Tag Archives: Draftosaurus

13th May 2025 (Report)

For some, the evening began early with fish and chips in the garden to mark a special visit from Plum’s Aunt Damson. The evening took an even more special turn as it was the day before Pine’s Big Birthday, so there was cake. Green also put in one of his special appearances, bringing his mum, Saffron, with him. Salmon came for the second time, and lastly, Orange, who had acquired a motorbike and was therefore now able to travel, also came for the first time in about eighteen months. So with all these extras as well as the usual suspects, the room was packed and the group split into four with Jade leading the “Feature Game” which was to be Moon, a card drafting game where players construct bases, vying to build the new lunar capital.

– Image by boardGOATS

Moon is played over three rounds or Eras, collectively representing the first hundred years of populating the Moon. Each Era is divided into three parts: first players produce Resources, Rovers and Hearts from their Settlements. Then comes the drafting where players choose a card from their hand to Build or discard, then pass their hand to the next player, repeating until there are no cards left. Finally, players claim the Hearts on the central Flag Reward Board, and score any Hearts placed on their Structures and Reputation Cards. At the start of the drafting phase, each player has one Expedition cards while the rest of the cards are Structure cards—this hand of cards represents an expedition from Earth that travels between settlements on the Moon.

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Unlike most card-drafting games, turns are taken sequentially with, players a Structure card from their hand and placing it in their Settlement paying any Resources and making sure any Flag Requirements are fulfilled. Alternatively, instead of playing a card, they can discard (or “Assimilate”) a card, taking the Resources, Rovers or Hearts depicted in the discard line. There are also four optional actions that players can carry out once each in any order before or after their mandatory action (Building or Assimilating)—use the Bonus Action on their Expedition Card; park a Rover; claim a Reputation card, or turn over a pink Action card.

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Once all players have taken their turn, all players pass their hands (including the Expedition card) to the player seated to their left and the player who now has the First Expedition Card starts the next round. There are some similarities with Terraforming Mars, with cards having “Flags” (akin to the “Tags”), with some cards needing some Flags as a prerequisite while others display and therefore provide them. There are five different Flags, Industry, Science, Food, Housing, and Transportation. There are also four different types of Resource, Energy, Water, Biomass and Metal which are represented by wooden tokens, or Resource-eeples.

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The guts of the game are the cards—there are five different types: blue Production cards, yellow Flag cards, pink Ability cards, grey Excitement cards and red Special cards. Blue and yellow Structure cards also display a Rover parking space. Players begin the game with two Rover-eeples, but can acquire more during the game. Players can park Rovers on other players’ Structures to either use the card to immediately gain its Resources (blue) or use the Flags on it to fulfill a Flag Requirement when Building (yellow). Pink Ability cards provide an ability players can use once per Era by flipping the card while grey Excitement cards provide Hearts, which are victory points—some of these just give points at the end of the game while others give Hearts during the game.

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There was some hilarity over the card names, especially when Orange built a Toilet right next to his food van, Just in case! Jade who was the most familiar with the game, took an early lead in the Hearts and finished with what appeared at first glance to be an unassailable lead with fifty-six of them, fifteen more than anyone else. There are other scoring opportunities however, with points available for Grey Structures and Reputation Cards, and Jade came off worst for both of these. Black picked up the most points for his Grey Structures with thirty followed by Pine with twenty-seven. Scores were much lower for Reputation with Black, Sapphire and Pine with a similar tally. In the end, it was very close, but the victory was Sapphire with a combined total of seventy-nine, just two more than Black in second, with Jade completing the podium.

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On the next table, Ivory and Byzantium were introducing Salmon to Brass: Birmingham. There was a concern after last time that they might be a bit pushed to finish it in time (especially after last time), but with only three and with Birmingham being quicker to play than the original Lancashire version, they felt it was worth a go. Ivory explained the rules while Byzantium set up the board. In both games, players develop, build and establish their industries and network in an effort to exploit low or high market demands. Players take turns according to the turn order track, paying two cards (from their hand of eight) to take any two actions from a possible six: Build, Network, Develop, Sell (cotton, manufactured goods or pottery), Borrow, and Scout.

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Building involves paying the required resources to place an industry tile while Networking is placing a Rail or Canal Link. When Developing, players increase the point value of an industry, while Borrowing involves taking a £30 loan and a reduction in income. The Scout action is new to the Birmingham game and replaces the Double Action Build in original, instead discarding three cards and taking a wild location and wild industry card. Played in two halves, when the deck runs out players score, remove all the Canal Links then play on but this time building Rails. The game ends when the deck runs out for the second time.

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Ivory went first. Due to Shrewsbury accepting all goods (this was randomly determined as part of set up) and selling goods being critical to scoring points, initially everyone focused on building near there and building industries that gave resources (i.e. coal and iron) that were going to be need to build further industries. So Ivory, who went first began by building a Coal Mine in Coalbrookdale, while Byzantium added an Iron Works at the same location and Salmon placed a Coal Mine next door in Wolverhampton. At the start it looked like all three would all be competing in the same area, but once they continued building their networks (via Canals) and more industries, everyone started to spread out. Ivory headed south, building Cotton Mills in Kidderminster and Worcester and was the first player to Sell, Selling to Shrewsbury and gaining four points for consuming Beer there (Beer being a prerequisite to Selling) and filling the tile to increase his income.

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Byzantium went north and sold Cotton to Warrington, gaining £5 as his “Beer Bonus”, and increased his income. Seeing the opportunity Byzantium was building, Ivory took the opportunity using a Leek card he had which allowed him to build outside his network, to build a Cotton Mill in Leek and immediately Selling, using the remaining Beer there to also gain £5. Salmon went more central (Cannok and Walsall), focusing on Coal Mines and Iron Works, but as no one was consuming the resources (both Byzantium and Ivory were slightly self-sufficient), he was unable to flip his industries and increase his income. This became a major issue for him as the game progressed. Everyone ran out of money quite quickly and were forced to take out Loans, decreasing their income making it negative so that they had to pay money to the bank at the end of each round.

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Whereas Byzantium and Ivory promptly Sold some Goods, flipped tiles and increased their income so it was positive again, Salmon got caught in a debt trap, having to take further Loans to take actions and service his debt. When required to take a third Loan (and then pay £9 each in upkeep), it was agreed that he should take the Loan without the drop in income, allowing him to take actions and sell goods and ultimately get back to a positive income. After a late era focus on breweries to get the Beer to Sell further goods, cotton and in Byzantium’s case, Pottery, the Canal Era came to an end. After scoring flipped tiles and Canal Links, Ivory had a slight lead.

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At the end of the Canal Era and going into the Rail Era, as well as all the Canals, all Level 1 tiles are removed from the board, representing obsolete technologies. This wiped out everything Ivory had and most of Byzantium and Salmon’s tiles, so the start of the Rail Era was similar to the beginning of the game. That said, Byzantium and Salmon were tied to their positions because, without a named card, players always have extend their Network from an existing position if they can. That meant, Byzantium and Salmon always had something that was going to score twice though, where as Ivory had to build from scratch, but was free to start anywhere.

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With Rail connections requiring Coal to build, and because the cards in Ivory’s hand were all close to Shrewsbury (which that accepted all goods), he began the second Era almost exactly the same action way as he started the first, building a Coal Mine in Coalbrookdale. Although he had nothing on the board, Ivory was able to rebuild very quickly, partly because he had a good income, but also because he had taken a Loan as his very last action in the Canal Era. Salmon and Byzantium also built their Networks in similar areas to the first Era. Byzantium’s core strategy was building and selling pottery to Warrington.

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Pottery is a unique resource in Brass: Birmingham, with the first pottery title being worth a large amount of points when flipped, the next being worth very little, the next giving big points etc.. Players are also restricted in developing Pottery, which mean they can’t skip the low point value titles. However, the big scoring tiles are worth a lot and Byzantium was able to get the highest level title out and flipped for a total of twenty points. Ivory again focused on the more standard cotton Mills, and each title being worth more points than the last, he was able to get multiple titles placed and Cotton sold, flipping the tiles to Shrewsbury. He also spent actions building lots of rail links next to his flipped tiles.

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Salmon again took a different approach, focusing on goods, the easiest to build and flip (especially as some don’t need beer), but these are not worth as many points. The game ended after all the cards had been played (for a second time), with Ivory’s focus on rail links and Cotton giving him victory over Byzantium by about twenty points. Meanwhile, Teal beginning to explain the rules for Cottage Garden to Plum, Plum’s Aunt Damson and Blue, but then Ruby arrived. Blue had cake to dispense and had a curiosity about Brass, so quickly offered her seat to Ruby and the Teal began again. Cottage Garden is a fairly straight-forward Tetrissy, puzzle-type, polyomino game with a similar feel to Patchwork, but with more people.

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In Cottage Garden, players are competing in the art of gardening and are working two beds with a variety of flowers. To do this, players select polyomino tiles of flower beds from a central market grid (restricted by the location of the “Gardener”), then place them on one of their two personal garden boards. Each board has several garden elements that are worth points when not planted over, and these are scored (on two different tracks) as soon as a garden has been completed. There are points “bars” on each track, and when these are passed players receive bonus tokens that can fill in empty spaces or give players a better selection of the flower bed tiles.

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Once a garden is finished, the player receives a new one to complete. After the Gardener completes her fifth lap around the market, the game enters its final round, after which, the player with the most points from their completed gardens is the winner. The received wisdom is that the problem with the game is that it doesn’t change or intensify, which some people find boring. However it also means that players have time to “get their eye in” and learn how to play without the game evolving beneath them and catching them out as they spend whole time playing chase. As such, it was pretty much the perfect game for the occasion.

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Everyone did pretty well—Ruby picked up the scoring quickest, but Aunt Damson got the first beehive. Teal wasn’t far behind though, getting the second. In the final round, Plum just scored her current flower bed and discarded the second so that she didn’t get any negative points, something that turned out to be a critical decision in a very tight game.Plum and Teal had the edge in scoring for Pots, but that was off-set by Ruby’s scoring for her Cloches and and Aunt Damson’s Beehives. Teal, Ruby and Aunt Damson were all within a couple of points, but the victor, was Plum with fifty-six, just three points clear of Ruby who edged second from Teal.

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In addition to Aunt Damson, Green had brought his mother, Saffron who was visiting. the area Saffron was quite well known to some of the group so there was quite a bit of chatter before she joined Green, Lime and Purple in a game of Azul. This is a game that is well known within the group and with everyone familiar, the rules explanation could be kept short: the game uses a very simple, but very clever market mechanic where players take all the tiles of one colour from a market stall and put the rest into a the centre, or take all the tiles of one colour from the centre.

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

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This time, Lime nearly got caught out, however, after Blue was summoned for a rules adjudication. The question was, was he able to have more than one feeder row in a colour? If they all had to be different he would be forced to place a lot of tiles in his overflow space and pick up a pile of negative points. As the rules are clear and players can have as many feeder rows of the same colour as they like at any point during the game (they can only put each colour in a row of the mosaic once), Lime dodged a bit of a bullet. As a result, he just edged it taking victory by three points from Green with Saffron a few points behind him.

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With everything else still going, when Azul finished, Blue joined the table to introduce Saffron to another one of the groups favourite games, Draftosaurus. This is a very simple drafting game (similar to games like Sushi Go! where players choose from a hand of cards and pass the hand on), but in this case players are drafting cool dino-meeples and adding them to their dinosaur park, with different locations scoring for different combinations of dinosaurs. The game is played over two rounds, each placing six dinosaurs. The first game was a bit of a land-slide although it ended in a tie between Green and his mum, Saffron, both scoring thirty-seven points.

