of the round are removed, and it is this that makes it a great game.

– Image by boardGOATS

We have the original version of the game rather than the new edition, Las Vegas Royale, though we added elements from the Las Vegas Boulevard expansion, including the double weight “Big” dice and the Slot Machine. We also house-rule to only play three rounds instead of the four in the rules as written. This time, Ivory stole a march in the first round, when he was forced to place his last die as a losing singleton in “Casino Five”, only for Purple to roll a five with her final roll and take out both herself and the hitherto winner, Pine. As a result Ivory took the jackpot of $90,000 to go with his other winnings.

– Image by boardGOATS

It is not a game to give up on though, as anything can happen. The second round was relatively uneventful, but the deal for the final round left the last three casinos each with a single card of $100,000. This is highly unusual, but we decided to play on and see what happened. In the end, it had a bit of an “all or nothing” feel about it, with players going in early and in big. It was probably no coincidence that the three big jackpots were taken by the three highest scoring players. Pine thought he had come off worst, Black, who had done so well in the other two games took the wooden spoon. It was Ivory’s flying start that was key though, and together with his strong finish, his total takings were a massive $430,000, $40,000 more than Blue in second.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Party games can be great when everyone is in a party mood.

2nd October 2018

Blue was the first to arrive with Pink, who had come specially to celebrate our sixth birthday. While they were waiting for food they managed a quick game of NMBR 9. This is a very simple game, almost like Tetris where players try to tessellate tiles, building layers on top of layers, with the higher layers scoring more points. It is almost a year since Blue and Pink picked it up at Essen, and since then it has been played repeatedly, an average almost once a month (or every other games night). Mostly we aren’t so keen on multiplayer solitaire games like this, but NMBR 9 is the exception largely because it is so very fast to set up and games are quick to play too making it a great filler. It is a shame it only plays four, because there is no real reason that it couldn’t play a few more. Food arrived really quickly, and we were still placing the final tiles. It was quite close with similar values for the “first floor”, but Blue edged it with a four and a nine on the next layer compared with Pink, who only managed a six.

– Image by boardGOATS

Burgundy arrived soon after, and attacked his ham, eggs ‘n’ chips, eventually followed by Pine, Ivory, Green, and Cobalt (a friend of Green’s who will be moving into the village in a few weeks time). As it was exactly six years since the first games night, we couldn’t let the night pass without some sort of small celebration. So this year we had chocolate brownie cupcakes adorned with meeples to go with the now traditional, the “Birthday Feature Game”, Crappy Birthday. This is a very silly game that we now play exactly once a year at the beginning of October, with some house rules to make it slightly more palatable as it really isn’t our sort of game at all. Strangely though, everyone seems to really enjoy playing it once a year on our birthday. The idea is very simple: everyone has a hand of gift cards, and everyone takes it in turns to “celebrate their birthday”. On a player’s “birthday” they receive a gift from everyone else. These are shuffled, and the “birthday boy” picks the best and worst – the players who gave these get a point and after one year (i.e. after everyone has had a “birthday”), the player or players with the most points win.

– Image by boardGOATS

It is the cards that “make” the game for us: they are brilliant with fantastic comments. For example, Pink was tickled, well, pink, by the “pet vulture” that he gave to Pine, which was “very friendly, but stares at you while you are sleeping”. Pine was quite taken with it too and picked it to be his favourite gift, to go with the “fresh turkey” which was always going to be unpopular with a vegetarian (though might have given him something to feed to the vulture). Burgundy showed an unexpected desire for a set of fluffy dice (thought that might have been more due to the nature of the other gifts than their actual desirability), and Ivory returned the “thoughtful gift” of a set of “camera scales”, which he felt would have been off-putting. Despite his love of Star Wars, Green decided he’d rather have “a suit of armour” than a complete collection of memorabilia . Star wars wasn’t in favour with Cobalt either as he unceremoniously returned the gift of “a Star Wars themed wedding” (though it wasn’t completely clear whether it was the Star Wars theme or the wedding that he was rejecting).

