Tag Archives: Splendor

11th August 2015

It was a quiet week, so unsure of how many people we would be, we started out with what was supposed to be something quick, our “Feature Game”, Port Royal. This is a fairly light card game with elements of push your luck and and deck (or rather tableaux) building. On their turn, the active player turns over the top card from the deck: this could be a coloured Ship, or a Person. The player then has two options, they can turn over another card and add it to the row, or take one of the face up cards. They can continue turning over cards either until they choose to take one or until they go bust because they draw a Ship and the colour matches one that has already been revealed.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

When taken, the coloured Ships are immediately exchanged for money according to the number of coins shown on the card. They also have a military value which is where the People cards come in. The People cards cost money, but in general, yield both victory points and special powers. For example, Sailors and Pirates give players a military strength. If their strength matches that of a Ship, the active player may repel the Ship to avoid going bust. There are also Settlers, Captains and Priests which are used to fulfill the requirements of Expeditions. Expeditions are cards that are immediately put to one side when drawn and allow players to increase their number of victory points by trading People cards for the higher value Expedition card.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor jsper

There are other People cards too. For example, the Governor awards players two extra coins if there are five or more cards on the table, and the Admiral allows players to take more than one card. Once the active player has taken their turn, then the next player can choose to take a card from the remaining face up cards, paying the active player one coin for the privilege. Once everyone has had the chance to take a card, play passes to the next player. The game end is triggered when one player hits twelve victory points and play continues until everyone has had the same number of active player turns.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

The game has obvious elements of “push your luck card turning” like Incan Gold, dual purpose cards like Bohnanza, tableau building like 7 Wonders and Dominion, and set collecting like Splendor. However, it also has other interesting features. One of the most interesting aspects was the way that the appearance of some cards is delayed because they are tied up as currency. This meant that in our game, the Tax Man didn’t appear at all for the first half of the game and then appeared several times in quick succession. Similarly to Bohnanza, the composition of the deck also changes. In Bohnanza, the deck shrinks dramatically and as all the rare cards are turned into money their rarity increases. In Port Royal, it is the People cards that become rarer as they are played into harbours, and ships, which start off quite scarce, become increasingly common increasing the chances of going bust.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor msaari

Black and Purple started out collecting Settlers, Priests and Captain cards, hoping for an opportunity to upgrade the victory points with Expedition cards. Blue and Burgundy eschewed Expeditions and instead went for the expensive People, with powerful actions. That said, Burgundy struggled at the start, going bust in the first two rounds which left him penniless and hampered his ability to buy anything at all. Meanwhile, Green was fighting just to get the cards he wanted before someone else pinched them. Eventually, Purple took her second Expedition card and triggered the end of the game, but nobody else was close enough to threaten her position; Burgundy took second on a tie-break with Green, who both finished with nine victory points .

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

The rules booklet was not the best, however, and there were a number of questions we had that went un-answered. For example, we were unclear on how to combine the Admiral with either the Jester or the Governor. The question was, since the Admiral allows a player to take two cards, does that mean they apply the Jester/Governor special powers twice? On reflection, we felt the way we played (by a strict reading of the rules) was incorrect as it meant the combination was exceptionally powerful. Similarly, could a player repel a card if it was the first of a colour to be drawn, or is it only the second card that can be repelled? On balance, although it was a long way from being the “quick game” we expected, we all enjoyed it and felt it was a good game. Green in particular was quite taken with the effect the dual-use of the cards had on the draw deck and everyone had had thoughts on how they could have done better, but it was fitting that the one who currently has to wear an eye-patch won the pirate game!

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor tonyboydell

After some debate, we decided that we wanted to play a deeper game next which meant we were quite limited as we didn’t have many five-player games. We all enjoy Snowdonia, so since we’ve all played it before we thought we could fit it into the time we had left despite the prolonged setup time (not helped by the fact that Blue’s box contains most of two copies). Unfortunately, we got side-tracked by the possibility of playing one of the alternative scenarios. We started setting out The Daffodil Line and then we realised it only played four, so as the game is very tight anyhow we decided not to try to stretch it to five and broke the shrink-wrap on Britannia Bridge instead.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor tonyboydell

Snowdonia is a very tight, worker placement game, where players have just two workers and an optional third if they have the required train and coal. The game simulates building a railway, with players first choosing actions in turn order, then carrying out the actions in “action order”. The actions include collecting resources from the stockyard, clearing rubble from the route, building track, and building stations. There are points for most things, but one of the actions is to take contract cards which give players extra points for completing a set number of given tasks (e.g. laying three sections of track).

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor ansi

There are a number of interesting aspects to the game. Firstly, the weather. Snowdonia is well known for its rain, fog and very occasional sun, and this has an effect on the rate players can perform tasks. Secondly, the author, Tony Boydell, is known to dislike resource hoarding and has built in a mechanism to discourage it. At the start of each round, resources are drawn from a bag and placed in the stockyard. There are also a small number of white cubes in the bag – for each one that is drawn the game carries out an action. Since resources are limited, if players hoard them, the chance of drawing white cubes increases and the game speeds up, perhaps unpredictably.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor winterplum

