Tag Archives: Taluva

29th May 2018

Two of our more sporadic members arrived early and were keen to get as many games played as possible, so the first game was squeezed in between ordering food and its arrival. As something quick was required and Turquoise hadn’t played it before, NMBR 9 was the perfect choice. A quick rules explanation was necessary, but there isn’t much to explain so it didn’t take long: one player turns over the card deck, one at a time and everyone takes the indicated card and adds it to their tableau, ensuring that the edge touches one of the other tiles. Once a few tiles have been placed to form a base layer, then tiles can be placed on top of other tiles as long as there are no overhanging parts, and the tile sits squarely on more than one other tile; the higher the tiles are placed the more they score. It was a tight game, well, tight between three players, but Pink romped away with it, twenty points clear, thanks to building one more level than everyone else.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

Food was a little delayed, so there was time for another short game, this time an old favourite, 6 Nimmt!. This is a game that gives players the illusion of control while everything is going well, and then shatters that illusion when it all goes wrong. It is one of those games that is more difficult to explain than to play, but essentially players simultaneously choose a card from their hand, then simultaneously, everyone reveals their card. Beginning with the lowest, each card is added in turn to the end of one of the four rows of cards on the table. If a card is the sixth to be placed in a row, the first five are “won” and the card becomes a new starting card. The player with the fewest “nimmts” is the winner, though almost as much kudos goes to the person for whom the game goes most wrong and ends up with the most “nimmts”. As usual, we played two rounds, and Magenta won the first with a duck, while Purple top-scored with twenty-six. Purple picked up more “nimmts” than anyone else in the second round too and bravely took the wooden spoon, but the winner is the lowest over two rounds, and when Magenta picked up thirteen in the second round, she left the door open for Turquoise who finished with a very creditable total of six.

– Image by boardGOATS

While Pink, Blue, Magenta and Turquoise munched their pizzas, and Burgundy was attacked his ham, egg and chips, there was just time for those not eating to play a quick game of Love Letter. This game is very, very simple and can be as long or as short as necessary, in fact we hardly ever actually play it to the bitter end (three wins for one person). Players start with a one card in hand and, on their turn draw a second, then choose which to play. Each card has a special action and the aim of the game is to be the last player remaining or, in the case of more than one player left standing, to finish with the highest value card. The first round went to Ivory came out on top, but in the second, Green made a lucky guess and knocked out Ivory in the first turn. Then Green lost on a comparison, leaving Black and Purple to battle it out to the last card, with Purple the victor. The third (and as it turned out, final) round ended up in a very unusual situation of being a tie between Green and Purple who both had the same high card. While checking the rules, Blue shouted across that the winner was the one who had the highest total in front of them, which gave victory to Green. With one-a-piece (except for Black) it was declared a three-way tie, though Purple was able to claim a moral victory with one win and a lost tie-break.

– Image by boardGOATS

Burgundy was still wading through his ham, egg and chips, but everyone else was finished, so it was time to negotiate who was going to play the “Feature Game”. This was to be Taluva, a game we’ve played before, but this time it was to include the Extension. The base game is a fairly simple tile laying game with a surprising amount of depth. The idea is that on their turn, players place their tile, then place a building then replenish their hand. This procedure is to that of Carcassonne, but that is where the comparison ends. The tiles are a strange dodecagon made of three hexagonal regions or fields, one of which is always a volcano. When placing tiles, they can be adjacent or on top of other tiles so long as the volcano sits on top of another volcano (the tile must also cover more than one tile and there cannot be an overhang). Buildings can be placed anywhere, provided that they obeys certain rules. Unfortunately, although the game is beautiful, the theme is a bit sparse making these rules appear very arbitrary which has the consequence that they are quite difficult to remember.

