Tag Archives: Port Royal: Ein Auftrag geht noch…

20th February 2018

As food was being dealt with, Red introduced a new gamer, Olive. Olive is not new to Eurogames, but was unfamiliar the “Feature Game”, Colt Express: Marshal & Prisoners. This is the second expansion to the train robbing game, Colt Express, and one nobody around the table had tried before. Pretty much everyone said, “I really like the game, but I wouldn’t mind playing something else depending what that is…” This inevitably led to a lot of debate as to who would play what, but in the end, Blue, Magenta, Pine, Black and Olive settled down to play Colt Express.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor lacxox

Colt Express is a programming game where players take it in turns to choose the cards they are going to play (sometimes in the open, sometimes in secret) and then, after all the cards have been chosen, players take it in turns to action the cards. The cards enable players to move their robbers along the train, onto the roof of their carriage, shoot or punch each other and pick up loot, the ultimate aim of the game. The thing is, by the time players come to actioning the cards they chose, they have forgotten what their plan was, and usually the game state is completely different to what they thought it would be. This ends up with lots of people taking a wild swing at empty space, or shooting someone they hadn’t intended to target. The Marshal & Prisoners expansion makes things even more complicated as one of the players is the train Marshal instead of a robber, and has different objectives during the game.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Punkin312

Black took the role of the Marshal, who starts the game with five objective cards. Two of these are to capture other players (drawn at random), and all of them are placed face down to be revealed to the Marshal one at a time, one per round. He also got a hand of special action cards and two clips of bullets. Everyone else got the same action cards as in the base game, but additionally got a Brilliant Ideas card. This card affects how players interact with the other new component, the Prison Car. Basically, its effect depends on the character’s location: if they are not in the prison car then they repeat the previous robber’s actions, otherwise they have a choice of freeing a captured robber or rescuing a prisoner who will then work for them.

– Image used with permission of boardgamephotos

It took us a little while to remember some of the finer details and also get to grips with the changes caused by the expansion. Marshal Black quickly captured Olive, a move everyone felt was a bit harsh on her fist visit. Fortunately for her, Pine was in a chivalrous mood so instead of freeing a prisoner (and getting the associated special power), he liberated Olive from her cell, at a cost of course. Meanwhile, Magenta had started out as she clearly meant to carry on, by being violent and shooting Blue. Inevitably, she retaliated in the next round and from there bullets flew in all directions. Magenta wasn’t only busy being a brutal murdering psychopath, she was also busy collecting. Pine was slightly more gentlemanly about it, but was also making free with the available loot. Blue’s game ended when she too was caught by Marshal Black and nobody saw fit to let her out.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Punkin312

Eventually the game came to an end, and Marshal Black was first to declare whether he had achieved his goals. To win, he had to succeed in four of the five challenges, but unfortunately for him, he’d only managed three of them. He’d managed to shoot all four people and capture Olive (which was one of his goals), but he’d failed to nab Pine and one of his other tasks was nearly impossible. This meant everyone had to reveal their stash. While locked in her prison cell, Blue had been reading the rules and discovered that the Brilliant Idea card would enable her to escape on her own, but by that time, the game was nearly over and the damage was done. Magenta, Pine and Blue had all managed to empty their clips so scored $1,000 as gunslingers. Pacifist Olive had managed to pick up the strong box and some other loot, but getting captured cost her $500. Pine finished second with an excellent $2,200, but it was a long way behind Magenta who finished well ahead with $3,150.

– Image used with permission of boardgamephotos

Meanwhile, after some discussion, everyone else settled on playing Port Royal (with the extra cards from the Expansion). This is a very simple game; on their turn the active player turns over the top card of the deck. If it is a Ship that they want, they can take it to give them income, alternatively, they can repel the Ship if they don’t want it and have sufficient cutlass cards to do so. If it is a Character card that they want and can afford, they buy it and put it in front of them. If they do not want the card they place it face up in the display in front of the draw-deck and draw another card. The active player continues in this way until they have taken a card, or a Ship is drawn that is the same colour as a ship already in the display and cannot be repelled, in which case, they go bust and play passes to the next player.

