Board games have long been a tradition in Germany, as has naturism, but a recent report in The Independent suggests that in rural Lincolnshire they have taken to combining the two German traditions. NakedLincolnshire organise “Social Nudity, Naturism and Clothes Optional Events”, and one of their recent events, attended by Colin Drury, was a games night in the Hemswell and Harpswell Village Hall. The report suggests they played Chess, UNO, Snakes and Ladders, Scrabble and other family-friendly fayre, so perhaps someone might like to go along to their next event introduce them to some more modern games?
Last time, we had decided to have a “test visit” to The Jockey, with the hope that we’d be back this week. Sadly, since then, the pub has been closed, so we were online for another week. Lime, Pine, Black and Purple were the first to join the meeting, quickly followed by Burgundy, then everyone else eventually joined the chatter. We had hoped to mark The Games of the XXXII Olympiad in Tokyo and our return to The Jockey by playing Ticket to Ride with the Japanese map. However, circumstances meant that this was the third unsuccessful attempt to play that game. So instead, this week, the “Feature Game” was the Ishikawa map for MetroX.
– Image by boardGOATS
MetroX is a simple little “Roll and Write” type game that seems easy at first, but is difficult to play well. The game is driven by a deck of number cards, where the simple ones dictate how many sections can be marked on a route: Players fill the boxes along the lines with “zeros”, with the number on the card dictating the number of boxes filled. In general, if the line comes to an end, or some of the boxes had already been filled (because they were part of another line for example), then any excess are lost. So the game is all about efficiency, as there is a limit to the number of cards that can be used on each line (as shown by the indicator boxes at the start of each one).
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There are a small number of special cards as well, which break the rules. For example, there are number cards with a circle, which allow players to skip any filled spaces and and help avoid wastage. There are also special “star” cards, which allow players to fill a box with a number equal to the number of tracks passing through the space—this number contributes to the player’s final score. There is also a “free” card which allows players to fill in a single space anywhere on the map. Cards are turned until all the indicator boxes on the map have been filled or until the six is drawn, in which case, the deck is shuffled and drawing (both of cards and routes) continues.
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Points come from the “star” bonuses, but also from line completion bonuses. These are scored similar to the rows and columns in Noch Mal! or the bonuses in Welcome To…, where the first player to complete a line scores a higher amount than those who complete it later in the game. This is off-set with a negative score for the number of unfilled boxes at the end of the game. This time we were playing with the Ishikawa promo map, which is remarkably simple, however, the fact there are very few indicator boxes not only makes it a very short game but also leaves very little room for manoeuvre. With only eleven rounds (plus any free cards) we were all worried that if we didn’t get a six we might struggle to complete lines. That concern turned out to be baseless, however, with every line being completed by someone during the game.
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Green’s mind was clearly elsewhere as he missed a number and spent a couple of minutes trying to work out what he’d done and then asked for clarifications on the negative scoring. For reasons that weren’t entirely clear, everyone struggled to calculate their scores, with a long delay before scores came in, and with a large number of corrections. Ivory led the scores with nineteen points. After a brief spell in second behind Pink and Purple, a couple of recounts later it was confirmed as a four-way tie between Ivory, Pink, Burgundy and Purple all with nineteen. So, following the example of the high jumpers, Mutaz Essa Barshim and Gianmarco Tamberi, they agreed to share the Gold Medal.
– Video from youtube.com
The Japanese are very fond of their railways, so as the Ishikawa map was so quick to play, we decided to follow it with another train game, the new Railroad Ink Challenge, which we first played a month ago. This is another relatively simple “Roll and Write” game, where players have to draw the road/rail depicted when four dice are rolled. All four must be drawn and they must connect to an “entrance” or something already drawn on the player’s map. There are also special cross-roads which can be used a maximum of once per round and only three can be used in the whole game. Each game lasts for just seven rounds, so again efficiency is vital.
– Image by boardGOATS
The Challenge edition adds extra features on the maps which in effect give players bonuses when they fill those spaces, and also adds a set of three “goal” cards that give players more points when they complete them. These work in the same way as the line bonuses in MetroX, except that there are three sets of points available: one for the first player(s) to complete them, one for the second set of players to complete them and one for everyone else. Last time, we played the Shining Yellow edition, but this time, although we used the yellow boards, we used challenge cards from the Lush Green edition, randomly drawing cards A, B and E.
