Tag Archives: Noch Mal!

3rd August 2021 (Online)

Last time, we had decided to have a “test visit” to The Jockey, with the hope that we’d be back this week. Sadly, since then, the pub has been closed, so we were online for another week. Lime, Pine, Black and Purple were the first to join the meeting, quickly followed by Burgundy, then everyone else eventually joined the chatter. We had hoped to mark The Games of the XXXII Olympiad in Tokyo and our return to The Jockey by playing Ticket to Ride with the Japanese map. However, circumstances meant that this was the third unsuccessful attempt to play that game. So instead, this week, the “Feature Game” was the Ishikawa map for MetroX.

– Image by boardGOATS

MetroX is a simple little “Roll and Write” type game that seems easy at first, but is difficult to play well. The game is driven by a deck of number cards, where the simple ones dictate how many sections can be marked on a route: Players fill the boxes along the lines with “zeros”, with the number on the card dictating the number of boxes filled. In general, if the line comes to an end, or some of the boxes had already been filled (because they were part of another line for example), then any excess are lost. So the game is all about efficiency, as there is a limit to the number of cards that can be used on each line (as shown by the indicator boxes at the start of each one).

– Image by boardGOATS

There are a small number of special cards as well, which break the rules. For example, there are number cards with a circle, which allow players to skip any filled spaces and and help avoid wastage. There are also special “star” cards, which allow players to fill a box with a number equal to the number of tracks passing through the space—this number contributes to the player’s final score. There is also a “free” card which allows players to fill in a single space anywhere on the map. Cards are turned until all the indicator boxes on the map have been filled or until the six is drawn, in which case, the deck is shuffled and drawing (both of cards and routes) continues.

– Image by boardGOATS

Points come from the “star” bonuses, but also from line completion bonuses. These are scored similar to the rows and columns in Noch Mal! or the bonuses in Welcome To…, where the first player to complete a line scores a higher amount than those who complete it later in the game. This is off-set with a negative score for the number of unfilled boxes at the end of the game. This time we were playing with the Ishikawa promo map, which is remarkably simple, however, the fact there are very few indicator boxes not only makes it a very short game but also leaves very little room for manoeuvre. With only eleven rounds (plus any free cards) we were all worried that if we didn’t get a six we might struggle to complete lines. That concern turned out to be baseless, however, with every line being completed by someone during the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

Green’s mind was clearly elsewhere as he missed a number and spent a couple of minutes trying to work out what he’d done and then asked for clarifications on the negative scoring. For reasons that weren’t entirely clear, everyone struggled to calculate their scores, with a long delay before scores came in, and with a large number of corrections. Ivory led the scores with nineteen points. After a brief spell in second behind Pink and Purple, a couple of recounts later it was confirmed as a four-way tie between Ivory, Pink, Burgundy and Purple all with nineteen. So, following the example of the high jumpers, Mutaz Essa Barshim and Gianmarco Tamberi, they agreed to share the Gold Medal.

– Video from youtube.com

The Japanese are very fond of their railways, so as the Ishikawa map was so quick to play, we decided to follow it with another train game, the new Railroad Ink Challenge, which we first played a month ago. This is another relatively simple “Roll and Write” game, where players have to draw the road/rail depicted when four dice are rolled. All four must be drawn and they must connect to an “entrance” or something already drawn on the player’s map. There are also special cross-roads which can be used a maximum of once per round and only three can be used in the whole game. Each game lasts for just seven rounds, so again efficiency is vital.

Railroad Ink Challenge: Shining Yellow Edition

– Image by boardGOATS

The Challenge edition adds extra features on the maps which in effect give players bonuses when they fill those spaces, and also adds a set of three “goal” cards that give players more points when they complete them. These work in the same way as the line bonuses in MetroX, except that there are three sets of points available: one for the first player(s) to complete them, one for the second set of players to complete them and one for everyone else. Last time, we played the Shining Yellow edition, but this time, although we used the yellow boards, we used challenge cards from the Lush Green edition, randomly drawing cards A, B and E.

Railroad Ink Challenge: Lush Green Edition

– Image by boardGOATS

Goal A gave points for players filling five of the nine central spaces; B gave players points for completing three of the “village” spaces and E gave points for completing all nine of the central area. Ivory’s printer refused to play ball, so he gave up and took an early night. We were all sorry to see him go of course, but it did give everyone else a chance to win. The first round included one of the especially awkward back-to-back curves, but it turned out to be the only one, though. This time there were a lot of T-junctions and fly-overs, with very few straight segments and simple corners. As a result, people started using their “specials” quite early rather than saving them to the end.

– Image by boardGOATS

As is often the case, there were a lot of reports of huge numbers of “hanging ends” meaning that players were variously taking chances and keeping options open, but hoping upon hope for helpful dice rolls. As the game progressed, people started claiming the Goals, with B going first. Some players had decided to use different colours for road, rail and stations, which ultimately seemed to slow them down as they not only had to choose what to do but also make sure they used the right colour. That just gave more thinking time to everyone else though, so nobody really minded.

– Image by boardGOATS

Without expansions, the game only takes seven rounds, so it wasn’t long before people were starting to worry that they were running out of time. Burgundy said he could really have done with one more round and there were several others who felt the same, but the rules are the rules, so Burgundy posted his score, setting an initial target of fifty-one. When Green gave his score of seventy-seven, however, he was so far ahead of Burgundy that photographic evidence was requested by everyone else. While his score was being verified as correct, Blue and and Pink were confirmed as the winners of silver and bronze respectively.

Railroad Ink Challenge: Lush Green & Shining Yellow Editions

– Image by boardGOATS

Time was marching on, so we moved onto Board Game Arena for something light and easy, and sensing that this might be the last chance online, we opted for our go-to game, 6 Nimmt!, with the Professional Variant. In this simple game, players simultaneously choose a card and, once revealed, starting with the lowest card, they are added to one of the four rows—the one ending in the highest number that is lower than the number on the card. The player who adds the sixth card to any row, instead takes the five cards and the number of bulls heads on the cards make part of their score.

– Image by boardGOATS

Face-to-face, these are summed and the lowest scores wins, however, on Board Game Arena, everyone starts with sixty-six points and the scores are subtracted from their running total. Thus, the game ends when someone falls below zero and the winner has the most points at the end of the game. In the Professional Variant, players can add cards to the either end of the row, with cards going at the start of a row if they are lower, than the first card in the row and the difference is smaller than it would be if they were to go elsewhere. This really adds a new dimension to the game, but there is serious mathematical upkeep giving us reservations about playing it with real cards, face-to-face.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

This time, Blue picked up first and enthusiastically started the race for the bottom. It looked like she was a certainty to end the game very quickly until she had competition from Burgundy. Everyone else had picked up some cards and Burgundy was the last person to maintain his starting total of sixty-six nimmts, when he suddenly shipped a landslide of points going from the lead to vying for last with Blue in just a handful of turns. Both Blue and Burgundy managed to steady the ship, albeit briefly, before Blue grabbed enough points to end the game.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Everyone else was actually quite close, and once again we had a tie for the Gold Medal, this time between Purple and Pine (who always does well in this game); both finishing with thirty-eight, just two ahead of Black. From there, Green wished everyone else a good night leaving just six. With lower numbers the options abound, but everyone was in the mood for something that didn’t require too much thought, and someone suggested giving L.L.A.M.A. (aka L.A.M.A) a go. Although it was still in beta testing and we’d not played it online before, we felt there was “no cause for alarm-a”, as we’d played it before (albeit a long time ago) and found it to be a very easy game

– Image by boardGOATS

Nominated for the Spiel des Jahres two years ago, L.A.M.A. has a reputation of being a bit of an “UNO killer”, that is to say, it is a similar game to UNO, but perceived to be better. L.A.M.A. is an abbreviation for “Lege alle Minuspunkte ab”, which roughly translates as “get rid of your negative points”, and indeed this is what players do, in a similar way to UNO. Players start with a hand of cards and, on their turn can, add a single card face up to the pile in the middle as long as it has the same face value, or the same plus one. The cards are numbered one to six, with the Llama card simultaneously being above six and below one providing a bridge between the high and low numbers.

– Image by boardGOATS

Alternatively, players can pick up a card or pass. When players pass, their score is the total of the face values of their cards, but if they have multiple cards of the same face value, they only count once. So if a player has five cards with a value of two, they would score two points, however, just one card with a higher face value would score more and Llama cards score ten points. The round ends when either everyone passes, or when someone gets rid of all their cards and everyone takes chips equal to their scores. Players who succeed in checking out get the bonus of being able to return one chip, which is important because the game ends when someone reaches forty points and the winner is the player with the fewest points.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Burgundy spent a lot of time moaning about being given poor options by Purple who was sitting on his right. Based on the effect this had, he might have had a point as he was rapidly picking up chips and was the one to make it to forty and trigger the end of the game. Further, Purple was doing really well, finishing with just nine, twenty-five fewer than anyone else except Black, who just pipped her to victory with only six. With everyone keen to play another game, but nobody enthusiastic about making a decision on what to play, and medals only awarded once for each “event”, a second round meant the Gold was still up for grabs.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

This time, Blue joined the moaning when Pine did the same to her as Purple had done to Burgundy, changing the number when she didn’t want and not changing it when she did. Burgundy did better this time finishing in joint second with Black with twenty-eight points. The winner of the second round finishing with just a single chip was Purple. This made her the L.A.M.A. champion taking the final Gold medal of the evening.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning outcome: As with the Olympics, everyone who takes part in playing games is a winner.