– Image by boardGOATS

The clever part of the game is that it uses the same dual use cards trick as Bohnanza, where the cards have one meaning when face up and are coins when face down. This means some cards get buried in the money piles and may never appear face up, making each game slightly different. The other clever part of the game is that if the active player buys or takes a card, then everyone else has the chance, in turn, to take or buy a card until there are none left in the row, however, it will cost them one coin, paid to the active player. In general, each Character card has a special power, but is also worth victory points at the end of the game which is triggered when someone reaches twelve points.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor msaari

It had been a little while since we last played this and we all felt a little rusty, and Ivory was entirely new to it. So, the first few rounds were a little tentative but as we got into it, Burgundy opted for his tried and trusted strategy of gaining the Admiral Character card that would give him two extra coins (taken from the draw deck) if there were at least five cards in the row when it was his turn to choose. This worked very well for him initially, so that when the option to get a second came along he took it for a potential gain of four coins when there were five cards in the row just be fore he could choose one. Whether it was just luck or that the rest of us made an extra special effort, he immediately stopped getting his five card chance after this and only rarely managed his four coins.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Punkin312

After the first couple of rounds we were still finding our feet and everyone really needed more money so we were all trying to get some higher scoring pirate ships. Green was the first to go bust when the third he pulled out was a second green pirate. Tom was next up and he also bust and so it went on round the table for an (almost) fully busted round, with only Burgundy bucking the trend. The game was generally bereft of the Expedition Cards (which allow players to exchange some people for more points), and unusually there were only two available in the whole game. This meant that for Green, Purple and Red who were pursuing and Expedition card based strategy it was a real struggle. Despite Burgundy’s frequent large haul of coins, it was actually Purple that fell foul of the Tax Man first, and Burgundy (by way of having a solitary soldier), kept winning the extra coin for largest defense force when the taxes were due.

– Image by boardGOATS

In the past, Green had done well with Pirate and Sailor strategy, but unfortunately this time he struggled to get the fighting cards he needed. Ivory was getting a feel for the game and took two red Trader cards that would add to his coin haul whenever he took a red ship. However, these cards are not as powerful in this game as they at first appear, as it’s rare that you get to choose which colour ship you take. Since he had this double bonus, the rest of us made sure he didn’t get to use it. In the end Burgundy made his strategy work and as everyone else struggled to gain traction he sailed to victory finishing with twelve points with everyone else in a very tight game for second place. It was not clear how long Colt Express was going to go on, but as they were about half way through, a shorter five player game was in order. This was not an easy choice with the games available which were either way too long or rather too short. It ended up being Red’s favourite, Bohnanza.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor spearjr

Bohnanza is a very popular game within the group, but somehow Ivory had managed to avoid playing it. Everyone else were old hands with it though, so after a quick summary of the rules we had a discussion of the key points of the game. As far as the rules go, the key part is for everyone to suppress all natural instinct and NOT sort their hand of cards. This is something that is surprisingly difficult given the OCD nature of most gamers, but is is the crux of the game as the cards must be played in the order they are received. The only way to work round this is to trade away the cards in hand, which means they must be played straight away, but by another player. There was a short discussion on this point as the fun of the game is in the trading and if people refuse to trade it becomes tedious. That wasn’t going to happen here though. Our group are usually fairly free and easy with our trades, but that’s not to say we are push-overs. We trade, but we trade hard. Occasionally we might let someone have an exceptionally good deal, but only on the condition that they remember for next time!

– Image by boardGOATS

In many ways this was fairly typical game of Bohnanza. Green was the first to go for a third bean field (often none of us do), and that was because he wanted to plant his Garden Bean while not getting in the way of his normal game. There are only six Garden Beans in the game, but if you can get at least two, that gives you a point per bean card. Although Ivory had already planted and harvested three Garden Beans, Green felt it was worth the gamble that at least one of the others was going to turn up sometime. He was right about that. They both turned up in Burgundy’s hand and he wasn’t trading! Ivory followed shortly after planting his third bean field, largely for the same reason: he did not want to harvest an incomplete field just yet for a low yield, high scoring bean. Like Green however, ultimately, the strategy failed.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor spearjr

By this time, Colt Express had finished and since Bohnanza was going with such a swing the “train robbers” decided to join in with their own “Game of Beans” using a second copy. In many ways it was a mirror of the first game; a case of different people, same game. So, Blue picked up a third bean field quite early in the hope that it would ensure she could capitalise on some of the rare, but valuable beans she had in her hand, in particular her Garden Bean. Everyone else tried to manage without, though Olive decided to pick one up in the late stages—a controversial decision in the eyes of the spectators. Like Green and Ivory, the third bean field didn’t help them either though, in Blue’s case, largely because it spent the almost the whole game with one solitary bean in it because the rest all ended up in Pine’s coin stash. Both games were quite tight, so much so that when the first group couldn’t find someone to trade with, they tried to see if anyone on the next table could help. Red, The Bean Queen, came out on top in the first game with sixteen, with Ivory finishing in second with fifteen and each place thereafter one coin behind the one above. The winner on the second table also finished with sixteen and was a tie between Pine and Black who’d had a quiet, but obviously effective game.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Sometimes violence pays.

