Tag Archives: Draftosaurus

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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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“.

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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.

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

4th October 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boardgames in the News: What are “Filler” Games?

To most people, games come in two types, board games and card games. Modern board gamer, however, have many other classifications. For example, board gamers make the distinction between Strategy Games and Family Games. Strategy Games typically are more complex than Family Games, which is not to say that Family Games don’t involve strategy, simply that the strategies are more involved. Typically, a “Light Family Game” will be relatively simple in concept and take around forty-five minutes to an hour to play, where “Heavy Strategy Games” tend to take at least a couple of hours and sometimes several or more.

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Examples of Family Games include Niagara, Downforce and Escape: The Curse of the Temple, while Altiplano, Keyflower and Concordia might be described as Strategy Games. There is a third category which, can be harder to describe, Filler Games. These are typically shorter games that often also fit the Family Game criteria, but have sufficient challenge that players of heavier Strategy Games enjoy playing them between other games. “Shorter” is obviously in the eye of the beholder—to people who often play games that last several hours, any game that lasts less than an hour and a half might be a “Filler game”.

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However, if a games night lasts around three hours, a Filler Game might be one that lasts no more than around thirty minutes or so. More importantly, and in order to save time, they have minimal setup time and are usually well known amongst gamers or at least are very quick to teach. Popular Filler Games include card games like No Thanks! and Love Letter, but also tile laying games like NMBR9 and board games like Tsuro and Draftosaurus. All these fit the basic criteria, but additionally are good fun and are great for warming up or down at the start or end of an evening, as well as for playing between games and while waiting for other games to finish.

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10th February 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

1st December 2021

It was a relatively quiet night with no Burgundy, Lilac or Teal. However, that was slightly offset by the arrival of Lime who had missed the last few and Beige, who is much cuter in real life than on Teams. The first game of the evening, as Blue and Pink finished their supper, was No Thanks!. A very simple game where players take a card or pay a chip to pass the problem on, it is easy to play when attention is elsewhere.

– Image by boardGOATS

At the end of the game, players sum the face value of the cards they collect and the player with the lowest score wins. The clever part is that if players have a run of cards, they only score the lowest, and the fact that some cards are missing encourages players to gamble. This time, Blue “top scored” with a massive sixty-six having tried and failed to make a run out of high scoring cards. Green won with a careful game that gave him thirty points and Pink was took second place, four points behind.

– Image by boardGOATS

As people arrived, the group split into two with the one group playing the “Feature Game“, Draftosaurus. This is a very light drafting game, a bit like Sushi Go!, but with dinosaurs (because everyone, especially Beige, likes dinosaurs). We have played this quite a bit, but mostly online over the last year or so, but the tactile wooden dino-meeples add a lot to the experience. The basic idea is that players start with a handful of wooden dinosaurs, pick one to keep and then pass the rest on.

– Image by boardGOATS

Players then choose which pen to place the dinosaur in obeying the restrictions the pens have for example, each dinosaur placed in the Meadow of Differences must be different. Players also take it in turns to roll the Placement Die and have to additionally follow the conditions imposed it (e.g placing the dinosaur in an empty pen or a pen that does not contain a Tyrannosaurus rex). The game is played over two rounds and at the end of the game, when all the dino-meeples have been placed, players add up their scores.

– Image by boardGOATS

Each pen scores according to its specialism, with players scoring an extra point for each Tyrannosaurus rex they have have. Draftosaurus is a very quick and light game, but is also very enjoyable, and this time the scoring was very tight too with just five pints separating first and last places. Blue just managed to edge it though finishing one point ahead of Pine with Purple and Lime tied in third.

– Image by boardGOATS

With five players the options were a little limited, but Pink effectively made the decision as he was keen to play Fabled Fruit, a game we last played two and a half years ago. This is a game he’s very fond of because he likes the cute animal artwork and bright primary colours. It is a light card game, with the unusual feature that the game evolves and changes each time it is played. This “Legacy” style was made popular by Rob Daviau and Matt Leacock with Pandemic Legacy, a game that divided gamers as it required them to destroy components and write over the board, an anathema to people who are accustomed to looking after their games, sometimes to an extreme degree.

