Tag Archives: Keyflower

20th September 2022

Blue and Pink were the first to arrive to the news that The Jockey was under new management. Pine soon followed and after a bit of chatter, the three of them settled down to the first “Royal Themed” game, Love Letter. This is a very quick little game played with a deck of just sixteen cards. The idea is that players have a hand of one card and, on their turn draw a second and choose which one to play. The cards each have a special action and a number—the actions allow players to eliminate each other and the player with the highest number at the end is the winner.

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Powerful cards can lead to early gains, but are risky as they make players targets, however, relying on weaker cards for too long will give a guaranteed loss. This time, Pink was taken out twice in consecutive rounds by Guard cards with Pine and Blue sharing the spoils. In the third round, it was down to Blue and Pine again and Pine ran out the winner. Although with three players the winner is usually the first to win five rounds, as Green and Lilac arrived with Orange and Lemon, the trio called it a halt there.

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Ivory, Black and Purple turned up as well and as they arrived, everyone remarked on the new smart table decor. We were only waiting for Lime, but when Pine suggested he might not be coming, his text enquiry was met with the response, “OMG, it’s Tuesday not Monday, will be there in twenty minutes!” So, while the group were waiting, they decided to start with the “Feature Game“. To mark the passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, this was Corgi Dash, a re-theme of the 1986 Spiel des Jahres winner Heimlich & Co.. Corgi Dash was published as a “Jubilee Souvenir” earlier this year, by Tony Boydell; although we had a copy picked up at the UK Games Expo, as it was a special occasion we had enlarged the board to make it easier to play in a large group.

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The game is very simple: on their turn, players roll a die and distribute the pips amongst the “corgis” to move them round the board. When one of the corgis reaches the throne (either in the Throne Room or the Kennels), each dog scores with the one that triggered the scoring getting nothing. The Throne then moves to the next location, and the corgis continue to dash towards the Throne. Each player secretly “owns” one of the dogs and after one dog reaches a score of thirty, everyone secretly guesses which dog belongs to which player. The game ends when one dog reaches forty points. Players then score for their dog and receive five additional points for each identity they guessed correctly.

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Blue, Pink, Ivory, Purple and Pine got going first. In their game, the blue dog (well, meeple actually) got picked on early which marked it out as the dog with no owner. Unfortunately, the blue dog turned out to belong to Pine and it was the grey dog who had no owner, which became more apparent towards the end when everyone concentrated on their own hounds. The black dog was the first to get to thirty and then the only one to get to forty too. Ivory was the only one to guess more than one owner correctly, but it didn’t make any difference as the black dog’s score was twenty more than any other, making it’s owner, Pink, the clear winner.

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On the neighbouring table, Green (who had played Heimlich & Co. a very long time ago, explained the rules to Lilac, Orange, Lemon and Purple. They finished their game early, guessing after two scoring rounds and scoring after the third. Green’s dog did by far the best picking up thirty-two points, twelve more than any other hound. Orange did exceptionally well at guessing who had each dog, getting three right, but it wasn’t quite enough to take the lead and he finished two points behind Green, both some way clear of the field with Lemon a distant third.

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Corgi Dash was very quick to play leaving plenty of time for other games. With all the happenings around Buckingham Palace and Westminster over the last week, “London themed” games seemed appropriate, so while everyone else played Ticket to Ride: London, Ivory, Blue and Lime took themselves off to the other side of the room to squeeze in a game of Key to the City: London. This is a reimplementation of one of Blue’s favourite games, Keyflower. Lime, however, had not played either game, so Blue and Ivory had to explain the rules first.

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Like Keyflower, Key to the City: London is based on an a series of tile auctions where players bid with meeples. The rules for bidding are simple: players can bid on any tile, but if there is already a bid, they must follow with the same colour and increase the value. In addition to bidding for tiles, players can also activate a tile in their Borough, a tile in someone else’s Borough or even a tile that is currently up for auction. Again though, players must follow colour if the tile has already been activated or has an active bid, further, every time it is activated it costs one additional meeple.

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At the end of each round, all meeples in winning bids return to the bank and players take any tiles they’ve won and add them to their Borough. All meeples on tiles in a player’s Borough go back to that player, and any meeples used to activate tiles up for auction go to the winner of the tile. Tiles are worth points at the end of the game. Some are just worth points out-right while others are dependent on tiles they are connected to and all are worth more if they are upgraded. Connections are acquired by activating specific tiles; tiles are also upgraded by activating them and paying any associated cost.

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The winner is the player with the most points at the end of the game. While the mechanics of the game are fairly straight forward, like Keyflower the art of the game is combining them to score well. The Connections are the main difference between Key to the City and Keyflower, but there are several other smaller differences like the round endings, for example. In Keyflower, players bid for boat tiles which dictate how many meeples they get at the end of each round, but in Key to the City, when players choose to end their round place their boat in a position on the river. The earlier a player “checks out”, the earlier they can place their boat and the more meeples they can get—and meeples are scarce, very scarce, in both games.

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This time, Ivory with the Buckingham Palace player screen and start tile, went first. He began by winning Paddington Station which gave him telecoms (black) and electricity (grey) cable connections. He went on to couple this with St. Pancras, Kings Cross and the Royal Academy which gave points when connected with electricity cables and Marble Arch and Monument which gave points for telecoms cable connections. Lime understood the fundamentals, but was struggling with how to fit them into the game, so when he picked up Battersea Power Station which provided water (blue) and gas (yellow) pipe connections, he was encouraged to pick up the London Eye and Canary Wharf to go with it which ultimately proved good choices.

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Blue lost out in a couple of early bidding wars, so ended up with the Barbican instead, giving her underground tunnels (red) and waste pipe (brown) connectors and later Charing Cross (more underground tunnels and grey electricity cables). Maybe she’s spent too long with Pink, but she mostly chose to eschew sewage pipes and electricity pylons, instead focusing on trains, using them to make connections with the Royal Opera and the Globe Theatre. Unfortunately, there was a little “rules malfunction” in the early part of the game with a misunderstanding of one of the scoring icons. Instead of players scoring for connectors of the colour indicated connected directly or indirectly to a tile, players should only score for each tile connected to the scoring tile.

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The “rules malfunction” was spotted quite early, so although it added a little to Lime’s confusion, everyone had enough time to correct things before scoring took effect. In the final round, Ivory bid for the Natural History Museum which gave him points for monuments, and London Zoo giving him two points for each blue meeple he was left with at the end of the game. He then activated a few last tiles and set sail. Lime engaged in making lots of utilities connections, and bid for the British Museum and the Royal Festival Hall (giving two points for each tile won in the final round and three points for each tile connected by all six utilities respectively).

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Blue took the V & A Museum (giving points for sets of skills tiles) and the Science Museum (giving points for tiles with six connections). Then she made a mistake: with Ivory out and Lime running low on meeples, she had the opportunity to either out bid Ivory for London Zoo, or compete with Lime for the British Museum and in a fit of stupidity went for the latter. Blue’s error might have proved critical though as winning the zoo would not only have given her twelve points, but also taken twelve from Ivory. As it was, in the final count, Ivory took victory with a hundred and seventeen to Blue’s ninety-six and Lime’s seventy-eight.

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Meanwhile, on the other side of the room two games of Ticket to Ride: London were underway. Ticket to Ride is one of our current favourite games and the London variant, being one of our “local” editions is particularly popular. The game plays in the usual way with players taking cards from the market, using them to pay to place trains on the map and claim routes, or taking Tickets which give points at the end of the game if the two destinations are connected. Each map has an extra rules “tweak” and in case of the London edition players get bonus points if they visit all the places in a borough.

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When Pink asked Pine who the people were on the box there was a general aura of shock when he claimed not to recognise Emma Peel (though he did correctly identify Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II). Their game with Purple and Black started off very confrontationally in the centre of the board and carried on in much the same vein as the game developed from there. Pink took Pine’s dubious advice to take more tickets, but failed to score them. Pine got his comeuppance though when Black just pipped him to the line beating him into second place by a single point, while Purple took third.

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The other group managed to rattle through the game really quickly too as everyone knew what they were doing. Orange completed all his Tickets and triggered the end of the game. For everyone else it was a more frustrating game. Lilac was convinced she was going to lose as she had failed to complete one of her tickets finding herself blocked, but in the end finished second, significantly ahead of Green and Lemon. Green had tried the “gamers tactic” (espoused by Black on previous occasions) said all the best Ticket to Ride players do, namely collecting more tickets at the start of the game.

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This went OK until about half way through when he got blocked on his best route, then while trying to re-route got blocked again, forcing him to try a third option. This was blocked too and he was locked out of his key station, finishing with three incomplete Tickets. Lemon had tried the same strategy (collecting tickets first), but also ended up with a couple not completed. As a result, Orange wiped the floor with everyone else finishing with a score nearly three times that of his nearest competitor: a convincing victory.

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Key to the City: London was still underway, so, given Her late Majesty’s well known love of the gee-gees, the two groups got together to play Turf Horse Racing. It was a while since anyone in the group played it, so Green reminded everyone of the rules. The idea is very simple, players have three counters to use for betting, two small and one large, double weight one. In the first stage, players take it in turns to use these counters to bet on horses. In the second stage, players take it in turns to roll the die and move a horse to determine the outcome of the race.

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The game works because the die has three horses heads with one of each of the other icons, and each horse moves a different amount depending on what is rolled. Since each horse has to move before a horse can be moved again, players can choose to make a positive move for one of their own horses, or nobble someone else’s. Although the rules as written give the maximum number of players for Turf Horse Racing as six, the group thought it would stretch to more due to the way it is played. And given the hilarity that ensued, that seemed a really good decision.

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It was decided that due to there being so many players, perhaps three bets per player would create too many horses with multiple bets, so it was house-ruled to two bets only each: one big and one small. The extra bet tokens needed were taken from Ticket to Ride: a scoring disc and a bus. Pine was the sole “investor” in Roamin’ Emperor’s fortunes. Pink, trying to get his revenge for being misled in Ticket to Ride, cajoled everyone to choose this purple horse to move only one space, much to Pine’s annoyance. Pink got his way, but then got his comeuppance when someone made his chosen horse, Lagoon Lady, also move only one.