18th October 2016

Magenta arrived first, and after a short delay while she fiddled with her phone she was joined by Blue (armed with lots of “Mammy Sheep” for Red and a pile of other bits from Essen for everyone else). Burgundy, Pine, Red and Cerise followed together with food. We were nearly done when Black and purple turned up and ordered their food, so while we were waiting we started a pair of parallel games of the “Feature Game”, The Game: Extreme. We’ve played the original version, The Game, quite a lot, so were keen to see what this added. The Game is very simple: as a group, players must try to to play every card from the deck (numbered two to ninety-nine) onto four piles. On their turn, the active player must play two cards from their hand on any of the four piles: for two of the card must be of higher value than the current top card, while for the other two it must must be of lower value.

– Image by boardGOATS

Players can discuss anything they like so long as nobody discloses any specific number information and they can play as many cards as they like on their turn so long as they play at least two (until the deck has been depleted, after which they must play one). To help eveyone out, there is also the so called “Backwards Rule” which allows players to push a pile back so long as the difference between the card they are playing and the card they are covering is exactly ten. Once the active player has played their cards, they replenish the missing cards. The game ends when all cards have been played or the active player is unable to play a card. The game is often compared with Hanabi, as it is a cooperative card game, but for Hanabi to work really well it needs to be played in total silence and with poker faces – anything less and clues are given away unintentionally and the level of “cheating” becomes arguable, but playing like this is very stressful. In contrast, we find that The Game is much more relaxed and “fun”, which is why we like it.

– Image by boardGOATS

The Game: Extreme differs from the original in that the cards have a different colour scheme and twenty-eight of them are marked with special “command”. There are seven different commands, three that take effect immediately and only directly affect the active player, and four that continue to affect every player on their turn until they are covered by another card. These commands are all nasty and vary from “play three cards” to “pick up only one card”, or “no talking”. It was very quickly apparent that the commands make The Game: Extreme much more difficult than The Game. What was less obvious was that it becomes much more stressful and, as a result, less fun. After both groups had endured two terrible rounds getting barely half way through the deck, Magenta, Blue and Burgundy came to the conclusion that a large part of the problem was that it felt like the game was playing the players rather than the players playing the game. Blue commented that it hadn’t felt like that with two players when , so maybe an extra card each would help? So Magenta, Blue and Burgundy gave it another try with seven cards apiece.

– Image by boardGOATS

This time, it was much better – everyone felt like they had meaningful choices instead of no choice, but it was still difficult. Clearly with the extra cards The Game was much easier, but still not trivial and the group finished with a creditable three cards remaining. Meanwhile, Pine, Red and Cerise had got bored with dispiriting losses and had moved onto Port Royal Unterwegs. This is supposed to be the travel edition of Port Royal, though how it is the travel edition, Heaven only knows as the box is the same size as the full version, which itself is big enough to include the expansion as well! Perhaps it is in reference to the number of cards, which is considerably less than half the number in the full game and, as a result it plays a maximum of four rather than the five in the original. The cards are different and the rules slightly more succinct too, which make the game play a little more streamlined.

– Image by boardGOATS

Port Royal is a very simple game: on their turn the active player turns over the top card of the deck and either takes the card if it is a Ship that they want; repels the Ship if they don’t want it and have sufficient cutlass cards to do so; buys the card if it is a Character card that they want and can afford, or places it face up in the display in front of the draw-deck and draws another card. They continue to do this until they have bought/taken a card, or a Ship is drawn that is the same colour as a ship already in the display and cannot be repelled, in which case, they go bust. The game uses the same dual use cards trick as Bohnanza where the cards have one meaning when face up and are coins when face down. In general, each Character card has a special power, but is also worth victory points at the end of the game. Port Royal Unterwegs is very similar except the characters are generally less complex and the game ends when someone gets to eight points instead of the usual twelve.

– Image by boardGOATS

These changes make Port Royal Unterwegs quite a bit quicker than its parent, but it helps a lot if players have an idea of what they are trying to do and what chances they need to take as there isn’t time for them to come round again. It turned out that of the group of players only Pine had actually played it before and he had scant recollection of it. Blue did her best to remind him from the next table, but as there were slight changes to the rules and she didn’t want to let the side down in The Game: Extreme, she couldn’t give them the help they really needed. After the event, Blue asked Pine what happened and he replied, “Just record it as three people who didn’t know what they were doing…” Red was similarly vague and aside from the fact that Cerise won and Pine came second, everyone seemed very keen to forget the whole experience. Maybe one to try again sometime.

