Tag Archives: Om Nom Nom

4th April 2023

While Blue was off getting fish and chips for people, Pink chatted with Pine and Green and his family as they arrived. Green had just got out Incan Gold and was explaining the rules, when food arrived, so it was hastily put away while food was consumed, only to be got out again as soon as the chips had disapparated. Incan Gold is a very simple “push your luck” type game where players are exploring a mine and trying to get out with treasure before disaster strikes. Each round a card is revealed and players simultaneously choose whether to stay or leave and share what spoils they already have. There are three types of card: Treasure, Artifact, and Disaster.

– Image by boardGOATS

The contents of the Treasure cards are simply divided equally between players when they leave the mine, or as equally as possible leaving behind any left-overs. Artifacts can only be taken if there is only one player leaving the mine, all alone. Disaster cards are the problem—Spiders, Snakes, Zombies, Lava and Rock Falls. Each one is present in the deck three times, and when the third is drawn, the mine collapses leaving everyone in it without any treasure. This time, though, the group didn’t get off to a very auspicious start. The first card out was a Rock Fall, the second was Fire and the third was another Fire!

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So the group decided it was such a bad start that they would shuffle and try again. On the second attempt, the first two cards out were again Disasters, but the third delivered some Treasure. It wasn’t very much and nobody felt it was worth leaving for. That was a good choice as there was a little more treasure to come. Still not very much, but more littered the floor of the tunnel, and it eventually proved too enticing for Emerald and Violet who managed to net about five gems each for their tents. For the rest of the group, they pushed it a little too far and promptly lost everything as they got caught in a devastating fire.

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The second tunnel explored also lured in too many explorers before collapsing the ceiling on everyone. The third tunnel brought the first glint of Gold—an Artifact. Eying each other up everyone elected to stay, which was fine, but on the next turn, Lilac decided she would chance it and run. Luckily for her she was the only one and managed to net the Golden treasure on her way out, and left everyone else to die at the hands of a rather midget-like Zombie. Lilac managed to repeat the feat on the fourth tunnel, collecting the Gold treasure as she made a run for it, although everyone else managed to collect more treasure and eventually decided to save what they had found instead of dying a horrible death.

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The final tunnel brought some nice treasure, and another Artifact, but with too many people leaving, they had to leave it where it lay. Pine was the one who held his nerve and safely collected the Golden treasure this time, before a Disaster as those remaining were overrun by Spiders. In the final reckoning it was neck & neck between Pine and Lilac on thirty-six points, but Lilac just edged it by dint of having two gold artifacts to Pine’s one. It was close for third, though Lime was the best of the rest with twenty-four, just ahead of Emerald and Violet. The least effective was Greedy Green, who’d stayed just too long just too often, eager for more treasure only to be bashed and burned and brutally murdered time after time.

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, everyone else played the “Feature Game“, the filler Om Nom Nom. This is a fun and light little game of think and double-think where players are trying to eat without getting eaten. The game is set up by seeding the board with cute dice, rolled to give cheese, carrots and flies for the bottom of the food chain, and mice, rabbits and frogs for the middle of the food chain. Players then receive a deck of six cards representing the animals for the middle of the food chain and the top of the food chain, cats, wolves and hedgehogs. With game play reminiscent of 6 Nimmt!, players simultaneously choose a card to play which are then evaluated.

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Players who played cards at the top of the food chain eat anything below, so long as there is enough for everyone who played the same card. Thus, if there are four mice (including any cards played) and two cats, the owner of the cats take two cards each and get to keep their cat cards too with them all going on their scoring pile. If however, there was only one mouse, both cats go hungry and neither player scores anything. Cards played for the middle of the food chain eat the dice at the bottom of the food chain as long as there are enough dice for everyone who played the same card, but also as long as they don’t get eaten by anyone playing a card at the top of the food chain.

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Thus, playing a card in the middle of a food chain is all about timing: there is a higher risk, but also a higher reward as the dice showing red faces are worth two points instead of the usual one for a card or a die showing a black middle of the food chain critter. Although we’ve played Om Nom Nom several times before, it was new to both Teal and Lime. Teal started off well though taking a massive fifteen points in his first round. Unfortunately for him, that turned out to be beginner’s luck and he didn’t do so well in the next round. Purple’s game, on the other hand, went the other way, starting with nothing in the first round and taking sixteen points in the second.

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With others being more consistent, in particular Blue who scored a seven and an eight in each of her first two rounds, it was all down performances in the final round. In the event, Black and Pink both did well in the final round, and Teal improved on his score in the second round too. It was Purple that won the final, albeit low-scoring round, taking ten points, giving her a winning total of twenty-six, three more than Teal in second with Black and Blue tying for third place some six points behind him. It had been a quick fun game, one that is always good value and definitely deserves another outing soon.

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Both games, Incan Gold and Om Nom Nom, finished at much the same time, so everyone decided what to play next. Teal had brought Nidvelilir at Green’s request, but this wasn’t the night for that. Eventually, Purple traded places with Pine and Lime leaving five players, in one group which picked out a lot of possible five-player games. Since Violet was here only for the a brief visit they let her choose. Her selection was Zooloretto or King of Tokyo, however Purple made a face at both choices and suggested Carcassonne instead. Violet was less keen as she felt she had played that a lot recently, so Green made an executive decision to play Boomtown—a fun little bidding game that hasn’t had an outing for a long time and doesn’t take too long.

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Unfortunately, at this point Emerald was really beginning to feel the heat of the pub and felt he couldn’t participate. He went off for a wander to get some fresh air, ironically just before the back door was opened to cool everyone down a little. As he had decided to sit this one out, the rest of the group revised the rules which were simple enough on the face of things. A deck of sixty cards is shuffled and placed face-down in the middle of the table, along with two dice, a pile of Mayor pawns (one in each of five different colors) and Town tokens (two each of the same colours). One card per person is turned face up and each player begins the game with $10 starting funds to bid for the card they want.

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Each player has to increase the bid or pass, until there is one winner. And this is the clever bit of the game—the winner, pays the player to their right, who passes on half of the money to the player on their right and so on until either there is nothing left to give or the winner is reached (they don’t get any of their own money back). Everyone then gets a card in clockwise order. There are Mine, Dynamite, Saloon, Hold-up, Governor and Special cards, each of which has an effect. Mines and Saloons give players gold and the player with the most Mines in any Town/colour takes the matching Mayor token which forces others to give them money.

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Dynamite cards allow players to destroy other players’ mines, while Hold-up cards allow players to steal from other and the Governor allows players to upgrade a Mayor so their mines are worth double. Once the cards have been allocated, the dice are rolled and players receive income for their mines. The game ends when the deck is depleted and all the cards have been sold. The player with the largest total from their their points, money, the production value of all the mines they control, and five bonus points for each Mayor, is the winner.

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Maybe it was the heat, but aside from Green, no-one was quite sure how Boomtown would play out, and it took a few rounds for everyone to get the hang of things. The group didn’t get off to a great start, even when they adjusted the draw deck to make sure there was enough mines for everyone by replacing the action cards that came out. The second round brought out two sets of Dynamite though, and both Green and Purple ended up destroying each others mine. The bidding never got very high in the first half of the game, mostly because nobody knew what they were doing, and did not necessarily want to choose first.

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However, by about half way and when the Mayor pieces had all been claimed and the Saloons were built everything started to hot up. Although Lilac had a lot of red Mines, which netted her a little money from players forced to take the last few remaining, every time they found gold, she had to pass most of her claim to Purple who had a red saloon along with Saloon girls! Violet managed to claim a couple of Mayors along the way, and although she lost one of them, she managed to avoid the attraction of the Saloon, so kept everything she collected. With some judicial rolling on the Card Shark Dice, she managed to rob some of the others blind.

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By the time the last cards had been claimed and the final Mines had given up their gold, it was Purple who had become the master Miner, by something of a landslide. Violet was a respectable second with Lilac, having passed on so much of her wealth to Purple, just managing to stay whisker ahead of Green for third. Meanwhile, on the next table, with so many players Survive: Escape from Atlantis had seemed a good choice as it plays six with the expansion. This was released to mark the thirtieth anniversary of two very similar, much older games, Survive! and Escape from Atlantis, and is an agglomeration of them both.

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The idea is that players rescue their meeples from the central Island of Atlantis before it sinks beneath the waves. The original Escape from Atlantis had a fabulous sculpted plastic central Island, with lots of Sea Monster miniatures, however, although the thirtieth anniversary edition is arguably a nicer production, the Island is made up of thick card hex-tiles, and the Sea Monsters are made of wood. This version has safe land shown on the corners of the board each initially guarded by a Sea Monster, with randomly placed hexes forming the Island and a fifth Sea Monster in a central lagoon.

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The new edition varies from its predecessors only a very little in game play. On their turn, the active player has three movement points, and then they remove one tile from the Island of Atlantis before rolling the Attack Die which dictates which of the Sharks, Whales or Sea Monsters the player moves. Sharks and Whales are introduced as the Island sinks: when players remove a hex from the Island, the underside has either an immediate effect (bordered with green) or a delayed effect with the tile stored, usually to be played before a later turn, though a small number can be used reactively.

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There was a lot of discussion about whether to include the Giant Squid and Dolphin mini expansions and what they did, but in the end, the group decided against it this time. In addition to placing their meeples on Atlantis, during the set up, players also place boats. These can hold a maximum of three meeples and are moved by whoever has the majority in the boat. It costs one movement point to climb into or out of a boat, either to or from a neighbouring land space or the water next to the boat. Meeples in the water can only swim one space per turn because it is tiring. Once in a boat, however, movement is easier and they can move as far as they want and are able.

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Thus, the priority is to get meeples into boats, but the decision players have is whether to try to put all their meeples in one boat or whether to hedge their bets. Pine and Pink tried the former. Pine managed to get two of his meeples in one boat and then, before he could get any passengers, set sail. Being early in the game there weren’t many Whales or Sharks about, and with only a short distance to safety, Pine’s pair made it there safely. From there, the game got quite savage with players preferentially taking land tiles with meeples on them, turning them into Swimmers with a long way to safety—one was unlucky enough to end up in the drink when a Shark dropped into the space next to him and swallowed him whole.

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Pink tried to emulate Pine’s success, but was a mite more greedy putting three of his meeples with a total value of eight in one boat. Although he had a plan to get the boat to shore, he reckoned without the appearance of a Whale which was promptly moved to the same space and proceeded to turn his boat into matchwood and transform his sailors into Swimmers. Whales aren’t interested in Swimmers though, so once his meeples were in the water, it left them alone. Pink then had ample opportunity to separate them out a little, and indeed was advised to by everyone else, but he choose not to. So, although everyone felt slightly sorry for him, it wasn’t long before the little clutch of Swimmers proved far too tempting a target and a Shark rocked up and ate them all.

– Image by boardGOATS

From there, there was a steady trickle of boats making landfall, with players trying to work together without doing the lion’s share of the work themselves. For every boat that made it to safety, however, there was at least one Swimmer that was eaten by a Shark or boat that was attacked by a Whale or a Sea Monster making it a bit of a war of attrition. But with six players, the game moves quite quickly and players don’t get many turns so collaboration is essential if players are to get anyone to dry land. Blue and Black cooperated effectively to get a couple of Sailors each home, as did Teal and Pine. Although for a long time, Lime was the only one not to have any of his meeples eaten, he was also the last to get one safe.

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With six players, the end of the game came round quite quickly. The game ends immediately when the Volcano is revealed under one of the last eight Mountain tiles and with so many players once the Woodland tiles have been exhausted the game can end any time, so one extra turn can make all the difference. And so it proved for many. It was Lime who turned over the Volcano tile, much to his disgust as he had a boat with two meeples ready to disembark on his next turn. Pink also had two in a boat near shore (total value nine) and Blue was equally unimpressed as it was her turn next and she needed just one move for her most valuable meeple to crawl up the beach.

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With Atlantis gone beneath a combination of waves and lava and every meeple that had not made dry land perished in the boiling sea, it was time to score. Each meeple has a value printed on the bottom, and although players knew what these were when they were placed, they were not allowed to look at them again. Teal had attempted to codify which meeple was which in their location on the spaces they were placed on, however, Blue quickly called him on this and like everyone else, over the course of the game he had mostly lost track of which was where. Pink and Lime had only got one meeple ashore a piece, but although they were relatively high scoring ones, everyone else had a similar value one home and at least one additional one too.

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Blue, Black and Teal managed to get three meeples ashore each, with Black totalling six points and Blue totalling seven. The winner was Teal, however, with a total of eight, though even one more turn or a slightly different turn of events earlier in the game would have made a huge difference to the final placings. It had been a lot of chaotic fun, but unquestionably, with so many players, there wasn’t much chance to plan and the game changed hugely between a player’s turns. With fewer players it is definitely a more strategic game, but with more, the onus is on players to work together more—indeed the players that did this this time, were the most successful.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning outcome: Just when you thought it was safe to fall into the water…

7th October 2021 – boardGOATS do the Quiz

There were five of us for food, and after he’d had a vat of disappointingly watery tomato soup at home, Pine joined the group to make six. Once everyone had finished eating, there was a brief intermission while we discussed Cheddar Goats (“What, goats made out of cheese?!?!”), and we had a little over an hour before the Quiz was due to start. Blue and Burgundy were keen to play Bohnanza, but Pink and Pine fancied something different so Green suggested Pick Picknic a simple little “push your luck” game based on chickens eating corn.