6th July 2021 (Online)

After the usual pre-game chatter (this time focussed largely on the village of Standlake—north of The River, Tut!), we settled down to play the “Feature Game“. This was the new Railroad Ink Challenge: Shining Yellow Edition. We have played Railroad Ink: Deep Blue Edition several times, both with and without the mini expansions and have really enjoyed it. This new version steps it up a little with several new “Challenges” to add to the base game.

– Image by boardGOATS

The basic idea is very simple: four dice are rolled and players have to draw all four pieces of track on their player board. These must either extend a previous section of road or track, or start at one of the red entrance “arrows”. Three times during the game, players can, additionally, draw one of six special intersections with only one per turn. Players score points for the longest sections of road and track, connecting red entrance “arrows” and for filling the central nine squares, losing points for any unconnected, “hanging ends”.

– Image by boardGOATS

The “Challenge” editions of Railroad Ink add special spaces which represent villages, factories and Universities (though we referred to them as “Houses”, “Spectre Octopi” and “Fingers Pointing Up”). These give extra point scoring opportunities and a chance to get an extra “special” section. It also includes goal cards which give players even more chances to score more points. These work a bit like the scoring in Noch Mal!, where the first players to complete a “Challenge” score maximum points and others who achieve it later score less. These provide a lot of variety to the game, especially when combined with the additional mini expansions that each game comes with.

– Image by boardGOATS

The first thing we noticed was that the dice we had didn’t seem to make sense—there weren’t enough simple straight and simple bend sections. It quickly became apparent that we had the wrong dice in the box. Fortunately, we also had the Lush Green Edition, so we stole the dice from that and carried on. It quickly became apparent that somehow this was much more difficult than the original Blue Edition that we had played so many times. It wasn’t clear whether this was just an unfortunate series of dice rolls, or whether it was a function of the fact players were trying to do more things which forced them to compromise more, or even the new back-to-back corners.

– Image by boardGOATS

Either way, it was clear that people had a lot of “hanging ends” and were desperately hoping for “good rolls” (perhaps cheese and pickle rather than egg and cress…). Most people managed to make something out of their spaghetti-like network though, and before long it was time to compare scores. Ivory was in charge of the Tusk-lets, so in his absence it was left to Pine to set the target score. When Pine reported his fifty-three, everyone knew it was a good score from Burgundy’s response of “Bugger.”

– Image by boardGOATS

Black matched Pine, and Pink thought he’d pipped them by one point with his fifty-four, but Blue had the beating of all of them finishing with fifty-seven points. The score survived Pink’s recount, in what had actually been quite a close game. It had been a reasonably quick game, so we moved on to play Take it Easy!, a tile-laying game we played back in February, but had really enjoyed. Each hexagonal tile has three pipes crossing it, in three different colours. Tiles are drawn from a stack one at a time, and each player adds them to their personal player board.

– Image by boardGOATS

The tile placement rules are simple: the tiles can be placed anywhere on the board but must be placed the right way up which fixes the directions of the nine different coloured pipes. Players score points for any pipes that contain only the one colour, and that score is the number of tiles in the pipe multiplied by the number on the pipe. Thus, the highest scores are achieved by locating the high value pipes so they go through the middle. Although there are a maximum of fifteen pipes, it is almost impossible to complete all successfully, especially as there are some tiles that are not used. So, there is an element of chance as well as hedging bets.

– Image by boardGOATS

It quickly became clear to Blue that she wasn’t going to be in the running this time, and others felt the same, knowing they had not done as well as they felt they should have done. Pink, however, once again thought he’d got it in the bag with his score of one hundred and forty-five, ten more than the hitherto next score, by Black. That was until Green reported a massive score of one-hundred and seventy-three. Everyone else, some thirty points behind struggled to believe it, but he’d simply made better use of the tiles as everyone else had been waiting for yellow (nine point) tiles to come out.

– Image by boardGOATS

With that, we decided to move onto Board Game Arena. There were lots of options, but Green was keen to share a game he had recently discovered called Hugo: Das Schlossgespenst (aka Escape from the Hidden Castle). This is a light, family roll-and-move type game, where players take on the role of guests at a party, trying to escape from “Hugo the ghost”. Hugo starts in the cellar, but quickly moves up to the gallery, chasing any guests that have not been able to escape into one of the side rooms.

– Image by BGG contributor duchamp

The catch is that even when apparently safe in a room, if another guest guest rolls exactly the right number the resident can be evicted, inevitably right into Hugo’s path. When Hugo catches someone, they go into the basement and, the deeper they go, the more “Fright Points” that player gets. The aim of the game is to finish with the fewest “Fright Points” after Hugo has been round the gallery seven times is the winner.

– Image by boardGOATS
from boardgamearena.com

Although the game seems like it is just a simple roll-and-move game, there is a little bit more to it than that. Players are in charge of more than one guest, so they have to choose which one to move on each turn. This decision will depend on where their pieces are with respect to Hugo, but also which rooms are closest, which rooms are empty and whether they can get one of their guests into one of the two “safe rooms” that give players negative “Fright Points”. In practice, this isn’t much of a decision because after a couple of rounds, Hugo is moving so quickly, escape is the only thing on the players’ minds.

– Image by boardGOATS
from boardgamearena.com

Although the game didn’t take the five minutes advertised, it didn’t take too long. There was much humour when one of Blue’s guests stuck its head up Pine’s frock, and likewise, when one of Pine’s stuck its head up Burgundy’s frock. It was very clear to everyone that Green’s prior experience was the explanation for why he very nearly won—it is a game that is all skill of course. In the event, however, Pine pipped him to the line by just one “Fright Point”. And with that strangeness over, and this possibly being the last online game session, it seemed fitting to end with the reigning Golden GOAT winner, 6 Nimmt!.

– Image by boardGOATS

Over the last year or so, we’ve played 6 Nimmt! more than anything else, way more, simply because it is fast, fun, and skirts the fine line between tactical masterpiece and unpredictable luck-fest. Players simultaneously choose cards that are placed at the end of one of four rows. The player who places the sixth card in a row, instead picks up the other five and their card becomes the first card in the row. In the Board Game Arena version of the game, players start with sixty-six “Nimmts”, losing some each time they pick up. The winner is the player with the most “Nimmts” or points when one player’s tally falls below zero.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Playing with the “Professional Variant”, cards can be added to both ends of the rows, simultaneously adding control and chaos in equal measure. This time, Burgundy was the first to pick up cards, but Green was the first to begin the race to the bottom in earnest. His personal roller-coaster ride hit maximum speed when he picked up a remarkable eighteen “Nimmts” on one turn.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

For most of the game, everyone was very, very close, except for Green, but then everything went wrong for everyone and the scores plummeted. Green inevitably triggered the end of the game though, but the final scores were surprisingly close aside from him. Despite picking up fifteen points on his final card, Burgundy finished with six “Nimmts” more than Pine and Blue who tied for second place. And with that, it was time for bed.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Watch out, watch out, there’s a Hugo about!

27th April 2021 (Online)

The evening started with Beige protesting about the lack of Dinosaurs. This had to be explained to everyone else: Pink had dropped round paperwork for Welcome to Dino World on Monday, only for Blue to realise that she’d got confused. This meant that everyone now wanted Dinosaurs and felt they’d missed out on something they hadn’t known wasn’t going to happen…

– Image by boardGOATS

In order to mark the start of “Golden Week” on Thursday, the “Feature Game” was the MetroX expansion, Sendai & Hakata & Nagoya. “Golden Week” encompasses four of Japan’s national holidays, celebrating the Japanese Constitution (May 3^rd), Children’s day (May 5^th), Emperor Hirohito’s birthday (April 29^th) and his love of plants (May 4^th, also known as Star Wars Day). Blue’s confusion with dates meant she had thought it was the end of May, not the start. Still, it meant people have something “up-roar-us” to look forward to in a month or so, and in the meantime, they had trains to play with.

– Image by boardGOATS

MetroX is a game we played a few months ago and was provided by Blue’s very lovely BGG Secret Santa. Somehow, although it is not complicated, it is a rather difficult game to get your head round. In summary, the game is a variant on the “Roll and Write” games where a card is turned over and players write on their train map. They assign the number on the card to a line and “build” that number of stations along the line (marking them with an open circle). When a player completes a line, they score points with the first player (or players) scoring more points than those to finish the line in later rounds (similar to the scoring for columns in Noch Mal! and Noch Mal So Gut!).

– Image by boardGOATS

There are four different types of card, but the most common are plain numbers which allow players to just build stations and these are numbered two to six, with fewer of the high numbers. Each line must be extended from the start end (the end with the “Indicator Boxes”, marked in red on our paperwork). This means that although stations can be built in the middle of the line because they are part of another line, stations cannot be added beyond this point (where the lines diverge) unless all the earlier stations have been completed.