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It couldn’t be left there of course, so the group “did a Lime” and played again. This time it wasn’t until the scoring that Green realised why he hadn’t seen a single T. rex—Blue sat to his right had nabbed them all before he got to see them! T. rex is a special dinosaur in general, but especially in Draftosaurus, giving an extra point for each one, but also having some placement restrictions. Blue is generally very bad at this game, but even a park full of dinosaur kings (and queens) didn’t help, although it was a very close game with four players within a couple of points. The clear victory though was Purple with thirty-eight, three points ahead of Lime who led the rest of the pack.

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From there, there was a bit of chatter, but by the time Cottage Garden had finished, Teal, Lime, Green and Saffron all decided it was time to head home, leaving Purple to join Ruby, Plum and Aunt Damson. There was some question about that they would play, but in the end they decided on one of Purple’s favourites, the hidden traitor game, Saboteur. In truth, this is not at its best with four, but despite that, the group really enjoyed it. The idea of the game is that players are Dwarves building a network of Tunnels in order to find treasure. They do this simply by playing a card to extend the Tunnel and drawing a replacement. The catch is that there is a traitor, an Evil Saboteur, in their midst.

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So, if the Dwarves have not found the treasure by the time the deck runs out, then they have lost and victory goes to the Evil Saboteur. In addition to Tunnel cards, the deck also contains Special Map, Rock Fall, Broken Tool and Fixed Tool Cards which Dwarves and Saboteurs can use as they feel appropriate. With four players, Ruby put two Saboteur cards in the pile used to assign the roles, but as it happened only one came out—Ruby. Plum seemed to get the all map cards and checked the target nearest her first: Coal. She then tried the the middle target card, but finally found gold in the one furthest from her.

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Ruby chose to strike out at Aunt Damson first, but that left Purple and Plum to continue digging for the gold. Ruby then played a tunnel card with a dead-end which exposed her as a Saboteur, and as the only one, the writing was on the wall. The game is formally played over three rounds, but we don’t like the way that plays and treat one round as a game in its own right. Everyone enjoyed the game, but Aunt Damson in particular—she had watched and enjoyed The Traitors, so the overall concept particularly appealed. It had been a lovely evening with a slightly different set of people and lots of games played.

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Learning Outcome: It’s lovely to host family and old friends.

8th April 2025

By the time everyone else started to arrive, Cobalt was already most of the way through losing his game of 20 Strong. This is a solo-player deck-based game where the object is to progress through a shuffled deck of cards, each of which bears a unique challenge. This challenge could be in the form of an enemy, a unique scenario, or some other requirement which are completed by rolling a set of seventeen dice with different odds for a hit. These dice, along with three adjustable stat dice, make up titular twenty dice. Cobalt continued rolling his dice while others ordered food, chatted and ate.

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Before long players began splitting into groups, deciding what to play. The first group was Blue, Pine, Mint and Pink playing the “Feature Game” which was to be Fire Tower. This is a competitive game where players order air drops of water, and plan the building of firebreaks in order to combat a woodland blaze. The rules are very simple: players begin their turn by spreading the fire in the current wind direction then play one card from their hand (or discard all their cards) and replenish their hand. There are four different types of cards, Wind, Fire, Water, and Firebreak cards. Wind cards can be used to change the Direction of the Wind which affects which direction the fire spreads in.

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This can either be by playing the card and changing the Wind Direction to that on the card, or by rolling the Wind die and leaving it up to fate. Alternatively, the player may place a fire gem on one empty space orthogonally adjacent to an existing fire space (or the central Eternal Flame), in the wind direction indicated on the card. Fire, Water and Firebreak cards give a pattern of spaces that the fire must either spread in, is removed from, or fire break tokens can be placed in. Firebreaks prevent fire from landing on or jumping over the spaces they occupy and can only be removed using a card that includes the De/Reforest action and cannot be placed in orthogonally adjacent to another Firebreak token.

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Each player took the Fire Tower on one corner of the board with Pine sitting opposite Blue and Mint opposite Pink. Blue went first followed by Mint, then Pine and finally Pink. The base game is an elimination game, with the winner the being the last player who’s Fire Tower has not be burnt down. The group decided to play without the events and keep the game as simple as possible to see how things worked. Pink was the first to get knocked out with Firestorms proving to be disastrous for his Tower. Pine quickly followed with before there was a long, determined rear-guard action by Blue.

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Unfortunately, Mint started in a better position and despite her best efforts, eventually Blue’s Tower was also a moldering ruin. Since Pink and Pine had spent quite a lot of time as spectators, the group decided to give it a second go, but this time working in pairs. This time, Blue’s Tower was first to be destroyed with Mint’s next. Eventually, only Pink’s tower was still standing giving a second victory to Mint, which was shared with Pink. The game had been quite enjoyable, if very different to the usual fare. There was still plenty of time left for something else though, so the group had a rummage in the bags and came up with Draftosaurus.

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This is a very popular game where players start with a hand of dino-meeples, choose one and pass the rest on before placing them in their dinosaur park. It frequently gets outings within the group, but on this occasion, for variety, the group decided to play with the winter setting which gives slightly different pens with slightly different placement conditions. It was very tight, but as is often the case, Pine, who just seems to “get” this game emerged the victor with thirty-six points. He was only one point ahead of Mint and Pink though, who tied for second place.

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Meanwhile, on the next table, Green putting in a rare, but welcome appearance, was leading Black, Purple and Plum in a game of Discworld: Ankh-Morpork. In this game, Lord Vetinari has disappeared and players control different factions which are trying to take control of the city. Game play is quite quick and simple with players playing a card and doing what it says. Most cards have more than one action on them, and players can choose to do some or all of these actions. Some cards also allow people to play a second card, so they can chain actions together.

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In this game, Black was the Dragon King of Arms, looking for trouble, Green was Chrysoprase, trying to amass lots of money, Plum was Commander Vimes who was trying to play through the deck and Purple was Lord Rust, with an area control remit. The game was over quite quickly with Black running out the winner in a game that is much under-rated and sadly very out of print due to IP issues. This copy was a much cherished one, as it had belonged to Burgundy so it was nice for it to get another outing within the group. There was time for a second game and this ended up being Faraway, a very clever, much more recent, card-driven game that has had a few outings since its release last year.

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The idea is that players simultaneously chose one of the numbered cards from their hand and starting with the the player that played the lowest card (similar to 6 Nimmt! or Kingdomino), everyone takes it in turns to choose one from the market to add to their hand. Players then simultaneously choose another card, and again, choose one to add to their hand. The game ends after everyone has played a total of eight cards, and then everyone scores. The clever part is that the cards are played left to right, but the scoring is from right to left.

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At first glance, this looks like it makes things easy, because early in the game players find out what they need to get points and can then focus on getting the resources they need as the game progresses, but of course that is not the case. This time, Purple had a really bad run where she kept getting the highest number cards, which meant she picked last, and then picked up the higher number cards left by others. Once again, the winner was Black making it two out of two for him, while Plum was second by seven points with Green a little way behind her.

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Meanwhile, the third group comprising Jade (fresh from his birthday celebrations), Sapphire, Teal, Byzantium and Cobalt spent the evening playing a five-playergame of Earth. This is a is a sumptuously illustrated card-driven engine-builder game that is often compared to Wingspan, where players are building themselves an ecosystem. The game itself is not actually all that complicated. Players are building a four by four grid of Flora and Terrain cards which represents their island and during the game they will plant flora, water it and allow it to grow. On their turn, players do one of four things: Planting (paying the cost in Soil tokens), Composting (gaining Soil and placing cards from the deck in their discard pile), Watering (place Sprouts and gain Soil) & Growing (draw new cards and place growth tokens).

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A bit like Puerto Rico, once the active player has chosen which action they are taking, everyone else gets to do a subsidiary, slightly weaker version of the same action. Once everyone has completed the action for the turn, everyone activates all the cards in their island that match the colour of the action chosen, starting with the card in the top left and working across each row in turn. At the end of the game (triggered when one player has completed their island), players score points for each flora card, any Trunks and Canopies they have grown, their Sprouts and their pile of “Composted” or discarded cards. Players also score points for achieving objectives on the Fauna cards revealed at the start of the game and for completing their island first.

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During the game, Cobalt built up the most points; his forty-two were some five ahead of Byzantium. By far the most points come in the end-game scoring however. A bit of a point salad there are seven scoring sections: Teal scored best for Compost; Jade scored most highly for completing his Canopies; Byzantium top-scored for Terrain, and Cobalt out-scored everyone else for his Fauna. As well as getting the most points for his Sprouts and Ecosystem Objectives, Sapphire also scored well in many of the other categories giving him a clear victory with one hundred and sixty-eight points, thirteen more than Byzantium who pipped Cobalt for second by a single point.

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Learning outcome: Playing with fire may be fun, but you risk getting burnt.

2nd April 2024

While Blue, Pink and Cobalt were finishing their supper, Plum led a quick game of Draftosaurus with Black, Purple and Cobalt (who had already finished his pizza). Cobalt was new to the game, so after a quick rules explanation the group were passing dino-meeples left and right and building themselves exciting dino-parks. The game is really quick and simple: players start with a handful of wooden dino-meeples, and on each turn, they draft one, that is to say, they choose one and pass the rest on. The chosen dino-meeples are then placed in the players’ parks, obeying the rules on the Die (the active player who rolled the Die excepted).

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The Die roll forces players to choose from locations in one half of the board, or restricts them to playing in an empty pen or one without a T-rex, making things considerably harder. Players draft a hand clockwise, and then a second hand anti-clockwise, after which, points are scored for each pen and totalled up to find the winner. This was Plum’s fiftieth game—it was one of their group’s go-to warm-up and filler games played remotely during the global pandemic on BoardGameArena. Although her 24% success rate seems really good at first, at four players, one out of four could be seen as about par.

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Plum marked her milestone with a change of strategy, forced by the Dice to go for the most T-rexes, but it worked giving her victory with forty-one points. Purple took a very respectable second with thirty-five points—one of her best scores in this game. From there, Cobalt headed off to play Meadow with Blue, Jade and Sapphire, while everyone else joined Plum, Black and Purple to play the “Feature Game“, which to mark the thirtieth anniversary of 6 Nimmt!, was the new Jumping Cow mini-expansion. 6 Nimmt! is one of the group’s favourite games and was arguably responsible for keeping us sane when we were stuck at home in 2020 and as a result, won the Golden GOAT Award.

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The game is super-simple: players simultaneously choose a card from their hand and then, starting with the card with the lowest face value, they are added to one of four row. Each card is added to the row that ends with the highest value card that is lower than the card to be placed. If that means the row now has six cards, the active player takes the first five cards in the row into their scoring pile, with their card becoming the new first card. The new Jumping Cow expansion is a single additional card that lurks at the end of the row. Cards are added as normal, however, when one is added to the Jumping Cow row, the Cow jumps to another row, the one with the lowest face value at the end.

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The Jumping Cow Card does not have a value itself, but it does add to the number of cards in the row. So if the card added is the sixth, the player takes the other four cards and then the Cow jumps. If the row the Cow jumps to has five cards in it, the active player takes four of those too before the Cow jumps again… Thus, as Plum discovered this time, multiple jumps can lead to collecting a lot of points! The game was the usual entertaining fun, but although the Jumping Cow expansion adds more madness, 6 Nimmt! is a near perfect game that needs little to no improvement (although we have found the Professional Variant an occasional worthwhile addition).