– Adapted from image by BGG contributor Muse23PT

Once Pandemic Legacy has been played out, the end product is a personalised copy of Pandemic which embodies the memories of the campaign. This further irritates some gamers because they feel they are left with a comparatively unplayable copy of the game or at least one that is less well be unbalanced and may have design flaws. Fabled Fruit is different from the Legacy games as the changes are not destructive, so the game can be reset and played again from the beginning, in this case by simply sorting the cards.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game is quite simple—it starts with six decks of four cards in the central play area and on their turn players move their worker from one pile to another and either carry out the action associated with the cards, or buy a card. Each card has a cost in fruit and, when bought represents a fruit smoothy. When a player buys their third card (in the five player game) they trigger the end of the game and the player with the most smoothies at the end of the round wins.

– Image by boardGOATS

The starting decks include simple actions like “take two fruit cards from the deck” and “give one banana to any other player and get two fruits in exchange”. As the game evolves though, the actions become more interesting with the introduction of a fruit card market and more complex interactions. This time Blue got out of the blocks quickest and was the first to three with Pine and Purple tied for second. It was a very enjoyable game and people were just starting to get interested in how the actions were changing and what animal would be introduced next, so the group decided to play it a second time and see what happened.

– Image by boardGOATS

By the second round there was lots of talk about how the some fruit looked like hemorrhoids and from there the conversation deteriorated into a discussion of bum grapes and hairy nuts. This time, Lime was the victor with Pine taking second place. As it was packed away and Pink sorted the cards to reset it, the group lamented the “problem” with “Legacy-type” games. Sadly, they really shine with a small group like a family or household that play together frequently. The problem with a group like boardGOATS is that people play in different groups each time, so it isn’t really possible to work through a campaign properly.

– Image by boardGOATS

With that, Lime took his leave and there was just time for the remaining foursome (plus Beige) to play a quick game of Coloretto. This distills the essence of the, arguably, better known board game, Zooloretto, into a simple yet clever little card game. We’ve all played it a lot, so it needed little introduction: on their turn, players either turn a card and add it to a truck, or take one of the trucks. The aim is to collect sets, but only the three score positively, the others all score negative points with the player with the most winning. This time, Blue picked up a couple of full sets and won by a bit of a landslide with Pink in second.

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, on the next table, Black, Green and Ivory were playing Brass: Birmingham, the Sequel to Brass (Lancashire). It is an economic strategy game that tells the story of competing entrepreneurs in Birmingham during the industrial revolution, 1770-1870. Each round, players take turns according to the turn order track, receiving two action points to perform any of the actions: Build, Network, Develop, Sell, Loan and Scout. The game is played over two halves: the canal era (years 1770-1830) and the rail era (years 1830-1870).

– Image by boardGOATS

The game is quite complex so Ivory’s explanation took a little while. Black had previously read the rules, but Green came in with no prior knowledge, so it was typical that the Start Player application chose Green to go first. He started the first, Canal part of the game building in the North West, while Ivory went for the Midlands and Black the Mid-South. Black and Ivory were soon linking their routes and connected up to the board edge trading towns. Ivory’s experience of the game meant he was first to use it and collect the Beer barrel.

– Image by boardGOATS

Green’s routes remained separate from the other two for a while, and although that gave him relatively uninterrupted growth in the region, he found himself limited to only one trade. Thus he pushed south to join up with the other two. At the halfway point, Ivory was narrowly in the lead over a surprised Green, with Black a few points behind. The board was then cleared and reset. Everyone had managed to build at least a couple of stage two buildings.

– Image by boardGOATS

As the second, Rail part of the game went on it became clear that everyone had switched places. Green was building up in the South East, and Ivory was working in the North and Black even further South. It took much longer to join up the routes so it wasn’t until the very end that players started to build and use resources that others had planned for. By the end of the game and after the final scoring, Ivory had romped away to a comfortable win, with Black leapfrogging Green into a comfortable second place.

– Image by boardGOATS

It had been enjoyable, though it was a bit of a rush at the end as time was pressing. Brass is an unusual game in the way that players can each use the others resources, which is an interesting twist. With many different options to planning, this makes for quite a thinky game which leaves players feeling they can do so much better the next time.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Beige is a lot smaller in real life.