– Image by boardGOATS

A hut can be built on any unoccupied level one terrain that isn’t a volcano. On the other hand, an existing settlement can be expanded by placing huts on all adjacent terrains of one type, with more huts placed on the higher levels (two on the level two etc.). There are also three temples and two towers to place which can only be added to existing settlements: temples must be added to settlements covering at least three fields, while towers must be placed on a level three field adjacent to a settlement of any size. The game ends when there are no tiles left and the winner is the player to have placed the most temples at the end of the game. In case of a tie, the number of towers built counts and then the number of huts. However, if a player succeeds in building all buildings from two out of the three different types before the game end, then he immediately wins the game. On the other hand, any player who squanders his building pieces and is unable to build any more is immediately eliminated.

– Image by boardGOATS

Adding the Extension adds four optional modules: pieces for a fifth player; two ships per player; a small number of double-hex tiles (rather than triple-hex tiles), and a board that provides a boundary for the building area. We added all four modules, though we used the largest boundary area so it had only a small impact on the game. The double-hex tiles are laid out face up and each player can only use one during the game, but as all tiles must be used unless a player checks-out early, the decision when to take play one can be quite important as nobody wants to be left with a tile they can’t use effectively. Perhaps the most interesting module, though, is the ships. These are played on “lagoons”, but critically, there is a limit of one ship per lagoon, and the ships do not connect other areas.

– Image by boardGOATS

From the very start, everyone seemed to get carried away with the idea of trying to build lagoons and place their ships. Everyone that is except Burgundy, who got his first settlement illegally removed by Blue and spent most of the rest of the game trying to catch up. Meanwhile, Pink stalled as his computer overheated, trying to come up with a strategy to compete with Ivory’s ever-growing empire. It quickly became apparent that it would require everyone else cooperating to bring it down. Burgundy and Blue tried to hatch a plan, but Black couldn’t see a way to prevent Ivory placing his last ship, and wasn’t prepared to spend as long thinking about things as Pink. And with that, Ivory brought the game to an end; definitely far more “thinky” than such a simple little game really had a right to be.

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, those who did not want to play long or heavy games chose a light game of Best Tree House, an easy game to learn (or so we thought). This is a fairly simple little card drafting game, but with the rules in German, it was down to Purple to try and remember how to play it and Magenta to attempt some translation. Players start with a hand of six room cards, and simultaneously choose one to add to their tree, passing the rest of their hand on to their neighbour. There are some rules about building: firstly, treehouses must be built in such a way that each new level has one more card than the last (giving the tree its shape). Each card represents a type of room and these are colour-coded to one of six colours. When a player is adding a card of a colour they don’t have in their treehouse yet, it can go anywhere, but if a player is placing a colour that already exists in their treehouse, it must connect to at least one card of matching colour. In this way players have to consider their card placements over the course of the game and try to avoid locking themselves out of options as play develops. The clever part is the Balance Marker which limits the placement options. It has three positions and when it is not central, the player cannot build on that side of their treehouse, indeed, they have to build to the other side of center in order to move their Balance Marker back to open up their placement options again.

– Image used with permission of
nonsensicalgamers.com

At the end of each round, players score their treehouse based on the trophies on display. We stumbled through the first game not entirely sure who should chose the scoring alteration cards after each round. It wasn’t till the end of the game, when Black had found a copy of the English rules online for us that we realised we had made a few mistakes in the way we played. Some of us had also re-used a colour that should not have been used as it had already been blocked by other rooms. Although the game was a tie between Purple and Turquoise on thirty-four each, we felt we had made such a mess of it that we needed to try again, but properly this time—it was only a short game after all. The second time round, the game made more sense and everyone made better choices. The choosing of the score alteration cards was certainly trickier this time, but that felt more like a game challenge. This time the victory went to Magenta, but everyone felt better after the second try and the game seemed a lot fairer too.