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This time, the top scorer (aided by the Jumping Cow) was Plum with sixty-one, closely followed by Ivory with fifty-seven. Purple did very well to limit her takings to nineteen, but she was beaten into third place by Pink who just kept his to single figures with nine. The winner was Teal, however, with just four from the first hand and a clear round from the second. From there, with six, the options were limited, but the group decided to stick together and, after eschewing Bohnanza, opted for another golden oldie: For Sale. Remarkably, Ivory had somehow not played this before, and was really taken with it, so much so that he immediately looked to see if he could get a copy and everyone was shocked to find it was out of print and the only copy available was for forty pounds on ebay!

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For Sale is really simple: Players start with a hand of cash and use this to bid for buildings, with a face value from one to thirty. In the second half of the game, cheques are revealed and players have to choose one of their properties—the player with the highest value building then takes the highest value cheque, thus the idea is not to waste high value buildings when the takings available are low. Pink, Plum and Teal were all really close and ended in a three-way tie for third place. Ivory and Purple were some way in front, but separated by a single point with Purple just taking victory, with a final taking of fifty-six thousand dollars.

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Casting about for another game that plays well with six, Bohnanza was passed over once again, this time in favour of Saboteur. Saboteur is a hidden traitor game where players are Dwarves tunneling to find gold. With six players, the rules have either one or two Saboteurs, however, as the game is always difficult for the Saboteurs and impossible alone, the group chose to forgo the ambiguity and go for a guaranteed two Saboteurs. Once the Saboteurs knew who they were, everyone got a hand of cards: a mixture of tunnel cards and special cards. On their turn, players play a card and draw a new one. Tunnel cards extend the network, while special cards allow players to break or mend tools stopping other players from building tunnels (or reinstating that ability).

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Additionally, there are Treasure Map cards which allow players to look at one of the three potential gold cards to see if it is gold or coal, and Rockfall cards which allow players to collapse the tunnel by removing one card. Usually, the Saboteurs hide for as long as possible in an effort to acquire some good “Saboteury cards” and play them with a lot of impact. Choosing the right time for that reveal is really critical though, leaving it too late means there isn’t time to do enough damage. This time then, Black announced his position very early by playing an obviously obstructing tunnel card and was swiftly followed by Pink who compounded the poor Dwarves’ problems by playing a Rockfall card.

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The Evil Criminal Masterminds were aided by the fact that when the Dwarves played their Treasure Map cards they struggled to find the gold. The game turned out to be quite epic, but success just fell to the Saboteurs, giving them a rare victory. As Teal and Ivory waved farewell, the others looked for something else to play. Saboteur is a great game, and although it is not as old as 6 Nimmt!, this year is also Saboteur’s anniversary year. It is celebrating twenty years, as is another old favourite, No Thanks!. In choosing this, those that had played all five games had played over a hundred years of popular games in one evening.

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No Thanks! is a super simple, push-your-luck game, where players are trying to finish with the lowest score from the total face value of their cards minus any chips they have. On their turn, players either take the top card and any chips on it, or pay a chip to pass the problem on to the next player. There are thirty-three cards in the deck (numbered three to thirty-five), but nine are removed at random, which is what makes the game really tick—when scoring, players only count the lowest card of a run. This time. Pink top-scored with forty-nine points. Plum and Purple both took forty-eight points for their cards, but in Plum’s case this was off-set by her enormous pile of chips, leaving her with just twenty.

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It wasn’t enough though. Black managed to just scrape through with only a single chip left at the end, giving him a total of thirteen points, and with it, victory. While everyone else had been sampling a smorgasbord of golden oldie games, Jade, Blue, Cobalt and Sapphire were revisiting the relatively new Meadow, which they’d missed out on playing last time. This is a fairly simple game, where the complexity is in choosing and placing tokens to get cards that combine well together. Players take it in turns to play an Action Tokens either in the Market or round the Campfire, and complete the associated Actions. The Market consists of a four by four grid of face up cards.

– Image by boardGOATS

Players play an Action token in the market to define a row or column with the number on the token dictating which card they will take from that row or column. They then place a card in their play area. This can be the card just collected or one from the player’s hand, but the prerequisites must be satisfied. Playing around the Campfire gives a special action and the option to additionally place a bonus point token on a tree-stump between any pair of symbols currently displayed in the player’s area. At the end of the game, the total score for the cards played is added up together with any bonuses and the winner has the most points.

– Image by boardGOATS

Last time, the general feeling was that the game dragged a little with four, so Blue suggested that instead of playing with the full eight rounds, maybe playing with six (as for the three player game) would make things easier. Jade interpreted that as the suggestion to play with the three player board, but as quickly became apparent, the campfire circle is smaller with three, leaving fewer bonus spaces available making that element of the game very competitive. Blue and Sapphire were already committed to their strategy as placing later bonus tokens give more points, so they went for the bonuses doubly hard.

– Image by boardGOATS

Jade kept getting Cobalt’s name wrong in a way reminiscent of Blue with Ivory’s name some ten years ago—that lasted the best part of a year, but hopefully Jade will sort it out before then. It didn’t seem to put Cobalt/Chromium/Cadmium off his game though. From early on, he focused on building some Landscape cards adding some valuable Observation and Discovery cards. Sapphire’s starting hand included a Wolf icon for his card from the North deck, and he played that nice and early giving him the opportunity to use it to claim a couple of the bonus spots giving him all three and a total of nine points. Blue also claimed her third quite early leaving only two for Jade and Cobalt/Chromium/Cadmium to share between them.

– Image by boardGOATS

Although she couldn’t see it, going into the final couple of rounds it was tight between Blue and Cobalt/Chromium/Cadmium. The game is very tight though, with only four turns per round, so it is important to make sure they all count. In the final round, Blue was fortunate in going first and was able to grab and play a couple of high value cards. Jade and Sapphire also added a couple more cards to their tableau all of which made it really hard to call. In the end, Jade (who had the most valuable tableau) pipped Sapphire by a single point (after a couple of recounts) and Cobalt/Chromium/Cadmium was two points clear, finishing with forty points. The winner, however, perhaps thanks to those final couple of cards, was Blue with a total of forty-three.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Golden Oldies are golden for a reason.

14th Movember 2023

With Black, Teal, Pink, Green and Lime all away, it was looking like it was going to be a very quiet night. In the event, however, the numbers remained good with the slightly unexpected arrival of Plum, Byzantium, Jade and Sapphire. When Green dropped off Purple and stayed for a while, it became clear that we’d need something short to play alongside Kites, the “Feature Game“. Kites is a real-time, cooperative game where players are playing cards and flipping egg-timers to keep the air display going. A single play-through doesn’t take very long, but it is the sort of game that tends to get played through a couple of times in succession.

– Image by boardGOATS

The idea is that that the Team have to launch six Kites, each represented by sand timers, and keep them flying by preventing the timers from running out. Game play is very simple: Players start with a hand of cards and must play one on their turn before replenishing their hand from the draw deck. The cards all show either one or two coloured symbols on the corner, which correspond to the six coloured egg-timers in red, orange, yellow, blue, purple and white/rainbow colours that represent the different Kites. When a card with two symbols on it is played, both egg-timers in those colours must be turned, however, a card with one just one symbol allows the active player to choose whether to turn the timer in that colour or to flip the white/rainbow coloured timer instead.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game ends when either all the cards are played out (the Team win), or when one of the timers runs out of sand (the Team loses). There are a couple of additional “features”. Firstly, the different coloured timers each have different amounts of sand in them—the purple lasts the longest at ninety seconds with red running fastest lasting just thirty seconds. This catches out the unwary, and indeed it caught out the group composed of Jade, Plum, Blue, Purple, Pine and Byzantium on their first try when they succeeded in playing just four out of the fifty-three cards in the deck. The second attempt wasn’t much better, ending with just six cards played.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game has an “easy start” mode where players start with just three coloured Kites (plus the white/rainbow one), but nobody was keen to take cards out of the deck. So, to make things a little easier, instead of starting with three cards in hand as per the rules, the group started with a hand of four cards, giving them a little more in the way of choice on their turn. With this “House Rule” they were a little more successful, but it was at the fourth attempt, that things clicked, and the group finished with only twelve unplayed cards. And it was then that the second “feature” caught out the group—when the draw deck has been exhausted, players can no-longer turn the white/rainbow timer.

– Image by boardGOATS

Having done well with four cards in hand, it was then that the group decided to revert to the rules “as written” and play with three cards in hand. This made things more difficult during the early part of the game, but had the advantage of leaving players with fewer cards to play once the draw deck had been exhausted. At that fifth attempt, the players were left with just six cards unplayed, and on the sixth try, they had eight left. They were so close, they could feel it, and everyone in the group was determined not to stop before they’d won, which turned out to be on the seventh play.

– Image by boardGOATS

Kites is not the usual sort of fare for many in the group, being both cooperative and featureing real-time play. It had been interesting and fun, however, with players learning how to work together and what information they needed to share. Two people took responsibility for turning the timers and everyone else made sure they let people know when they spotted a timer running low. Perhaps the biggest impact was the realisation that waiting was sometimes more powerful than playing quickly, and certainly more haste often brought less speed. With the successful game, everyone felt they’d had enough, and while the other table finished their game, the group moved on to another party-style game, the simple little memory game, That’s Not a Hat.

– Image by boardGOATS

Each player starts with a single card and shows it to all the other players before turning it face down. One player then draws an extra card shows it to all the other players and passes their original card to the left or right (as per the arrow on the back of the card), announcing what they think it is. The receiving player can either accept the card as it is, or challenge the declaration. If a challenge is incorrect, the recipient keeps the card as a penalty point, whereas a correct challenge leaves the card/penalty point with the gifter. It seems very simple, and doesn’t sound promising when described, however, after a couple of turns, when someone realises they can’t remember the card they’ve got in front of them and is forced to guess, the tension mounts and everyone suddenly appreciates the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

Byzantium, Plum and Jade had played the game before and knew what to expect, but it was new to everyone else. Most people thought they knew what card everyone had, only to discover that wasn’t the case after a couple of swaps. Blue and Purple picked up just the one penalty, while Plum and Jade picked up a couple each. After the game, there was some discussion about challenges needed to be accompanied with the correct card identity (which is how Plum had played it it HandyCon). With this, it actually paid to try to bluff/confuse people who couldn’t identify the correct gift. Inspired by this, there was some discussion about a possible “House Rule” to introduce a bit more jeopardy: the challenger could optionally attempt to name the gift with the carrot of forcing another point on their gifter, and an incorrect guess reversing the effect of the challenge.

– Image by boardGOATS

That was for another day. This time, the winners, were Pine and Byzantium who avoided any penalties, though whether that was by luck or judgement wasn’t entirely clear and indeed, was unimportant. That was especially true as the game was brought to an abrupt end by the game ending on the next table. That was 7 Wonders—Green only wanted to play something short that he was familiar with and this fitted the bill. 7 Wonders is a card-drafting game, but has a bit of a “Marmite Factor” and is very unpopular with a significant number in the group, so rarely gets played. This time though, Cobalt, Ivory and Sapphire were all happy to join Green and give 7 Wonders an outing.

– Image by boardGOATS

In 7 Wonders, players take the role of leader of one of the seven great cities of the Ancient World (Alexandria, Babylon, Ephesus, Giza, Halicarnassus, Olympia and Rhodes), gathering Resources, developing commercial routes, and developing their Military, build their City and erecting an architectural Wonder. In each round or age, players receive seven cards and draft them, that is choose one card, then pass the remainder to their neighbour (much like Sushi Go! or Draftosaurus). Players then reveal their cards simultaneously, paying Resources if required, collecting Resources or interacting with other players according to the cards played ant their player board (which gives special powers).

– Image by boardGOATS

7 Wonders is essentially a card development game: Some cards have immediate effects, while others provide bonuses or upgrades later in the game. Some cards provide discounts on future purchases while others provide Military strength to overpower neighbors and some cards give nothing but victory points. Each card is played immediately after being drafted, so everyone knows which cards their neighbor is receiving and how their choices might affect what they’ve already built. Players continue to draft cards until everyone has six cards (discarding the seventh). The game ends after three rounds or ages.