Britannia Bridge (or Pont Britannia in Welsh) is the bridge across the Menai Strait between the the mainland of Wales and the island of Anglesey and the scenario simulates building a railway from the mainland to Holyhead on Anglesey. Thus, before players can build any track, they have to build the bridge. Uncharacteristically the weather remained quite sunny, though as it was Anglesey rather than Snowdonia, perhaps that was to be expected. This kept the dig rate up and the track-bed was cleared in record time. However, although four white cubes came out in fairly quick succession, after that, they seemed to lurk in the corners of the bag, so much so that we checked they were there twice.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor winterplum

Black and Purple both built locomotives early giving them the distinct advantage of the optional temporary labourer. Black used his to move his Surveyor collect contract cards and Blue decided to obstruct his plans by taking the some of the most lucrative (but most challenging) contracts. Everyone else looked at the short track and some of the high scoring options and decided to go for points. Blue, Green and Burgundy decided to wait until the maintenance was done before buying a train, but since the white cubes were so slow, by the time it happened they all decided the game was too far advanced for it to be worthwhile.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor tonyboydell

Although Black got an early train (The Dawn Raider) and made good use of his extra worker, he was unable to used his special ability as it depended on white cubes being drawn. Purple took the nine point train and also used the extra worker to move her surveyor. Burgundy scored a massive number of points by building bits of stations and the game sort of stalled with one track left to build and nobody very keen to build it. Green eventually got fed up and felt everyone else was picking up points faster than he was, so he decided to end the game. Blue somehow managed to scrape it all together in the last round building the last siding she needed to fulfill her thirty-one point contract for four track sections and grabbed a six point contract which she had already fulfilled. These, together with other bits and pieces this gave her a total of seventy-nine points, just two ahead of Black (who also completed three contracts) and someway clear of Burgundy who took third place with sixty-six points.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor winterplum

Although we enjoyed the variation and the Bridge undoubtedly changed the start, the different scenario didn’t change the game very much: contract cards were still very powerful and ultimately made the difference though Burgundy did incredibly well just building stations. In short, the weather and its effect on the “dig rate” together with the lack of white cubes made a much larger impact on the game than the Bridge. And that can happen in any game of Snowdonia.

– Image by BGG contributor aleacarv

Learning Outcome: The weather has a big influence on building a railway, wherever you choose to build it.

Spiel des Jahres Nominations – 2015

Each year a jury of German-speaking board game critics (from Germany, Austria, Switzerland), review all the games released in Germany in the preceding twelve months. Their job is a really important one amongst gamers, because they award the coveted Spiel des Jahres, the German Game of the Year. There are also other awards including the Kinderspiel and Kennerspiel des Jahres (Childrens’ and Connoisseurs’ Games of the Year). These awards are highly lucrative for the winners as many German families look for the red logo when choosing games to buy at Christmas.

– Image from spieldesjahres.de

The criteria used by the judges include:

game concept (originality, playability, game value),
design (functionality, workmanship),
layout (box, board, rules),
rule structure (composition, clearness, comprehensibility).

The announcement of the Spiel and Kennerspiel des Jahres awards will be made early in July. Last year, the winner was Camel Up with Splendor as runner-up and Istanbul taking the Kennerspiel des Jahres award. The nominees for this year have just been announced and this year, unusually, we haven’t played any of them in the group yet. However, one of our more popular two-player games, Patchwork was included as a recommended game and we are planning to play one of the nominees, Machi Koro, this week.

Boardgames in the News: Are Asmodée Taking Over the World?

Asmodée is the French translation for Asmodeus, and according to Binsfeld’s classification of demons, Asmodeus is the demon of lust and is therefore responsible for twisting people’s sexual desires. In the boardgame world though, Asmodée (originally known as Siroz) are a small French game publishing and distribution company, specialising in the family market. For example, they are well known for Dobble, Dixit, Time’s Up! and Ca$h ‘n Guns, but they also publish some more challenging games including Snow Tails, Mr. Jack, Formula D, Takenoko and 7 Wonders.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor kilroy_locke

Asmodée was started in 1995 by Marc Nunès, a self-trained entrepreneur developing role-playing games, but quickly became France’s foremost games publisher and distributor. One of the big early successes was Jungle Speed, launched in 1998, which has since gone on to be one of the top-selling titles in France, rivalling Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit and Pay Day. The real turning point came in 2003, however, when Asmodée obtained the French licence to distribute Pokémon collector cards, which opened up the mass retail sector. This development led to an 18% investment from Naxicap in 2005. Naxicap’s stake was bought out two years later by Montefiore who acquired 60% of the company as part of a deal with management worth €40-50 million. Montefiore invested €120 million to finance Asmodée’s international growth, funding the acquisition of the Belgian game distributor Hodin in 2008, the Spanish games developer Cromola and the German Proludo in 2009, followed by the purchase of a 60% stake in the UK-based distributor, Esdevium Games in 2010. Asmodée also strengthened it’s portfolio with the acquisition of Abalone and partnership with Libellud (leading to the distribution rights for Dixit) in 2010.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor msaari

In 2012, Asmodée branched out further, setting up a subsidiary in Shanghai, China, with the intention of expanding “into a new market taking advantage of Asmodee’s extensive line-up of games and the existing relationships with partners, thus promoting the brand in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan”. This ambition brought Asmodée to the attention of the Eurazeo, a European investment company and a deal was announced in November 2013 that valued Asmodée at €143 million. In January, 2014, almost exactly a year ago now, Eurazeo bought 83.5% of Asmodée through an equity investment of €98 million while Asmodée’s management team and original founders reinvested €14 million of their own money.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor garyjames