– Image by boardGOATS

There was a brief hiatus while Ivory entertained everyone with a complete rendition of Rod Campbell’s “Dear Zoo” story. Despite being written over thirty-five year ago, nobody else seemed very familiar with the story and everyone was spell-bound as Ivory explained, “I wrote to the zoo to send me a pet. They sent me an elephant, but he was too big, so I sent it back.” A very long list of animals later, we established that the puppy was just perfect and Crappy Birthday continued. The game finished with Pink who fittingly received a real birthday card (it really IS his birthday soon). Blue then tried to persuade him that Chernobyl was now a safe place to visit and full of lots of interesting wildlife, but he wasn’t convinced and much to everyone’s surprise, rejected a visit (and possible nuclear suntan) in favour of “twenty tanning sessions”. With Crappy Birthday done and people just licking the last of the icing off the meeples from the cupcakes, it was time to decide what to play next.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pink was very keen to play either Altiplano or Clans of Caledonia and Ivory and Burgundy were very keen to join them. Time was short and the games are similar lengths, however, Blue, Pink and Burgundy had all played Altiplano, and with it’s similarity to Orléans, it was felt that it would be easier for Ivory to pick up quickly. On the next table, everyone else was trying to decide what to play. With Cobalt new to the group and not able to stay late, they needed a short game that was quick and easy to explain that might be a good introduction to gaming, so in the end, the group settled on Coloretto. The game is very simple, with players drawing a card and adding to one of the available “trucks”; each truck can take a maximum of three cards. Instead of drawing a card players can take a truck and the round is over when everyone has taken a truck. The aim of the game is to collect sets of cards, but while the three largest sets score positive points, everything else gives negative points. The really clever part is the score which is based on the triangular number series, so sets score increasingly well as they get larger (or badly if they score negative points of course) .

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

Cobalt quickly got to grips with the game, but played it safe by taking the bonus score cards. Pine went for a specific set of colours and Green ended up with several that he could build on. As the game progressed, Cobalt continued to play cautiously and kept the number of colours he had small. Green had several colours, but a few sets were building to a significant number. Meanwhile Pine’s attempt to keep to specific colours was failing and although had lots of one colour, just couldn’t get the others he wanted. The final round featured a golden joker which took a little while to work out the rules for. Despite being very pretty, it turned out that it wasn’t such such a good thing after all, especially at the end of the game. Pine ended up with it and took another random card, which didn’t help him, but didn’t hurt him either. It was very close, but in the final scoring, Cobalt’s cautious approach kept his negative points down to just one, but his positive score had also suffered. It was Green that topped the podium though, with five points more than Pine.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

Cobalt and Green were chatting while Pine was side-tracked by the eye-catching alpaca on the neighbouring table. Eventually Cobalt called it a night, and Green and Pine contemplated playing something and had just decided to play a quick game, when Black and Purple arrived. They were delighted to find that cakes had been saved for them (with suitably coloured meeples), and the foursome settled down to a game of Splendor. This is another light, set collecting game that we’ve played a lot. With simple choices, we find it a relatively relaxing game to play and perfect in the circumstances. The idea is that players use gem tokens to buy cards, which in turn provide permanent gems that can be used to buy other cards. Some of the high value cards also give points and players who collect enough of the right gems may earn a visit from a Noble giving them more points – first player to fifteen points is the winner.

– Image by BGG contributor zapata131

Everyone followed their own strategy, but it looked like opal (black) and diamond (white) gem cards were the ones that everyone would need due to the Nobles and very few blue sapphires and green emeralds. Purple managed to corner the market for diamonds causing everyone difficulties. Green was building up red rubies and opals and also going for high scoring cards and Black was managing to gain lots of opals and was quietly beavering away. Pine seemed to find himself in all sorts of trouble as he just couldn’t get the cards he needed with everyone else nabbing them just before him. It was beginning to look like Black was going to win, but suddenly Purple’s hoarding of diamond gems paid dividends as she was able to grab nobles one after the other and reached the magic fifteen points before anyone else, and exactly one turn ahead of Black as it turned out.

– Image used with permission of boardgamephotos

Meanwhile, on the neighbouring table, Altiplano had been going for some time. It had been the “Feature Game” a few weeks back and everyone had really enjoyed it as it gave a new spin on the “bag building” mechanism used in another game we are very familiar with, Orléans. The games are similar in that each player has their own player board, draws “workers” out of their bag and then plays them onto their board before everyone takes in it in turns to carry out the associated actions (one at a time). The biggest fundamental difference between the two games is that in Altiplano, when tokens are used, they don’t go straight back in the bag as in Orléans, instead, they go into a separate box. The tokens then only go back into the bag once everything has been used and the bag is empty. This reduces the lottery element and as a result the game is a lot less forgiving to a poorly controlled bag, but players have much more control if they can find a way of using it.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor JackyTheRipper