– Image by boardGOATS
Goal A gave points for players filling five of the nine central spaces; B gave players points for completing three of the “village” spaces and E gave points for completing all nine of the central area. Ivory’s printer refused to play ball, so he gave up and took an early night. We were all sorry to see him go of course, but it did give everyone else a chance to win. The first round included one of the especially awkward back-to-back curves, but it turned out to be the only one, though. This time there were a lot of T-junctions and fly-overs, with very few straight segments and simple corners. As a result, people started using their “specials” quite early rather than saving them to the end.
– Image by boardGOATS
As is often the case, there were a lot of reports of huge numbers of “hanging ends” meaning that players were variously taking chances and keeping options open, but hoping upon hope for helpful dice rolls. As the game progressed, people started claiming the Goals, with B going first. Some players had decided to use different colours for road, rail and stations, which ultimately seemed to slow them down as they not only had to choose what to do but also make sure they used the right colour. That just gave more thinking time to everyone else though, so nobody really minded.
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Without expansions, the game only takes seven rounds, so it wasn’t long before people were starting to worry that they were running out of time. Burgundy said he could really have done with one more round and there were several others who felt the same, but the rules are the rules, so Burgundy posted his score, setting an initial target of fifty-one. When Green gave his score of seventy-seven, however, he was so far ahead of Burgundy that photographic evidence was requested by everyone else. While his score was being verified as correct, Blue and and Pink were confirmed as the winners of silver and bronze respectively.
– Image by boardGOATS
Time was marching on, so we moved onto Board Game Arena for something light and easy, and sensing that this might be the last chance online, we opted for our go-to game, 6 Nimmt!, with the Professional Variant. In this simple game, players simultaneously choose a card and, once revealed, starting with the lowest card, they are added to one of the four rows—the one ending in the highest number that is lower than the number on the card. The player who adds the sixth card to any row, instead takes the five cards and the number of bulls heads on the cards make part of their score.
– Image by boardGOATS
Face-to-face, these are summed and the lowest scores wins, however, on Board Game Arena, everyone starts with sixty-six points and the scores are subtracted from their running total. Thus, the game ends when someone falls below zero and the winner has the most points at the end of the game. In the Professional Variant, players can add cards to the either end of the row, with cards going at the start of a row if they are lower, than the first card in the row and the difference is smaller than it would be if they were to go elsewhere. This really adds a new dimension to the game, but there is serious mathematical upkeep giving us reservations about playing it with real cards, face-to-face.
– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com
This time, Blue picked up first and enthusiastically started the race for the bottom. It looked like she was a certainty to end the game very quickly until she had competition from Burgundy. Everyone else had picked up some cards and Burgundy was the last person to maintain his starting total of sixty-six nimmts, when he suddenly shipped a landslide of points going from the lead to vying for last with Blue in just a handful of turns. Both Blue and Burgundy managed to steady the ship, albeit briefly, before Blue grabbed enough points to end the game.
– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com
Everyone else was actually quite close, and once again we had a tie for the Gold Medal, this time between Purple and Pine (who always does well in this game); both finishing with thirty-eight, just two ahead of Black. From there, Green wished everyone else a good night leaving just six. With lower numbers the options abound, but everyone was in the mood for something that didn’t require too much thought, and someone suggested giving L.L.A.M.A. (aka L.A.M.A) a go. Although it was still in beta testing and we’d not played it online before, we felt there was “no cause for alarm-a”, as we’d played it before (albeit a long time ago) and found it to be a very easy game
– Image by boardGOATS
Nominated for the Spiel des Jahres two years ago, L.A.M.A. has a reputation of being a bit of an “UNO killer”, that is to say, it is a similar game to UNO, but perceived to be better. L.A.M.A. is an abbreviation for “Lege alle Minuspunkte ab”, which roughly translates as “get rid of your negative points”, and indeed this is what players do, in a similar way to UNO. Players start with a hand of cards and, on their turn can, add a single card face up to the pile in the middle as long as it has the same face value, or the same plus one. The cards are numbered one to six, with the Llama card simultaneously being above six and below one providing a bridge between the high and low numbers.