– Image used with permission of nonsensicalgamers.com

Although time was getting on, it still wasn’t that late, and the “Feature Game” looked like it might be drawing to a close soon, therefore we picked another short one, Dodekka. This is a simple little push-your-luck card game, with five different suits, Fire, Earth, Air, Water or Ether each with cards numbered 0-4. The game starts with three random cards placed in a line from the draw deck. On a player’s turn they can either take a card from the deck and add it to the end of the row of cards, or take the card nearest the deck. If the total of the face values of the cards in the row exceeds twelve, then the player has to take the whole row. At the end of the game, players choose a scoring suit and add up the face value for that colour, then they subtract the penalty points – one for every card not in their scoring suit. Purple and Green are old hands at this one, but Turquoise and Magenta had not played it before. Green made a good show of demonstrating how not to play this game as he managed to collect a vast array of cards of all colours. His positive score was not bad, but he had a shockingly high negative score giving an overall minus one.

– Image by boardGOATS

It was much closer between the other three. Turquoise got to grips with the idea quite quickly and managed to amass a high positive score of 16, but ended up with a few too many other colours. In a game that is often won with a score of two or three, her score of nine was excellent and remarkably tied with Purple who scored. Eclipsing them both, however, was Magenta, who scored positive thirteen like Purple, but amazingly had avoided the traps and ended up with only two other cards to give an unheard-of total score of eleven. By this time, Taluva had finished, and that group had moved onto another quick game that we’ve not played for a while, The Game. This was played with the blue cards from The Game: Extreme, but we just ignored the additional extra icons. In this game, players must try to cooperatively play every card from the deck (numbered two to ninety-nine) onto four piles. On their turn, the active player must play two cards from their hand on any of the four piles: for two of the card must be of higher value than the current top card, while for the other two it must must be of lower value.

– Image by boardGOATS

Players can discuss anything they like so long as nobody discloses any specific number information and they can play as many cards as they like on their turn so long as they play at least two (until the deck has been depleted, after which they must play one). To help eveyone out, there is also the so called “Backwards Rule” which allows players to push a pile back so long as the difference between the card they are playing and the card they are covering is exactly ten. Once the active player has played their cards, they replenish the missing cards. The game ends when all cards have been played or the active player is unable to play a card. This time, a lot of players started with mid-range cards, but once those had been cleared, things progressed quite satisfactorily. Inevitably, when Burgundy was forced to trash a pile, things began to go wrong, but once he’d played all his cards, with a bit of careful organisation all of a sudden it looked possible, and indeed, as Ivory played his last cards, a four and a three, we beat The Game for the first time in a very long while.

– Image by boardGOATS

While all this excitement was going on, Green had left for an early night and the last three decided to give NMBR 9 another go. This time, all three players only managed two scoring layers, and, as a result, there was just one point between second and third. It was Turquoise, however, who had really got a handle on the game this time though, and finished more than ten points ahead of the others with a creditable score of sixty-four. There was still time left for something shortish, and with six people there wasn’t an awful lot to choose from, so in the end, we went for an old favourite, Bohnanza, also known as “The Bean Game”. Because most people have played this a lot, in general, it was only a few minor points that really needed clarifying though reminders are always helpful: hands must NOT be rearranged; active players MUST play the first card from hand and may play the second; the two cards turned over from the deck must be planted before any other trading can be done; fields with only one bean in them cannot be harvested unless all fields only have one bean in them; draw FOUR cards at the end of players turns, and third bean fields cost only TWO coins…

– Image by boardGOATS

The game was very close. Purple was clearly doing well with lots of lucrative Soy beans, while Black-eye beans were unusually popular. Black was stuck with a precession of coffee and wax beans, while Blue kept digging up stuff just before she acquired more of them. Burgundy kept complaining that he had a very small pile, but by the end it looked just as healthy as anyone else’s. Blue bought herself a third bean field at her first opportunity, and, controversially, Ivory followed about two thirds of the way through the second round. This drew lots of surprised gasps and sucking of teeth, as the received wisdom is that with large numbers of players, the extra field is rarely worth it. It was impossible to tell whether Ivory would have done better without it, but it was a game of small margins. In the end, it was a tie, with Blue and Purple both finishing with thirteen points, largely thanks to a very dodgy trade on the final turn.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor spearjr

Learning Outcome: Great games can come from a simple rule set.

