Tag Archives: Tuscany

14th June 2022

Pink and Blue were the first to arrive, bringing guests from eastern Europe, Orange and Lemon. Orange and Lemon were new to our sort of board gaming. After an explanation of what mushy peas are, food and some chit chat, others started arriving. The “Feature Game” was the Moor Visitors expansion to Viticulture. Teal had been keen to play the Tuscany board and the plan was to play both together. So when he and Ivory had arrived, they took themselves off to the other side of the room with Pink and started setting up.

– Image by boardGOATS

Viticulture is a worker placement game about planting vines, harvesting grapes and making wine. The idea is that the game is broken into seasons and years, and players take it in turns to place their workers in the various locations on the board to carry out the associated actions Although it is not in and of itself an especially innovative game, it is very polished and smooth, and a joy to play. There are a couple of little elements within the game of note. Firstly, each location can take a limited number of workers dependent on the number of players. To grease the wheels a little though, each player also has a “Grande” worker that they can place anywhere, even in a “full” space.

– Image by boardGOATS

Players start the game with four cards from which they choose two, a mama and a papa and these dictate players’ starting conditions: money, number of workers, buildings and cards. There are four different types of card, Vines, Contracts, and summer and winter Visitors. Players can only plant vines in the summer, and then only if they have sufficient land and any necessary buildings. From there, grapes can be harvested in the autumn and placed in players’ crush pads and thence combined to form wine and stored and aged in their cellar. Wine can then be used to fulfill contracts in exchange for points. Although this is the main source of points, it is not the only one.

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Some of the Visitor cards give special actions that can be used to generate points, as can buildings like the Windmill and the Tasting Room and some of the Visitor cards. At the end of each year, players get their workers back and age their grapes and wines as well as collecting residual payments (income). The Moor Visitors expansion adds extra visitor cards which are just mixed into the deck providing more variety. The Tuscany expansion mixes things up more, by changing the seasons in which the actions occur, particularly adding actions to spring and autumn. It also provides a couple of extra mechanisms, including the “Influence” action, special buildings and specialist workers.

– Image by boardGOATS

This time, there was the initial random draw of the start tokens to “see who’s cock comes out first”, and then the game got under way. Ivory and Teal both trained one of their workers to be “Special Workers”. These act as normal workers, but have a special ability when used in a particular way. Each game, two of these are drawn at random from a deck, and when players train workers, they can make that worker a specialist for an additional fee. The specialisms are open to all players, though each player can only have a maximum of one worker with each skill set.

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The Special Workers this time were the Soldato who bullies other players into paying to use the same action space, and the Sommelier which gives an additional opportunity to age grapes. Ivory went for the military option while Teal selected one of his workers to learn about serving wine. Elsewhere, Pink’s strategy was centered around the use of his Fruit Dealer card from the Moor Visitors expansion. This gave him a point (or money) every time he harvested a specific field. Teal built a Café which allowed him to turn grapes into money or points. Everyone also began with what seems like the accepted strategy of selling off land to gain funds in the early part of the game, buying it back later as required.

– Image by boardGOATS

Ivory made an early move to stake his claim on the influence map, using the Influence action to place his Stars. When placing Star tokens, players get a bonus reward for doing so. In this way, it effectively provides an alternative way to access some “actions” when they are not available on the main board. At the end of the game, the player with the most Stars in each region gets one or two bonus points. After placing all six of their Star tokens, players can still use the Influence action by moving them to swing control of regions (but without gaining the instant reward). As the game progressed, everyone else muscled in on the Influence action too, and by the end of the game, Pink had the edge.

– Image by boardGOATS

It was an extremely tight game. With the Tuscany expansion, the end is triggered when someone passes twenty-five points. This time, everyone was very watchful, determined not to get caught out like last time when an early break by Teal unexpectedly ended the game leaving Ivory and Pink unable to play their big final plays. As a result, everyone finished the game with exactly the same number of points—twenty-six. That meant the advantage Pink had on the Influence map made the difference, leaving him three points ahead of Ivory and Teal who shared second place both finishing with twenty-eight points, in what had been an epic game between three experienced players.