The games are visually very different too, with everything set out on a central player board in Orléans, which also features a map which players are trying to navigate and build on. There is no map, in Altiplano, but there is still a spacial element to the game: the central play area is made of locations arranged in a circle and only certain actions can be carried out in each one. For example, if players want to sell goods, they must be at the Market, and must have the relevant goods placed in the Market spaces on their player board. Before or after their action, players can move, but movement is very restricted. Players begin with one card that can move up to three spaces in either direction, but they can also “buy” additional moves. And this is where we got the rules wrong. The correct rules are that players can place a food token onto one of the movement spaces allowing the player to travel just one space (recycling the food into their box). When these spaces are upgraded with carts, there is still a cost of one food, but now players can move up to three spaces. The rules error was that players couldn’t use the extra movement spaces until they had got a cart, and then they could only travel one space.

– Image used with permission of boardgamephotos

Blue was sure something wasn’t right, but was too busy checking other things and answering questions that she didn’t get to find what the problem was until the game was nearly finished. At this point, Pink informed everyone that he hadn’t been listening to the rules outline and had just been “playing correctly”. The problem with this is that in a game as tight as Altiplano, even the smallest of changes can have unpredictable consequences. Last time, Green had been taking a token when he bought Cottage Cards (in effect using them as Canoe Cards); although he had only benefited from a couple of extra tokens, he would have been able to use them several times, and as one of them was Stone it would have helped him to get extra tokens out of his bag, and taking the last Glass token ended the game prematurely etc. Thus, in this game in particular it is impossible to unravel mistakes and try to work out what effect it might have had, though both Blue and Burgundy felt they would have benefited hugely had they been able to take those extra moves.

– Image used with permission of boardgamephotos

Aside from that, the game was mostly played according to the rules. Pink went for a warehouse strategy concentrating on trying to obtain high value goods, in particular Silver and Wool. Burgundy really struggled at the start and in the end just tried to get hold of any resources he could, and then send them off to his warehouse. Blue started off really well, but her game stalled in the second half when she ended up with a lot of stuff in her bag that ended up blocking spaces she wanted to use and slowed down the rate she was drawing the tokens she wanted. While trying to sort out the mess she commented, “I’m going to stuff my whorehouse,” which gained a lot of sniggers from the neighbouring table. The game was a bit of a mystery to Ivory and he kept saying that he could see how the game worked, but not where he was going to get any points from. That said, he managed to get nearly a hundred of them giving him a very creditable score for a first try especially given the rules error and the haste they had been explained in. He probably raised the biggest laugh of the night as well when he sighed deeply and announced, “I think I’m just going to have to get my wood out!”

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor JackyTheRipper

Blue had fulfilled more contracts than anyone else and had the vast majority of the glass, but it wasn’t enough. It was very tight between Pink and Burgundy in first and second place though—Burgundy had more goods in his warehouse, but Pink’s were generally of a higher value. In fact it was so close that it called for a recount, just in case. It turned out that the scores had been correct though and Burgundy’s hundred and fifty-two, just edged out Pink who finished three points behind. Comparing the totals to those achieved last time showed how much everyone has improved since the winning score for that game was a hundred and three. The reason for that is probably largely the fact that everyone is getting better at controlling the contents of their bag. As Pink pointed out, it really is critical to get rid of things that aren’t wanted, otherwise you end up in the mess Blue got herself into.

– Image used with permission of boardgamephotos

Learning Outcome: Don’t put wooden meeples on cakes, they are too chewy…

3rd October 2017

The evening started with a quick hand of Love Letter between Blue and Burgundy while they waited for their “Fave” pizzas to arrive. The game only lasted a handful of turns and Blue took it with the Princess when she played a Baron to force a comparison. As Burgundy said, with that combination of cards lined up against him, his poor Baron didn’t stand a chance. There wasn’t time for him to get his revenge, however, as food arrived, along with a Happy Birthday text from Pink (who wasn’t able to come). With the arrival of Red and Magenta, Blue and Red talked about work for a few minutes before Ivory and Pine joined the party and everyone settled down to a quick game of 6 Nimmt!—a quick game that could be played while eating pizza.