– Image used with permission of
nonsensicalgamers.com

While all this was going on, Black and Purple on the next table were struggling with one of their Essen acquisitions, Best Treehouse Ever. This is a card drafting game where players spend three weeks (rounds) building themselves a tree-house. Similar to games like Between Two Cities, 7 Wonders and Sushi Go!, players start with a hand of cards (in this case six) and then everyone simultaneously chooses one room card and places it face down in front of them before passing the rest of the cards on to their neighbour. Once everyone has passed their cards on, everyone simultaneously adds their room to their tree-house. There are very few building restrictions, but it is these that make the game interesting. For example, tree-houses must be no more than six levels high and each room must be supported by two branches from the room below (except on the outside). The first room of any colour may be placed anywhere, but those that follow must touch a room of the same colour. If at any point a room card cannot be placed, it must be discarded, reducing the final magnitude of the tree-house and ultimately the number of points it can score.

– Image used with permission of nonsensicalgamers.com

The really clever bit is the “Balance Marker” – a wooden cube at the bottom of the tree. Everyone knows that when building a tree-house it must be balanced if it is not to collapse. So, rooms cannot be built on the same side of the tree as the balance marker, which shifts throughout the game based on the players room placement. Thus, the building restrictions require constant awareness of the position of rooms in a players tree as well as those in the trees of the opposition. While the ability to start a new set of coloured rooms gives flexibility, players must be cautious not to cut off existing colours too early. Once all cards have been played or discarded, the round is concluded by a scoring session where players choose one of the four game changer cards, which either multiply the score of one room colour or completely prevent a room colour from scoring. After three complete rounds there is a final scoring round where players with the majority of one or more room colours at the end of the game will score an additional point per room of that colour.

– Image used with permission of nonsensicalgamers.com

With just two players, the scoring s simplified – the multipliers are removed and players have one “this room doesn’t score” card each instead. As ties don’t score at all in the final round, these become quite critical in a head-to-head game. This time, both players had level five treehouses, though this was probably largely because it was the first time Black and Purple had played the game and they played too many rounds. In the final scoring, Purple dominated the red and brown rooms while Black had the majority in yellow and purple rooms. It was very tight, but Purple took the game by a single point. Best Treehouse Ever was a game that Black and Blue had discussed getting. Sadly, it was clear that Black was disappointed that it wasn’t at its best played with two, however, it will doubtless get another outing in the near future with more of us involved.

– Image used with permission of nonsensicalgamers.com

With Black and Blue suffering from “German lurgy” and Burgundy still recovering from his last bout, everyone was keen for an early night. Once Red, Cerise & Magenta had headed off, everyone else settled down to go through the rules of Kerala, a simple little tile laying game with beautiful presentation, while Purple multi-tasked and wrote an essay about her favourite tree-house. In Kerala, each player starts with a single tile in their own colour with two wooden elephants perched precariously on it. On their turn, the active player draws the same number of tiles from the bag as there are players and then chooses one before everyone else takes it in turns choosing one. Players then simultaneously place their tiles next to a tile with an elephant on it and move the elephant onto the new tile. The tile can be placed in an empty space, or on top of a tile previously laid. Thus, over the course of the game players’ elephants ponderously move over their play-area with players messing with the player to their left by leaving them with tiles they don’t want.

– Image by boardGOATS

Tiles come in the five different player colours: red, green, blue, black and purple. At the end of the game players require precisely one contiguous region of each colour (with two allowed for their own colour); if they are missing a colour they lose five points and if any regions appear more than once, tiles must be removed with a penalty of two points per tile. There are three types of tiles, Elephant tiles, Edge tiles and Action tiles. Elephant tiles score points at the end of the game with players receiving one point for each elephant visible. “Edge” tiles have one side with a different colour; if these are adjacent to the correct colour the player scores an additional five points otherwise they can be ignored. There are also two sorts of action tiles, which score no points but allows the player to move either a tile or an Elephant.