– Image by boardGOATS
Alternatively, players can pick up a card or pass. When players pass, their score is the total of the face values of their cards, but if they have multiple cards of the same face value, they only count once. So if a player has five cards with a value of two, they would score two points, however, just one card with a higher face value would score more and Llama cards score ten points. The round ends when either everyone passes, or when someone gets rid of all their cards and everyone takes chips equal to their scores. Players who succeed in checking out get the bonus of being able to return one chip, which is important because the game ends when someone reaches forty points and the winner is the player with the fewest points.
– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com
Burgundy spent a lot of time moaning about being given poor options by Purple who was sitting on his right. Based on the effect this had, he might have had a point as he was rapidly picking up chips and was the one to make it to forty and trigger the end of the game. Further, Purple was doing really well, finishing with just nine, twenty-five fewer than anyone else except Black, who just pipped her to victory with only six. With everyone keen to play another game, but nobody enthusiastic about making a decision on what to play, and medals only awarded once for each “event”, a second round meant the Gold was still up for grabs.
– Image by boardGOATS from boardgamearena.com
This time, Blue joined the moaning when Pine did the same to her as Purple had done to Burgundy, changing the number when she didn’t want and not changing it when she did. Burgundy did better this time finishing in joint second with Black with twenty-eight points. The winner of the second round finishing with just a single chip was Purple. This made her the L.A.M.A. champion taking the final Gold medal of the evening.
– Image by boardGOATS
Learning outcome: As with the Olympics, everyone who takes part in playing games is a winner.
It was a quiet, if hot night; Blue and Khaki were the first to arrive closely followed by Pine and Burgundy, and all four settled down to eat and discuss the very British subject of The Weather. Just as they were finishing eating, Ivory turned up toting his copy of the “Feature Game”, Wingspan. Then he started something when he ordered a desert, specifically ice cream. Everyone else, who had struggled to finish their supper and had hitherto been replete watched with envious eyes as Ivory tucked into his two scoops, one each of Baileys and Toblerone. Only Burgundy held out and it wasn’t long before another food order was placed, including two grown-up orders of a single scoop of raspberry sorbet and one childish order of a scoop each of chocolate orange and Toblerone.
– Image from horseandjockey.org
While waiting for the second round of deserts to arrive, the group decided to play something, and, given that the Spiel des Jahres awards had just been announced, decided to give L.A.M.A. a go. L.A.M.A. was nominated, but did not win (despite Reiner Knizia’s amazing outfit), however, for our group it was a much better fit than Just One, the winner. Just One, is a word guessing game in a similar vein to the previous laureate, Codenames, which was extraordinarily unpopular with our Tuesday night group. Word games are similarly unpopular, so Werewords was never likely to go down well either, making L.A.M.A. our group’s pick, even though we had not hitherto played any of the nominees to form a real opinion.
– Image by boardGOATS
As Ivory commented, L.A.M.A. has a reputation of being a bit of an “UNO killer”, that is to say, it is a similar game to UNO, but perceived to be better. L.A.M.A. is an abbreviation for “Lege alle Minuspunkte ab”, which roughly translates as “get rid of your negative points”, and indeed this is what players do, in a similar way to UNO. The deck contains coloured cards numbered one to six, and some Llama cards. Players take it in turns to play a single card, the same number or one higher than the last card played. Llama cards can be played on sixes, and one’s can be played on Llamas. If they cannot play (or choose not to), players can draw a card from the deck, or stick with what they have, and not play for the rest of the round.
– Image by boardGOATS
When either everyone has passed, or someone has played out their hand, everyone scores points equivalent to the face value of their cards in their hand, and Llama cards score ten. There is a catch though, in a mechanism faintly reminiscent of No Thanks!, any duplicate cards do not score, thus, a two fives and a six will only score eleven. Players receive tokens for their score, but if a player checks out with nothing they can return a token to the pool. Since white tokens are worth one and black worth ten, and players can return either, the advantage can sometimes be with the player with a higher score. For example, someone with nine points can only return one white token leaving them with eight, while someone with a single black ten can return everything they have. The game ends when someone reaches forty.