10th February 2015

Getting into the mood for Saturday (St. Valentine’s Day), we started out with just a couple of quick hands of the old favourite, Love Letter. Blue took the first hand and Grey the second, however, we were still expecting a few more, so we decided to play another quick game and after a little discussion, we went for Coup.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

This is a light little card game with a lot of similarities to Mascarade, which we played last time: on their turn, players declare they are going to take an action and other players can either claim they are a specific character and counter or challenge the active player to prove that they are who they say they are. Basically, the actions are either: take money in various different amounts (with different risks); spend money to assassinate or perform a coup, or trade a card with the deck. Players have two character cards face down in front of them, and when challenged correctly or assassinated/subjected to a coup, they turn one face up. When both of a player’s cards are face up, they are out; the winner is the last man standing.

– Image by BGG contributor jerome75

Unfortunately, Blue, who had played it quite a bit in the past got horribly muddled with the rules, largely due to the similarity between this and Mascarade, so consequently, forgot a small but quite critical rule: when a challenge is made and the challenge is unsuccessful, the player should exchange their card with one from the deck. Although this obviously had an impact, since everyone was playing by the same rules, it wasn’t too drastic.

– Image used with permission of BGG reviewer EndersGame

Before long, Cerise and Grey were outed as Dukes and Indigo was claiming to be a Captain and was stealing from Cerise. “Burgundy the Brave” kept challenging, but unfortunately was wrong more than right and was soon out of the game. When Cerise claimed to be the yet another Duke nobody believed her. Meanwhile, Indigo was building up quite a store of cash, so Green decided it was imperative that her money supply should be cut off and assassinated Cerise proving that she had been holding two Dukes at the start. Green’s unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Blue (who was the Contessa) left just Indigo, Grey and Blue in the game. Indigo’s successful coup was rewarded by a prompt assassination of her final character by Blue, leaving just Blue and Grey. Grey, as a captain was trying to collect enough money for a coup, while Blue needed just one more coin for the assassination. So, Blue kept taking two coins in Foreign Aid and Grey immediately stole them. It looked like Grey had it, but since Blue still had two character cards, that gave her an extra chance to collect money the game ended when she mercilessly stabbed Grey’s captain in the back.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor nad24
and nonsensicalgamers.com

We then split into two groups with the first playing the “Feature Game”, Takenoko. The back-story for this game is that a long time ago, the Chinese Emperor offered a giant panda bear as a symbol of peace to the Japanese Emperor. Since then, the Japanese Emperor has entrusted the members of his court (the players) with the difficult task of caring for the animal by tending to his bamboo garden. So the players have to cultivate the different plots of land, irrigate them and grow one of the three species of bamboo (Green, Yellow and Pink) with the help of the Imperial Gardener. The winner is the player who grows the most bamboo, managing his land plots best while feeding the Panda.

– Image by BGG contributor woodenbricks

The play area starts with one single hexagonal “pond” tile with two characters on top: the Imperial Gardener and the Panda. On their turns players first determine the weather, then perform their actions. The weather is determined by a roll of the weather die, which give the active player some sort of bonus. For example, when the sun shines, the payer gets an extra action, and rain stimulates the bamboo of their choice to grow.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Oceluna

Once the weather has been determined, the player can perform two actions. These must be different and the player can choose freely from the five available. Firstly, the player can add a new bamboo plot, by drawing three hexagonal tiles from the face down stack and choosing one to place. This tile must be placed next to the starting “pond” tile or adjacent to two plots already in play. There are also “improvements” which are sometimes built into the plot, but can also be obtained by rolling the weather die and can be played at any time. The second option is to take an irrigation channel. These can be played straight away or stored for later use, but bamboo only grows on irrigated plots. The main way to irrigate a plot is by connecting them to the pond via channels.

