For a while, it looked a lot like the “Feature Game”, Lewis & Clark , wasn’t going to happen – it’s a longer game and one that requires a specific type of gamer.  Of the usual candidates for this sort of game, Burgundy had given notice that he was feeling under the weather, so wouldn’t be coming; Blue was in attendance but was feeling a bit off-colour too; Black wasn’t in the mood for something heavy; Mulberry was recovering from jet-lag so needed an early night, and Green and Ivory hadn’t arrived by 8pm.  Inevitably though, we were just deciding what else to play when Green and Ivory turned up and looked keen to give Lewis & Clark a go.

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With Blue joining them, that left Black, Purple, Mulberry and Pine (who was celebrating coming off his antibiotics again), to come up with something to play.  While everyone played musical chairs, suggested games and admired Blue’s shiny new copy of Roll for the Galaxy: Rivalry (freshly muled from the US by Mulberry), the foursome decided to play Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra.  This is the new implementation of last year’s Spiel des Jahres winner, Azul, which features the same market, but with glass pieces instead of ceramic tiles.

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The differences are more than cosmetic though – instead of placing their pieces in a row and moving them onto a grid, pieces are placed directly into the player’s window.  This is modular consisting of the double-sided strips laid out at random so everyone has a different starting setup.  There are restrictions on how the pieces can be placed though:  tiles must be placed in the strip immediately below their Glazier meeple, or in a strip to its right.  The Glazier is then placed above the strip the tiles were placed in,, so he gradually moves to the right. Instead of taking tiles, players can choose to reset the Glazier’s position, moving him back to the left most strip.

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Players get points when strips are completed scoring the sum of the score depicted below the strip and any strips to the right that have already been completed. There is also a colour bonus—each round has a colour drawn at random at the start of the game, and any tiles that match the colour for the round score extra. Once a strip has been completed, it is flipped over; after it has been filled a second time it is removed. Any left over tiles that cannot be placed are placed into the glass tower and yield a penalty with players moving along a negative score track which has small steps at the start that gets larger. When the market is empty the round ends and the round indicator tile is also dropped into the glass tower which is emptied when the .  There are also end-game bonus points with two variants available, one colour dependent and the other rewarding completing adjacent strips.

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Mulberry was new to the game and had not even played the original Azul, despite it having been so popular within the group.  Pine, Purple and Black had, of course, played the original game many times, but were less familiar with the Stained Glass of Sintra variation and Pine at least had played it just once.  It was a tight game and it wasn’t clear who was going to win until the end of the sixth and final round when it became apparent that Black was in a good position to make a killing and probably take an insurmountable lead.  Unfortunately, for him, he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by putting his red glass pieces in the wrong place.  Pine meanwhile had made  a bit of a mess of things elsewhere which left him a score of minus ten for his unused tiles, but this wasn’t enough to knock him of the top of the podium where he sat two points ahead of Black in second and a few more ahead of Mulberry in third.

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Mulberry needed an early night to help with the jet-lag and Lewis & Clark was still underway, so the remaining three decided to play a recently released game, Gingerbread House.  In this game players are witches in the Enchanted Forest, building their gingerbread house and attracting hungry fairy tale characters with colorful gingerbread.  Each player has a player board showing a three-by-three grid of building spaces with a symbol on each space.  They also have a pile of rectangular tiles each featuring two squares showing two symbols, a bit like dominoes, which are placed face-down in a stack with the top three turned face up (a little like the train cards in Ticket to Ride).  On their turn, players draw one of the face up tiles and place it on their player board, then carry-out the effect of the symbols they covered up.  The most likely symbol is one of the four different types of gingerbread, which means they collect a token of that type.

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Sometimes a player wants to cover two squares on different levels, in which case “stair” tiles can be used as a spacer; players can also receive these as an effect of placing tiles, or they receive two stair tiles if they forfeit their turn.  Other effects include the opportunity to swap one type of gingerbread for another or cage a fairy tale character.  If the two symbols covered are the same, the player gets the effect three times instead of twice adding a positioning element to the tile placement.  Once a tile has been placed, the active player can use some of their gingerbread tokens to capture fairy-tale characters, either from the face up character line or from their “cage” trap near the gate of their cottage.  If placing tiles completed a level, the active player may take a bonus card (up to a maximum of three).

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Pine, who had not played the game before went for a very tall house combo, taking a “Chimney” bonus tiles which reward players with eight or more levels (complete or incomplete) and a “Treasure Chest” bonus which would give points if his had at least four complete levels.  Black started off capturing the most valuable fairy tale creatures and then added the “Magic Wand” bonus card which gave him even more points.  Purple meanwhile, also concentrated on the characters she was capturing, taking the “Cauldron” bonus, which rewarded her for catching non-human characters.  Black’s strategy was very effective and, although the characters are hidden once they are taken, so it was no surprise that he was well in front, scoring as many points for his characters alone as Purple and Pine scored in total.  It was really close for second place, however, but Pine just pipped Purple by a single point.

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Meanwhile, on the next table, Ivory, Green and Blue had been playing the “Feature Game”, Lewis & Clark.  This is a resource collecting race game, with a deck building element.  Players are explorers trying to get from St. Louis to Fort Clatsop, traveling up the Missouri River over the Rocky and Bitterroot Mountains through Montana and Idaho, and down the Columbia River to the Oregon coast.  Players do this by playing character cards from their hand which provide actions including gathering resources, traveling or converting primary resources into secondary resources.  There are several very unusual things about the game.  Firstly, each card has a power as well as an action.  Whenever a character card is played it must be empowered either by playing a second card and using it’s power rating, using natives, or a combination of both.  This dictates how many times the action is carried out (up to a maximum of three).