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After the first round it was Silver Blaze blazing a trail up front, closely followed by Mostown Boy and Raven Beauty. This theme kept repeating with Lagoon Lady and Roamin’ Emperor moving only one space a turn, until finally Pine struck gold and was able to shoot his horse forward by a massive fifteen spaces and get it into the leading group. It was a close race, and eventually Silver Blaze was overhauled and brought back into the pack. As the race entered it’s final furlongs Lagoon Lady was still languishing behind. Although it had made up some ground, Roamin’ Emperor was making better progress but also starting to fall back. One more “mega surge” would have been enough to put it within spitting distance of a win, however, that was not to be.

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In the end it was The Red Baron who crossed the line first, with Silver Blaze second and Desert Prince third. Adding up the betting totals, Lemon took home the biggest winnings with eight, with Lilac just one behind in second and Black a comparatively distant third. The conclusion was that Turf Horse Racing can definitely be played with eight, but maybe a little more tinkering is needed. Perhaps keeping the three bets, but with seven horses, the start player moved around the table very slowly—something to think on and investigate further perhaps.

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Learning Outcome: Her Majesty had a point—dogs and horses can be a lot of fun.

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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13th January 2022

Blue and Pink were the first to arrive, soon joined by Black and Purple. Others quickly rolled up and before long, everyone was discussing what they’d been doing over the holiday. Teal produced a new “Roll and Write” game that everyone could play together, called Trek 12: Himalaya, a game where players are climbing a mountain. He gave a quick summary and demonstrated how he’d raided the stationary cupboard so everyone quickly agreed to give it a go.

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The game has some prima facie similarities to On Tour which we played remotely a couple of times, in that two dice are rolled and their results combined. In On Tour, the results are simply combined to make a two digit number, so a two and a three can make a twenty-three or a thirty-two. In Trex 12, the numbers are combined by addition, subtraction or multiplication and additionally players can pick either the larger or the smaller individually, with each option available a total of four times during the game.

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Players are trying to make chains of consecutive numbers and groups of the same number—runs and melds, which represent ropes and camps respectively. At the end of the game, players score for the highest number in the rope (or camp), plus one additional point for every other connected point (which must be connected when they are played). Additionally, players score bonus points for the longest rope they make, and the largest camp, and penalties for any isolated numbers that are not part of a rope or a camp.

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It took a couple of turns to get going, but thereafter it was quite quick. The game has a sort of legacy element with alternative maps and envelopes that can be opened once certain challenges have been met, but we played the Dunai map and without any complications. Teal pointed out that although the first number can go anywhere, thereafter numbers must be written next to other numbers so it was wise to keep options open. Pink therefore started at one end, immediately demonstrating how to make the game more challenging.

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Pine and Blue seemed to be working to very similar strategies with a long rope and a large “Four” camp in the middle, though Pine made a better fist of it and finished in second place with sixty-eight. Ivory was the overall winner though, with lots and lots of short bits of rope of high value and a final score of seventy-two, well clear of the total needed to beat the game. Trex 12 had been both quick and enjoyable, so after that aperitif everyone was ready to move on to something a little more filling, and the group split into two, the first playing the “Feature Game“, Streets.

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Streets is a tile laying game by the same people as the very enjoyable Villagers. It is, perhaps, a little lighter and, rather than developing the occupants of a village, players are building a city, transforming it street by street, from a small town into a centre of culture and commerce. The turn structure is similar to more familiar games like Carcassonne: On their turn, the active player chooses a building tile, adds it to the town, places an ownership marker on it and then scores any completed features, in this case, Streets.

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Although there are similarities, there are a lot of differences: players have a hand of three tiles all of which represent buildings; as well as ownership tokens, the active player also places people on the building, then there are the tile placement and scoring rules. The building tiles have a road at the bottom and sky at the top and can be placed such that a Street, a row of houses, is extended by adding the tile to it in the same orientation, or terminated so that the road is perpendicular forming a junction. When both ends of a Street finish in a junction, the Street is closed and scored.

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Different buildings score in different ways, for example some tiles give points for people in the Street and others for the number of building symbols in the Street. There are a few little niggly little rules. For example, when scoring a Street players include the symbols on the street itself, but also any on a tile that terminates the Street and points towards it. There are other ways of scoring buildings as well, for the number of adjacent tiles or copying another building of choice in the Street for example. In addition to the money won for the building itself, players also score for the number of people on the tile scored.

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When a building is scored, the active player moves the people on to different building in another, open Street. This encourages players to terminate Streets even though they might not score themselves, because they can move people onto their own buildings elsewhere which means they will score more later in the game. There are a few other things that contribute to the decision making dilemmas. For example, players only have five ownership tokens, and if they run out, they have to take them from another building without scoring it.

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The game ends when all the tiles have been played and any remaining Streets are scored, but for half points (similar to Carcassonne). The basic game is quite straight forward, but although most people got to grips with it, the combination of small text, symbols, a little confusion of terminology and general tiredness meant others struggled with planning effective moves. Black took what was obviously an early march when he played his micro-brewery tile to “copy” another high-scoring tile in the same street, but Purple, Blue and Pine had their moments too.

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In the end, Black won with a cricket score of a hundred and twenty (well, a score that would have beaten England in the recent Ashes series anyhow). Blue, Purple and Black quite enjoyed the game and could see the its potential for adding expansions too. Definitely one to be played again, though Pine might need some persuading. Meanwhile, on the next table, Ivory, Pink and Teal were getting to grips with a game of Key Flow (Lime having taken an early night after another very early morning).

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Ivory and Pink have played Key Flow and its big brother, Keyflower, many times before (including relatively recently in October), but Teal was new to the game though he’d heard good things. In both games, players are building villages and activating the buildings in their villages by playing meeples (or rather Keyples) to generate resources and score points. The games have a lot in common including the artwork, the iconography and the fact both take place over four rounds or seasons, but the underlying game mechanism is different. In Keyflower, players acquire tiles by auction where in Key flow players gain cards by drafting.

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Key Flow is surprisingly straightforward to play, though doing well is a completely different matter. Players who start with a hand of cards, choose one and pass the rest on, adding their chosen card to their village before they get their next, slightly smaller hand. There are three types of card: Village cards, Riverside cards and “Keyple” cards. Village cards are buildings that can be activated by playing Keyples above them, while Riverside cards provide instant resources and skill tiles.

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The cards have to be “connected” together and location can be important. Buildings for example are more productive if they have been upgraded, but upgrading needs resources and the resources need to be moved to the building being upgraded. Similarly, in autumn there are some buildings which score points for resources they are holding. Therefore, it is helpful if the building producing the resources is near to the one being upgraded or used for scoring as moving resources can be expensive and sometimes difficult.

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Simlar to the Keyples in Keyflower, the Keyple cards are used to activate buildings and produce resources. Some can be played either in a neighbour’s village or the player’s own village. Other cards can only be played in the village one side or cannot be played in one’s own village. This is why three players is arguably the sweet-spot for Key Flow—with more players there is at least one village players cannot use, adding a level of randomness that it is difficult to deal with. With three however, everything in play is accessible, though perhaps at a cost.

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At the start of the game players get some winter cards which can act as objectives to guide players’ strategies; at the start of the final round players get to keep one of these with the rest going into the draft. At the end of the game, players score for any autumn cards, any buildings with upgrades as appropriate, any winter cards and finally one point for any otherwise unused gold.

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This time, Pink went for a “Scholar Strategy”, but changed his mind at the last minute to go for the Ranch instead. Teal went for a gold strategy with the Jeweller to double his score, and picking up both the Gold Mine and the Smelter, the latter of which he upgraded so he could exchange one skill tile for three gold. Unfortunately, Pink found that useful too and therefore got in his way somewhat. Ivory didn’t appear to have a strategy early on, but made sure he had plenty of resources he hoped would be useful later in the game.

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In the final round, Pink got his Scholar anyhow then lucked out and got the Trader too, while Teal’s flotilla of boats gave him a lot of options, but somehow he struggled to convert them into points. Ivory who had been keeping all his options open with a scatter-gun approach, managed to finish with a smorgasbord of points from pigs, Keyples, travel, and of course resources.

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It was not a surprise Ivory won as he always does well in this game, but Pink was very pleased to have run him close finishing just five points behind. With that, people started to drift off, a few people hung about for a while, just chatting, amongst other things, discussing what “Cotton Clouds and White Cashmere” smells like and whether the new soap in the Ladies really did smell of it…

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Learning Outcome: “Roll and Write” games aren’t only the preserve of “Remote Gaming”.

3rd Movember 2021

Blue and Pink were, unexpectedly, joined by Green and Lilac thanks to a clock-reading malfunction. So while Blue and Pink were dealing with their dinner, Green introduced Lilac to Tsuro. This is a very accessible game that we actually managed to play a little over a year ago from home, but is much better played in person. Each player starts with a stone lined up on the edge of the board and a hand of three tiles. On their turn, they place one of their tiles on the board next to their stone, and move their stone along the path on the tile, then replenish their hand.

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The aim of the game is to stay on the board the longest, with the last player remaining, the winner. It wasn’t long before Lilac had Green on the ropes and Blue and Pink urged her to take her chance and finish him off. It’s not in Lilac’s nature to go for the jugular, however, and despite the encouragement, she didn’t make the most of her opportunity. Inevitably, Green wriggled free and it wasn’t long before he was edging Lilac off the board himself. With the first game over, and Blue and Pink finishing their dinner, there was a little chatter before others arrived and players were deciding what to play.

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The “Feature Game” was to be Modern Art, which is an auction game where players are buying and selling art trying to make a profit with paintings valued by the number of artworks of that type that were sold. It is an older game, nearly thirty years old, and several people had played it before, albeit some years ago. When Green admitted that he hadn’t really enjoyed it, Pink was shocked and suggested that not liking Modern Art was akin to not liking puppies, at which point Green, much to Pink’s horror, admitted he wasn’t that keen on them either…

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Needless to say, when settling on games, Green took himself away from the slightly offended Pink and his copy of Modern Art leaving him (with his brick and sack comments), to play the “Feature Game” with Ivory, Blue and Teal. The game is a simple, yet clever auction game, and therein lies the problem—the group has had mixed responses to auction games. For example, the highly regarded Ra (like Modern Art designed by Reiner Knizia) received mixed responses when that was played, however, one of the all-time favourites, Keyflower, is an auction game at its heart (though to be fair it doesn’t really feel like one).