– Image by boardGOATS

While Pink, Ivory and Teal took themselves off to set up Viticulture, everyone else introduced themselves to Orange and Lemon, and gaming was forgotten for the moment. Eventually, this non-Viticulture group separated into two halves, one playing Imhotep while the other (including Orange and Lemon), beginning more slowly, with lighter introductory games. Imhotep is a fun family game that won a nomination for the Spiel des Jahres award in 2016. We’ve played it a few times since then, but like so many games, it had a two year hiatus thanks to the global pandemic.

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In Imhotep, players move large wooden “stone” blocks by boat to build five monuments. The game is quite simple to play: on their turn, the active player can acquire blocks from the quarry, load blocks onto a boat, sail a boat to a monument and add blocks to it, or play an action card. Each monument scores points in different ways, and the player with the most points after six rounds is the winner. The game was new to Lilac and Lime, but they quickly got the hang of it—it is quite easy to learn the functions, but deciding the best way to play is where the challenge comes in.

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Lilac started out making a play for the Obelisks and quickly took a commanding lead there with four stones by the end of the second round, with one each to Black and Lime. Lime decided to go for Statues in the market place, which everyone else ignored and so he too managed to get an early lead in them with three by the end of the second round. Black wanted to get his group of five stones into the Burial Chamber, which Green (who had previously announced that he was thirty-fifth world-wide in the Board Game Arena rankings) had spotted and tried hard, but ultimately unsuccessfully to block. Green managed to get a few larger regions himself in the process though.

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The Pyramids got steadily built, but unusually for Imhotep the Temple was ignored for most of the game. It wasn’t until the sixth round that any stones were placed there. The scores for the Pyramid (and towards the end, the Temple as well), kept everyone close together—there was usually only three or four points from first to last place, with the order changing frequently as the game progressed. Coming to the last couple of rounds, Lilac was challenged by Lime and Black in the Obelisk, but Lime and Lilac (both new to the game), missed the stones in one of the last boats, which Black watched closely.

– Image by boardGOATS

On Black’s turn he moved a two stone boat with only his and Green’s stone to take the lead and give Green a bump from last place to equal third with Lime. Lilac may have lost out in the Obelisk, but she managed to gain a full five stone region in the Burial chamber, plus a couple of other odd stones. Black got his five but no more. Everyone got a final points bonus from a green card, although Black and Lime’s were for the Temple and only scored a single point. Lilac took a big score of seven for the Burial chamber card.

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Green also scored well for the Obelisk (five point) and for the Pyramids (six points), as earlier in the game Lime had shifted a three stone boat to the already filled Pyramid preventing the other players scoring more than a single point each. In the final tally it was very close between Lime and Green, but Green pipped him by a single point, finishing with fifty points to Lime’s forty-nine. The game finished at exactly the same time as the other group finished their second game.

– Image by boardGOATS

Purple and Blue had been introducing Orange and Lemon to some of the group’s favourite filler games. They started out gently with Tsuro, aka “The game of the Path”. This is super quick and simple, with players choosing to play one of the three cards in their hand on their turn, and placing it to extend the path their stone is on. The winner is the last player still on the board, with players eliminated when their stone is unavoidably moved off the board or collides with someone else’s.

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There was a certain amount of people “feeling their way” at the start, but with only four players there’s a lot of space on the board at the start. Players can exploit this and set themselves up with a nice little corner to work in, curating their tiles and avoiding getting themselves into difficulty. That didn’t last long though, and came to an end when everyone wound up sat on the same tile. Purple was the first to go, soon followed by Blue. From there, there was a bit of a head to head, before Lemon “offed” Orange and claimed victory in her first game.