With the backing Eurazeo provided, Asmodée then went big: in August last year it was announced that Days of Wonder would be “merging into the Asmodée Group of game companies”. Days of Wonder are one of the biggest names in modern boardgaming, and are often credited with the growth of the modern boardgame industry, thanks largely to their flagship Ticket to Ride games, which have sold well over two million copies to date. This is not the only “big game” in their catalogue either, they are also responsible for Memoir ’44 and Small World, both of which are popular games, demonstrated by the number of expansions they support and which take Days of Wonder’s total number of games sold to over five million since their founding in 2002.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor crosenkrantz

According to Forbes, Days of Wonder generates between $10 million and $20 million in revenue annually, not bad in such a niche market. From Eurazeo/Asmodée’s point of view, such an acquisition makes sound financial sense, not just because of the commercial value, but because they already provided a lot of the distribution for Days of Wonder games. This wasn’t enough for Asmodée however, and three months later, they acquired the U.S. publisher Fantasy Flight Games.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor adamfeldner

This was a bit of a change of direction for Asmodée: hitherto, all the acquisitions had been firmly in the family boardgame and distribution markets. Fantasy Flight games are a very different animal and their headline games, Twilight Imperium and Arkham Horror are much less family friendly. Even their X-Wing Miniatures Game which is very popular with fathers and sons, is a long way outside the normal scope of Asmodée, since it is essentially a two-player war game with a Star Wars theme. However, there are considerable benefits for both parties, since the merger will enable Fantasy Flight to improve its distribution in Europe, while simultaneously giving the growing Asmodée Group access to Fantasy Flight’s North American sales and marketing teams.

– Image used with permission BGG contributor Toynan

Asmodée weren’t stopping there, however, with Ystari Games, Asterion Press and Pearl Games also becoming “part of the Asmodée family” late last year. The link with Ystari Games almost certainly comes from their mutual interest in Space Cowboys. Space Cowboys is a game creation studio created in 2013 by Marc Nunès (who started Asmodée way back in 1995, remember?), Philippe Mouret and Croc (both of Asmodée), Cyril Demaegd (Ystari) and Sébastien Pauchon (GameWorks). Space Cowboys is a very small outfit, but already has one Spiel des Jahres nomination under its belt in Splendor and looks to be trying for a second with Black Fleet, the gorgeous pirate game released at Essen last year.

– Image from eurazeo.com

So, what are Asmodée up to? The concern is that gamers generally like the current diversity in the market and fear that this succession of mergers and partnerships will mean a homogenisation of the games available. The November 2014 Eurazeo “Investor Day” report spelled out the current state of Asmodée in detail and the good news is that this does not seem to be Eurazeo/Asmodée’s intention. The report states, “Each studio has its own DNA,” and goes on to say, “Repeated success lies in the full independency granted to these studios, to keep innovating.” So it seems the diversity is valued, however, by acquiring mid-sized publishers like Days of Wonder and Fantasy Flight, Asmodée is positioning itself to compete more effectively with multinational toy giants like Hasbro and Mattel, who publish top board game brands including Monopoly and Scrabble.

– Image from eurazeo.com

So, is it a good thing that Asmodée are setting themselves up to rival the big boys? Well, Asmodée is not the only company to engage in mergers: in 2011 Filosofia purchased the U.S. publisher Z-Man Games, and U.S. publisher FRED Distribution (which releases games under the Eagle Games and Gryphon Games brands), acquired U.S. publisher Face2Face Games. More recently, in late 2013, Mayfair Games (the U.S. partner for Catan) bought a controlling interest in Lookout Games (the company who first brought Agricola, Caverna, Le Havre and Ora et Labora to the market).

– Image from escapistmagazine.com

Clearly a large stable company provides security for designers, as well as providing support for the individual studios who know that one poor decision is no-longer likely to bring about the end of the company, both of which have to be A Good Thing. However, companies like Eurazeo invest for only one reason: financial return. With an effective monopoly, Asmodée are now in a position to squeeze the market, indeed we may already be seeing the evidence of this in the price rises announced at the start of the year. With this in mind, it will become clear in due course whether Asmodée is good for boargaming in the UK or whether it is genuinely the demon of lust responsible for twisting our gaming desires…

13th January 2015

With several new people, we started with two sets of parallel games. The first group began with Zombie Dice, a very quick dice game where players are zombies and the dice are their victims. On each turn, players first roll three dice: a brain symbol is worth one point at the end of the round, while footsteps allow that die to be re-rolled. On the other hand, shotgun blasts are bad, and collecting three ends the players turn and they forfeit any points they’ve collected. After rolling their first three dice, players can then decide if they want to score their current set of brains or whether they fancy pushing their luck by grabbing a new set of three dice and rolling again.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor zombiegod

With Grey taking his first win, Red convinced the group to play one of her favourite games, Walk the Plank!. This is a very silly game that we’ve played a lot over the last year and everyone seems to enjoy. There were the usual hoots of delight as kamikaze pirates committed mass suicide and everyone enjoyed it so much, that after Grey had taken his second win, they played it again.