– Image by boardGOATS

After a few slight rules queries, everyone got on with the gentle action of choosing tiles and moving elephants, but gradually everyone became aware of the game’s “Tusks” as Blue left Pine with something he really didn’t want for the second time and what had initially seemed like multiplayer solitaire suddenly wasn’t. As their areas expanded, players gradually got themselves into difficulties and then struggled to get themselves out of them again. Although nobody pulled their punches when choosing tiles to leave, everyone offered genuine assistance and friendly opinions, especially to those unfortunate players left with rubbish at the end of the round. Predictably, having played it before, Blue finished some way ahead of the pack, though Black, with a veritable troop of Elephants in a very tidy array joint top-scored with forty-five, eight ahead of Pine in third.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Essen is Awsome, and Blue needs cloning.

20th October 2015

While Burgundy, Magenta and Blue waited for their supper to arrive, they began a quick game of Bellz!, the “Feature Game”. This is a very simple manual dexterity game, albeit one that is very well presented. The pouch opens out to form a soft bowl containing bells in four different colours. Each colour includes bells in three different sizes; the aim of the game is to be the first person to have picked up all the bells of just one colour using the stick which has a magnet in each end. On a player’s turn they can pick up multiple bells or chicken out and stop at one, but if they pick up any bells that don’t match the colour of those they have already collected then that turn is forfeit.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor joeincolorado

It is certainly more difficult than it looks and there is a little bit in the way of tactics as the magnetism gets weaker further away so with skill it is possible to daisy chain bells and only pick up certain bells. There is also a strong magnet one one end of the “wand” and a weaker one on the other. Th rules are not completely clear (and are completely in German in any case!), and gamers inevitably ask whether the bowl can be moved and how much shaking is allowed, which were things we house-ruled. We had had about two turns each when Green arrived and joined in. Food arrived and we were still struggling so we carried on as we ate. Burgundy ran out the eventual winner with Blue following close behind leaving Magenta and Green to fight it out for the last bell. Grey and Cerise promptly turned up and, as it is an eye-catching game, also had a go with Cerise taking the honours.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

This was followed by a discussion of the Essen game fair including some of the games seen and purchased by Blue and Pink. By far the majority of the toys they picked up were expansions for games we’ve played before including:

Colt Express (Horses and Stagecoach);
Istanbul (Mocha & Bakseesh);
Ticket to Ride (UK & Pennsylvania);
Port Royal (Ein Auftrag geht noch…; aka Just one more contract…);
Tokaido (Matsuri);
Camel (C)Up (Supercup).

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor sdetavern

There were several new games too though, in particular:

Inhabit the Earth (the new game by Richard Breese, author of Keyflower);
Isle of Skye: From Chieftain to King (an interesting looking auction and tile laying game by the authors of this years Kennerspiel des Jahres, Broom Service);
The Voyages of Marco Polo (the winner of this years Deutscher Spiele Preis; a worker placement and route building game by the people behind Tzolk’in);
Food Chain Magnate (a longer, heavy strategy game from the Dutch publisher, Splotter Spellen);
Karuba (a tile laying, path making game that is suspiciously similar to Das Labyrinth des Pharao, a game picked up on behalf of Black and Purple who had seen it at the UK Games Expo back in May).

There were also older games, some of which we’ve been interested in for a long time. For example Rockwell was a big game at Essen two years ago, and Green and Blue have expressed an interest in both at the time and since. Somehow either the price wasn’t right or it wasn’t available at the right time, until now when a good deal beckoned. Blue and Pink picked up a number of small games as well. These are often hard to get hold of except at places like Essen and are sometimes a hit, and sometimes not so popular, but as they are relatively inexpensive and take up little space in the luggage, they are what makes the fair special. Finally, there were the promotional items, extra copies of which Blue handed round.

– Image by BGG contributor Rayreviewsgames

Eventually we decided it was time for a game, and with six the decision is always whether to split into two groups or not. Green suggested Eketorp for six, but Blue really wasn’t keen, so eventually we opted for Codenames, a new social deduction team game based on the meanings of words which had received a lot of good reports before Essen. Green pulled a face at the idea of “a word game” and Burgundy commented that social games were not really his thing, even Blue who bought it wasn’t terribly keen because it had sounded un-promising when she read the rules. Cerise was almost enthusiastic though and Magenta pointed out that it shouldn’t take long, so we gave it a go.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

The idea is that there is a grid of twelve cards and the players split into two teams, with even numbers of male and female, we did the childish thing and played boys vs. girls. The leader of each team is the Spymaster, and as Grey had popped out for a second, we volunteered him to be one so it was natural that Cerise should be the other. The Spymasters’ job is to get their team to reveal the cards/words that correspond to their team of “agents”, by giving clues. The clue must be a single word followed by a number which reflects how many words are indicated by that clue. For example, the clue, “trees: three” could be used to indicate the words “oak”, “ash” and “elm”. Members of the team then touch cards that they think are their agents; they must indicate at least one, but may try up to one more than the number in the clue.

