Tag Archives: Dingo’s Dreams

Golden GOAT Award Winners – 2021

Just before Christmas, the boardGOATS meet for food, have a bit of a party, and decide the winners of the GOAT Awards. Sadly, that wasn’t possible last year, so this year we made up for it with lots of crackers, cards, and lots of festive treats. While waiting for food, the group voted for our favourite game of the year. As in previous years, we awarded two prizes: the Golden GOAT for our favourite game and the “GOAT Poo” award for our least favourite.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

As usual, everyone had three points to hand out for the Golden GOAT Award plus a bonus if wearing Festive Attire, but we limited each person to a maximum of two points per game (after a little controversy over the voting last time). Everyone could also nominate up to two individual games for the GOAT Poo Prize. This year, there were several nominations for GOAT Poo, but the clear winner was Dingo’s Dreams. This is probably quite a clever game that we would normally enjoy, but we played it online with lots of people, none of whom had any idea what they were trying to do. As a result, the complete chaos made for a very un-fun experience all round.

– Image by boardGOATS

With all the online games, there was less competition than usual, but the 2019 winner, Wingspan, was very nearly the first game to win the Golden GOAT award twice. In the event, it was just pipped to victory by Praga Caput Regni – quite an achievement given that only four people in the group had played it. While discussing possible candidates for Moment of the Year everyone fondly reminisced about the time Lime accidentally joined an online game of 6 Nimmt! with a bunch of Frenchmen, but that was last year. The GOATS have long memories though, and it would seem that they still haven’t forgiven Pink for stealing everyone else’s gems in Niagara, despite his repeated assertions that he was “just following the rules”.

– Adapted by boardGOATS from image by
BGG Contributor El_Comandante

16th December 2021

Ivory, always excitable when it comes to Christmas, was first to arrive, shortly followed by Blue and Pink, with armfuls of crackers, parcels, party poppers and Golden GOAT voting forms. It was our first visit to The Jockey since the retirement of the Charles and Anna, but Michelle and John made us very welcome on their first full day, and were very understanding of the noise mess we inevitably made.

– Image by boardGOATS

We started with the crackers, frantically chasing dice, chocolates, and meeples all over the place, and then suffering the flock of appalling goaty jokes with which they were filled. As people munched the chocolates from their crackers they filled in their Golden GOAT voting forms, then Pine and Pink collated the results. There were lots of nominations for GOAT Poo, but the runaway winner was Dingo’s Dreams. This is probably quite a clever game that we would normally enjoy, but we played it online with lots of people, none of whom had any idea what they were trying to do. As a result, the complete chaos made for a very un-fun experience all round.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Discussion surrounding the Moment of the Year included reminiscences of the time Lime accidentally joined an online game of 6 Nimmt! with a bunch of Frenchmen, but that was last year and therefore not eligible this time round. Pine and Pink fondly remembered the pasting they gave to Burgundy and Blue when they played Ticket to Ride: Heart of Africa, but the winner was the online game of Niagara when Pink won by stealing gems from everyone else—an event that still lingers in the the memory of those who were robbed and are even now dreaming of revenge.

– Adapted by boardGOATS from image by
BGG Contributor El_Comandante

With all the online gaming, there was less competition than usual for the Golden GOAT award. Indeed, the 2019 winner, Wingspan, was very nearly the first game to win the Golden GOAT award twice, but much to Green’s obvious delight, it was just pipped to victory by Praga Caput Regni – quite an achievement given that only four people in the group had even played it. We spent our winnings from the quiz on appetizers and with some having a full three-course dinner, we weren’t finished till quite late. There was just time for a game or two though…

– Image by boardGOATS

Pine was keen to play Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries, but after the Heart of Africa experience nobody else was enthusiastic to join him. Ivory was keen to play the “Feature Game” which was Santa’s Workshop, so Pink, Blue and Burgundy joined him. This is a medium-light weight worker placement game, similar to Stone Age, Lords of Waterdeep or Viticulture, but with a festive theme. Players operate teams of elves making presents for Santa to deliver on Christmas Eve.