– Image by boardGOATS

While Cerise was chalking up her first victory, the second group were finishing their game of King of Tokyo, the “Feature Game”. This was a “Black Friday Special” and is another fun dice rolling game. The idea is that players are mutant monsters, gigantic robots, and strange aliens – all of whom are destroying Tokyo and attacking each other in order to become the one and only King of Tokyo. Each player has a stand-up monster, a counter and everyone sits round a board depicting Tokyo. On their turn, players roll the six oversized dice with four possible outcomes: numbers (potentially leading to points), attack (a paw print), healing (a heart) and energy (lightening bolts). In order to score victory points, the active player must roll at least three of the same number. Thus, three “twos” will score two points, but each additional “two” will deliver an extra point (so four “twos” would score three points etc.).

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Any attacks rolled are delivered to the monster who is currently in Tokyo unless that is the active player, in which case, everyone else receives the damage. Each player starts with ten lives and each attack die costs one. Whenever the player in the middle is attacked, they have to take the damage, but can then chose to leave the middle, to be replaced by the player who attacked them. Moving into Tokyo has its advantages and disadvantages: players score a point on going in (with two more if they are still there at the start of their next turn) and they can cause everyone else a lot of damage, however, they cannot using healing dice while in Tokyo which makes it risky to stay.

– Image by BGG contributor rothkorperation

Finally players can also collect energy tokens which are a sort of currency and allow players to buy cards which give their monster special powers. The winner must either destroy Tokyo (by collecting twenty victory points), or be the only surviving monster once all the fighting has ended and all the others have died. Green started off well, with Burgundy and Indigo in hot pursuit. Blue seemed unable to get anything she wanted, so took great delight in seeing everyone else reduced to a very small number of lives. Burgundy was two points ahead of Green, but it was Green’s turn and he ended the game with a gambol rolling five “threes” and finish as the King of Tokyo.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor dekedagger

With the end of both games and the arrival of Purple and Black, we had a quick shuffle of seats and Cerise replaced Green to play another game that has been popular recently, Splendor. This is a simple set collecting game where players collect gems that they can then use to buy cards which in turn allow them to buy more cards which are worth points and help them to collect “nobles” which give even more points. The game started slowly with all the basic cards gone and nobody looked close to winning. However, Blue knew she’d done something right when there was a chorus of disappointment from Cerise and Burgundy when she reserved a high scoring opal card, a trick she repeated the following round. Buying one of the opal cards enabled her to win two nobles giving her nine points in one turn and putting her over the finishing line, with Indigo finishing just one point behind after a last minute surge.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Meanwhile, the other group were playing Stimmt So!. Although we’ve not played this for a while, we have played the closely related game, Alhambra which uses the same mechanic. The idea is that players have a choice of actions: they can buy commodities, or they can go to the bank for money. There are four different legal tenders and the cost of each commodity must be paid in the specified currency. When making purchases (of shares in Stimmt So! or of buildings in Alhambra), players can always over-spend, but if they pay the exact amount they can have an extra turn. Thie extra turn can be used to either buy another item or to take money from the bank. If they chose to make a second purchase, they can again pay the exact amount and get another turn. Play continues in this way until the player no-longer qualifies for another turn or all the available stock has been purchased after which, the stock is refilled for the next player. Thus, the game is a balance between collecting small denominations of the different currencies (which are more versatile) and collecting larger denominations (that are worth more). The points are awarded at stages during the game to players with the most of each commodity.

– Image by boardGOATS

It was a slow start as people built a stock and cash and very few shares were bought. Then, as each person built up a usable amount of money the game took off. Black quickly took control of the Petrol market with three shares and everyone else built a small portfolio. Grey followed Black’s lead and went for an early lead in Banking. The first scoring round came along quite quickly and with almost nothing in it and then the game was really afoot. Purple decided to challenge Black’s dominance in Petrol and Grey added to his Banking stocks. Airlines, Computing and Entertainment were all hotly contested, but Automobiles remained obstinately absent despite an interim shuffle! The second scoring came with a range of winners and losers and Black, Grey and Red stretched a small, but significant lead over Yellow and Purple with Green at the back who had been refusing to overpay for anything, plenty of cash, but few shares! Going into the last round, there were several cards that nobody wanted as they could no longer even share the lead, but eventually people started buying and Automobiles finally made an appearance. This got the game moving and the final shares came and went in short order. Black managed to shrug off falling oil prices and finish just ahead of Red, a canny second, demonstrating that not putting all your eggs in one basket can be a good idea. Grey was not far behind demonstrating that putting all your eggs in one basket is still a not a bad strategy though!

– Image by boardGOATS

Splendor finished first, and Indigo was persuaded to play one more game before she had to leave. As we wanted something fairly quick, we opted for a card game and chose Coloretto. This is a cute little set-collecting game that inspired, the perhaps better known, Zooloretto. The aim of the game is to collect sets of cards with the largest three sets scoring positively, and the reset all giving negative scores. Thus, on their turn, the active player can either draw a coloured chameleon card, or take a “truck” and all the chameleons on it. If they draw a card, they have to choose which truck to put the chameleon on, trying to make the trucks contain a combination of colours that suit them, but not everyone else. Alternatively, they can choose take a truck, trying to match the colours on the truck with the sets they already have and minimise their losses. This was quite a close game until suddenly, in the final round Indigo drew an orange chameleon which we hadn’t realised had been hitherto missing from the game. We inevitably blamed the shuffler as all the orange cards turned up together. Blue managed to avoid picking any up however, and finished just two points ahead of Burgundy.