20th July 2021 (Online)

Since last time, there had been quite a bit of debate about returning to the Horse and Jockey, but there was a little hesitancy and with the extremely hot weather, staying at home this week turned out to be the right choice all round. As the decision had been just a little bit last-minute, we chose to keep the “Feature Game” simple and opted for the Skills Mini Expansion for Cartographers. We have played Cartographers several times and everyone has really enjoyed it. With the Spiel des Jahres winners announced this week, this was also the nearest we could get to playing a game to mark the occasion (it received a nomination for the Kennerspiel award last year).

– Image by boardGOATS

Cartographers is a “Roll and Write” type of game, but one with more of a “gamery” feel than most. It is based on Tetris, with shapes revealed on the flip of a card in a similar way to other games we’ve played this year like Second Chance and Patchwork Doodle. However, the thing that makes Cartographers more “gamery” than these is the addition of terrain and players usually have to make a choice, either of the shape or the terrain. The terrains are tied in with goal cards, four of which are revealed at the start of the game. Two goals are then scored at the end of each of the four seasons, in a similar way to another game we like, Isle of Skye.

– Image by boardGOATS

There are lots of other little aspects of the game that make it interesting—the presence of Ruins and Ambush Cards in the deck, for example, deliver a curved ball, just when players feel they are in control. Players can also build their income by surrounding mountain ranges and choosing to play certain shapes; this gives more points at the end of each round. The Skills expansion gives players a way to offset this income for special actions which potentially give players other ways of achieving their goals, further adding to the decision space.

– Image by boardGOATS

One of the most impressive things about Cartographers is the amount of variety that is built into the game, which means every play feels different and the game stays remarkably fresh. So, there are two different player maps and four of each type of goal card. This variety is carried through to the Skills expansion; there are eight cards of which three are chosen at random. This time we chose the B side of the map (with empty “wasteland” spaces marked) and drew the Greenbough, Mages Valley, Wildholds and Borderlands goal cards together with the Search, Negotiate and Concentrate skills cards. These skills cost anything from free (like Search) to three (like Concentrate), and each can be played multiple times per game although only one can be played each Season.

– Image by boardGOATS

We quickly realised that the expensive skills like Concentrate are only likely to be played in the final round, as the cost is in “income” and that income is generated at the end of every round. So, playing Concentrate at the start of the game will ultimately cost a player twelve points, while playing it in the final round will cost three just three points. For this reason, the free Search skill was always likely to be used by almost everyone in almost every season (and so it proved). Of course, the higher tariff reflects the increased power though: Search allows players to increase the size of the shape they are drawing by a single square; Negotiate (which costs one) allows players to draw a two-by-two shape, and Concentrate allows players to draw the shape a second time.

– Image by boardGOATS

As well as the skills which we had not played with before, several of the goal cards were new to us as well, including Greenbough (which rewards gives players one point per row and column with at least one Forest square in it) and Mages Valley (which gave points for each space next to a Mountain—two points for each Lake and one point for each Arable). We’d played with the Wildholds goal before though (which gives six points for each Village of six or more spaces) and, although Borderlands was new to us (which give points for each completed row or column), we’d played The Broken Road goal which is similar (giving points for completed diagonals).

– Image by boardGOATS

The game began much as usual, and Pink, who was watering the tomatoes in the “mini-market-garden”, commented that he could hear Burgundy muttering, sighing and generally sounding stressed from outside. Although we had played with “Wastelands” before, we had all focussed on how the fact some of the spaces were already full would help. We had all forgotten how much the Wastelands obstruct plans and generally make life considerably more difficult. Blue made a bit of using the ruins spaces to give her more flexibility later, but had forgotten that it would reduce the number of spaces she would be able to fill later in the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

It was clear after the first round that Ivory was going to be tough to beat, a feeling that was cemented after the second round. Unusually, Burgundy was the first to post a score, with a total of one hundred and forty-one. Although this was high enough to earn him second though, when Ivory’s score came through he was a massive twenty-five points ahead. Once again, it had been a very enjoyable game, and as we tidied up there was a little bit of chit-chat about the skills and what they added to the game. Since they are not compulsory, the consensus was that we should add them every time, though it was clear that they had been widely used because of the presence of the free Search skill, which everyone had used, and some in every round.