– Image by boardGOATS

Bizarrely, Ivory had somehow managed to avoid playing 6 Nimmt! despite it being one of our most frequently played games. So, there was a quick run-down of the rules before we could start. The game starts with four cards face up on the table, the beginning of four rows. Each player starts with a hand of cards and players simultaneously choose one and place it face-down before a simultaneous reveal. Cards are then played in ascending order, with players placing their card on the highest card that is lower than the card being played. When the sixth card is added to a row, the first five are taken by the active player and the number of heads contribute to that player’s score; lowest score wins. We tend to play two rounds, each using half of the deck of one-hundred and four cards. The thing that makes the game so compelling is that players begin to feel they have control over their destiny, but any grip they may have is incredibly tenuous and once things start to go wrong the problems tend to escalate horribly.

– Image by boardGOATS

This time, things started to go wrong early for Red and Blue, but Pine outstripped them by miles and finished the first round with twenty three “nimmts”—as he commented, enough for a whole dairy heard. Burgundy and Magenta were doing much better with one nimmt and none respectively. Given his excellent performance in the first round, everyone expected Burgundy to start collecting cards with enthusiasm in the second round, and so it proved. His efforts paled into insignificance compared with some of the others though, in particular Ivory and especially Blue, who finished with a massive top score of forty-four. The winner was unambiguously Magenta, however, who added a second clear round to her first and managed to end the game without picking up a single bull’s head, a real achievement.

– Image by boardGOATS

With everyone now arrived and pizzas all consumed it was time for the party to really start, with the “Feature Game”, Crappy Birthday accompanied by a marvellous blue Meeple Cake supplied by Georgie from The Jockey. Everyone sang Happy Birthday and Blue and Green as the originators of the group blew out the candles then Red took the knife and started to carve while Magenta began dealing cards for the game. With everyone eating cake (including the people at the pub who couldn’t believe we’d been going for five years), attention turned to Crappy Birthday. This is funny little party game which we played for the first time last year to celebrate our fourth anniversary. The premise of the game is that it is one player’s birthday and every one gives them a “present” chosen from the cards in their hand. The birthday boy or girl then has to choose the best present and worst present and then returns these cards to the person who gave them. At the end of the game players count up the number of pressies they have had returned and the one with the most (i.e. the one who gave the fewest mediocre presents) is the winner. The game has a lot in common with Dixit, but is a lot simpler. In the same way though, the production quality of the cards is really key to making the game work, though the emotions are very different: in Dixit everyone marvels at the beauty of the art, in Crappy Birthday everyone laughs at the stupidity or brilliance of the gifts.

– Image by boardGOATS

This time we discovered that Black wanted a Viking helmet for his birthday, Red wanted to go on the first trip to Mars, Burgunday fancied a course in Sumo wrestling and a drive across the Sahara was on Ivory’s “Bucket List”. There were many amusing gifts that didn’t actually score points including the Gnome ABBA Tribute Band (singing, “Gnoming me, Gnoming you” perhaps?) and a dead rat to hang on the front door at New Year. We also discovered that Pine hates heights and horses (especially those that are trying to throw you off), so the session of rodeo riding was thrown straight back in disgust. Red returned a Porta-Potty (she’s seen plenty in the last year apparently); Blue threw back comedy lessons (she hates being on stage); Black sent back a chair because it was boring and Red decided she couldn’t cope with a 150lb burger and claimed it would make her sick. Everyone clearly thought that physical exertion was not Burgundy’s thing, but it was the tight rope walking that he was least keen on while Ivory had a fit of shyness and turned down the kind offer of a session skinny-dipping. Purple rejected the idea of her very own personal roller-coaster, though it was close between that and snake charming lessons. Pine commented that he would have combined the snake charming with the five chihuahua puppies as the latter would have provided an excellent food supply for the snakes. This did not go down well with Purple who had chosen the chihuahua’s as her favourite gift and didn’t want them eaten…

– Image by boardGOATS

It didn’t really matter who was the winner because everyone had fun and everyone got their moment in the spotlight as they had to explain their decisions. And while they listened everyone else got sticky eating the meeple cake which was soon nibbled away to leave just a bit of head and a foot. After one round we counted up who had the most returned cards and Ivory who had five cards was the winner by miles with Green and Burgundy in a distant, joint second place. Party games aren’t really the Group’s “thing”, but everyone enjoyed this one (particularly accompanied by cake) and the consensus seemed to be that once a year was about probably right, especially as it gave everyone time to forget the silly things on the cards. With the birthday cards collected in and the cake mostly gone it was time to decide what to play. Nobody was quick to decide and things were complicated by those planning to leave early. In the end we decided to stick together as a group (it was a party after all) and play a round of Saboteur.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor mothertruckin