– Image by BGG contributor SergioMR

In the meantime, Green, Grey, Black and Purple started a game of Click & Crack. This is one of last year’s “Essen Specials” and has proven to be a fantastic little filler game. Each player has two penguin counters. They take in turns to place them on an ice floe made from twenty-five tiles arranged to form a five by five array. Each player also has two tiles depicting an arrow. Once the penguins have been placed, players choose a direction for their arrow tiles and reveal them simultaneously. Then, starting with the first player, each player picks a penguin and applies one of their direction tiles. They can either move the chosen penguin in the specified direction, or the penguin stamps on the ice and causes the floe to crack in the specified direction. When a crack has been completed so that it divides the floe into two, the player who played the final crack wins the smaller piece of ice and takes the tiles and any penguins caught on it. Each floe tile is worth one point at the end of the game and each trapped penguin is worth minus one point.

– Image by BGG contributor thir_teen_

The game ends when one player has at least seven points, or when the main floe is less than seven tiles in size or if there are three penguins left on the floe. The game went all Purple’s way. First she broke off a massive piece of ice and trapped a few penguins in the process. Then before anyone else could do very much, she broke off another large piece capturing a few more penguins and finished the game with eight points and only Black scoring: a paltry two.

– Image by BGG contributor smn1337

While the penguins were busy finishing up, Cerise (aided by Burgundy), gave Blue a sound thrashing at Dobble (an old favourite that we’ve not played for ages) before the late night brigade started the last game of the evening, Lancaster. As it was his new game, Green had been absolutely desperate to play it, so despite the lateness of the hour, we gave it a go. The game is a worker placement game themed around the House of Lancaster, played over five rounds, each consisting of several phases. First, players take it in turns to place their knights. Knights can be placed in the counties, or in the a player’s private castle or they can be sent off to fight against the French. Knights have a rank (one to four).

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

When knights are placed in the counties, this rank can be augmented by the addition of squires, but once a knight has been placed, it can be usurped by a higher ranking knights (or a knight with sufficient squires to give it a higher rank). In this case, the knight is returned to the player, but any squires are returned to the supply. This means that players might be quite cavalier about knights, but tend to be much more parsimonious when assigning squires. Winning a county enables players to choose either to recruit a noble, or to perform a one off action associated the county, or, alternatively, on payment of three coins, they can do both.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Toynan

If they win a war, the knights sent off to fight the French win points, with the largest contributors (highest combined rank) scoring most heavily. However, they also receive an immediate benefit which can be monetary or in the form squires or nobles etc.. Knights placed within the castle also give a one off benefit, although it is received later. The knight’s rank is immaterial for castle placements (as they cannot be usurped) and there is no possibility of victory points.

– Image used with permission of
BGG contributor kopernikus

Once all the knights have been placed, it is time for Parliament to vote on changes to the laws. The laws basically provide scoring bonuses and other benefits. At the start of the game there are three laws in place and three new laws that players will vote on. These three new laws are considered one at a time and the group votes on whether they should be kept (pushing out one of the old ones) or rejected. Players get one vote each for each law, but can reinforce their vote with votes provided by nobles (and via other means). After the voting, the other rewards are handed out: for occupying the counties, for knights placed in castles and for winning wars.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

Although everyone broadly understood what they could do, nobody really fathomed how everything fitted together. So, different players tried different strategies. Blue decided that the she couldn’t turn down the thirty-six points awarded at the end of the game for a complete set of nobles, so went for that. Burgundy was more canny, however, he also went for the nobles, but picked up a lot of them through the one off reward provided by going to war with the French. This way he also got victory points as he went along. Green also tried to pick up points in the battles, but focused on trying to build up the strength of his knights and manipulate parliament. Black tried to reinforce his castle to deliver regular rewards with little input, while Purple tried a little bit of everything, just doing as much as she could on each turn.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor kilroy_locke

Burgundy led the charge with Green, Black and Purple close behind. Since Blue was focusing on collecting her set of nobles, she hardly shifted from zero for the first four rounds. Going into the final round however, it was suddenly everything to play for. Everyone had got the hang of how to use their knights and how the laws worked and knew what they wanted in the final round, but that did not mean they were going to get it! Knights were placed and then unceremoniously stomped on by more powerful knights with several high ranking knights being placed with four or five squires in reinforcement. Blue and Burgundy both picked up their full compliment of nobles (just) and Green was outvoted when he tried to get his preferred law through. Black scored for his castle and Purple managed to change the law to convert her mass of coins into points so that she scored heavily. With her full set of nobles, Blue surged forward into second place, just ahead of Purple, but it was all way too little too late; nothing could match Burgundy’s commanding lead and he finished nearly sixteen points clear of the field. Although there were a number of rules that we played incorrectly and a number of points that need clarifying, it was Burgundy’s superior strategy, played out to perfection that won the game.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor kilroy_locke

Learning Outcome: We really need to learn how to shuffle.

23rd October 2014: A Post Essen Special

This was a special Thursday night meeting because we’d had to cancel Tuesday (because the pub was holding a Chinese Night) and everyone who went to the Spieltage in Essen couldn’t wait to show off their new toys! As it was a Thursday, we couldn’t use the pub, so we spent the evening at a private house in the village, something we used to do routinely after the fire, but haven’t done since the pub reopened.