– Image by boardGOATS

Normal number cards cannot “skip” completed stations. In other words, in a line where the first two stations have not been completed, but the third has, if a “Six” is used to build the first two, the third cannot be jumped, and the remaining four are wasted. So efficiency is the name of the game. There are a small number of special cards with a circle round the number that allow players to skip completed stations, but these are few and far between and are only low numbers. There is also a wild that allows players to fill in one station anywhere on the board without filling in an indicator box.

– Image by boardGOATS

In addition to scoring points for completed lines, players can also score a lot of points for intersections. In the deck of just twenty cards, there are three “Star Cards”. These allow players to build just one station at the cost of one Indicator Box, but instead of writing a zero in the box, they write a number that corresponds to twice the number of lines that go through the station—this is the number of points they score at the end of the game. With some stations forming the intersection of four or five lines, these can be very lucrative, but the timing of these cards is really critical.

– Image by boardGOATS

This time the early cards were not helpful with a circle card coming out first, when there was no opportunity to take advantage of their special ability. The second card produced even more moans and groans as it was a “Star”, when there was only one place that would give more than two points and some people had already used that with the first card. There was a bit of confusion as well with some of the colours looking a bit similar as a result, Purple was quick off the mark and was the first to claim a line, but others thought it wasn’t possible given the number of cards we’d had; it turned out the line was longer than she thought.

– Image by boardGOATS

Several people got in a bit of a mess, but Pine got into such a tangle that he retired early as fixing his problems was too difficult. We got all the way through the deck on the first pass, as the “six” (and shuffle the deck) card was the very last in the deck. Which meant we had the full quota of low numbers (and high numbers too), and as we’d had some useful cards at the start everyone struggled at times. Despite the issues, it didn’t really take long to play. So, while everyone else was still counting up Ivory was the first to post with a massive, and what proved unbeatable score of twenty-eight, helped by being able to put one of his “stars” on the one highest scoring space, giving him a eight points.

– Image by boardGOATS

Burgundy claimed a “moral score” of twenty-six, which would have given him second place, though in reality he was just off the podium behind Green with twenty-three and Black with twenty-two. With that, Lime took an early night and Pine joined the group again for the lighter, travelling band, route planning game, On Tour. We first played this back in January, but a few people missed out. Those that had been there had really enjoyed it though, and we were keen to give it another go.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game is really, really simple: two d10 dice are rolled to give two numbers. These are combined to give two, two-digit numbers. Players have a map with a network of circles, and write these two numbers in two of the circles somewhere on their map. At the end of the game, they have to plot a route through the numbers along the provided connections such that the route connects adjacent points starting with a low number and never decreasing. Players get one point for each circle they manage to visit.

– Image by boardGOATS

There is a restriction provided by cards which indicate the area of the map numbers can be placed in on each turn. These also provide a specific location, such that players who place a number in that circle score a bonus if their route goes through it. There are two maps available: USA and Europe, so being a group full of Europhiles, this time, we chose Europe.

– Image by boardGOATS

The dice were particularly challenging this time though and despite both Blue and Pink trying, neither managed to roll a five, or a two, and there were an awful lot of nines. There were the inevitable complaints when people didn’t get what they wanted, and these increased in number as things became increasingly critical as the end approached. Pink possibly came off the worst claiming a “moral score” of thirty-seven, though his actual score was only twenty-five.

– Image by boardGOATS

Green managed the highest score, with thirty-eight with a route going from Ireland to Norway via Italy and Bulgaria. Blue and Black made up the podium four and eight points behind respectively. Time was marching on, but there was still time for our now traditional end-of-evening trip to Board Game Arena and after everyone had enthusiastically eschewed Dingo’s Dreams, we went for our old favourite, 6 Nimmt! (with the Professional Variant).

– Image by boardGOATS

6 Nimmt! is so simple and so much fun, and we’ve played a lot of it online in the last year. The simultaneous card selection means the downtime is minimal, and the balance between strategy and luck means it is the perfect game for our large group at the end of the evening. Starting with the card with the lowest face value, they are added to the end of row that ends with the highest number that is lower than the card in question.

– Image by boardGOATS

If the card is the sixth card, the player picks up all the other cards, and that is exactly what happened to Blue on just the second turn. This game is one of those where once it goes wrong it goes very wrong, and from there, things just went from bad to worse for her as she picked up again on the third turn too. She wasn’t the only one to get unlucky of course. For example, Pink managed to pick up on the first turn of one round when four of the other six other players played cards between ninety-one and a hundred, leaving him to place the next card and pick up a pile of cards.

– Image by boardGOATS
from boardgamearena.com

Fairly inevitably, Blue ended the game, though it was closer than it might have been with Burgundy finishing with just one point left from his starting sixty-six. At the other end, Pine (who always does well in this game), lost just ten points giving him a massive win, with twenty-five points more than anyone else. After a vote on Vevox to decide what to play, we went for the easy option and decided to play 6 Nimmt! again.

– Image by boardGOATS
from boardgamearena.com

This time, Pine did not do quite so well and Pink was the one who managed finish with the most points, fifteen points clear of second place, which this time went to Blue. Remarkably, Burgundy managed the whole of the final round with just one point and on the last card, Purple pipped him to the post and ended the game. Green had spent a large portion of the second game talking to himself when his sound went down, so decided that was his queue to finish. Another online vote confirmed things and everyone went to bed.

– Image by boardGOATS
from boardgamearena.com

Learning Outcome: Every country should have a “Golden Week”.

16th February 2021 (Online)

Purple and Black were the first to arrive and chatted with Pine when he popped up. There was some chit-chat about where Mulberry and Red were at the moment and eventually Green, Lilac, Burgundy, and Ivory also joined the party. In a return to the “Roll and Write” style of game, the “Feature Game” was to be MetroX (aka メトロックス), a game based around routes on the Tokyo and Osaka underground maps. People were gamely mispronouncing the names of the lines when Burgundy asked which map we were going to be using, which was when Blue realised that she had sent out the wrong file. There was a brief hiatus as people fired up their printers and Pine explained how one of his friends had said he “looked like a row of sheep’s arses”, and then with the correct paperwork, we could get started.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game is quite simple: a card is turned over and players assign the number to a line and “build” that number of stations along the line. When a player completes a line, they score points with the first player (or players) scoring more points than those to finish the line in later rounds (similar to the scoring for columns in Noch Mal! and Noch Mal So Gut! which we played a few weeks back). There are four different types of cards, but the most common are plain numbers which allow players to just build stations and these are numbered two to six, with fewer of the high numbers. With each line restricted so that only two or three number cards can be assigned to it, Pine was quick to point out the obvious flaw and with it, the whole point of the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

Each line has roughly ten to fifteen stations, so while some could be completed with three high numbers, it is not possible to complete them all outright without an awful lot of luck (and/or some very bad shuffling!). However, most stations appear on more than one line, so the game is about using lines that run parallel creatively, sacrificing some to ensure others score well. There are catches though. Firstly, each line must be extended from the start end (the end with the “Indicator Boxes”, marked in red on our paperwork). This means that although stations can be built in the middle of the line because they are part of another line, stations cannot be added beyond this point (where the lines diverge) unless all the earlier stations have been completed.

– Image by boardGOATS

Secondly, normal number cards cannot “skip” completed stations. In other words, in a line where the first two stations have not been completed, but the third has, if a “Six” is used to build the first two, the third cannot be jumped, and the remaining four are wasted. So efficiency is the order of the game. There are a small number of special cards with a circle round the number that allow players to skip completed stations, but these are few and far between and are only low numbers. There is also a wild that allows players to fill in one station anywhere on the board without filling in an indicator box.

– Image by boardGOATS

In addition to scoring points for completed lines, players can also score a lot of points for intersections. In the deck of just twenty cards, there are three “Star Cards”. These allow players to build just one station at the cost of one Indicator Box, but instead of writing a zero in the box, they write a number that corresponds to the number of lines that go through the station. With some stations forming the intersection of four or five lines, these can be very lucrative, but of course these are in the middle of the board and therefore need careful planning and a bit of good fortune to be able to make them really count.

– Image by boardGOATS

People were not really taken with the rules and particularly with the fact they couldn’t see how it was going to work, generally didn’t feel it was “possible”, and that they were going to end up with negative points. Everyone was happy to give it a go though and we started with the Tokyo board. We started with a lot of high numbers which made the game seem really straight forward at first. About half way through though, we discovered that Green had misunderstood the rules (again!) and there was a bit of clarification and a pause while he tried to rectify things.

– Image by boardGOATS

Purple was the first to complete a line, claiming Fukutoshin. That focussed everyone’s mind a bit as they realised it wasn’t quite so impossible after all. Drawing a six triggers shuffling in the discard pile, and although Pink shuffled the deck thoroughly, the high cards returned, at least initially. Eventually, we drew some “Stars” and people were able to start picking up bonus points for intersections as well. Despite all his comments about how impossible it was, Pine soon claimed Namboku and Lilac claimed Chiyoda.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game ends when there are no Indicator boxes left, and it was as Pink and Burgundy started a count down of how many cards there were left that some players realised that they’d failed to fill them in every time. There was a bit of a flurry as people tried to correct things and then it was all over and everyone started adding up their scores. As usual, Ivory was first to post his score, and as usual, it was very competitive. Pine wasn’t convinced his score of thirty-four was right, especially as it was one more than Ivory’s, but either way, they were both beaten by Pink and Black with thirty-seven and Black took it on a tie-breaker.