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The group (aside from Pink) was therefore slightly reticent, but went for it positively, and in the event, really enjoyed it. Each round consists of several auctions, each of which is conducted by a player. The auctioneer chooses one card from their hand which is auctioned according to the indicator on the card. There are five possible auction types: Open, Fixed Price, Sealed Bid, Once Round the Table, and Double (where two pieces by the same artist are offered at the same time).

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We were playing with the new Oink Games version, which features real modernist artwork from the likes of Mondrian, Kaminski and Ivory (who obviously has talent we were hitherto unaware of). When the fifth work by an artist is offered for sale, the round ends (without the final auction), and the works valued. The value depends on how many paintings were sold by that artist in the round, with the value increasing by $30,000 for the most popular. Players then sell their art to the bank, but here there is a catch. Players only get a return on art by the three most popular artists in that round—everything else is worthless. The value of the art that is sold, however, is the cumulative total including increases over all the previous rounds.

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Thus, players sell their art giving them money to buy more, and more expensive art in the next round. Although the mechanics are clever, what makes the game fun is the auctioneer’s pitch as they try to describe the work they are selling and draw the other players’ attention to its clear and obvious assets and up-sell it. One notable lot by Kaminski was initially described as “a cat’s pencil sharpener” and then to much hilarity as “a charming number depicting someone bending over picking up a fiver.” The game ends after four rounds and the player with the most money at the end wins.

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This time, players clearly had a bit of a fixation with Kaminski with his works being the most popular in the first round, with Hick and Mondrian making a distant second and third. The initial popularity of Kaminski inflated the perceived value of his work in the second round and, although fewer works were offered for sale, it still scored, though the Mondrian age was upon us. The third round was dominated by the works of Okamoto, putting in a brief, but valuable appearance for those that made purchases, as it provided funds for the all-important final round. This led to a resurgence of Hick as the most popular together with poor Ivory, who’s work had hitherto only had a brief period in the limelight in the second round.

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The eternal popularity of Kaminski continued until Blue brought the game to an end with a double auction ensuring Kaminski’s works gave a return again, and having scored in every round, they were very lucrative. Despite the game feeling like there was a lot of ebb and flow, the final scores were remarkably close with a mere twenty grand between first and third—fine margins indeed in a game where the scores were measured in hundreds of thousands and players reserves fluctuated wildly during rounds. It was Blue though, who made the most, finishing with $392,000, just ahead of Ivory (the gamer rather than the artist).

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Meanwhile, at the other table, Green, Lilac, Purple and Black (who also expressed a dislike of Modern Art, though not of puppies), were playing the puppy related game, Snow Tails. This is a fun race game where players are racing dog sleds along a winding track of varying complexity. The idea is that players have a hand of cards, which they play to adjust the dogs’ speed or apply the brake. When they play cards, they can play up to three (one for each dog and one for the brake), but they must all have the same value. The sled speed (how many spaces it moves) is then the sum of the dogs’ speed minus the value on the brake.

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Additionally, the sled will drift left or right by the amount by which the two dogs’ speeds differ. Players have to use this to negotiate corners and slalom round pine trees to get to the finish line. The cards come from their own personal decks, and this is where the game gets clever because players have to manage the cards they play to make best use of them. If a player crashes or goes into a corner with too much speed and exceeds the limit, they pick up a dent card. These occupy space in the player’s hand which means they have less choice.

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The first player to cross the line (or, in the case of a tie cross it and travel the furthest), is the winner. The group spent far too long debating which track to use. Lilac had not played Snow Tails before so the group did not want to make it too extreme, but also not too trivial for everyone else. In the end the group decided on a variation of “Treemendous” (chosen as it would fit on the “narrower than we would like” pub table) and swapping the first set of trees for a narrow canyon. Through random selection, Lilac was chosen as start player, but as she wasn’t sure how the game would play she took a gentle start so Purple, Green and Black shot past her at speed.

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Through the first corner and approaching the Canyon, Purple hit the side of the track and slowed up, while Green and Black raced forward. Lilac took her foot off the break and caught Purple, who was struggling to get her head around which side of the sled needed the higher number to move to the right to get around the corner. With the bend successfully negotiated Black slowed for the canyon, but Green decided to let rip through it. He made it in one go without hitting anything, but was on the outside for the next corner. Black took a steadier run through the canyon and came out on the inside of the corner behind Green.

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Lilac also maintained a steady pace taking a couple of turns for the Canyon, while Purple continued to dally at the back, hampered somewhat by her reduced hand size from her earlier crash. Black and Green raced to the forest, with Black reaching it just before Green. He “dropped an anchor” and came to an almost complete stop at the entrance right in front of Green, causing him to slow up sharply and swerve to the left instead of taking the route ahead he had planned.

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Black managed to clear the forest first but found himself drifting towards the outside of the long hairpin bend. Green was close behind, but his direction of travel sent him to the inside. Lilac continued her steady progress, avoiding the hazards and came through the forest unscathed in the middle of the track. Black and Green were racing hard: Black had the speed, but was forced to the outside of the track and wasn’t able to make progress while Green going more slowly on the inside, manage to squeeze past to get just ahead. Then it was a straight fight to the line.

– Image by boardGOATS

Black was able to lift his break to a one, but could only manage a double four, so he positioned himself less advantageously to try and block Green. It didn’t work as Green came off the corner on another track, but he was a little heavier on his break, so still on a two, and also a double four, Black managed to just slide past for the win finishing just ahead. Lilac continued her steady progress and finished the following round while Purple took a more leisurely ride through the forest, came out on the outside of the bend. Struggling to stay on the track on the way round the corner, she finally found her speed down the final straight and came flying off the end of the track, unfortunately a couple of rounds too late to win.

– Image by boardGOATS

Snow Tails was still going when Modern Art finished, but only just, so Tsuro got a second outing of the evening. This time, Blue was out first by killing herself and taking her piece off the board, quickly followed by Pink who committed harakiri in a similar fashion. That left them to cheer on Teal and Ivory. It was close and they were down to the last few tiles, but in the end, Teal took victory when he pushed Ivory off the board. As the huskies settled down for a well-earned nap, Pine arrived just in time for one last game of Bohnanza, replacing Green and Lilac who went home as they had an early start the next day.

– Image by boardGOATS

Bohnanza is one of our old favourites, and barely even needs a reminder beyond the rules that are specific for the particular player count. With six, players start with different numbers of cards, they plant one or two beans turn over two bean cards from the deck, plant and trade, then draw four cards to replenish their hand. Buying a third bean field is cheaper as well with six, costing two Bohnentaler instead of three. This is important because the game is shorter with more players and some players barely get a turn in the final round.

– Image by boardGOATS

As a result, buying a third field is always a bit risky, and the general consensus is that it is rarely worth it. This time was the exception that proves the rule however, with lots of people deciding to buy a third field. This had the unintended effect of shortening the game as more beans were left in fields at the ends of the rounds. This didn’t stop the usual hilarity when people made the occasional silly trades and players got unfeasibly lucky with the draw of the cards. This time the winner was Ivory, two Bohnentaler ahead of Pine, but in truth, we are all winners with a game that is so much fun.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: It is amazing how much money people will spend on tat.

6th October 2021

For the first time, the group were meeting on a Wednesday to avoid clashing with the Quiz on Thursday. As Blue and Pink waited for food they decided to squeeze in a quick game of NMBR9 to celebrate our ninth birthday. This is a quick little tile-laying game that has almost zero setup time, so is very appealing as a filler in this sort of situation. The tiles are poly-ominos roughly shaped like the numbers zero to nine and there is a deck of cards featuring each number, zero to nine, twice. Players take the appropriate number from the box following a flip of a card, and add it to their personal play-space.

– Image by boardGOATS

Tiles have to be placed in layers with tiles on higher layers being more valuable as the number on the tile is multiplied by the “storey” it is on. Tiles must be placed adjacent to another tile on the same layer and, when placing tiles on higher layers they must not be wholly over one other tile and must be completely supported (no bridging gaps or overhangs). This time, Pink managed to make it to four layers putting a seven on the top layer, his third “storey” to give twenty-one points. As a result he was sure he was going to win.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pink had fewer tiles on the second and, particularly third levels, though, where Blue had concentrated her efforts. The effect was very similar, so much so that there was only one point in it, but much to his disappointment, even several recounts couldn’t put the deficit in Pink’s favour. He was cheered up by the imminent arrival of his pizza though and they were still eating when Green, Lilac, and then Teal turned up. Since Green and Lilac had missed last time, they introduced themselves to Teal and there was some general chit-chat as everyone else turned up.

– Image by boardGOATS

Appropriately, as we were celebrating our ninth birthday, there were nine of us to play the traditional birthday “Feature Game“, Crappy Birthday, as we ate meeple decorated chocolate cupcakes. Crappy Birthday is a silly little party game but is a surprising amount of fun. As we explained the rules to Teal, we reminisced about last year, when we played it over two sessions (one wrapping our parcels and one giving them) in order to be able to play it online. Lime expressed his astonishment that it was a year ago, and everyone concurred that it didn’t feel like a year.

– Image by boardGOATS

Crappy Birthday doesn’t sound like much: the game is played over one “year” and each player takes it in turns to have their birthday, with everyone else choosing a card from their hand as a “gift”. The birthday boy or girl then chooses their favourite and least favourite gifts and the givers of these each get a point. As such, those gifting are trying to avoid the mediocre , in a similar way to Dixit, but “not as good” as Purple opined. While most people around the table would agree that Dixit is the better game, this group tend to get more fun out of Crappy Birthday because of the really silly gifts on the cards.

– Image by boardGOATS

The silliness of the gifts would get stale if we played the game more frequently, but we only play Crappy Birthday once a year and we usually only use around half the cards, so most cards only come out once every two years. It is a great way to find out about people though, so being new to the group, everyone thought Teal would be at quite a disadvantage. This year we found out that Pink was unimpressed by 100lb of raw fish, Lilac quite fancied a trying out a wingsuit and Blue would overcome the creepiness of 3am in the Paris catacombs as apparently they were hard to get to visit. Ivory, was torn between the opportunity to sing the National Anthem before a Major League Baseball game and getting his earlobes stretched, but went for the latter as his least favourite as it was more permanent.