– Image by boardGOATS

On their turn, players can send elves to collect wish-list items, mine for coal, visit the metal, wood, fabric, plastic and assembly workshops, or train their elves so they work more efficiently. Players earn Cookies for every gift they make, and every three days, Santa carries out an inspection and the teams that have made the most gifts get more Cookies. The elves can also visit the Reindeer Stables to get help and more Cookies—the player whose team of elves has earned the most Cookies by the end of Christmas Eve is the winner.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game is played over the nine days before Christmas, appropriately from 16^th December (the date of our “Un-Christmas Dinner”) up to and including Christmas Eve. Each gift card shows what it is made of and how much assembly it will need, as well as how many Cookies it will earn when it is completed. One of the things that makes this game a little different to other worker placement games is that players are unable to store resources: elves must first acquire the gift card, then the materials to make the gift (wood, plastic, fabric and metal), and only then can the elves assemble the gift.

– Image by boardGOATS

The idea is that the elf is taking the pieces to the assembly room and making it there, so timing is everything. If a player visits receives five pieces of wood, but can only use three, the other two go to waste. Players can improve their situation by getting some of their elves trained—this costs a turn, but a visit to the School Room means they can use this additional skill to produce more material or assemble things more efficiently. The question is whether this is worth the effort as the game is played over just nine days with only three turns per day (or four at lower player counts).

– Image by boardGOATS

Blue and Burgundy started fast and took the bonus Cookies for the most productive team at the end of the 18^th December, but by the end of the Christmas Eve, Ivory and Pink were getting the most Cookies for being the most productive while Blue and Burgundy’s attentions were elsewhere. Ivory started out making a lovely wooden music box, but then moved rapidly into making plastic tat. Selling coal to Santa was also highly lucrative (Santa always needs coal to give to naughty children).

– Image by boardGOATS

Blue did the reverse, starting by making Lego bricks with lots of plastic and then moving on to making dressing up clothes and a lovely teddy bear which she failed to assemble. Burgundy also struggled with his assembly and spent quite a lot of time visiting the stable and petting Comet (to take the first player marker) or Donna (to obtain the assistance of Zelf to get extra material). Pink similarly struggled and felt it was important to prioritise being the first player at certain points during the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

It was a very close game and the final few turns were really critical as players tried to make sure they completed everything they could and most realised they couldn’t finish what they wanted to. Ivory thought he might just make it and gambled on getting enough visits to the assembly room to do what he needed. In contrast, Blue pragmatically took the Cookies from Dasher’s stable and gave up all hope that she might be able to assemble her gifts. And that made the difference, giving Blue victory, finishing ten Cookies ahead of Ivory, with Pink just behind in third.

– Image by boardGOATS

Although not an exceptional game, Santa’s Workshop is unquestionably one of the best festive games we’ve played—all the more so as it has a genuine Christmas theme rather than simply being “snowy”. Sadly, the pieces lack a little something, especially Santa, but we made up for that by stealing the bits from Christmas Penguins, which we played a couple of years ago and had great bits, but lacked something in the game-play. The game itself was purchased in a couple of years ago and sent on by a friend in Australia, but first got caught in the bush fires there and then playing it was delayed by Covid when last year’s Christmas Event was online; the verdict was that it was worth the wait though.

– Image by boardGOATS

On the next table, the rest of the group settled down to play Carcassonne: Winter Edition. This is essentially the same as the original “blue box version” of the tile playing game, Carcassonne, but with a pretty snowy scheme, which everyone agreed they preferred to the usual version. So, as with the original, the game play is very simple: on their turn, the active player plays a tile, adding it to the map (ensuring all the edges agree) and then optionally place a meeple on the tile before scoring any completed features.

– Image by boardGOATS

The features on the tiles include city segments, roads and cloisters. Players score two points for each tile in a city or road they own if it is completed during the game, or one point at the end if incomplete. Similarly, Cloisters score nine points when completely surrounded or one point for the central tiles and each surrounding it at the end of the game. The clever part of the game is that while players cannot add a meeple to a feature that is already owned by another player, these can be joined together and then shared so that both players score.