The idea of Saboteur is that each player is either a Dwarf or a Saboteur and players take it in turns to play a card from their hand. The Dwarves aim is to extend the tunnel to the treasure, while the Saboteurs try to stop them. There are two types of cards that can be played: tunnels and special cards. The cards with tunnel fragments shown must be played in the correct orientation, though the tunnel depicted can include junctions, bends, and even dead-ends. While the Dwarves try to push the path towards the gold, Saboteurs try to play disruptive cards while trying not to look like it. Meanwhile, special cards include “rockfall” cards which can be played to remove a tunnel card already played, and maps which can be used to see where the gold is hidden. Most importantly, however are “broken tool” cards which can be played on another player to prevent them building tunnel cards until they (or another kind-hearted soul) plays a matching “fixed tool” card to remove it. The game is supposed to be played over several round with the winning team sharing out a pile of gold cards, but we tend to play it as a team game and stick to one round at a time.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor mikehulsebus

The game began quite carefully with everyone doing their best to look like dwarves, that didn’t stop the accusations though and it wasn’t long before someone decided that Black and Green were looking shifty. Green had almost all the map cards and unsportingly decided to stick to the rules and refused to share them. Then Pine roused suspicions when his use of a map card led to a disagreement with Green clearly identifying one of them as a Saboteur. Before long Ivory had joined the fray and nobody knew what was going on, except that the tunnels kept moving forward. Eventually, Blue left nobody in any doubt when she gleefully diverted the tunnel away from the only possible remaining gold. With the last card in the draw deck gone, it went down to the wire, but all the sabotage from Blue, Pine and Ivory was to no avail. Cards continued to be played and it took a whole extra round, but the Dwarves just managed to make it to the treasure.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor mikehulsebus

With time ticking on, Red and Magenta left for an early night and the residue of the group split into two parts, the first of which played Sheep & Thief. This game has had a couple of outings recently, in particular on a Tuesday two weeks ago. Sheep & Thief is a curious little tile/card drafting and laying game with elements of pick up and deliver mechanisms added for good measure. Each player has a board divided into a four by four grid, and starts with their home card and two sheep in the top left hand corner. Each round is played in two halves: first players draft cards then they play them, taking it turns to place one card per turn. Players are trying to connect their home card to the other three corners while trying to keep their sheep safe and trying to catch other players sheep with their fox, meanwhile, they are also attempting to navigate their black sheep to the bottom left right corner of their board. With points for all sorts of things including sheep captured, sheep retained, long rivers, connecting the home card to the other corners of the board as well as for moving their black sheep as far from home as possible, it is a veritable “point salad”, but one where it is actually very difficult to do well.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pine, with his love of sheep was always going to do do well, despite this being his first try at the game. Everyone else had played it several times before and therefore knew what they were letting themselves in for. The strategies were very varied though, for example, Purple prioritised getting her road from her home card to the opposite corner of her board and picked up fifteen points for doing so. Green prioritised getting his black sheep as far as he could in the hope that he might get points for his road in the process. Unfortunately, although Green’s sheep netted him fifteen points, he was not able to connect his home card to any other corner and therefore failed to get any extra points as a result. In contrast, Black tried to do a bit of everything which really isn’t a strategy that works for this game. As a result he really struggled. It was a very close game, and on the re-count finished in a tie between Green and Pine who both scored thirty-one points with Purple just behind. Since the tie-breaker is the number of sheep and and both Green and Pine finished with the same number of sheep the victory was shared.

– Image by boardGOATS

On the next table, Ivory, Burgundy and Blue were being indecisive. In the end after looking longingly at the “Deluxified” Yokohama, they reluctantly decided that it would probably take too long and decided to give Dice Forge a go instead. This game was new to everyone except Ivory who gave his assurance that it would not be a long and complicated game. And he was right – the whole thing took less than an hour and a half including teaching. The game is a dice building game, with a lot in common with the deck building games like Dominion and bag building games like Orléans, or cup building games like Roll for the Galaxy, where the aim is to try to mitigate the effects of luck by stacking the deck, bag, cup or in this case dice, to improve the odds. In the case of Dice Forge, it is the dice themselves that players are modifying. Each player starts with two dice, similar to those in some of the Lego games, where the faces can be removed and changed.