– Image by boardGOATS

7 Wonders is quite a famous game that Cobalt had heard about it and wanted to try, though he was the only one from the group who was unfamiliar with it. It is one of those games where it seems like there is a lot to take in, but actually it is really quite simple and easy to pick up (though players do tend to require a round to see how it all plays, and there are only three in the whole game). Everyone chose their respective Sides of Wonder. Ivory who had Giza, elected to go for Side B, which has a four-piece Wonder and would give lots of points if he could complete it; Cobalt (Halicarnassus) chose to go for the simpler Side A, which would give him points and a chance to rifle through the discard deck for a card if he managed the second stage.

– Image by boardGOATS

Sapphire (Ephesus) felt both sides were the same, money & points, just in different ways, while Green (Olympia) went for his Side B where he could have the option of copying a neighbour’s end game purple scoring card and the ability to buy Resources for only one coin each instead of two. As expected the first round was a little slow as Cobalt felt his way around the cards and options, with help from the rest of the group, particularly from Ivory who was sat next to him and was initially passing his cards to Sapphire (so he could show Ivory the deck for some explanations without giving anything away).

– Image by boardGOATS

The first round was gentle. Ivory and Sapphire lost out in the fight to Cobalt and Green. In the second round Cobalt had to use his “Muppet Allowance” and swap a card he had kept when others pointed out he should have taken the other one. Green was building up his army and building his Wonder with a lot of his own Resource (even though he had the Wonder benefit). Cobalt and Sapphire were beginning to specialise in the green Science cards. Ivory was not really sure where he was going as he was beginning to lose out by not having access to the vast amount of Resources he needed to build his epic Wonder.

– Image by boardGOATS

By the third and final round we everyone had the problems associated with trying to choose the best of a good bunch of cards. Green and Cobalt ended up in an army fight, with six points at stake and already a reasonable army, it wasn’t a battle either of them wanted to give up on. The result was that they both let other good cards pass by. By the end there were not many purple cards left, as it seemed a few had been used to build the Wonders, so Green’s “Copy” did not score heavily, although he did win the battle with Ivory (and subsequently with Sapphire too). Sapphire managed to get a full set of Science and a couple of single type multipliers, thus learning the power of Science in 7 Wonders (which is often hard to achieve).

– Image by boardGOATS

By the end scoring, it seemed that Ivory, unusually for him, had indeed been boxed into a corner and ended up some way adrift of the rest of the group. That aside, it was a very close contest between Cobalt, Green and Sapphire, with only a couple of points between each of them, but it was new player Cobalt who took the Laurels of victory. Everyone enjoyed the game, so it might get another outing soon for which Green would be particularly grateful as it had always been a firm favourite of his. With all the early games over at the same time, it was possible to swap the groups about as Green took an early night. Jade was keen to introduce people to After Us, a game he had picked up at the UK Games Expo and hadn’t yet had the opportunity to introduce the group.

– Image by boardGOATS

After Us is a deck-building, Resource management, engine building game featuring an original card-combo mechanism. The story is set in 2083 and mankind has died out leaving only apes which have kept evolving. As the leader of a tribe, players try to guide it towards collective intelligence, by adding new Primate Cards to their starting deck of tamarins. Primate Cards have three rows of “Effects”—the top row will award resources, the middle row will give points (often at the cost of resources) and the the bottom row will have abilities related to the primate type. At the start of a round, players draw four Primate Cards from their deck to be laid out in a row making “Connections”.

– Image by BGG contributor The Innocent

The aim is to get the most out of the Connections by closing the open ended “Frames” along the sides of the cards by butting them up against adjacent cards that also have open ended Frames. Players then resolve the now closed Frames following the order of top left to bottom right, trying to gain as many bonuses as they can. Once everyone has simultaneously collected their Resources they can then use them to buy Primate Cards which are added to the top of the draw deck (and thus they come into use on the very next turn). In this way, they are improving the quality of their deck. The Frames have been resolved, the players simultaneously chose one of their Action Discs denoting which primate type they want to recruit.

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The Action Disc chosen will also gives the player a bonus. When recruiting, players have an option to pay three or six Resource (fruit, flowers or grain) to gain a Card. Players can additionally spend two Resource during this phase to copy one of their neighbours’ Action Disc bonus. Once everyone has resolved their Action Disks and bonuses, players discard their cards and draw four new ones and start again. The game starts slowly with players building their tribe, but it can end in a sudden rush when one player breaks into a gallop and charges past eighty points triggering the end of the round. In the shuffle, Cobalt joined Byzantium, Jade, Blue and Purple playing After Us. Jade and Byzantium led the way (both being familiar with the game), while the others felt their way.

– Image by boardGOATS

Arranging the cards to make the Connections proved the biggest challenge initially, especially when frustratingly, it wasn’t possible to make use of a really good half Frame. Blue, Purple and Cobalt just started collecting cards as well as they could, but Jade showed everyone an alternative, shedding all his starting cards until he had no tamarins at all. It was then that Byzantium suddenly started surging forward on the points track—having picked up a small number of good quality primate cards and shed a few tamarins he just turned the handle on his engine and it was too late for anyone else to do anything about it. And he was the first to cross the eighty point finish line, with Blue (who had put on a bit of a spurt) in second.

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, Ivory, Plum, Pine and Sapphire settled down to to play the new Scandinavian edition of Ticket to Ride, Northern Lights. Like all the other editions, players take it in turns to either take two coloured cards from the market, pay cards to place trains or take more ticket cards. Like all the different versions, Norther Lights has a small number of special rules, but unfortunately, the rules in the box are in Danish, Swedish, Finish and Norwegian, and nobody in the group is a speaker, worse, although we played it about three months ago, nobody could remember the rules, so it was out with the phones to get translations. The biggest difference boiled down to the addition of bonus cards, four of which are drawn at random at the start of the game and give extra points at the end.

– Image by boardGOATS

Additionally, there are some triple routes (which only take effect with five players) and some routes have a “+X” next to them which give players who build them X train cards from the face down pile. Finally, for all routes Locomotive cards can replace any other card and for ferry routes Locomotive cards can be replaced with a pair of the same colour (and as a result, unlike most of the other versions, if there are three or more face-up Locomotive cards in the market, the market is not refreshed). This time, the bonus cards drawn at random gave points for the most stations in Norway, the most stations in the arctic circle, the most successfully completed small Tickets, and the longest continuous connected train route.

– Image by boardGOATS

While everyone else seemed to be taking more and more tickets, Plum focused on completing her three starting Tickets, two fairly long ones running north-south, and a short one across the top. It was a tight game for the podium places, though with Ivory, Pine and Plum vying for the lead. Ticket to ride is often a high-risk, big-reward game though and if Plum had taken Tickets on her final turn instead of placing a single train for one point, she would have gained two more tickets and an additional twenty point which would likely have given her victory. As it was, she finished in third, behind Ivory in second and Pine the worthy winner with a hundred and twenty-five points.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Keeping kites flying takes teamwork.

31st October 2023

With it being Halloween, there were lots of treats and some very fine spooky-themed attire to go along with the “Feature Game“, Betrayal at Mystery Mansion. This is a Scooby-Doo themed re-implementation of Betrayal at House on the Hill, a semi-cooperative game, where players work together until there is a haunting and one player takes on the role of the bad guy. So, the first task for the evening was to decide who was going to take on the roles of Mystery Inc., which precipitated lots of discussion about which was the best character. Scrappy got short-shift from Pink, though others were less dismissive. In any case, Scrappy was not an option, and before long, Sapphire, Pink and Pine joined Jade to solve the mystery.

– Image by boardGOATS

Jade, as the group leader, took the role of Fred, while Pink and Pine enthusiastically engaged in the game as Scooby Doo and Shaggy. That left Sapphire to choose from Velma or Daphne and he went for brains over bimbette. The group spent quite a bit of time exploring the mansion collecting clues and the like, before the haunt finally started. As Sapphire was the one to trigger the haunt, Velma was “temporarily lost in the woods” as he took on the roles of the bad guys, a Spectre and a female character called Sharon who was being possessed and controlled by the Spectre. As the game progressed, it became apparent that the Spectre was her great uncle who was trying to control her to gain access to documents that would enable him to take control of the family fortune.

– Image by boardGOATS

The Scooby Gang (minus Scrappy Doo, Daphne and the now lost Velma) had to track down and battle the Spectre and try break the spell controlling Sharon. As the villain, Sapphire rolled very well and it was very hard for the Gang to pin him down. Fred ended up stunned at one point, but thankfully revived after missing a turn. Shaggy scoffed piles of Scooby Snacks in order to re-roll, but the dice weren’t with him. Scooby himself, however, did very well and survived his battle with the Spectre then was able to recharge in one of the special rooms of the mansion. In the end the Mystery Inc. won the day and the great uncle was unmasked and announced that he “would’ve gotten away with it if it weren’t for you pesky kids”!

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, there were two other games underway on the neighbouring tables. Blue, Plum and Byzantium eschewed Witch’s Brew (which plays better with more people) and opted for the slightly bigger, beefier, boardgame version of the same game, Broom Service. Both games rely on the players having a personal deck of Character cards and a lead and follow mechanism. Each player starts by choosing a set number of Characters from their deck, each with different actions. The first player then chooses one to lead with and announces that they are either “Brave” or “Cowardly”. If they choose Cowardly, they can take the action straight away, whereas, if they choose Brave, they must wait until everyone has played to see if they can take the more powerful action.

– Image by boardGOATS

The next player must follow if they have the card in hand, and has the same decision to make—be a Coward and take the weaker action, or be Brave, and risk being gazumped by a later player, as there can only be one Brave player taking the powerful action. The Brave player (or the most recent Brave player) then leads with another card. In the card game, Witch’s Brew, players are collecting tokens to give them points, however, in Broom Service, there is an additional “Travelling Salesman” pick-up and deliver type of mechanism. Players have two Witch-meeples which travel the land collecting potions and delivering them locations to get points. This time, it was a really, really close game, despite everyone doing different things.

– Image by boardGOATS

Byzantium prioritised collecting Lightening Bolts and Blue concentrated on collecting potions and delivering them. While they both headed south and contrived to get in each-other’s way, Plum headed north and fell foul of one of the events which left her stuck with no good move in the final round. Blue kept forgetting about the “Bewitched Roles” which can be used but with a hefty three point penalty and lost six points as a result. Byzantium assumed he would be the only one to consciously choose to take the hit and thus guarantee he could be Brave, but happened to do that exactly when Blue picked them as well and lost the advantage when he led with those roles.

– Image by boardGOATS

As the game came to a close, it was clear it was going to be close with Blue ahead by a single point with sixty points scored during the game. She lots of resources left while Byzantium had none but lots of Lightening Bolts, and Plum had some of both. Initially, Blue and Byzantium tied with seventy-three, just two points ahead of Plum. That gave Blue victory with the tie break (the most left over resources), but that was only until the miss-count was spotted and Blue lost one point and with it her Winning Witch Medal, instead taking second place by a single point.

– Image by boardGOATS

While the first two tables were playing spooky-themed games, Black and Purple led Teal and Cobalt in the monster-mad Finstere Flure (aka Fearsome Floors). This is a game where players are trying to escape from Fürst Fieso before the castle collapses and without getting eaten. The idea is very simple: first players move all their pieces the number of spaces shown on their visible side, then the Monster moves. The Monster moves according to a stack of tiles, either moving a set number or moving until he eats. The Monster moves one step forwards then looks straight ahead, left and then right. If he sees a player, he turns and moves towards them.