– Image by boardGOATS

This time, the group also included the the Lebkuchenmann expansion. This consists of additional Gingerbread Man tiles mixed in with the base game; when drawn, the player moves the brown Gingerbread Meeple to an unfinished city of their choice. Before he is moved, however, the current city containing the Gingerbread Man is scored. Each player receives points for the number of meeples they have in the city multiplied by the number of tiles in the city. Thus, even players that only one meeple in the city when their opponents have more get a few points.

– Image by boardGOATS

The Gingerbread Man also leaves the current city when someone adds the tile that completes it and the Gingerbread Man is scored just before the normal scoring. This means it is sometimes desirable to finish someone else’s city, in order to move the Gingerbread Man or to make them earn fewer points for it. The clever part about the Lebkuchenmann expansion is that it can be played in both a friendly and a spiteful way.

– Image by boardGOATS

Very early in the game, Green, Purple and Lilac all found themselves with cities which looked all but impossible to close out. Black went for an early “Farmer”, making snow angels and Green followed suit. “Farmers” only score at the end of the game, giving points for the number of cities the field supplies, but they tie up the meeples for the rest of the game and, if placed early can end up being cut off yielding a poor score. So, only time would tell whether this would prove to be a master move or a waste of a good meeple.

– Image by boardGOATS

Lilac was building herself a nice big city, obtained the first Gingerbread Man and placed it into her growing metropolis. This attracted the attention of Pine who set up camp in a small city across the open divide. On his next turn he got exactly the tile he needed (a city tile with two opposite open ends), and joined the two together. When the city was completed shortly after, both Pine and Lilac scored, not just for the city, but for the Gingerbread Man too. This put them both out into a commanding lead on the score board, with Pine half a dozen points ahead—a lead he would not relinquish for the rest of the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

In the meantime, the rest of the group kept drawing road tiles. The Gingerbread Meeple was very handy to get some of the awkward, incomplete cities to score at least something, as he hopped around the board giving out gifts. As the snowy scene expanded and grew, more farmers were placed, more cities were completed, and roads wiggled their way round the landscape joining areas previously separated. As one of his last moves, Green found the one tile that would fit into the gap next to his first city to complete it. This did something else, too, that would have a game-changing impact, though nobody realised it until scoring.

– Image by boardGOATS

With the last tile placed everyone scored their uncompleted cities, roads and cloisters. At this point Pine was still in front, with Lilac not too far behind in second—the Farmers were going to be key. Black and Green had managed to maneuver two Farmers each into the same massive field, but sadly Purple’s lone farmer got booted out. Lilac had a couple of farmers on the other side of the board, one gave her two cities and the other gave her three, just enough to push her ahead of Pine (who had eschewed the whole farming in the snow business as being too cold for him).

– Image by boardGOATS

Green’s and Black’s Farmers had amassed a total of huge total of ten cities for their shared field, which brought them right into contention. Scores were just about to be added to the board when Black pointed out that his (and Green’s) field went further round and actually swallowed Lilac’s farmer with three cities due to the tile placed by Green to complete that city. So Lilac lost nine of her points and Green’s and Black’s new field total was for thirteen cities giving them thirty-nine points each. This leapfrogged both of them ahead of Pine and Lilac, with Green coming out a few points on top. A close game, everyone enjoyed. This edition is a worthy edition with the Lebkuchenmann expansion a perfect little festive addition too.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: ‘Elf and Safety is everyone’s business.

27th April 2021 (Online)

The evening started with Beige protesting about the lack of Dinosaurs. This had to be explained to everyone else: Pink had dropped round paperwork for Welcome to Dino World on Monday, only for Blue to realise that she’d got confused. This meant that everyone now wanted Dinosaurs and felt they’d missed out on something they hadn’t known wasn’t going to happen…

– Image by boardGOATS

In order to mark the start of “Golden Week” on Thursday, the “Feature Game” was the MetroX expansion, Sendai & Hakata & Nagoya. “Golden Week” encompasses four of Japan’s national holidays, celebrating the Japanese Constitution (May 3^rd), Children’s day (May 5^th), Emperor Hirohito’s birthday (April 29^th) and his love of plants (May 4^th, also known as Star Wars Day). Blue’s confusion with dates meant she had thought it was the end of May, not the start. Still, it meant people have something “up-roar-us” to look forward to in a month or so, and in the meantime, they had trains to play with.