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Once a card has been played, either as an action or to activate another card, they are placed on the player’s personal discard pile, so there is also an element of deck-building to the game, with more characters available through the “Journal” .  Of course, the most exciting cards are those with the highest rating, so using them to activate other cards may be efficient, but means that action will not be available until the deck is recycled.  This is another interesting and clever aspect of the game:  each player has their “Scout” and their “Camp”, and they move their scout along the rivers and through the mountains and then, when they “make camp”, they move the camp to join the Scout and pick up all their used cards.  This is a similar mechanism to that used in K2 where players have tents to shelter in, however, in Lewis & Clark the key part is that there are “time penalties” that penalise inefficiencies, like any unused character cards.

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As well as the cost associated with inefficient use of their characters, there are also penalties for hoarding resources.  In order to travel players need buffalo (or bison…?), canoes, and horses, Acquiring canoes and horses require other resources and these must be transported to the new camp by boat—the more resources a player has when their camp moves, the more costly it will be.  Each player’s expedition also has a number of natives, and these also travel by boat.  Players start with five boats three that will hold resources and two for the natives; transporting two resources and one native is free, but the costs increase significantly when more travel.

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Another interesting mechanism used in the game is way players gather some of the resources.  Each player starts with action cards that generate the four primary resources, wood, equipment, fur and food (depicted by buffalo, or bison—what’s the difference?  You can’t wash your hands in a buffalo…).  These have a brown, grey, pink or yellow icon associated with them and each character card depicts one of these.  When a player plays, for example, a lumberjack card, they get wood equivalent to the number of visible brown icons visible in front of them, but also those displayed by their each of their neighbours.  Thus, if a player has two wood icons in front of them, and their neighbours have another two each, they would get up to six wood (enough to make four canoes), and if they activated that card three times, that would increase to eighteen.  If both neighbours decided to make camp, however, they would pick up all their cards and playing that lumberjack activated once would then only yield two wood.  Thus, timing is critical and one turn can make all the difference.

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Instead of playing a character card, on their turn, players can take a village action by placing a native on the board.  Some of these locations, like the Hunter space, can only hold one native, so the player can only take the action once and nobody else can visit the Hunter to get food and fur until the space has been vacated.  Other spaces like the Canoe Maker, can be visited many times, so a player who has a lot of wood can turn them into up to three canoes.  Natives can also visit the Shaman, which enables players to repeat another player’s Character card.  This turned out to be really important as spaces are only emptied when a player plays their Interpreter card.  The Interpreter calls all natives on the board to a powwow in the middle of the village and then as many of these natives as desired can be recruited for that player’s expedition.

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Once per turn, before or after the compulsory action (playing a Character card or deploying a native in the village), players can make camp and recruit new Characters from the face up cards drawn from the Journal deck.  Each character has an intrinsic cost in equipment, as well as a cost in fur dependent on it’s position in the Journal.  There is a potential for hands to become full of unwanted cards, however, it is possible to use one card to pay part of the cost.  Additionally, there is a location in the village, “Farewell” that players can use to discard cards and also refresh the Journal.

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Although the game seems to take an inordinately long time to play, it is not actually that complicated.  Essentially, players are trying to gather resources and use these to recruit helpful Characters and acquire secondary resources (horses and canoes) and then use these to travel along the rivers and through the mountain.  Although it seems simple, planning and timing is absolutely critical—getting it wrong can easily mean that a Scout finishes his round behind his camp so that the expedition fails to move forward.  The location of the mountains can mean that even a successful forward movement may be inefficient as The Commander (the movement Character card everyone starts with) only allows players to use canoes to move four spaces along the river and horses to move two spaces in the mountains.

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Ivory went first and began by collecting resources, followed by Blue and then Green.  Blue was the first to move and headed off up the river from St. Louis and then made camp.  Ivory and Green weren’t far behind, but when they came to make camp the time penalties they accrued meant they actually went backwards.  This is not always such a bad move in this game if it is due to building a robust engine for later in the game.  So in the first few rounds it looked like Blue had a massive lead, but that didn’t last as the others began the chase.

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Blue was first into the mountains and then realised she had mis-read her expedition leader  card and found that horses would only move two spaces each through in the mountains, not four (like canoes).  The mountains are key to the game and particularly changing ovement and avoiding wasting moves.  Green thought he had it sussed with his Cut Nose Character card, but hadn’t checked the rules and just assumed that it would allow him to move one space through the mountains without needing any resources.  That would have made it a very powerful card, as trading for horses to get through the mountains requires three nonequivalent primary resources per horse (which moves two spaces).  He was very disappointed and, like Blue had to completely reconsider his options.

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Meanwhile, Ivory had a plan to get his expedition through the mountains.  His combination of the Black Cat and Coboway Character Cards meant he could collect any missing resources he needed easily and then use them to move fast through the mountains.  Inevitably, with Blue mired in the mess she had made, Ivory galloped into the lead, but he still had the Colorado river to negotiate before he could get past fort Clatsop and make camp.  For this he needed natives, but so did Blue.  Unfortunately for Blue, the fact that Ivory was ahead of her in the turn order meant he was able recruit more natives and it wasn’t long before his expedition paddled past the finishing line, and, despite a large time penalty, made camp on the Oregon coast, a very worthy winner in what had been a very enjoyable game.  Definitely one to play again.

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Learning Outcome:  Many native Americans have unpronounceable names.