– Image by boardGOATS

Now everyone had got the hang of things, we decided to give the second map, Osaka, a go. In contrast to the last game, the first card was a “Star” and the other two came out shortly afterwards, making it very difficult for players to score lots of points for intersections. Despite that, players still seemed to make good progress. In fact, there were five claims for completing four different lines in one round with Pine, Green and Ivory completing Midosuji, Sakaisuji and Yotsubashi respectively, and Black finishing Yotsubashi as well and New Tram.

– Image by boardGOATS

It was just as the game was coming to a close that the gremlins from a month ago came back to victimise Black and Purple. Unfortunately, we weren’t quick enough to spot it this time, and Pink had shuffled the deck before we noticed. The game was close to the end so it was sad that we couldn’t see whether Pink or Black did better in the rematch, and everyone else decided to finish up while they sorted out their problems. Like Take it Easy! a couple of weeks back, by the end, the players were desperately begging for particular cards they needed and as they got what they wanted there were sighs of relief, while other groaned when they got something they couldn’t use.

– Image by boardGOATS

When the last card had been revealed, everyone moved on to the scores. Once again, Pine, was right up there finishing with a total of thirty, but Burgundy, one of the most improved finished one point ahead with thirty-one. There was some chat about the game while Purple and Black rejoined us, and it seemed it suffered from “marmite factor” with Green saying it wasn’t for him (though if he’d got the rules right it might have helped), and Pine saying that although he’d won, he hadn’t really enjoyed it. On the other hand, Blue, Pink, and Burgundy thought it was clever and liked it. While we were chatting, Violet joined the group to talk about a new venture she was considering.

– Image by boardGOATS

She wondered whether there would be any interest in custom dice featuring the boardGOATS logo. There was some discussion about weighting dice correctly so they are truly random and how the market would be, as nobody wanted Violet to spend money on something that would not give a return. With Purple and Black back from their gremlin-bashing, Ivory took his leave and everyone else moved on to playing the inevitable 6 Nimmt! on Board Game Arena. We normally play this at the end of the evening, but this time, with lots of people, it put in an early appearance.

– Image by 311matman on instagram.com

While we waited for Violet to sort herself out with an account, Pine pointed out that Green had been playing games, so Green had started investigating Pine’s profile, marvelling at the number of experience points he had. It was then that he pointed out that Pine was 24^th in the overall rankings for Cribbage. It’s true that most people who use Board Game Arena probably play Euro games rather than traditional games, but all of a sudden we realised we had a bit of a celebrity in our midst. Eventually though, we got over being star-struck and actually started playing…

– Image by boardGOATS

We’ve played 6 Nimmt! an awful lot, so it needs only a little introduction: players simultaneously choose a card from their hand and they are revealed at the same time. Starting with the lowest value card, the cards are added one at a time to four rows – the player who adds the sixth card, instead takes the other five which become their scoring pile. On Board Game Arena, we now play the “Professional Variant”, where cards can be added to both ends of the rows, causing mayhem when least expected.

– Image by boardGOATS

It takes a bit of time to get used to playing with the additional layer of complexity, so it wasn’t really a surprise that poor Violet won the race to the bottom, although he father, Green wasn’t really all that far behind. The winner was Pink who picked up just ten “nimmts” and finished with fifty-six points. Black was joint second with the inevitable Pine, who always does well at this game, though this time they were twenty points behind Pink.

– Image by boardGOATS form boardgamearena.com

Time was marching on, and with plenty of people still about, that limited our choices of game somewhat. Before Christmas, we had given Incan Gold (aka Diamant) a try, but strange card draws had let to a very odd game. As the dust settled, we decided to give it another go. The game is a fairly simple “Push your Luck” game where players are exploring a temple. Players decide whether they are going to stay and explore, or leave the temple and take any treasure with them.

– Image by boardGOATS

Players who stay in the temple will get shares in any treasure cards that are drawn that round, but if they are present when a second Hazard card of any given type is drawn, the temple collapses and buries everyone in it and they lose any treasure they have collected. In the first round, Black left first followed by Green and then gradually everyone else except Pine and Pink decided discretion was the better part of valour. Inevitably, they got caught, so in the second round Pink was the first to leave (quickly followed by Purple).

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

When a treasure came out everyone else tried to leave and take it with them, but as nobody left alone nobody managed to get it. Eventually, only Pine, Burgundy and Blue were left in and when Blue and Burgundy left too, Pine was all by himself. When he turned one last card he got fifteen gems all to himself and left with a total of twenty and the treasure as well, much to everyone else’s chagrin. In the third round Black managed to escape alone to take a treasure and Pine and Green got caught by a couple mummies and while everyone else escaped, nobody scored very well.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

In the fourth round, Burgundy almost managed to repeat Pine’s effort when he was last in the temple and turned over a fourteen so took all of it, leaving with seventeen gems. The final round was a bit of a dud, with only Pink and Violet scoring and even they didn’t get much as they left together after the first round, so shared the seven gems left on the floor. They did better than everyone else though because the fourth card was a second snake and that was that. It was very close, but the winner was Burgundy, just one gem ahead of Pine. Black made an excellent third, proving that consistency is important as well as big wins. And with that, it was time for bed.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: It’s a great shame Henry Beck never worked in Japan.

19th January 2021 (Online)

Although they started the meeting early, Blue and Pink left Pine and Green to chat while they set things up. Lime popped in and joined the chatter, with everyone else arriving in good time for 8pm. Blue was just starting to explain the rules for the “Feature Game“, Noch Mal So Gut!, when the gremlins first put an appearance (and no, it wasn’t Beige, though he might have been responsible for summoning them).

– Image by Pine

For the most part, we’ve been quite lucky with the technology. We’ve had a couple of issues, once when Lime and Ivory got alternately thrown out of Microsoft Teams and another when Tabletop Simulator died on us last April in the middle of a game of Finstere Flure (aka Fearsome Floors), but otherwise the issues have been very minor. This time the Gremlin Attack was ultimately more spectacular, although it started slowly with Black and Purple having issues with the window-in-window Teams view that wouldn’t maximise. Eventually the problem went away and Blue explained the rules.

– Image by boardGOATS

Noch Mal So Gut! is a slightly more complex, more strategic version of Noch Mal!, a game we have played a few times (including with the first Zusatzblock) and is known within the group as “Boardgame Bingo“. The basic version of the game is quite simple: the active player rolls three colour and three number dice and picks one of each, using them to cross off coloured blocks on their player board. Everyone else then picks one colour and one number from the remaining dice and uses them in the same way. The player board consists of coloured squares in groups making blocks. Squares can only be crossed off when they are orthogonally adjacent, match the colour on the die chosen and either start in the middle row (Row H) or are next to another square that has already been crossed off.

– Image by boardGOATS

The dice are numbered one to five with a wild for the sixth face, and the number indicates exactly how many squares must be crossed off, it is not possible to “overpay”. Similarly, there are five colours and one wild (black)—each play only gets eight chances to use number or colour wilds during the game, so they must be used sparingly. Points are scored for completing columns or crossing off all the squares of a colour, with the player who manages this first scoring more points than those to achieve it later in the game. Negative points are scored for any stars that are not crossed off. The game ends when a player crosses off all the squares of two colours.

– Image by boardGOATS

The second implementation, Noch Mal So Gut!, adds a couple of new features which add a large slice of strategy. Firstly, there is an extra die which players can choose to use instead of the colour/number dice pair. This special die provides actions like bombs which blow up any four squares in a two-by-two group, or the ability to cross out two squares with stars on them. The special actions can only be used if a player has a “special die” token to spend. These can be collected during the game, primarily by crossing off squares featuring the special symbol. In addition to the special die, players also score points for completing rows, with the first successful player or players additionally gaining a bonus, special dice tokens, bombs or hearts. The hearts are one of the symbols on the special die, in fact it features on two faces so comes up quite often.

– Image by boardGOATS

Hearts give players the bonus points when they complete columns; the number of bonus points they get depends on the number of hearts they have when they complete the column. So this adds a little bit of spice to the game: should a player spend dice rolls in the early stages on hearts and hope to be able to cash in later? Or should they concentrate on completing rows and columns and end the game before other players can capitalise on the hearts they have collected? The good thing about Noch Mal! (and the reimplementation) is the interaction, through the dice selection and also the scoring. This is something that is sorely missing in many of the “Roll and Write” style games we have been playing.

– Image by boardGOATS

That said, the dice selection element does slow the game down somewhat. It’s not too bad though, as everyone is only waiting for one player before they can make their selection simultaneously. It didn’t take too long to get started, though first Black and Purple had technical issues and then Green dropped out for a bit too, so they all had to be filled in on the bits they missed. A couple of others had a moment and Microsoft Teams got the blame, but we soon started playing, and as always, Ivory was quick to start collecting columns making rapid progress to the right where he started to claim lots of points. We were making good progress when Black and Purple vanished, so we waited to see if they would come back.

– Dots by Dribbble on
pinterest.com

After some waiting, and attempts to invite them back, it was starting to look like they had a more serious problem. Green offered to contact them by SMS and everyone else took drink, snack and litter tray breaks while the opportunity was there. Eventually, we heard back that Black’s computer had crashed and was now doing a disk-check. We were reluctant to admit defeat, so although we carried on without them, we took screen-shots of the dice choices they had, just in case they were able to rejoin us. This was working fine until it was Black’s turn and it was looking like the game might have to continue without Black and Purple, when miraculously, they suddenly rejoined the meeting. A quick flash back through the previous three or four rolls and the game continued from there.