– Image by boardGOATS
Blue started badly, by picking up a massive twenty-four points on the first round. Burgundy did slightly better, although the size of his total was largely thanks to Pine who repeatedly stepped up the current card value upsetting Burgundy’s plans. This became something of a running joke, with Pine playing a one and thus preventing Burgundy playing his Llama cards. Pine and Ivory started well remaining in single digits for several rounds, but in the end it was surprisingly close. Fairly inevitably though, it was Blue who hit the magic forty first with Burgundy and Ivory just behind with thirty-nine each.
– Image by boardGOATS
Khaki took a very creditable second place thanks to winning one round and ditching ten points as a result. It was Pine who won the game, however, as the most consistently low scoring player, finishing with eight points fewer than Khaki, a total of only twenty. With the ice cream desserts and the llama aperitif dealt with, it was time to move on to the main course, the “Feature Game”, Wingspan. Ivory commented that he’d been really looking forward to this and described it as, “an engine builder like Terraforming Mars, but much prettier”. While we set up, Pine explained that his curious order of “Yardbird” was not a reference to the game, but the IPA. It turns out the beer is not named after the the rock group (that featured Eric Clapton among others), but actually Charlie Parker, the jazz saxophonist.
– Image by boardGOATS
The players are bird enthusiasts seeking to discover and attract the best birds to their network of wildlife reserves. The game itself is fairly straight forward: there are two main types of actions, introduce a new bird card, or carry out an an action and activate the associated birds. In order to introduce a new bird card into their reserve, a player needs entice them by spending food. Each bird is played in one of the three habitats: woodland, grassland or wetland. Some birds, like the Common Raven, can be found in any habitat so players can choose where to play them, others birds like a Green Heron are only found in one or two habitats (in this case, wetland), so can only be placed in those habitats.
– Image by boardGOATS
There are three other actions, collect food, lay eggs or acquire more cards. In each case, players place one of their action cubes (or fluffy little birds in our pimped out copy), in the space to the right of the right most card in the associated habitat. The more birds there are in a habitat, the better the action. So, for example, if a player has no woodland birds and decides to take food, they can only take one food die from the bird-box dice tower receiving one food in return. On the other hand, a player that has four bird cards in their woodland habitat can take three food if they activate their woodland habitat. Once the action has been completed, the player activates each bird in that habitat, in turn. The grassland action, laying eggs, and the wetland action, taking cards work in a similar way.
– Image by boardGOATS
Eggs can generally be placed on any bird card as long as it has sufficient capacity. Eggs, aside from looking a lot like Cadbury’s Mini Eggs, are very useful as they are needed when adding cards to habitats—after the first card in a habitat, in addition to food, there is a cost of one or two eggs per bird. They are also worth points at the end of the game. Activating the wetland action, allows the player to take a face up card from the three available, or draw blind (similar to Ticket to Ride games). In both cases, any birds in the habitat are also activated after the action has been taken. Some birds have a special power on activation, while others give a bonus when they are originally played and some give an advantage when other players do a particular action. These special actions include providing extra food, laying extra eggs or acquiring extra food.
– Image by boardGOATS
Some actions dictate where the food goes, so in some cases, the food is left on the bird card and cannot be used by the player, instead scoring a point at the end of the game. Similarly, some cards are tucked under other cards, simulating flocking birds, or the prey caught by predators, and these score a point each at the end of the game. Eggs on cards also score, and there are interim challenges, and the most successful players at these also score. Finally, each bird is itself worth points, and each player starts with a choice of two bonus cards which provide points if that player is successful in a given category. The game lasts four rounds with each player getting eight actions in the first round, but only five in the final round.
– Image by boardGOATS
Aside from the gorgeous artwork, there are a lot of very nice little touches in this game. For example, although the egg capacities for the birds aren’t correct, they are proportionally right with the American White Pelican only holding one egg, while the Mourning Dove holds five. Similarly the food requirements and habitats are correct. Sadly, the cards are all North American birds, but there are plans in the pipeline for European birds and even Australian, African and Asian bird expansions in due course. At the start of the game each player gets two bonus cards and keeps one of them. These can reward players with two points for every predator they have, or give points if the player has, say, four or more birds with a large wingspan, but the probability of these is given on the card which is a nice feature too. So, all in all, it is a very well produced game.