– Image used with permission of
BGG contributor aleacarv

The Girls started off badly finding a neutral and the Boys started off well quickly getting a three card lead. Before long, the Boys started to get a bit stuck with movie clues and the Girls began to catch up. As Magenta pointed out afterwards, it was important to listen to both the clues and the discussion of the other team as you can get extra clues. And so it proved in the end. With the teams tied, the clue was “Regents; two”. Blue and Magenta misheard and thought Cerise had said “Regions”. The Boys struggled on their turn too though, and suddenly the Girls had another chance. When Green had repeated Cerise’s clue during the Boys’ discussion, Blue had suddenly realised the Girls’ mistake and they were able to find “Park” and close out the game. Although it is not really our sort of game, everyone was very complimentary about it and as a group we enjoyed it much more than we thought we would. We could all think of people who would like playing it and now that we know how it works, it would be much quicker to play next time too, making it a surprisingly fun filler with the right group.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

With that done, we had to decide what to to play next and, with too many for Cosmic Encounter, inevitably Eketorp was raised again. Grey was very enthusiastic, but Blue really wasn’t keen, especially as it can drag with six players. Much to Blue’s delight and eternal gratitude, Magenta tactfully suggested that, despite being a Viking, she could play something else with Blue and Burgundy. With that, Green happily started explaining the rules.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Ceryon

Eketorp is a game where players attempt to gather resources to build their Viking stronghold on the Swedish island of Öland. In this game players try to second guess which resources the others don’t choose, with a battle and a potential extended stay in the hospital as the reward for failure. The game itself is played in several rounds. First material is distributed across the board according to the card revealed at the start of the round. The players then decide, in secret (behind their player screens), which areas to send their Vikings to. Vikings can either go to one of the seven resource or brick areas, reinforce the defence of their own village, or attack one of the other players’ villages. Players then reveal their choices and place their Vikings on the central board.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor cuazzel

Depending on how the various Vikings meet, peace may be preserved or battles may ensue. Vikings on a material field live in peace if there are sufficient building bricks, i.e. there is the same number of building bricks (or more) than there are Vikings wanting them. If there are insufficient bricks available, then there will be a battle. Battles also take place on a siege field in front of a player’s castle for the right to lay siege if several Vikings are positioned there. Battles always take place in a particular order. Firstly, the starting player engages in a battle, then everyone else takes turns until all battles and sieges have been resolved.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor helioa

Battles are fought using cards chosen from a starting hand of four. Each player choses a card in secret and then they reveal them simultaneously with the highest card winning. The difference in value between the two cards determines the battle difference which indicates which area of the hospital the loser ends up in. In the case of a tie, both parties go to the hospital. The clever bit is that once a battle has been fought, players swap cards and place the new card face down in front of them. Once a player has played all their cards in battles, they take the cards in front of them to form a new hand. In this way, the game is self-balancing so that a player who has a bad card draw at the start will have a better hand later in the game and vice versa.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor cuazzel

If village siege is successful, then the attacker gets to pillage bricks from the village wall. Bricks may only be taken from the walls that are two bricks high and the total point value of the bricks taken may not exceed the battle difference. Bricks can only be removed from top to bottom and the attacker can then take one of these bricks home (with the remainder going back into the reserve). Once all battles have been resolved all the winning Vikings can take their bricks home and add them to their village wall. Each wall comes in six parts and a maximum of three bricks can be stacked in each giving a maximum of eighteen in total. Once a brick has been used, it cannot be moved at a later date. The bricks are nominally made of different material and are worth different amounts at the end of the game (green, or grass is worth one whereas grey or stone is worth four for example). The end of the game is triggered when one player reaches the maximum of eighteen bricks.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor
Capitaine Grappin

At the start, with no village walls to attack or defend, and all Vikings fit and healthy, the central resource pools were particularly busy places. After many attacks and counter attacks, eventually all were either victorious and claimed resources, or were licking their wounds in differing levels of the Viking hospital (talk about a beds crisis!). Green took the early lead at this point. Round two was much quieter, with less than half the Vikings available to go brick hunting, so everyone was relatively successful with their choices.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor DrGrayrock

