Tag Archives: Sushi Go!

21st February 2023

With this set to be our last meeting before The Horse and Jockey changed hands, a lot of people turned up early to enjoy the Thai special (a preview of the Thai Night the following day). As the last of the food was consumed the final couple of people arrived, and then it was all about deciding who was going to play what and how we were going to split up the group of thirteen. In the end, Ivory took a group of five to play the “Feature Game“, Verdant, while Pink and Lime led a group of four to play Cascadia, and Green gave his copy of Wingspan with all the expansions (Europe, Oceania and Asia) an outing.

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The “Feature Game“, Verdant is a card game where players are trying to match plants to rooms and grow luxurious foliage to give them the most points at the end of the game. The game is played over fourteen rounds with players taking it in turns to take cards from a central market. In a similar way to Cascadia where hexagonal tiles are paired in the market with animal tokens, in Verdant, the cards are paired with object tokens. However, where, in Cascadia players just have to choose which pair to take, in Verdant the decision is a little more complex. Instead of taking a card and it’s token, in Verdant each tokens is paired with two cards (a room and a plant) and players choose one card to take with the associated token.

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Players then add the card to their three by five array, with plants placed next to rooms and visa versa to form a chequerboard-type arrangement. Whenever a plant is placed next to a room with matching lighting conditions, it gets a verdancy token; plants which achieve target verdancy are completed and gain a fancy pot (some of which give bonus points) and then score points at the end of the game. Players then add and/or spend their object tokens. The objects come in two types, Furniture/Pets and Nurture tokens. Furniture/Pets are either added to a room or placed their one storage space. Nurture tokens are particularly useful as they can be spent to add extra verdancy to plants.

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At the end of the game, as well as scoring points for completed plants, players also score for each room with adjacent plants that match their type—one point for each plant, two for each if the room contains an object with a colour that matches the room. Finally, players are rewarded for any residual verdancy and receive bonus points for having a complete set of each plant type, for having a complete set of each room colour and an increasing number of bonus points based on how many unique Furniture/Pets they have in their home.

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Blue started, and with no idea what she was doing, took a high verdancy plant and passed the problem on to Teal whose turn it was next. There was quite a lot of “try something and see what happens” going on in the early part of the game, but before long Pine voiced everyone else’s thoughts when he asked of Ivory, “How come you’ve got two pots already?” Then, as everyone shrugged, Pine added, “Oh, I see, you have cheap plants…” Ivory looked, if not exactly disgruntled, some way from being actually gruntled, and replied, “You make it sound like I got them from a garage on the way here!” And so the game continued with players taking cards and adding them to their arrays with as much verdancy as possible.

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About halfway through the game, Pine shared a new post on The Jockey Facebook page which said the current business owner would now be leaving in two weeks but Dan (the current manager) would be responsible for the pub for the next couple of months. So, while there’s still some uncertainty, it seems there WILL be a meeting in two weeks time. By this time, people were getting into their strides a little, though most people’s main strategy just seemed to be taking Nurture tokens whenever they had the chance, something which Pine and Indigo seemed to get a lot of and Blue didn’t have until her final tile (which she picked up with a Panda Plant, much to Pink’s delight from the next table).

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And that just left the scores. A bit of a point salad, it seemed like points came from everywhere. The bulk of everyone’s points came from completed plants though and rooms scored surprisingly well too. Most people thought Ivory was going to win, and so it proved, but much to her surprise, Blue was only a couple of points behind his seventy-nine, and took second. It was really tight for third with everyone else within a couple of points of each other, but it was Pine who just made it onto the podium ahead of the others. Although the game had taken quite a bit longer than expected and was more of a head-scratcher than its brother Cascadia, Verdant had been universally enjoyed and deserves another go.

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Speaking of Cascadia, Pink, Lime, Black and Jade were giving last year’s Spiel des Jahres Award winner another outing. In this game, similar to Verdant, on their turn, players take a terrain tile and animal token from the market and add them to their array. In this game however, players score points for their largest terrain of each type and also for animals in a specific arrangement. There is a lot of replayability in the game as each animal has several different scoring motifs on cards with one of each drawn at random at the start of each game. This time Bears scored for each group not surrounded by bears with larger groups scoring more; Salmon scored for long chains, and Elk scored for groups of one, two, three or four tiles in a particular layout.

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There was some discussion surrounding the scoring of Foxes, but they scored for each unique animal pairs surrounding them. The Hawk card was from the Tantrum House Promo Set and gave points for each Hawk that had a direct line of sight with both an Elk and a Fox. And this proved challenging for most people as Pink spent the first half of the game by taking all the Elks in what was later referred to as “The Great Elk Shortage”. The others soon got their revenge, however, when Pink was after Bears and everyone else took them just before he could. The game progressed quite quickly and before long, it was time to score.

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Despite the Elk and Bear based tussle, the scores for the Wildlife were very close with Jade just three points ahead of Black and Pink. In this game though players ignore the largest areas at their peril, but these need quite a lot of planning to make them work. With bonus points available to the player with the largest of each type of terrain, going heavily into one or two not only scored per tile, but also an extra three points. This tactic gave Pink eight more points than anyone else for his Habitats which ultimately gave him a comfortable victory, eight points clear of Black in second.

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Cascadia was the first game to finish and the group looked around for something quick to play that everyone knew, and quickly settled on Sushi Go!. This is the archetypal card drafting game, where players are dealt cards, keep one and then pass the hand to their neighbour. Played over three rounds, players are collecting different types of sushi. This game was closer than Cascadia and a bit rushed. There was a big debate as to whether players could play wasabi on top of wasabi and score nine points—the initial response was “that would be silly”, but it was confirmed with a rules check.

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The group played with the Soy Sauce Promo which gave points for having lots of different types of sushi, and variously pretty much everyone had a go at making them score. Almost everyone eschewed the Chopsticks, which allow players to take two cards instead of one later in the round, but that assumes there is an opportunity to use them later. Pink gave them a go, but without much real success. The final round had no Puddings, so there was a three-way tie for Desserts giving each player two points, except for Pink who missed out completely and lost six points. With a deficit of eight points in such a tight game that probably gave victory to Jade, who finished two points ahead of Pink in second and five ahead of Black in third.

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Meanwhile, on the third table, a rather epic game of Wingspan was underway. This is one of the group’s favourite games and seems to be popular with almost everyone. The game is a kind of action based card-driven, engine-building game. Players take it in turns to take one of four actions: take food; take bird cards; pay food to place bird cards, or lay eggs on bird cards. Since we enjoy Wingspan and play it a lot, we have all the current expansions within the group, though none of the people playing this time had experienced Oceania or Asia (except solo), so the group decided to put in as much content as they could. This meant using all the bird cards available, creating three huge stacks.

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There were so many cards that they piled way up beyond the top of the card holder, and by the end of the game, they were still over the top! The group added the round bonus chits from the European and Oceania expansions to the base game ones, but ended up only pulling out one from Oceania (birds pointing left) and none from Europe. And of course the group used the nectar (replacing the original set of dice too), and lots of different coloured eggs from the different sets. The only parts of the expansions the group weren’t able to use were the two player components and the six/seven player components from Asia as there were four in the group, Green, Plum, Byzantium and Sapphire.

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The group only needed to refer to the rules a couple of times for clarification on how the birds interacted. Byzantium’s Snowy Owl, did not point left or right, so he could not count it towards the end of round goal, which meant he only tied with Sapphire for first place in round two. For most of the game there was little egg-laying, but the group managed to fill their boards with lots of birds (ten to thirteen each). Only Green and Sapphire went on an egg laying frenzy in the last couple of rounds, but they still only managed ten and thirteen in total respectively. Plum and Byzantium both managed to collect an almost unheard of total of four bonus cards each.

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Although this helped Byzantium towards an extra twelve points from the bonus cards, it was still shy of Sapphire’s thirteen from two cards (seven points of which he gained on his very last turn with a lucky bonus card draw). Plum, however, really made good with her bonus cards for a whopping total of twenty-five. This was to prove the clincher for her as she won the game with ninety-six points, some way ahead of Sapphire’s eighty-eight giving him second and Green five points behind in third. Of the expansions, everyone in the group used lots of Nectar (another aspect where Plum managed to outscore everyone else) and a good smattering of birds from each expansion, except for Asian birds.

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Only Sapphire placed an Asian bird card with the group using twenty base game birds, ten from the European expansion, fifteen from Oceania and the single Asian bird. Green did manage to get two “flitting” birds and regularly made use of them to flit between habitats. During the after game discussion, the group agreed that they really wanted to try the two player and the large group versions. Having played Wingspan with six last summer without the Asia adjustment, it was clear what needed tightening up, and that seemed to have been done. As a result, the group all agreed that they looked forward to a Mega-Wingspan game soon.

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Learning Outcome: Some board games are prickly and others more succulent.

27th December 2022

It was a quiet night with everyone still recovering from Christmas. Black and Purple arrived at the advertised 7pm, soon followed by Lime and then Pink, Blue and Pine. After a bit of chatter about Christmas and the “To Let” sign outside the pub, the group eventually settled down to play the “Feature Game“, Zuuli. This is a light, family friendly, card drafting game that is a bit like Sushi Go! or 7 Wonders, but with animals. Similar to Sushi Go! or 7 Wonders, players choose a card from their hand before passing it on to the next player.