– Image by boardGOATS

Beyond this, the game is actually quite simple. On the active player’s turn, everyone rolls both their dice and adds the result to their accounting tracks. On their turn, the active player can then also spend some of their gains to either upgrade dice, or to move their pawn from their central “Starting Portals” to one of the “Islands” on the board and take a “Heroic Feat” card. Each upgrade has a cost, with the best upgrades having the highest costs. The cards also have costs and the most powerful cards are the most expensive. When upgrading, players can choose which faces to replace and what to replace them with. In contrast, most of the cards have a single use special action or bonus, but some also have a perpetual action. With the game restricted to only ten rounds, however, these have to be bought early if they are to prove game winners. Once everyone had had the full ten rounds, each player adds up their points and the player with the most is the winner.

– Image by boardGOATS

There are several sources of points: firstly, some dice faces give points, but this is not a particularly efficient way of scoring unless there are some cards that can be used to increase the acquisition speed. Cards can be more effective, but only if the means to buy them can be accumulated quickly and efficiently. Blue started off trying to get some nice dice faces to improve the probability of a good roll. She quickly realised the really clever part of the game: what is the best way to upgrade the dice and how should the faces be distributed? For example, is it better to put all the good faces on one die and guarantee one good roll, or is it better to spread them across both and hope to roll more good rolls than bad ones? She opted for the latter, but wasn’t sure whether that was the right choice or not.

– Image by boardGOATS

While Blue was faffing about with where to put her dice, Burgundy had a much bigger problem as he was struggling to roll what he wanted in order to upgrade his. This had the knock-on consequence that by the time he got what he wanted, invariably, Blue or Ivory had pinched what he wanted. Ivory, having played the game before clearly had a much better idea of what he was trying to do, but although he managed some exceptional rolls, he struggled from time to time too. In the end, Burgundy more or less gave up on dice and started to collect cards. Somehow he managed to accrue a seventy-two cards—a massive number compared with compared with the forty-two/forty-six that Ivory and Blue had gathered together. It almost worked as well, since he netted a fantastic ninety-eight points, remarkable considering his very slow start. In the end Burgundy finished just two points behind Blue who top-scored with a nice round hundred. Everyone had enjoyed it though, despite the frustrations, and everyone was quite keen to give it another go, though not straight away as it was definitely home time.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Time flies when you are playing boardgames!

4th October 2016

It was a quiet night, thanks to illness, work and other commitments. There were still enough of us to split into two small groups, the first of which settled down to play Endeavor. This is a game we’ve played a couple of times this year and still proves quite popular. This time, only Green had played it before and Grey and Ivory were unfamiliar with it, so it was necessary to have a complete run-down of the rules. The game is played over seven rounds, each of which consists of four phases: Building, Population, Income and Action. The idea is that players have four status tracks, one each for Industry, Culture, Finance and Politics, which roughly correspond to the four phases of the game and dictate what players are allowed to do at each stage.

– Image by boardGOATS

Players begin by choosing a building, some of which provide an increase in one (or more) of the four status tracks, some provide actions, while most others do a mixture of both. Players then move population markers from their general supply to their harbour according to their current culture level. A strong population is essential as it ultimately limits the number of actions players can take on their turn. The income phase allows players to move some of their workers from buildings back into their harbour as dictated by their current level on the income track. These add to the population players have available to do things with, while also making space on the buildings so that these actions are available for re-use. The first three phases of each round are mostly just preparation and book-keeping; the guts of each round are in the final phase, where players take it in turns to carryout an action of their choice. There are five basic actions: Taking Payment, Shipping, Occupying, Attacking, and Drawing Cards.

– Image by boardGOATS

In order to carryout an action, players must activate an appropriate building by moving a population marker from their harbour to the building. In the case of shipping, occupying and attacking, the actions are carried out on the central, communal player board. To ship, after activating an appropriate building, players can move one of the population markers to one of the six shipping tracks and take the token that was on the space. These tokens are useful as they add to the status tracks, but some also give a free action. Shipping is also important as it gives players a presence in a region which is necessary for occupying, attacking and drawing cards. When a player places the last token on a shipping track, The Governor card from the top of the pile in the region is allocated and the region is considered “open”. This means that players who already have a presence in the region can also occupy the cities within the region. This gives both tokens and victory points, but where a player occupies a city that is connected to another city they already occupy, they get an extra token, which can be very valuable, as well as providing extra points at the end of the game. This makes position very important, but if someone occupies a city that another player wants, one option is attacking.