Over the course of the next couple of rounds, the game board became more crowded and there was even the odd cheeky raid on a village. By this time, Grey had managed to create a nice evenly built village wall, one or two bricks high made up of both grass and wooden bricks (worth one and two points respectively) – easy pickings in a fight, but less threatening too. Green was a bit lopsided, concentrating on building with a range of brick colours mostly on one side in order to limit the attack directions. Cerise however had quietly managed to built quite a good wall round a large part of her village with a lot of clay and stone bricks (worth three and four points). So, the next two rounds were characterised mostly by Grey and Green attacking for Cerise’s wall. The first attack by Green was successful, but only enough to nab the top green brick, hardly a dent at all and netted only one point. Grey’s attack was a stalemate.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Garry

In the final round, Cerise found herself surrounded on all sides with Green and Grey attacked from one side each. Again only Grey was successful enough to break down part of the wall though. Then for the final battle of the game, Grey and Green had to go head to head for the right to attack Cerise from the third side – it was a draw and Cerise was safe! As Cerise was the only one who had managed to build a wall at least three high all the way round she picked up the five point bonus and proved herself the superior Viking with a score of forty-four leaving Green and Grey some way behind, fighting it out for the wooden spoon. In the end, Grey decided he didn’t like the game after all, because had Cerise beat him!

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor
Capitaine Grappin

Meanwhile Blue, Burgundy and Magenta conducted a brief audit of the games available and Burgundy’s eyes lit up at the idea of trying out the new Ticket to Ride Map Collection as he had played a lot of Ticket to Ride and prided himself on being quite good at it. Magenta is also no slouch either however, and was also keen as she had won her last three games of Ticket to Ride: Europe. Similarly, Blue has slightly unjustly acquired a reputation for beating people at Ticket to Ride, and although she hadn’t played it much recently, she had won her demonstration game at Essen and had enjoyed it too, so was very happy to give it another try. Although everyone was keen to try the UK map, to avoid giving Blue an unfair advantage, the Pennsylvania side was chosen.

– Image by boardGOATS

The basic Ticket to Ride game is really very simple. On their turn the active player can do one of three things: pick up two coloured train cards from the face up display or the face down draw deck; place plastic trains on the map using cards to pay and scoring points; or draw ticket cards, which name two places and give points at the end of the game if the player has built a route between them, but score negatively if not completed. From there, each different version makes small changes to the rules, for example, some editions include tunnels and/or ferries and sometimes there are extra cards or bonus points etc.. So, the first problem was trying to remember which of the specific rules are applicable to the base game and then integrate them with the new rules for the Pennsylvania map. In particular, this was whether we should be using the double routes and how many points the different routes should be worth since there was no score table. Eventually, we decided to use single tracks (ala three player Ticket to Ride: Europe) and scored routes as follows:

Single car: One point
Two cars: Two points
Three cars: Four points
Four cars: Seven points
Five cars: Ten points
Six cars: Fifteen points
Seven cars: Twenty-one points

The seven car route from Cumberland to Baltimore engendered a lot of discussion, as there aren’t any routes of that length in Ticket to Ride: Europe. Burgundy was fairly sure they were worth eighteen points in Märklin, but the increase in points from six to seven cars seemed very uneven compared with the change from five to six cars. In the event, it didn’t make much difference, but checking the rules online later confirmed that Burgundy was right and it should have been eighteen.

Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 5 – United Kingdom & Pennsylvania

– Image by boardGOATS

Burgundy was quite pleased with his starting tickets getting three east-west routes that he thought could largely be coincidental. His delight faded to despair, when in the first turn, Blue took the route from Altoona to Johnstown and quickly followed it by adding the Altoona to Dubois, in quickly completely scuppering his plans. Magenta was equally unimpressed that double routes were not in use when Burgundy and Blue quickly completed all the connections to Johnstown rendering one of her tickets impossible within the first few turns. From there, the game quickly descended into a knife-fight in a phone box with everyone scrabbling to make their starting tickets and it looking very much like nobody was going to succeed.

– Image by boardGOATS

As Burgundy pointed out though, tickets were not going to be so important in this game as there were a lot of points available from the Shares. This is a new feature specific to this map. The idea of these is that most routes also have one or more company logos shown next to them on the map. When these routes are completed, players choose which company they would like to take a share certificate for. The companies are different sizes with some companies having a lot of certificates available while smaller company others have fewer. At the end of the game, each player’s stock holdings are evaluated and points awarded. The bigger companies are worth more points, however, it is harder to get the majority stake in these. In the case of a tie, the share certificates are numbered and the points go to the person with the one taken first.