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In contrast to Sushi Go!, however, instead of using cards at the end of each turn, players save them until the end of the round and then try to make sure they have all the animals housed. The game is played over three years (“Really?” commented Lime, “I thought you said it was a short game—I had no idea we were going to be here until 2025!”). In the rules as written, there is scoring at the end of each of the three rounds (or years), but it was clear that everyone was struggling with the rules a little at the start, so we “House Ruled” it so for the first game, we only scored at the end of the final year.

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The idea is that each enclosure has a size, habitat type and a satisfaction multiplier while each animal has a space requirement, habitat and satisfaction. To score, for each enclosure, players simply add together the satisfaction value of the animals and multiply the total by the value for the pen. There is a catch, however. As well as ensuring the animals have enough space in the right habitat, players also have to make sure that animals don’t eat each other: animals are either fierce or friendly, friendly animals can share an enclosure, but fierce animals can only live in an enclosure with their own kind.

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Additionally, some animals and some enclosures have special conditions, for example, tree frogs score double if they are in both water and jungle habitat, and the starting enclosure (the “New Plot”), only scores if it is fully occupied. There were lots of rule clarifications: the first concerned why you would want more land expansions which add no additional space (answer, because they add terrain type). Then some of the animal conditions needed clarifying, and finally whether an expanded New Plot needs to be full (including the expansion). This was not helped by the fact we were including the extra cards from the mini expansion (now included in the second edition, namely hippos and red pandas).

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As a result, it was a bit of a messy first game, made worse by the fact that the Christmas spirit meant people were struggling to concentrate. The end result was quite tight though with a single point between first and second as Pink just pipped Blue with Black not far behind. It was no surprise, when Lime suggested giving Zuuli a second try now we all knew what we were doing. As it turned out, this was more a case of, “now Lime knew what he was doing.” This time, we played with the rules as written, including the scoring at the end of each year.

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By the end of the second year, it was very clear that Lime was going to be the winner, the only question was by how much. In the end he beat Pink into second by a massive twenty points as he finished with seventy-one, though Pink felt he deserved a bonus points for failing to kill his red pandas with hypothermia (unlike Longleat who managed to kill their two cubs born to much fanfare over the summer). Blue and Pine were not far behind Pink fighting it out for third, but this time it was all about Lime whose scores in the second and final year were well ahead of everyone else’s.

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With six, the question was then whether to play as two groups of three, or stick with a larger group of six. As a sociable group, especially at Christmas and other festivals, we tend to go for the latter, and this time was no exception. Whenever there are six players, Keyflower always gets a mention and Pink had put it in the bag, but it was too late to start it really. That left either a couple of much shorter, filler-type games, or Niagara. Mostly people have refused to play Niagara with Pink since, in a “Moment of the Year” he infamously won a game by daring to play by the rules, stealing gems from several others including Burgundy and Blue who never forgave him.

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Lime felt that with five against one it was a good opportunity for the group to get their collective revenge and Niagara duly made it to the table. This is an older game which won the Spiel des Jahres Award nearly twenty years ago, but is still a lot of fun. It is a sort of programming game where players simultaneously choose which Paddle tile they are going to play and then take it in turns to activate that action (mostly move their canoe). Players begin with two canoes which they use to collect gems and attempt to return them to the starting jetty; the winner is the first player to get home four identical gems, one of each of the five varieties or any seven gems.

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The game is really made, however, by the really cool moving river, which is essential to the game play. After each round, the river moves, with the movement equal to the movement of the slowest canoe. In addition to moving canoes somewhere between one and six spaces (depending on the Paddle tile played), players can also adjust the speed of the river by playing a Cloud Paddle Tile. This adds a little extra jeopardy, especially as players cannot reuse Paddles until they have used them all and when they play their cloud, their canoes don’t move and therefore risk their craft plummeting over the cataract.

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It costs two movement points to pick up a gem (or drop one off). However, if traveling up stream and the boat finishes its movement on the same space as another loaded boat, the player can steal from other players on the same space, as long as they have space in their boat. Native, Niagara only plays five, however, with the Spirits of Niagara expansion, it plays six, though with a few rules tweaks. These include replacing one single canoe with a double canoe that can hold two gems which makes stealing easier and more likely. There are also new Paddle cards, the introduction of a Whirlpool, the Bathing Beaver and the Hurried Elk.

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Most of these just make things more complex. So Blue made the executive decision to only include an extra Paddle Tile (value seven) and replace the slowest Paddle Tile (value one) with the 1/2/3 (which allows the player to decided how many they can move, but they can only move one boat). This seemed to maintain the simplicity of the original game while ensuring there wasn’t too much carnage. That said, almost everyone ended up with at least one boat going over the falls, Lime lost several. All that proved was that crime doesn’t pay, however, as he repeatedly nicked gems from poor Pine.

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Following the ill-feeling last time, Pink announced his strategy up front—to win, by whatever means was necessary within the rules, including stealing gems. However, when fate chose him to go first, he garnered opprobrium (and a rules check) when he began by playing his seven and picked up two purple gems on his first turn. Pine also tried stealing gems from others, but as they were immediately pinched by Lime who followed him in turn order, he commented that it felt just like pay day—there one moment and gone the next! Blue was the first to get a gem home, though it was a colourless one, one of the easiest to claim and it wasn’t long before others followed.

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There was a bit of group-think going on, with players generally playing their higher value Paddle Tiles at the start, making the river run fast before it slowed down later when everyone played slower Paddle Tiles. Black and Blue increased the flow of the river to its maximum, but Lime slowed it down again at the first opportunity. We had just got through the Paddle Tiles the first time when Lime commented on his plans. Black responded that he wasn’t going to get another as he was going to end it, and if he didn’t Pink would. In the event, Black, Pink and Blue all achieved the winning condition with four gems of the same kind but Blue and Pink had collected a fifth so rejoiced in their shared victory.

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There was just time for one last game, of an old favourite, 6 Nimmt!. This is one of our most played games and slightly controversially won the Golden GOAT Award in 2020 largely for keeping us sane while playing games online. Online we played a lot of the “Professional Variant”, but this time we chose to keep it simple. Players simultaneously choose a card from their hand and then, in ascending numerical order, the cards are added to one of the four rows. Each card is added to the row ending with the highest number that is lower than the face value of the card played; if it is the sixth in a row, it becomes the first card instead and the player adds the other five cards to their scoring pile. The lowest score is the winner.

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We play a variant that has two rounds and sees all (or almost all, depending on player count) of the hundred and four cards in the deck. This time, the first round was quite attritional as everyone picked up cards. Aside from Pink who picked up twice as many points as anyone else, it was all quite close though. The second round was more variable however. It was Black who top-scored this time, giving him a total of thirty-two, one more than Pink’s final score. Most of the other scores averaged out giving totals in the high teens, however, Purple’s second round clean sheet gave her a winning score of nine.

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And with last orders called, that was it. There was a little bit of chat about the New Year Party, but otherwise it was a sad farewell. With more uncertainty surrounding the pub, it is a little unclear whether it will still be open for the group’s next scheduled meeting (10th January), so we will see. With that very much in mind, we waived good night to the staff, wished them a Happy New Year and hoped to see them in January.

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Learning Outcome: Don’t leave red panda cubs out in the cold.

4th October 2022

To mark the tenth anniversary of our first meeting, this week was a bit of a party. We started with a fish and chip supper (courtesy of Darren at The Happy Plaice) and followed it with cake, complete with “marzimeeples”. There was also a special “solo game” of Carcassone, where everyone chose a tile, wrote their name on it and stuck it on a board to be framed as a keepsake to mark the occasion. Unfortunately, Lilac was unwell and not able to come, and the chaos on the A34 (due to a burst water main on the Oxford ring road and an accident) conspired to delay Black, Purple, Orange and Lemon. Everyone else made it though, and after a quick round of Happy Birthday and some cake, the group moved on to play the now traditional “Feature Game“, Crappy Birthday.

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Crappy Birthday is a party game where players give each other comedy birthday presents and the recipient has to decide who gave the best and worst gifts. We house-rule the game to play a year so that everyone has one birthday, so on their turn, they receive a gift from everyone else. They then look through the gifts and choose the best and worst, and the givers of those gifts get a point each. The winner is the player with the most points at the end of the year. Written like this, the game sounds very dry, but there are three things that make the game a lot of fun.

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Firstly, the gift cards are fantastic; the pictures are great and the texts that accompany them are just enough to give a flavour while also allowing interpretation. Secondly, the way we play, the Birthday Boy or Girl goes through the gifts reading them out. It is not so much this, as the disgust, excitement or other response as people “open their gifts” that makes everyone smile. Playing board games can be very impersonal—for many people this is a good thing as it allows people who are shy or private to control what they reveal about themselves because everyone focuses on the game. As a result, gamers often don’t really know an awful lot about each other. In playing Crappy Birthday, however, players reveal just a little bit more of their likes and dislikes, helping everyone to get to know each other that little bit better.

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Finally, we only play Crappy Birthday once a year. This is really key, as without this constraint, the cards would get repetitive and the element of surprise would be lost. In terms of game play, it isn’t a very strategic or challenging game, so playing more frequently would likely mean it would quickly outstay its welcome. As it was, Pink started (his birthday was soonest), and he set the tone for the year. As usual, we discovered lots of interesting things about people in the group. Pink surprised everyone with his delight at receiving some Monopoly money toilet paper, though it was a close-run thing between that and a road trip across the Sahara as he’d always fancied participating in the Paris-Dakar Rally. He was much less impressed with the bungee-jump however.