– Image by boardGOATS

Thus, the Monster looks, moves, looks, moves until he either runs out of spaces to move, or eats someone. The game ends after fifteen rounds. It is simple enough, but there are a few little elements that add to the fun. Firstly, each player piece moves a total of seven spaces over two turns, but while some alternate three and four space moves, others are more variable, with the most extreme moving six spaces and then one space on the next turn; these different pieces require different tactics. Players can’t land on another player, if they walk into a rock they push it and if you step in a pool of blood, they slide across it.

– Image by boardGOATS

Finally, if the Monster walks into a wall he appears elsewhere on the board adding a further layer of unpredictability. The game opened with a bang when the first Monster tile revealed was a “Two Kill”, that is to say, the monster keeps moving until he’s eaten twice. From there, it was carnage. Everyone had someone eaten, with some multiple times. There were people who managed to escape from Fürst Fieso, though it wasn’t easy of course. Everyone managed to get at least one piece out of the castle, with Purple and Cobalt managing to get two pieces out. The winner, however, was Black who liberated three of his people.

– Image by boardGOATS

They were the first to finish, so moved on to play the recent release, Ticket to Ride: Ghost Train. This is really just a variant of First Journey, a simpler version of the group favourite, Ticket to Ride, aimed at children and non-gamers with super-sized pieces. Like the original game, players take it in turns to either take “two parade float” cards (in this case blind), or pay cards to place trains on the map. However, instead of scoring points for placing trains, the game is essentially a race game. Players start with three Tickets and every time they complete one, they draw a replacement. The winner is the player who completes the most Tickets.

– Image by boardGOATS

This time, Teal took an early night, but Black, Purple and Cobalt went at it with spooky enthusiasm. As a different take on the original, they found this a very enjoyable alternative. As well as Tickets, players can also win “Trick or Treat” bonuses for connecting the Dark Forest region to the Seashore region. Black and Purple both took a “Trick or Treat” bonus, but the winner was Cobalt who finished with six Tickets, one more than Purple who would have taken another if she’d had just a little more time. That wasn’t the only Ticket to Ride game of the night however, as the Scooby Gang played a quick game of Ticket to Ride: Berlin once they had solved their mystery.

– Image by boardGOATS

Ticket to Ride: Berlin is one of the mini versions, and there was a little chat about these and which ones people had played. The first mini version was a “demo” game the publisher used to introduce people to the game at conventions. Since then, there have been a series of City versions, with New York, London, Amsterdam and San Francisco all featuring and Berlin being the most recent (with Paris to come next year). These all feature the same basic mechanism as the original game (including the scoring of points for placing trains unlike the First Journey type games), but they have fewer train pieces and a smaller map. The Berlin map, is long and thin, but the big difference is that players have mixture of Trams and U-Bahn pieces.

– Image by boardGOATS

Tram and U-Bahn routes are paid for in similar ways, though only one U-Bahn piece is needed to mark them and they score slightly more points. Once the differences had been highlighted by Pine and Pink (who played this together a few weeks back), everyone got down to business. Jade and Sapphire dominated the West while Pink and Pine concentrated on the East, though the geography of the map meant everyone had to include East-West connections in their network. It was a hard-faught close game with both Jade and Sapphire taking negative points due to incomplete Tickets. Pine completed five Tickets and Pink finished six.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pine’s Tickets were more lucrative, however, and he took victory with sixty-one points, while Jade with forty-nine just pipped Pink by two points in the struggle for second place. Everyone had enjoyed the game, and Jade commented that it was one of his favourite renditions of Ticket to Ride so far—indeed, the addition of a second set of transport seems to have been much more successful in this mini version than it was in the full-sized Rail & Sails where it made it longer and more fiddly without making it significantly better. While everyone else was playing and then discussing the merits of different versions of Ticket to Ride, the Crafty Trio, Plum, Blue and Byzantium had finished Broom Service and squeezed in a quick game of Dinosaur Drafting with Draftosaurus.

– Image by boardGOATS

This is a fun little game that we play quite a bit, where players choose one Dinosaur from a handful, add it to their Park and then pass the rest on. Dino-placement is slightly restricted by the roll of a die, with everyone getting points for how they occupy their pens. Usually, the group plays with the Summer board, but with the cold weather, the group decided to play with the alternate, Winter board which introduces new and different pens. These include the Well-Ordered Wood (Dinosaur types must alternate); Lovers’ Bridge (giving six points for each pair of Dinosaurs separated by the bridge); the Lookout (contains one Dinosaur and scores two points for each one of that type in their right neighbour’s pen).

– Image by boardGOATS

The most challenging, however is the Pyramid, which holds up to six Dinosaurs in a layered structure, but dinosaurs of the same species may not be placed adjacent to each other (horizontally or vertically). Blue got into a mess with this, and was stuck with a Dinosaur she could not place at the end as a result. Plum and Byzantium did slightly better and were able to capitalise more on the Quarantine Zone, which allows players to move the single occupant at the end of the game. In the end, it was a tight game (though not as tight as Broom Service), in which Plum ran out the victor, three points ahead of Byzantium.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning outcome: They’d have got away with it if it weren’t for those pesky kids!

17th October 2023

Being the first meeting after SPIEL, there was a lot of chatter about Essen and how things had changed since the last time anyone from the group went, some four or five years ago. Lots of people from the group have been over the years, and others have been to other conventions like UKGE or HandyCon, so have something to compare it to. Eventually, the group settled down to play games and five very quickly volunteered to play the “Feature Game“, which was Forest Shuffle, a new Essen release. This is a card game where players are trying to build combinations of animals around trees to score points.

– Image by boardGOATS

Game play is quite simple: players start with a hand of cards and, on their turn draw two cards from the market (or “Clearing”) or play one to their tableau. There are two sorts of card, Trees and “Critters”. Before playing a Critter, players must have played a Tree, which then has spaces on all four sides. Birds and Butterflies are played to the canopy, Fungi and Amphibians are played at the bottom of the tree and Mammals are played either side. The clever part is that Critter cards are split so they show two critters (either left and right or top and bottom), so players choose which they would like to play, and therefore where, tucking the other side under the tree, making the unplayed half invisible.

– Image by boardGOATS

Players have to pay the cost of playing a card into the fact up Clearing, making those cards available to other players (and even sometimes themselves). Most cards have an effect associated with them, usually this is a one-off special action, but in the case of Fungi, they are special powers that last for the rest of the game. If the card played matches the colour of the cards used to pay for it, sometimes there is an additional bonus (e.g. take an extra turn, or extra cards, play a card for free etc.). These can be extremely powerful as they allow players to, for example, pay with cards they can then pick back up, or play a sequence of cards together.

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The game ends abruptly when the third “Winter is Coming” card is drawn from the deck and the player with the most points is the winner. Players score points for Trees and for Critters, but it is how players get their cards combining together that really makes the difference. Thus it is a game of strategy and tactics, but also of timing, which relies on very simple rules. Blue outlined the rules and explained how some of the cards work together, then ??? started by choosing a card from the market. There was a little confusion when the Dürer-Fledermaus/Feldhase card came out with the text all in German, but otherwise, everyone got the hang of the basics quite quickly, though playing well can take a little longer.

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Pine got into a bit of a tussle with Blue and Black for Linden Trees, while Blue spent a long time setting up a “super-move” to play a Brown Bear and place lots of cards from the Clearing into her cave. Ivory started collecting bats, more bats and even more bats, which coupled with a few gnats gave him lots of points. His Fungi also gave him a extra cards as he built his forest, making him look like the player to beat. Meanwhile, Teal was collecting hares (including the Dürer-Feldhase) and before long had down of them. Then he switched his tactics somewhat after picking up a Roe deer. This was a critical moment, because from there her started adding lynxes, which give ten points each if there is a Roe deer in the forest.

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With five, Forest Shuffle drags a little, particularly when everyone is new to the game as they have to read all the cards and try to work out which combinations work well together. It was an enjoyable game in spite of that, though most people played it in a very multi-player solitaire way, concentrating on their own game rather then keeping an eye on what others want and avoiding gifting people points. That said, everyone became more aware of what was going on in their neighbour’s forest as the game progressed. Nobody really had a feel for how well everyone was doing though because of the way the cards combined. So it was a little bit of a surprise how disparate the scores were.

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In the end, it was “The Lynx Effect” that made the difference, with Teal taking victory with a hundred and nine points, nearly twenty ahead of Ivory and his bats, with Pine a distant third. Teal had an early start the next day, so flushed with success, he headed off leaving Ivory to consider leaving as well. However, when presented with the possibility of playing Draftosaurus, he was tempted into staying—despite it being one of the most popular games in the group, Ivory had only played once before. He felt he hadn’t really got to grips with it that time, so was keen to give it a quick try now.

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Pine was interested in playing with the Marina Expansion again, but given Ivory had only played it once before, the group decided to save that for anther time. Without that, Draftosaurus is a simple enough game of drafting wooden dino-meeples with players starting with a hand of six, choosing one and passing the rest on. Players also take it in turns to roll a die and that dictates where players can place their chosen dino-meeple in their Dinosaur Park. The parks have pens that score points under certain conditions (e.g. the “Woody Trio” scores seven point if if contains exactly three dino-meeples) and the player with the most points after two rounds of drafting is the winner.

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In contrast to Forest Shuffle, Draftosaurus was an extremely close game—everyone picked up seven points for the “King of the Jungle” and fifteen points for their “Meadow of Differences”. Everywhere else, where one player had an advantage, others picked up points elsewhere. Purple and Blue picked up points for their “Woody Trio”, Pine for his “Solitary Island” and Ivory had an extra loved up couple. In the end, Purple and Pine tied for third with thirty-five points, and Blue just pipped them to second place by a single point. It was Ivory who was the victor, just two points ahead, perhaps thanks to his extra tyrannosaurs giving him an extra point each; it is safe to say, that he’s definitely got to grips with the game now…

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Meanwhile, on the next table, Green’s suggestion of Terraforming Mars (with the Prelude Expansion) was turned down since the group didn’t want to play a complex and potentially longer game. For the same reason, the group eschewed Village although it has been a long time since the group played it (Green commented on how the original artwork is very pretty, but the new version is horrible!). In the end, since last time Green had agreed to play one of Cobalt’s games, the group ended up playing Barcelona, a game that is both complex and quite long. With hindsight, perhaps looking for something else entirely might have been sensible as everyone except Cobalt needed to learn it, and even with experienced players it can take a while.

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Barcelona is a game where players take on the role of builders in nineteenth century Barcelona who are working on the new expansion to the city following the destruction of old city walls. Each round, each player takes a single turn consisting of two or more actions, a building phase, and then preparation for their next turn. Players start with two random Citizen tokens which are placed in a stack onto a chosen unoccupied intersection. Unusually, players can place anywhere they want (no adjacency restrictions as seen in other games).

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Choosing an intersection is the guts of the game that has significant consequences, initially the type of actions the player can carry out in that round, which are indicated by the streets selected. At the end of their turn, players must construct a single building if they can which depends on the Citizens adjacent to the building spot selected. There are four types of buildings: corners and normal shaped Level One buildings require any two adjacent citizens while Level Two building require at least one of them to belong to the middle class and Level Three buildings require three adjacent citizens, one of which must be a member of the upper class.

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As well as moving players along the Cerdà track, Level Two buildings also allow them to progress on their own Sagrada track giving Sagrada bonus tiles with rewards increasing the more they progress. Level Three buildings move players two steps on their Sagrada track and give them seven pooints, but will also move players down two steps on the Cerdà track. All the citizens required for buildings have to come from intersections adjacent to the building spots and are removed from the board and placed on their respective progress tracks according to their colour. Once the first citizen is placed on the end segment of a track, that segment’s Cerdà scoring is triggered and players gain points based on the criteria shown on the tile.