– Image by boardGOATS

MetroX is a game we played a few months ago and was provided by Blue’s very lovely BGG Secret Santa. Somehow, although it is not complicated, it is a rather difficult game to get your head round. In summary, the game is a variant on the “Roll and Write” games where a card is turned over and players write on their train map. They assign the number on the card to a line and “build” that number of stations along the line (marking them with an open circle). When a player completes a line, they score points with the first player (or players) scoring more points than those to finish the line in later rounds (similar to the scoring for columns in Noch Mal! and Noch Mal So Gut!).

– Image by boardGOATS

There are four different types of card, but the most common are plain numbers which allow players to just build stations and these are numbered two to six, with fewer of the high numbers. Each line must be extended from the start end (the end with the “Indicator Boxes”, marked in red on our paperwork). This means that although stations can be built in the middle of the line because they are part of another line, stations cannot be added beyond this point (where the lines diverge) unless all the earlier stations have been completed.

– Image by boardGOATS

Normal number cards cannot “skip” completed stations. In other words, in a line where the first two stations have not been completed, but the third has, if a “Six” is used to build the first two, the third cannot be jumped, and the remaining four are wasted. So efficiency is the name of the game. There are a small number of special cards with a circle round the number that allow players to skip completed stations, but these are few and far between and are only low numbers. There is also a wild that allows players to fill in one station anywhere on the board without filling in an indicator box.

– Image by boardGOATS

In addition to scoring points for completed lines, players can also score a lot of points for intersections. In the deck of just twenty cards, there are three “Star Cards”. These allow players to build just one station at the cost of one Indicator Box, but instead of writing a zero in the box, they write a number that corresponds to twice the number of lines that go through the station—this is the number of points they score at the end of the game. With some stations forming the intersection of four or five lines, these can be very lucrative, but the timing of these cards is really critical.

– Image by boardGOATS

This time the early cards were not helpful with a circle card coming out first, when there was no opportunity to take advantage of their special ability. The second card produced even more moans and groans as it was a “Star”, when there was only one place that would give more than two points and some people had already used that with the first card. There was a bit of confusion as well with some of the colours looking a bit similar as a result, Purple was quick off the mark and was the first to claim a line, but others thought it wasn’t possible given the number of cards we’d had; it turned out the line was longer than she thought.

– Image by boardGOATS

Several people got in a bit of a mess, but Pine got into such a tangle that he retired early as fixing his problems was too difficult. We got all the way through the deck on the first pass, as the “six” (and shuffle the deck) card was the very last in the deck. Which meant we had the full quota of low numbers (and high numbers too), and as we’d had some useful cards at the start everyone struggled at times. Despite the issues, it didn’t really take long to play. So, while everyone else was still counting up Ivory was the first to post with a massive, and what proved unbeatable score of twenty-eight, helped by being able to put one of his “stars” on the one highest scoring space, giving him a eight points.

– Image by boardGOATS

Burgundy claimed a “moral score” of twenty-six, which would have given him second place, though in reality he was just off the podium behind Green with twenty-three and Black with twenty-two. With that, Lime took an early night and Pine joined the group again for the lighter, travelling band, route planning game, On Tour. We first played this back in January, but a few people missed out. Those that had been there had really enjoyed it though, and we were keen to give it another go.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game is really, really simple: two d10 dice are rolled to give two numbers. These are combined to give two, two-digit numbers. Players have a map with a network of circles, and write these two numbers in two of the circles somewhere on their map. At the end of the game, they have to plot a route through the numbers along the provided connections such that the route connects adjacent points starting with a low number and never decreasing. Players get one point for each circle they manage to visit.

– Image by boardGOATS

There is a restriction provided by cards which indicate the area of the map numbers can be placed in on each turn. These also provide a specific location, such that players who place a number in that circle score a bonus if their route goes through it. There are two maps available: USA and Europe, so being a group full of Europhiles, this time, we chose Europe.