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Pine was next and this time didn’t get his usual pile of equine and meat flavoured gifts. His choice of a giant lobster sculpture for his front yard was also unexpected, and he explained that it would be interesting to see where it ended up when the kids and drunks in the village decided to move it. On Plum’s turn we discovered that she liked the idea of a one-armed bandit and Chess lessons (no cheating, obviously), but preferred Flying lessons. Pink proved he knew Blue best when she picked a non-electric iron as her favourite gift, while Ivory was disappointed that when Teal eschewed his generous gift of a trip on the first trip to Mars. We discovered that Teal used to play the bagpipes, and that Lime was quite disgusted by the thought of a giant baby sculpture for the front of his house (to be fair, it looked quite hideous and not a little creepy).

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Leaping off or out of things seemed to be generally quite unpopular, with a parachute jump being Black’s least favourite gift, though he was delighted by tickets to a live metal music gig. Ivory complained that he kept drawing perfect gifts for people just after their birthday. On his birthday, Pink thought he had a winner when he gave Ivory a snow machine, and everyone else felt the same knowing how much he loves Christmas, but surprised everyone by choosing a space walk as his best gift and a permanent barbed wire fence as his worst. Pine showed his approval when Lemon picked bird watching as her choice gift, and most people could see her point when she ranked her deer-foot lamp as her least favourite.

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There was more surprise on Purple’s turn when she chose a custom chopper as her best gift, but her dislike of a trip on a submarine was less of a shock. The final birthday of the year was Orange who picked throat rings as his best gift. There was a lot of taxidermy-based gifts so it was perhaps fitting that his less surprising choice of worst gift was a good luck bat (not particularly good luck for the bat if the picture is anything to go by). Not that it really mattered, but everyone knew who the winner was long before the end of the year, as Lemon had managed to get a point in half of the rounds and finished with five points. The race for second place was much closer though with three people taking two and Black and Purple tying with three points apiece.

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There was a lot of chatter, some tidying up and more chatter, before Lime and Teal wished everyone else a good night and enjoyable rest of the party, and those remaining tried to decide what to play. Everyone was very indecisive, so eventually Blue made the executive decision that one group would play New York Slice while the others played Ticket to Ride, and Pink went out to the car to collect the rest of the games that had been left in the car when everything else was brought in. After some four-player, five-player, no definitely four-player shenanigans as Lemon shuffled from one game to the other, Ivory, Orange, Plum and Pink eventually got going with New York Slice.

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New York Slice is a re-implementation of …aber bitte mit Sahne, a game we’ve played a couple of times over the summer. Having enjoyed the pizza version last month, it definitely deserved another outing. The idea is that one player makes the pizza and cuts it into segments equal to the number of players, then players take it in turns to choose one of the segments. When a player takes a segment, they can either eat the individual slices or store them for later. Those they will eat are worth points at the end of the game with the score dependent on the number of pepperoni slices on top. The pieces players keep are scored depending on who has the most of each type at the end of the game.

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Each piece of pizza has a number on it which tells players the number of that type in the game and also what the player with the most will score at the end of the game. Some of the pizza slices have anchovies on them and any that are visible at the end of the game are worth minus one. Each pizza is also served with a Special—a side order bonus tile with rule-breaking powers which accompanies one of the portions. These can be good or bad, and add something to the decision making all round. This time, the game was very close with just four points between first and last.

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As often happens, most people didn’t compete for the majority in the lucrative Meat Feast pizza, instead gobbling up the pepperoni straight away giving Orange the eleven points relatively cheaply. The most valuable pizzas were collected by Orange and Ivory, whereas Plum made most of her points from her Specials: “The Everyone-Else Diet” and “Seconds”. The Everyone-Else Diet” was handy because it gave negative points to everyone else for every two slices eaten. It was perhaps “Seconds” that just gave her the edge though, as it allowed her to eat one set of slices just before scoring, enabling her to see what she wasn’t winning and eat that. As a result, she finished a single point ahead of Ivory with Orange taking third.

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Meanwhile, on the next table, Blue, Black, Purple and Lemon settled down to a game of the new Ticket to Ride: San Francisco. This is the latest in the Ticket to Ride series and is making its debut at Essen this year. The games all follow the same basic pattern: on their turn players draw coloured cards, or spend them to place trains on the central map. They score points for trains placed, but also for completing any tickets they kept at the start of the game or picked up and kept during it. One of the smaller games, Ticket to Ride: San Francisco only plays four and has fewer pieces so games are shorter.

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Like all the other versions of the game, however, San Francisco also has a small rules tweak: when players make a connection to a tourist destination, they can collect a token. They can only collect one per turn and one from each location. Each tourist destination has different tokens, and players score bonus points at the end of the game for each different token they have collected. These points are significant, varying from nothing to twelve, with the number of points increasing exponentially as players add more to their collection. Otherwise, the map is different and instead of trains, players have cable tram-cars to place, but otherwise it is similar to the other versions of Ticket to Ride.

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Black’s starting tickets both went north-south, but one was on the east side and the other the west side. So he picked one and immediately went fishing for a more. Everyone else was slightly better off, and although Blue’s were better aligned they were fairly low scoring so once she had made a little progress she also took more tickets. Black and Purple went for the potentially lucrative Tourist tokens, while Lemon kept forgetting to pick them up and ended up collecting a handful at the end. Although the more a player has, the more they are worth, it turns out that getting the last couple is really difficult, and they are the ones that are worth the most points.

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Blue tried to claim the long route from Fort Mason to the Golden Gate Bridge, but couldn’t get the multi-coloured-wild or the last yellow card she needed despite the draw deck apparently being stuffed with them. In the end, she ran out of time as Black brought the game to a swift end. In the end, it was a really close. Black had the most points from placing trains on the board, closely followed by Purple, who was also very close to running out. Blue had the most completed tickets though so it all came down to the Tourist tokens which meant Black edged it by a single point from Blue with Purple just a couple of points behind that.

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Ticket to Ride was still going on when people had finished their pizzas, so although Ivory headed home, Plum was tempted to stay for one last game of Draftosaurus. This was new to Orange, so while Pink set up, Plum explained the rules. Draftosaurus is similar to games like Sushi Go! or Go Nuts for Donuts except that instead of drafting cards, players draft wooden dino-meeples, which players then place in their Dino Park. Unfortunately, Orange wasn’t familiar with either of those games, so Plum explained that drafting is where players start with a handful of dino-meeples, take one and pass the rest on.

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So, in Draftosaurus, each player begins the round with a handful of wooden dino-meeples and a player board for their dinosaur amusement park. Everyone chooses one meeple from their handful to place in their park and passes the rest to the next player. Each turn, one of the players roll a die which adds a constraint on which pens players can place their dinosaur in. The different pens have different scoring criteria and some also have restrictions. The game is played over two rounds, with players passing meeples clockwise in the first round and anti-clockwise in the second, ending with twelve meeples in their park.

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The parks boards are double-sided, but this time the group played just one round on the summer side. The game rocked along quite nicely, though Plum struggled to find mates for the dinosaurs in her Prairie of Love, while Pink and Orange had fun with the Forest of Sameness and Meadow of Differences (which have to have either all the same or all the different dinosaurs in them). A few scaly beasties ended up being thrown into the river because of the dice restrictions, but everyone did a good job of picking the right King for their Dino Park. Orange was king of the King of the Dinosaurs with the most Tyranosaurus rex, but he wasn’t the king of Draftosaurus—that was Pink who finished with thirty-nine points and a lot of Hadrosaurs.

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Learning outcome: It’s great to be ten, but bring on eleven!

17th May 2022

Black and Purple were first to arrive this week, but Pink and Blue were not far behind, and once food had been ordered, there was just time for a quick game of Love Letter to commemorate its recent tenth anniversary. We used to play this quick little filler game quite a bit, but that fell victim to the global pandemic and, as a result, it’d been a while since anyone round the table had played it. Played with just sixteen cards, the game is really simple, but is a great way to kill a few minutes. The idea is that each player starts with one card, and on their turn draw a second from the deck and play one of the two.

– Image by boardGOATS

Each card has a number and an action or effect. The actions range from number one, the Guard, which allows the player to guess what character card a player is holding and “assassinate” them if correct, to number eight, the Princess, who will win the game for the player holding it at the end, but lose it for them if they are forced to discard it before then. There was just time for three rounds before food arrived. Black took the first round and Pink the second. Pink then recused himself as he went to chat to some of the locals about Jubilee plans leaving Black, Purple and Blue to fight it out with Blue taking the final point.

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With the arrival of Pine and Lime, the group went on to play Moneybags, which had been the “Feature Game” a couple of weeks ago. The idea of this is that, on their turn, players have to decide whether to rob another player’s hessian sack of gold or not. Critically, however, they must not be too greedy. This is because the victim can challenge the thief, and if the thief is found to have more than the victim, the victim takes the lot, but that makes them more of a target as now everyone else knows how much they have…

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This time, the game did not go according to plan. Black played the Godfather and divvied up the loot. Purple robbed Pine, who promptly challenged and won a huge pile of gold. As it was his turn next, after lots of advice from everyone else, he closed his bag and stepped out. Then Blue challenged Black and won, knocking him out too. Although it was close between Pine and Blue, much closer than most people thought it would be, Pine’s huge stash won out. The moral of this story is to rob someone before you in the turn order otherwise, if they challenge and win, they can kill the game by closing their bag.

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This week, the “Feature Game” was the Arts and Architecture expansion to Tapestry, which is something that Ivory in particular, had been waiting ages to play. We wanted to give others an opportunity to play the base game first and then the (slightly less complex) Plans and Ploys expansion, which got an outing a few weeks ago. That was enjoyed by everyone involved, so it was now time to add the second expansion. The base game is simple in terms of what you do, but playing well is much more difficult. The idea is that there are four advancement tracks: Science, Technology, Exploration and Military, and on their turn, the active player progresses along one of these taking the actions for the space they land on.