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This value is then multiplied by players’ positions on the Cerdà track, which represents whether or not players build according to the original intentions of Ildefons Cerdà (now considered the inventor of urbanism). The game is then played over a variable number of rounds interrupted by three scoring phases before a final scoring phase, after which, the player with the most points wins. Cobalt started first and went straight in, knowing exactly what the best thing to do was, but being first he couldn’t buy a building with only one stack of citizens. Everyone else was much more uncertain of what to do.

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At the outset Black chose to follow a policy of not buying buildings if he could get away with it (the rules are you must buy after your turn if you can), while Green had decided to work to getting the best result for each stage scoring, and Lime for a while was really confused and did not really know what he was doing at all. Lime managed to trigger the first stage scoring, meaning that while he, Cobalt and Black had two turns before scoring, Green had only one turn—so much for his game plan and he soon found himself falling behind the others. Going last seemed to be a significant disadvantage, something Cobalt said has been mentioned before in forums, especially for four player game.

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And so the game continued. Cobalt knew what he was doing, while Black was trying not to buy buildings, but to get as many points along the way from other means as he could—as he put it, the game was a bit of a “points salad”. Green fared a little better at the second round scoring, but he was still a turn behind the rest (as was Lime for the second stage). By this time he had decided to get his tram moving as much as possible as well, which was helping him to catch up on the score board. Lime was still struggling, and gaining a lot of help and advice from Cobalt. It seemed to be working though as he was scoring nearly as well as Cobalt himself.

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The final stage of the game took a bit longer to complete, but was mostly just more of the same. By the final scoring, Lime took the lead to win the game while Cobalt’s experience had helped him compete and take second place, just three points behind. Green had caught up a bit and took third, while Black’s strategy of not buying really hampered him as he dropped further and further behind. He admitted that it probably wasn’t a good strategy as the later building buys really brought home a lot of points due to the points that also came with each purchase. It had been an interesting game though, not so much about building a points engine, but looking for a good haul of points on each turn. Having played once though, next time it might feel more like players are scoring from the game rather than the game scoring for them.

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Learning Outcome: Nobody can resist the Lynx Effect.

27th June 2023

Lime was the first to arrive, soon followed by Blue, Pink with Purple, then Pine, Jade, Plum, Ivory, and Teal. Jade and Teal were armed with some of their toys from UK Games Expo, so the first two games were the “Feature Game“, the Aerial expansion to Draftosaurus and the 2022 Spiel des Jahres nominated SCOUT. There was the usual chatter at the start while Blue and Plum tried to work out some of the details of the Draftosaurus expansion where the rules were unclear. Then there was the usual hiatus to sort out who was playing what, but eventually Plum led Purple, Jade, Pine and Pink passing Pterodactyls round the table.

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Draftosaurus is a lot like Sushi Go!, but with wooden dinosaurs. It’s one of our most popular games that we first played online in 2021 and have since played lots of times in person, drafting real, cute, miniature, wooden dinosaurs. Instead of sushi cards, players start each round with a handful of wooden dino-meeples, choose one to keep and add to their dino-park, and pass the rest on to the next player. The active player rolls a location die, which applies a restriction to where dinosaurs can be placed that everyone except the active player has to observe. There are various pens, each of which score players points in different ways. For example, the Meadow of Differences can only hold one of each type/colour and scores for each different type.

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In contrast, the Forest of Sameness can only hold one type/colour of dinosaur, but also scores more the higher the occupancy. The Prairie of Love needs pairs of dinosaurs of the same type, each of which score five points, while the Woody Trio will score seven points if it contains precisely three dinosaurs at the end of the game (otherwise it scores nothing). The King of the Jungle and the Solitary Island only hold one dinosaur each, but the King of the Jungle scores if nobody else has more of that type of dinosaur, while the Solitary Island only scores if it contains the only dinosaur of that type in the Park.

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At any time, players can place dinosaurs in the River that runs through the middle of their Park instead of placing them in an enclosure. There, they will only score a single point, except for any that are the red tyranosaurus Rex which increase the score of any pen they are in by one. Played over two rounds (passing clockwise and then anti-clockwise, scores are calculated at the end of the game and the player with the most points is the winner. There is a bit of variety in the base game with double-sided Park boards, though we’ve rarely if ever played the winter side. There are also two expansions; a month ago, we played the Marina expansion which adds an extension to the river and plesiosaurs, but this time we wanted to try the Aerial expansion which adds nests on Mountain extension boards and pterodactyls.

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Pterodactyls can only be placed in the nests on the Mountain expansion board, but when they are placed the player gets some sort of bonus. The nests are all numbered, one, two or three. The rules say that before a pterodactyl can be placed in a nest numbered two, one must be placed in nest numbered one. It was not clear, however, whether players could place dinosaurs in multiple nests numbered one, or whether a second pterodactyl had to be placed into nest numbered two (and by extension, a third should be placed in a nest numbered three). After much searching online, Plum concluded players had to start with a nest numbered one, before they had the option to use a nest numbered two—an interpretation that was later found to be correct.

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The Aerial extension boards are double-sided, so things were further complicated by the fact that the board chosen had two nests marked 2a and one marked 2b. It was suggested that perhaps players had to do both the 2a nests before progressing on to the third nest, but Plum thought that was not the case and that was the choice. After the event, it was found that the third nest could only be used once one of the 2a nests had been filled (but was not accessible via nest 2b). Plum did best finishing with a massive thirty-eight, but as everyone was still getting to grips with the new rules and the game is not a long one, the group decided to give it another go with the reverse side of the Mountain board.

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This time it went better for everyone except Plum and Pink (who had come second in the first game, with thirty-four). Plum had prioritised placing three pterodactyls so she would be able to ignore the restriction imposed by the placement die, perhaps at the expense of all else. Lime (who always likes to play games twice in quick succession) and Pine had got the hang of the game and took first and second respectively with thirty-six and thirty-two points. Although everyone had played Draftosaurus quite a bit during 2020/2021, nobody had been familiar with the expansions. While they certainly add something new, the Marina expansion is probably the better of the two, though it would be interesting to see how the game would play with both expansions in use too.

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From there, the group went on to play Mamma Mia!, which is a hand-management card game from Uwe Rosenberg, the designer of the king of all hand-management games, Bohnanza. Mamma Mia! is quite an old game and we played it quite a bit some years back, but the last time was nearly six years ago and those that knew how to play it had forgotten, and others hadn’t played it then or since. Purple did her best to explain the rules from memory, but was somewhat hampered by Plum and Lime who kept interjecting, trying to guess how the game might play. Meanwhile, Pink spent the time trying to read the rules and make sense of them, that said, the game is not all that complex, though really very clever, like all of Uwe Rosenberg’s games.

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The idea is that each player starts with a hand of pizza topping cards and a deck of order cards. On their turn, the active player puts pizzas in the oven by placing ingredients cards on top of the central pizza deck and then, optionally, follows it with an order card (which are colour coded for each player) before replenishing their hand from the supply deck. Unfortunately, in the rushed rules reading, there were a couple of, er, malfunctions: the group omitted to include the restriction that only one type of ingredient could be played per turn and only one order could be placed, and after placing the toppings cards. Further, when drawing cards, a player may take them from either the central ingredient deck or from their personal order stack, but not both in the same turn—another rule that, er, malfunctioned.

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Once the ingredients supply deck is empty, the pizzas are thematically taken out of the oven, by flipping the pile of cards over and placing the cards face up in separate piles for each ingredient i.e. in the order they were played. When an order is reached the ingredients piles are examined to see if there are sufficient to fill the order. If so, the cards are removed from the piles, if not, the owner of the order card may add any missing ingredients from their hand to ensure the order is fulfilled. If they choose not to do so, the incomplete order card is discarded. After three rounds, the player with the most fulfilled orders is the winner.

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It was all a bit mad, and with players (incorrectly as it turned out) placing assortments of ingredients cards in the oven, they called out what cards they were adding to the deck. The cry of “Four chilies and an olive,” was met with the comment from the next table, “That sounds like a mariachi band—who’s the olive?” It was clear that a lot of fun was had. Plum succeeded in completing an order of requiring fifteen ingredients that everyone else thought was very risky, but that was pretty much all she managed in the whole game. Pink, who finished with six clearly thought he should have won, as he commented that Lime was “apparently” the winner with seven and Pine responded, that Pink was “apparently” second, “apparently” followed by Purple in third…

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Pine commented that before the game started they’d had three different variations and he wasn’t sure which they were going to play, and as it turned out, the one they chose wasn’t quite right! Despite all the rules issues, however, it had been a lot of fun. The card-counting memory play worked well, though without a bit of luck in the ingredients department, players could keep playing cards hoping to replenish the hand with better once, without success. Still, it is clearly fun little card game that we should play again and see if the game is better with the rules played as written.

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On the next table, Ivory, Teal, Jade and Blue started with SCOUT. This is a ladder-climbing game with a very nominal theme of circus owners collecting acts for their show. This theme isn’t really reflected in the art or the game leading Blue to comment that it was the most theme-less game she had ever seen and she wondered why they had bothered. Not that this made it a bad game, by any means—indeed, when the group played it last year both she and Teal had really enjoyed it. The game is quite simple, the first player leads with either a run of consecutively numbered cards or a meld of cards of the same number. The next player can play either a larger set of cards or has cards, or one of the same size but of a higher value (melds always beat runs of the same size).

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If they beat the cards on the table, the active player takes the beaten cards into their score pile and leads with a new set. Alternatively, the next player can “Scout” i.e. take a card from either end of the set on the table and add it to their hand. And this is where the game gets really clever—like Bohnanza, players can only play consecutive cards from their hand, but when they add a card to their hand, they can add it anywhere. Further, the cards are double-headed, that is to say, they have different values depending on which way up they are. At the start of the game, players are dealt a hand and, as in Bohnanza must not rearrange their cards, though they can choose which way up the whole hand is, and thus the quality of the hand as a whole.

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When Scouting, the player can choose which way up it goes into their hand as well as where, and it retains that value in their hand and when played. Once per round, players can “Scout and Play”, taking a card from the display and immediately playing a set of cards for the cost of a single point. Playing this at the right time can be critical to winning the game. The round ends when either a player plays their last card or when play gets back to the player who last played a set and everyone else in between Scouted. Players score for each card they have taken, but any remaining cards in their hand give negative points, often the decisive factor.

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This time, the first round was quite close. Ivory finished the round and also took the most points. This was the case for much of the rest of the game, and it was soon clear that everyone else was playing for second place. In that, it was actually quite close. Blue did particularly badly in the penultimate round, and looked to be cruising for a bruising. However, she ended the final round very quickly with a very long run leaving both Jade and Teal with negative points (though Ivory still top-scored). These negative point proved critical, and Blue took second with twenty-seven points, two more than both Teal and Jade. They were all miles behind Ivory though, who finished with nearly twice that with forty-nine.

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From there, the foursome moved onto an equally theme-less card game that Jade had come back from UK Games Expo, but one that is also very good, Cat in the Box. The game that was preceded by a quick game of Snap when Ivory pulled the same game out of his bag. The game is essentially Hearts, but with the twist that the cards exist in all suits until they are played (analogous with Schrodinger’s cat where the it is both alive and dead until the box it is in is opened—hence the name of the game). The cards are all black and there are five cards of each value. As in Hearts, the first player leads with a card of there choice declaring its suit. The players have a pile of tokens and, when they play a card they mark that card on a tally board so nobody else can play the same card.