– Image by boardGOATS

We discovered that Teal likes to keep his feet on the ground, so he eschewed a flight in a fighter jet, but really liked the idea of a Viking helmet. It was about this point that we were joined by one of the former bar staff who stuck about to help Pink with his gift selection. It seemed she didn’t really help a lot though as he completely failed to get any of his gifts picked as best or worst.

– Image by boardGOATS

From there, Purple nearly ended up instigating divorce proceedings when she received a set of camera scales from Black (a gift nobody else would have been prepared to give to anyone). Instead of fully justified revenge, however, Purple gave Black’s his favourite gift a campervan. Lime having just moved house eschewed recycled newspaper wallpaper, instead opting to decorate his new home with some modern art after some classes. DIY seemed to be in the air, as Green chose a house that needed renovation, though he volunteered Lilac to fix the roof.

– Image by boardGOATS

As usual, Lime’s amazing gift-giving skills meant he did well, but this time he was beaten into third place by Purple and, remarkably, Teal who tied for first place, with four—it seems Teal knows us all surprisingly well after just a couple of weeks! As people counted their scores and decided what to play next, the group put together a special selection of gifts for Pine who was running late thanks to a group of over-enthusiastic cubs whom he had been showing round his work. This special selection was tailor-made for a vegan who doesn’t like horses.

– Image by boardGOATS

From there, the group split into three, one led by Lilac who wanted to play Thurn und Taxis, one led by Ivory who wanted to play Key Flow and one led by Green to play with something short that Pine could join in with when he arrived. Thurn und Taxis is a slightly older, Spiel des Jahres winning game where players build postal routes connecting cities across Bavaria and surrounding regions. Routes are built city to city to city, so that each city is adjacent to the next city on the route and there is a road connecting these two cities.

– Image by boardGOATS

Players are building routes by collecting cards and playing them in front of them. Every turn, the active player takes a city card from the face-up display (or blind from the top of the deck) and then plays a card for a city connected to either end of their existing route. The card played, must connect to their route, otherwise they have to discard their route and start again. Then they can score their route if they choose, but each route must consist of at least three cities and players may build only one route at a time.

– Image by boardGOATS

If after adding to the route, the length of the route is at least three cities, the player may declare it finished and score it. Players start with a supply of twenty post offices in their colour, each of which is worth minus one at the end of the game. When they score a route, players place post offices in cities on the board, but they have a choice. Each city is in a region and each region has a colour, when a route is scored, the active player can either place one post office in one city in each of the region their route visits, or in all the cities on one of the regions their route goes to.

– Image by boardGOATS

When a route is scored, the active player can take a cart card. These give points, however, in the general case, the cart card must be one more than the previous one and the route must be longer than the cart number. Thus, if someone is scoring a six leg route, they can only take a level six card if their previous cart was a level five card. If they enlist the help of the Wainwright, however, if they have a level five card, they would be able to take a level six card with a route of only four legs. Once a route is scored, the city cards of that route are discarded, and the player begins a new route on their next turn.

– Image by boardGOATS

The Wainwright is not the only special character in the game: the Postman, Bailiff and Coachman are all there to offer help, allowing players to take a second card, refresh the card market and play a second card respectively. Players can only enlist aid once per turn though, so they must choose who they call on carefully. When a player exhausts their supply of post offices or acquires a value seven carriage, the end of the game is triggered with players continuing the round—the player with the most points wins.

– Image by boardGOATS

In addition to points for cart cards, there are also bonus points available for players to connect all the cities in a region or to have a post office in every outer region, as well as for players completing longer routes and for the player who triggers the end of the game. In general, bonuses score most for the first player to make the achievement with diminishing returns thereafter. This is therefore a consideration players must take into account, but the fact that players must add at least one city to their route each turn or lose the whole route is probably the most important aspect of planning in the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

Although Thurn und Taxis is an older game, Purple had not played it before, and it took her a while to get her head round it. She got to grips with it eventually, however, it was later in the game and Black and Lilac had already got a head start. It was very close between them though with the scores neck-a-neck until the last. Lilac triggered the end of the game by taking a level seven cart card and with it took what turned out to be the decisive bonus point, pipping Black with twenty-seven points to his twenty-six.

– Image by Lilac

On the next table, Teal had looked in the game bags and decided Azul was one he’d like to play. Green, Lime and Teal had just started without Pine when he inevitably arrived a couple of turns in. He politely eschewed their kind offers to start again, instead concentrating on his healthy supper of crisps and cake and choosing his gift. In Pine-like fashion, he chose to redefine the rules and decided his favourite gift was a hunting expedition as long as the subjects of the hunt were the people delivering the perkiness training in his other “choice” gift.

– Image by boardGOATS

We have played a lot of Azul and its derivatives (Stained Glass of Sintra and Summer Pavilion) over the last three years, but the original is probably still the favourite across the group. It is really very simple, and despite being an abstract game, the pieces are really nice. On their turn, the active player either takes all the tiles of one colour from one of the “markets” putting the rest in the centre, or they take all the tiles of one colour from the central pool. They then add the tiles to one of the rows on their player board. The catch is that all the tiles placed in any row must be the same colour and if they over-flow, they score negatively. Additionally, each colour can only score in each row once.

– Image by boardGOATS

Only complete rows are removed and scored, and then only at the end of the round (when all the tiles in the market and central pool have been taken). Thus if a player has a nearly complete row at the end of a round, they carry that through to the next round leaving them with less free space to work with. When a row is scored, one tile is moved to the player’s mosaic and scores for the number of tiles it forms a continuous row/column with. The game ends when one or more players complete two rows. This time it was a game of two halves, or rather two games. It had been a while since we played the original version (or any version for that matter), but it wasn’t long before Teal, Lime and Green were happily playing, filling their boards.

– Image by boardGOATS

Lime and Teal took an early lead and were soon well ahead of Green as he had concentrated on filling his grid from the bottom up, whereas they had been working from the top down. As the game progressed Green began to catch up. It was then that he realised that he’d forgotten what the game end trigger was. He’d thought it was when the markets could no-longer be refilled, but checked the rules to be sure. Only to find that two full completed rows had happened two turns earlier! The group decided to finish the round and make it the last. It was very close between Lime and Teal, with Lime just taking victory by three points. The other games were still going and it was not yet late, so the group decided to give it another go, and this time finish the game correctly.

– Image by boardGOATS

In the second game, Green built his grid from the top down and the scores remained fairly similar, until around half way through when Teal began to pull away. It was at about this point that Green noticed that one row had tiles of a colour he’d already scored for that row. No-one was quite sure how it had happened, but the mutual decision was that he’d move these tiles down to the next row. That turn didn’t go quite as expected, but at least it wasn’t a complete disaster. The following round, he discovered he’d done the same thing again. This time he worked out what he’d done: he’d had failed to clear the remaining tiles when he moved one across to the pattern board. So, on the previous turn, instead of moving tiles, he should have removed them. It didn’t really matter though as Teal won by a landslide.

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, Ivory, Blue and Pink had revised the rules, completed card set up for Key Flow, and had started playing. Key Flow is the card game of one of the group’s favourite games, Keyflower. In both games, players are building villages and activating the buildings in their villages by playing meeples (or rather Keyples) to generate resources and score points. The games have a lot in common including the artwork, the iconography and the fact both take place over four rounds or seasons. Fundamentally, the underlying game mechanism is different, however, with players acquiring tiles by auction in Keyflower and by card drafting in Key Flow.

– Image by boardGOATS

Once the card decks have been sorted out, Key Flow is quite straightforward to play, though doing well is a different matter. Players who start with a hand of cards, choose one and pass the rest on. They then add their chosen card to their village. There are three types of card: Village cards, Riverside cards and “Keyple” cards. Village cards are buildings that can be activated by playing Keyples above them, while Riverside cards provide instant resources and skill tiles.

– Image by boardGOATS

The cards have to be “connected” together and location can be important. Buildings for example are more productive if they have been upgraded, but upgrading needs resources and the resources need to be located on the building being upgraded. Similarly, in autumn there are some buildings which score points for resources they are holding. Therefore, it is helpful if the building producing the resources is near to the one being upgraded or used for scoring as moving resources can be expensive and sometimes difficult.

– Image by boardGOATS

At the start of both Keyflower and Key Flow players get some winter tiles/cards which can act as objectives to guide players’ strategies. Whereas in Keyflower these are just added to the tile draw, in Key Flow, players get to keep one of their winter cards with the rest going into the draft. At the end of the game, at the end of winter, players score for any autumn cards, any buildings with upgrades as appropriate, any winter cards and finally one point for any otherwise unused gold.

– Image by boardGOATS

One of the biggest differences between Key Flow and Keyflower is the way Keyples work. In Key Flow, they are cards and come in singletons and pairs. Each card has a small Keyple at the bottom of the card, and the number of Keyples needed to activate a building is one more than the number of small Keyples already there. So if there is one small Keeple already there, a pair would be needed to activate that building. Further, only one card is can be played each round, so if two small Keyples are already present, the Keyple card must be augmented with a Keyple token (obtained as a bonus with some cards or from some buildings).

– Image by boardGOATS

Further, the Keyple cards also feature arrows which indicate where they can be played. Some can be played either in a neighbour’s village or the player’s own village. Other cards can only be played on one side or cannot be played in their own village. This is why three players is arguably the sweet-spot for Key Flow—with more players there is at least one village players cannot use, adding a level of randomness that it is difficult to deal with. With three however, everything in play is accessible, though perhaps at a cost.

– Image by boardGOATS

It had been a while since Key Flow had been given an outing, so although game play is functionally straightforward, it took Blue, Ivory and Pink a while to remember the little features and how to make the game work for themselves. Pink started off early with an obvious strategy of generating stone, stone and even more stone from his Keystone Quarry. It was very clear, even to Pine who joined in to spectate about halfway through, that Pink had a winter card that would score for stone. And so it proved when he produced the Trader in the final round.