– Image by boardGOATS

The dice were particularly challenging this time though and despite both Blue and Pink trying, neither managed to roll a five, or a two, and there were an awful lot of nines. There were the inevitable complaints when people didn’t get what they wanted, and these increased in number as things became increasingly critical as the end approached. Pink possibly came off the worst claiming a “moral score” of thirty-seven, though his actual score was only twenty-five.

– Image by boardGOATS

Green managed the highest score, with thirty-eight with a route going from Ireland to Norway via Italy and Bulgaria. Blue and Black made up the podium four and eight points behind respectively. Time was marching on, but there was still time for our now traditional end-of-evening trip to Board Game Arena and after everyone had enthusiastically eschewed Dingo’s Dreams, we went for our old favourite, 6 Nimmt! (with the Professional Variant).

– Image by boardGOATS

6 Nimmt! is so simple and so much fun, and we’ve played a lot of it online in the last year. The simultaneous card selection means the downtime is minimal, and the balance between strategy and luck means it is the perfect game for our large group at the end of the evening. Starting with the card with the lowest face value, they are added to the end of row that ends with the highest number that is lower than the card in question.

– Image by boardGOATS

If the card is the sixth card, the player picks up all the other cards, and that is exactly what happened to Blue on just the second turn. This game is one of those where once it goes wrong it goes very wrong, and from there, things just went from bad to worse for her as she picked up again on the third turn too. She wasn’t the only one to get unlucky of course. For example, Pink managed to pick up on the first turn of one round when four of the other six other players played cards between ninety-one and a hundred, leaving him to place the next card and pick up a pile of cards.

– Image by boardGOATS
from boardgamearena.com

Fairly inevitably, Blue ended the game, though it was closer than it might have been with Burgundy finishing with just one point left from his starting sixty-six. At the other end, Pine (who always does well in this game), lost just ten points giving him a massive win, with twenty-five points more than anyone else. After a vote on Vevox to decide what to play, we went for the easy option and decided to play 6 Nimmt! again.

– Image by boardGOATS
from boardgamearena.com

This time, Pine did not do quite so well and Pink was the one who managed finish with the most points, fifteen points clear of second place, which this time went to Blue. Remarkably, Burgundy managed the whole of the final round with just one point and on the last card, Purple pipped him to the post and ended the game. Green had spent a large portion of the second game talking to himself when his sound went down, so decided that was his queue to finish. Another online vote confirmed things and everyone went to bed.

– Image by boardGOATS
from boardgamearena.com

Learning Outcome: Every country should have a “Golden Week”.

13th April 2021 (Online)

During the usual chit-chat it became apparent that Pine didn’t have the paperwork for the “Feature Game“, Tiny Towns, or if he did, he couldn’t find it. So after everyone had listened to him rifling through his front room for a bit, Pink popped round with replacements and everyone had everything they needed to start. Tiny Towns is an area and resource management game where players are planning and building a town. Although it has some similar elements, it makes a bit of a change from the many “Roll and Write” games of which we’ve played so many.

– Image by boardGOATS

The idea is very simple: in each round, everyone places a resource cube on one of the sixteen plots on their player board. After placing cubes, players may, if they wish, remove cubes corresponding to a building and place a corresponding building on one of the newly vacated spaces. Functionally, that is all there is to it, but the clever part is the interplay between the different buildings and how players score points. The different buildings all require different resources in different arrangements, and although they give different amounts of points and different conditions, the relationship between the building types is always the same.

– Image by boardGOATS

For example, the Cottage is always included in the mix of buildings, but to score points, a Cottage needs to be “fed” by a red building. In the introductory buildings, this is the Farm, but drawing at random, we ended up with the Greenhouse which feeds all the cottages in a contiguous block. We also had the Shed (which could be built anywhere), the Temple (scored points if adjacent to fed Cottages), the Almshouse (scores increase the more you have, so long as you don’t have an odd number!), the Bakery (scores if adjacent to red or black buildings) and the Trading Post (can be used as any resource for subsequent buildings).