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At a time of their choosing, players can declare they no-longer have cards of a suit by marking that on their cat card, but although that enables them to play a red trump card, it also limits what cards they are left with in their hand. The round ends either when a player creates a Paradox because they cannot play any of the remaining cards in their hand, or when the last player plays their final card. At the end of the game, players score one point for each trick they took during the round. However, in a sort of solo-Bridge fashion, players make a contract at the start of each round, declaring how many tricks they think they will take. If they successfully take exactly this number, they get bonus points equal to the largest contiguous group on the tally board, introducing an area control element.

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The catch is that if the round ends with a Paradox (and it usually does), then the player that caused the Paradox does not score any bonus points and additionally scores minus one for each trick they won. This is particularly savage as a player can go from doing very well to doing very badly in a heartbeat, as Blue discovered in the first round. Not appreciating the risk, she made a contract for three tricks, which she achieved and with the bonus points would have taken seven or eight in the round until she went bust and ended up with minus three! So, the risk of Paradoxes introduces a lot of tension, but there is also an element of tactics in forcing players to take tricks they don’t want to

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Teal was more circumspect and played very cautiously, so although he caused two paradoxes, they only cost him a total of two points. Unfortunately for him, he only picked up one point in each of the other two rounds leaving him with a round fat zero. Jade started cautiously, but then went for bonus points, successfully taking seven points twice, but unfortunately, for him his paradox in the third round was costly, losing him three points, he still finished with ten points, one more than Blue. Ivory just managed to avoid triggering a Paradox, which is a key part of the game of course. So with his moderately high, consistent scoring in the second, third and final rounds he finished with fifteen points and his second victory of the night in what was a fun, if quite nasty game.

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Learning Outcome: Little card games can be an awful lot of fun.

30th May 2023

Pink and Blue were late arriving thanks to a debate as to whether the actor Gary Lewis was in the Roland Emmerich film The Day After Tomorrow. Eventually Blue and IMDb were proved right when Pink found the guy who WAS in the film (Richard McMillan, who bore no resemblance to Gary Lewis whatsoever), but that meant they were late arriving and Plum and Byzantium were already there. Unfortunately, due to a mix up, the Jockey wasn’t serving food, so Blue headed off to get chips for everyone from Darren at The Happy Plaice. As the chips were consumed, everyone else arrived and it was just a question of who would play the “Feature Game“, the Wild Ride expansion to our go-to motor racing game, Downforce, and what everyone else would play.

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Eventually Pink and Green committed to Downforce, and were joined by Pine (who claimed that after doing well the first time he played, he’d come last ever since), Black and Lime (as long as the other group weren’t playing Wingspan). Pink and Green reminded people of the rules of the base game, which are simple enough: after being dealt their hand of cards, players bid for cars, with the player who pays the most deducting the cost from their final score. Once the bidding is over, the race takes place. Players take it in turns to play one card from their hand, and then move all the cars depicted on it in turn.

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When the first car crosses a betting line, the race is paused while everyone bets on which car will win the race. There are three betting lines, but the winnings for betting decrease the closer they are to the finish line. At the end of the game, players total their winnings from the race with those from the betting, deducting the cost of their car and the player with the most cash is the winner. The Wild Ride expansion adds two new tracks: Aloha Sands and Savanna Stretch. Aloha Sands adds water jumps which cars can use if they are moving fast enough. The jumps allow players to pass other cars and get round the track more efficiently, but timing is everything.

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In contrast, Savanna Stretch features wild animals that block the track. Once the first car has passed an animal, they are moved to another part of the track, as such, they help to prevent the “runaway leader” problem that can sometimes be an issue in the base game. It was this track that players chose to use this time. The inclusion of extra animals on the track caused a little confusion initially, but the group soon worked out two of the important features of this track. Firstly, the animal tile only moves after the first car is fully past it and all other the cars have finished their movements for that card, which means that the animal is really only an impediment for the first few cars.

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The other the slightly unusual aspect of this track is that the pole position car starts at the rear of the pack. With five players and six cars, there was always a chance that someone would get two, and that someone was Lime. While this can be a huge advantage, especially if the cars are cheap, it can also be a risky strategy as it can be difficult to manipulate two cars and they can also become a target for other players. Unfortunately for Lime, his cars were among the most expensive, leaving him with a deficit of $11M before the racing began, compared with Pink and Green for example, who paid just $2M for theirs. Once everyone had got to grips with the rules and the cars had been allocated, the race was underway.

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For a track with so many tight sections it was not surprising that there was a lot of blocking going on—most of it, to be fair, totally deliberate… Pink (in the red car) found his early push to the front to be a mistake, as he was instantly the target for blocking maneuvers from turn two until the final straight. Green (in orange) used his online experience from Board Game Arena to keep himself in the pack, but not at the front. Luckily for him several other players selected his car to win the race at the first two check points, which helped keep him out of trouble and pushed forwards.

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However after the halfway mark, Black (driving the blue car) and Pink both surged forward causing Green and Pine to lose their nerve and bet on Black (instead of Green) at the last checkpoint. However, they should not have worried, as very soon after that, Green’s car surged forward weaving between the cars in front to race for the line and victory. Pine was close behind, followed by the first of Lime’s cars (the other brought up the rear). With the race done, there were just the winnings to claim from the bookies. Because Green had got away with paying little for his car and won the race, he had a significant prize pot even before betting was paid out.

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There wasn’t a huge difference in the results from the betting, but it was enough for Green to extend his lead. Pine also raked in millions as his betting pattern was the same as Green’s (perhaps someone should investigate them for race fixing). As a result, Pine come in clear second with Black completing the podium. Since there was still some time left for a “proper” game, the group hunted around for something that wasn’t too long and could play five. In the end, they settled on the simple little “push your luck” game, Port Royal, as much because no one could find anything better for five players, than because anyone really wanted it specifically.

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It had been a little while since most of the group had played, though the rules are simple enough. On their turn, the active player chooses to “twist” and turn over the top card of the deck, or “stick” and keep the current card set. The deck of cards consist of coloured ship cards and character cards. The first decision is to decide whether to risk a “twist” because if second ship card of a colour is drawn the player goes bust and their turn ends. If a player “sticks” they can take a ship and add its treasure to their stash, or they can use their gold to buy the support of characters. These give players victory points and special powers, but also can be used to claim contracts and give more points.

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Once the active player has taken a card, players round the table can take a card too. The cards are double-sided like those in San Juan or Bohnanza, so in the same way, keeping an eye on the discard pile and the money in players’ hoard is also key. Although Black and Green did their best to quickly explain the rules, Pine and Lime were still both a little unsure, and perhaps with good reason. Part way through the second round Black and Green realised something was amiss and re-read the rules and spotted a “rules malfunction”: they had forgotten that when a player takes a card on another player’s turn, they pay the active player one coin, thus encouraging players to push their luck further to give more players more choice.

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So from the second round on-wards they group started playing correctly. Pink’s strategy involved ignoring the Sailors and trusting to luck with turning the cards while spending his money on symbols to make up Expedition cards. That gained him the first Expedition card, but ultimately, this single minded approach wasn’t very successful, at least in this game. Green went for a strategy of collecting fighting cards, in order to fight off the pirate ships. This worked initially, but by the time he had five fighters (and seven points), he kept going bust on his turn as he turned up skull bearing Pirate Ships against which there is no defence!

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This meant that everyone else was able to gradually build their wealth and cards to catch him up. Green then collected two more fighters and in preparation for one final attack, but would he get the chance? Black had managed to accumulate a lot of points, not least because he collected money for both a large array of cards and for when it went bust thanks to the Admiral and the Jester. If Black could collect another special symbol he could claim an expedition and win the game before Green could make his mega move with a full fighting force. Unfortunately for Pine, he wasn’t able to collect the symbol he needed to claim a expedition as he went bust.

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So it was Green’s turn again and he started to pull out cards, with a huge line of cards. After defeating every lower value Pirate Ship he came across, he managed a full five different coloured ships. From there he was able to collect another five coins and purchase the two crosses on display, which gave him an expedition card and enough points for victory. At the conclusion of the game, Pine confirmed his early feelings that he did not really like this game, and Lime felt it was all a bit too confusing, never really sure what he was doing. This was an older game that we used to play a lot of at the club, but it seems to have lost its lustre now and will probably forever remain an occasional play game.

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Meanwhile, on the next table there was a lot of debate as to what they’d play. With five, the options were quite restricted, Burgle Bros. almost made it, until Teal realised it only played four, which left Tiny Towns. Plum wasn’t so keen, so in the end, the group went for the old favourite Wingspan (having said to Lime that they weren’t going to play it… Sorry Lime!). There was some debate as to whether there was time for the game with five players, and options of playing three rounds instead of four were briefly discussed, but since everyone knew what they were doing, the group decided to give it a go and see if they could squeeze in a full-length game.

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The game is an engine builder that is quite simple in theory, but quite difficult to play well. Players are collecting birds for their sanctuary, scoring points for exciting birds, eggs, cached food and cards tucked under birds (representing flocks of birds or prey caught), as well as bonus points for achieving particular goals during the game and at the end of the game. The idea is that, on their turn, players either play a bird card from their hand into their tableau, or carry out the action associated with one of the three habitats (Woodland, Grassland or Wetland) and then activate each bird in that habitat. While that is all there is to it, it’s all in the cards and getting them to work together.

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Wingspan can be a little “multi-player solitaire”, that is to say, there can be very little interaction between players in some games. For some players this is preferred as it means players don’t have their carefully laid plans destroyed by others, while others feel they might just as well be sitting alone and interaction between players is what makes playing games important. It had been a while since it’s last outing, but the group were quick to get going and were happy to play with the European Expansion which was already mixed in. Plum in particular, got off to a flying start with her opening hand, four of which were coloured birds and matched her chosen Bonus card (the Photographer).

– Image by boardGOATS

In contrast, Blue had cards that didn’t match at all. The Rodentologist was her best Bonus card giving her two points for each bird in her sanctuary that ate a rodents, but not one card in her starting hand qualified. Teal started out with a strategy to maximise his egg production and prioritised birds with brown powers and resource conversion to assist that aim. The first card Plum played helped him in this, and everyone else too as it happens as it was a very generous Ruby-throated Hummingbird that gave everyone food every time it was activated. Teal returned the favour as he laid eggs at every opportunity and Plum had a bird that rewarded “once between turns” if anyone laid eggs.

– Image by boardGOATS

As the game progressed, players worked on the end of round bonuses. Three of the four birds Plum had kept from the start also happened to have bowl nests which contributed towards the fourth round goals, as long she could ensure they had eggs on them. She didn’t really aim for anything else, but Blue, Byzantium and especially Teal did well in the early rounds. Plum picked up some more birds with colours in their names, but also managed to play the Yellowhammer end of round card which she was able to use to great effect as it enabled her to play an extra bird card if she had used all four actions during the round. Byzantium had issues with the dice which repeatedly wouldn’t give him what he wanted.

– Image by boardGOATS

Then to compound Byzantium’s woes, he got himself in a bit of a mess when he played his migrating bird into the wrong habitat meaning he didn’t get the advantage of moving the bird straight away and costing him more eggs into the bargain. Purple had different dice issues when she rolled five berries and called “Yahtzee!” Blue had improved her hand and acquired some more helpful cards, including one that gave her an extra Bonus card, the Behaviourist, which gave her three points for each column with three different power colours. As people sifted through the deck trying to find cards they liked the look of, the California Condor appeared, which everyone agreed looked like a monkey.