– Image by boardGOATS

Things were less clear-cut for Blue and Ivory, however. Blue started by just playing the cards in her hand, which meant she ended up with a lot of cows (just because). In summer, Ivory picked up a boat that allowed him to convert sheep into pigs and pigs into sheep, which went nicely with his animal scoring winter cards. Blue, on the other hand, very out of practice with this sort of game, just played tactically, and played for points. Her Workshop went well with the Mercer’s Guild she had in her winter cards, but the Well and Goldsmith, both fully upgraded gave her thirty-five points alone.

– Image by boardGOATS

Ivory had a bit of a nightmare and was unable to make the game work for him this time. This was made worse by a rule we only spotted towards the end which meant each Keyple card could only be used towards one goal and the fact he made a mess of things when he put a Riverside card in the middle of his village and had to make it work retrospectively. As he said sadly, although he had remembered how to play, he’d forgotten how to win. Pink, with his massive pile of stone thought he was in with a good chance, but they were actually only worth one and a half points each, so although he had a huge pile, it only gave him thirty-nine points and had taken a lot of work to get them.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pink was a little bit stymied by the fact he was banking on also getting a a sheep scoring card in winter, but Ivory took it before it got round to him. Blue on the other hand had lucked out when she picked up a lot of Keyple scoring cards that nobody else seemed interested in giving her over a hundred points and a comfortable victory. With that, Ivory left, as did Lime and Teal, leaving Green, Pink, Blue and Pine waiting for the conclusion of Thurn und Taxis, and time to play a couple of rounds of Love Letter. In the end, it really was just a couple of rounds and ended with a round a piece for Green and Pink, as the pub was closing and it was time to leave.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: While camera scales may seem like a good gift idea, in reality the giver will probably end up sleeping on the couch.

12th May 2020 (Online)

Having spent the last few meetings playing online using Tabletop Simulator shared through Microsoft Teams, this time we decided to do something a little different. One of the group’s most popular games is 6 Nimmt!, which also plays lots of people. It has unavoidable hidden information, but is available through the online platform, Board Game Arena.

– Image by boardGOATS

On our first online game night, a small group had had a difficult time playing Port Royal on Yucata. Some of the group had also played rather challenging games of Snowdonia and San Juan, and, as a result, had moved to Board Game Arena for three more recent, epic games of Keyflower. The graphics and playing environment on Board Game Arena are more up to date than those for Yucata, but like most other platforms, the servers have been struggling at peak times with the load caused by the recent influx of new online gamers. The folks at Board Game Arena have done a lot of work on that in the last couple of weeks though, and the performance has improved significantly as a result. So much so, that we felt reasonably confident it would be stable enough to be the focus of games night.

– Image by boardgamearena
on twitter.com

So, this week, the “Feature Game” was to be 6 Nimmt! played on Board Game Arena. This is a game that everyone knows well, though there are a couple of minor tweaks to the rules. The idea is that everyone starts with a hand of cards, ten on Board Game Arena (we usually play with the hand size that is dependent on the number of players). Simultaneously, everyone chooses a card, and then, starting with the lowest numbered card, these are added to the four rows in the display. Each card is added to the row that ends with the card with the highest number that is lower than the card played.

– Image by boardGOATS

Placing the sixth card in the row causes the active player to take all the cards in the row, replacing them with their played card. The clever part is that the score is the not the face value of the cards, but the number of “bull’s heads” shown on the cards. The aim of the game is to finish with the lowest score. When the group usually play, we split the deck into two halves and play just two rounds. On Board Game Arena, however, everyone starts with sixty-six points and the game end is triggered when someone’s score falls to zero.

– Image by boardGOATS

From 7pm, players began logging onto Board Game Arena and joined the MS Teams meeting. Lime was one of the first and his chat with Blue and Pink was interrupted by a phone call from one of Blue’s relatives trying to source a set of drain rods. Blue and Pink were quite convinced they didn’t have any, but that didn’t stop Pink having to spend the next hour hunting for some without success (so Lime kindly offered to lend his if required). While Pink rummaged in the garage, everyone else joined the meeting and chatted. Mulberry unfortunately wasn’t able to join us, but she was replaced by Ivory on his first online meeting. It was great to “see” him again after so long, and good to hear that Mrs. Ivory, Little Ivory and Littler Ivory were all doing well and might be interested in OKIDO.

– Image by boardGOATS

Eventually, Pink finished ferreting and returned to the chair kept warm by his panda and everyone settled down to play. The Board Game Arena implementation worked nicely and everyone was able to chat in the background using MS Teams, but also through the game’s “chat” channel. There was the usual moaning about the quality of cards and comments about how badly things were going: it was almost like playing together in the pub, though not quite.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Green and Purple managed to avoid picking up any cards for the first round or two, but it wasn’t long before their natural collecting mania began. The disease spread and soon Pine, Ivory and Black were picking up lots of cards too. It wasn’t long before Lime triggered the end of the game, and Burgundy managed to avoid picking up anything in the final round to win, ten points clear of the rest of the field.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

There is a lot of luck in the game, especially with so many players, but everyone was happy to play again and it is very easy to engage in a re-match, or so we all thought. It wasn’t until the second game had started that we realised we’d “lost” Lime somewhere along the way. He seemed to be playing a game, but then it dawned on him, that he’d somehow got himself involved in somebody else’s game by mistake. He was very embarrassed and was keen to extricate himself, but Blue worked out where he’d gone and shared the link. So, to the complete mystification of the four French gamers involved, the Brits all joined their game as excitable spectators.

– Image by boardGOATS

Everyone boisterously cheered on our British Representative, to the blissful ignorance of the French and huge embarrassment of poor Lime. Meanwhile, Black worked out how to abandon the incomplete game and Blue started a new one which everyone joined while still following Lime’s progress against the French. Lime played really well and was in the lead for much of the game, but sadly, one of the French finished strongly and just beat him. Still, we all felt he’d done an excellent job keeping the British end up, and he finished a very creditable second (especially since he was somehow also playing the group’s game and working!).

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

After all that excitement, our game was something of an anticlimax. Nobody was really paying much attention for the first part as they were distracted by Lime’s stellar performance. But when everyone focussed on the game again, Pine, Blue, Ivory and Green were fighting it out to at the top while Pink was doing his best to end the game nice and quickly. There were the usual smutty comments (Green: “Ivory’s got a big one there…!”) and other banter (Pine: “I had the lead for all of two seconds…!”), but eventually, Pink put everyone out of their misery, somehow leaving Blue just ahead of Pine.

– Image by boardGOATS
from boardgamearena.com

Nobody was desperate for an early night, so everyone chose the rematch option again, and this time, everyone ended up in the same game. It started quite close, but Black soon found the cards irresistible and quickly amassed an unassailable pile of brightly coloured cards. At the other end, Pink went from “zero” to “hero”, going from last place to first place, with Pine and Lime tying for second place. Nobody seemed keen to play another round and the evening degenerated into chatter. Pink shared how to customise backgrounds on MS Teams including a selection he had downloaded from the BBC, with one from Blake’s 7 and another from Multi-coloured Swap Shop.

– Image from youtube.com

This led to a discussion as to which was better: Swap Shop or ITV‘s offering, TISWAS. From there, Pine shared some of his album collection with a quick blast of The Goodies’ Funky Gibbon and everyone started sharing weird things on YouTube including sheep playing on roundabouts; a fluffy sheep with no facial features, and the world’s biggest dogs. Pine offered Pink a copy of the soundtrack to The Sound of Music on orange vinyl, a generous offer that was politely declined.

– Image by boardGOATS

With Lime, Ivory and Green gone, and everyone else clearly not ready for bed yet, but running out of chat, someone suggested another quick game. Once Blue’s maths had been corrected several times (ruling out all the five-player games), the group started a game of For Sale. This is a simple auction game of two halves. First, there is the property sale, where players take it in turn to bid for a building or pass and take the least valuable available. Then, players choose which properties to sell when the “buyers” reveal their offers (cheques).

– Image by boardGOATS

The clever part of this game is that the property cards are numbered (one to thirty), so they have a relative value with those numbered close to thirty more valuable than those around one. Everyone starts with $14,000 and bids are in $1,000 increments, but anyone passing takes the lowest value property available, but takes a rebate equal to half the value of the bid (rounded down). This adds an interesting level of decision making towards the end of each bidding round. In the second phase, cheques are revealed with values between zero (void) and $15,000. The player with the highest value of cheques and any left over money once all properties have been bought and sold, is the winner.

– Image by boardGOATS

Board Game Arena have a very nice implementation of For Sale, faithfully reproducing the original, quirky card art. There were a lot of controversially high bids, not least from Burgundy who paid $9,000 for the space station, the highest value property. It worked though, as Burgundy just pipped Pine to win by a mere $1,000, in what was a very tight game. It is a game where valuing property is key, both for buying and selling, and as it plays quickly, the group decided to give it a second try.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

This time, aside from Pink propping up the table again, everyone who had done well, did badly, and everyone who had done badly did well. So, Blue, Black and Pink were at the top this time, with Blue pushing Black into second place by $5,000. With that, Pine left the others to decide what long and drawn-out game they were going to play over the next fortnight, and everyone else eventually settled on Tokaido and set up the table to start the next day.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Learning Outcome: 6 Nimmt! est imprévisible dans toutes les langues.

28th April 2020 (Online)

People started to arrive online from about 7pm with Mulberry briefly joining the party to say that she was going to have to work and sadly couldn’t join in the game. It wasn’t long before everyone was once again sharing their stuffed toys, including Burgundy who’s new friend “Bunny” was watching over him from on high. While Blue and Burgundy set up the game, Lime proudly showed off his new haircut that Mrs. Lime had done for him, only for someone to comment that it made him look like a bit like Tin Tin…

– Image by Burgundy

The “Feature Game” was to be Tsuro, a very simple game of tile laying. The idea is that on their turn, the active player placed a tile in the space next to their stone and moves their stone along the path. The last player left on the board is the winner. The game plays lots of people, so was thought to be ideally suited to these online game sessions, but unfortunately, has hidden information in that each player has a secret hand of tiles that they play from. In order to accommodate this playing online (using Tabletop Simulator to visualise, shared through Microsoft Teams), we simply displayed two tiles and on their turn each player picked one.