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In general, players must pay resources to carry out actions and, in some cases, may pay more to carry out a bonus action. The first player to progress along each of the tracks receives a building as they pass landmark spaces, which those players then add to their city. Filling rows and columns of their city gives additional resources and as these are scarce, the extras can be invaluable. Players can focus on a specific track or take a more balanced approach, but this decision is often driven by starting Civilisations which give players a special and unique ability. Coupling the Civilisation with the right strategy is often the difference between success and failure.

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When players run out of resources, they can instead take income which means players move on to the next round at different times. The Arts and Architecture expansion provides more civilizations, tapestry cards, technology cards and capital city plans. The biggest change, however, is the addition of a new advancement track featuring new Art or Masterpiece cards and tiles and, of course, associated Landmark miniatures. Each Income phase, players can activate their masterpiece power and get the benefit shown, typically resources or points allowing players to prolong their turns further, but like the Technologies, they are really a long term investment.

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Green and Teal joined Ivory in what was a Tapestry rematch of the last game and, in addition to the Arts and Architecture expansion also included the Plans & Ploys expansion. Each player received a standard capital city and an expansion capital city, but everyone decided to try the new ones to add variety to the game. For the Civilisations, in an effort to ensure things were balanced, the up-to-date starting adjustments were used, and players chose:

Craftsmen (Ivory), which gave him a new board to place his income buildings on for extra bonuses;
Historians (Teal), which enabled him to choose a player each round, and when that player placed a special building, Teal would gain extra resources;
Architects (Green), which gave his income rows double points scoring under certain conditions.

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Green’s Civilisation did not last beyond his first income phase, however, as he played the Plague Tapestry card which allowed him to draw a new one. This new one, Entertainers, gave him an extra bonus track to follow each income phase. Ivory made his intentions clear by moving up the new purple Arts track and gained a couple of special Arts cards. Green followed him, but also spread a bit more onto the Technology track for a Technology card. It was Ivory who was first to take an income phase, but as he had not explored the Technology track he did not have a Technology to upgrade on his first income. Ivory did have a couple of Arts cards to provide him with a nice little bonus though.

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Teal went a different route and travelled up the Explore track and expanded his island. The resources he gained on the way enabled him to take his first income much later than the others. This pattern of Teal taking income last remained in play to the end of the game. Green took the second income first, and Ivory switched back to first for the third income. It was Ivory who took his final income first, closely followed by Green leaving Teal to play on his own at the end. By this time, Ivory had collected all the Arts buildings, completed both the Arts and Science tracks and expanded his empire by three more hexes.

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Ivory had also collected three Arts cards and replaced two of his income scoring tracks. He had only placed two income buildings on his Civilisation card, but had mostly completed his capital city (including a massive seven special buildings), but had only one, solitary technology card. Teal had completed the Explore track, although two of his space hexes were very poor scoring for him, and had not progressed at all on the Arts track. His empire was seven hexes in size, including the one in the centre of the territory. He had also collected six special buildings on his way, but no Technology at all.

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Green managed to complete the Arts and Technology track, choosing to travel up the Arts again for his technology completion bonus. He did not expand his empire at all, although he had grown the islands a little. He finished with four Arts cards and three Technology cards, but only five special buildings. In the final scoring Green finished with a personal best of two hundred and ninety-three points, beating the hitherto invincible Ivory who “only” managed two hundred and fifty-one, some way ahead of Teal. Part of the reason for this was that Teal did not place his last player cube choice from his civilisation on his penultimate income.

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This was because the game ended in a bit of a rush because time was getting on and Teal unfortunately didn’t thought the others wouldn’t get any more buildings. As a result he missed out on a few free resources in the final round and even a few resources can make a huge difference. As ever it is difficult to find the right balance in Tapestry as players need to both specialise and be a Jack of all trades, which is very hard to do. Although the game took longer as a result of the expansions, all three liked the added enhancements and would be keen to play again with all the extras.

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Meanwhile, on the the other side of the room, Lime was introducing Black, Lilac and Pine to Die Wandelnden Türme, a recently released, curious little family game. The idea is that players start with a handful of Wizards placed on top of the little Towers around the board, and a hand of three cards. On their turn, the active player plays a card which allows them to move one of their Wizards a set number of spaces forward, or move a tower a set number of spaces. When Towers move, they take any resident Wizards with them but can also land on top of another Tower and trap any pieces that were on the roof. A player that catches other pieces in this way gets to fill a Potion Flask. They can then spend the Potions to cast spells.

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In the base game the spells available are “move a Wizard one space forward” or “move a Tower two spaces forward”, but others are available and change the feel of the game a little. Players are trying to land all their Wizards in the black, Raven Castle and fill all their Potion Flasks—when someone succeeds, that triggers the end of the game. It is a fun and entertaining game where players Wizards get variously trapped and if they have a bad memory, can find they lose them in the circus of dancing towers. And that is exactly what happened to poor Pine. His Wizards disappeared and every time he uncovered where he thought they were, he discovered they weren’t.

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In the end it was a tie between Lime and Black, but it had been a lot of fun, and Pink in particular was watching with envious eyes from the next table as he’d read about the game in the Spielbox magazine and fancied giving it a go. While eying up the Wizards, Pink was playing Calico with Purple and Blue. This is another game that is new to the group, although it was released a couple of years ago. It has a similar feel to Patchwork, the popular two-player tile-laying game about designing quilts, though the games are by different designers. The most obvious difference is that Patchwork is a Tetris-like game with polyomino tiles, where all the tiles in Calico are regular hexagons.

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On their turn, the active player chooses a patch tile from their hand of two, and sews it into their quilt, before replenishing their hand. If they complete a colour group with that tile, they can add a button to their quilt; if they create a pattern group that is attractive to a cat, it will come over and sit on their quilt. At the end of the game, when the quilt is finished, players score for buttons, cats, and their own personal target. In reality, the theme is a bit “pasted on”, but the pieces are nice, and make what is otherwise a bit of a brain-burny abstract a little more accessible. Purple and Pink struggled with the puzzly nature of the game at the beginning, where Blue got a better start.

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Achieving the personal targets is difficult—these specify the number of different tiles that should surround a particular tile. For example, the goal tile AA-BB-CC scores when surrounded by three different colours, or three different patterns, with two matching tiles in each colour/pattern. Successfully fulfilling a target with both the colour and the pattern scores more points, but is significantly more difficult. Despite explaining this to Purple in her rules outline and saying she had decided to give up on the extras, Blue somehow got lucky and was able to fulfill two of private goals with both the colour and the pattern. With lots of buttons and cats, it was a bit of a runaway victory for Blue, but it was very close for second, with Pink just edging it.

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Die Wandelnden Türme finished first, so the foursome scratched about for something else to play and settled on The Game. This is a simple cooperative game that was one of Burgundy‘s favourites. The team have a deck of cards numbered from two to ninety-nine (in our case, from a copy of The Game: Extreme, but ignoring the special symbols), and they must play each card on one of four piles. For two piles where the card played must be higher than the top card, and for two it must be lower. There are just three rules: on their turn, the active player can play as many cards as they like (obeying the rules of the four piles), but must play at least two cards before replenishing their hand, and players can say anything they like but must not share “specific number information”.

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Finally, there is the so-called “Backwards Rule” where players can reverse a deck as long as the card they play is exactly ten above or below the previous card played on that pile. The game ends when, either all the cards have been played onto the four piles, or a player cannot play a card. This time, things went wrong from the start and unusually, kept going wrong, so much so that there were still two cards left in the deck when the group could no-longer play. Lilac ducked out and Pine, Lime and Black gave it a second try, but the end result was not much better. Clearly the group keenly felt the loss of Burgundy’s special skills.

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While they played their second game of The Game, Calico came to an end, and Lilac joined Purple, Pink and Blue for a game of Sushi Go!, the archetypal “card drafting” game. Players start with a hand of seven cards, and choose one to keep, passing the rest on to the player on their left. Players repeat this with the aim of the game being to end up with the set of cards that score the most points. The game is played over three rounds with the player with the highest total winning. This time, the game was interrupted by an arrival, one some people had been waiting all evening for. The “special guest” was the new resident at the pub, a gorgeous black Labrador puppy by the name of Winston.

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The game decidedly played second fiddle when cuddles were on offer. Despite the distraction of Winston, or perhaps because of his help, Blue, who is usually appalling at this game, somehow managed to make two solid rounds. Pink did the same in the first and third rounds, while Purple and Lilac were more consistent over the three rounds. Purple finished with the most puddings, and Pink and Lilac shared the penalty for having the least. Those penalty points made all the difference as Blue pipped Pink to the post. And as Tapestry had also finished and Pink had finished admiring Teal’s copy of Root, it was time for all little puppies to go to bed.

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Learning Outcome: It’s hard to specialise and be a “Jack of all trades” simultaneously.

20th April 2022

Meeting for the first time on a Wednesday, Pink and then Blue were the first to arrive, and like last time, played a game of Abandon all Artichokes (with the Rhubarb mini-expansion) while they waited for food to arrive. This is a very quick and simple “deck shredding” game: on their turn the active player takes a card from the face up market, adds it to their hand and then plays as many cards as they can before they discard the rest and draw five new cards. If this new hand contains no Artichoke cards, the player wins. Although it is very simple, it seems the function sequence is somehow challenging. Pink struggled last time, but seemed to have got the better of it as he won.