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Imhotep was still going and Viticulture had only just started, so Blue and Purple decided to introduce Orange and Lemon to the tile laying game, NMBR 9. The idea is that players take a random tile and place it in their area—tiles must be joined to the others, and if placed on top of other tiles they must additionally be entirely supported and by two or more tiles. At the end of the game, when two of each tile, numbered zero to nine have been played, the game ends. Players score points for each tile multiplied by the “floor” it is on. Thus ground floor tiles score nothing, but any tiles on the second level (the first floor) will score their face value, and so on for higher levels.

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Although the rules are quite simple, in practice the game is one that can really make your brain hurt. In this sense, it was a significant step up from Tsuro, though still quite a short light game. This time, the tile order did not help players at all with high numbers coming early and at inconvenient times. Players concentrated on building a sound foundation in the hope of better tiles to follow. In the event, this worked better for some than others, and, as a result, it was very close between first and second. Lemon, with seventy-two points ran out the winner once again, just two points ahead of Blue in second place.

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With both groups finished at the same time, there was a lot of chatter, before eventually the groups joined to play something together. Orange had played Saboteur before, and with such a large group, it seemed an obvious game to play. There was a quick reminder of the rules for those who had not played it before or who were new to it. A hidden traitor card game, it is one where there is a lot of banter with players accusing each other left, right and centre. The group is split into two teams—Lovely Dwarves and Evil Saboteurs. The aim of the game for the Dwarves is to find the gold, while the clue is in the name for the Nasty, Evil Saboteurs, who are trying to stop them.

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On their turn, players either play a card, or discard a card. There are two types: tunnels and actions. Tunnels are played in the central area and must extend the existing tunnel network. Action cards are special cards including map cards (which allow players to take a peak at a target card and report back on whether it is gold or not), rockfall cards (which allow players to remove a troublesome tunnel card), and tool cards. This last category is where the fun comes. Players can prevent others from digging tunnels by “breaking” their tools. Mostly this is because they think someone is on the opposite team, but occasionally it is just “because”.

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This time, Lime started by picking on Pine for what turned out to be no very good reason. Pine claimed the gold was in the middle (very early) and five others checked it and concurred. Pine had a lovely “Saboteury” hand, but emphatically claimed he wasn’t. And indeed, he wasn’t which meant Lime had to apologise to him at the end as he’d picked on him throughout. Blue picked on Green—because “He’s always a Saboteur, Right?”—except he wasn’t either. The guilty parties were Lemon, Lilac and Purple, but it was a fairly easy win for the Dwarves for whom Lime brought victory home.

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It had been a lot of fun, so everyone was keen to have another go. After she had been on Team Evil the first time round, Pine perhaps unfairly targetted Lilac who was wholly innocent the second time. The same could not be said of Purple who was a Saboteur twice in a row. After picking on him the first time, Blue had to make peace with Green as they were on the same side in the second game (and not the “right” one either). It is essential for Saboteurs to work well together, and although they did and it was close, it was not quite close enough and Lemon found the gold for the Dwarves. There was time for one last round, and if the second round was close, the final round was even closer.

– Image by boardGOATS

While the Dwarves were worrying about who might be the three Saboteurs, Lime and Black managed to sow the seed of confusion when with Lime claimed that the gold was in the middle and Black agreeing. Later it turned out that this was actually coal and although Lime showed his true colours early, it wasn’t until he was joined by Black that the Dwarves realised they’d been duped. Concerned about the third Saboteur, Blue just managed to find the Gold before they ran out of cards. Lime and Black had done really well as Saboteurs though, especially as it turned out there were only two of them. It had been a lot of fun, but with Viticulture at an end, several people wanting an early night and it now having got quite late, everyone decided to leave it at that.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: It’s never too early to start making enemies.