– Image by boardGOATS

As when we played Tiny Towns on previous occasions, we played with the Town Hall variant which works better with more players. With this, instead of players taking it in turns to choose the resources everyone places, cards are revealed for two rounds and players have a free choice for the third round. Part of the reason for playing it again was in preparation for the Fortune expansion in a few weeks. This time though, we added the Monument variant to increase the challenge slightly. In this, players are dealt two special building cards each at the start of the game and choose one to act as a personal, and initially private, goal. Each house-hold had a pack of Monument cards so everyone could deal cards and they could remain secret.

– Image by boardGOATS

With the Greenhouse in play, almost everyone tried to group all their cottages together, but everyone had a slightly different way of doing this and a different approach to using the other buildings. Pink in particular focused on Cottages, but later regretted it, while Black tried to score points for Temples, but found it hard to do this and keep his Cottages in a single group as well. Blue tried to build her monument, the Architects Guild, early, and then use it to create two Trading Posts then use these to build lots of Cottages all snuggled up together. That didn’t work so well.

– Image by boardGOATS

Ivory and Pine on the other hand, built the Archive of the Second Age which gave them one point for each different building type in their town, and both managed five. Burgundy built the Mandras Palace which gave him points for each different building orthogonally adjacent to it, but only managed two, giving him four points. Green went for the same Monument and made better use of it taking the maximum, eight points. Perhaps having a palace in your town makes it a better place, but either way, Green and Burgundy took first and second respectively, with Black completing the podium.

– Image by boardGOATS

Tiny Towns had taken a little while to play and it was getting late, so we moved to Board Game Arena to finish off the night. For a few weeks, we have been saying we should try the some of the new games, so Green had tried a few and suggested we tried Dingo’s Dreams. This is a strange little game where players compete to be the first to successfully guide their animal through the dream world.

– Image from kickstarter.com

Players start with a grid of twenty-five tiles set up at random in a five by five array representing their dreamscape, and one extra tile with their animal depicted on it. Each turn, a card is revealed and players find the tile that matches it and turn it over. They then take their animal tile and slide it in from one edge; the tile that emerges is the tile added the next time round. Players continue until one player succeeds in matching the pattern in their dreamscape to the goal tile.

– Image by boardGOATS from
boardgamearena.com

Unsurprisingly as he was the only one to have played it before, Green won. Unfortunately, nobody else understood how the game worked as the explanation wasn’t as clear as it could have been. That meant nobody really had a clue what was going on and the whole thing felt very random. As a result, everyone was very glad when it was over and keen to move on to one of our favourite games, No Thanks!, which has become an alternative to 6 Nimmt! as our go to game for relaxing fun.

– Image by boardGOATS

No Thanks! is very simple: on their turn, players take the card or pay a chip to pass the problem on to the next player. At the end of the game, the face value of the cards score negatively, offset by any remaining chips. The clever part is that if a player has two or more consecutive cards, only the lowest one is counted, but there are some cards missing from the deck, so there is a strong element of chance. This time, it was a bit of a car crash, with almost everyone ending up with runs with gaps in them. The exception was Green, who managed a six card run from thirty to thirty-five, and offset twenty-one of those negative points with chips giving him a winning score of minus nine.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

With Green having won three out of three games, everyone felt the need for revenge, so we gave it a second go. Green tried the same trick again collecting high value cards, but wasn’t so lucky this time. Purple, however, with the last few cards managed to complete a seven card run, and with the lowest card a twelve, she managed that rarest of things—a positive score and everyone was delighted for her.

– Image by boardGOATS

It was getting quite late, but there was just time for a game of one of our recent discoveries, Draftosaurus. As Pine described it the first time we played, this is basically Sushi Go!, but with dinosaurs. Players start with a handful of dinosaurs, place one in their park and pass the rest on. Dinosaur placement is according to a dice roll which restricts where on their board players can place their dinosaurs on each turn. Otherwise, players score according to how well they have fulfilled the different requirements for the pens.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

This time we played two rounds, first with the Summer board, and then with the Winter board. In the first round, Pine top-scored with a massive forty points, nine points more than anyone else. The Winter board was new to everyone except Pine, but despite that, the scores were very close. Pine still top-scored, but only by a point or so, however, the damage had already been done, and Pine closed the night with the final victory of the evening.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Learning Outcome: Make sure your Greenhouse is big enough to feed all your Cottages.