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As they were finishing, Pine turned up and, while Pink went to the bar, Blue explained the rules to him and then they played again. Pine also struggled a bit with which pile was the discard pile and which the draw pile, and where to take cards from and where they were going to. There is hope though as, despite the arrival of food in the middle, Pink won the second game too. Pink and Blue were just finishing their supper when Purple and Black arrived, soon followed by Green, Lime and Ivory.

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This week, the “Feature Game” was the new edition of Libertalia, Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest, a card driven game where players are admirals commanding a crew of sky pirates in search of adventure, treasure, and glory. Pine had watched the advertised play-through video and professed it “looked” fun, so was keen to give it a go. Ivory and Pink joined the party, while Green shouted across from the other end of the table that he would be happy either way as he knew nothing about it. In the end, after considerable debate, Ivory, Pink and Pine were joined by Blue and Purple, leaving Green, Black and Lime to find something else to play.

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Although Blue had read the rules, she had very deliberately not looked at the character cards, so Pine arguably knew most about Winds of Galecrest. It is a rejuvenated version of the older game, Libertalia, but with new, lighter artwork, additional characters and streamlining of some of the mechanisms. Very simply, each player starts with a deck of forty cards, of which six are drawn into their hand. The idea is that players have the same character cards to play, but can play them in different orders. Thus, one player (in our case Pink) shuffles their forty numbered cards and then draws six, which the the others find in their numbered and sorted decks.

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The game is played over three voyages, the first of which takes four days, the second, five days, and the final voyage takes six days. Each day, players simultaneously choose a card to play, which when revealed are laid out in numerical order on the island. The are then played three times: first in ascending order (daytime), next in descending order (dusk) and finally simultaneous (night). Some cards only have actions that activate in one or two of the time-frames, but any characters still on the island, move back to that player’s ship and stay there till the end of the voyage. At the end of the voyage, players activate any loot and characters they have with end of voyage actions. Despite that being pretty much all there is to the game (and it being written clearly on the board), the group still managed to make a bit of a meal of it.

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The first hand consisted of six relatively uninteresting cards (or so it seemed at the time), which all had daytime actions. The first voyage, and to some extent the second too, players were feeling their way. Because the group failed to remove the Character cards from their ships at the end of the first voyage, that skewed things somewhat, especially as some players had the First Mate in their ship which in some cases scored twice giving points for the number of characters in their ship which was also artificially inflated. Ivory knew which cards he’d played and when, but others were unsure and some had built a strategy that relied on having certain Characters in their boat at the end of the second voyage. So rather than trying to back-track, ships were emptied for the first time at the end of the second round.

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It took the group a bit of time to understand when the actions for the loot happened—most occur at the end of the voyage, but some occur on the day they are collected, during the dusk phase. As a result, several players missed some of those dusk actions, the additional reputation gained from picking up a Barrel in particular. At the beginning of the second round, Blue, Pine, Ivory and Pink agreed they were all playing the “obvious card”. On revealing their cards they discovered they had differing ideas of what the obvious play was, which gave the first inkling that there was much more to the actions than had first appeared, but the players really got to grips with the planning aspects of the game in the final round.

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Ivory played his Carpenter, which reduced his funds by half, and immediately followed it with the Officer which increased his kitty to twelve doubloons. Then, because he is always a threat, he was targeted by Pine and then Blue, losing first his Carpenter and then his Gambler from his ship (both give money at the end of the round). Blue then assassinated Pink’s Carpenter and he took out her Gambler in revenge. Pink discovered that the Saber type loot was much more dangerous than he gave it credit for as yet another of his Characters on the island bit the dust. Meanwhile, Purple was building the contents of her treasure chest largely unmolested, mostly only suffering as collateral damage. Pine also made killing by playing his Bodyguard with perfect timing, simultaneously taking lots of gold for discarding all the Sabers and Hooks from the loot pile, and starving everyone else of treasure.

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In the final accounting Blue was the most successful pirate, though she was one of the beneficiaries of the “rules malfunction” at the end of the second voyage. Purple made an excellent second place though, picking up loads of gold from her loot while largely managing to avoid being caught in the cross-fire as the others attacked each other. Libertalia is a much more vicious game than those we usually play, even though it was a “Calm” game and supposedly “easy and friendly”—Heaven only knows what Stormy will be like! It was a lot of fun though, especially when the group started to get to grips with it properly during the final round. It’s clear the game could cause a lot of relationship trouble, but that won’t stop it getting another outing soon.

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Meanwhile, on the next table things were much more peaceful with Green, Black and Lime laying carpets. No-one felt up to anything too taxing or long tonight, so after reviewing the selection of games available Black suggested they play Marrakech, which certainly fitted the bill. Marrakech, is an unusual little game, with fantastic little rugs made of fabric and coins made out of wood, where players take the role of a rug salesman who tries to outwit the competition. Each player starts with ten Dirhams and an equal number of carpets. On their turn, players may rotate Assam ninety degrees, then roll the die and move him forward as many spaces as shown (up to four).

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If Assam lands on another player’s carpet, the active player must pay one Dirham per contiguous carpet square of that colour. Finally, the active player then places one of their carpets orthogonally adjacent to Assam. The winner is the player with the most money after the last carpet has been laid. After a quick explanation to Lime (who hadn’t played it before), the group had to decide the Role of the Merchant. On Board Game Arena, there are two options: one where the player turns him himself before rolling the dice, and another where the player who just played gets to turn him at the end of their turn and before the next player.

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After a brief check of the rules, the group discovered that the first option was the original rule (move the merchant before rolling the dice) and so they went with that. As a result it took several turns before anyone landed on anyone else’s carpet, then Black landed on a single square of Lime’s. A couple more turns and landing on carpet became a regular activity. When Green landed on a five square of Black’s, it became apparent that Lime had been labouring under a false understanding about what counted as a paying patch of carpet. He had thought that players have to pay for all the carpet squares connected, by any means including other people’s carpets, but of course only the patch that the Merchant is stood on counts.

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At various points in the game everyone had a large patch of carpet posing a hazard to the other players: Green had a large area in one corner, Black a large squarish patch in the middle, and Lime managed to get a zig-zag line from one corner all the way to the opposite one. Mostly everyone managed to avoid landing on these until they were broken up, but that duck was broken when Green landed on a large Black area, shifting the coin balance heavily in Black’s favour. At the end of the game carpet value was added to coins, and although Green had the most carpet showing, Black had significantly more coins than the others and finished as the winner by five points.

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Libertalia was still ongoing, and Marrakech had served as an excellent aperitif, but it was now it was time to move on to something more substantial, and the game of choice was Niagara. This is fantastic family game, that won the Spiel des Jahres Award in 2005, but is still a lot of fun seventeen years later. The idea is that players have two canoes that they are using to navigate up and down the river while trying to collect gems and land them safely on shore. Players simultaneously choose a paddle card from their hand, which dictates the distance their canoes travel. Once everyone’s boat has travelled, the river moves and any canoes that are too close to the falls take the long drop and are turned to matchwood.

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Players are trying to land five gems of the same type (or seven different colours) and the first to do so is the winner. We last played this about nine months ago, online, through the medium of Board Game Arena. On that occasion, Pink had betrayed everyone’s trust and stole several people’s precious loot. The victims (in particular Burgundy), were vociferous in their grievance, and as a result, despite Pink being enthusiastic about playing again, nobody was keen to join him. With Pink tied up in a quite different loot battle, this was a good opportunity to play again as it was still quite early and it was also an opportunity to introduce Lime to an old classic.

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The first round played relatively gently and much the way it normally does with everyone holding their cloud paddle tile (which allows them to change the speed of the river) back for the last round. Going into the second round however, Black and Green conspired to shake things up a notch. After putting a canoe onto the river, Black then moved the cloud from the plus one space it had been left on at the end of first round, to the plus two space. However, Green had also thought this was a bold move and had planned to do the same, but unfortunately, he had to move the cloud and as plus two is the maximum, the only direction to go from plus two was back to plus one. The result was that everyone spent the rest of that round moving five steps forward and four back.

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The highest cards were not enough to get players’ boats off the river and each time they just got dragged back again, with the landing stage forever out of reach. Green tried to “go against the flow” using some lower cards earlier in the round and holding a bigger card for later, but apart from moving around on different river discs, the end result was still the same. Everyone ended up on the same disc a couple of times too, and Lime was unfortunate when he lost one of his boats over the rapids. At the beginning of the third round players got their boats off the river. By this point, Black had managed to collect four different coloured gems and only needed that elusive pink. Green also had four gems, but that included two purple ones. Lime had just two gems as he decided to trade one to get his second canoe back.

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Black tried to inch down the river, sometimes choosing not to move a canoe in order to arrive at that last spot to collect his game winning pink gem. However Lime slowed the river down to minus one, and this left Black’s canoes in the wrong place. In the meantime, Lime also collected another couple of gems and Green managed to pick up another two as well, one purple and one blue. This left Green needing just one gem to win with seven (the fact that a pink would give him one of each did not matter—there is no double win in this game). As the new round began, Green got on the river, collected the final purple gem and there was nothing the others could do to stop him landing it on his next turn. And with that, the paddling was over with Green the victor.