– Image by boardGOATS

It has been a very long time since we’ve played Pick Picknic, but the rules are not difficult. At the start of each round, the six coloured farm yards are seeded with a random corn (worth one, two or three points). Players then simultaneously choose a card from their hand and play it. If their card is the only card of that colour and is a chicken, it gets all the corn. If there is more than one chicken of that colour, they can either come to an agreement to share the corn, or fight for it. If there is a fox amongst the chickens, the fox has a good feed and the corn remains till the next round. If someone plays a fox card and there are no chickens, the fox goes hungry.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pick Picknic is a game in a similar vein to the popular Om Nom Nom. Both games are based round the food chain with people playing animal cards in an attempt to feed their critters without them becoming food themselves. The principal difference between the games is that Om Nom Nom has three separate food chains, while Pick Picknic only involves foxes chickens and corn. However, effectively Pick Picknic has six separate chains as there are six different colours.

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Further, in Om Nom Nom, everyone has a complete set of cards at the start and everyone plays through their deck during the game, whereas in Pick Picknic players have a hand of five cards drawn at random from a larger deck. This makes the game slightly less deterministic, as players could hold any card in their hand. Also, as players’ hands are constantly being replenished and the farm-yards are constantly being reseeded, the game feels more like it is constantly rolling onwards, reaching a point where people know some animals will inevitably go hungry.

– Image by boardGOATS

The random nature of the cards certainly showed themselves this time. Pine had an endless string of foxes, most of which went hungry. Blue ended up with some very fat chickens who took a lot of corn, and Pink played a handful of foxes, all of which turned out to be fantastic at stealing chicken from Farmer Boggis. It didn’t take long to work through the bag of square corn, and then it was just the counting. Blue had a huge pile of corn, but the only chicken she had caught was a “fleet fowl” which was actually worth minus two.

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That almost made the difference, as Blue and Pink were well clear of the others, but there was only three points in it, with Pink proving to be a very fantastic Mr. Fox. There wasn’t long to think about it though as Charles came round early with the Quiz sheets. Indeed we were one chip into a game of No Thanks!, when the picture round arrived, and then group had something even more important to worry about when the questions started.

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It was clear we were very rusty as we had an awful first round. Things got much better from there though as we delightedly demonstrated out knowledge of as diverse subjects as Dr. Who, sport and what Angela Raynor allegedly called a Tory MP. As the Quiz progressed, we slowly crawled our way up the rankings from eighth out of nine to finish second, just one point behind the eventual winners “Buggle’s Buddies”. It was close and we were left to rue a couple of unfortunate errors. Still, there’s always next month.

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Learning Outcome: Nobody likes the team that wins the quiz.

17th August 2021 (Online)

Although the test event at the Horse and Jockey was very successful last week, we decided to continue online for another week. So, after the usually chatter (mostly centred on the subject of revenge for the drubbing some of us got from Pine in playing the Heart of Africa expansion to Ticket to Ride), we moved on to the evening’s “Feature Game“. One of the more popular games that we have played online is the “Roar and Write” type game, Welcome to Dino World. We only played it once and then in “Lite Mode”, but there had been a lot of interest in the more exciting sounding “Danger Mode”, so we decided to give it a try this week.

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The basics of the game is that three dice are rolled giving a number of “pips” which players can spend on up to three actions. These actions are to: build paths; build a dinosaur pen (with generators), or build a facility. The relatively novel aspect of this is that as well as choosing actions to do, players can also combine two or more dice together and use the increased value to do fewer, more powerful actions. Thus a roll of one, three, and four can be used to do three separate actions of that level, or two actions of value, four say, or a single action of level eight.

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Playing the game with a large number of players (and remotely to boot), instead of players having goal cards that are scored at the end of each round, we use the variant where there are communal goal cards (called “Visitor Cards”) which are scored at the end of the game. The game lasts just eight rounds, after which everyone adds up their scores for visitors, facilities, unused generators and, of course, each dinosaur pen. This “Lite” version of the game is made considerably more complex when the game is played on the “Danger” board with the addition of Threat and Security Tracks and a modification to the way generators are built.

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The idea of the Threat Track is that every time a dinosaur pen is added the park, the threat level increases by one for a herbivore and two for a carnivore. Once per round, players can also increase their Security Level, by crossing off boxes on the Security Track. These boxes contain points, which if unused at the end of the game, are added to the player’s score. After the building phase is the malfunction phase when a single six-sided, (d6) “Threat Die” is rolled. The value of the Threat Die is added to each player’s Threat Level minus the Security Level to give the Danger Level. If the Danger Level is six or above, disaster strikes, generators malfunction, and dinosaurs start to rampage.

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Although both use 4 MW generators, they work slightly differently in the Danger and Lite Modes. In Lite Mode, each generator will supply a maximum of four pens (the ones sharing a side with the generator), so a pen that requires a total of 3 MW must be adjacent to three different generators. In Danger Mode, one generator can supply a maximum of 4 MW, but it can supply more than 1 MW to an individual adjacent pen indicated by a power line drawn between the two. Thus, the amount of power a generator supplies can change during the game—it is the generators that are working closer to full capacity that are most likely to fail…

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If the Danger Level in a park reaches six, any generators that are working at maximum capacity fail. It is a brief power-outage, but as a result, any pens that rely on these generators are affected and one square of these pens is lost (crossed out). The problem really comes, however, when the final square in a pen is lost and and the pen fails completely, because now the dinosaurs break out and cause damage to all the neighbouring pens causing a cascade reaction. And any pen that is destroyed completely no longer scores.

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Thus, the game is a matter of achieving a fine line between getting the most out of a limited number of generators with the minimum amount of security while still avoiding rampaging dinosaurs. The rules explanation took longer than expected as there was quite a bit more to Danger Mode, and worse, it was a while since we last played the game in Lite Mode, so we had to revise that too. Eventually we were going, however, only for a hiatus after the first round for a rules-check.

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Burgundy was right to point out that although the rules say players can carry out the three actions in any order, each one could only be carried out once per turn, in particular building dinosaur pens and building facilities. Around half the players had already built two pens in the first round, so we decided that any player that had not done so, could build a second pen in the second round if they chose, and thereafter we would adhere to the rules “as written”.

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As last time, the first couple of rounds were very slow as players tried to assimilate the Visitor cards and work out a plan to maximise the points they could get from them. This time they were:

≥3 Protoceratops pens (worth four points);
≥2 Different facilities touching orthogonally (worth four points);
≥1 Protoceratops pen, ≥1compsognathus pen, and ≥1 stegosaurus pen all within four paths of any entrance (worth six points);
≥1 T. rex pen and ≥1 brachiosaurus pen (worth six points);
≥4 Brachiosaurus pens (worth ten points);
≥2 Velociraptor pens and ≥3 herbivore pens (worth ten points).

The Facilities were the Viewing Platform and the Ranger Lookout which score points equal to the number of undamaged spaces in one neighbouring pen at the end of the game, and one point per pen visible orthogonally (respectively).

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In addition to the variety from the Visitor and Facility cards, there are also Research cards which are there to mitigate bad luck. In Lite Mode, Research is just six opportunities to adjust a die by ±1, but these are replaced by three cards, X, Y, and Z which players can use three times, twice and once respectively. This time, these were:

Calculated Risk: When building a carnivore pen, only add one to the threat track but add one damage to the pen (X);
Alternate Funding: Use one die as if it were any value (Y);
Docile Gene Editing: Do not increase the threat when building a pen this round (Z).

While minimising generators and security gives players more points at the end of the game, there is no benefit in not using their Research, so while most players kept some back in case of emergencies, others started using them from the very beginning.

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Although we were slow to get started and the first few rounds were also very slow, once we got going the rounds were much quicker. And then came the maths. Without Ivory to set an early (usually unbeatable) target, Pine stepped up with a score of one hundred and seven. This was soon topped by Burgundy with a hundred and twenty-seven, then by Black with a hundred and twenty-nine. However, on recount, Burgundy excitedly announced that he also had a hundred and twenty-nine, while Black sadly revised his score down to a hundred and twenty-seven. All was not lost as both players recounted again and Black’s score returned to one hundred and twenty-nine while Burgundy’s third and final count proved to be the lowest at a hundred and twenty-six, “Bah!”.

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At this point, Black and Burgundy gave in as Pink’s verified score was a hundred and thirty, and it was clear they were battling for the minor places. Pink, who thought he had won, however, was decidedly unimpressed when he was beaten by two points by Blue. There must have been something in the air, or maybe it was the fumes from the vast amount of Tipp-Ex that Blue had used. Pink’s check of Blue’s score initially increased her tally by six, only for him to reduce it again on a second recount, but the changes weren’t enough to give Pink victory.

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Pine was suffering with screen-eyes so took an early night leaving six to move onto Board Game Arena. Six is an important number as a lot more games become available, but after some discussion where people expressed the desire to play something different yet light, we chose Go Nuts for Donuts!, which Pine had said he had been playing and had found light and entertaining. It was indeed very, very simple: each donut has a number and players simultaneously choose a card to “bid” for them. The catch is that a bit like Om Nom Nom, if more than one person chooses the same donut, it cannot be shared and nobody gets it.

– Image used with permission
of boardgamephotos

The different types of donuts score points in different ways and the player with the most points after all seventy cards in the deck have been exhausted is the winner. Some just give points, others score if you have more (or less) than a certain number of one type of cards, while others allow players to take cards from the deck or discard pile. The clever part is the simple decision, however: which card to choose. It is not as simple as it first seems. Sometimes a player wants the card that gives the most points, but then other players may want that, so perhaps it is better to choose something else, even a card someone else wants simply to stop them getting it. And which one is best if there is more than one donut of the same type?

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Go Nuts for Donuts! is quite a brutal game in that it is perfectly possible to end up with no cards much less cards you actually want. It is a lot of fun though, and would probably be even more fun in person when players get to see the whites of each other’s eyes and read their body-language. This time, although Purple got the most cards with eleven, it was only enough for second place. Burgundy’s six cards worked better together, and thanks largely to his fine set of four Boston Cream donuts, Burgundy’s score of eighteen just gave him victory by a single point.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

The appearance, style and set-collection nature of Go Nuts for Donuts! is very reminiscent of Sushi Go!, so with Green’s departure, the rest of the group settled down for one last food-related game. We’ve played Sushi Go! quite a bit, mostly because it is very quick and simple. The archetypal card drafting game, players start with a hand of cards and pass the rest on, trying to collect sets to give them the most points at the end of the game. Played over three rounds, we played with a widdershins draft in the second round, and included the Soy Sauce mini-expansion for extra flavour.

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Pink took the first round largely thanks to a full set of three sashimi cards (which give ten points). Players always fight for the wasabi cards as these can give a significant points boost, multiplying the next nigiri by three, but Purple was the only one to get any and she couldn’t make the best use of it as she had to pair it with egg nigiri (only worth one point). The second round was pretty much a repeat of the first with Pink taking another sashimi trio and Blue scoring the egg nigiri with wasabi.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

With Pink well ahead with thirty-six, the final round was really about limiting losses. Purple took a full six for her puddings and Pink took six points for his maki rolls, but overall, the takings in the final round were pretty similar. The rest of the group were actually quite close together with Purple (again) the best of the rest, but despite losing three points for tying for the least puddings, Pink’s final total of forty-two was unbeatable.

– Image by boardGOATS
from boardgamearena.com

Learning Outcome: If the fences of dinosaur pens lose power, things can go very wrong (though perhaps that was already well known).

13th Movember 2018

There was a bit of a delay for food, so after Blue had handed over an exciting box of echidnas to Pine and given Burgundy and Green a selection of Splendor, Orléans, and Zooloretto promo cards from Essen, we decided to play something quick. As there were a lot of hungry people, we decided to start with a quick game of Om Nom Nom. This is a fabulous little double think game based on critters eating other critters further down the food chain. The game is set up with a large handful of dice which are rolled to give either items from the bottom of the food chains (flies, carrots and cheese) or animals from the middle of the food chains (frogs, rabbits and mice). Players start with six cards representing animals from the middle of the food chain and the predators from the top of their food chains (hedgehogs, wolves and cats). Players simultaneously choose a card to play and then everyone reveals them and they are placed on the appropriate space on the three central player boards. before and the animals begin to feed starting at the top of the food chain. For example, wolves eat frogs and any surviving frogs then eat flies.

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If only one card of any type is played, the predator feeds and the player takes their card back with any cards/dice their animal has eaten placing everything in their scoring pile. Where more than one card of the same type is played and there is enough food to go round it is shared equally and everyone eats (taking their cards back with their share of the prey). If there is not enough food for everyone to get a share, they all starve and lose their cards going home with nothing. This is repeated until there are no cards left. Food at the bottom of a chain is worth two points at the end of the game and food from the middle of a chain and any cards are worth one point. The game is played over three rounds and the winner is the player with the most points.

– Image by boardGOATS

Blue won the first round with eleven, more than twice the points anyone else managed to gather. Om Nom Nom is one of those games where a high score in one round is usually balanced by a dreadful score in the next, so everyone expected Blue to fail to score at all in the second round. Burgundy’s twelve points in the second round looked really good, but contrary to the usual run of things, Blue somehow managed to improve her score picking up eighteen points—one less than the record for a single round in our group. The third round was a little bit of a dead rubber, but Burgundy was keen to see Blue get her bad round and if she did, fancied his chances. It was a much more even final round and with lots of points available, things looked good for Burgundy, but unfortunately for him, everyone else chose this round to get it together. In the end it was all about second place, which Burgundy just managed to take ahead of Black and Mulberry as food arrived.

