Habitats | boardGOATS

The evening began with everyone admiring Plum’s spooky cardie and wish Black a happy birthday, before people settled down to play spooky games. To mark Halloween, the “Feature Game” will was Ghosts Love Candy Too (the sequel to Ghosts Love Candy). This is ostensibly a quick little card game where players haunt kids to steal their sweeties, however, in practice, it took rather longer than expected to get to grips with. The idea is that players simultaneously choose a card from their hand (of nine) Ghost Cards and then reveal which card people played to decide turn order. Starting with the player who revealed the highest value card, players then take it in turns to place their card one one of the Kid Cards, to “haunt them”.

– Image by boardGOATS

The player immediately takes any Treat Tokens on the Kid Card and then activates the Kid’s special ability. Any Kids whose courage has been exceeded are then collected by the active player and the Kid Card is replaced. Players score points for some of the Kid Cards (some positive, but most are negative), and for Treats they have collected according to their personal, secret, Craving cards which mean that Treats score differently for each person. Thus, while one player may score five points for, say, Licorice, another another player, Licorice will only be worth one point. for some reason, there was a bit of sussing out of the rules as, although Blue had done her homework, somehow it didn’t quite fit together in practice.

– Image by boardGOATS

Between them, however, Teal, Pink, Ivory, Cobalt and Blue worked it out in the end. Ivory began, and his favourite was Chocolate, while Cobalt who went second was after peppermints. From early in the game, it was apparent that Teal was collecting Gummy Bears, and seemed to have little competition, but then, it appeared that Blue was collecting Candy Corn, but that was all she could get her hands on and she really wanted Licorice. In the end it was a tie between Teal and Pink, who did really well on his Treats, especially his favourites, Lollipops, but picked up ten negative points from his huge pile of terrified Kids. Victory went to Teal on the tie-break, however, as he had the most of his favourite Treats (that pile of Gummy Bears).

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, on the next table, Jade was leading Black, Purple and Green in a game of Potion Explosion, which is sort of “Candy Crush the board game”, played with Marbles. Players take an Ingredient Marble from the dispenser causing other Marbles to fall. If that causes Marbles of the same color to connect and form rows or columns, they “explode” and players can take them take as well. They then use the Ingredients to make potions and then drink them to give special magical powers. The winner, however, is the player who brews the most valuable Potions with the least Help and the most Skill.

– Image by boardGOATS

This time, Purple took the least assistance and finished with no Help tokens at all, however, a little Help can go a long way if you make the most of it. Green got a Lot of help which cost him eight points but this was more than offset by the fact he had the most valuable Potions, worth fifty-seven points, and the most Skill giving him another twelve and a total of sixty-one points and substantial victory margin. Black just pushed Jade into third—although Jade had considerably more valuable Potions, Black had more Skill and had needed a lot less Help, giving him a total of fifty-one points, two more than Jade.

– Image by boardGOATS

On the third table, Plum had been keen to give the Ghost Train version of Ticket to Ride a go, however, before they got round to that, they played a couple of games of the rather more tenuously Halloween themed Nova Luna. This is an abstract tile laying game that uses the mechanism from the slightly older, animal-themed game, Habitats. On their turn, players choose a tile from the Moon wheel to add to their array. Each new tile brings a new task to fulfill which are completed by placing colors in a specific arrangement which in turn bring more new tasks. Each time a task is completed, the player may places one of their Markers and the first to place all of their Markers is the winner.

– Image by boardGOATS

Plum was joined in Nova Luna by Sapphire (as it is one of his favourite games), Byzantium and Mint on her first visit. The group played two games—the first of which was really close. Plum and Sapphire tied one seventeen and were beaten by a single point by Mint. The winner was Byzantium, however, with a two point lead and finished with twenty points. The game was slightly less tight, though Byzantium, the master of consistency, was also the victor with twenty points. Second place this time went to Plum with sixteen who was one point ahead of Sapphire who, in turn, was one point ahead of Mint.

– Image by boardGOATS

Then the group moved on to play the Ghost Train version of Ticket to Ride. This is really a re-implementation of the introductory version of the game Ticket to Ride: First Journey, but what makes it special is the gorgeous board and large train pieces. It still uses the same basic mechanism as all the Ticket to Ride games with players collecting parade Float Cards and using them to claim routes on the main board. Each player starts with a couple of “Ticket” cards showing locations they have to connect. In this version, when a player completes a Ticket, they reveal it and draw a new one. If a player can’t complete a ticket, they can take a turn to discard both their cards and redraw.