3rd May 2022

Like the last few games nights, this one started with Pink and Blue playing the deck-shedding game, Abandon All Artichokes. This is a very simple game where players start with a deck of ten artichoke cards from which they draw a hand of five, then, on their turn, they take one card from the face up market, play as many cards as they can, before discarding their hand to their personal discard pile. If, on drawing their new hand of five cards they have no artichokes, the game ends and they win. In the first couple of games a few weeks back, Pink struggled somehow, and Blue won.

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Then Pink got the hang of it, and won several games on the trot, but this time it was Blue’s turn to finally get back on terms, just before supper arrived. They were just finishing when Black and Purple, and then Teal arrived. Although it was still very early, it was a perfect opportunity to play the “Feature Game” as it was Moneybags, a quick little social deduction, filler game. The premise is similar to that of Ca$h ‘n Guns, where players are thieves dividing up the spoils from a robbery, stealing from each other and generally trying to deceive everyone so that they come out on top.

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In Moneybags, one player takes the role of the Godfather, divides the loot “evenly” amongst the players’ small hessian sacks. Holding only the top of their sack, each player takes it in turns to Pass, Stick, or Rob another player. Pass and Stick are simple actions (pass and remain in the game, pass and stick with the total in their sack so they can neither Rob nor be Robbed), but Rob is the interesting one. The active player can Rob any other player that is still “in”, taking some or none of the loot from their sack. The thief mustn’t be too greedy, however, as the victim can challenge—the protagonists compare their loot and the one with the largest stack loses, the winner takes all the loot and the loser is eliminated.

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After two turns round the table, the game ends with the Godfather (or arguably Godmother), taking their second turn. The winner is the player with the most loot. Moneybags can be played over three rounds, though like Saboteur it is probably best when one round is considered “the game” rather than playing in campaign mode. Pink started as the Godfather and divvied up the money. In addition to coins, there is also a Diamond in the loot; this is worth roughly ten coins. When comparing spoils, the coins are stacked with the Diamond placed on top so that the tallest stack loses when Robbed or wins at the end of the game. The Diamond is comparatively light, so it adds a little bit of additional ambiguity to the proceedings.

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Pink, made a point of taking note of where the Diamond went and then stole it back later in the game giving him the first round, slightly ahead of Teal in second. Lime arrived during towards the end of the game, so the rules were explained to him. Then Ivory joined the party so Blue swapped out and gave him a quick summary as well, while Purple, as Godmother, divided up the spoils. With a slightly better idea of how the game played, the second round went even better with more players Robbing and challenging each other. As a result, the Diamond went round the table several times. There was much hilarity as players tried to guess how much cash people had, and Pink showed his age when he commented that someone’s stash “chinked like a bus conductor’s money bag”.

– Image by boardGOATS

Once again, the Godparent finished with the Diamond, but Purple had very little cash to go with it and therefore only made third place. This time the winner was Ivory, in a very, very tight finish, just ahead of Black. It had been a lot of fun and although we could easily have played another round or two, we also wanted to play some longer games. Moneybags fills a similar role to 6 Nimmt! though, so it will get another outing soon. In the meantime, Viticulture (Essential Edition), Roll for the Galaxy, and Brass: Birmingham were all suggested for the next game, but Pink always loves playing Viticulture and Teal has been keen for a while, so Ivory took them off to play that while the others decided what to play.

– Image by boardGOATS

Viticulture is a worker placement game where players plant and harvest grapes, make them into wine and fulfill contracts to get points. The first player to reach twenty points triggers the end of the game, and at the winner is the player with the most points at the end of that round. Although Viticulture is not particularly novel or innovative, it is widely respected as one of the best worker placement games around, succeeding in being both smooth to play and relatively easy to learn, though it takes real skill to be good at it. This time, everyone sold land to fund worker training; although we haven’t done this when we played previously, it would seem to be an accepted tactic in most games now.