– Image by boardGOATS

This is carried out in the same way as occupying, but is a separate action and costs an additional population marker. Occupying a region also adds to a players presence in the region: players can also draw the top card from a region’s stack and add it to their player-board, so long as their total presence in the region is higher than the card number. Cards are important as they also add to the status tracks as well as provide victory points, however there is a card limit which is enforced when a player passes at the end of the round and any status track points gained with the card are lost when cards are discarded. Once everyone has completed one action phase players continue taking it turns until everyone passes. Thus, the final possible action is taking payment which is the simplest action and allows players to move one of their population markers back to the harbour so that they can re-use the building in the same round. In addition to the five basic actions, some of the more expensive buildings provide a choice or even a combination of two of the basic actions. After seven rounds, points are awarded for cities, for connections between cities, for progress up status tracks, cards, some special buildings, and any left-over population markers.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

It was an inauspicious start: Grey was unhappy with the name, it hurt his language sensibilities, and he was very concerned as to where the “u” had gone. Green was definitely at an advantage as the only person to have played the game before, but he did his best to guide the others for their first few turns. In truth, there is very little choice to be made in the first round or so, however, what choice there is tends to turn out to be critical by the end of the game. With so little decision to make, the first round is always over in a flash, though the later rounds take progressively longer as the game goes on. Ivory and Green both started building Workshops for the extra brick, while Grey went for a Shipyard and started to ship. In the second round, Ivory and Green’s Workshop enabled them to build more valuable buildings and Ivory took a Guildhall to get in on the shipping act, while Green declined the extra brick and went for the Shipyard. This gave him a second green population token and popped him over into gaining three population markers. As the fog of first game confusion began to clear for Grey, he saw the advantage of the Workshop, so took it at the second opportunity.

– Image by boardGOATS

The first few rounds raced past as everyone developed their own board, increased their populations and took cities and shipping tracks, but some clear strategies were emerging. Green had a large number of cities in central Europe and a smattering of shipping routes, but was pushing strongly for Africa (to make connections with his European cities and give some great bonus action chits). Ivory was also keeping a strong hold in Europe, but not so much on the shipping tracks, while Grey was concentrating on opening up India and the Far East. Ivory had built up a healthy row of cards, and although he was the only one to resort to slavery so far, it was only the one card. In the fourth round Grey took the penultimate space on the India shipping track and gifted Green a super-turn, when he used his Dock to ship (thus opening up the region) and then occupied too. The newly occupied town linked to his European city and so he got that extra token too. Grey did get the bonus Governor card in consolation however. And then, the regions tumbled, next were the Far East and then North America.

– Image by boardGOATS

By the fifth round, the first four cards in the central region had all been taken, and a quick count up showed Green had five cities. He waited until the sixth round and, since no-one had attacked him, he took the final card and abolished slavery. Luckily Ivory was not too badly affected by this and avoided the collapsing house of cards such an event can often trigger. At the start of the final round, Grey spotted that Ivory had a cluster of four cities plus one in Africa: that gave him four connections. He also noticed that there was one cornerstone city that connected them all. So he bravely marched in, took the losses involved in attack and swiped several points from Ivory in one go. The final turns were used for mopping up as many points as possible and once everyone had passed, it was on to final scoring.

– Image by boardGOATS

Not unexpectedly given his extra experience with the game, Green scored the most, with victory points from most areas. Ivory was close behind in what had been a very enjoyable game. In fact Grey had not only got over the mis-spelled title, but had enjoyed it so much that he went on to try to find a copy for himself. Alas Endeavor is very out of print so if it can be found, it’s going to cost a pretty penny, which is a shame, as it is a really good game with good replay-ability, thanks to its random token layout. On the adjacent table, there was much debate as to what to play, but eventually, the group settled on Istanbul, winner of the Kennerspiel des Jahres two years ago. We’ve played it a couple of times, but Pine was completely new to it, though both Blue and Red had played it before. It is also a fairly simple game where players are trying to lead their Merchant and his four Assistants through the Turkish bazaar. There are sixteen locations each with an associated action, but to carry out an action, the Merchant needs an Assistant to help out.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor duchamp

The problem is, once an action has been completed, the Merchant must move on, however, an Assistant remains to complete the details of the transaction. Thus, the Merchant can only carryout a transaction if he has the help of an Assistant. When he runs out of Assistants, the Merchant cannot carryout a transaction and must either visit the Fountain and summon his Assistants or go back to stalls where the Assistants are to collect them. The central play-area is made up of tiles representing each stall, so there are four possible layouts: “Short”, where the distances between places that work well together are small making game-play easier; “Long”, where places that work well together are far apart, which forces players to plan ahead more; “Challenging”, where similar places are grouped together, and “Random”. For this game, we chose “Long” routes to give us a slightly more interesting game.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