– Image by BGG contributor woodenbricks

Alternatively, a player can move one of the characters, either the Imperial Gardener or the Panda. Both move over any number of plots, in a straight line, but when they reach their destination, their action is different. The Panda cannot resist bamboo, so will eat one segment of bamboo from the plot he lands on (the pieces are stored on the player’s individual board); the Imperial Gardener encourages the bamboo to grow, and the bamboo on the plot he lands on grows by one segment as does every adjacent tile growing bamboo of the same colour (as long as they are irrigated).

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor lacxox

Finally, the active player can draw an objective card and add it to their hand; there is a hand-limit of five and these are the only way to score points. There are three types of objectives, those related to Plots, the Gardener and the Panda. Plot objective cards yield points to players when certain plot configurations are irrigated; Gardener cards are achieved when bamboo of given height are grown in the right spaces and points for Panda cards are awarded when a player has managed to encourage the Panda to eat the requisite number of coloured bamboo segments.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor ObeyMyBrain

When a player completes one of their objectives, they show everyone and the card is placed face up in front of them. They can complete as many objectives as they like on their turn and end of the game is triggered when one player full-fills a set number of objectives, after which, everyone gets one last turn. The game was really tight from start to finish and every time one player got a nose in front, the others seemed to catch up and over-take, only to be leap-frogged themselves. The game finished with just three points separating first and last place, with Burgundy just pipping Indigo.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

While half the group were Playing with Pandas, Green persuaded everyone else to give Lancaster another go. This is a longer game which embodies a few very clever ideas and that we played for the first time a few weeks ago. The basics of the game are that players take it in turns to place their knights in the shires, in their castle or send them off to war. They then vote on and evaluate “the Laws” which give players a benefit. They then get their their rewards for knight placement. After five rounds, the player with the most points wins.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor kilroy_locke

One of the clever things about the knight placement is the way that players can usurp a knight that has already been placed, by supplementing him with a number of squires. So, a knight of level two can be replaced by a night of level one with two squires. However, squires are “single use”, so should the original player decide to respond with a level four knight, the other player’s squires are lost. This is a very clever way of speeding up the bidding. For example, in Keyflower, two players can keep bidding in increments of one which means it may take several turns for the outcome to be resolved. In Lancaster, a failed bid that is repeated at a higher level may turn out to be considerably more costly than bidding higher the first time round. This encourages players to be a smarter about their bidding and changes the dynamics a little too.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

One of the key parts of Lancaster is “the Laws” and managing them. On our previous play, we didn’t really get to grips with them at all. Although it is now clear to us how important they are, we are still only just getting to grips with them. The game starts with a set of three Laws, with three to be voted on during the round. Since there is a conveyor-belt system, it is possible that some Laws will remain in place for several rounds. This means even if a particular Law does not reward a player during the round it becomes active, they may benefit in subsequent rounds.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor kilroy_locke

This game was quite different to the last: firstly, as a group, we had a better idea of rules, and secondly, there were only three of us compared with five before. Blue was too busy worrying about the game on the next table to concentrate on the rule-reminder, and paid for it in the first round when her plan relied on the rewards coming before the Laws. Green tried to increase his force and then generate benefits by fighting the French, however, with fewer players, it is much more difficult to win the battles which means your knights are tied up for a lot longer. Having screwed up the first round, Blue didn’t bother trying to increase all her knights to full force and tried to be a bit more canny about how she used them instead and pick up upgrades by other means. Meanwhile, Grey, who had not played the game before, tried to build up his stack of noblemen and played the laws. Blue and Green were far too bothered with their own games to notice, but Grey managed to get the eight point Law for having three knights in the shires voted in. More importantly, he managed to keep it there, and this combined with a respectable number of nobles and a few uncontested visits to Somerset (giving him six victory points each time) eventually gave him the game by a sizeable margin from Blue.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