– Image by boardGOATS

While Burgundy, Blue and Mulberry ate their belated supper, everyone else carried on the food theme, playing a little Japanese game picked up by Black and Purple at Essen called くだものフレンズ or Fruit Friends. This is a little card drafting and set collecting game where players are collecting different types of fruit using the “I divide, you choose” mechanism. There are a surprisingly few games that use this idea, but two of the best are …Aber Bitte Mit Sahne (aka Piece o’ Cake) and San Marco. …Aber Bitte Mit Sahne is relatively unusual as it works well with players dividing the pie into more than three. In contrast, San Marco is a three to four player game, but plays much better with three than four because the “I divide, you choose” mechanism generally works best when the pile is divided into three.

– Image by boardGOATS

In Fruit Friends, each player starts with a random start or “seed” card, dealt face up. Players are then dealt seven cards which they divide into three piles of two (discarding the final card). Beginning with the player who was dealt the apple start card, players offer the three piles to the player on their left who takes one pair; the next player then chooses from the remaining two piles leaving one pair for the active player. Play continues in this way until everyone’s cards have been taken. The second round is played the same way except cards are offered anti-clockwise and the player with the grapes start card goes first. The final round is clockwise again, and the player with the kiwi start card begins. At the end of the game, each player has eighteen fruit cards, with each type scoring differently.

	1 card	2 card	3 card	4 card	5+ cards
Apples	0 points	2 points	5 points	9 points	14 points (max)
Grapes	2 points	5 points	8 points	11 points	11 points (max)
Kiwis	2 points	6 points	0 points	12 points	18 points (max)
Bananas	3 points	7 points	12 points	0 points	0 points
Peaches	2 points	5 points	9 points	14 points	20 points (max)

There are some catches, for example, peaches come in two colours, yellow and white, but only one of them scores. Oranges score one point per apple card and similarly melons score one point per grape card (both up to a maximum of four points). The scoring intervals also offer some quirks, so while almost everyone scored twelve points for their bananas at the end of the game, Ivory went “Banana Bust” by over-shooting. Otherwise it was close at the top and you could fit the first four players in a fruit-basket with only five points between them. It was Purple, the “Kiwi Queen”, who just had the edge, “pipping” Green by a single point with Pine and Black finishing in joint third.

– Image by boardGOATS

By the time the game came to an end, the eaters had mostly finished, so Black started getting out the “Feature Game”, Imaginarium (also described previously as “the one with the elephant on the box”). Burgundy and Ivory were quick to stake a claim to play it and Purple was equally quick to opt out. Mulberry and Blue made up the five, so Green started to collect together the games he thought the rest might play, which Pine pointed out just made it look like he was playing Jenga with boardgames. It took a while to come to a conclusion, but eventually the trio went for Echidna Shuffle.

– Image by boardGOATS

Echidna Shuffle is a game that we first discovered at the UK Games Expo back in June and since then, has been very popular with everyone who has played it. This is partly because of the fabulous, over-produced pieces, especially the lovely echidnas with cute smiley faces. The game is very simple: Players have to get their bugs to their tree-stumps by moving echidnas around the board. On their turn the active player rolls the die, and moves echidnas a total of that number of spaces. The clever part is that players only roll the die on alternate turns with intermediate turns evaluated from the dice board giving a total over two turns of nine moves. Thus, if someone rolls the maximum, a seven, the next turn they get just two. Similarly, if they roll a small number, say a three, then they get a six on the next turn. This means nobody gets screwed over by the dice, but there is still a nice, randomisation effect to the movement.

– Image by boardGOATS

There are two sides to the game board: green “Summer” and snowy “Winter”. There was some discussion as to which to play. Pine thought the Summer side of the board rather than the Winter side was more of a challenge. He explained that it was more confusing on the snowy side and that it is not so easy to block people. On the other hand, the first time it was played with the Summer side, the game had become something of an epic marathon as everyone worked together to stop everyone else winning. So this time the group started with the “advanced” Winter board and ended up with a very short game indeed. After only about three rounds, Purple had got one of her bugs home and Green had managed two. Then Pine surprised everyone and with a roll of seven managed to complete all three of his bugs and the game was over, almost before it had begun.

– Image by boardGOATS

Echidna Shuffle is really meant to be a children’s game, so perhaps it should not have been a huge surprise that it ended quite so quickly. Maybe Pine had had a point though, so unusually the game got a second chance, this time with the Summer board. This second game, did indeed last longer, but was still relatively quick and before too long everyone had just one bug remaining each. Green was first to get to this point, but Purple and Pine managed to successfully block his route while they also got their second bug home. In the end Pine became the “Kingmaker” as everyone knew how many moves each player would get and he found himself in the position where he could either move the echidna out of purples way and into Green’s or do something else entirely. Either action (or inaction) would result in win for either Green or Purple and in the end he inevitably chose to open the door for Purple.

– Image by boardGOATS

It maybe that as a bunch of adult gamers, we have found the limit of this very pretty and lovable game. On the other hand, the number of players also has quite an impact—the full compliment of six seems to have the effect of dragging out the Summer board, but the combination of a small number of players and the complexity of the Winter board appears to make the game too open. Hopefully the company will bring out some new expansions or different board layouts that will give us more to explore, in the meantime, the game may get fewer outings in the weeks to come.

– Image by boardGOATS

Because of the late start and the fact that Green wanted an early night, there wasn’t enough time for another medium-weight game, but it was still early enough for a short game. After some discussion, the trio agreed upon Walk the Plank!, a cute little programming game with a hefty dose of “take that”. In programming games players choose the cards they are going to play before the round starts and then action them during the round, usually taking it in turns to reveal one card and then carry out the associated action. One of the classic games of this type is Colt Express which won the Spiel des Jahres a few years ago, but Walk the Plank! is a quicker and simpler game. The idea is each player has three pirate meeples on a ship and the last one remaining is the winner. Players start each round by simultaneously choosing three cards and laying them face down in front of them. On their turn, players turn over the top card and action it.

– Image by boardGOATS

The cards allow players to do things like “shove” one of the meeples belonging to the player on their left, or to the player on their right. When this is played a meeple that shares a space with one belonging to the active player is moved one step along the plank and thus closer to falling into the depths. There are lots of other actions including “drag to ship”, “drag to sea” and “Charge!”, but the most exciting cards are probably the “retract the plank” cards. At the start of the game the plank comprises three pieces, but usually at least one player removes one of these at the start of the game, heightening the stress levels. We usually play with a couple of house-rules too, firstly we play to the last meeple standing (the rules say the last two share victory) and we allow the plank to be completely removed (the rules say there is always one piece left).

– Image by boardGOATS

We’ve loved the game for years and have several different editions within the group—this time we played with the “limited edition” which includes some optional extra cards. This time two of the extra single use cards were added to each player’s deck: “Parlay”, which gives a player a chance to turn the tables via a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors, and “Dynamite”, which pushes everyone on one tile one space closer to the sea. After a little shuffling about, Green played his “Dynamite”, but succeeded in sending two of his own men closer to the water as well as the others. Then Purple played a “Charge!” card to try to push Green into the sea. Green used his “Parlay” to see if he could to prevent it, but this ended up in hysterics thanks to a total inability to play the game correctly. It started with Green playing on the count of three as agreed and Purple after the count of three (i.e. on four). After multiple attempts including one where Purple ended up just pointing vaguely at Green everyone was in fits of giggles, but it didn’t look like the tie was anywhere nearer being resolved.

– Image from theguardian.com

Pine suggested that perhaps they should try after the count instead. Green duly obliged, but Purple had finally worked out how to play on the count of three and still the problem persisted. Then Green chose stone and Purple also chose stone changing to paper at the last second, but this was spotted by Pine who ruled a “Let” and so they had to try yet again. By this time everyone was laughing so hard that in a fit of confused giggles Purple then chose “none of the above” by using a single finger. Pine suggested Green and Purple put their hands behind their backs, but this time it was Green’s turn to make a mess of things and he just couldn’t get the hang of it. In the end, in an effort to stop Purple from soiling the furniture, Pine suggested they remove the counting element and play with closed eyes which was finally successful. It was largely immaterial by this time, but Green won, so one of Purple’s pirates went charging off the plank into the sea.

– Image by boardGOATS

Getting back to the game seemed tame by comparison. Everyone ended up back on the boat and then started moving forward again. With the plank retracted, Green found himself with all three of his pirates on the end when Pine played his dynamite and Green was out in one go taking one of Purple’s and one of Pines own with him. So Green became the Ghost and with two pirates versus one, it looked to be Pines game. Two rounds later, though the Ghost shoved one of Pine’s pirates off the ship to level things up until Purple played her “Dynamite” and managed to get both dumped into the water, bringing the game to a shuddering halt, and on that note, Green headed home.

– Image by boardGOATS

Imaginarium was still underway with no sign of finishing soon, so Pine and Purple decided to give Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra a go as Pine had missed out last time. As in the original game, Azul, players take all the tiles of one colour from a “factory” and put the rest in the middle, or they take all the tiles of one colour from the middle. Tile placement and scoring is rather different however. All the tiles taken in a turn are placed in a single column of the player’s personal player board. This board is modular with the double-sided strips laid out at random so everyone has a different starting setup. Tiles must be placed in the strip immediately below the Glazier meeple, or in a strip to its right. The Glazier is then placed above the strip the tiles were placed in. Instead of taking tiles, players can choose to reset the Glazier’s position, moving him back to the left most strip.

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

This is definitely a game that takes a at least one play to understand how it works and what the best way to score points is. For example, the way the score builds, it is imperative to complete the furthest right strips early as then they score again and again. However, they are relatively low scoring, so this is not the only important strategy. So while Pine started off well, Purple scored more later, especially when she picked up colour bonus point as well. Early in the game, the penalty for picking up the first player token or for having left-over tiles is small, but it quickly increases, and with Pine taking the first player token more than Purple, he finished with more negative points too. All the little extras combined to make it a bit of a landslide in Purple’s favour, but then Purple had the advantage of having played the game several times, so next time will surely be different.

– Image by boardGOATS

While these games had been going on, the “Feature Game”, Imaginarium was getting an outing. Subtitled “The Dream Factory”, this game is a worker-placement, engine builder with a Steam Punk theme where players are building machines in a factory. Beautifully produced with remarkable artwork, players first take it in turns to choose a position on the factory conveyor-belt. They select either the broken machine card that they are going to buy or a position to collect charcoalium. These are then carried out in “action” order which then also becomes the selection order for the next round. At the end of the round any unused cards move long the conveyor-belt and the early positions are populated with new, exciting cards. As the game progresses, the broken machine cards generally become more expensive, but the machines become more useful, producing more and/or higher value resources.

– Image by boardGOATS

On a player’s turn, their existing “machines” first produce resources, then the player must buy the broken machine card they had chosen. The active player finally carries out two actions dictated by an unusual clock mechanism: each player has a board with the six possible actions arranged in a circle and the hands of the clock are fixed such that players are unable to take actions that are adjacent. As the clock hands must be moved every round, players are only able to take repeat one action in consecutive rounds. Possible actions include hiring a character, trading resources, extracting charcoalium, repairing broken machines and reorganising or dismantling existing machines. When a machine card is taken from the conveyor-belt, it is broken, they must be repaired before they will work and produce resources. Once repaired, machines can be combined to make them more efficient, or dismantled to give points, the game ends when one player gets to twenty points.

– Image by boardGOATS

One of Ivory’s questions before playing a new game is always, “Where are the points going to come from?” In addition to dismantling machines, points are also available for completing “projects” i.e. satisfying goals drawn at random at the start of the game, or by trading charcoalium. There are also two points available for players who have the most of one of the four resources at the end of the game. As the game was late starting, the group decided to end the game at fifteen points instead of twenty, though to begin with it didn’t look much like anyone was going to get to fifteen points before midnight. Black assured everyone that people would pick up speed as the game progressed and eventually, Ivory got going completing the first of the projects and then Black and Blue followed.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game is mostly multi-player solitaire, except when it’s not. There are some machine cards that take resources from the other players. In a game where resources are very tight and players are very reliant on resources for their plans this can be crucial. The game also has a distinctly mean streak, as a player that is unable to pay for the card they have chosen, doesn’t get the card, but also loses all their resources, completely upsetting their plans and forcing them to start again from scratch, potentially losing them the game. This is exactly what happened to Blue—Ivory went earlier in the turn order and bought and then repaired a machine that took all her charcoalium which meant she lost the card she was going to buy and all her resources. She vowed to get her revenge, but the opportunities for that are few and far between. As she waited for her chance, she gathered charcoalium to ensure she would be able to buy the right card when it came up.

– Image by boardGOATS

Sadly for her, interaction in the game is minimal so there she never really got her chance. Amassing large amounts of charcoalium wasn’t totally without use though as it enabled her to fulfill one of the projects and as they were playing to a smaller total, she started trading them in for points in an effort to avoid coming last. Meanwhile, Ivory kept amassing points and Mullberry kept doing “the weird goat-head thing” which ensured she always had plenty of charcoalium and was starting to build a productive engine. Black and Burgundy had also just got their engines going and were planning to score heavily when Ivory announced that he’d passed the fifteen point mark. With Blue still to take her turn, she maximised her points and everyone added up their scores. Sadly, for Black, Burgundy and Mullberry this wasn’t a long process as shortening the game had had the unforeseen consequence that the game ended just before their plans had come to fruition. Much to her surprise, Blue had done rather better as she had stuck to short-term targets that lent themselves to the short game.

– Image by boardGOATS

There was only one winner though and Blue’s fourteen points flattered her position as the scores did not tell the true story of the game. It’s definitely a game to try again sometime, though perhaps with fewer people which would give players a bit more control over their own destiny. The artwork is somehow both amazing and very disturbing at the same, and it certainly had an unforeseen effect on Blue. She is not normally one to remember dreams or one to design games, but when she awoke the next morning she had a fleeting recollection of dreaming about playing a card only version of Om Nom Nom that she had designed called “Yum Yum Tum”. We will have to see if that ever comes to fruition.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: When gamers are hungry they play games about eating.