– Image by boardGOATS

Blue picked up the first row, Green took one, Burgundy got a couple and Blue took a couple more. Pink meanwhile had collected a full set of hearts and was starting to make hay on the bonus points. People seemed to enjoy this implementation more than the original Noch Mal!, because it offers more in the way of strategy. It was pushing 10pm by the time Burgundy brought the game to an end, though to be fair we’d spent nearly half of the time dealing with the gremlins. And it took a while to work out the scores too. Like the original, the first task is to finish with a positive score, which this time, everyone managed. As the totals came in, Burgundy, Green, Pink and Pine had all done well, but Blue was well out in front finishing with sixty-four points, more than twenty ahead of Pink in second.

– Image by boardGOATS

The lateness of the hour ruled out the possibility of playing ClipCut Parks or Cartographers (again!), and given the IT issues, we decided it was time to move to Board Game Arena. After a bit of chit-chat about leaving up Christmas lights, Ivory and Lime said good night. There was some discussion about what to play: Pine commented that despite nominating it for the GOAT Poo prize before Christmas, he actually really liked Welcome To… on Board Game Arena, and for some reason found it better than playing on paper. Green took a quick look and vetoed it as “another Roll and Write game” saying he’d had enough of them. So eventually, we decide to play Saboteur.

– Image by boardGOATS

Saboteur is an old favourite which we’ve played a lot over the years, including just two weeks ago. This is a hidden traitor type game where players are Dwarves tunnelling to find gold, or evil Saboteurs trying to prevent the Dwarves succeeding. Players have a hand of cards which they can use to progress the tunnel or or action cards which they can use to do things like stop other players from digging, cause rock-falls or look at the target cards and help to identify where the gold is hidden. Half the fun in this game is the banter and accusations that go along with it.

– Image by boardGOATS

This time, the banter started with Green accusing Blue of being a Saboteur, mostly just because. Blue retaliated and accused Green, but when Pink played a dead-end card on the main route to the gold, Black broke Pink’s pickaxe for him and Pine followed by breaking his lamp. Green triggered a rock-fall only for his suspicions about Blue to be confirmed when she blocked the tunnel. With Purple aligning herself on the side of the Saboteurs, by breaking Green’s pick, the three Saboteurs knew each other. The game is always really difficult for the Saboteurs, but with three against four Dwarves and the tunnel blocked, there was just a chance that they might manage it this time.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Pink broke Black’s trolley only for Burgundy to repair it immediately. Pine removed the blockage and Blue blocked it again. Eventually Pine cleared it again and with the deck exhausted, victory for the Saboteurs was tantalisingly close. That triggered a tsunami of tool destruction. The Dwarves were creeping ever closer to their target though, but there was just a chance. If Purple could play a straight tunnel past the target it would mean the Dwarves would have to tunnel that bit further, and perhaps they wouldn’t have the cards.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Unfortunately, Purple misunderstood and, amid much hilarity, the Dwarves gleefully claimed their treasure. They almost certainly would have won anyhow, but it still felt a bit like an opportunity missed. There wasn’t time to dwell on it though as it was time for the second round. Burgundy declared his position early by playing a dead end card forcing Pink to clear it, exonerating him. Pine joined Burgundy’s side when he caused a tunnel collapse in the middle of Route One and Purple again showed her evil side by breaking tools. The Dwarves quickly patched up the tunnel, but the Saboteurs again put up a fight.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Eventually, Blue claimed some coal and the gold with a single card, and it was time for the third round. This time, the Dwarves hedged their bets and started with a three-pronged approach, but before long, the tunnel was marching forward towards the central card. Green revealed his true nature as an Evil Saboteur by playing a dead-end card and was joined by Purple and Pink, (again). Pine cleared his blockage enabling Black to get to the treasure before the deck was exhausted.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

The winner depends on the distribution of “gold cards” at the end of each round. There are the same number of cards as players, and the number of gold on the cards varies at random between one and three. The person who finds the gold will always get the highest value card and one other, as they are doled out to the winning team, highest first, in reverse player order. The problem is, as the Dwarves have the advantage, the “winner” will almost always be a player who has not been a Saboteur.

– Image by boardGOATS

This time that was not the case, with Blue and Burgundy tying for first place, both having been Saboteurs, but also both having personally found gold and also been the penultimate player (thus getting four cards). Black was the only player not to have been Evil at some point during the game and took the bronze medal, also having taken four cards, but with a lower total value. Poor Purple though, who had been a Saboteur in all three rounds definitely drew the short straw. In fact, we are starting to think her friendly exterior belies an Evil lurking beneath as she has been the Saboteur on no fewer than four occasions this year already!

– Image by boardGOATS

As Pink and Pine signed off, eschewing our usual finale of 6 Nimmt!, this time we enticed Green to stay for one last game of Coloretto. This is a very simple card game that forms the underlying mechanism of the perhaps better known board game, Zooloretto. On their turn, players have a very simple choice: Draw a coloured chameleon card and add it to a truck, or take a truck. The chameleons come in seven different colours and players are trying to build sets, but only the largest three sets will score positively, with the rest subtracted from that total. With five players, the game is quite short. This time, the game started with everyone pretty much level until Blue started to lag behind.

– Image by boardGOATS

Forced to gamble, when she found herself the only player left “in” with an almost empty truck, she chanced her arm and turned over cards. When she got lucky the first time, she tried gambled the second time it happened and went from the back of the pack to taking a large lead. Black tried the same trick and also got lucky then when Burgundy decided to “take one for the team” and played “King Maker”, Black took the lead as the game came to an end and held on for a fine victory. With that, Green decided it was definitely time for bed and after a little bit of chit-chat, everyone else went too.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Learning Outcome: Being evil is harder than you might think.

Remote Gaming: Some Learning Outcomes

With the advent of Covid-19, boardGOATS, like many other groups were left with the choice of meeting online or not meeting at all. So, like many other groups, boardGOATS chose to try to continue with meetings. While some groups have struggled, dwindled, and eventually given up, so far, boardGOATS has managed to keep going with almost everyone still attending regularly. We decided that we would put together this summary of some of the reasons we think we are still meeting, and a resource companion in case anyone else is in the same boat.

– Image by boardGOATS

The first, and by far the most important factor is that everyone has been extremely patient and very tolerant of the limitations. Everyone is fundamentally appreciative of the interaction meeting online offers and have been amazingly understanding of the current issues. This is essential. Secondly, we meet once a fortnight: boardGOATS meetings have always been alternate weeks, but this is actually quite key when meeting online. If meetings are too frequent everyone can get very frustrated quite quickly, but too infrequent and people lose the routine. As it is, fortnightly means everyone makes a date to make it happen as otherwise the next one would be a month away.

– Image by boardGOATS

Finally, there’s planning and organisation. Having a plan is vital if things are to run smoothly, and smooth is essential to avoid people becoming frustrated. The group has always had a “Feature Game“, because we’ve always been a group that takes ages to decide what to play; having a starting option helps us to get going a bit quicker. With remote meetings, however, the “Feature Game” has become essential. It is also important that someone takes the lead to teach if necessary, and keep things moving to stop games dragging, but also allows the all important banter to flow when possible as well.

– Image by boardGOATS

The group have broadly used three different approaches to remote gaming, all underpinned by Microsoft Teams. This choice of platform is largely immaterial, but our decision was made early on because of possible security issues with alternatives and the hardware that some of the group were using. Either way, this provides sound and, where required, visuals. We always start the meeting early and then leave a place holder in front of the game camera so everyone knows which screen to pin in advance. In our case we usually use a stuffed panda doing something humourous, but a game box would suffice too.

The three different approaches to remote gaming we have used have been:

A real-life game hosted at one location, shared through Teams.
This works well, but really only for relatively simple games like Second Chance, HexRoller or Noch Mal!, though we’ve played Cartographers and Troyes Dice as well. It turns out that “Roll and Write” type games work exceptionally well, but other games are possible too. The most complicated game we’ve played using this method is Las Vegas/Las Vegas Royale, which is one of the group’s favourites, but this is right on the limit of what is possible. The key is that players need to be able to see the whole game layout with all the information. For this, the resolution of the camera is important, but also that of the screen used for displaying it at the other end. Video compression by the platform feeding the data can also be an issue. Lighting is absolutely critical too—good lighting makes all the difference.
Main Advantage: We’ve found this feels most like playing a “real” game.
Main Disadvantages: One person/location does most of the manipulation, and there is a complexity limitation.
A virtual game on Tabletop Simulator manipulated by a small number of people , shared with everyone else through Teams.
Some people can’t install software on their computers and for others sand-box type environments like Tabletop Simulator are too complex. Piping a virtual game through Teams is a sort of half-way house. To make this work, the person “hosting” has to set the game up with the camera view set to “overhead” with everything in view, and leave it there. Then they share this screen through their meeting platform (in our case, Microsoft Teams). Again, this means there is a limit on the complexity of the game: the most complex games we’ve played using this method are Camel Up and Finstere Flure (aka Fearsome Floors). These have worked quite well, but it’s a bit more impersonal and relies on a small number of people operating the Simulator to make the game work. Downtime is a bit of an issue too for turn based games. For these reasons, this has been the least popular method for our group.
Main Advantage: We can modify and play slightly more complex games to our own house-rules.
Main Disadvantages: People need to be comfortable with the software and there are limitations caused by the stability of the platform as well as there being a steep learning curve for those who are not used to playing computer games.
An online game played on a website (e.g. Board Game Arena) with audio provided by Teams.
These are great because they allow players to do things like draw cards from a shared deck and keep them hidden until they play them. This is a fairly fundamental aspect of many games and enables games like Saboteur which would not otherwise be possible. There is a limited range of games available though, and there is no scope for modifying the game either (adding extra players or altering the end-game conditions, for example). On the other hand, the software does a lot of the up-keep and can make even quite advanced things possible. For example, without Board Game Arena to do the maths, we would never have discovered the delightful madness that is the “Professional Variant” of 6 Nimmt! (which recently won the 2020 Golden GOAT at our annual GOAT Awards). It does feel very much like playing a computer game though.
Main Advantages: Very low maintenance and higher complexity games are possible including those with “hidden information”.
Main Disadvantages: Everyone needs to have an account on the platform and a device, and the games are restricted to those that are available and the rules as implemented, in particular, player counts.