Meanwhile, the Panda Players had finished so Burgundy and Cerise squeezed in a quick two player game of Coloretto. Cerise and Burgundy had played this last month with Blue and Indigo, but it is not generally thought of as a good two player game. Nevertheless, they gave it a go and found it much more enjoyable than expected.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Bizowikc

With Grey and Cerise’s departure, that left just time for one last, shortish game, Taluva. This is a fairly simple tile laying game with a surprising amount of depth. The idea is that on their turn, players place their tile, then place a building then replenish their hand. This procedure is to that of Carcassonne, but that is where the comparison ends. The tiles are a strange dodecagon made of three hexagonal regions or fields, one of which is always a volcano. When placing tiles, they can be adjacent or on top of other tiles so long as the volcano sits on top of another volcano (the tile must also cover more than one tile and there cannot be an overhang).

– Image by BGG contributor Purple

Buildings can be placed anywhere, provided that they obeys certain rules. Unfortunately, although the game is beautiful, the theme is a bit sparse making these rules appear very arbitrary which has the consequence that they are quite difficult to remember. A hut can be built on any unoccupied level one terrain that isn’t a volcano. On the other hand, an existing settlement can be expanded by placing huts on all adjacent terrains of one type, with more huts placed on the higher levels (two on the level two etc.). There are also three temples and two towers to place which can only be added to existing settlements: temples must be added to settlements covering at least three fields, while towers must be placed on a level three field adjacent to a settlement of any size.

– Image by BGG contributor Moviebuffs

The game ends when there are no tiles left and the winner is the player to have placed the most temples at the end of the game. In case of a tie, the number of towers built counts and then the number of huts. However, if a player succeeds in building all buildings from
two out of the three different types before the game end, then he immediately wins the game. On the other hand, any player who squanders his building pieces and is unable to build any more is immediately eliminated.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

We played this a while ago as a two player game, so it was interesting to see how it played with more. As last time, we had a thorough going through of the rules with all the weird exceptions and special cases (e.g. players cannot build a temple in a settlement that already has one, however, it is OK to join two settlements with temples together; you can place a tile on top of huts, but not towers or temples etc.). The game was very close and it looked like Blue was going to make it, however, Green and Burgundy ganged up on her and Green managed to sneak the win with the last tile.

– Image by BGG contributor Moviebuffs

Learning Outcome: Two three-player games are sometimes better than one six-player game.

9th September 2014

It was a very quiet night possibly exacerbated by the closure of the A417, which impeded everyone who comes from the south.

We started out with a filler game called Taluva. This is really a thinly veiled abstract, but is very pretty for all that. On the face of it, it has a lot in common with Carcassone: players take it in turns to play tiles and then place a meeple. However, the tiles are twelve sided and comprise three hexagonal regions or fields, one of which is always a volcano. When placing tiles, they can be adjacent or on top of other tiles so long as the volcano sits on top of another volcano (the tile must also cover more than one tile and there cannot be an overhang).

The meeples are the real difference though: in this game, they represent buildings rather than characters, and the rules for placing them are a bit arbitrary. Players can place their building anywhere (buildings do not need to be put on the tile they’ve just placed), but the type of building dictates where you can put it and how many you can place. Thus, a single “hut” can be placed on any level one field (excluding volcanoes) to form a settlement, that is to say, the hut cannot be placed on a tile that sits on other tiles. On the other hand, an existing settlement can be expanded by adding huts to all adjacent fields of the same type, but in this case, the number of huts added depends on the level. So, a level two field (i.e. one that sits on top of one other tile) would get two huts and a level three field (one that sits on top of two other tiles) would get three.

Each player also has three temples and two towers to place, and these must be placed adjacent to settlement containing at least three huts (and no other temples) and on a level three tile in a settlement of any size respectively. The game ends when all players but one are eliminated because they are unable to place a building, or when one player wins by exhausting two of their type of building or when there are no tiles left. In the last case, the winner is the one who placed the most temples, then the most towers and finally the most huts.