– Image by boardGOATS

There are also bonus Tickets available for connecting a location of the Dark Forest region in the top left corner of the board to a location in the Seashore region in the bottom right and bonus Float Cards for connecting Town Hall to the Crypt. The winner is the first player to claim their sixth Ticket or the player with the most Tickets when someone places their final Train piece on the map. The game was a bit of a landslide, with Sapphire stealing a march on the others and quickly taking the lead, rapidly collecting his six tickets before anyone else had got anywhere. Mint took second with two Tickets and and Byzantium and Plum tied for third.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pink was somewhat surprised when Mint expressed an interest in his bottle of his favourite Blood Orange cider. Initially he was reluctant to part with it as it wasn’t empty, but once it was pointed out that they needed it for their next game and Pink could just poor the rest into his glass, everyone was happy and Mint began setting up her birthday present—Cards vs Gravity. This is a silly, but fun party game where players balance cards on a platform attached to the top of a bottle that has the feel of Jenga, but with cards. The idea is that players have to add cards to the tree without collapsing it. Byzantium was obviously on a bit of a roll, and followed up his two victories at Nova Luna with two victories against Gravity (and the others of course).

– Image by boardGOATS

With everyone pretty much finished, some headed home, but the remaining ten managed a couple of rounds of the old favourite, and totally not Halloween themed, 6 Nimmt!. In this game, players simultaneously choose a numbered card from their hand and then reveal them at the same time. These cards are added to four rows of cards in the centre of the table, starting with the lowest card, adding each one to the row that ends with the highest number that is lower than the card. Where the card would have been the sixth card, instead the player takes the five cards as their scoring pile leaving their card as the first in the new row. The player with the lowest final total is the winner. The catch is where players play a card that is lower than all the end cards, and as a result takes the row of their choice.

– Image by boardGOATS

This has the potential to completely upset everyone’s plans. The plans are not the thing here though, it is the tension and anticipation as people wait to see who is going to pick up that brightly coloured, high-scoring set of cards… This time, Cobalt top-scored in the first round with twenty-seven, slightly more than Jade. Pink, Ivory and Purple all finished in single digits, but it Pink was the victor with one solitary point. In the second round, Green took the biggest pile giving him thirty-three points, but Jade managed to take thirteen points from just three cards. Ivory was the only one to stay in single digits, and was therefore the winner with a total of eight points.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Even apparently silly children’s games can be fun when the occasion is right.

As usual, we started with a debate about who would play what. Green picked out a load of games he fancied, including The Voyages of Marco Polo which he had only played the once before and fancied playing again. Blue commented that it was the sort of game that Ivory would probably enjoy and with Black having spent quite a bit of time playing it online, he joined the others to make a trio. The Voyages of Marco Polo, won the Deutscher Spiele Preis in 2015 and was designed by the same pairing that put together Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar, another game we have enjoyed recently and is a game we should play more often. The game is played over five rounds with players recreating Marco Polo’s journey to China via Jerusalem and Mesopotamia and over the “Silk Road”. Each player has a different character and special power in the game. Each round, the players roll their five personal dice and can perform use them to perform one action each per turn. The actions include: gathering resources, gathering camels, earning money, buying purchase orders and travelling. The game ends with players receiving victory points for arriving in Beijing, fulfilling the most purchase orders, and having visited the cities on secret city cards that each player gets at the start of the game.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Last time he played, Green had been very successful with Kubilai Khan. This time, after dice rolling to see who started, Green got to go first, but although he had the opportunity to take Kubilai Khan again, he decided to go for a different challenge. So this time Green went for Matteo Polo giving him the white dice and the extra contract every round. Ivory was next and went for Mercator ex Tabriz, a potentially powerful character which would give him an extra resource every time anyone else got one from the favour track or resource selection track. Black, having played often online, opted for Kubilai Khan and starting from Beijing with the immediate ten point bonus, but no other advantage. The fourth character that was rejected by all, was Wilhelm von Rubruk who allowed the player to place houses on cities they passed through without the need to stop (Black commented afterwards that this was a a very difficult character to be successful with). Next, each player received four destination cards from which to choose two. With many groans of dismay everyone quickly discarded one card they felt was all but impossible to complete and then had to choose the worst of the remaining cards for the second discard. No one felt very happy with their selections, but the cards dictated the strategies.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor jsper

For Green the strategy was simple, get as many contracts completed as possible and not worry too much about travelling. However, some of the contracts provided extra free movement on completion, so with minimal travelling some of the cities could be completed. For much of the game Green and Ivory laboured under the false understanding that only one contract could be completed per round. This meant that after he had secured the resources he needed for his one contract, Green was left with some “spare” actions, which he decided to use for travelling and money collection. It was only at the end of the penultimate round that Black corrected their misunderstanding and that although only one contract could be completed per turn, several could be done per round! It was all a little too late for Green though. The extra free contract he got in the last round was a doozy, giving him another new contract when completed, but only yielding three points. Unfortunately the new contract released was also low value at only two points (although it was then easy to complete).