4th September 2018

Blue, Red, Burgundy and newcomer, Mulberry, were finishing their food when Pink arrived after a long drive from the north-east. While he was waiting for his food he opened a very special present Red had brought back from Spain for him. Pink and Blue have quite a few games and for various reasons there are one or two that they have multiple copies of. However, there is one game that they have many, many copies of. Ironically it is a game Pink doesn’t even like playing very much, and yet, it has become a bit of “a thing” that every time Pink goes to Essen he comes back with yet another copy (ideally in a different language, but often just another German copy). Red has strong opinions about this particular game though, and believes that by far the best language to play it in is Spanish, so kindly brought Pink a copy back from Spain to add to his burgeoning collection. As he began to unwrap it, Pink took a few moments to realise what it was, but was really touched by this very special gift of Bohnanza.

– Image by boardGOATS

There wasn’t time to play it before food arrived, then everyone else was turning up and the “who’s going to play what” debate began. The “Feature Game”, Keyflower with the Farmers expansion had been Pink’s request and Keyflower is one of Blue’s favourite games, so they were a bit of a foregone conclusion. They were quickly joined by Burgundy who is also very fond of the game, and Ivory who was keen to see if the expansion changed the balance and the strategies available. Since that was likely to be the long game, they got on with it while everyone else sorted themselves out. Keyflower itself is not a complicated game mechanistically, though it has an awful lot of depth. Over four seasons, players are simply taking it in turns to bid for tiles to add to their village or use tiles available in the villages or the central display. The clever part is that bidding and using tiles are both done with meeples as currency and players must “follow suite”, that is to say, use the same colour if the tile has already been activated.

– Image by boardGOATS

In Keyflower, the depth is generated by the actions available on from the tiles and their interaction, added to the fact that except when playing with a full compliment of six, only a subset are used, and these are drawn at random. This means that one of the most important aspects of game play is to keep as many options open as possible since everything is likely to change in the final round. This is not only because some tiles don’t appear, but also the fact that there is always someone who will make it their business obstruct even the best laid plans. Thus it is vital to have at least two ways ways out. Adding The Farmers expansion exacerbates this as it introduces lots more tiles so each one is less likely to be revealed. This is a potential problem when trying to “play with the expansion” as it is perfectly possible that none of the Farmer tiles are introduced into the game. To prevent this, some tiles were drawn explicitly from the Farmers set.

– Image by boardGOATS

The Farmers expansion doesn’t change game play much, it just adds depth by the addition of farm animals as another means to score points. The idea is that animals are kept in the fields that are formed by the roads in a village. Each field that is occupied scores points depending on the type of animal or animals in it. Thus each field with sheep in it scores one point, each field with pigs scores two and each with with cows scores three points. These scores are increased for villages with special tiles, like the Weaver, which increases the sheep score to three per field. Animals in a field another of the same type breed at the end of each season and can be moved in a similar way to resources. The expansion also introduces Corn to the game, which allows players to enhance their movement actions. Otherwise, the game with the expansion plays in much the same way as the basic Keyflower game, takes a similar amount of time and requires a similar blend of tactical decision making and strategic planning.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor garyjames

Meanwhile, everyone else had divided themselves into two groups of three and had begun to play. Pine joined Red and Mulberry in a game of Finca. Pine had played it before, but a long time ago so Blue took time out from setting up Keyflower to explain how to it worked. It’s a very simple game of set collection with beautiful wooden fruit that’s now nearly ten years old. At its heart is an interesting rondel mechanism. On their turn, players choose one of three possible actions: move around the rondel and collect fruit; use a donkey cart to deliver fruit; or carry out an action with one of the special, single use tokens that each player starts the game with. There are some lovely features about the game. For example, players move as many spaces round the rondel as there are workers on the space they started on and the number of fruit they get depends on the number of workers on the space they finish on. As players have four workers each, there are lots of factors to consider when choosing which worker to move.

– Image by BGG contributor kneumann

Investing wisely is the key to the game, and Pine went for variety while Mulberry specialised more, particularly in figs and oranges. It was the figs and oranges that won the day with Mulberry finishing with fifty-one points, just four ahead of Red who’d had lots of fruity fun with Finca. With that finished, Red spotted Yardmaster in a bag, one of her favourite games, and decided to introduce Mulberry to it. It is quite a simple game and was described by Mulberry as “UNO with trains”. Players are building a locomotive by drawing cargo cards and using them to buy railcar cards from the four face up cards in the middle. The game was very close, but it was Red’s experience that was key, giving her a two-point winning margin over Mulberry in second place. With that done, they moved onto another old favourite, 6 Nimmt!.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor moonblogger

6 Nimmt! gets played a lot, but it’s unusual that we play it with so few players. The idea is that everyone chooses a card and then players add them to one of the rows, in ascending order adding them to the row ending in the highest card that is below the card they are playing. The catch is that when a sixth card is added to a row, that player picks up the first five cards. The game really is at its best with more players where the simultaneous card selection adds mayhem. They just played the one round; perhaps Mulberry misunderstood and thought the idea was to collect “nimmts”, but either way, she top scored with twenty-one – quite an achievement with only three players and only one round! Red did rather better and finished the winner with just two “nimmts”.

– Image by boardGOATS

On the neighbouring table, Green had joined Black and Purple and they started out with this year’s Spiel des Jahres winner, Azul. This is a really an abstract game with only a loose theme of tiling a palace, but unusually, nobody seems to mind and we’ve played the game a lot with multiple copies in the group. The game is really just a set collection game, similar to Finca and Yardmaster, but with an added spacial factor as tiles have to be placed to score points. Tiles are chosen from “factories” with those that aren’t taken going into a central pool. Since players can only take one colour at a time and must always take all the tiles of that colour in that location, they can easily end up with not quite enough, or even too many scoring negative points. Although it is not really an aggressive game, it is remarkable how much damage players can do to each other. Landing too many tiles is bad, but it is arguably worse to get “not quite enough” as it inhibits options in the next round too and therefore can affect the whole game. As we’ve played it a lot, we all have a good understanding of how to play, so unless someone gets things very wrong, games are often close, making them quite tense affairs. This was no exception, with Purple just taking the honours with sixty-three points.

– Image used with permission of boardgamephotos

To alleviate the stress of Azul, the trio moved on to play Om Nom Nom, a light “dice-chucker” This needs a similar sort of double think to 6 Nimmt!. The idea is that the board is seeded with dice populating the lower levels of three separate food chains. Then players simultaneously select an animal card to play, populating the higher levels of the food chains. The idea is that cards played at the top of a food chain will eat those immediately beneath it. So if there is a juicy bunch of carrots rolled, is it best to play the rabbit and risk getting eaten by a fox, or is it better to play a fox and gamble on everyone else being tempted to play rabbit cards? Often the wisest move is not to get involved, but if everyone adopts that approach, the carrots get left and everyone is now playing in the more confined space of two food chains. Sometimes the game is very tight, but this was not one of those times. Black took five cheeses in one round and finished some twenty points ahead of everyone else.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor msaari

The other games were still going and nobody fancied anything particularly taxing, so after a brief hiatus, Splendor got the nod. Yet another set collecting game, it is also very simple and surprisingly popular in our group. There is a remarkable amount of thought necessary for the apparently simple choose three different tokens or buy a card. Many people seem to think it is a trivial game, but for us, it has the right balance of strategy and tactical thinking to make it the perfect game when people are tired but still want something that provides a little bit of interest. We’ve played it a lot, and almost inevitably, Burgundy wins. One of the factors in choosing the game was the guarantee that he wouldn’t win this time as he was engaged elsewhere. In the event, it was another close game, with Green and Black very close to finishing, but Purple just getting to fifteen points first and ending the game before they could catch her – her second win of the night.

– Image used with permission of boardgamephotos

We were about an hour into our respective games and Blue was concentrating deeply on her next turn in Keyflower, when her village was suddenly and unexpectedly improved by the addition of a very fine chocolate cake complete with candles. Much to her embarrassment, it was also accompanied by singing. There was a brief interlude while Blue blew out her candles and cut up the cake, admired her quite a-llama-ing card, everyone consumed the really rather delicious cake (Waitrose finest no less), and Burgundy made sure there wasn’t even a pattern left on his plate. And with all that done, the games continued.

– Image by boardGOATS

Keyflower continued after cake and the strategies were beginning to become clear. Ivory, Blue and Pink were going for animals, while Burgundy’s plans had been undermined by both Blue and Ivory and was trying to make something from his very, very small village. With the arrival of Winter, players had to put in their choice of the tiles they’d been given at the start. Much to Ivory’s disgust, someone had put in the Dairy which increases the score for fields with cows in them. Since neither the Cow Shed tile nor the Ranch tile had been drawn in Autumn, nobody had any cows so the Dairy was a waste of a Winter tile. This meant there was even more competition for the other tiles, and there weren’t many of those as players can put only one tile into the mix. Burgundy got his Key Market which nobody else had any real interest in, Blue took the Hillside, but lost out on the lucrative Truffle Orchard to Pink.

– Image by boardGOATS

Ivory took the Mercer’s Guild and the Scribes after a brief tussle with Blue. It was quite tight with everyone getting points from different places and it was clear the tiles everyone picked up in the final round made all the difference. Ivory, Blue and Burgundy had spread their points about, while Pink put all his eggs (or rather pigs) in one basket, but it paid off, giving him a massive forty points and seventy-three points overall, four more than Blue in second place. Everyone had enjoyed playing with the expansion, particularly Ivory who felt it had added more depth. Although Ivory had to go, there was just time for a quick game of 6 Nimmt!, so Pine took his place and the foursome played a couple of hands. In the first round Burgundy and Pine competed for the highest score with twenty-five and twenty-seven points respectively. In the second round, Pine picked up what might be a record score of forty-five. At the other extreme, Blue managed to keep her score down to eleven, and added to the three in the first round that gave her a clear victory—just in time for her birthday at the end of the week.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Sometimes a pig strategy brings home the bacon!

10th January 2017

A new year, a new log book, and a shortage of people thanks to sickness, work and problematic cars. Pine, Magenta and Blue were the first to arrive, so while they were waiting for food they decided to get in a quick game of No Thanks!. This used to be one of those games that got played a lot, but for some reason it fell out of favour and was replaced by games like Love Letter, 6 Nimmt! and Om Nom Nom. No Thanks! is a very simple little game where players have to make the binary decision to take a card or pay a chip and pass the problem on to the next player. At the end of the round, players add the face values of the cards together and offset this with any remaining chips to give their total – the smallest value is the winner. The really clever part is that if a player has a run of consecutive cards, then only the lowest counts. Spice is added by the removal of nine cards from the original thirty-two consecutive cards in the deck.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor ckirkman

We first introduced Pine to No Thanks! over Christmas, when he had done rather well at it, this time was a bit different, however, with Blue coming in first with twenty-five in a generally high scoring game. As food arrived, so did the other gamers, with Ivory first and, just as we were explaining the rules to him, Green rolled up as well. The second hand began with Ivory picking up cards. As it went on, he picked up more cards, and more and more. This was excellent for everyone else until it started to look like he might be able to make them into one very long run. In the end, Ivory’s massive gamble didn’t pay off and he finished with ninety points, a massive eighty more than anyone else. It was Magenta who took the round though, her enormous pile of chips offsetting all her cards leaving her with minus one.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

With food over and everyone who was expected present, we decided to move onto our “Feature Game” will be Jórvík. This is a Viking retheme of a game we have played a few times and enjoyed called The Speicherstadt. The game is card based and driven by a novel auction mechanism that somehow doesn’t really feel like an auction. The idea is there is a row of cards and players use their meeples to bid with. They take it in turns to choose which cards they would like to have the option of buying, by placing their meeples in rows below the cards they want. The cards are then “auctioned” in turn with person who who placed their meeple below a card first getting first refusal. The clever bit is that the cost of the card is the same number of coins as there are meeples below the card. When it is their turn, the active player can choose not to to buy the card, but then they must remove their meeple which makes it cheaper for the next player in line. Thus, placing first can be a good thing if you have enough money to back it up, but money is scarce, very scarce.

– Image by boardGOATS

The cards could be contracts (that give points at the end if fulfilled), ships containing goods (that enable players to fulfill contracts), defenders (which help score points if there is an attack of the Picts), craftsmen (which enable players to sell goods for a better price), feasts (which give points the more you have), journey cards (which just give points) or, towards the end of the game, skald cards (which yield points for some other condition). The deck of cards is broken into several batches which ensures that while cards don’t come out in a fixed order, early cards are less powerful than cards that appear later in the game. The basic Jórvík game is quite light, but the new rendition includes the original Kaispeicher expansion. This provides extra cards, though more importantly, it also adds a whole new mechanism that still has the same flavour, but turned on its head.

The new expansion adds a second method for players to get cards: at the start of each round a second row of cards are displayed and, instead of using their turn to place a meeple in the auction, they can use it to reserve a card. This card (and its meeple marker) are then moved to a new row. At the end of the round, after the cards in the usual “auction” have been dealt with, the reserved cards are paid for in the order that they were reserved. The snag is that the cost depends on how many cards were reserved after it. Thus, players who reserve early have the best selection of cards to choose from, but will end up paying if they choose to buy it. This means that players often end up reserving a card, as much as anything else, to stop the other players from getting it. This led to Pine commenting that the game was a bit like window shopping with players standing hopefully next to items they had no hope being able to afford!