– Image by boardGOATS

The shares certainly did have a massive impact on game play. Normally in Ticket to Ride, players achieve their first routes and then start picking up tickets, trying to maximise the number of longer routes as these give the best points return for the cards and trains, but, that wasn’t how this game went. Although Blue bravely picked up some more tickets and was promptly followed by everyone else, this was the only time anyone did this as everyone got in everyone else’s way so much it was just too risky. Since achieving tickets was proving so challenging, everyone started trying to pick up share certificates which meant building small routes as these were the cheapest and easiest way to get them. Then suddenly, Burgundy declared he was out of trains and the game came to a quick end which only left the scoring.

– Image by boardGOATS

Although Burgundy had moaned about how badly he had done, neither Magenta nor Blue realised just how badly until it came to scoring tickets. It’s true that the first ticket scored him ten points, but all the others were incomplete losing him nearly all the points he had accrued from placing trains. Magenta also had a ticket she had failed to achieve, but it hadn’t cost her nearly so dearly. Blue on the other hand had somehow managed to make all her connections and therefore also picked up an extra fifteen points for the Globe Trotter Bonus. Unfortunately for Burgundy, although he had done well on the shares, the horror-show that had been the tickets had put him right out of contention and he was nearly lapped (though not quite!). Although Magenta had shares in more companies, the combination of the extra tickets and the fact that Blue had managed to hang on to the majority in a couple of the larger companies made the difference. Blue finished on one hundred and ninety eight, just over thirty points ahead of Magenta in what was a very tough game.

– Image by boardGOATS

With Grey and Cerise gone, that left us with time for a quick filler to finish. 11 Nimmt! and Deep Sea Adventure were both in the frame, but Green liked the sound of Qwixx, which had been nominated for the Spiel des Jahres in 2013, but was beaten by Hanabi. The game sounded interesting though there was very little to it. On their turn, the active player rolls six dice, four coloured and two white. Each player has a score sheet with four tracks: the red and yellow tracks go from two to twelve and the blue and green tracks go from twelve to two. Once the dice have been rolled, all the players may cross off a number of any colour that corresponds to the sum of the white dice, if they choose. The active player may additionally cross off one number corresponding to the sum of one of the coloured dice and one of the white dice. They can choose which of the white dice they are going to use, but the die colour must match the colour of the track.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor joeincolorado

The snag is that players must progressively cross off numbers to the right, i.e. once they have crossed out the red five for example, they cannot go back and cross out the red four. Also, while all the other players can freely choose whether or not to use the white dice, the active player must cross out something on their turn or take a penalty (minus five at the end of the game). Finally, if someone wants to cross out the last number on any track (twelve for red and yellow, two for green and blue), they must first have crossed out at least five other numbers on that track, at which point the die corresponding to that colour is locked and the colour is closed for all players. The game ends when two dice have been removed from the game or when one player has accrued four penalties. Scores are awarded for the number of crosses in each row according to the triangular number sequence also used in Coloretto (one, three, six, ten, fifteen, twenty-one, twenty-eight, etc.), so every additional cross is worth an ever increasing amount.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

The game started with everyone being very cagey and not taking the option of scoring the white dice as they were too high, but eventually, some people were braver than others and different patterns began to emerge. Initially, the game looked very promising with the potential interplay between different effects, like the probability distribution for two dice, balancing the high scoring potential with not getting stuck and picking up penalty points. Blue was even wondering whether it would be necessary to get another scoring pad. However, being gamers, we all played to a very similar strategy and, before long, the inevitable happened, with everyone stuck waiting for the most unlikely dice rolls (two and twelve). As a result, Burgundy who got there first started picking up penalties closely followed by Green. The game ended when Burgundy picked up his fourth penalty point and we added up the scores. Magenta, who had only taken the one penalty finished five points ahead of Blue with Burgundy and Green nearly twenty points behind thanks to all their penalties. And then the inquisition began.

– Image by boardGOATS

We all really like the game at first because of the way the probability interacted with the constraints on number selection, however, we quickly found that it felt very random because the game was self-balancing. As their game finished, each player was going to be hoping for lucky dice rolls. Since twelve and two are relatively unlikely which would have a delaying effect, during which time, anyone who had not got quite as far was going to be able to grab a couple of extra crosses. The random nature of rolling dice meant that ultimately, the effect of any strategy or tactics applied during the game were vastly outweighed by the randomness of the dice at the end. Although we felt it was probably a good game for children to have fun with, as a game, it was very surprising it was nominated for the Spiel des Jahres.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

Learning Outcome: Sometimes it is good to play games outside your comfort zone.