Each of the different modes has their limitations, but we’ve found that by mixing them up we avoid getting fed up with any specific issue.

One of the biggest challenges boardGOATS has is that we have been playing as a group of up to ten. This is because we are all friends, even though many of us only know each other through the fortnightly meetings. If the group were to break into two or more parts it would likely be along the lines of game “weight”, which would mean some people would never play together and it could be divisive. This only works because those who prefer more complex games are extremely patient and understanding. Ultimately, as a group, we feel the social aspect is the most important thing at the moment, much more important than the quality of the gaming. We’ll definitely make sure we play lots of more complex games when we finally return to our beloved Horse and Jockey though.

– Image by boardGOATS

24th Movember 2020 (Online)

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!

29th September 2020 (Online)

This week it was Ivory’s turn to share his pizza with everyone, while Blue and Pink shared ice creams with Purple and Black. With the food over, Blue explained how we were going to prepare for our birthday next time, by “wrapping parcels” for Crappy Birthday. This is a silly party game that we play every year to celebrate the anniversary of our first meeting in 2012. Basically, players take it in turns to have their birthday, and everyone else chooses a gift from a hand of five cards.

– Image by boardGOATS

Unfortunately, this doesn’t really lend itself to playing online, but as so many things have been cancelled this year, we didn’t want this to be one of them. So, to get round the difficulties, we decided to play it over two evenings: firstly wrapping cards, then opening them two weeks later. Each player had a set of electronic files containing cards. Everyone opened the first file and chose a card to give to the player whose name was drawn out of the box lid, making a note of what they were giving and to whom.

– Image by boardGOATS

When people had gifted two parcels, they closed the file and opened the next one which included the same cards as the first file and a couple of new ones, thus simulating drawing two more cards. Once everyone’s name had been drawn, everyone emailed the list of gifts to Blue for her to arrange delivery ready for next time. And then it was on to the “Feature Game” which was Welcome To….

– Image by boardGOATS

Welcome To… is another “Roll and Write” style game, though without the colouring-in element of some of the games we’ve played recently, and as a result is a bit more complex. In this game, players are planing and building housing estates in 1950s USA. This time, the player board depicts three rows of houses and a scoring table. The idea is that there are three decks of double sided cards with a house number on one side and an action on the other. At the start of each round, the top card is turned over to show the action side. Players then choose one of the three house number/action pairs to use.

– Image by boardGOATS

Players must write a house number on any one of the three streets, but the numbers can only feature once on each, and must be ascending from left to right. Players may then carry out the associated action, which could be building a fence, building a swimming pool or park, adding a number a second time (“Bis!”), modifying the number by one or two (using the Temping Agency) or increasing the value of houses on “Estates” of certain sizes.

– Image by boardGOATS

At the end of the game, players score points for building swimming pools and parks, having used the “Temping Agency” the most, and also for different sized “Estates”. An Estate is a continuous group of houses (i.e. no gaps) with a fence at each end. Estates of size one up to six score different numbers of points and one of the actions players can use is selectively increase the value of some of these.

– Image by boardGOATS

Additionally, players score points for completed “City Plans”. These are three cards revealed at the start of the game. which give points to people who complete their requirements. The catch is, a bit like Noch Mal!, the first person (or people) to be successful get more points, usually around double that of anyone who finishes them later in the game. This is also one of three “game timers”, with the game ending when someone completes all three Plans.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game also ends if someone manages to fill in all the houses in all three streets, which is not easy. More likely, players are going to find they cannot build any of the three houses being offered. If this happens, players player take a “Building Permit Refusal”—when someone takes their third, that also triggers the end of the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

There are lots of little rules that make the game more complex than most of the “Roll and Write” games we’ve played. For example, players can build fences anywhere, but parks must be on the street they built their house on, and pools can only be built in the garden of the house if it was on the plan. That said, it is not actually difficult, but there is a lot to think about and if players are going to score well.

– Image by boardGOATS

There were a lot of questions from the group, and people clearly found it difficult to understand, not helped by the difficulties of learning a game over MS Teams. Nevertheless, teaching and learning through a computer is a skill lots of school teachers, pupils, university lecturers and students have had to develop this year, and it turns out it is useful for gamers too. So eventually, Pink finished shuffling and turned over the first set of cards to start the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

Everything went quiet as people put their “Game Face” on and concentrated. It wasn’t long before the silence was broken by Burgundy sighing, Pine grumbling and Blue checking how people were getting on. To reduce the waiting and questions whether everyone was ready, we used the “hands up” function to indicate when players had finished writing. This was really helpful to keep track of things with so many people playing.

– Image by boardGOATS

The City Plans in play were all from the basic game (and we weren’t playing with roundabouts either), so all three were based on estate sizes: 1) two of size four; 2) a six and three ones; 3) a four and a three. Green was first to complete a City Plan taking number three, and was soon followed by Pink and Ivory taking the lucrative second Plan giving them eleven points each.

– Image by boardGOATS

Gradually, as the game progressed others claimed more City Plans and there was a feeling that the game was coming to a close. Increasingly, people found their choices were becoming more limited adding to the tension. This feeling was heightened when Purple became the first to be unable to play, and took a Building Refusal Permit. A few rounds later, and Mulberry ended the game by completing her third City Plan and everyone started adding up their scores.

– Animation by boardGOATS

Despite people finding it difficult at first, the scores were surprisingly close with a winning score of ninety-five and most of the group not far behind. It is definitely a game that rewards a little experience especially as it is quite different to the other games we’ve been playing recently, so it wasn’t surprising that Pink ran out the winner. Green ran him close though, with an excellent ninety-two. There was a bit of chatter while some said their “good byes” and the rest of the group decided to play Saboteur on Board Game Arena.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game is easy to play and everyone knows what they are doing, so it is always quick to get started. Each player has a hand of cards and take it in turns to either play a tunnel card, or play an action card. The aim of the game is to help the team build a tunnel to whichever of the three terminal cards holds the gold. Unless you are a Saboteur of course, in which case, your aim is to hinder the efforts made by everyone else, but without being spotted…

– Image by boardGOATS

Saboteur is usually better with more players, but the group had sort of decided they were going to play it before they realised how many people there were left. With just six there were either one or two Evil Saboteurs and the rest were Lovely Dwarves. This makes it hard for the Saboteur team and they have to get their act together quickly to make the most of what little time they have.

– Image by boardGOATS

In the first round, Pine made it very clear he was going to make the most of his time and bluntly said he thought Blue was a saboteur and broke her pick axe for her, preventing her doing any tunnelling. This was apparently in response to her playing a map card in her first turn which he decreed was “A very Saboteury Move”. Everyone else felt that Pine’s move was much more “Saboteury” and jumped on him in response. Everyone except Purple that is, who ran to his aid.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

It wasn’t long before Purple’s true colours were flying when she joined Pine and blocked the tunnel with dead-ends. However, the Dwarves, now knowing there wasn’t a traitor hiding in their midst, got their act together, dealt with the blockage and headed for the gold. Before long, it was 1-0 to the Dwarves.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

The Evil Saboteurs were a little more cagey in the second round. Purple looked at the bottom card and indicated it was Gold. After last time, nobody trusted her so first Pink and then Pine double checked and all concurred. The Dwarves were one card away from an easy run to the Gold when Burgundy’s rockfall card told everyone else which side he was on. It was too little too late, however, and nothing he or his partner in crime, Black, could do could prevent the Brave Dwarves repainting the tunnel and finding the gold.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Early in the third and final round, Burgundy started by looking at the middle card which he claimed was coal. By this time, suspicion was a currency everyone was rich in, so Pink double-checked and concurred, then checked the bottom target card. Burgundy claimed suspicion and immediately verified that they’d found Gold. Purple announced that she thought Pink was behaving suspiciously and broke his pickaxe for him—an extremely Saboteury move!