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Meanwhile, Black quietly got on with his game, regularly choosing the six camel resource and buying black dice to travel slowly from Beijing, down the board, and releasing the three action city. He used this to good effect gaining lots of purple resource bundles for contracts. It was while activating one of these city actions he revealed that the number on the die used indicated the number of times it could used. Cries of foul play came from Green and Ivory. Green had used a four spot on the “coins for houses” action before and Ivory would have used his six die on it this round instead of the five coin action space. Black scurried to the rules and discovered that for this “coins for houses” action, it was the number of houses which could be claimed for by the die. In other words, he could use a die of two to claim only two houses even if he had three. A player would need a three spot die to claim for all. So in the end, nothing changed for Ivory and Green, though it was something to try to remember for next time.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Ivory decided that money was important and regularly placed his die in the purse and the “five coin” action. He was able to do because he was gaining so many resources from Black and Green’s actions, thanks to his special character. This kept his contracts ticking over and he managed to travel around the board and complete all but one of his cities and get to Beijing. This left him with with a dilemma in the final round: he needed a high value die and used his spare camels to provide a black, but only rolled a one. Green gave him another camel (thanks to his resource collection). So Ivory placed in the favour track for two more and bought another black die, this time rolled a three… In the end he decided to just take coins to try to get an extra point.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

It was moot in the end. Green managed seven contracts in all, one more than Ivory and two more than Black, so Green got the seven point bonus after all. With twenty-nine coins at the end he was one short of an extra bonus point, though it wouldn’t have been enough. Black had made a mistake in his travelling and not got the cities he meant to – he failed to get one of his cards and only built two houses. Despite this, his ten point bonus for Beijing and several high value contracts gave him second place. Ivory had had a great game though, picking up six contracts, taking second place in Beijing, completing one city card and taking a full 10 points from four cities in total. It was more than enough to give him a three point lead and win the game. Ivory decided that Blue was right, he had really enjoyed The Voyages of Marco Polo.

– Image used with permission of
BGG contributor bovbossi

On the neighbouring table, Blue, Burgundy, Purple and Pine had started off with the “Feature Game”, Habitats, This is a very light tile laying game, which comes with small ceramic animals instead of the more usual wooden player pieces. There are a lot of tile laying games available, but there are a couple of things that make this one a little different. Firstly, tiles selection: there is an array of tiles and on their turn, players move their ceramic animal one step forward, left or right and take the tile it would have landed on and add it to their park. Players can add their tile almost anywhere they want, so long as it borders at least one other tile. The second unusual aspect of the game is the scoring: tiles feature an animal and a terrain, but to score they most be surrounded by a set number of other given terrain tiles. The game is played over four rounds with bonuses after the first three and final scoring at the end of the game. Pine, with his orange Camel started out very strongly making him a bit of a target, however, although there is plenty of interaction, it is quite difficult to interfere with their plans a lot. Burgundy started a little slower, but soon got his “extremely correct little Zebra” picking up tiles he wanted (as Pine said, “All zebras have a Hitler mustache and pink ears, don’t they?”).

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

Purple and her Penguin got a little trapped in the early stages, but got herself out of the mess quite quickly. The bonuses were for the most different landscape tiles in the first round, different numbers of areas in the second and for a small compact park in the third. They didn’t really seem to add much to the scores though, and with hindsight, some players might have done better ignore them completely as it is possible they were more of hindrance than a help since the most anyone got was five points (Pine and his orange Camel). That said, the final scores were quite tight, with Blue and her yellow Leopard finishing just five points ahead of Pine who took a solid second. On reflection, the difference was Blue’s effective use of Diagonal Tower tiles which allowed her to double score a lot of her animals. Interestingly, the most recent edition of Spielbox had had a review of Habitats and they had been decidedly unimpressed. While we agreed that it was quite a light game and certainly wasn’t long, the over-riding view was positive and Burgundy, summed it up when he commented, “Quite liked that”.

– Image by BGG contributor styren

The Voyages of Marco Polo was still underway on the next table, so the group decided there was time for something else. Pink had wanted to play Cottage Garden at the last Didcot Games Club meeting, but the number of players had been all wrong, so he had played it with Blue over the weekend. Since it was fresh in her memory, there was a good chance of getting the rules right. In any case, like Habitats, it is a fairly light tile-laying game, basically the boardgame equivalent of Tetris. Cottage Garden is similar to the earlier, two-player game, Patchwork, but with a slightly different front-end and scoring mechanism. The idea is that at on their turn, the active player chooses a tile from the appropriate row of the square “market garden”, and add it to one of their two flower beds. If they have completed one or both of their flower beds by the end of their turn, then they are scored.