Blue began by collecting money and visiting the Wainwright to build up the size of her cart, while Red began collecting the special tiles from the Mosque’s while they were still cheap. Although Pine felt he understood the rules and the aim of the game perfectly, it took him a few rounds to work out how to go about making things work together effectively. So it was that Blue just managed to get to the Jewelers before Pine and use a double card to buy two gems. As Pine had only had the exact money for his own double gem purchase, he was now two Lira short and had to go and acquire more cash. To add insult to injury, he had just acquired his extra Lira when Red pulled a similar trick and Pine had to go and find yet more cash. While Blue and Pine were building piles of currency, Red was quietly collecting tiles from the Mosques and a full set gave her two gems.

– Image used with permission of of boardgamephotos

Blue and Pine completed their carts and, with her gems from the Jeweler, Blue seemed to have got her nose in front. That was before Pine, largely unintentionally, got his revenge for the problems Blue had caused him earlier in the game. Everything Blue tried to do, Pine was there first and obstructed her plans. In such a tight game, it was just enough to give Red the extra time she needed to get her fifth gem and trigger the end of the game. Despite a massive forty-two Lira, Pine needed two turns to change them into gems leaving Blue just ahead in second place with four gems. As Endeavor was still in the closing stages, Red, Blue and Pine investigated the “Feature Game”. To celebrate our fourth birthday this week, this was to be Crappy Birthday a silly little filler/party game. This game has a lot in common with games like Apples to Apples and in particular, Dixit. The idea is that each player has a hand of cards featuring strange potential gifts. On their turn, it is the active player’s birthday and everyone else passes them a card. The active player then chooses what they think is the best and worst and returns them to the original owner who keeps them as points.

– Image by boardGOATS

After a couple of turns, Endeavor came to an end and the group joined up for a proper game of Crappy Birthday. The key to playing this sort of game is knowing the other players. Although we meet regularly, we don’t all know each other all that well, so this was always going to be interesting. By the end, we’d learned that Red would quite like to bungee-jump; Green thinks turning his car into a caravanette would be fun (well, perhaps not his car); Blue has a pathological hatred of having her photo taken and Pine likes fluffy penguins and had been to the Westmann Islands and played with warm lava… In the absence of cake (partly due to a mix up) we completed two rounds and Ivory and Green finished in front with three points apiece. Given how unsuccessful social games often are with our group (most recently Codenames, which was very divisive), this was not expected to be a great success. However, the cards were such fun and so unusual, that we all really enjoyed it. Sadly, that means the game has poor replayability as, once the surprise has gone, the game will be much less fun.

– Image by boardGOATS

With that done, Red, Ivory and Grey headed off, leaving Pine, Blue and Green to play something quick. After a little chit-chat Splendor was the chosen game, with both Pine and Blue having unfinished business after getting soundly beaten twice in quick succession. In this game, players have just three options on their turn: collect gem tokens, buy a gem card using gem tokens (and/or cards), or reserve a gem card and receive a gold (wild) token at the same time. Players can have a maximum of ten tokens, though unlimited cards and the cards act as permanent tokens. Thus, at its heart Splendor is an engine building game built on a set-collection mechanism. Players score points when they buy some gem cards and for attracting Nobles which are awarded to the first player collect certain combinations of gem cards; the game end is triggered when one player reaches fifteen points and the player with the most at the end wins.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

The game started with both Pine and Blue going for it with all guns blazing. The set up included three special Noble tiles: one from the 2015 Brettspiel Adventskalender and two from the promotional tiles set, but all four Nobles included opals. So, it was just as well that there were lots of opals out at the start of the game. Blue and and Pine collected as many of them as they could. Green picked up a few too, but found the competition was quite stiff and went for more rubies and sapphires. It was Pine who picked up the first of the Nobles, but that galvanised Blue into action and she grabbed the remaining three in quick succession. She was still a few points short of the finish line, and it was then that Green realised he had misread one of the cards. Having had a similar lead and lost last time she had played, she wasn’t going to let this one get away, and ruthlessly gathered the remaining points she needed to quickly bring the game to a close. Blue finished the game with sixteen four points ahead of Pine in second place.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Learning outcome: Some of the best games can be very difficult to get hold of.