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Burgundy attempted to redeem his behaviour in the previous round by repairing Pink’s tools, while Black repaid Purple by smashing Purple’s lamp. Although Purple was able to fix it herself, it looked like the Dwarves were home safe and sound until Pine’s turn. As discussed with the team, he played a card between the middle and bottom cards, but when it connected the carefully dug tunnel to the middle, coal, everyone was sure that they’d found the second Saboteur.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Pine protested that it was incompetence rather than malice that meant he’d put the card in upside down. The Dwarves had to fix his “mistake” though, and their cards were running out. Black discarded a card and Blue had no choice but to smash some more of Purple’s tools, leaving it down to Pink to finish things.

– Image by boardGOATS

In the end, it turned out that the Saboteurs were Black and Purple, and Pine just had a sausage-finger-moment. That left Blue as the “winner”, but the scoring is very random and highly dependent on turn order, so really all that can be said is that it was 3-0 to the Loyal Dwarves. There was time for something else before Pink’s bedtime, and given the shortage of time, the group bowed to the inevitable and moved on to 6 Nimmt!.

– Image by boardGOATS

This has become one of our favourite games, especially since we’ve been forced to play online as it is light and fun and fast to play, and helps us to forget the current situation. The game is so simple, and yet so much fun, with almost no downtime. Players simply choose a card and Board Game Arena does the rest. Of course, everyone like to think they have control and their strategy is working, right up until it isn’t.

– Image by boardGOATS

The idea is that the card chosen is played on the end of one of four rows, with players trying to avoid placing the sixth card as that means the points on the other five cards are deducted from their total. So the aim of the game is to try to second-guess what everyone else is doing and stay safe. Recently, we’ve been playing the “Professional” variant which allows players to add cards to either end of the rows, adding more “strategy” and more chaos, and a whole lot more fun.

– Image by boardGOATS

Things started to go wrong Blue first, when she cheered thinking she’d got away without a pick-up, only to discover she’d got nine “nimmts”. Purple picked up nine in the same turn, however, while Blue managed to stabilise her game, Purple’s went from bad to worse when she managed what might be a new record, picking up nineteen nimmts in a single turn!

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Fairly inevitably, Purple triggered the end of the game, but the other end was less clear. That was until the end of the game, when Blue, who had somehow managed to avoid picking up anything else, just pipped Burgundy to the win. With that, Pine and Pink bade everyone else good night and the remaining foursome looked for something else to play.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

There were a few options, but they were limited by the fact that nobody wanted to play anything long or too intense. In the end, they decided to give Sushi Go! a try. This is a game we’ve all played before, but nobody had played on Board Game Arena. is a pure card drafting game: players start with a hand of cards and keep one and pass the rest on. The aim is to collect cards in combinations to give them points.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

In Sushi Go!, it is all about collecting the right cards at the right time. For example, three Sashimi cards are worth ten points, but two are worthless. There is also a significant “hate drafting” aspect though. This is where players take cards to inconvenience others rather than to benefit one’s own game. This is mostly because Maki Roll and Pudding points are awarded to those with the most cards, but can also be because causing another player to finish with worthless cards can sometimes be as effective as scoring points oneself.

– Image by boardGOATS

The first round was one of rediscovery since it was a very long time since anyone had played it. Blue rediscovered the perils of trying to collect Sashimi, when she got stuck with only two which scored her nothing. Burgundy, on the other hand, just before her in turn order, collected three and claimed ten points. Purple collected lots of Nigiri and Black made hay out of Maki Rolls. So, going into the second round it was pretty much a three-way tie with all to play for.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

In the second and third rounds, Black and Purple made a lot of points from playing Nigiri cards after wasabi cards which is a multiplier and can be very lucrative. Although Black was in the lead going into the final round, the fact Burgundy took two Wasabi/Nigiri combos meant he took a fine victory. The game plays so quickly though and the Board Game Arena rendition is so good that everyone fancied trying giving it another go.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

The second game was much closer, the competition for Wasabi and Maki Rolls got more intense with everyone now well aware of how lucrative they could be. Although it was very close, in the end, Burgundy just managed to keep his crown, beating Black into second place by a single point and everyone else just a couple of points behind. With such a tight finish, a third game was inevitable. Blue who had come last in the previous two games was determined not to this time. However, a grotty starting had meant she was forced to start with lot of puddings.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

By this time, everyone was looking more carefully at what they were passing on, so Blue finished with a bit of hate-drafting, ensuring that Burgundy couldn’t get a full set of Sashimi and that ensured she avoided the wooden spoon. Purple and Black started out with Wasabi and really managed to make their cards count. In the end, there were still only two points in it, but this time it was Black and Purple fighting out for first place, which Black just took. And then it was definitely time for bed.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Learning Outcome: Swimming pools are not as common as you might think.

18th August 2020 (Online)

The evening started with a bit of chit-chat about happenings in the village and the big hole in the A417 which had a large number of Thames Water employees staring into it and had closed the road to Wantage. Since nobody is travelling very far to games night these days, nobody was inconvenienced. Every cloud… Although nobody was inconvenienced by the road closure, that didn’t mean nobody had been travelling: Green and his family all called in from Aviemore and shared their picture of “little Nessy” and their plans to visit her big sister the following day.

– Image by Green

While Mulberry (now recovered from her jet-lag) encouraged her computer to play ball, Green “shared” a glass of whisky with everyone and people reminisced about a certain New Year Party and a particular bottle of the “finest” Bavarian whisky. Eventually, we finally started the “Feature Game“, Railroad Ink: Deep Blue Edition. We’ve found “Roll and Write” style games work really well under the current constraints, so we thought we’d try another one. Rather than a communal colouring fest like Second Chance or Cartographers, in this game players are planning a road and rail network where players score points for connecting, generating a long road and a long track, and using the middle of their board, but lose points for “hanging ends”.

– Image by boardGOATS

The idea is very simple: each round, all the dice are rolled and everyone adds all of the features to their map. Three of the dice feature roads and rails (straight sections, bends and T-junctions) while one features interchange stations (straight and on a bend) and an flyover. There are seven rounds and everyone scores their map once at the end. The game comes with a couple of expansions, but as this was the first try for most people, this time we stuck to the base game with just the four white dice.

– Image by boardGOATS

When players add features they must “grow” their network from one (or more) of the entrances to the map and they make notes of the round in the corner of each square to try to avoid confusion. A continuous road, railway line or network is not interrupted by stations, but a rail and a road that cross at a flyover are not connected. In addition to the seven rolls of four dice that everyone must add to their board, players may, optionally, also add special cross-roads to their map, given in white on the print-outs above the play areas. A maximum of one per round can be added, up to a total of three during the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

At the end of the round players score points for several things. Firstly, they score points for each separate network they have built, with networks scoring points for the more exits they are connected to according to a table. Points are then scored for each players’ longest stretch of road and longest section of rail, taking one point per segment. Next, players get bonus points for each square they’ve filled in the centre of their board. Finally, players lose points for each “hanging end” i.e. ends that do not connect correctly.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pink rolled and then the questions and clarifications started. Eventually though, everyone was happy, or at least happy enough and had scribbled things on their board. Pink and Blue showed their boards to help explain and then Pink rolled for the next round. This inevitably led to more clarifications, before Pink could roll again. And so it continued. Everyone seemed to have got the hang of what they were doing, and by this time everyone was lamenting the lack of junctions and blaming Pink for his poor rolling, while Pine and Green were complaining about their “Hanging Ends”.

– Image by boardGOATS

Just before the fifth round, Pink reminded everyone about their special spaces, saying that if they wanted to use all three and hadn’t used any yet, they would need to use one per round from this point forward. This distressed Mulberry as she couldn’t find a way to use any of them without messing things up. It took a while for everyone else to realise her plight and point out that it was a good idea to use them if you could, but they were optional.

– Image by boardGOATS

Before long, everyone was adding up their scores and checking what was and wasn’t valid. It was only then that Green realised that he’d connected roads to some of his rail entrances and rails to some of his road entrances. He tried to say that it hadn’t been clear at the start, but as everyone else had managed to get it right, nobody was feeling very charitable (it was Green, after-all). So his score of forty-six was duly reduced to twenty-one.

– Image by boardGOATS

It was quite close at the front with Blue, Ivory and Black (now known as “The Silent One”) all vying for second place, but Burgundy just took the runner-up position. Pink, however, was a few points in front and finished with a fine fifty-three. Although Pine had really enjoyed it and some of the others were happy to play again, there were some who had found it very challenging and wanted a change. Lime took his leave as he’d had a rough week. Mulberry didn’t have any other print-outs, so being the brave millennial that she is, she said she would edit the pdf on her tablet using a stylus.

– Image by Mulberry

Although opinions had hitherto been divided about what to play, Noch Mal! (aka Encore!) would likely be easier for her than Second Chance, so that decided it. Noch Mal! has become known as “Board Gamers’ Bingo” by some members of the group, and certainly it has a bit of a feel of that about it. Three colour and three number dice are rolled and the active player chooses one of each and crosses off the number of squares in that colour. Everyone else chooses from the colours and numbers left. The catch is that players must cross off exactly that right number of that colour, they must be in a continuous block and adjacent to something already crossed off in the starting column.

– Image by boardGOATS

Points are scored during the game for completed columns and crossing off all of one colour with the game ending when one player crosses off all of their second colour. The first thing we noticed was that red and orange looked the same and yellow was nearly invisible on screen. So, after Pink threatened to rearrange the furniture and crawl under the sofa to get to the plug so he could move the light, Blue took the easy option and wrote the colours on a bit of paper to act as labels and the game began.