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Although it was not that late, Lime and Green left for their respective homes, leaving Black to watch the final few turns of Libertalia. When that wound up, Ivory headed home and there was still time left for something short. While everyone else discussed the options, Pink went to the bar for a “tot” of Dead Man’s Fingers Rum. In his absence, Bohnanza was eschewed as “not short” and 6 Nimmt! and Coloretto had both been played recently. Saboteur doesn’t play so well with smaller numbers so in the end, the game chosen was Sushi Go!. The first thing to do was to remove the promotional expansions for its big brother Sushi Go Party! (Sukeroku, Inari, Sake and Pickled Ginger; these can be played with the original version but other cards need to be removed), however the Soy Sauce promo cards included as usual.

– Image by Pine

The game is really simple: from their hand of cards, players simultaneously choose one to keep and pass the rest on before repeating until everyone has no cards. At the end of the round the different cards are scored according to their individual characteristics. After three rounds, puddings are evaluated and the winner is the player with the largest total number of points. This time there was a serious shortage of puddings in the first round and Blue seemed to have more than her fair share. It wasn’t clear whether it was because she was overly focused on deserts or whether it was just because she’s rubbish at the game, but her score was lower than everyone else except Pine.

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Pine made up for it in the second and third rounds. In general, consistency is usually the winning factor in Sushi Go!, so Pink should have been in a good position, but both Black and Purple had a couple of really strong rounds, as indeed did Pine. As a result, it was a really close game. Pine was undone by the combination of his poor first round and the fact he was the only one with no puddings and lost six points as a result. In contrast, Blue’s score was boosted by six points as she had a clear majority. It was Purple and Black who were the ones to beat though, as they tied for the lead on thirty points and tied on the pudding tie break as well, so shared victory.

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Learning Outcome: If you are looking for job security, don’t become a pirate.

1st December 2021

It was a relatively quiet night with no Burgundy, Lilac or Teal. However, that was slightly offset by the arrival of Lime who had missed the last few and Beige, who is much cuter in real life than on Teams. The first game of the evening, as Blue and Pink finished their supper, was No Thanks!. A very simple game where players take a card or pay a chip to pass the problem on, it is easy to play when attention is elsewhere.

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At the end of the game, players sum the face value of the cards they collect and the player with the lowest score wins. The clever part is that if players have a run of cards, they only score the lowest, and the fact that some cards are missing encourages players to gamble. This time, Blue “top scored” with a massive sixty-six having tried and failed to make a run out of high scoring cards. Green won with a careful game that gave him thirty points and Pink was took second place, four points behind.

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As people arrived, the group split into two with the one group playing the “Feature Game“, Draftosaurus. This is a very light drafting game, a bit like Sushi Go!, but with dinosaurs (because everyone, especially Beige, likes dinosaurs). We have played this quite a bit, but mostly online over the last year or so, but the tactile wooden dino-meeples add a lot to the experience. The basic idea is that players start with a handful of wooden dinosaurs, pick one to keep and then pass the rest on.

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Players then choose which pen to place the dinosaur in obeying the restrictions the pens have for example, each dinosaur placed in the Meadow of Differences must be different. Players also take it in turns to roll the Placement Die and have to additionally follow the conditions imposed it (e.g placing the dinosaur in an empty pen or a pen that does not contain a Tyrannosaurus rex). The game is played over two rounds and at the end of the game, when all the dino-meeples have been placed, players add up their scores.

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Each pen scores according to its specialism, with players scoring an extra point for each Tyrannosaurus rex they have have. Draftosaurus is a very quick and light game, but is also very enjoyable, and this time the scoring was very tight too with just five pints separating first and last places. Blue just managed to edge it though finishing one point ahead of Pine with Purple and Lime tied in third.

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With five players the options were a little limited, but Pink effectively made the decision as he was keen to play Fabled Fruit, a game we last played two and a half years ago. This is a game he’s very fond of because he likes the cute animal artwork and bright primary colours. It is a light card game, with the unusual feature that the game evolves and changes each time it is played. This “Legacy” style was made popular by Rob Daviau and Matt Leacock with Pandemic Legacy, a game that divided gamers as it required them to destroy components and write over the board, an anathema to people who are accustomed to looking after their games, sometimes to an extreme degree.

– Adapted from image by BGG contributor Muse23PT

Once Pandemic Legacy has been played out, the end product is a personalised copy of Pandemic which embodies the memories of the campaign. This further irritates some gamers because they feel they are left with a comparatively unplayable copy of the game or at least one that is less well be unbalanced and may have design flaws. Fabled Fruit is different from the Legacy games as the changes are not destructive, so the game can be reset and played again from the beginning, in this case by simply sorting the cards.

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The game is quite simple—it starts with six decks of four cards in the central play area and on their turn players move their worker from one pile to another and either carry out the action associated with the cards, or buy a card. Each card has a cost in fruit and, when bought represents a fruit smoothy. When a player buys their third card (in the five player game) they trigger the end of the game and the player with the most smoothies at the end of the round wins.

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The starting decks include simple actions like “take two fruit cards from the deck” and “give one banana to any other player and get two fruits in exchange”. As the game evolves though, the actions become more interesting with the introduction of a fruit card market and more complex interactions. This time Blue got out of the blocks quickest and was the first to three with Pine and Purple tied for second. It was a very enjoyable game and people were just starting to get interested in how the actions were changing and what animal would be introduced next, so the group decided to play it a second time and see what happened.

– Image by boardGOATS

By the second round there was lots of talk about how the some fruit looked like hemorrhoids and from there the conversation deteriorated into a discussion of bum grapes and hairy nuts. This time, Lime was the victor with Pine taking second place. As it was packed away and Pink sorted the cards to reset it, the group lamented the “problem” with “Legacy-type” games. Sadly, they really shine with a small group like a family or household that play together frequently. The problem with a group like boardGOATS is that people play in different groups each time, so it isn’t really possible to work through a campaign properly.

– Image by boardGOATS

With that, Lime took his leave and there was just time for the remaining foursome (plus Beige) to play a quick game of Coloretto. This distills the essence of the, arguably, better known board game, Zooloretto, into a simple yet clever little card game. We’ve all played it a lot, so it needed little introduction: on their turn, players either turn a card and add it to a truck, or take one of the trucks. The aim is to collect sets, but only the three score positively, the others all score negative points with the player with the most winning. This time, Blue picked up a couple of full sets and won by a bit of a landslide with Pink in second.

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, on the next table, Black, Green and Ivory were playing Brass: Birmingham, the Sequel to Brass (Lancashire). It is an economic strategy game that tells the story of competing entrepreneurs in Birmingham during the industrial revolution, 1770-1870. Each round, players take turns according to the turn order track, receiving two action points to perform any of the actions: Build, Network, Develop, Sell, Loan and Scout. The game is played over two halves: the canal era (years 1770-1830) and the rail era (years 1830-1870).

– Image by boardGOATS

The game is quite complex so Ivory’s explanation took a little while. Black had previously read the rules, but Green came in with no prior knowledge, so it was typical that the Start Player application chose Green to go first. He started the first, Canal part of the game building in the North West, while Ivory went for the Midlands and Black the Mid-South. Black and Ivory were soon linking their routes and connected up to the board edge trading towns. Ivory’s experience of the game meant he was first to use it and collect the Beer barrel.

– Image by boardGOATS

Green’s routes remained separate from the other two for a while, and although that gave him relatively uninterrupted growth in the region, he found himself limited to only one trade. Thus he pushed south to join up with the other two. At the halfway point, Ivory was narrowly in the lead over a surprised Green, with Black a few points behind. The board was then cleared and reset. Everyone had managed to build at least a couple of stage two buildings.

– Image by boardGOATS

As the second, Rail part of the game went on it became clear that everyone had switched places. Green was building up in the South East, and Ivory was working in the North and Black even further South. It took much longer to join up the routes so it wasn’t until the very end that players started to build and use resources that others had planned for. By the end of the game and after the final scoring, Ivory had romped away to a comfortable win, with Black leapfrogging Green into a comfortable second place.

– Image by boardGOATS

It had been enjoyable, though it was a bit of a rush at the end as time was pressing. Brass is an unusual game in the way that players can each use the others resources, which is an interesting twist. With many different options to planning, this makes for quite a thinky game which leaves players feeling they can do so much better the next time.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Beige is a lot smaller in real life.

19th August 2021 – “Unofficial boardGOATS”

We’d had such fun at the “Post-Covid Test Event” at the Horse and Jockey and some were so disappointed to have missed it, that we decided to have another, this time “unofficial” meeting at the pub before our formal return. As we chattered away and waited for food to arrive, we told Lime what we’d played last time. He said he was sorry to have missed Sushi Go! as he really enjoyed it, and in a trice, a real, hardcopy of the game was out and cards were being shuffled and dealt. We’ve played Sushi Go! plenty of times both online and in person, but as usual, we had a very quick run-through of the rules.

– Image by boardGOATS

Players start with a hand of seven cards, and choose one to keep, passing the rest on to the player on their left. Players repeat this with the aim of the game being to end up with the set of cards that score the most points. The game is played over three rounds with the player with the highest total winning. The final round was coming to an end when pizza arrived, but we just had time to get to the end. It was close, but Blue made up for her disastrous showing earlier in the week online with a win, just a single point ahead of Pine (who had missed out completely on the previous game).

– Image by boardGOATS

Food was summarily dispatched and Ivory arrived, and after some discussion about what to play and whether to split into two groups, we all settled down together to play the dice-drafting game, Sagrada, with the 5-6 player expansion. This is another game that most of us are reasonably familiar with and we thought it would be a good game to play to help dust some more of the cobwebs off our gaming skills which had proven to be decidedly rusty at the “Test Event”. The base game is quite simple: the starting player draws dice from the bag and players take it in turns to take one and add it to their stained glass window.