– Image by boardGOATS

Only two of us had played the game before (mostly in its original form as The Speicherstadt), and nobody had played with the expansion at all. Everyone tried different strategies, with Magenta trying to collect feasting cards (largely unsuccessfully) and Green beginning by trying to collect defender cards in the hope of being able to scoop up all the points for repelling the Picts. Ivory, Blue and Pine were slower to settle on a strategy, though Ivory was ominously collecting what looked like some very powerful cards. Then, Pine began collecting pink resource cubes, the valuable cloth and successfully used them to fulfill a couple of lucrative contracts. For a long time this looked like it was going to be a winning strategy, until Blue changed tack. She had started by trying to pick up contracts and fighting with everyone else for resources, but it was gradually becoming clear to her that this wasn’t working. Although Blue had fallen foul of the Picts in the first round, since then she had been trying to avoid losing points. This strategy had kept her in the running, and she decided to to actively pursue the points. In the end she finished with thirty-six points, just three ahead of Pine in second place.

– Image by boardGOATS

Despite winning, Blue wasn’t sure about the expansion. She felt it added a largely random element that players had no control over. She felt the that the fact players were reserving cards that only they could buy meant that once someone had selected a card nobody else had a chance to contest it. The only thing they could do was force the price up. Green, on the other hand, said he really liked it and thought it was really clever, though he agreed that with five players it probably wasn’t at its best. In the end, we concluded that it would likely add a lot to two and three player games, which encouraged Blue to get out her copy of The Speicherstadt with Pink to try it with Kaispeicher. Jórvík had taken longer than expected and for Ivory and Magenta it was home time.

– Image by boardGOATS

Living more locally, Green, Pine and Blue had time for a quick game and chose Lanterns: The Harvest Festival. This pretty little tile-laying game was a Christmas present chosen with the group in mind, so this seemed like a good opportunity to give it a go. The game is very simple: players have a hand of tiles and take it in turns to add one to the central “lake”. Each tile has up to four coloured sections and if the tile is placed in such a way that some of these match the tiles they are next to, the active player gets a lantern card of that colour. In addition, every turn, each player gets a card that corresponds to the colour on their side of the tile placed. At the start of their turn, players can make a devotion and trade sets of lantern cards for points tiles. There are three stacks of points tiles, with values decreasing from top to bottom. Each stack corresponds to different sets, with one each for three pairs, a set of seven different and four of a kind. There are also special platform tiles that give players favour tokens. These grease the wheels a little as pairs can be spent to allow players to swap a card for one of a different colour.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

The winner is the player with the most points once all the tiles have been played. This means that there are two competing factors, players want to make as many dedications as they can, but higher value dedications are better. Tile placement was cagey at the start, but before long Green and Blue began making dedications, quickly followed by Pine. It was Green who managed to maintain the highest frequency of dedications though Blue’s early tiles were generally slightly higher in value. Frequency was important and his later tiles were also higher value which meant Green finished ten points clear with fifty one. With bed calling, there was just time to discuss a new idea: “Monster Games” sessions. The idea is that as a group we have quite a lot of games that are too long to play on games nights, so the plan is to arrange ad hoc games afternoons in private residences, with the first one planned for 14^th January.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

Learning Outcome: Sometimes it is better to stop others than make a purchase yourself.

23rd August 2016

A little unsure as to who was coming, we decided to start with the “Feature Game”, which was the filler, Abluxxen (also known as Linko!). This is a “get rid of all your cards” type of game, and although it is initially a little confusing to understand, it mostly became clear as we played. On their turn, players play any number of cards as long as they are all the same. The cards are then sequentially compared with the last cards played by all the other players: if the number of cards played is the same, and the face value of the cards played is higher, then the other player’s cards are “snatched”. They can either be “snatched” by the active player (the “snatcher”) who takes them into their hand, or alternatively the “snatchee” has to do something with them. The “snatchee” can either choose to take them back into their hand or discard them. If they decide to discard, then they must replace the cards with the same number from the face up display in the centre or drawn blind from the draw deck.

– Image by boardGOATS

Thus, the idea is that players are trying to get rid of cards and force other players to pick cards up, however, picking up cards an also be a good thing as it can be an opportunity to improve the cards in hand. Better, having a lot of identical cards in hand means that when they are played they go on top of any cards previously played making it more difficult for anyone to “snatch” them or force them to be picked up. The game ends when either one player runs out of cards or the draw deck and central pool has been depleted. Just to add to the the confusion, however, the winner is then the player who has played the most cards, but any cards left in hand give a penalty of minus one.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

Although it was a simple game and everyone knew what they had to do, at first nobody really understood what they had to do to win. Gradually people began to work it out though, starting with Burgundy who had watched a video of the game online, then Ivory who was new to the group, but had played plenty of games before. Pine and Blue eventually joined the “in the know” club, but Red continued to struggle. Every time it was her turn, Red said, “Sorry, I know I keep asking, but if I play two sevens what will happen?” Despite this apparent lack of understanding, Red was the first to check-out and with a huge pile of cards too. This was particularly amusing as Red had just been explaining to Ivory that he shouldn’t believe Burgundy and Blue when they claim to be doing badly or have no idea what they are doing as they usually go on to win. Inevitably then, although most people were only one or two turns away from finishing, Red was miles ahead much to Burgundy’s chagrin as he needed just one more turn and was left with six cards in hand compared with the seven in his pile. Blue who had just played seven “fives” and had only a couple of cards in-hand was second, just ahead of Ivory and Pine.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

Black and Purple had walked in just as Abluxxen started, so amused themselves reading game rules and trying to work out what everyone else was doing. Abluxxen had taken a little longer than expected so with everyone present and a group of seven, we decided to split into two. Red was keen to play Niagara, a really unusual game with a moving river. It won the Spiel des Jahres in 2005 and still holds up as a good family game more than ten years on. The group has played it before, but in summary, players have two boats that they move up and down the river, trying to collect gems and return them home, to the top of the river. There are a couple of catches. The first is that each player has a set of Paddle Cards and must play each one once before they can play any of them again. These Paddle Cards dictate how far they can move on the river, but can also affect how much the river will move. Paddle Cards are selected simultaneously at the start of the round, so there is an element of programming involved, though not as much as in games like Colt Express or Walk the Plank!, but it does mean there is an element of anticipation.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Marsh

The second “catch” is the river. The river flows after everyone has moved their boats and the rate is dependent on the lowest Paddle Card played in the round and the weather. Each player has a weather Paddle Card, which they use to speed up or slow the river down, however, as this has to be played instead of moving boats, this can be a trap for the unwary. In the worst case this can lead to the loss of a boat and its contents with a penalty to get the boat back. The game ends when one player fulfills one of three criteria: four gems of the same colour, one gem of each of the five colours or any seven gems. Gems are limited, and this leads to the third “catch”, which is that once a player has picked up a gem and has it safely in their boat, another player can steal it so long as they are paddling up stream and land on the same river segment. So a nice little game with a nasty edge.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor erfalucho

Red was joined by Pine, Ivory and Burgundy in what was to be a very close game. With four players, each boat should only hold one gem at a time, but a minor rules malfunction meant that everyone played with the double boats from the Spirits of Niagara expansion. Red and Burgundy took full advantage of this collecting the difficult blue and pink gems first and in one trip. It quickly became clear that five unique gems was going to be difficult so everyone went for the slightly easier seven random gems. Pine was the only “proper adventurer” exploring the limits of the river. Misinformed by Burgundy with respect to the effects of the weather, Pine become intimately acquainted with the waterfall, turning one of his boats to matchwood, but he was the only one to experience the long soggy drop. Otherwise, the weather was fairly muted and everyone was fairly close to getting a full set of gems when Red, kicking on from her successful start got her nose over the line first, finishing with a total of eight gems.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor William Hunt

With Niagara done, the group moved onto Splendor. In this game, players have just three options on their turn: collect gem tokens, buy a gem card using gem tokens (and/or cards), or reserve a gem card and receive a gold (wild) token at the same time. Players can have a maximum of ten tokens, though unlimited cards and the cards act as permanent tokens. Thus, at its heart Splendor is an engine building game built on a set-collection mechanism. Players score points when they buy some gem cards and for attracting Nobles which are awarded to the first player collect certain combinations of gem cards; the game end is triggered when one player reaches fifteen points and the player with the most at the end wins.

– Image by boardGOATS

Despite being a very simple game, it is one we still enjoy as a relaxing little filler. Indeed, it got an outing last time when Blue succeeded in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory when Burgundy came steaming through from nowhere to win. It could have been this, or perhaps it was previous alleged trouncings that inspired Blue and Purple to let out an emphatic war cry from the neighbouring table exhorting everyone to stop Burgundy at all costs. So, Burgundy did lots of sighing as everyone rallied to the clarion call and went out of their way to bring him down. Pine had been one of the victims last time and, understanding his likely fate commented that he wished he could record all of Burgundy’s deep sighs and general moaning and then play it back to him when he won.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

The tactics appeared to be working, however, as about half way through, Pine had eight points as Burgundy took his first. It wasn’t long before Burgundy took the first Noble too, but he was still some way behind and nobody was terribly concerned. Meanwhile, Ivory was quietly building his engine taking lots of freebees, looking like the new threat. Red was enjoying herself hoarding rubies just to annoy Burgundy even though she was well aware that it wasn’t actually doing her any favours. Then suddenly, Burgundy took his second Noble and the writing was on the wall: everyone knew they were doomed. It wasn’t long before Burgundy took his third Noble and nobody had an answer as he repeated the trick he’d pulled off so successfully last time winning from the back of the pack.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Meanwhile, on the next table Black, Blue and Purple were engaged in a slightly protracted game of Castles of Burgundy. This is a game we’ve not played before with the group, though Blue had played it a few times as a two player game and Black had played it quite a bit online. It is one of those games with fairly simple mechanics, but a lot of complexity in the game play. The idea is that each player has two dice which they roll at the start of the round. On their turn they then spend the two dice, trading them for two separate actions. Players can take a building from the pool on the central player board that matches the number on their die, for example, if a player rolled a six, they can take any of the buildings in the “six” poll and place it in their own supply. Their supply is limited in size and there must be space for them to be able to do this.

– Image by BGG contributor thatmadgirl

Alternatively, the player could take a building form their supply and place it on their personal player board on a space that matches both the number of the die and the colour of the building. Both of these actions are quite restrictive, so players can instead choose to collect two worker tiles and add them to their store. These worker tiles are the oil that greases the wheels a little, since they allow players to alter one of their dice by one for each tile used (e.g. spending two worker tiles will allow a player to change a five to a three or a one). The last action is selling goods. Players can acquire goods tiles during the game, but can only store three different types. each of the six types correspond to a different number and, on their turn, as an action players can sell all their goods that correspond to the die (modified by workers if they choose). In return they get a silverling and some points. Silverlings are a form of currency and can be used to buy one extra building per round. These are taken from a special pool, though there is nothing particularly special about the buildings themselves except that they are harder to obtain and therefore are generally only taken by players that really want them.

– Image by BGG contributor verminose

Points is what the game is all about, and being a game designed by Stephan Feld, there are lots of different ways to get them. Although the actions within the game are simple, how points are achieved is where the complexity of the game really lies. Each building placed on their board gives the active player a bonus. Sometimes it is a bonus action, sometimes it is bonus points and sometimes it is a strategic advantage; it is the player that makes the most of these bonuses that will win the game. Players then also score points for placing buildings to complete regions on their own board. The larger the region, the more points they get, however, there are also bonus points for completing regions early. Extra points are also available to the first players place the maximum number of each type of building in their province.

– Image by BGG contributor 3EBC

Black, by far the most experienced, began by investing in the special buildings that give one off strategic bonuses (e.g. an the opportunity to place an extra tile or take another from the central board). Blue began without a strategy and, as is her wont played very tactically, without a real strategy and see what unfolded. Purple, on the other hand, went for animals early. These give points, but in an unusual way: every time an animal tile is added to an area, all the other animals of the same type score again. Blue picked up four pigs in the first couple of rounds, then added two, then three then another four more, and before long she was following Purple down the animal route. Their strategies were very different, however, with Purple taking anything she could get while Blue was much more targeted. So, as Blue went heavily into pigs, she was able to keep re-triggering their scoring building a tidy number of points. Purple could have made up for with the yellow knowledge tile that rewards players with four points at the end of the game for each different sort of animal they have, but Blue had her eye on it too and got there first.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor kilroy_locke

While Blue and Purple were engaged in a agricultural battle Black was able to continue with his plan pretty much unchallenged. So he moved into shipping and completed lots of areas picking up the corresponding bonuses. Purple took the bonus for finishing the farming tiles first and picked up points for finishing several others too including mining – quite an achievement since she was the last to get a mine at all. It was the compound scoring for the animals that clinched it though coupled with the knowledge tile that enabled Blue to place her green farming tiles more flexibly and she ran out the winner with one hundred and eighty-five points, nearly twenty ahead of Black in second place.