Typically, almost everyone came which meant we needed a second table! While people arrived and drinks were found, Essen was discussed and the games played and bought were presented. New games were the order of the day, so one table opted for Castles of Mad King Ludwig, while the other began with Istanbul, the 2014 Kennerspiel des Jahres. It was exciting to break new games out of their shrink wrapping, but something that hadn’t been appreciated, was the time it would take to punch the components and learn the rules.

Although Castles of Mad King Ludwig had a lot of components to remove from their cardboard frame, at least the rules didn’t need to reading as one of the players had played it at Essen and was prepared to teach it. Time was also saved someone the punching by using poker chips – although the components and box are generally really nice, the small cardboard money tokens are a little fiddly.

The game itself is quite a simple game in many ways: the idea is that players buy rooms to add to their castle. A deck of cards is used to determine which rooms are available, and game ends when this deck has been exhausted. The active player, or Master Builder then chooses the respective value of each room. The clever part is the sale, an idea which appears to have been borrowed from Goa, where all monies are paid to the active player except for those spent by the active player, which go to the bank. Thus, the idea is that the Master Builder wants to arrange the tiles such that rooms desired by the other players are expensive, but generally not too expensive, and similar to Goa, having a lot of money is powerful, but when you spend it, you generally give that advantage to the active player.

So, each room has a cost, but also a points value when placed, a size, and some sort of bonus for “completing” it. A room is considered complete when every door leads to another room and this is where there is a spacial element to the game, since it is necessary to ensure that doors are laid out in such a way that rooms can be completed if appropriate. The bonuses vary from an extra turn to money to extra victory point cards that are applied at the end of the game. Some rooms also yield bonuses for “adjacency” which is determined on a room by room basis when the room is placed.

Ably assisted by Purple, Black explained the rules to Blue and Pink and then play began. All was apparently proceeding well, when we discovered that despite the fact she was in the lead, Blue was unsure when the room bonuses applied – on placing, or to rooms added after placing. This confusion was duly rectified (it is on placing) when we discovered that Pink hadn’t quite got a complete grasp of the rules either. And then Purple, who was suffering with post-Essen lurgy, took her turn to have a fuzzy-rule moment. Meanwhile, Black, who was concentrating on keeping everyone else on the straight and narrow found his castle was suffering a little and was starting to fall behind, so he quickly took measures to improve his situation by building a couple of Red rooms which yield a lot of points, though have some significant penalties if you get things wrong.

As the game headed towards the conclusion, Black was clearly in front and pulling away, but that was without the final scoring. At the end of the game there are points available for any bonus cards held by players as well as for winning the King’s Favour. The King’s Favours are scored separately with points potentially available for the everyone as players are ranked and score points accordingly. There are four competitions that change with each game, and in the four player game, first place earns eight points, with four, two and one for second, third and fourth place respectively. In this game, the King favoured castles with the largest footprint of living and utility space, as well as those with a lot of corridors and circular rooms. Having picked up a lot of orange utility rooms early in the game, Blue had a lot of bonus points to score as well as coming first in two of the Kings Favour competitions, taking her well clear of Black in second place.

Meanwhile, Green, Azure, Red and Orange battled their way through learning the rules to Istanbul. This is also a fairly simple game where players are trying to lead their Merchant and his four Assistants through the Turkish bazaar. There are sixteen locations each with an associated action, but to carry out an action, the Merchant needs an Assistant to help out. The problem is, once an action has been completed, the Merchant must move on, however, the Assistant remains to complete the details of the transaction. The play-area is made up of tiles representing each stall, so there are four possible layouts: “Short”, where the distances between places that work well together are small making game-play easier; “Long”, where places that work well together are far apart, which forces players to plan ahead more; “Challenging”, where similar places are grouped together, and “Random”. As nobody had played it before, we didn’t know quite what to expect, so for this game, we chose “Short”.

Thus, a player’s turn consists of moving their stack of pieces (with the Merchant on top) one or two stalls around the bazaar. If the stack ends on a space where there is already an Assistant of the same colour, then the stack is placed on top of that Assistant, otherwise, the bottom Assistant in the stack is removed and placed next to the stack. Then, if the play wants he can perform an action at that stall, for example, buy goods at the fabric, spice or fruit warehouses, sell goods at one of the markets, or buy gemstones from the dealer etc.. If the player does not have an Assistant to collect or leave, then the players turn ends straight away, similarly, if a player meets someone else’s Merchant, they must pay them two Lira each, and forfeit the right to an action. Meeting one of the other characters in the game also has consequences: the Governor allows players to buy bonus cards; the Smuggler allows players to buy or trade goods, and a family member can be captured and sent to the Police Station in return for a reward. The game ends when a player has five rubies.

Each player tried different strategies and tactics and to begin with, everyone was quite close and before long, everyone had with two or three of the five required rubies. At this point, Green and Red looked at the gem dealer and felt that his gems were very expensive and that it was going to be a while before anyone could get enough to end the game. However, Orange was buying goods and then selling them in the market and then used his double buy bonus card to jump from two rubies to four. Meanwhile, Azure had gained a special bonus token that allowed her to change a dice roll and then set about visiting the “Tea House” and gambling on dice rolls. With the ability to change dice rolls, it meant she could call higher and therefore win more money which she took next door to buy her rubies. By the time Green and Red realised that Azure had enough to buy her remaining rubies, it was too late and Azure had secured the win.