– Image by boardGOATS

With Cartographers over, we had a bit of a discussion about moving back to our much loved and greatly missed, Horse and Jockey. We’d conducted some anonymous surveys over the preceding week to try to gauge opinion trying to ensure that nobody felt under pressure to do anything they weren’t comfortable with. Some of the group had been back on occasional Thursdays, playing old favourites like The Settlers of Catan, Wingspan, and Roll for the Galaxy and new games like Red Rising, Mercado de Lisboa, Ticket to Ride: Amsterdam, Tapestry (with the Plans and Ploys expansion), Ginkgopolis, Everdell, and Draftosaurus (aka “Sushi Go with Dinosaurs”). Others, however, had not been to the pub for nearly eighteen months. After some discussion, we decided that we’d schedule a trial visit in ten days time, so that those who had not been out could see how they felt without committing, and those that went could report back to those that were feeling a little more reticent.

– Image by boardGOATS

After that, we moved onto Board Game Arena. It was a quiet night without both Pine and Lime, and once Green and Ivory had left as well, we were down to five which gave us a lot of options. Coloretto was one, but in the end we chose Niagara, a game we’ve all played quite a bit, but never online, and we were keen to see the new Board Game Arena implementation and whether losing the tactile moving river would leave the game lacking. A strong element of the game is the element of simultaneous play, however, and this was a large part of the appeal this time. Players simultaneously choose a Paddle Tile which dictates how far their canoe will move in the round. Then, in turn order, players move their canoe up or down the river, paying two movement points to pick up a gem from the bank (or drop one off).

– Image by BGG contributor El_Comandante
adapted by boardGOATS

The winner is the player to get four gems of the same colour, five gems of different colours, or any seven gems safely home and into the shallows. On the face of it, this is relatively simple, but the really clever part of the game is the movement of the river. In general, the river moves at the speed of the slowest boat—if the lowest numbered Paddle Tile is a two, then the river moves two spaces and all the boats move with it. However, one of the Paddle Tiles is a weather tile which enables players to increase or decrease the rate to make life harder or easier. Since everyone has to play all their Paddle Tiles before they can recycle them, the timing of their weather tile is critical: players who leave it to the end run the risk of the river running fast and losing boats over the cascade because they can’t do anything about it.

– Image by boardGOATS
from boardgamearena.com

And it wasn’t long before that’s exactly what happened, when both Blue and Black got their timing wrong and lost boats over the falls, so had to pay hard earned gems to get new ones. Then, to add insult to injury, Pink sneakily crept up on Blue and stole another gem from her. Players can only steal if they land on the same space as another boat while travelling upstream, and even then it is a choice. There was much ill feeling especially from Blue, but she wasn’t the only one. And with that, the gloves came off and everyone tried to redress the balance and ensure that such bad behaviour would not go unpunished.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Pink was abreast of that though and had a plan. Knowing his bad behaviour would make him a target he collected gems in one boat letting others take them while he stole the gems he wanted and got them to shore quickly. Much to everyone’s disgust, he soon had five different gems and there was nothing anyone could do to stop him getting them home. Burgundy actually had more gems giving him a nominally higher score, but his set of six did not include five different colours and Blue’s set of five included three nuggets of amber. The victims of Pink’s grand larceny were unimpressed with his terrible behaviour, and as it was getting late, we decided to call it a night.

– Image by boardGOATS
from boardgamearena.com

Learning Outcome: Theft is totally unforgivable.

13th April 2021 (Online)

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image from kickstarter.com

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

– Image by boardGOATS from
boardgamearena.com

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

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

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

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

16th March 2021 (Online)

Purple, Black, Pine and Green chatted while Blue reminded herself of the rules for the first game. Green showed everyone his new game, Fossilis, which comes with little plastic dinosaur bones, tweezers, and even a tiny plastic scorpion—one to play when we get back to the pub, along with the very newly released Red Rising, the Oceania Expansion for the really popular Wingspan, and a whole host of other games that we’ve been waiting over a year to play.

– Image by boardGOATS

And sadly, with the realisation that it was a year and a day since a very small group met at The Jockey for the last (unofficial) games night there, we moved on to playing the “Feature Game“, Das Labyrinth des Pharao. Das Labyrinth des Pharao is a tile laying game in a similar vein to Take it Easy! which we played a few weeks ago, or the Spiel des Jahres nominee, Karuba (which we last played about five years ago). In Das Labyrinth des Pharao though, players are exploring a pyramid and collecting treasure.