– Image by boardGOATS

Towards the end of the game, partly as a result of Plum’s Hummingbird, Byzantium ended up with a surfeit of food and nothing to spend it on. So, he switched tactics and took the Condor hoping to get a bonus card that would improve his fortunes. It didn’t. Blue tried the same and didn’t do any better. After the final round Plum activated her Yellowhammer again and was left with the choice of playing a bird that gave her a Bonus card or one that gave two extra points. She also went for the Bonus card, the Fishery Manager, but only one of her birds ate fish. Time was ticking on, but the game was over well within two and a half hours with just the scoring to go as last orders chimed.

– Image by boardGOATS

Blue had some high scoring birds, but not as many as Plum who took fifty-five points for them alone. Blue had quite a lot of eggs too, but not as many as Teal who had twenty-three. Everyone else was concentrating on counting, when Purple (aided by Black who had come along to lend a few fingers), gave her score for her bonus cards: thirty-four points, more than twice that of anyone else. Unfortunately for her though, prioritising her Backyard Birder Bonus which gave her points for birds scoring fewer than four points left her with lots of low scoring birds. It was a close scoring game, but first place went to Blue who finished a handful of points ahead of Plum with Teal a little way behind in third.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Forget snakes on a train, what about snakes on a race track?!?!

Next Meeting, 30th May 2023

Our next meeting will be Tuesday 30^th May 2023. As usual, we will start playing shorter games from 7.30pm as people arrive, until 8pm when we will start something a little longer. For those who want to eat, the table is booked from 6.45pm, for the last time under the current chef/management.

This week, the “Feature Game” will be the Wild Ride expansion (rules; video review) to our go-to motor racing game, Downforce (rules; review; how to play video). Like Draftosaurus last time, the group first played Downforce online (in this case for our online New Year Party 2020/2021), but since then we have played it several times in person. The Wild Ride expansion adds two new tracks, one with jumps, the other with animal obstacles.

– Image by boardGOATS

Speaking of car racing…

Jeff and Joe were chatting about one of their favourite subjects, racing cars and their drivers.

Joe commented, “I think the best driver of all time is James Hunt, he just made the 1970s for me—he was just amazing.”

Jeff thought for a moment and then asked, “Who won the 1975 F1 World Championship?”

“Lauda,” replied Joe.

Jeff took a deep breath, then shouted back, “WHO WON THE 1975 WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP?!“

16th May 2023

Unusually, Blue and Pink were joined early by Lime for pizza, and Pine who wasn’t eating. So, while they were waiting for food to arrive the group squeezed in a very quick game of Coloretto. This is a popular game within the group, but somehow Lime had missed out on it. It is quite simple to play, but one of those games that takes a couple of tries to get the hang of playing well, or as in Blue’s case, lots of tries and still not play it well. The idea is simple enough though: players take it in turns to either take a coloured chameleon card from the deck and add it to one of the “trucks”, or take one of the trucks and add the cards on it to their display.

– Image by boardGOATS

Players score points according to the triangular number series where every additional card is worth one more additional point than the previous card. Thus, the fourth card someone gets is worth ten points, four more points than the third card (which itself is worth three more than the second and so on). Collecting chameleons was briefly interrupted by the arrival of Hoi-sin duck pizzas, but that didn’t stop Pink winning with a total of thirty-seven points, well ahead of a tie for second place between Blue and Pine. By this time, Purple, Black and Teal had arrived and it was time to decide who was going to play what.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pink and Lime were very keen to give Zoo Break another go, having left the town of Bedlam over-run with escaped animals last time the group played. With it being such a quiet night, there was some debate as to what the other group were going to play, but in the end they opted for the “Feature Game“, the Marina expansion to one of our most popular little games, Draftosaurus. Pine was keen to play with the cute wooden zoo meeples and after the mayhem last time, Blue was also keen not to miss out, which left Purple, Black and Teal to play with dinosaurs. The only problem was, none of them knew how to play it, so while Lime, Pink and Pine set up Bedlam Zoo, Blue quickly explained the rules to Draftosaurus.

– Image by boardGOATS

Draftosaurus is a very simple drafting game in the vein of Sushi Go! or 7 Wonders, but instead of drafting cards, players are drafting wooden dino-meeples. The idea is that players start with a handful of dino-meeples and choose one to keep and pass the rest on to the next player. The active player rolls a location die which adds restrictions on which pens players can place their chosen dinosaur in in their dino-park. When everyone has placed their first dino, the die is passed to the next player and everyone chooses their next meeple from the pile passed to them by their neighbour. The round is complete when each player has placed six meeples, and the game is played over two rounds (passing dino-meeples in opposite directions in each round).

– Image by boardGOATS

The Marina expansion adds brown Plesiosaurs to the yellow Triceratops, blue Stegosaurus, pink Brachiosaurus, orange Spinosaurus, green Parasaurolophus, and red Tyrannosaurus rex from the base game. Where dinosaurs from the base game can always be placed in the river that runs through the middle of each player’s park (where they only earn a single point), Plesiosaurs all go into the river, which they travel along into an expansion board. Each expansion board is slightly different, but when a player places the non-Plesiosaur dinosaur shown on the bridge, if they have a dinosaur immediately up-stream of the bridge, it can pass under it into the next section of the river where it will score more points.

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It was a close game with everyone following different tactics. Teal concentrated on trying to fill his Meadow of Differences while Black focused on collecting pink Brachiosaurs and Purple stuffed her Forest of Sameness with blue Stegosaurs. Black took one Plesiosaur, Purple collected two and Teal three, though only one of his made it under the first bridge and out of the main river. Purple managed to minimise the number of non-scoring dino-meeples in her park, and that just gave her the edge, and she finished a couple of points ahead of Teal who took second place.

– Image by boardGOATS

Although Teal, Purple and Black tried to persuade her to stay (and there was even some suggestion of her playing both games simultaneously), once she had explained the rules, Blue joined the madness in Bedlam, playing Zoo Break. In this game, players are keepers trying to prevent their charges escaping from the zoo, and to win the game, they have to return all escaped critters to their enclosures and lock the doors. Losing is much easier—if five cuddly creatures or one dangerous one escape from the zoo, then it is all over. Last time, only one animal escaped, but it was a cobra, so that was that.

– Image by boardGOATS

On their turn, players first roll the action die to find out how many Action Points the player has to work with for that round. Then, after they have carried out their actions, one card from the Escape deck and then one card from the Move deck are revealed. The Escape card liberates one or more animals, while the Move card often moves animals towards the exit, but occasionally causes other things to happen, like waking up sleeping tigers, breaking barricades and generally cause more chaos. After last time, the group decided to start by digging through the Supply deck and make sure everyone went really well equipped, then, prioritise capturing (or at least controlling) the Meerkats, as they had been so problematic last time.

– Image by boardGOATS

On that occasion, the group had played with two “Phew” Cards in the Escape deck, and (following a rules malfunction) all the blank cards in in the Move deck. In spite of all the blank cards, they still lost spectacularly. So, this time, the group stuck with the two “Phew” Cards, but removed the blanks from the Move deck and did not add any other rules variants as they really wanted to win, though they stuck with the thematically logical variant where tigers remain tranquilised when returned to their pen. Lime had the Black Belt special power which meant he couldn’t be hurt by animals, so he got the job of dealing with snakes which hide so players have to reveal them, with the risk of being attacked if they are dangerous.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pink, as usual wanted to work with the pandas, but the Capuchin monkeys were a more immediate threat, and the group made a point of dealing with the troublesome meerkats early this time, so then he went on to deal with them once the monkeys were locked up. Blue, who had the panda enclosure key, took over trying to control them, but they kept escaping just as Blue was about to lock their cage. Blue was encouraged to capture one panda who was in the rhino’s path, but that meant she was left standing there—”You’ll be fine”, said Pink. And Blue was immediately flattened by a charging rhino and had to spend a turn with the medic removing the hoof-prints from her forehead. One meerkat escaped from the zoo, but was left to run free so Keepers could focus elsewhere and then lock their enclosure.

– Image by boardGOATS

With two enclosures locked early, things became slightly more manageable. The group wimped out of using the faulty lock variant however, because nobody wanted to risk failing a second time, and certainly, including it would have made things much more difficult. As it was, one tiger got within sniffing distance of freedom, but was tranked before he could take that one final bound. Pine made excellent use of his running skills (as Track Star he could move twice as fast as anyone else) and bravely helped Lime with snakes and wielded his dart gun—before long, the zoo was littered with big sleeping cats. That was all very well, until they woke up at which point Pine had to do the job all over again.

– Image by boardGOATS

After her run-in with the rhino, Blue tried to end her turn on hedge spaces, but that meant she was unable to swap supplies with other players as she couldn’t share her space. Once the Pandas were vaguely under control, Blue was able to get a stretcher and another dart gun and help Pine with the tigers, making use of her Gardener ability, hiding in bushes and taking a pop at the big kitties from a place of safety. While Pine and Blue were working on the tigers, the elephants started rampaging. As the nearest and armed with a leash, Lime took a break from snakes and tried prevent them from causing too much damage. This was all very well until (much to Pink’s disgust as he would have loved a black and white cuddle), Lime rolled the lowest number and got hugged by a panda leaving him unable to do anything until it was prised off him.

– Image by boardGOATS

In the dying rounds, Pink’s, and indeed everyone else’s delight was evident, when another panda popped up for a cuddle and everyone cheered when Pink was the one to roll the lowest number and get a hug. As the Lucky Duck, on his turn he was able to roll the Action Die multiple times to get more points, but he checked the rules to see if he was obliged to spend his first three points to escape from the furry cuddle or whether he could just stay there for the rest of the game. In the end, he sent it back to its enclosure, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered. With one last push, Pine and Lime rounded up the last of the snakes, then the group finally sorted out the charging elephants and mischievous pandas, and finally locked up the rhino, giving the group a much deserved victory.

– Image by boardGOATS

Draftosaurus is a much quicker game than Zoo Break, so while they Keepers were dealing with the tigers, elephants and disobedient pandas, Teal, Black and Purple moved onto play Splendor. This was one of Burgundy’s favourite games and he was almost unbeatable at it, so we never play it without thinking of him. It is a very simple engine builder card game, but takes great skill to repeatedly win in the way Burgundy did. The idea is that on their turn, players either collect gem tokens (three different colours, or two the same as long as there are at least four left), or spend tokens to buy cards from the market. Cards act as permanent gem tokens (effectively reducing the cost of cards later in the game), but also provide Victory Points—when a player passes fifteen points, that triggers the end of the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

In addition to the two basic actions, there is also the relatively rarely used action of reserving cards, where a player gets a wild, gold token and can reserve one card which they can pay for later. This time, both Teal and Purple reserved cards, while Black prioritised taking high value cards. Reserving cards can be a very effective tactic, but the game is all about the cards available in the market and surfing through them as quickly and efficiently as possible and amassing points. As it was, Black romped away with victory, his fifteen points three times that of anyone else. And with that, both Splendor and Zoo Break finished, leaving the group with a little time to play something else. Teal and Lime headed off, so after some discussion, Pine, Black, Purple, Pink and Blue decided to give Draftosaurus with the Marina expansion another go as it was the “Feature Game“.

– Image by boardGOATS

It was then that the group realised the errors in the original explanation, in particular how the Solitary Isle enclosure worked. Pine corrected Blue’s errors and the second game began. Pine and Blue both tried to exploit the Plesiosaurs at every opportunity, and Pink tried to claim extra points for reverse parking his solitary Plesiosaur into the dock. It turned out he didn’t need them though, as with forty-seven points he took his third win of the night. Blue and Black tied for second place, while Purple unfortunately had to recount when she realised she had a pink Brachiosaur elsewhere in her park so couldn’t score seven points for her solitary Isle. That left a bit of time for a chat, but everyone was tired and it wasn’t long before the last of the group headed home.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Who needs TV when you’ve got T.Rex?