Despite having to learn the game from scratch, Istanbul finished long before Castles of Mad King Ludwig, so they decided they liked the gem-stone theme and went on to play a game that is already quite well known within the group, but has been so popular that a copy was also purchased at Essen – Splendor. From the group who had finished, only Green was familiar with it, so he took the responsibility of teaching. Red started out collecting rubies, while Green bought onyx and diamond and Azure and Orange went for across section. Orange built up a stack of chips which enabled him to quickly build a good stack of non-scoring gem cards, these, in turn rapidly led to a lot of low level scoring cards. Red continued to concentrate on Rubies, but branched out a little and gaining some of the high scoring cards. Then suddenly, one player remembered the option to reserve a card and take a gold token and before long everyone was doing it! Green thought he was about to win and activated his saved five-point diamond card to claim three points for one of the Nobles (four onyx and four diamond) only to realise that he already had enough diamonds and it was onyx that he needed! Meanwhile, Azure quietly got on with building a mixed set of gems cross-colour starting with low value, moving on to middle and finishing with high values and with it took the game. No-one secured the patronage of a Noble, though Green came closest as he took second place.

Azure and Orange, Green and Pink headed home leaving Blue, Red, Black and Purple with just time for a quick game of the Romeo and Juliet themed card game, Council of Verona. This is another new game, but it has a lot in common with Love Letter, a quick little game that we’ve all played a lot and are very familiar with. The idea of Council of Verona is that on their turn, they play a card (a Montague, a Capulet or a Neutral) either in Exile or in Council. Broadly speaking, the cards come in two categories: cards with an action and cards with an agenda. So once they’ve played a card, players then they choose whether to perform any action associated with that card and, if they wish, they may then play an influence token on any agenda cards in play. Each player has three influence tokens, a zero, a three and a five. At the end of the game, the influence tokens are evaluated for any agendas that have been successfully fulfilled and the scores totalled up accordingly.

The rules suggest that you play three rounds and draft the cards at the start, but since we were all unfamiliar with the game, all tired and two of us were suffering from post-Essen-lurgy, we decided to play just one quick game and deal the cards out randomly and try to get a feel for it. Blue and Purple played Romeo and Juliet (who want to be together) into Council and added influence tokens, while Red played Prince Escalus (Neutral who wants council to be balanced) and added a token. Blue then played Lord Montague (wants more Montagues on Council than Capulets) and Black, Red and Purple retaliated by shuffling things around. Blue who went last, played Lady Montague allowing her to swap two influence tokens giving her a winning score.

Learning Outcome: New games are a lot of fun!

15th July 2014

This week we started with a quick game of Kittens in a Blender. This is a light card game, if one with a slightly ghoulish theme. The idea is that on their turn, players must play two cards from their hand of six cards. If they choose to play a kitten card it can go onto the counter in the middle of the table; into the relative safety of the box, or straight into the blender to await its fate. Other cards allow Kittens to be moved one space from the box to the counter or the counter to the blender vice versa. And then there are the blend cards, which cause any kittens in the blender to be blitzed, the kittens in the box to be permanently rescued and the kittens on the counter to move to the blender to become the next in line for “kitten smoothy” (if they aren’t rescued in time). Players score points for every kitten of their own colour that they rescue, and lose points for those that meet a less pleasant end.

Yellow started out picking on Blue and Orange kittens and, well, Red ones too. So before long, everyone retaliated and the fur began to fly as it all got ugly quite quickly. Orange managed to do the least to offend everyone else and finished miles ahead of everyone else with fourteen points while everyone else struggled (or failed) to finish in paw-sitive figures.

Everyone else was here by now, so next up was our “Feature Game”, the new Spiel des Jahres winner, Camel (C)Up. There has been much debate about the correct name as the box is ambiguous. It was originally released as “Camel Cup”, presumably to reflect the Australian camel race, however, the Spiel des Jahres citation clearly calls it “Camel Up”, which at first sight seemed strange, however, once we started playing it became clear why this name was appropriate. The game consists of a race of five camels and players effectively bet on the leader and eventual outcome of the race. Thus, on their turn players can do one of four things: use the cool pyramid dice shaker to move a camel; bet on which camel will be in the lead at the end of the round; bet on the final outcome of the race (i.e. which camel will cross the line first triggering the game end, or which will be in last place when that happens), or place their oasis tile which can earn the owner money as well as help or hinder a winning/losing camel.

There are a couple of clever things about the game. Firstly, the dice shaker: this is a pyramid-shaped device, made out of card and held together with an elastic band. The idea is that players shake it, turn it upside down and push the slider to let out just one die. Although it malfunctioned a couple of times, in general, it works well. As there are five dice (one per camel) and when a die is “rolled” it is removed from the shaker for the rest of the round, this is used to determine the length of the round (or “leg”). Next, when a camel moves onto another camel’s space it is stacked on top of it, then if the bottom camel moves, the top camel takes a ride. This means that a riding camel can get an extra move, and stacks can contain any number of camels, so if a camel is lucky it can pick up a lot of extra moves. Finally, the way the betting is handled means that players don’t have to worry about stakes and odds. To bet on the outcome of a leg, players simply take a tile of the appropriate colour. Since these are stacked with the highest value first, if that camel comes home first, that player gets more at the end of the round. Similarly, the betting on the end of the race is done by players choosing a card from their hand of five (one per camel) and placing them in the “to win” stack or the “to lose” stack. The earlier they are placed, the more the player wins (if they get it right of course!).