– Image by boardGOATS

As well as following the restrictions given on the players’ window cards which specify colours and numbers for some spaces, players must place new dice next to already played dice while avoiding placing dice of the same colour or number in adjacent spaces. Depending on the difficulty of the player’s window card, players get a number of “cheat tokens” which are worth points at the end, or can be spent to use “Tools” to enable players to improve their move dice, change dice numbers and otherwise break the rules. This time the Tools cards drawn at random were the Eglomise Brush, the Copper Foil Burnisher and the Cork-backed Straightedge.

– Image by boardGOATS

The Eglomise Brush and the Copper Foil Burnisher allowed players to move dice ignoring any colour/number restrictions printed on their window card, while the Cork-backed Straightedge allowed players to place their chosen die in a location not adjacent to another die. The Tools are really useful as they allow players to improve their scores. These come from individual goal cards, and shared goal cards drawn at random. This time we drew one objective card rewarding dice of the same colour arranged diagonally and two that scored points for pairs of dice (ones and twos/threes and fours).

– Image by boardGOATS

The 5-6 player expansion, tweaks the rules a little. In the base game, in each round, the draft goes one way and then returns so that the first player gets to choose first and last with the last player taking two dice one after the other (similar to the initial settlement placement in The Settlers of Catan). With large numbers of players this can lead to a lot of down-time, partly because of the sheer number of decisions (which are taken sequentially), but also because there are more dice giving players a larger number of options to consider. To avoid this, players start the game with their own personal dice pool consisting of two of each colour, rolled to give random numbers. Players then take one die from the draft and one from their personal dice pool.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pink began, drawing seven dice from the bag, but we were only a few rounds in when Lime thought he might have dropped one. This queued a mad session of dice counting as well as fond recollections of the time Pine dropped a No Thanks! token between the floor boards which is probably still there. Fortunately, the dice, though small, would not fit through the gap and it turned out nothing had been dropped anyhow. Meanwhile, Blue and Burgundy discussed how to interpret the “diagonals” in the objective card as it was unclear from the rules. We decided to use the generous interpretation and score for each diagonal line, counting dice multiple times, but checking online after proved this incorrect and each diagonally adjacent die of the same colour scores just once.

– Image by boardGOATS

Lime was first to use his cheat tokens, though almost everyone else soon joined him. The exception was Pine who, despite starting with one of the most difficult Window cards, still had all six cheat tokens left at the end. Ivory pointed out that Pink’s window seemed to have a lot of high scoring green dice, making it likely that green was his personal objective and giving him a high score that would be hard to beat. And so it proved, though Ivory scored only one less for his personal, purple objective. Scores for pairs of dice were mostly similar, though Ivory, who started out with a hatful of ones managed to pair these with five twos giving him ten points.

– Image by boardGOATS

In the end, Burgundy and Pink were both close with fifty-six and fifty-eight points, but Ivory was five points clear with sixty-three. Lime had a horrifically early morning so reduced the numbers to five, and giving the mess we’d made with Bohnanza last time, the rest of the group decided to give it another go. This is a fantastic trading game where players first plant beans from their hand, then draw two beans from the deck which can be planted or traded (and planted by the recipient) and finally harvest beans. The key point about the game is that cards in hand must not be rearranged.

– Image by boardGOATS

There are some really clever aspects to the game, for example, because the beans become money, the distribution of beans in the deck changes as the game progresses, but players can manipulate that by choosing when they harvest. Harvesting just before the deck is shuffled means more cards of that sort become available in the next round. With slightly fewer players, this becomes increasingly significant. This time, Burgundy’s shuffling got the blame when Blue started with a handful of green beans and then turned over more.

– Image by boardGOATS

Green beans continued to fall into her lap and punctuated by a full set of garden beans, some black-eyed beans and a small number of others, she harvested significantly more than the fourteen cards available. Pine managed to gather a full set of four cocoa beans, which felt all the more special as they often not in the game because they are removed for many player counts. Pink repeatedly demonstrated how he was unable count, trying to taking four cards to refill his hand each round instead of three. A couple of rounds in, Blue, bought herself a third bean field and nearly underpaid for that too (the cost varies depending on the number of players).

– Image by boardGOATS

As the game came to an end, players tried to maximise their final scores, and then started counting. Twelve was beaten by thirteen, which in turn was beaten by fourteen and then Ivory’s score of fifteen. But Blue was still counting, and counting—the green beans and her third bean field had done their job and she finished with a massive twenty-one. With that, Ivory left leaving four players and just enough time for a quick game of Love Letter, a game that is available online, but we’ve eschewed playing as it loses all it’s fun.

– Image by boardGOATS

One of the most successful of the micro-games, there are just sixteen cards. Each player starts with one card, draws a second from the deck and then plays one. The aim of the game is to end with the highest value card, or be the last player standing when the deck is exhausted. Some cards allow players to assassinate others if they correctly guess what they are holding, or if they compare cards and have the lower value. The game is played until one wins three rounds. Burgundy and Blue took the first and second rounds, before Pink took one round and Blue took another and with it, the lead.

– Image by boardGOATS

Pine had been knocked out of every round and when Pink picked him again he protested that Blue would be a better target. His protests were in vain, however, with Pink correctly suggesting Pine was “The Princess”, he was knocked out once more. Pink’s comment, “Don’t worry, you’ll always be a princess to me,” received a disgruntled, “Eat my tiara!” in reply. When Burgundy eliminated Pink, that gave Blue the last card and she went for the jugular taking what was the final round and with it, the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Anyone can be a princess.

17th August 2021 (Online)

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

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

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

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

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image used with permission
of boardgamephotos

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

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

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

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

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

– Image by boardGOATS
from boardgamearena.com

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

20th July 2021 (Online)

Since last time, there had been quite a bit of debate about returning to the Horse and Jockey, but there was a little hesitancy and with the extremely hot weather, staying at home this week turned out to be the right choice all round. As the decision had been just a little bit last-minute, we chose to keep the “Feature Game” simple and opted for the Skills Mini Expansion for Cartographers. We have played Cartographers several times and everyone has really enjoyed it. With the Spiel des Jahres winners announced this week, this was also the nearest we could get to playing a game to mark the occasion (it received a nomination for the Kennerspiel award last year).

– Image by boardGOATS

Cartographers is a “Roll and Write” type of game, but one with more of a “gamery” feel than most. It is based on Tetris, with shapes revealed on the flip of a card in a similar way to other games we’ve played this year like Second Chance and Patchwork Doodle. However, the thing that makes Cartographers more “gamery” than these is the addition of terrain and players usually have to make a choice, either of the shape or the terrain. The terrains are tied in with goal cards, four of which are revealed at the start of the game. Two goals are then scored at the end of each of the four seasons, in a similar way to another game we like, Isle of Skye.

– Image by boardGOATS

There are lots of other little aspects of the game that make it interesting—the presence of Ruins and Ambush Cards in the deck, for example, deliver a curved ball, just when players feel they are in control. Players can also build their income by surrounding mountain ranges and choosing to play certain shapes; this gives more points at the end of each round. The Skills expansion gives players a way to offset this income for special actions which potentially give players other ways of achieving their goals, further adding to the decision space.

– Image by boardGOATS

One of the most impressive things about Cartographers is the amount of variety that is built into the game, which means every play feels different and the game stays remarkably fresh. So, there are two different player maps and four of each type of goal card. This variety is carried through to the Skills expansion; there are eight cards of which three are chosen at random. This time we chose the B side of the map (with empty “wasteland” spaces marked) and drew the Greenbough, Mages Valley, Wildholds and Borderlands goal cards together with the Search, Negotiate and Concentrate skills cards. These skills cost anything from free (like Search) to three (like Concentrate), and each can be played multiple times per game although only one can be played each Season.

– Image by boardGOATS

We quickly realised that the expensive skills like Concentrate are only likely to be played in the final round, as the cost is in “income” and that income is generated at the end of every round. So, playing Concentrate at the start of the game will ultimately cost a player twelve points, while playing it in the final round will cost three just three points. For this reason, the free Search skill was always likely to be used by almost everyone in almost every season (and so it proved). Of course, the higher tariff reflects the increased power though: Search allows players to increase the size of the shape they are drawing by a single square; Negotiate (which costs one) allows players to draw a two-by-two shape, and Concentrate allows players to draw the shape a second time.

– Image by boardGOATS

As well as the skills which we had not played with before, several of the goal cards were new to us as well, including Greenbough (which rewards gives players one point per row and column with at least one Forest square in it) and Mages Valley (which gave points for each space next to a Mountain—two points for each Lake and one point for each Arable). We’d played with the Wildholds goal before though (which gives six points for each Village of six or more spaces) and, although Borderlands was new to us (which give points for each completed row or column), we’d played The Broken Road goal which is similar (giving points for completed diagonals).

– Image by boardGOATS

The game began much as usual, and Pink, who was watering the tomatoes in the “mini-market-garden”, commented that he could hear Burgundy muttering, sighing and generally sounding stressed from outside. Although we had played with “Wastelands” before, we had all focussed on how the fact some of the spaces were already full would help. We had all forgotten how much the Wastelands obstruct plans and generally make life considerably more difficult. Blue made a bit of using the ruins spaces to give her more flexibility later, but had forgotten that it would reduce the number of spaces she would be able to fill later in the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

It was clear after the first round that Ivory was going to be tough to beat, a feeling that was cemented after the second round. Unusually, Burgundy was the first to post a score, with a total of one hundred and forty-one. Although this was high enough to earn him second though, when Ivory’s score came through he was a massive twenty-five points ahead. Once again, it had been a very enjoyable game, and as we tidied up there was a little bit of chit-chat about the skills and what they added to the game. Since they are not compulsory, the consensus was that we should add them every time, though it was clear that they had been widely used because of the presence of the free Search skill, which everyone had used, and some in every round.