– Image by boardGOATS

This reduces the amount of planning possible, making the game less strategic, more tactical and, potentially, more random. So to compensate a little and make it fairer, when any tiles with four-fold symmetry were drawn, they were put to one side as an extra option, a third tile, available until someone picked it. As there were a lot of players, we also decided to use the slightly larger board from Tsuro of the Seas, and modify the pieces to suit our purposes. Aside from this, the rules were the same as the original: players can rotate the pieces (or ask someone to do it for them), but they must place them in the space next to their piece.

– Image by boardGOATS

Once a tile has been placed on the board, all stones must be moved along any paths extended, and any that collide or go off the board will be eliminated. Burgundy started in the bottom left corner followed by Black, Purple and Lime, who was joined in the early stages by Little Lime who was keen to help. Pine with his special friend, Beige assisting, followed by Pink, Blue and Green with Lilac and his “pet” sloth in support. Everyone was fairly well spaced out around the edge of the board, so the game began quite slowly. That was OK though as everyone had to get a feel for the graphics and what they were doing.

– Image by boardGOATS from Tabletop Simulator on Steam

As the game progressed, people started to get entangled with each other. The first to come a cropper was Black with Pink not too far behind. Burgundy and Blue got stuck and went off together followed by Green who ran out options and then ran out of road. When Lime was eventually forced off the board by a lack of space, there were just two left. As Purple had to move into the space around Pine (playing on behalf of Beige), giving him the opportunity to push her off the board and claim the first victory for his little Gremlin.

– Image by boardGOATS from Tabletop Simulator on Steam

That had gone quite well and hadn’t taken very long, so as setting up has some overhead, we decided it would be quickest to just play it again. Blue and Burgundy re-stacked all the tiles and everyone chose their start positions. For some reason, this time Green ended up surrounded by lots of empty space while everyone else was bunched together. Green quickly put up a barrier and then went off to play with Lilac to play together alone in the corner, leaving everyone else to fight for space.

– Image by boardGOATS from Tabletop Simulator on Steam

Pine commented that Blue hadn’t moved far, but when she commented that she’d just been round in a circle, Pine objected inciting Pink to call him a “Boardgame Pedant”. Pine took this mantle with pride and said he might add it to his CV as it already said he was a “Bird-watching Pedant”. Blue queried this with “Bird-watching Pheasant?” and Pink upped the ante with “Bird-watching Peasant?” Pine concurred, “Yeah, that too…”

– Image by boardGOATS from Tabletop Simulator on Steam

As the game plodded on, Pink was the first to go off, soon followed by Lime and Black. Then there was a bit of a hiatus though as players got tangled up. Pine was the first who kindly eschewed the opportunity to expel Blue from the game (or maybe he had no choice); and then Blue returned the favour (also with no other option). Somehow, the paths kept getting entwined bring everyone to the same place, while Pine played with himself in the top corner, ominously.

– Image by boardGOATS

It was during this second game that the technology started to struggle a little and Teams kept freezing as the load on the network began to exceed the capacity of the village carrier pigeon. The game just about kept moving though, with Pink, bored having been the first to leave the game, started intimidating Blue with his large Panda. Blue and Pine were next off, thanks to Purple, who had to choose who was going to stay in the game with her. In the end, her choice of Burgundy proved to be unfortunate as he ruthlessly dispatched her on his next turn. It didn’t make much difference though, and Green with lots of space and no competition was the winner. Although his second tile had been crucial to his success, it was really the unintentional assistance from Pine when he played a convenient blocking tile in E5 that clinched it.

– Image by boardGOATS from Tabletop Simulator on Steam

With that over, there was a little bit of chit chat about other game options that would work online: Finstere Flure was an option on the Simulator, but 6 Nimmt! on Board Game Arena was discussed, as was Take it Easy! with pieces delivered by Blue and Pink. That didn’t last long though as the evening degenerated into comparing soft toys again (“Is that Kingston Bagpuss?!?!”) accompanied by renditions of songs by The Eagles. As Green, Lilac and Pine melted away, Blue, Pink, Purple, Black and Burgundy played a few turns to get to the end of Spring in their Keyflower rematch. But that’s another story…

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Learning Outcome: With all this “working from home”, the Stanford Carrier Pigeon needs a good feed.

18th February 2020

Food was a little delayed, so we decided to start playing something. Food was clearly on our collective minds though, because we opted for a starter of Point Salad. This is a very simple set collecting game where players take cards from the market. The cards are double sided with brightly coloured vegetables on one side and scoring conditions on the other. The market consists of three piles of cards showing the scoring condition sides, and six cards showing the reverse, the vegetable side. The number of cards a player can take depends on where they take it from: one scoring card or two vegetable cards.

– Image by boardGOATS

Each pile of cards feeds one pair of vegetables. So, when a vegetable is taken, a scoring condition card is turned over to reveal its vegetable side, and that scoring condition is no longer available. Players can also, once per turn, turn over one of their scoring cards so it becomes a vegetable, but they may never turn over a vegetable to make it a scoring card. The game is over when all the cards have been distributed, and the scores have been totaled. One of the more unusual things about this game is that both vegetable and scoring cards can be used more than once. So, a player with a card giving points for sets of onion, cabbage and carrot (i.e. coleslaw), can score it as many times as they have sets. Furthermore, if they also have a card that scores for pairs of carrots and lettuces (i.e. rabbit food), they can reuse the carrot cards and count them a second time.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pine began collecting lettuces, an obsession with green things that ended up lasting the whole evening. Burgundy was more obsessed with red things, specifically tomatoes, so Mulberry, Black and Purple took great delight in snaffling them first, even when they didn’t help. Blue only needed mayonnaise for her coleslaw as she collected onions, cabbages and carrots and generally made a nuisance of herself with Mulberry, sat to her left. Food arrived before the game finished, and with people getting distracted by pizza and chips (always more appealing than salad) it is possible there were some missed opportunities. It was tight finish at the front with only six points between the winner and third place. Sadly, despite everyone else’s best efforts, Burgundy top-scored with fifty-six, ahead of Mulberry and then Blue.

– Image by boardGOATS

Once everyone had finished eating, it was time to decide who would play what. The “Feature Game” was The Isle of Cats, a tile-laying game where players are rescuing cats and packing them onto their ship. There were a lot of takers, none of which were keen to back down (even though Mulberry misunderstood and thought it was called “Pile of Cats” which, on reflection, does sound very exciting). The game is not terribly complicated though we did make a bit of a meal of it. It is played over five rounds, each of which starts with card drafting. Players are dealt seven cards and keep two passing the rest to their neighbour; this is repeated until they receive only one single card.

– Image by boardGOATS

The cards come in five different colours: blue, green, yellow, brown and purple. Blue cards are Lesson cards which are really just Objective cards, but these come in two types, personal and public. Yellow cards depict some combination of “Boots”, “Cat Baskets” and “Broken Baskets”. Boots are useful because they dictate where you come in the turn order, while Baskets are needed to used to “pay” to rescue Cats. Yellow cards are treasure cards, brown cards are special “Oshax” cat cards and purple cards are instant effect cards that can be played at any time.

– Image by boardGOATS

At the start of every round, each player receives twenty Fish which are used to pay for both cards and Cats. So, once the cards have been drafted, players choose which ones they want to buy. with prices varying from free to five Fish. The rest are discarded. It is imprudent to over-spend, as Fish are also needed later in the round to lure cats off the island and onto the players’ ships; some cats are easier to lure than others, with cats on one side of the island costing three Fish and others costing five Fish.

– Image by boardGOATS

Once everyone has paid for their cards, they must play any blue Lesson cards they kept in the round. Any Public Lessons are revealed while Private Lessons are kept to one side face down. Players then play their green cards—this is the guts of the game. Players do not have to play all their green cards straight away, some can be kept for later rounds. The number of Boots played are counted up, and the turn order is adjusted according to the number of Boots played so that the player with the most goes first and so on. Player then take it in turns to spend one of their baskets and the appropriate amount of Fish to take one of their Cats and place it on their ship.

– Image by boardGOATS

Each player starts the game with one “Permanent Basket” which they can use once per round, aside from this, the other Baskets usually come from the cards played or other Permanent Baskets acquired later in the game. The Cats come in five different colours and are depicted on polyomino tiles which are placed on the players’ Ship-player boards. At the end of the game players score points for grouping Cats of the same colour together in Families: the larger the Family the more points. So, a group of three Cats of the same colour will score eight points, while a Family of ten Cats scores a massive forty points. In addition, players lose one point for each rat they have failed to cover with a cat, and lose five points for each room they fail to fill.

– Image by boardGOATS

Thus, perfectly tessellating Cats is the aim of the game, but additional points are also available from the Lesson-objective cards. It would be quite a challenge to perfectly tessellate tiles while keeping cats of the same colour together and conforming to the arbitrary objectives given in the Lessons, however, there are a couple of things to help grease the wheels. Players who cover Scrolls on their Ships with a Cat of the same colour can add a Treasure tile to their ship for free—these are small tiles that are very useful for filling in holes. There are only five scrolls though, one of each colour.

– Image by boardGOATS

Additionally, however, once everyone has run out of Baskets, they can also play their Rare Treasure, yellow and brown cards. The yellow cards enable players to place more Treasure tiles while brown cards allow players to place the very rare Oshax Cats (or “Oh, shucks!” Cats as we mostly called them). These are very friendly Cats and will join any Cat Family of the player’s choice, though they have to pick the colour when they place it. The cards are quite rare and very expensive, but a couple of these can be a really good way to boost the size of a Family.

– Image by boardGOATS

In addition to Baskets on cards, each player starts with one Permanent Basket which they can use once per round. Blue started the game quickly, by playing two lesson cards followed by a special card which enabled her to swap them for a second Permanent Basket. Everyone looked on agog, envious of the advantage that would give, however, it had cost a lot of Fish, and she spent the rest of the game trying to recover. Mulberry struggled to get some useful cards, but eventually managed to get a Permanent Basket of her own while Burgundy managed to get a couple of his own and he concentrated on trying to make sure there were no gaps round the edge of his boat to fulfill Lesson 113 to give him twelve points.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pine meanwhile, continued his obsession with green and hogged all the green cats. Since cards are drafted most of the cards are seen by some of the other players, so when he said he wasn’t sure how one of his Lesson cards worked, Blue and Burgundy knew exactly what his problem was. The Lesson in question was Card 222 which gave ten points for each row of twelve containing at least twelve cats of the same colour. Green’s queries concerned whether the row had to be continuous or whether they could be broken up by treasure, and whether Oshax cats counted. We said they didn’t have to be continuous and Oshax cats counted so long as they were the right colour. As a result, Pine’s green car family continued to grow, now forming long rows, lots of them.