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At the start of the game, players get choice of a couple of “Mama” and “Papa” cards (taking one of each)—these give people starting resources, workers, money, Visitor cards or a starting building. Pink took a Trellis from his Mama card which meant he could just plant grapes that needed a Trellis and not worry about building any cultivation infrastructure. The others prioritised money. Playing two worker cards at the same time (using the on-board bonus) was a popular. Though it required care not to overrate the feature and wind up playing some slightly naff workers, when perhaps it might have been better to wait until the next round.

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The grey, extra-worker meeple was also popular, with players seemingly happy to be last in the turn order if that meant they got an extra “turn”. Although everyone had played the game before (though Teal only online), there were some rules that needed “ironing out” as years of playing with the Tuscany expansion meant that Pink had forgotten many of the differences between that and the base game (Tuscany will get an outing as the “Feature Game” in a few weeks). The game was brought to an unexpected (and obviously skillful) conclusion by Teal, who finished the game just before Ivory and Pink had the chance to deploy their big scores.

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On the next table, Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest got a second outing, largely as Black and Lime had missed out last time, but also as Purple and Blue had enjoyed it. This is also a fairly simple game to play, with a lot of depth. Players start with the same hand of Character cards chosen from a larger deck. This provides a lot of variability, while also ensuring that nobody has an advantage caused by random card draw. The cards are numbered from one to forty, each with different actions—some daytime, some dusk, and some nighttime. The idea is that everyone simultaneously chooses a card to play, then the cards are activated in ascending order during the day, descending order at dusk and simultaneously at night.

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Some of the cards can have a huge impact on other players’ games. For example, the Brute causes the highest value card in play to be discarded, which means the player that played that card doesn’t get actions on that round. In addition to night time actions, any players whose characters survive the day, also get to take some loot, if there is enough available of course. Some of the loot is extremely valuable, some of it can be used to assassinate other Characters and and some can be more of a curse than an advantage. As a result, rounds can go well or badly.

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The game is played over three voyages, lasting four, five and six days respectively. At the end of each voyage, players bank their takings and are paid a small amount based on their reputation at the start of the next round, which then acts as their kitty. This time, Blue had an appalling first round. This meant she was some twenty to thirty doubloons behind the others from the start, but also meant that when when others threatened, she was able to point to her lack of funds and how she was “not the threat”. In contrast, Lime took an early lead and therefore attracted a lot of hostility, missing a lot of turns as a result.

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By the start of the final voyage, Blue was still some way behind, but hadn’t given up, Purple was fighting to get to the front, Lime was getting a bit fed up of being picked on and Black knew he was likely to be next in line. It was all to play for, especially as the final voyage is the longest so players have time to plan and work card combinations. Blue managed an amazing final round and nearly made it in what was a very tight finish—she ended just two doubloons behind Lime and Black who tied with eighty-six. Lime could have won outright if he had played his Captain in the final round, but as it was, Black’s Aristocrat left him third on the Reputation track, one place ahead of Lime, giving him victory on the tie-breaker.

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Remarkably, Viticulture had finished first, so after discussing and admiring Roll for the Galaxy and comparing it with Race for the Galaxy (which Teal was more familiar with), the trio squeezed in a quick game of Love Letter. This is a super-quick micro card game played with just sixteen cards that celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. When it was first released it was very innovative, but since has inspired a lot of similar games, it is still great in its own right, as a simple, quick filler though. The idea is players are trying to finish with the highest ranking card, so on their turn, they take a card from the deck adding it to their hand, then play one of their two cards.

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Each card has a rank, but also an action that takes effect when played. For example, these allow players to look at others’ cards, force others to discard their card, or make them compare cards with the lowest being eliminated. The last player standing wins the round, the first to three is the winner of the game. This time, Pink and Ivory got their revenge on Teal for ending Viticulture too soon. Between them, they shared the five rounds, with Pink just taking the balance and with it, victory as Libertalia and the evening as a whole, came to an end.

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Learning Outcome: There’s no such thing as honour amongst thieving gamers.