– Image by BGG contributor Korosu_Itai

Ivory headed off, and Castles of Burgundy was still well under way, which gave Red an opportunity to suggest one of her favourite games, Bohnanza. The original bean-trading game, this is a staple family game and is still very popular with the group as it keeps everyone involved throughout and is usually very popular as a “gateway” game. Last time he’d played it, Pine had really struggled, which both surprised the rest of the group and caused us a certain amount of consternation as it should have been a game Pine would have enjoyed. It seemed he couldn’t remember the disaster last time though and he was happy to try again.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor spearjr

The game is very simple, but players have to keep their eye on what is going on around them. Players start with a hand of cards and are not allowed to change the order – a simple mechanic that is the critical part of the game. In front of each player are two “Bean Fields” and on their turn, players must plant the first card in their hand and may plant the second. Thus, the key to the game is managing the order of cards in their hand, as they cannot be rearranged and must be “planted” in the order they arrive. However, it is possible to remove unwanted cards by trading them away. Once the active player has planted the card(s) from their hand, then they turn over the top two cards from the draw deck: these must be planted by the end of the turn, though not necessarily in one of the active player’s fields if they can be traded. Once all these cards have been planted, the active player can then offer to trade any unwanted cards in their hand before their turn ends with them replenishing their hand from the draw deck.

– Image by boardGOATS

There are lots of different strategies players use: the cards have different values which reflect their rarity so some go for high value rare cards and others for more common cards that are easy to get. The best players are usually the most flexible and those that fit in best with what other players around are trying to do. Another aspect players need to keep an eye on is harvesting. Each field can only contain one type of bean and when they are harvested some of the cards are kept as profit. In this way, the rare cards (which are also the most profitable) are gradually depleted from the deck. So towards the end of the game, they become increasingly difficult to find. Worse, sometimes there might only be one card left and woe-betide the player that gets stuck with it in a field as there is a nasty little rule that says players can only harvest a field with one bean card if all their fields have only one bean card.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor spearjr

This time, Pine began well offering lots of generous donations which earned him lots of good will as well as getting him off to a flying start. In contrast, Burgundy was repeatedly forced to plough up fields before promptly picking up the beans he had just disposed of. The first trip through the deck always seems to take ages, but as usual, the second time through was much quicker. With three players, everyone got a couple of turns in the final, third pass and everyone was looking nervously at each others’ piles of “coins”; it looked very close. In fact, there was only one point in it as Red finished just ahead of Pine who finished with a very creditable twenty-seven.

– Image by boardGOATS

With Castles of Burgundy finally over, Blue was keen to play something quick and light to finish the evening and, knowing how much Purple likes it, suggested Om Nom Nom. This is a really sweet little game with elements of double-think. The idea is that there are three food chains each with three tiers, a primary predator, a secondary predator and pray. Each player has a hand of cards representing the top two predator tiers and dice are rolled to represent the bottom two tiers. Once the dice have been rolled and assigned to their spaces on the board, everyone simultaneously chooses a card and the food chains are resolved starting from the top. Any predator with no prey (or where there is insufficient for all the animals played) goes hungry and is discarded. Otherwise, prey is divided equally amongst its predators leaving any left-overs for later.

– Image by BGG contributor jancis

A bit like 6 Nimmt!, it is all about synchronising with everyone else, or rather in this case, getting out of synch with everyone else. This is because everyone has the same set of cards, so if every player except one plays the same cards, all the players who played the same cards will likely cancel each other out and get no reward. On the other hand, irrespective of whether they get any reward for playing something different, the very fact they did not play the same card means they have it to play later when there is no competition. This worked particularly well for Blue in the first round, when she managed to pick up lots of carrots and cheese uncontested. Since prey at the bottom of the food chain are worth two point, this netted her a massive seventeen points. In contrast, the second round was very low scoring with lots of animals going hungry. Blue was less effective this time, but still won the round so going into the final round the game was hers to lose, and she tried her best.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pine struggled throughout and Red couldn’t get to grips with the double think aspect so was curious as to whether random draw would work better Since she won the final round it is possible that it did. Meanwhile Blue was doing her best to throw the game, demonstrating that while it was important to be out of synch with everyone else, it was important to be out of synch in the right way. First her rabbit got eaten, then her cat went hungry, but somehow she managed to scrape together enough points to ensure she ran out the winner.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: You don’t have to know what you are doing to win.

12th July 2016

The hungry were feeding when an itinerant gamer from the north-west wondered in to join us. In the area for work, Yellow has been visiting several local game groups recently and was nice enough to come and join us for the evening. In addition, Grey made another unexpected appearance; apparently Cerise was away with the little one, so he was free to come out and play with us. Unfortunately for them though, our start was delayed a little while Blue and Burgundy scoffed their supper as quickly as they could and everyone else talked politics. Normally politics is a topic of conversation people avoid for fear of arguments, but it is amazing how everyone in the group seems to agree at the moment. In fact, as the evening wore on, it felt like history was being made as we watched: news come in that the Labour NEC had decided that Jeremy Corbyn should be able to stand as leader without needing the usual support from members of the Parliamentary Party, and the Petitions Committee had decided to schedule a referendum debate for 5th Sept, following the petition that garnered over four million signatures.

– Image by boardGOATS

Eventually, we decided to get on with it with Blue and Magenta keen to play the “Feature Game”, Puerto Rico. Surprisingly (as Puerto Rico is Green’s favourite game and it was with him in mind that we chose it), Green was keen to play Amerigo instead. He had missed out on playing it on Friday night with the Didcot group and it had clearly been playing on his mind over the weekend. By the same token, Burgundy and Black were less keen to play Amerigo as they had played it on Friday and they quite fancied Puerto Rico instead. Purple had played it on Friday, but was keen to play again, so the group naturally split into two with Pine joining those playing Puerto Rico and Grey and Yellow joining the Amerigo group.

– Image by boardGOATS

Puerto Rico is an older game, and in many ways the archetypal Euro game. The idea of the game is quite simple in that on their turn, the active player chooses a “roles” then everyone takes it in turns to carry out the action associated with that role. Each role has a “privilege” which the active player gets which gives them a little bonus (as well as the opportunity to take the action first. Once everyone has chosen a role, the remaining role cards are “improved” by the addition of money, the used role cards are returned to the pool and the start player (The Governor) moves one player to the left before the new Governor starts the next round. The aim of the game is to get victory points which are awarded for buildings and for shipping goods. However, to build, players need money, and before they can ship goods, players need to be able to produce the goods with a plantation (and where necessary process them in the appropriate building).

– Image by boardGOATS

Each building/plantation has a special bonus, but for a player to receive this, the building needs to be occupied by a “colonist”. All these activities are carried out through the role cards. For example, the Builder enables players to construct a building, but the player who chooses the role gets the privilege of paying one doubloon less than they would have done otherwise. Similarly, the Craftsman is used to produce, but the privilege allows the player who chose the role to produce one extra item (of those they had already been able to produce). Other roles include the Captain (enables players to ship goods); the Trader (allows players to sell goods for money); the Settler (players can take a plantation tile and add it to their island); the Mayor (the ship of “colonists” arrives and they are divided amongst the players), and the Prospector (everyone does nothing except the person with the privilege who takes a doubloon from the bank).

– Image by boardGOATS

The “colonists” arrive by ship, are dark brown and work on the plantations, so many gamers have assumed the term is a pseudonym for African slaves and in the USA this means some people have refused to play the game. We are not like that in our group and, though we have no problem talking about slaves, we had far more fun talking about “colonists” in a way that everyone knew what we really meant. What with that and the references to the Big Meerkat (that’s in the centre of Newcastle you know), the Orifice building (otherwise known as the Office), Worf (Son of Mogh), and the Big and Little Whorehouses (or perhaps they were really warehouses), much of the game was carried out in a sort of code. This special group understanding was continued in the game play too where Magenta kept getting in Burgundy’s way, much to everyone else’s obvious delight, though Magenta insisted that it was all purely accidental.

– Image by boardGOATS

Burgundy started, so he, Blue and Black began the game with an indigo plantation while Magenta and Pine started out with a corn field. Pine found it quite hard to see what we needed to do, but he soon got past that and, as the game wore on, he quickly monopolised the tobacco market. He remained the only player dealing in tobacco for most of the game which was quite important due to the way shipping works: when a player chooses the Captain role, players take it in turns to place goods on one of the three ships. Each ship can only carry one type of cargo and they all have a finite space. As the only player shipping tobacco, whenever Pine was able to transport some of his tobacco he simultaneously prevented others from shipping their goods. Since this is the key way to get victory points, before long, Pine had built a sizeable pile and looked to be romping away with it. Meanwhile, Black, then Magenta and Burgundy moved into sugar which made them uneasy allies, sometimes working together to get sugar into a ship, but otherwise competing to get their goods into the last space on a ship.

– Image by boardGOATS

While everyone else was engaged in building a productive plantation, Burgundy began by by using his land for quarries, lots of quarries. These make building cheaper, but don’t provide goods when someone chooses the Craftsman role. Seeing where he was going, Magenta picked up a Construction Hut which enabled her to choose a quarry instead of a plantation each time anyone chose the Settler role. Blue managed to pick up one quarry, but otherwise, between them, Burgundy and Magenta were in danger of getting all of them. Burgundy got round the potential for a lack of plantations by building a Hacienda which gave him an extra plantation every time anyone else Settled. He then coupled this with Hospice which meant that one of these plantations/quarries arrived complete with a “colonist” – a very powerful combination. For a long time Black havered over whether to try to get in on the quarry game or not. To begin with he decided not before picking one up anyhow.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pine was sat next to Magenta quietly coveting her Construction Hut, but it was pointed out that it wasn’t a good time to buy it and there were better things he could do, advice he took. It obviously rankled a little though because every time after that when quarries were mentioned he added, “Though I’m not allowed a quarry…”. Eventually, Blue decided she was struggling from a lack of both cash and victory points and needed to do something drastic to get back into the game. So, taking a leaf out of Pine’s book, she expanded into coffee and then screwed everyone else up by starting a coffee ship which took several rounds to fill. Eventually, she was joined by Pine who then variously helped her and got in her way.

– Image by boardGOATS

Blue and Black both made a hash of their timing with the crafting and shipping, and when Blue finally worked out what she was doing and planned what she needed for a large building she lost the plot and failed to choose the Builder role when she had the chance. So, when Magenta took the builder a couple of turns later, everyone had enough for a large building and Blue was left without her first or second choice. Magenta who had filled less than half her plantation spaces took the Residence just to stop Burgundy and Blue who had been able to fill theirs and would have been able to get maximum points for it (thanks to their Haciendas). So, Burgundy took the Fortress (which gave him one point for every three “colonists”) and Blue took the Customs House (which gave one extra victory point chip for every four already held). This left Black with the dregs from which he took the Guild Hall (giving him points for his production buildings). Meanwhile, Pine ominously kept producing vast amounts of tobacco and shipping it.

– Image by boardGOATS

By this time, Blue and Black were convinced that Pine was miles ahead, and everyone else was playing for the minor places. Pine in turn was convinced Magenta had a healthy lead; Magenta was certain she was losing, but continued to innocently obstruct Burgundy and the game turned nasty as everyone began to struggle to ship what they wanted. With the number of victory point chips available dwindling faster than the number of “colonists”, everyone scrabbled to build that last utility and ship those final crates. It turned out that it was a very close game: Magenta had a misleadingly large pile of singleton victory point chips; Pine probably would have won if the game had the game ended a round or two earlier, and Burgundy may well have won had it gone on another for another couple of rounds. In the end though, despite being quite convinced she was nowhere close, Blue finished in first place with fifty-six, just three points ahead of Pine with Black taking third on a tie-break.

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, on the next table, Amerigo was going full steam ahead. In this game players are exploring the islands of South America, securing trading routes, and building settlements. The game board is made up of a four by four grid of large tiles that make an archipelago. Players then have two ships each which they sail through the maze of islands, mooring at natural harbours to build trading posts, and then expanding settlements. The actions available to players are determined through the use of a special cube tower that contains lots of buffers and buttresses. The idea is that each of the seven actions has an associated set of coloured cubes: blue for sailing, black for loading cannon, red for buying buildings, green for settling etc. At the start of the game, all the cubes are put into the top of the tower a small number get stuck and remain inside the tower to be potentially knocked out at a later point in the game.

– Image used with permission of
BGG contributor punkin312

There are four rounds and each round consists of seven phases, corresponding to each action where all the cubes available of that colour are poured into the tower. Most of these cubes come out again, but some dislodge cubes previously caught in the baffles, while others others get stuck themselves. Of the cubes that come out, the colour that is in the majority dictates the number, while all the colours dictate the actions. Thus, if five blue, one green and one black come out, players can choose between sailing, building settlements or loading cannon, and in each case, they have five “action points”. So, the actions that are available are largely predictable, with a slightly random element meaning there is a tactical element (taking advantage of the actions currently available in the best way possible) as well as a strategic (long term plan) element to the game.

– Image by BGG contributor mcfer

Points are available throughout the game for all sorts of things, including being the first person to land on an island and establish a trading post; building settlements on an island; completing an island by settling on its last available space; collecting gold, and moving along the progress and special action paths. At the end of each round, however, the pirates attack and players have to fire their cannon to repel boarders. Anyone who has not loaded sufficient cannon to fend off the pirates, loses points which is particularly nasty, because these players lose as many points as they would if they’d had no cannon at all, and they also have to fire the cannon they had loaded!