– Image by boardGOATS

It was in the final round that Mulberry turned nasty playing Public Lesson Card 235 which meant anyone who didn’t have seven treasures would lose five points, which inconvenienced Blue quite a bit. When it came to scoring, it turned out that we weren’t quite right with the rule for Card 222—the rows should have been continuous. That might have cost Pine ten or even twenty points, though of course had he known that, he would likely have been able to offset that a little. It wouldn’t have mattered anyhow as finished with ninety points and a huge lead. Over thirty points behind, it was close for second, but Burgundy, who just managed to ensure there were no gaps at the edge of his boat, pipped Blue, by two points.

– Image by boardGOATS

There are a number of really nice things about The Isle of Cats. Firstly the production quality is stellar and there are some really, really nice touches. The cat artwork is fantastic and the fancy screen-printed cat-eeples from the deluxe upgraded version are quite special. Unquestionably, we made a mistake playing with five the first time round—we were slow, with a lot of people spending a lot of time checking whether tiles would fit and that made the game even slower. Mulberry commented that she disliked variable turn order as a mechanism: it is common in lots of games, but tends to encourage a lot of pauses followed by queries about whose turn it is. The are other little things like the fact the purple and brown cards could have been more distinct. Overall, it definitely deserves another chance, but it might be hard to get some of the players from the first time to give it a second try.

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, on the next table, Ivory, Black and Lime, started off with Key Flow. This was particularly sad for Blue to see, because Key Flow is a sort of card game of Keyflower, one of her favourites. That said, Key Flow had been played at our sister group, the Didcot Games Club, just a few days previously, so she consoled herself with the memory of that and concentrated on The Isle of Cats. Although Key Flow has a lot in common with Keyflower, it has a very different feel. Where Keyflower is really an auction game (using meeples as currency), Key Flow is a card drafting game. So, in Key Flow, players start with a handful of cards, simultaneously choose one and place it face down, passing the rest on.

– Image by boardGOATS

Players then simultaneously reveal their card and add it to their village before picking up the hand they’ve just been given, selecting another card and so on. Like Keyflower, the game is played over four seasons, and like Keyflower players receive some of the Winter offerings at the start of the game which they can then use to drive their strategies. The iconography is very similar too, so a player who is familiar with Keyflower generally feels at home with Key Flow. The cards come in three flavours: village buildings, riverside buildings and meeples. Village cards are placed in a player’s village, in a row extending either side of their starting home card. Riverside tiles are placed in a row below, slightly off-set.

– Image by boardGOATS

Meeple cards are used to activate Village cards by placing them above the relevant building. As in Keyflower, buildings provide resources, skill tiles, transport and upgrades. They also provide meeple tokens which can be used to increase the power of meeple cards or activate a player’s own buildings at the end of the round. Arguably the clever part is how the meeple cards work. At the centre of each card there are a number of meeples which dictate the power of the card. A single meeple card can be played on any empty building; a double meeple card can be played on an empty building or one where one other card has already been played.

– Image by boardGOATS

If two cards have already been played, a triple meeple card is required to activate it a third and final time. Alternatively, a lower power meeple card can be played with one of the meeple tokens, which upgrade a single meeple card to a triple meeple card. Double meeple cards can also be upgraded, but each building can only be activated a maximum of three times per round. The really clever part is that the meeple cards have arrows on them indicating where they can be played: in the player’s own village, in the neighbouring village to the right, the village to the left, or some combination.

– Image by boardGOATS

Black began the game by adding the Key Mine to his village which provided him with iron (wooden, black octagonal prisms). In summer he added the Smelter which added more iron producing capacity (converting skill tiles), but he quickly upgraded this to give gold instead as it is more versatile and can be used instead of any other resource and any left overs are worth a point each at the end of the game. Ivory also had resource providers in the shape of the Workshop which provided him with a wood, an iron and a stone every time it was activated. He then added an Apprentice Hall which generated skill tiles.

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, Lime built a village strong in gold production, with the Gold Mine and Brewer and potentially the Carpenter too if he could upgrade it. To his village, Black added a flock of sheep on his river bank while Ivory added a heard of pigs; Lime was more of a mixed farmer though with a bit of everything. As the game progressed into the scoring rounds, Ivory added a Truffle Orchard which gave him four points for each pig and skill tile pair, allowing him to put all his pigs to good use netting twenty-four points.

– Image by boardGOATS

Lime and Black pulled in similar points tallies with their Emporium (four points for each green meeple and gold pair) and Traveller’s Lodge (points for transport and boats) respectively. With similar points for their upgraded buildings as well, it was close and the smaller contributors became really important. Ivory’s Trader which scored him fifteen points for stone and axe skill tiles, while both Black and Lime scored ten points for their Autumn stores (Stone and Timber Yards respectively).

– Image by boardGOATS

Perhaps it was the points he got from the meeples (Winter Fair and Craftsmen’s Guild), but there was only two points between first and second in the end. Black finished with a total of seventy-one points, just enough for victory—a couple of points more than Ivory, with Lime not far behind. It had been a hard fought game, and Ivory was impressed how the Scribe, which in Keyflower he felt was always a winner, had little effect. For him, this made the game more interesting, though he had really enjoyed the last time the group played Keyflower with the Farmers expansion, as that had also mixed things up.

– Image by boardGOATS

Given the recent game with the Didcot group it was inevitable that a comparison was going to be made. This time Black won, but he scored fewer points than he had the previous week when he had come second. Perhaps the most marked difference was how much quicker the three player game of Key Flow had been than the six player game a few days earlier. Where the six player game had taken all evening, there was still time for something small, and with Lime taking an early bath, Ivory and Black chose to play a head-to-head of Ticket to Ride: London.

– Image by boardGOATS

Ticket to Ride is a train game with an inexplicable alure, which everyone in the group loves and we’ve found that the small versions of the game, New York and London make excellent fillers. The rules and game play are very similar to the full versions, but the take half the time, and with just two players, that makes it a very short game indeed. On their turn, players take coloured cards or spend them to place their pieces on the map. Points are awarded for completing tickets, but critically, failing to connect two locations marked on a ticket will score negative points. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.

– Image by boardGOATS

This time, Ivory built a network connecting Brick Land and the Tower of London in the East with Hyde Park in the West, while Black joined Regent’s Park in the North with Waterloo and Elephant & Castle in the South. The crunch point came in the area around Covent Garden, but despite this, both players managed to complete all four of their tickets. This meant it was down to the length of the tickets and the number of pieces placed—Ivory had the edge on both of these. His revenge for the result in Key Flow was completed by a four point bonus for connecting all four in the St. Paul’s district resulting in a ten point victory. With that, Ivory headed home, leaving Back to watch the end of The Isle of Cats.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Games take longer with more players.

Golden GOAT Award Winners – 2019

The second Golden GOAT Award was announced at the boardGOATS 2019 “Un-Christmas Dinner” on Tuesday. As last year, we also gave an award acknowledging our least favourite game of the year, known as the “GOAT Poo” prize. Only games played at a GOATS games night since the 2018 Un-Christmas Dinner could be nominated, and, in a slight change to the rules from last year, everyone had three points to hand out for the Golden GOAT Award (plus a bonus if wearing Festive Attire), and everyone could nominate up to two individual games for the GOAT Poo Prize.

– Image by boardGOATS

This year there were a number of popular nominees, including Gingerbread House, Lords of Vegas, Villagers and Tokaido, with Boom Boom Balloon getting several honourable mentions for being very silly, but a lot of fun. There was some surprise that Terraforming Mars, Keyflower and last year’s Golden GOAT winner, Altiplano, had all not been played (we must make sure we rectify that next year). This was perhaps a measure of how strong the field was, and many people commented that there wasn’t a stand-out “bad game” for them. Tapestry was a strong candidate for the unofficial “GOAT Marmite-factor” Award receiving nominations for both prizes and added controversy, with a suspicion that its nomination for the GOAT Poo Prize was based purely on the appearance of complexity rather than any actual experience.

– Image by boardGOATS

The winner of the “GOAT Poo” award was 7 Wonders, with nearly a third of the group nominating it; it is clearly another Marmite game though as there were plenty of people keen to jump to its defense. The clear winner of the Golden GOAT 2019, however, was Wingspan, with Key Flow an equally clear second (the Silver GOAT perhaps?). Both are excellent games and very deserving choices; we look forward to playing them more next year.

– Image by boardGOATS

5th March 2019

The evening started with lots of chit-chat including discussions about the smell of weed (the cheap stuff is called skunk for good reason apparently), a Czech bloke who was eaten by his illegally kept lion and the fact that Pine was feeling very poorly (which ultimately turned out to be a nasty case of cellulitis rather than man-flu). Meanwhile, lots of pancakes were eaten and there was a mix-up between Blue’s and Green’s leading to much hilarity. The return of Ivory after a a couple of months on “sabbatical” heralded the long awaited Key Flow, as the “Feature Game”. Key Flow is a card game version of one of our favourite games, Keyflower, and before Ivory left we promised we would save it for his return.

– Image by boardGOATS

Purple and Black quickly excused themselves from playing Key Flow, and with Blue, Burgundy and Green joining Ivory, the group divided into two with unusual alacrity. Blue and Burgundy explained the rules, which though related to Keyflower (and by extension, Key to the City: London) with familiar iconography and similarly played over four seasons, give the game a very different feel. Key Flow is a very smooth card drafting game, so players start with a hand of cards and choose to one to play and hand the rest on to the next player. The cards come in three flavours: village buildings, riverside buildings and meeples. Village cards are placed in a player’s village, in a row extending either side of their starting home card. Riverside tiles are placed in a row below, slightly off-set. Meeple cards are used to activate Village cards by placing them above the relevant building.