– Image by boardGOATS

Although we’ve not played it on a Tuesday, some of the group have played it before at the Didcot Games Club (November 2015 and September 2016). Like all the games that we’ve found that work well played online, Das Labyrinth des Pharao is quite simple to play, but it is a little bit “thinky” relying on planning and a little bit of luck. Everyone had the tiles and board that were delivered a few weeks back, and they had found their Tiny Towns cubes and a meeple from one of the special Christmas crackers we’ve had at one of the unChristmas Parties during happier times.

– Image by boardGOATS

The first thing to do was lay out the tiles around the board, in number order—some appear more than once, so these are stacked. Players then counted out five, four and three of their cubes as treasures. Once everything was set up, Blue explained that Pink would turn over one of the beautifully decorated number cards (each part of a polyptych), and everyone had to place the corresponding tile on their board.

– Image by boardGOATS

They can place the tile anywhere on their board, in any orientation. Some of the tiles have scarabs depicted on them—players can place treasures on these, but must start with the lowest value treasures first. So, only when all five one-point treasures had been used, could players move on to the four two-point treasures, and finally the three-point treasures (blue, green and red disks respectively, though we were playing with turquoise, yellow and red cubes).

– Image by boardGOATS

After the third round, players have to choose which of the six possible entrances they are going to start from and then progress their “explorer meeple” along the path as far as they can. In the rules, players mark the path at intervals so everyone else can see how far the explorers have travelled, but given the added difficulties associated with playing remotely and the fact that players could count their own path at any time, we omitted this.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game ends after twenty-five of the twenty-eight cards have been revealed and then people add up their scores. Firstly, they score one point for each quarter tile their tunnel extends along. Next they score points for each treasure chamber their tunnel passes, that is a chamber that contains one treasure surrounded by walls on all four sides. As usual, the player with the most points is the winner.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game was a bit of a tale of people missing cards and having to try to correct it, and for a change, it wasn’t just the usual suspects. As the game progressed, it became clear that most people had tried to follow Blacks advice and tried to place as many of their treasure tokens as they could. The problem with this is that they aren’t worth anything unless players have managed to enclose them in a chamber and ensure their route passes alongside.

– Image by boardGOATS

In fact, one of the biggest problems for some turned out to be connecting valuable parts of their tunnel to their chosen entrance to ensure their treasure hunter was able to explore the temple. Pine and Pink seemed particularly afflicted, and as the game drew to a close, Burgundy and Pink in particular were getting increasingly desperate for tile number fourteen. The final tile was number six, which did most of the job and with that, everyone had to work out their scores.

– Image by boardGOATS

As usual, Ivory posted his score first, setting a competitive target of fifty, made up of thirty-one from his path and nineteen in treasure. In general, the scores were quite close, with almost everyone scoring between forty and fifty. The longest path was thirty-seven and the most treasure collected was nineteen. In most cases, those that had a long path (like Blue and Burgundy) had few treasures, while those with a lot of treasure (like Pine and Green) had not explored as deep into the temple. The exception was Pink, who managed to do well at both and finished with a total of fifty-four.

– Image by boardGOATS

It had been a fairly short game, and as it was a while since we’d practised our colouring, we moved onto a quick game of “Roll and Write” Tetris, in the form of Second Chance. We’ve played this quite a bit since we first started playing online, but the last time was just before Christmas, so we decided to give it another go.

– Image by boardGOATS

The idea is that two shapes are revealed and players must draw them in their nine-by-nine grid. The shapes come in different sizes and the game rewards efficiency in packing. If a player is unable to play either shape, they get a second chance: one card all to themselves. If they can play that, then they can carry on, but if they are unable to play that as well, then they are eliminated.

– Image by boardGOATS

Unusually, being eliminated is not necessarily a guarantee of failure in this game: the winner is the player with the fewest unfilled spaces at the end, which is when the deck of cards runs out. So, in this game, a player can be knocked out, but still win. This time, there were a couple of people who threatened to need a second chance, but then suddenly in one round, nobody was able to place either shape and everyone needed a second chance.

– Image by boardGOATS

That round took out everyone but Green and Black, but as there were no cards left, it turned out to be the final round, and that was that. The scores varied from eleven to two, with a tie between Lilac and Blue for first. Pink suggested a vote based on the quality of the art-work, but nobody wanted to choose between them and a tie it remained.