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

Inevitably we all started off sailing to islands near to us, and generally we all did the main colour action in the first round. Grey toyed with the idea of not doing Cannon’s, but in the end decided to copy the more experienced players. So an easy and simple, first round, in a game that gradually became a more cut throat battle. Purple concentrated on running up her brown track and gaining the bonus action chits and spread across to a few islands. This strategy seemed to leave her struggling for points as the game went on. Yellow was unsure how best to approach the game, so tended to stick to the action colour sequence, but got hold of the red equals green equals red bonus chit, which he used to good effect to build up on his several islands. This strategy netted him a good haul of points as the game progressed.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor jsper

Grey was running an expansionist policy, getting to as many islands as he could. On top of this he, quite slyly, built over the extra empty trading post spaces, thus rendering them useless and gaining a monopoly on several islands, however, his score also seemed to suffer for this. Meanwhile, Green carried out a number of red planning actions to build up a large backlog of buildings to place. This meant he always had something to place in those tricky corners, but he lost out on his big islands by leaving it too late to place them. Early on, he nabbed the big six neutral tile (the only one in the game) and then realised that he was on the wrong side of the big island to be able to place it, so had to make a quick trip to the other side to develop a new trading post before he could place it for a whopping eighteen points. This strategy was proving quite productive and he and Yellow were regularly vying for the lead.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Oceluna

In the last part of the game, while Purple and Yellow continued their general strategy, Grey decided he had enough islands and started to place his tiles on them to gain the resources. Green, having built as much as he could, was left wondering what to do next. He had lots of tiles still to place, but nowhere to place them without a new trading post. There were four left, all on the other side of the board and they were disappearing fast, so green started sailing. By using his gold and going round the outside he was able to get to the area in just one move. By this time, there were only two trading posts left as everyone else worked together to stop Green. With no more gold, Green was not quite able to get to a trading post and ended just one space away. Yellow took his turn and he built on the other trading post leaving Green to sail once more and place his trading post.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

With only two single spaces left on this last island, there was a bit of a stand-off between Yellow and Green: whoever built first would gain a single point, but leave the other to get the three point bonus for finishing the island. Meanwhile, there was a total of eight pirates on the board which everyone had covered until Purple took the two-plus pirate attack bonus token. Purple was aright of course, but everyone else needed another two cannon if they weren’t going to end up with an eight point penalty. More turns were sacrificed to gain cannon which also sent players to the top of the line and provided extra gold. Purple and Green found themselves with no actions to do, so ended up trading action cubes for gold, while Grey and Yellow mopped-up island bonuses.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

In the very last action everyone swapped their gold for extra spaces on the white turn order track, just to get to that extra scoring location. With the game coming to an end and neither Green nor Yellow prepared to give quarter on the last island, neither took the final three points. Before the final scoring began, Yellow was in the lead, a few points clear of Green. As the final scoring phase began, it became apparent that everyone except for Purple had misunderstood the scoring the resource bonuses. We thought the number on the yellow action chits was its multiplier value, however, this number is irrelevant to the scoring, it only means it costs more to obtain. Grey was particularly annoyed as he had deliberately been going for the high value action tokens and had been choosing the resource tokens appropriately.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

In the end, it was very close with Grey and Purple catching up however, it wasn’t quite enough, and Yellow and Green remained several points ahead, tied on a hundred and thirty-one. The tie-breaker gave it to Yellow, as he was at the end of the turn order track and Green was five spaces farther back. On reflection though, Green later realised that he could have taken it had he known the rules better as he’d finished with six gold. He could easily have spent the surplus gold to move along the track, but had decided against it as, although it would have given him an extra five points, the gold was worth one point each so there had seemed no point.

– Image by BGG contributor jancis

Puerto Rico was still underway, and with Grey deciding he could do with an early night (while the Cat’s away, the Mice will play – and it seemed this Mouse had been playing quite a bit!), Purple, Green and Yellow opted for some quick, light-hearted fun with Om Nom Nom. This is one of our more popular games, and we’ve played it a few times on a Tuesday evening. Purple loves it and it was new to Yellow though, so despite his conviction that it’s completely random, Green joined in. The idea is quite simple, each player has a hand of “Predator” cards, and the dice represent “Prey”. Players simultaneously choose a card to play and then Prey is divided up accordingly. If there is enough Prey for all the Predators to eat, then players take their share of the appropriate dice. If not, the Predator(s) go hungry and the cards are discarded. The catch is that some cards are both Predator and Prey, which is where the game descends into double-think (or Luck as Green prefers to think of it).

– Image by BGG contributor jancis

Green has tried a variety of “methods” to beat the “luck”, but much like an inveterate gambler, a “technique” that works a couple of times almost always fails in the end, and so it proved this time too. In the first card of the first round, Green decided to change his card just before everyone revealed theirs which proved fortuitous as his hedgehog ended up with a bunch of frog dice and cards. So, Green swapped his second and third cards at the last second and he picked up Prey on both occasions. As the round progressed, Purple and Yellow also achieved some success and Green took another card, but by the end of the round, the scores were very even with Purple ahead by just one point. Probability can be a funny thing, but it was still quite a shock to roll nine carrots, each with a probability of one-in-six. And so began a little game of cat & mouse, literally with everyone trying to second guess each others choices and all ending up feeling that the carrots looked too good to be true and there was bound to be a fox hanging around.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor msaari

At the second attempt, Yellow found he couldn’t resist temptation and went for the carrots only to find Purple’s fox was waiting to pounce. Then, somehow (and nobody could work out exactly how), Purple ended up with the entire haul of carrots all to herself. By this time, Green had reverted to type and scored nothing for the round, Yellow produced a creditable showing, but Purple took an amazing twenty-nine points. The final round was a much more even spread of dice and scores. Yellow was getting better and better and won the round while Green got lucky and took a few more points. Purple was not so successful this time out, but it didn’t matter, as her massive score in the second round gave her a record-breaking forty-eight, according to the scoring card, a new high score!

– Image by BGG contributor jancis

Learning Outcome: Don’t ascribe to luck what others might call skill.

23rd February 2016

After another quick game of Love Letter (a resounding win for Magenta), we moved on to our “Feature Game”, Kobayakawa. This is a simple little Japanese micro-filler game with elements of betting and push-your-luck. The rules sounded unpromising, but it was much more fun on the table. The idea is very simple: from a deck numbered one to fifteen, each player is dealt a single card with one extra one face up in the middle. Like Love Letter, players draw a card and chose which to keep, but the aim is different as players are trying to set themselves up for the second phase of the game. In the second phase, players take it in turns in player order choosing whether to pay a token to join the bidding or not. The player with the highest card in hand wins the pot and the winner over all is the player with the most tokens after seven rounds. There is a catch, however, as the player with the lowest card gets to add the face up card to their total.

– Image by boardGOATS

It is at this point that the little bit of strategy comes in: in the first phase, players can choose to replace the face up card instead of drawing a card into their hand. It is only a very little bit of strategy though, since play is strictly in player order and at the start of the round you have almost no information. Thus, a player who has chosen to keep a low card can find their round is trashed when the last player in the round changes the face-up card from a high value to a low one. That said, the game is not meant to be an intensely deep strategy game, and it was much more fun than it sounded on reading through the rules. Pine took an early lead with Green crashing out as he ran out of tokens. Although we enjoyed it, we felt the end-game could do with a little work as the rules say that everyone who has enough tokens must pay two to join in the last round of bidding (instead of one as previously). This increases the value of winning the final round and means the preceding rounds can be essentially meaningless unless a player has managed to accrue more than half the number of tokens available (and in that case the final round is pointless instead). We felt that maybe the game would be better with an early target, with the winner being the player to collect, say, three times the number of tokens as players, and if that hadn’t happened by round seven, then play the final round.

– Image by boardGOATS

This was followed by a short break during which we discussed what to play next and got side-tracked by an (unusually serious) conversation regarding the upcoming EU referendum. As the debate disintegrated into general moaning along the lines of European stereotypes Green felt a game of Lancaster was in order, as it is a game where players are directing noble families from the time of Henry V, vying for power and favour amongst themselves, with a side order of fighting the French. This is a game that has had a couple of outings recently since we first played it just after Christmas, but this time we decided to add the Reward Tiles mini-expansion. Pine was the only one not to have played it before, so we had a quick run-through of the rules. Players take it in turns to place their knights in one of three places: in the shires; in their castle, or in the wars in France. Once the knights have been placed, players then vote on and evaluate “the Laws” which give players a benefit just before they get their their rewards for knight placement. After five rounds, the player with the most points wins.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Baartoszz

The mini-expansion added reward tiles which are drawn at the start of each round and placed next to a county on the game board. During the rewards phase, the player who takes control of the county may collect the reward tile instead of the imprinted basic reward (collecting both the nobleman tile and the reward tile if they pay the extras). Clearly these weren’t going to have a huge impact on the game, though they would make some of the benefits slightly more available during the game, something that had the potential to help out Purple who insisted that she never did very well as Green and Black always knocked her out of the castle improvement counties (something that was not denied). The first round of knight placement was a benign affair as no-one seemed up for a fight. Black concentrated on beating the French, Purple inevitably went for castle improvements, Green wanted the starting token and Pine thought building up his knights would be a good start.

– Image used with permission of
BGG contributor kopernikus

Then came the first phase of voting for the Laws. Confusion abounded concerning quite how it worked, and having been fairly unanimous in our votes we prepared to discard two laws and replace them with two more. A quick check of the rules about how we do this indicated that we’d done it all wrong: we should have voted for the new laws we wanted not the old laws we wanted to keep. There was a little more discord at the ballot box when we tried again, but we still got two new Laws. With that, the most complicated part of the game, out of the way for the first time, we went into the rewards round with players counties collecting knights, castle improvements, voting cubes and squires, and awarding points for the victory in France. It was when we came to the rewards from the Laws that Green realised that all his calculations as to what he would get were wrong since number of squires and money had suddenly changed. It was only when placing the knights in the second round that Green realised that the rewards from the Laws should be awarded immediately after the vote and before the rewards from the rest of the board. We changed to follow the rules for the rest of the game, but did think that it could make an interesting variant as it provides an extra level of uncertainty into the game.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor kilroy_locke

Over the next couple of rounds, Black continued his grudge against France, Purple tried to build her castle (largely unsuccessfully), Green gathered voting nobleman around his table and Pine built up his fighting strength. By round three Purple and Black had both accumulated a lot of squires and Pine and Green found themselves being kicked out of a few counties and having to replace somewhere else and by the fourth round, the knives were really out and the counties were changing hands like “pass the parcel” at a birthday party. Pine and Green had superior knight strength, but Black and Purple had the upper hand with squires; battles raged across the land and the rivers ran red with the blood of so many faithful soldiers.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

The battles continued into the final round, however, Black had often swiped the nobleman from under the noses of the other players by judicious use the free nobleman king’s favour and the free nobleman alternative reward from the expansion (the only person to actually take advantage of it in the whole game). Eventually, everyone settled with several sending their knights home to treat their wounds, and the game ended except final scoring. Black began the scoring several points ahead of the others and it looked like his fighting in France may have paid off, especially as he had managed to gain quite a table of nobleman as well. The superior knights of Green and Pine and the better castles of Pine and Purple brought them a little closer to Black prior to the nobleman scoring. Black and Purple finished with the same number of nobles giving them fifteen points, but Green finished with two more which he had snuck in right at the end and took him to a near full compliment giving him an extra thirteen points and with it the win, leapfrogging Black in second place with Pine finishing just one point behind in third.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

In discussing the game after, Pine said he quite enjoyed it and we ruminated on how weak the castle improvements seemed to be, more because they were so hard to get early on, when they would provide the most benefit whereas later on they were of less use. This brought in the idea of using the expansion extra reward tokens all at the beginning of the game rather than only one new one out each round. We also wondered if placing them randomly rather than on specific counties could work, though that might need some thought.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

Meanwhile, Blue, mindful that Green and Burgundy had been keen to play Endeavour again, had produced that as a her offering for a game about international treaties. With Green engaged elsewhere, Blue and Burgundy recruited Magenta to the cause and gave her a rules run-down as she had not played it before. The game felt much less confusing than last time as it was fresh in Blue’s and Burgundy’s minds having played it within a month. So, despite all the little bits that need to be set out, the perceived complexity of the game and the relative inexperience of the players, Endeavour was actually under way first. The game is played over seven rounds, each of which consists of four phases: Building, Population, Income and Action. The idea is that players have four status tracks which correspond to Industry, Culture, Finance and Politics, which roughly correspond to the four phases and dictate what players are allowed to do at each stage. The game is actually much less confusing than we made it last time, though there are a number of apparently little rules that have the potential to make a large difference. For example, last time at least one player had multiple copies of one building which can significantly change the balance of the game as well as potentially making that building unavailable to other players.

– Image by boardGOATS

Players start by choosing a building: although the choice is very limited at the beginning so everyone begins with only a slight variation in direction, we have a feeling that the choices made very early on in the game are critical. Similarly, getting the first round of settling and shipping right is vital as this gives both position and a crucial fast start on the status tracks allowing players an early toe-hold in the game. As such, Magenta was at something of a disadvantage not having seen the game play out before, though with just three players (compared to four last time) there was just a little more wriggle room. Burgundy and Magenta began by building Shipyards, so Blue decided to do something different (largely just for the sake of it) and built a Market instead. Although she didn’t plan it that way, it meant that she was first to start picking up cards from the Asset Deck in Europe, giving her an alternative method of building her status tracks.

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, Magenta and Burgundy were both engaging in shipping though Magenta was having the better of it managed use to build up her Population and Income tracks and quickly took the Governorship of South America. Somehow, Burgundy had got things very slightly out of kilter and was unable to put them right. Before long his Income status track had fallen behind which restricted his available population as well as blocking up his action spaces. Magenta was on roll judiciously shipping, settling and picking up Asset cards, and generally playing a very canny game. In the previous game, with four players, almost all the board had been opened up in what had been a very tight game. This time, with only three players, large sections of the board didn’t get explored much at all. This was exacerbated by Blue only starting her shipping slowly, so Burgundy had to make almost all the running in India, which was hard work, but necessary for him to build a network of settlements. Matters were made worse for him with Blue pouncing on one of his key targets.

