As people signed in, Blue, Pink and Burgundy shared some feelings about the “Feature Game” which was to be Troyes Dice.  This is back to the “Roll and Write” style games and is a very recent release, based on the well regarded game Troyes (a game about a medieval city, the name of which is pronounced a bit like “trois”, the French for the number “three”).  When Pine joined the group he made his feelings known about the awful joke at the bottom of the reminder page, and said it was old when he was at school back in the middle ages…

– Adapted from image by Zairon on wikimedia.org

Troyes Dice is a planning and resource management game with an interesting rondel mechanism at its heart.  Although the fundamentals are not overly complex, the number of options players have make the game very challenging.  The game is played over eight days, each with a morning and afternoon phase.  At the start of each phase, four dice are rolled and placed on the four available coloured plazas.  The clear dice then adopt the colour of the plaza they are placed on, while the black die “destroys” its plaza making it unavailable.

– Image by boardGOATS

Players then choose one of the coloured dice to use, and pay the associated cost shown in the centre of the dial.  Dice bought in this way can be used to buy resources or to construct a building of the same colour and number.  Buildings come in two types: Worker buildings which ultimately give points and Prestige buildings which provide special effects.  There are three colours red, yellow and white representing the Noble, Civil and Religious districts respectively, and there are different resources and special effects associated with the different districts.

– Image by boardGOATS

Although this is fairly straight forward, the number of options players have and the interplay between them make the game one of the most complex that we have played since the group has been forced to play online.  All the Worker buildings get players workers which equate to points at the end of the game.  However, more points are available to players that build Cathedrals (Religious Prestige buildings) as Cathedrals give points to players for building other buildings.

– Image by boardGOATS

So, a player who has built the left-most Cathedral (i.e. number one) will get points for the number of Noble Prestige buildings they have built.  The amount of points each one of these is worth depends on when the player builds that particular building:  if it is the first or second, they will be worth just one point, but if it is built later in the game and is the fifth or sixth, each Noble Prestige building will be worth three points.  Thus a player who builds all six buildings of one type and then manages to build the associated Cathedral will score six, twelve, or eighteen points depending on when the Cathedral was built.  So timing is critical.

– Image by boardGOATS

The Civic Prestige buildings give players resources depending on the number of dice of the relevant colour currently available.  Resources are essential.  Money (the Civic Resource) is essential for buying dice and the higher value dice cost more.  The other two resources, red pennants and white bibles are useful because they allow players to alter the number of the die to be used, or its colour.  This is adds hugely to the number of possible options available.

– Image by boardGOATS

The third set of Prestige buildings in the red, Noble district, is the most difficult to understand.  Building one of these protects all the buildings of the same number from the black die.  From the third round, the black die not only makes its plaza unavailable, but also makes any buildings of that colour and number that have not yet been built, unbuildable for the rest of the game.  If a player builds, say, the sixth Noble (red) Prestige building, that means that any subsequent black sixes rolled will have no  effect on that player.

– Image by boardGOATS

There are a number of obvious strategies that arise.  For example, to get the maximum protection, Noble Prestige buildings should be built as early as possible.  In contrast, since the Religious Prestige buildings that are built later give more points, trying to build some other scoring buildings first is a good idea.  This is risky though, as failing to build the target building will score nothing.  Although the rules are quite complex, in practice they are not as bad as they may seem at first.  Simply put, players choose one of the three available dice and use it to collect resources or build a building in one of the three districts.

– Image by boardGOATS

It is dealing with the number of options available that is the real challenge though.  There are only three active dice, but using a combination of pennants and bibles, the numbers and colours of the dice can be changed to almost anything people want, which gives lots to think about.  That said, even this is not as difficult as it seems at first because resources are valuable so unless the action is mission critical, most options will rule themselves out as they are too expensive.

– Image by boardGOATS

First time through though, the number of options can seem bewildering and planning a strategy can seem daunting.  That said, for the first couple of rounds, Blue and Pink talked through the options people had available and almost everyone did the same thing, starting by building protective fortresses because these were good value and early in the game seemed to give the best chance to use them.

– Image by boardGOATS

Playing games remotely can be a bit of a solitaire experience and it is generally very hard to follow what others are doing.  As a result, players often take more information from throw-away comments than they would usually do.  From this, Green seemed to think that he and Burgundy were following very similar strategies.  The game is also a slow burner, and Ivory repeatedly commented that he couldn’t see where he was going to get any points from.  This unsettled Pine, because this sort of game is usually meat and drink to Ivory, so if he was struggling, that meant Pine felt doomed.

– Image by boardGOATS

About half-way through, Black and Purple went silent and didn’t respond when people asked if they were OK.  Someone pointed out to them that their microphone was on mute, but there was still no reply and even text messages didn’t get a response.  Eventually they rejoined the group and Purple got a bit of a telling off for muting the mike, though she was adamant it wasn’t her fault.