– Image by boardGOATS

From there, Ivory and Lilac took an early night, while the rest of the group moved to Board Game Arena for a game of Saboteur. This hidden traitor game is one we’ve played a lot online over the last year. The idea is that players are either Good Dwarves or Evil Saboteurs, with the Dwarves trying to play cards to build a tunnel and find the treasure, while the Saboteurs try to stop them using blocking cards and by breaking the Dwarves’ tools.

– Image by boardGOATS

It is always extremely difficult for the Saboteurs to win, but we live in hope and everyone is always pleased to get the opportunity to try. The first round it was Blue’s and Black’s turn to try. With seven players, there can be two or three Saboteurs—with just two it was pretty much guaranteed to be gold for the Dwarves, and so it proved. The Dwarves headed straight for the gold, and despite a desperate rear-guard action the round was quickly over.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

The second round was much closer. The evil Pine, Pink and Green made life extremely difficult for the Dwarves very effectively blocking their first route to the gold and forcing them to go all around the houses before they found the gold. Early in the game, Pink caused chaos by disagreeing with Pine as to where the Gold was, and the ensuing confusion made it very close. The Saboteurs had a lot of cards that worked in their favour, but they still couldn’t quite stop Purple from finding the gold in the end. The third and final round was a different story though…

– Image by boardGOATS from
boardgamearena.com

Initially, the tunnels made good progress, but largely by chance, the tunnel headed towards the top card, when the treasure (it turned out) was at the bottom. Things were made worse for the Dwarves when paranoia meant they turned on each other early. There was more confusion about where the gold was and the Dwarves were in disarray. Eventually, Pine revealed his colours, and then Black, and finally Burgundy. For once, the cards went the Saboteurs’ way and they played them really well too. Despite a desperate effort, there was nothing the Dwarves could do against such wickedness, and after a year of trying, the Saboteurs took their first victory.

– Image by boardGOATS from
boardgamearena.com

Time was marching on and we were looking for one last game to play, something perhaps a little different from the usual 6 Nimmt!. After some discussion, Green and Black ducked out and everyone else played Draftosaurus—a game that Blue and Pink have very nearly picked up on several occasions, including Essen in 2019, just after it first came out and that Pine described as “Sushi Go! with dinosaurs”. With that description, nobody could resist giving it a go.

– Image by BGG contributor kalchio

By this, Pine meant the main mechanism is drafting. In Sushi Go! players have a hand of cards, then simultaneously, they choose one to keep and pass the rest on. In Sushi Go!, players are collecting sets of cards, but in Draftosaurus players are drafting little wooden dinosaur meeples and placing them in their dinosaur park, on their personal player board. The clever part, and what makes it different to Sushi Go!, is that the scoring is driven by the different park locations.

– Image by BGG contributor kalchio

Before each draft, a die is rolled that restricts where players can place their chosen dinosaur and the seven locations all score for different combinations of dinosaurs. This means that players can want the same dinosaurs for different reasons, or different dinosaurs for the same reasons. The game is played over two rounds, drafting six dinosaurs drawn at random from a bag, first clockwise and then anti-clockwise. In the Board Game Arena rendering, this is all done electronically and the tactile nature is lost, however, the graphics are charming.

– Image by boardGOATS from
boardgamearena.com

For those who were new to the game, it took a couple of turns to work out where the scoring opportunities are and how to make the best of them, and also to work out how the dinosaurs are passed round and how players could affect each other. Pine was the only one to have played before, and therefore had a better grasp of how things worked. Rather than use this experience to beat everyone else’s faces into the dirt, he helped keep everyone else straight and offered help and advice as required.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Draftosaurus rocks along at quite a pace, and it wasn’t long before the game was coming to an end. Burgundy and Pink had got to grips with the game best and quickest and there was only one point in it. Although they had mostly tried different approaches, both had also tried to collect different dinosaurs in the Meadow of Differences. Burgundy had the edge though, and took victory with thirty-eight points.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Everyone had really enjoyed it and fallen a little bit in love with the charming graphics, quick game play, and what’s not to like about building a dinosaur park?!?! This is definitely one to get and play once we can meet up properly again. And on that positive note, looking forward to playing together with tactile dino-meeples after a year of gaming from home, it was time for bed.

– Image by BGG contributor kalchio

Learning Outcome: Pharaohs and Dinosaurs, what’s not to like?