28th May 2019

While Pink, Blue and Khaki finished their pizzas, the other early arrivals played a quick game of Coloretto. This is a relatively short game of set collecting which is very popular with the group; it was new to Lime though so needed a quick rules explanation. The idea of the game is that on their turn, players can either pick up a chameleon card from the face down deck and add it to a “truck”, or take a truck (passing for the rest of the round). The innovative part of the game is the scoring which uses the triangular number sequence (one point for the first card, three points for two cards, six points for three cards etc.), with positive points for three sets and negative for the rest. Thus, players need large sets in three different colours and small sets in all the rest.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

With five players, it was relatively hard to make trucks particularly unappealing to everyone, so the negative scores were kept to a minimum. It was quite close at the top as a result, with Black, Lime and Mulberry all in the running. Lime finished with the highest score for his sets totalling thirty, with Mulberry a handful of points behind, but Black had four bonus points and no negatives. In the end, Lime pipped Black by a single point with Mulberry just a couple of points behind that.

– Image by BGG contributor SergioMR

With Coloretto over, everyone finished with their supper and the stragglers all arrived, there was the usual discussion over who would play what. The “Feature Game”, Viticulture with the Tuscany expansion, was always likely to take most of the night, so the question was really who was going to play that and what else was on offer. One of the options suggested was Ticket to Ride with the India map, which was described by Pine as an game where you “just pile people on top of the trains and pack the inside with goats!” Clearly none of our GOATS fancied the inside of a hot carriage and the discussion continued as Ivory, Pink and Blue started setting out Viticulture and Mulberry (having spent some time as a oenologist) dragged Khaki along for the ride.

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Viticulture is a worker placement game where players plant and harvest grapes then make and trade wine. Although there is nothing especially innovative about the game itself, it is an exceptionally good example of its type and is considered bit of a modern classic as a result. There are two editions, the original Viticulture, and the “Essential Edition“. We usually play with Essential Edition which includes some of the smaller expansions from the original Tuscany (like the Mama and Papa set up cards), and, as the revised edition, is considered to be the definitive version. In this base game, the actions are split into two seasons, Summer and Winter, with visitor cards arriving in the Autumn and extra cards arriving in the Spring. Visitor cards come in two varieties, yellow Summer and blue Winter cards which are played in the different seasons as a special action.

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The Tuscany expansion messes about with this arrangement with actions in all four seasons, so players have to eke out their meagre supply of workers to last the whole year. In addition to the larger, “expanded” and restructured board, the Tuscany expansion also adds an extra deck of building cards that players can use to create a personal action space or increase the effectiveness of other actions. These can be very powerful if used effectively. Additionally, there is a “influence” board that depicts the regions which players can place “Star-eeples” on to get an instant bonus. If they have the majority in a given region at the end of the game, they also get a small number of bonus points. Finally, Tuscany also adds workers with a special ability, these cost a little more to train, but if used efficiently can more than pay for that over the course of the game.

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The other major difference between Viticulture and Tuscany is that the game tends to start slower, with players building their vineyard getting all the pieces of their engine together. The game is not terribly complicated in terms of taking actions, but planning is tough and as people new to the game, Mulberry and Khaki struggled a bit to get going. Blue, on the other hand, was out of the traps like a rabbit and got vines planted and harvested with remarkable speed, but then promptly stalled as she desperately needed money, more contracts, and more space in her wine cellar. In contrast, Ivory and Pink were slower to get going because they were carefully planning their strategies.

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In the early part of the game, nothing much seemed to happen. Blue’s simple, but fast start, got her well in front, while Khaki began by actually going backwards, sacrificing victory points to try to build up his team of workers. Everything else was pretty quiet though, as Ivory was collecting cards and Mulberry concentrated on building. Pink started with the intention of building an irrigation tower and no trellis (to save money), but that was quickly scuppered when every vine he draw after the first required a visit from “Mrs. Trellis of North Wales“. There were plenty of sarcastic comments from the next table as they felt they were well on the way to finishing, while it looked like nobody had made any positive progress except Blue, despite playing for well over an hour.