– Image by boardGOATS

There are only eight days, or sixteen rounds in the game, so it didn’t last over-long.  It wasn’t long before players were adding up their scores and Ivory was finding that he had more points than he’d thought.  It wasn’t surprising that Pink top-scored with Blue in second place, as they had both played it it before.  What was more surprising was how close together everyone else was.  Ivory was a very close third with forty-four and Green was just two points behind him, but everyone else was within ten points of Blue too.

– Image by boardGOATS

With that done, it was definitely time for something lighter. We haven’t played Noch Mal! (aka Encore!, or Boardgamers Bingo as some of the group call it) for a while and since we have some new player boards, we thought we’d give it another outing.  The idea of the game is that six dice are rolled, three showing numbers one to five and a question mark, and three showing five different colours and a cross.  The active player chooses one colour die and one number die to use and everyone else gets to pick one of each of those that remain.

– Image by boardGOATS

Players use their dice to cross of blocks on their player boards with players scoring points for completing columns and for crossing all of one colour off.  The question marks and crosses are wild, but players can only use total of eight during the whole game—any that remain unused by the end of the game score a point.  Players also score negative points for any stars that have not been crossed by the time one player has completed all of two colours and brings proceedings to a close.

– Image by boardGOATS

In this game, the first target is to end with a positive score.  The first time we played, everyone really struggled with that, but more recently people seem to have got the hang of things a little.  We decided to play Zusatzblock I, which is a pink colour.  This time, although it was not obvious why, playing with the new board seemed to really upset things.  For some, it was clear that the pink background messed up their ability to see the difference the colours (we dealt with people’s difficulty distinguishing colours on camera by placing the coloured dice on a home-made, quickly-cobbled-together play mat).

– Image by boardGOATS

Pine in particular really struggled with the colours and got his plans completely screwed up when he confused orange with red.  Others did not have that excuse though, and many still failed to get a positive result.  In a remarkably low scoring game thanks to the game “finishing early”, Green looked to have it with a score of just eight.  That was until Pink, who had triggered the end of the game as part of his plan, announced he’d managed a massive ten points and took his second victory of the night.

– Image by boardGOATS

Time was marching on, but HexRoller had gone down really well last time and was almost over before it had begun, so the group decided to give it another go.  This is a completely abstract game where players write numbers rolled to write on a grid.  There are eight dice rolled each round and players choose two of the numbers rolled and write them on their grid the number of times they appear.  Numbers must be written in spaces adjacent to numbers (of the same value) that already appear on the board.

– Image by boardGOATS

Points are scored for filling the coloured regions, connecting the two preprinted numbers, for not using the special actions etc..  Although it is not very easy to understand from the description, it is actually quite easy to play, so much so, that Pine, who had missed out last time picked it up really quickly.  Also, as the game is played over just seven or eight rounds (depending on the board used), so doesn’t really have time to outstay its welcome.

– Image by boardGOATS

Despite its simplicity, Black managed to make a meal of it and somehow missed out a number.  Although everyone else really enjoyed the game last time, it seems it is not his favourite.  Pink tried to claim a “moral score” of fifty-four because he only needed one more number to fill one of his coloured areas, but nobody else was buying into that.  It wouldn’t have been enough for him to win his third game of the night though, as victory went to Burgundy who finished with sixty-three points.

– Image by Burgundy

Everyone was feeling a little jaded so we decided to play just one more game, our old favourite, 6 Nimmt! (on Board Game Arena).  This pops up almost every games night, and after the new-lease of life given to it by the “Professional” variant, we thought we’d give the “Tactical” variant a go.  The idea of the game is that players start with a hand of ten cards and simultaneously choose one to play.  Starting with the lowest card played, these are then added to the end of one of the four rows of cards (in the case of the “Professional” variant, to either end).

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

When a player’s card is the sixth card added to a row, the player takes the other five into their scoring pile.  Normally, the cards have a face value between one and a hundred and four, with typically around half in play in any given round.  This means that if a row has three cards in it and ends with a eighteen, playing the nineteen is guaranteed to be safe.  Playing higher numbers, say low to mid twenties, though is increasingly risky, but is often a good gamble.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

The “Tactical” variant changes the number of cards in the deck so that the highest card is ten times the number of players plus the four on the table.  In other words, every card is present in every round and now, there really is nowhere to hide.  This makes the game much more stressful, but as it progressed, we came to the slow realisation that it actually wasn’t as much “fun”.  We decided this was probably because there wasn’t as much chance in the game, which effectively reduced the excitement of finding out whether you were going to “get away” with a risky card.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Furthermore, if the cards were not in your favour, it very much felt that it was game over—yes it might be possible to reduce the number of nimmts picked up, but in most cases, there wasn’t much you could do about it.  So in a way, reducing the chance almost made it feel like the game was more random, rather than less.  Some things don’t change though.  Purple was still the main instigator of the race to the bottom, although this time her main competitor was Black who actually got their first and triggered the end of the game.  As usual, Pine came in the top three, this time beaten only by Burgundy.  And with that, everyone signed off for an early night.

– Image by Burgundy

Learning Outcome:  If at first you don’t succeed, Troyes, Troyes, et Troyes again!