– Image by boardGOATS

Although everyone finished in much the same place, as before, with nearly complete status tracks and a near full set of cards, it was clear that Burgundy had struggled and Magenta had really done very well. Blue’s position was less clear as she hadn’t done quite as well as Magenta on the status tracks (especially as she had to discard one of her cards at the end of the final round), but had picked up points elsewhere, in particular on her Asset cards. In the final count, Burgundy was nowhere near as far back as we had thought and it was clear that if he had been able to increase his income just slightly, earlier in the game, he would have been way out in front. As it was, Blue finished some twelve points clear thanks to her Asset card victory points and more cities than anyone else.

– Image by boardGOATS

Lancaster was still under way, so Burgundy, Magenta and Blue decided to play something small and quick that they all knew. The minimal set-up time and its more relaxed feel commended The Game, and since the decision had to be made quickly, no-one really looked any further. We’ve played this simple little card-laying co-operative game a lot, so the only thing we needed to check was the number of cards in the starting hand. Unfortunately, an appalling deal quickly put paid to our “R&R” and the stress levels quickly rose as it looked highly likely that we weren’t going to even get through the deck. In the event, we just about managed to get to a point where the draw deck was depleted, but that was it and we finished with seventeen unplayed cards. Lancaster was drawing to a close, but scores still had to be tallied and there were a lot of bits to put away, so we decided to give it another go, with speed. Not thinking seemed to help (or maybe it was the practice from the previous try), because we made a much better fist of it, finishing with just four unplayed cards.

– Image by boardGOATS

With Magenta heading home for an early night, there was just enough time (and people) for a quick game of one of our most popular fillers, Om Nom Nom. The game is quite simple with players simultaneously choosing animal cards to try to eat as much possible: for example, a cat will eat mice. Similarly a mouse can eat cheese, but only if it is not eaten by a cat first. The board is seeded with dice, after which there is a large dose of double-think as players try to guess whether everyone/anyone else is going to go for the largest tastiest helpings or not. As usual, Green moaned about how badly he does in the game, and tried his usual array of randomly choosing cards and going for his second choice rather than his first, but for all that, he didn’t do so badly in the end, though he was some way behind Blue who just pipped Pine thanks to a large helping of carrots (which, it turns out score double) in the final round.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor msaari

Learning Outcome: Games can be very different when you change even the smallest of rules…

1st December 2015

Red and Blue were late thanks to a ridiculous queue at Frilford Crossroads, so food had only just been ordered when Green and Pine turned up. We hadn’t seen Grey and Cerise for a while, so when they arrived the evening descended into gossip. Pine manfully resisted the chips, but when he eventually succumbed, he ended up with more than he bargained for as they’d all stuck together… Amid chips and chat, eventually, someone suggested a game and everyone else agreed, so we started with the “Feature Game”, Pandemic: Contagion. The original game, Pandemic, is a very well known cooperative game where everyone plays together to defeat the tide of disease that is overcoming the world. Pandemic: Contagion is a lighter game and almost the complete opposite: players are the diseases and compete against each other to be the most effective and take over the world.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game itself is fairly straightforward. Cards are drawn to represent cities – these are coloured and are under attack from disease. On their turn players can do any two of three possible actions: place cubes or “infect” a city, draw cards or mutate their disease. Placing cubes cost cards and the cards must match the colour of the city they are infecting. The number of cubes they can place or cards they can draw depend on the characteristics of their disease, and both can be increased by mutation. Like infection, mutation must be paid for with cards, though the number of cards used depends on the level, thus going from an infection level three to level four is much more expensive than going from level one to two.

– Image by boardGOATS

A city becomes overrun with disease when the total number of cubes placed on the card equals or exceeds the population. At this point, the city is scored and the players with the most cubes get points (in the event of a tie, the disease to infect it first wins). The person who placed the last disease cube additionally gets a bonus action that depends on the city. At the start of each round an event card is drawn which either alters the rules of the game for the duration of that round, or otherwise disrupts everyone’s plans, by for example, causing them to lose cards or reduce their infection rate etc. etc.. Some of these cards also have a symbol on them either a city indicating that a new city should be added, or a skull and crossed bones after every second of which points are awarded to the player with the most disease cubes in each city. The game ends when either, there are only two cities left, or the game has proceeded through all twelve event cards.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game went very slowly with everyone falling for “group think” and going for the cities with the largest populations which therefore score the most points when completed. Unfortunately, this left the game somewhat mired in treacle as everyone did pretty much the same thing for the first three rounds collecting cards and infecting cities. Blue picked up a few points at the first interim scoring, but otherwise it was pretty dull and we were all wondering what we were doing wrong. Then it dawned on us that our disease cubes weren’t doing very much: for all the large cities, one player had a significant majority, so there was no incentive to compete for it; worse, the winner was reluctant to commit more resources to the cause, but that meant their cubes were just sitting there, waiting.

– Image by boardGOATS

Burgundy tried to get things going by increasing the number of cards he could draw, but that back fired when an event card forced him to dispose of half his cards (much to his horror, rounded up!). It was then that everyone began to look for other things to do and attention turned to finishing off some of the smaller, weaker cities. We’d sort of forgotten about the bonuses that come when cities are scored and it turns out that some of them are very powerful indeed. This was amply demonstrated when Blue finished Milan that gave her a card for every city she had infected, which turned out to be quite a few.

– Image by boardGOATS

With a little grease to oil the wheels, she was now able to use her newly liberated disease cubes to infect other cities in an effort to finish them. Everyone else joined in and finally the game began to look a little better, however, before we’d had time to really start to appreciate it, the game was over and it was time to score the remaining cities. Blue took the win with sixty-one points with Cerise some fifteen points behind behind just fending off Burgundy and taking second place, but everyone was frustrated at what had looked like a promising game, but had fallen so spectacularly flat.

– Image by boardGOATS

On reflection, as Blue commented (much to Green’s amusement as he listened in from the next table), “If we’d played it differently it would have been a very different game.” Although that sounds like a stupidly obvious thing to say, the problem was that everyone tried to play the same way and everyone fell into the same trap which dragged the game down badly. If we’d realised the value of the bonuses and gone for some of the smaller cities first, the game wouldn’t have dragged so much and would have been much more enjoyable and interesting. Unfortunately, as Pine succinctly put it, he’d enjoyed everything he’d played with us and would be happy to play any of them again, “except that.” Which means it’s unlikely to get a second chance very soon.

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, Green and Grey had decided they fancied playing something a bit more “piratey” together. With Pandemic: Contagion supposedly taking “just half an hour”, they decided to give Port Royal a go. Although Green had played it a couple of times, Grey was completely new to the game. We’ve played it quite a bit recently, but in summary, the game combines “push your luck” with strategy, the idea being that players turn over cards until there is something they want, or they go bust. Once they’ve taken a card, the other players have their pick of what’s left (for the cost of one coin). This means that in a two player game, the strategy changes quite a bit as players have to watch what they leave as well as be careful about taking a card and paying their opponent for the privilege.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor joeincolorado

Green decided to aim to complete “expeditions”, while Grey took a more tactical approach, just doing what seemed best at the time; neither player decided to protect themselves by picking up pirate cards. Both players really enjoyed it and the fickle hand of fate was much in evidence: there was much hilarity when three of the four tax cards came out in the same round. Fate wasn’t done yet either and when Green pushed for four ship cards (in order to be able to buy two cards in the round), almost two dozen cards had been drawn before he finally went bust by revealing a second of the same colour. With no pirates in his arsenal to repel the attack, the whole lot was wiped out, much to Grey’s annoyance as he had his eye on a particular card. In the end Green won convincingly with his expedition strategy, but he had the advantage of having played it twice before.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

Since the larger group were still playing Pandemic: Contagion and only about half way through, Grey and Green decided to give Port Royal another go. This time both players decided to mitigate some of the luck by picking up pirate cards and it was generally a very close game. Pirate ships were repelled left, right and centre and more than once two cards were purchased in one round. In the end Grey brought the game to an end by exchanging cards for an expedition causing him to exceed the magic twelve points, finishing on fourteen. Since Grey had started, Green got one more round. With eleven points, Green needed four to win. As only two card purchases would do, he went for a four pirate line. With a fighting total of six he could easily repel anything except the skull ships. With the odds in his favour managed to get to the necessary four ships so that he could buy two cards, but his meagre finances stopped him getting the four points and had to settle for three, leaving him with fourteen points, level with Grey. Unfortunately for Grey, he had no money left to buy anything, and it all went down to the tie-breaker. The rules state this is by money, and since Green had just one coin left, he took his second victory of the night.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

With Pandemic: Contagion STILL going (yes, it really DID drag on, though it was near the end by this time…) Green and Grey decided to play a very quick game of Pick Picknic. This is another game that was new to Grey, but he proved to be a natural at. A sort of early version of one of our current favourites, Om Nom nom, the game combines simultaneous card selection with bluffing and a good slice of luck. The idea is that there are six farm yards of different colours, if someone plays the only chicken card of a given colour, they get all the grain at that coloured farm. If multiple players go for the same coloured yard, then players can either agree to share the corn in any way that is mutually acceptable or roll the die for all of it. Foxes don’t eat corn, however, they only eat chickens, so if someone plays a fox card, they will eat any chicken cards of that colour, and before long Grey was happily gobbling his way through Green’s chickens adding to his pile of captured corn. In the end Green managed to get more corn, but the birds captured by Grey’s hungry foxes more than made up for the missing corn and Grey ran out a clear winner. Both players agreed that they preferred Pick Picknic to Om Nom Nom. Although it doesn’t have the great dice of the newer game, they game doesn’t have the feeling that it’s all over after one poor move.

– Image used with permission of BGG reviewer EndersGame

With Pandemic: Contagion finally finished, Cerise and Grey headed off, leaving Burgundy, Green, Pine and Blue with a little over an hour to play. After a little bit of thought, we decided to continue Pine’s “boardgame education” and introduce him to The Settlers of Catan (or simply “Catan” as it is now known). Playing with Green’s fourth Mayfair edition, there were the inevitable comments on the new colour scheme. Blue outlined the rules to Pine while Burgundy and Green set up the board. At its basic level, the game is one of resource management and civilisation building.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor kilroy_locke

Players start with two roads and two settlements. These are placed along the edges and on the corners of the hexagons of the modular board. Each hexagon has a number on it, and on each player’s turn, first they roll both dice and resources are awarded to players with settlements on the corners of the hexagon that corresponds to the total rolled. Once the resources have been handed out, the active player can trade resources with other players and use them to build more roads and settlements, develop their settlements into cities or buy development cards. Victory points are awarded for settlements, cities and the longest continuous road as well as via development cards (both as straight victory points and for the player with the most soldier cards, i.e. the Largest Army). The random set up had the desert off centre and almost all the specific ports a very long way from good supplies of the necessary resources. After much debate, we decided to let Pine go first and try to make sure he ended up with decent starting positions. Green, who went third, decided to try something different and explore the coast hoping there would be less competition there, leaving Blue two reasonable positions in the centre of the board.

– Image by boardGOATS

As usual with “Settlers”, resources were poorly distributed amongst players and after a brief flurry of wood, it disappeared for the rest of the game. On the other hand, Green was awash with ore, and Blue, who had quickly upgraded one of her settlements to a city after an early glut of wheat, suddenly found she had more brick than she could possibly work out what to do with. Pine, once more attracted animals and had an enthusiastically breeding flock of sheep while Burgundy persistently rolled sixes – just about the only number he didn’t have a settlement on. We had a big debate as to whether a four-for-one trade with the bank had to be four identical cards. After checking the rules, we found they should be identical, though neither Burgundy nor Blue remembered playing that way in the past. Since we were a little tight on time, we decided to house-rule it to “any four resources” this time, though on reflection, it probably wasn’t really necessary.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor
thephantomhennes

Burgundy picked up the Longest Road tile and joined Pine in the sheep farming business. Having ensured Pine’s starting placements were reasonable, he was making an excellent job of building on it and had found a nice little bit of space to work in, building a couple of new settlements and threatening to take the Longest Road card. Meanwhile, Green discovered that he was a bit stuffed, with few good options despite having tried to place his starting settlements to avoid being cut off. With good access only to ore and occasional wheat, he started buying development cards and used the robber effectively to cut off the wood supply. Blue, with a sudden influx of cards, managed to get her nose in front with a couple of settlements which she was able to upgrade quickly when she got another sudden influx of grain and brick.

– Image by boardGOATS

Just passing the hour mark, Blue hit eight points and was looking to extend her road and take the Longest Road from Burgundy, or build a couple more settlements. In the event, the dice rolled in her favour and she picked up a stack of cards with no sign of the robber, which meant she was able to do both giving her eleven points. This brought the game to a swift and sudden end and the score belied how close the game actually was. Since we’d finished a little quicker than expected we decided to play something quick. The suggestion of Red7 scared off Burgundy, but after some consideration, Blue and Green decided to continue Pine’s boardgame education with a quick game of Love Letter.

– Image by boardGOATS

Love Letter is a game we played a lot a year or so ago, but not so much recently. The first of the so-called “micro games” it is played with just sixteen cards. Each player starts with one card and on their turn, draws a second card and then plays one of them. Each card has a value (one to eight) and an action (discard a card, swap cards with another player, compare cards, etc. etc.). The object of the game is to have the highest card when the deck has been exhausted or, be the last person remaining, which ever is soonest. The rules say the winner is the first player to take a set number of hands, however, we tend to play far a few rounds and then decide how far to take it. In this case, Green, Blue and Pine had one point each, so we went for one final round, which Pine took with much aplomb.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor thatmadgirl

Learning Outcome: Sometimes it is the way that you play that makes a game enjoyable.