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Then suddenly, things began to happen. Pink had sorted out the vine situation, and had purchased a large cellar (to go with the medium cellar he’d started with) which meant he could fulfil some valuable contracts, increasing his residual payments at the end of the round giving him a substantial income in a game where money is always very tight. Then Ivory began his charge for the finish, setting his Wine Press and Guest House to work. He was particularly adept at leveraging his Guest House for points, finding ways to take Visitor cards from other players and turn them into points, and then playing other Visitor cards that enabled him to repeat the action. Mulberry built an Academy that would give her money whenever another player trained a worker, but it was too late in the game as most people had finished training by that point. Khaki’s Fountain was more effective though giving him money every time someone else gave a tour.

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As the game approached the end, the question was whether Blue was going to get over the line before Pink and Ivory, really started raking in the points. With her trained Salesman who enabled her to full-fill two contracts as part of one action, but had proved fairly useless for most of the game, it looked like she might just make it. Pink was coming up fast and screwed up Blue’s plans on the influence board just for good measure. Khaki and Mulberry suddenly started to make real progress as well, with Khaki making a rapid shift from negative points to lots of points over just a couple of turns. It was Ivory though, who stormed ahead, full-filling several orders in the final round as well picking up an extra five bonus points from the influence board. He finished with a grand total of forty points, ten more than Blue in second place who, in turn, was a single point ahead of Pink.

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, the second group were playing Maya, an older game where players are taking part in the construction of pyramids in places like Chichen Itza and Palenque. The game is a combination of semi-blind bidding mechanics, special actions, and building up “influence” by building pyramids in the ancient Mayan civilization. The greater the influence, the more gold players get from the Mayan leaders and the aim of the game is to have the greatest pile of gold. Each player starts with an identical hand of cards, ranging from three to eight, representing workers. Players start by using their worker cards to bid for actions. These actions come with a pile of stones, and this is one of the clever parts of the game – players must have enough workers left to move the stones they win or forfeit some of their prize.

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Players then take turns placing them on the different pyramid locations, placing one stone at a time and starting on the lowest levels. In general, players can only place a single stone per turn, though they can place a second stone if they discard a third stone back into the supply (quarry). When a player completes a level of a pyramid and has the majority of stones on that level, they get a free stone from their supply to place on the next level of that pyramid, thus, clever players can discard a stone to play two, and then receive that discarded stone back immediately to place it higher.

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Once all the stones have been placed, the pyramids are evaluated. Each level of a pyramid is scored separately, and only those in first and second place receive gold. Where there is a tie, all players get the gold as if they had placed first. At the end of the round, the pyramids decay, and all players who scored gold on any level of has to return one block from that level back to the supply. If this leaves a player with no blocks on a level, all of that player’s stones on higher levels also go back to the supply. The game ends after three rounds.

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Everyone started off building in Tikal, while Pine and Lime developed Copan and Black and Purple struggled in Uxmal. Palenque was all but ignored by everyone except Purple until the last round when everyone joined her because they were unable to build in the other areas. It was a very tight game and the nature of it meant nobody knew who was wining until the totals had been calculated. There was just six points between first and last, but it was Pine who came out on top this time, one point ahead of Lime who took second place.

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Viticulture was still going on, so after enjoying a bit of heckling about how the scoreboard hadn’t changed, the group decided to re-visit Bohnanza, this time with an English deck, to reduce Lime’s confusion. This is one of our most played games, with almost everyone very familiar with it. The key part of the game is that players must plant their bean cards in the order they receive them. The only way this fundamental rule can be violated is by trading bean cards with other players. As everyone knows the game so well, it is often very tight with frequent multi-player ties. This time it was also very close, but there was more spread than there often is. On this occasion, the tie was for first place, and it was Black and Pine who finished top with a total of twenty.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: Sometimes slow and steady wins the race.