– Image by boardGOATS

As in Keyflower, buildings provide resources, skill tiles, transport and upgrades. They also provide meeple tokens which can be used to increase the power of meeple cards or activate a player’s own buildings at the end of the round. Arguably the clever part is how the meeple cards work. At the centre of each card there are a number of meeples which dictate the power of the card. A single meeple card can be played on any empty building; a double meeple card can be played on an empty building or one where one other card has already been played. If two cards have already been played, a triple meeple card is required to activate it a third and final time. Alternatively, a lower power meeple card can be played with one of the meeple tokens, which upgrade a single meeple card to a triple meeple card. Double meeple cards can also be upgraded, but each building can only be activated a maximum of three times per round.

– Image by boardGOATS

The really clever part is that the meeple cards have arrows on them indicating where they can be played: in the player’s own village, in the neighbouring village to the right, the village to the left, or some combination. In the four player game, this means everyone has access to the buildings in three of the villages, but not the fourth (located opposite). And in this game that was critical for Blue. As in Keyflower, players begin the game with a small number of winter scoring tiles (cards in Key Flow), which can be used to drive their strategy. In Key Flow, each player additionally chooses one at the start of the final round, so they know they are guaranteed to keep one of these and can invest more deeply in one strategy. As a result, Blue was caught in a difficult situation. As the game developed, Burgundy and Ivory both collected a lot of skill tiles; Blue was also interested as she had received the Scribe winter card at the start which gives seven points for every set of three different skill tiles.

– Image by boardGOATS

Unfortunately for Blue, she could only get pick-axe skill tiles and Green sat opposite, had the Hiring Fair which would have allowed her to change some of them, but the seating position meant she couldn’t use it. Ivory had other plans, however, and was busy picking up pigs and sheep. Burgundy was producing gold and Green was producing wood. Everyone was hampered by a paucity of coal as the Key Mine and miner cards were among those removed at random at the start of the game. The game progressed through the seasons, and the game is very smooth, with more restrictions on the decisions and less of the negative, obstructive bidding that often features in Keyflower, making it a bit quicker to boot, though the setup is a little tedious.

– Image by boardGOATS

Blue and Green were not in the running which was notable as they usually both do well with Keyflower, but both had struggled to get the cards or skill tiles they needed for their strategies. In truth, though the theme is similar and the iconography and some of the mechanisms are the same, the two games are really very different, so perhaps it was not so surprising after all. It was very, very close between Ivory and Burgundy at the front though, with just two points in it. Ivory had no points from autumn cards, but a lot of upgrades and lots of points from his winter tiles. In particular he scored well for his Truffle Orchard, which rewards players for having a lot of pigs and skill tiles, that he coupled with the marvelously named Mansfield Ark which allows pigs to be replaced with sheep. In contrast, Burgundy had fewer upgraded buildings, but a lot of autumn cards that scored points for him, especially his Stoneyard. It wasn’t enough though, and despite Green dumping his winter tile to try to limit Ivory’s scoring options, Ivory just beat Burgundy into second place—Welcome back Ivory!

– Image by boardGOATS

While Blue and Burgundy explained the rules to Key Flow and set up the decks of cards, the other debated what to play. Auf Teufel komm raus came out of the bag and then went back into the bag when Purple decided she didn’t want to play it, only for it come back out again in response to the chorus of protests, and this time make it onto the table. This is a game we played for the first time a few weeks ago and enjoyed though we struggled with constantly making change due to a shortage of poker chips that make up the currency. Thanks to the very kind people at Zoch Verlag, now furnished with a second pack of chips, it was time to play again. The game uses “push your luck” and bidding in combination to make a simple but fun game.

– Image by boardGOATS

Everyone simultaneously places bets on the maximum value of coal that will be drawn out of the fire by one player in the round. Players then take it in turns to draw coals, either stopping when they choose or going bust if they draw a piece.This time, despite her reluctance to play it, Purple started very quickly and held the lead for most of the game. Like last time, Mulberry skulked at the back, and abused this position to overtake Pine at the end by making a pact with the Devil. Black stayed hidden in the pack for the majority of the game and then, in the final round pushed the boat out and gambled big. In this game going large can lead to a spectacular win or equally spectacular loss. This time, the gamble paid off and Black raked in a massive three-hundred and eighty points taking him just ahead of Purple in the dying stages of the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

With Auf Teufel komm raus over and Key Flow still underway, Purple was able to choose a game she wanted to play, and picked Hare & Tortoise. This is an old game, the first winner of the Spiel des Jahres award, forty years ago. The game is a very clever racing game where players pay for their move with Carrots, but the further they move the more it costs. The icing on the cake are the Lettuces though: each player starts with a bunch of Carrots and three Lettuces—players cannot finish until they have got rid of all their Lettuces and nearly all of their Carrots. On their turn the active player pays Carrots to move their token along the track; each space has a different effect including enabling them to eat Lettuces, but each will only hold one player’s token at a time.

– Image by boardGOATS

Competition for these Lettuce spaces is always fierce, but that’s not the only stress, as efficiency is key, players who move too fast consume their Carrots too quickly and have to find a way to get more, which slows them down. The winner is the first player to cross the finishing line, but that’s only possible if they’ve eaten all their Lettuces and almost all of their Carrot cards. Last time we played Hare & Tortoise, it was six-player mayhem and a real scrabble as a result. This time with just four, it was still a scrabble, but not quite as intense. Black got his nose in front and managed his timing very effectively so was first to cross the line. Pine and Mulberry were close behind, the latter just two turns from crossing the line herself.

– Image by boardGOATS

Hare & Tortoise finished at about the same time as Key Flow; Pine had looked like death all night and Mulberry had an important meeting in the morning so both left early. Ivory, on the other hand, said he would stay for another game so long as it was short, so the rump of the group settled down to an old favourite, 6 Nimmt!. Everyone knew the how to play: players simultaneously choose a card, then simultaneously reveal them before playing them in ascending order placing each on the row ending with the highest card that is lower than the card being played. When the sixth card is added to a row, the first five are taken and the number of heads contributes to the player’s score, lowest score wins. We tend to play a variant over two rounds with half the deck in each round and not resetting the table in between.

– Image by boardGOATS

This time, Blue continued her poor run of form and top-scored in the first round with twenty-six, closely followed by Purple with twenty-two. With a round to go, Burgundy, Ivory, Green and Black were all still in with a shout though. Unusually, the second round went very similarly to the first, with Purple top-scoring with thirty-one (giving her a grand-total of fifty-three), Burgundy and Ivory getting exactly the same score as they had in the first round, and Green finishing with a similarly low score. Only Black and Blue had significantly different scores, and while Black’s second round score destroyed his very competitive position from the first round, nothing was going to put Blue in with a chance of winning. It was Ivory, again, who was the winner though, with a perfect zero in both rounds—two games out of two on his return (while we are very pleased to see him back again, we’ll have to put a stop to this run!).

– Image by boardGOATS

Ivory decided to quit while he was ahead, leaving five to play Sagrada with the expansion. Sagrada is a similar game to Azul, using dice instead of tiles and with a stained glass theme (which was slightly controversially also used in the recent Azul sequel, Stained Glass of Sintra). In Sagrada, each player has a grid representing a stained glass window. At the start of the round, a handful of dice are rolled, and players take it in turns to choose one and place it in their window. Once everyone has taken one die, everyone takes a second in reverse order (a la the initial building placement in Settlers of Catan). This leaves one die which is added to the Round Track—the game ends after ten rounds, i.e. when after the tenth die has been placed on the Round Track.

– Image by boardGOATS

When players place dice, they must obey the restrictions on the window pattern card selected at the start of the game. This time we played as well as two cards from the main decks (Gravitas for Purple and Firmitas for Black), we also used three promos: Vitraux (Blue), International Tabletop Day (Burgundy), and Game Boy Geek (Green; ironic as he’d never had a Game Boy in his life!). This doesn’t score any points they come from the objectives: public, which are shared and private which are personal. This time, the public objectives awarded points for columns with different colours, rows with different colours and columns with different numbers. The original game only included enough material for four players, but the recent expansion provided the additional pieces for the fifth and sixth, and four of the five private objectives came from there, giving those players the total face value of dice played in specific places.

– Image by boardGOATS

In addition to the private objectives, the group also decided to use the private dice pools. When these are used, players only take one die from the draft (instead of two), taking the second from a pool rolled at the start of the game. The final part of the game is the tool cards, three of which are drawn at random. These can be used by players to help manipulate dice after they’ve been rolled or placed. This time the tools were the Grinding Stone, Lens Cutter and Tap Wheel which enabled players to rotate dice to the opposite face, swap a drafted die with one from the Round Track and move two dice of the same colour that matches one of the dice on the Round Track. To use these Tools, players must pay in tokens that are allocated at the start of the game according to the difficulty of their window pattern card. Any of these left over at the end of the game is worth a point, but otherwise, points can only be scored by completing the objectives, and any dice that cannot be placed score negative points.

– Image by boardGOATS

The problem with this game is that it is extremely easy to get into a pickle and end up placing dice illegally. Blue, who was a bit all over the place due to a night shift on Monday thought she would be the culprit, but it was Black who fell foul of the rules, and several times too. Each mistake only cost him one point though, and in some respects it is better to have to remove dice than compromise plans. Although she didn’t make any mistakes, Purple was concentrating so hard on placing all her dice she completely forgot to work on the objectives. Misplaced dice tend to be indicative of other problems though and Blue was absolutely determined not break the rules this time, having made a complete pig’s ear of the game just over a year ago at New Year. As a result she concentrated so hard that she gave herself a headache.

– Image by boardGOATS

In the end, arguably it was worth the sore head as Blue not only avoided any illegal die placements, but also managed to get sets of different colours for all five columns in her window. Green managed four out of his five columns though and did well on some of the other objectives too. Burgundy hadn’t done so well on that objective, but had done better on others, especially his own private objective. It was very close for second, with Burgundy just one point behind Green’s sixty six, but Blue, headache and all was well in front with over eighty. As they packed up, the group discussed the inclusion of the private dice pools and the effect of the extra player. Blue felt the dice pools gave a better chance to plan, while Black felt they made the decision space more complex and slowed the game down. Certainly, with five there’s a lot of thinking time and it can be very frustrating to see others ahead in the turn order take all the “best” dice, something that seemed worse with more players.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: It’s great to welcome people back when they’ve been away!