– Image by boardGOATS

With Cartographers over, we had a bit of a discussion about moving back to our much loved and greatly missed, Horse and Jockey. We’d conducted some anonymous surveys over the preceding week to try to gauge opinion trying to ensure that nobody felt under pressure to do anything they weren’t comfortable with. Some of the group had been back on occasional Thursdays, playing old favourites like The Settlers of Catan, Wingspan, and Roll for the Galaxy and new games like Red Rising, Mercado de Lisboa, Ticket to Ride: Amsterdam, Tapestry (with the Plans and Ploys expansion), Ginkgopolis, Everdell, and Draftosaurus (aka “Sushi Go with Dinosaurs”). Others, however, had not been to the pub for nearly eighteen months. After some discussion, we decided that we’d schedule a trial visit in ten days time, so that those who had not been out could see how they felt without committing, and those that went could report back to those that were feeling a little more reticent.

– Image by boardGOATS

After that, we moved onto Board Game Arena. It was a quiet night without both Pine and Lime, and once Green and Ivory had left as well, we were down to five which gave us a lot of options. Coloretto was one, but in the end we chose Niagara, a game we’ve all played quite a bit, but never online, and we were keen to see the new Board Game Arena implementation and whether losing the tactile moving river would leave the game lacking. A strong element of the game is the element of simultaneous play, however, and this was a large part of the appeal this time. Players simultaneously choose a Paddle Tile which dictates how far their canoe will move in the round. Then, in turn order, players move their canoe up or down the river, paying two movement points to pick up a gem from the bank (or drop one off).

– Image by BGG contributor El_Comandante
adapted by boardGOATS

The winner is the player to get four gems of the same colour, five gems of different colours, or any seven gems safely home and into the shallows. On the face of it, this is relatively simple, but the really clever part of the game is the movement of the river. In general, the river moves at the speed of the slowest boat—if the lowest numbered Paddle Tile is a two, then the river moves two spaces and all the boats move with it. However, one of the Paddle Tiles is a weather tile which enables players to increase or decrease the rate to make life harder or easier. Since everyone has to play all their Paddle Tiles before they can recycle them, the timing of their weather tile is critical: players who leave it to the end run the risk of the river running fast and losing boats over the cascade because they can’t do anything about it.

– Image by boardGOATS
from boardgamearena.com

And it wasn’t long before that’s exactly what happened, when both Blue and Black got their timing wrong and lost boats over the falls, so had to pay hard earned gems to get new ones. Then, to add insult to injury, Pink sneakily crept up on Blue and stole another gem from her. Players can only steal if they land on the same space as another boat while travelling upstream, and even then it is a choice. There was much ill feeling especially from Blue, but she wasn’t the only one. And with that, the gloves came off and everyone tried to redress the balance and ensure that such bad behaviour would not go unpunished.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Pink was abreast of that though and had a plan. Knowing his bad behaviour would make him a target he collected gems in one boat letting others take them while he stole the gems he wanted and got them to shore quickly. Much to everyone’s disgust, he soon had five different gems and there was nothing anyone could do to stop him getting them home. Burgundy actually had more gems giving him a nominally higher score, but his set of six did not include five different colours and Blue’s set of five included three nuggets of amber. The victims of Pink’s grand larceny were unimpressed with his terrible behaviour, and as it was getting late, we decided to call it a night.

– Image by boardGOATS
from boardgamearena.com

Learning Outcome: Theft is totally unforgivable.

13th April 2021 (Online)

During the usual chit-chat it became apparent that Pine didn’t have the paperwork for the “Feature Game“, Tiny Towns, or if he did, he couldn’t find it. So after everyone had listened to him rifling through his front room for a bit, Pink popped round with replacements and everyone had everything they needed to start. Tiny Towns is an area and resource management game where players are planning and building a town. Although it has some similar elements, it makes a bit of a change from the many “Roll and Write” games of which we’ve played so many.

– Image by boardGOATS

The idea is very simple: in each round, everyone places a resource cube on one of the sixteen plots on their player board. After placing cubes, players may, if they wish, remove cubes corresponding to a building and place a corresponding building on one of the newly vacated spaces. Functionally, that is all there is to it, but the clever part is the interplay between the different buildings and how players score points. The different buildings all require different resources in different arrangements, and although they give different amounts of points and different conditions, the relationship between the building types is always the same.

– Image by boardGOATS

For example, the Cottage is always included in the mix of buildings, but to score points, a Cottage needs to be “fed” by a red building. In the introductory buildings, this is the Farm, but drawing at random, we ended up with the Greenhouse which feeds all the cottages in a contiguous block. We also had the Shed (which could be built anywhere), the Temple (scored points if adjacent to fed Cottages), the Almshouse (scores increase the more you have, so long as you don’t have an odd number!), the Bakery (scores if adjacent to red or black buildings) and the Trading Post (can be used as any resource for subsequent buildings).

– Image by boardGOATS

As when we played Tiny Towns on previous occasions, we played with the Town Hall variant which works better with more players. With this, instead of players taking it in turns to choose the resources everyone places, cards are revealed for two rounds and players have a free choice for the third round. Part of the reason for playing it again was in preparation for the Fortune expansion in a few weeks. This time though, we added the Monument variant to increase the challenge slightly. In this, players are dealt two special building cards each at the start of the game and choose one to act as a personal, and initially private, goal. Each house-hold had a pack of Monument cards so everyone could deal cards and they could remain secret.

– Image by boardGOATS

With the Greenhouse in play, almost everyone tried to group all their cottages together, but everyone had a slightly different way of doing this and a different approach to using the other buildings. Pink in particular focused on Cottages, but later regretted it, while Black tried to score points for Temples, but found it hard to do this and keep his Cottages in a single group as well. Blue tried to build her monument, the Architects Guild, early, and then use it to create two Trading Posts then use these to build lots of Cottages all snuggled up together. That didn’t work so well.

– Image by boardGOATS

Ivory and Pine on the other hand, built the Archive of the Second Age which gave them one point for each different building type in their town, and both managed five. Burgundy built the Mandras Palace which gave him points for each different building orthogonally adjacent to it, but only managed two, giving him four points. Green went for the same Monument and made better use of it taking the maximum, eight points. Perhaps having a palace in your town makes it a better place, but either way, Green and Burgundy took first and second respectively, with Black completing the podium.

– Image by boardGOATS

Tiny Towns had taken a little while to play and it was getting late, so we moved to Board Game Arena to finish off the night. For a few weeks, we have been saying we should try the some of the new games, so Green had tried a few and suggested we tried Dingo’s Dreams. This is a strange little game where players compete to be the first to successfully guide their animal through the dream world.

– Image from kickstarter.com

Players start with a grid of twenty-five tiles set up at random in a five by five array representing their dreamscape, and one extra tile with their animal depicted on it. Each turn, a card is revealed and players find the tile that matches it and turn it over. They then take their animal tile and slide it in from one edge; the tile that emerges is the tile added the next time round. Players continue until one player succeeds in matching the pattern in their dreamscape to the goal tile.

– Image by boardGOATS from
boardgamearena.com

Unsurprisingly as he was the only one to have played it before, Green won. Unfortunately, nobody else understood how the game worked as the explanation wasn’t as clear as it could have been. That meant nobody really had a clue what was going on and the whole thing felt very random. As a result, everyone was very glad when it was over and keen to move on to one of our favourite games, No Thanks!, which has become an alternative to 6 Nimmt! as our go to game for relaxing fun.

– Image by boardGOATS

No Thanks! is very simple: on their turn, players take the card or pay a chip to pass the problem on to the next player. At the end of the game, the face value of the cards score negatively, offset by any remaining chips. The clever part is that if a player has two or more consecutive cards, only the lowest one is counted, but there are some cards missing from the deck, so there is a strong element of chance. This time, it was a bit of a car crash, with almost everyone ending up with runs with gaps in them. The exception was Green, who managed a six card run from thirty to thirty-five, and offset twenty-one of those negative points with chips giving him a winning score of minus nine.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

With Green having won three out of three games, everyone felt the need for revenge, so we gave it a second go. Green tried the same trick again collecting high value cards, but wasn’t so lucky this time. Purple, however, with the last few cards managed to complete a seven card run, and with the lowest card a twelve, she managed that rarest of things—a positive score and everyone was delighted for her.

– Image by boardGOATS

It was getting quite late, but there was just time for a game of one of our recent discoveries, Draftosaurus. As Pine described it the first time we played, this is basically Sushi Go!, but with dinosaurs. Players start with a handful of dinosaurs, place one in their park and pass the rest on. Dinosaur placement is according to a dice roll which restricts where on their board players can place their dinosaurs on each turn. Otherwise, players score according to how well they have fulfilled the different requirements for the pens.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

This time we played two rounds, first with the Summer board, and then with the Winter board. In the first round, Pine top-scored with a massive forty points, nine points more than anyone else. The Winter board was new to everyone except Pine, but despite that, the scores were very close. Pine still top-scored, but only by a point or so, however, the damage had already been done, and Pine closed the night with the final victory of the evening.

– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com

Learning Outcome: Make sure your Greenhouse is big enough to feed all your Cottages.