We started at a leisurely pace before Blue remembered that we should have started with a subset of tiles and then it all became a little more frenetic. Having played it a few times before, Blue should have had the edge over Green, however it is one of those games that Blue has a bit of a blind spot for. So although Green felt he was stymied at every turn, he was only ever one or two tiles from taking the lead. The game finished with Blue and green level on towers and temples, but Blue had placed more huts, so just kept her nose in front. We concluded that we liked it, though there was nothing in the theme to assist remembering the rules. We also thought is would play very differently with more players.

After much debate (which ended in rolling the dice) we decided to play our “Feature Game”, Darjeeling. This is a game about collecting and shipping crates of tea. Each player has a tea-collector meeple which moves around an array of tiles, picking up tea. When they have a set of complete tea chests, they can choose to ship them. Bonuses are awarded for shipping larger loads and for shipping the type of tea that is in the greatest demand and the game ends when a player gets to a hundred points. The demand indicator is very clever – it consists of a double set of wooden disks lined up on a sloping track: when a tea is shipped the corresponding coloured disk is moved from the bottom to the top and the bonus is awarded according to the number of discs between the two discs of the same colour. So, if there are two discs of the same colour at the top of at the ramp, shipping that colour will give no bonus. As other teas are shipped, however, these two discs will gradually move down the ramp together until they are at the bottom when they will give the maximum bonus possible.

The other clever part of the game is the scoring for shipping: points are awarded at the beginning of a players round according to the number of crates still on ships multiplied by their position in the boat-stack. When crates are shipped, they go onto a boat at at the top of the boat-stack, so a boat still at the top of the boat-stack at the start of a players turn will score points equivallent to three times the number of crates on the boat. When Purple, Black, Blue, Green and Pink played this game a while ago and Green managed to ship six crates and unfortunately nobody was able to ship anything for at least two rounds which meant for a while Green scored eighteen points every time at the start of each of his turn and consequently gave the rest of us a bit of a hiding. There was no way Blue was going to let that happen again…

Blue started, but Green was the first to ship with four crates. Blue followed immediately with four of her own. Since Green had just shipped, he was not in a position to ship again for a couple of rounds and as soon as he did, Blue shipped again straight away knocking Green off the top spot. Blue persisted with this strategy for several rounds, shipping immediately after Green even if the timing was suboptimal for her, but preventing Green from building up a commanding lead. In fact, before long, Blue was building a sizable lead of her own and it wasn’t long before she passed one hundred points, bringing the game to a close. A couple of poor final moves meant the score was closer than it should have been, but Blue ran out the clear winner.

We were a bit tired, so we finished off with a game we’ve played before, but haven’t played for a while, Citadels. The idea of this game is that players are trying to build a city and the game ends when the first player builds their eighth building. To do this, players choose character cards and then each character is called in the prearranged order. Thus, when the late characters are played, the situation may have changed significantly from when they were originally chosen. On a character’s turn, the active player first takes money or cards, and then (if they can) they build one of the building cards from their hand. There are bonuses available for players who get one of each building colour, the player who gets to eight buildings first (triggering the end of the game) and any others who finish the game with eight or more buildings.

With so few players, we included the Witch and the Wizard from the The Dark City expansion. Blue started quickly and built a valuable purple building, while Green started with cheaper buildings collecting a range of colours. Blue then built a very cheap red building which Green promptly destroyed using the Warlord. As the game came to a close, Green had a building of every colour while Blue had more buildings but was missing red and no matter what she did, could not replace the one that got zapped. Blue finished first with another high scoring purple building and Green finished with the Architect building two buildings to bring him up to eight. Blue’s valuable buildings and the extras for finishing first offset the bonus points Green picked up for a full set of colours and all eight buildings. So the game ended thirty-three all.

Learning Outcome: Sometimes games play very differently with the minimum number and maximum number of players possible.