Camel Up

The game began with the the Blue and White camels getting a slight head start. White made a surge forward and everyone made a dash for the White betting tiles, until one player put a mirage in front of it… For some reason, although all the other camels had no difficulty jumping the mirage, the White one really struggled and quickly went from the front to the back, a problem exasperated as every other space now had a mirage tile on it. The Yellow Camel managed to catch a couple of rides, and before anyone could do much about it, it was across the line, with it handing the win to the only two players who had played it before.

Time was getting on and we only had time for a short game before some of us had to leave, so we played Incan Gold. This is a game we played quite a bit a year or so ago, but hasn’t made it to the table in a while. Basically it is a push your luck game, where players are mining for gold and gems. Each player enters the mine and a card is drawn and placed to make a path; the value of the gems on the card is split equally amongst the players in the mine with any left overs placed on the card. Players then get the option to leave the mine (sharing all the left-overs as they go), or stay in the hope of getting more treasure. The snag is that in addition to gem cards of varying values, there are also “nasty cards”. You can draw lots of different nasty cards, but if s second of the same time type is drawn, the mine collapses and anyone left in loses whatever they had collected in that round. In this game, it was a tale of “nasty cards” as the first three rounds had at least two nasty cards in the first five every time. So it was all a bit scrappy with everyone nervously leaving early. Then, somehow, Orange managed to pull off a bit of a coup and got out of the mine with lots of booty, just before it collapsed. It turned out the lead was unassailable and Orange pulled off her second victory of the night.

Now much depleted in numbers, we decided to continue with the Spiel de Jahres theme and finished with a game of Splendor (one of the runners up). We played this a few weeks ago and like Camel Up, it is quite a simple game, but is much more strategic. The idea is that players are gemstone dealers and can use gem-chips they have collected to purchase cards. In turn, these cards allow players to buy more cards of a higher value, some of which come with extra prestige points. The end of the game is triggered when the first player reaches fifteen points. Black ran off with an early lead, however, while Purple struggled a little, Blue managed to catch up with a couple of high scoring cards. By this time Green had got his engine working properly and started to catch Black. It finished a very close game, but Black just managed to hold on, beating Green and Blue by one and two points respectively. Inevitably we finished with a discussion as to whether we Camel Up or Splendor was the better game. We concluded that while Camel Up was fun, with seven it was too chaotic so that the “sweet-spot” was probably four or five and it would probably be great fun with a family under those conditions. For us, however, we enjoyed Splendor much more and it will no-doubt make a return.

Learning Outcome: Camel racing is fun, but trading gems is Splendid!

Spiel des Jahres Nominations – 2014

Every year the a jury of German-speaking board game critics (from Germany, Austria, Switzerland), review games released in Germany in the preceding twelve months and award the best the German Game of the Year, or Spiel des Jahres. The criteria used include:

game concept (originality, playability, game value),
design (functionality, workmanship),
layout (box, board, rules),
rule structure (composition, clearness, comprehensibility).

Last year, the winner was Hanabi, and previous winners include, favourites like Ticket to Ride: Europe, Niagara, Zooloretto, Alhambra, and Carcassonne. The nominees for this year have just been announced and include (amongst others) Splendor, which we played last time we met.

Spiel des Jahres

6th May 2014

This week, we started out with our “Feature Game”, Splendor. This is a fairly simple game of gem (chip) collecting and card development. On a player’s turn, they have a choice of four options: They can collect three different gems (or chips); they can collect two identical chips (but only if there are four or more left); they can pay chips to buy a card, or they can reserve a card and get a gold chip for their troubles. Gold chips are “wild” and can be used to replace any other colour when buying cards. Each card also represents a gem and, once bought, can be used in any purchase thereafter. At the start of the game a set of “noble” tiles are revealed and these are awarded to players with sets of three types of gem cards and give points at the end of the game. In addition, some cards also give points at the end of the game and the game ends at the end of the round when one player has fifteen points. The game was very tight with Green edging it by one point.

Our second game was Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar a game we last played back in December last year. This is a worker-placement game with a difference: players place their workers on the wheels of a Mayan Calendar that actually turn at the end of each round. On their turn, players can either place workers on the wheels, or they can remove them from the wheels, but they can never do both. Players can place as many as they can if they choose, but the more they place, the more it costs. When workers are removed from the wheels, players perform the associated actions, however, generally, the longer the worker has remained on the wheel, the larger the rewards.

Each player gets to pick from a small number of starting advantages and Green chose to start with an extra worker. In contrast, Blue started out with a moderate supply of corn and spent her first few turns getting extra workers and a building to help her feed them. Green was making excellent progress and also had a building to help feed his workers, and then we realised that he hadn’t made sure he had three corn at the start of each round. The penalty (as for most things in this game) was angering the Gods, so he regressed down all three temples and we carried on, but unfortunately his rhythm was broken.

Green really struggled to feed all his workers and have enough corn to do anything. Blue stopped concentrating on what she was doing and Green stole the monument she had been working towards (which rewarded good positions on the technology tracks). In her confusion, Blue went a little overboard harvesting corn and ended up buying her way out while Green held back by his lack of corn. As there was no competition for placing skulls, Blue picked up a hat-full of points there, and with the bonuses provided by her positions higher up the temples, she inflicted brutal revenge for the single point defeat in the previous game.

Learning Outcome: Do not anger the Gods: they will have their revenge.