– Image by boardGOATS

For those that hadn’t played before, and even those that had, Ivory was startlingly quick to be the first to complete a column, even more so given that it was almost as far to the right as he could go. After that it was a gentle trickle as players called out that they’d finished columns. Before long, Green called that he’d finished the first colour, appropriately enough, green.

– Image by boardGOATS

All the columns were completed and others started to finish colours and everyone knew the end was nigh when Green took his second colour and with it ended the game. As players began to call out their totals, Mulberry was completely aghast that people had actually managed to score points since she’d finished with minus two. She wasn’t alone with a low score and everyone else tried to reassure her that they’d all been there – the first time the group played, three players finished with negative points and the average score was one!

– Image by boardGOATS

This time Green’s father who had joined in from Scotland, top scored with nineteen, but Green felt he hadn’t quite been playing right. It was close at the top with Ivory finishing with ten, Pine with twelve and Blue with thirteen. The winners were Green and The Silent One, tied on fourteen points. With that, the Scottish Connection went to bed as they had an early start in the morning for their Nessy hunt. Ivory and Mulberry also took their leave, leaving six to play on. Playing games on Board Game Arena is just that bit easier and enables a wider variety of games so everyone moved there.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pink is very fond of For Sale, so he suggested that, and, as it is a very quick and relatively easy game, everyone else quickly concurred. This game is played in two halves, buying and then selling. In the first half, in each round enough cards are revealed for one per player. Players then bid to stay in, taking the lowest value card when they pass. Once all thirty property cards have been auctioned off, players sell them. In this phase, in each round, cheques are revealed and players choose one of their properties to sell. The cheques are then shared out with the highest value cheque going to the player who sold the most desirable (highest numbered) property. The wealthiest player at the end is the winner.

– Image by boardGOATS

One of the key rules that makes the auctions interesting is that players who pass, get half their bid returned, while the player who wins the auction pays their full bid. In the original Ravensburger/Schmid editions, where a bid was an odd value, the money returned was rounded up. However, in real life, we play with the more recent, Überplay version where the returned money is rounded down, so this is the way we play online too. For a bit of variety, this time we decided to play with the original rule, which would give everyone a little bit more money to spend and make passing early a little more lucrative.

– Image by boardGOATS

Burgundy normally does really well at this game setting standards others seek to achieve. The change to the rules seemed to really cramp his style though, and he just couldn’t find his rhythm. Pine and Purple were similarly afflicted, where, in contrast, Blue, Pink and Black seemed to flourish where they usually struggled a bit. Most of the high cards came out towards the end of the first half, so the players who hadn’t spent too much in the early rounds were able to capitalise, often getting high value cards without having to pay their full bid.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

In the end Purple had managed to spend only $3,000, but that meant her properties didn’t give her a great return. In contrast, everyone else had spent most of the their starting pot, and Burgundy had no spare change at all. Pink felt sure he had the game in the bag, but it was much tighter at the top than he thought with Black snapping at his heels, and Blue beating him by a single point with fifty-three. It was clear that the change in the rules had unbalanced some people’s game so we decided to give it another go and give Pink another chance.

– Image by boardGOATS

The artwork on the property cards is one of the things that makes the game special and fortunately it has been ported to the online version of the game too. The most valuable property, number thirty, is a space station while the least valuable, number one, is a cardboard box. There are some lovely intermediates though and offering them to people always adds to the atmosphere. This time, Purple commented that “Burgundy’s on the Bothy,” only for Pine to respond, “Burgundy’s on the toilet, you’re on the bothy and Black’s on the banjo-shack!”

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

This time, Burgundy and Purple still struggled, though Pine did much better. It was still tight, and remarkably the end result was almost exactly the same as before with Blue winning again. This time she had a margin of two points and a total of fifty-two, but the placings were a bit different. Black moved one place up on the podium and took second, with Pine taking third place, leaving Pink a little crest-fallen. There is one thing guaranteed to cheer up any disappointed gamer, however, and that is to play 6 Nimmt!.

– Image by boardGOATS

Since we discovered the “Professional” variant a few weeks back, it has given 6 Nimmt! a new lease of life for the group. The game is so simple and yet so much fun with the illusion of control until everything goes wrong. In the basic game game players simultaneously choose cards and then, starting with the lowest, add them to the end of one of four rows, picking up cards if the card they chose was the sixth card added to a row. In the “Professional variant, cards can be added to either end of the rows making the decision space that bit more complex, dramatically increasing the madness.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

As people moved to the table, someone commented that it was now playable in 3D, though why anyone would want to play a card game in 3D was anybody’s guess. Inevitably, there was a pause while everyone tried the 3D option. Unfortunately, most people found it was difficult to operate and, everyone seemed to have issues with either cards not showing or not sitting where they should. Still, it’s only in “beta” testing, and we love 6 Nimmt! just as it is. So everyone returned to the 2D mode and got on with playing.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

This time, Black, who had done so well in all the other games, seemed determined to lose and to do so spectacularly. The only thing that seemed likely to prevent it was Purple who has a remarkable knack of picking up cards a skill that is only increased by the new variant. While she didn’t do quite as well as last time, she did manage to pick up fourteen. She wasn’t the only one to pick up lots of “Nimmts” in one turn, Pine managed thirteen in one turn and Burgundy twelve.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Winning in 6 Nimmt! always requires a combination of good play with a healthy slice of good fortune. For this reason, we usually celebrate the looser, the person who has been most generous in picking up cards for others, as much as the winner. This time, Black’s generosity of spirit was very much in evidence, but Purple was the most altruistic. At the other end, Burgundy had put an end to his poor run in For Sale, coming second, but it was Pink who book-ended the evening with his second win.

– Image by boardGOATS
from boardgamearena.com

Learning Outcome: An integrated transport policy is a Good Thing.

Boardgames in the News: What are “Roll and Write” Games?

In the last few years, “Roll and Write” games have been everywhere, but what defines them and what let to the rise in their popularity? Well, their roots lie in simple dice games, which are as old as the hills, but arguably the first “Roll and Write” game is Yahtzee, a game that is now a childhood classic. Although the commercial game dates from the 1950s, the game is based on the older family of traditional games, including Yacht, Generala, Poker Dice etc..

– Image by boardGOATS

The idea is that players roll five dice to try to get specific combinations, re-rolling some, all or none up to three times. These fall into different categories each of which can only be scored once and are crossed off on a scoring sheet. This roll and re-roll mechanism has been used as the basis of many more modern games like Pickomino (aka Heck Meck), To Court the King and even Roll for the Galaxy, but these are not “Roll and Write” games, they are dice games. More dice games with a “Writing” element, followed as well though. These include Reiner Knizia’s Decathalon, the Catan Dice Game, and Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age with its subsequent series of games.

– Image by boardGOATS

Perhaps the most influential game of this type, however, is Qwixx. In this game, each player has their own score-sheet with four rows, numbered two to twelve, each in a different colour. On their turn, the active player rolls six dice: two white and one of each of the four colours. The active player can mark off the sum of one white die and one coloured die in the row of the same colour, while everyone else can mark off the sum of the two white dice on any one of their four rows. The catch is that the numbers must be crossed out in order: descending for the blue and green rows, ascending for the red and yellow rows.

– Image by boardGOATS

And that is the core that really makes a “Roll and Write” game: the decision making. While there is no industry recognised definition, it is widely understood that games that fall into the “Roll and Write” category have the following key characteristics:

A randomiser: traditionally dice, but some games use cards etc.;
A key element of decision making;
Individual work sheets, which are more than just a score pad.

Qwixx was published seven years ago, and was popular in its own right receiving a nomination for the Spiel des Jahres award in 2013. Its legacy, however, is the way it helped to open the door for other games in the genre. Noch Mal! (aka Encore!) followed in 2016 and in 2018, “Roll and Write” games really took off. Yahtzee, Quixx and Roll Through the Ages have now been followed many other very popular and successful games including, Welcome to…, Ganz Schön Clever! (aka That’s Very Clever!), Railroad Ink, and Cartographers: A Roll Player Tale. Between them, these games have received two Kennerspiel and two Spiel des Jahres nominations.

– Image by boardGOATS

There are now, hundreds of “Roll and Write” games available and new games continue to arrive, each with their own twist: some based round rolling dice, some involving a deck of cards, and there are even games now that involve cutting out! But what is the appeal, and why the sudden growth in this genre? For the publisher they are obviously cheap and relatively easy to produce, often needing little in the way of complex or bespoke components. In a squeezed market this is very important. For designers they are easy to prototype and many of these games are relatively easy to play-test too. This is because they can often be played solo, and the mathematics of probability are well understood (by mathematicians at least).

– Image by boardGOATS

For gamers, the low price of these games means financial investment is typically small. They are usually quick to learn and don’t over-stay their welcome either, which means they are low risk and if they “click” they also can see a lot of table time. They are easy to play remotely too, because players just need pens and a work-sheet each, and access to a web camera. And thus, the timing of the rise has been serendipitous: with so many people stuck at home this year, “Roll and Write” games are really coming into their own now. It remains to be seen whether their popularity will continue into 2021 and beyond.

– Image by boardGOATS