– Image by boardGOATS
Ivory started very quickly, luring a Barn Owl to his woodland, and it quickly started hunting, with any prey caught being stored on the owl card and worth points later in the game. He quickly followed this with two cards that allowed him to draw extra bonus cards, and looked to be set up for a strong game. Next to him, Pine was struggling—the game is not complicated, but it is a little different to anything else we’ve played. He got the hang of things eventually though, and his Canada Goose looked a very nice card as it allowed him to tuck two cards underneath it (each worth a point at the end of the game) for the cost of one wheat when activated. Khaki was helping everyone out though, as his Ruby-throated Hummingbird kept everyone supplied with food.
– Image by boardGOATS
Burgundy just quietly got on with things, but as he and Khaki had the most eggs in nests on the ground at the end of the first round, they took the end of round bonus points. Meanwhile, Blue’s Yellow-Billed Cuckoo was giving her useful eggs whenever someone else laid eggs, as long as she remembered to activate it. With Burgundy and Khaki taking the end of round bonus for the most wetland birds at the end of the second round, it was starting to look ominous. Ivory had his eye on a bigger prize however. The end of round bonuses increase in value throughout the game, so he was clearly after the bonus at the end of the third round, which rewarded the player with the most grassland birds. Burgundy had his eye on that too though, as did Blue and as the number of actions decreased the game became increasingly difficult.
– Image by boardGOATS
Blue’s Eastern Bluebird proved very useful as it allowed her to play to birds for one action. So in the end Burgundy, again took the points, this time tying with Blue, with Ivory just edged out. As the final round came to a close, it was too late to improve the engines and everyone just had to concentrate maximise their points. And after that, all that was left was the counting. The game is a little bit “multi-player solitaire”, so nobody was sure who was going to win, though Burgundy was high on most people’s list. Indeed, it was very close with just five points separating the podium positions, and only one point between the rest. In the end, Burgundy on eighty-six tied for second place with Khaki, who had a lot of high value birds and had been determined not to disgrace himself (and definitely didn’t). Blue just had the edge however, largely thanks playing her Inca Dove which allowed her to lay a lot of eggs in the final round.
– Image by boardGOATS
Learning Outcome: Tempt a hot group of gamers with ice cream and most will give in.
Blue, Red, Burgundy and newcomer, Mulberry, were finishing their food when Pink arrived after a long drive from the north-east. While he was waiting for his food he opened a very special present Red had brought back from Spain for him. Pink and Blue have quite a few games and for various reasons there are one or two that they have multiple copies of. However, there is one game that they have many, many copies of. Ironically it is a game Pink doesn’t even like playing very much, and yet, it has become a bit of “a thing” that every time Pink goes to Essen he comes back with yet another copy (ideally in a different language, but often just another German copy). Red has strong opinions about this particular game though, and believes that by far the best language to play it in is Spanish, so kindly brought Pink a copy back from Spain to add to his burgeoning collection. As he began to unwrap it, Pink took a few moments to realise what it was, but was really touched by this very special gift of Bohnanza.
– Image by boardGOATS
There wasn’t time to play it before food arrived, then everyone else was turning up and the “who’s going to play what” debate began. The “Feature Game”, Keyflower with the Farmers expansion had been Pink’s request and Keyflower is one of Blue’s favourite games, so they were a bit of a foregone conclusion. They were quickly joined by Burgundy who is also very fond of the game, and Ivory who was keen to see if the expansion changed the balance and the strategies available. Since that was likely to be the long game, they got on with it while everyone else sorted themselves out. Keyflower itself is not a complicated game mechanistically, though it has an awful lot of depth. Over four seasons, players are simply taking it in turns to bid for tiles to add to their village or use tiles available in the villages or the central display. The clever part is that bidding and using tiles are both done with meeples as currency and players must “follow suite”, that is to say, use the same colour if the tile has already been activated.
– Image by boardGOATS
In Keyflower, the depth is generated by the actions available on from the tiles and their interaction, added to the fact that except when playing with a full compliment of six, only a subset are used, and these are drawn at random. This means that one of the most important aspects of game play is to keep as many options open as possible since everything is likely to change in the final round. This is not only because some tiles don’t appear, but also the fact that there is always someone who will make it their business obstruct even the best laid plans. Thus it is vital to have at least two ways ways out. Adding The Farmers expansion exacerbates this as it introduces lots more tiles so each one is less likely to be revealed. This is a potential problem when trying to “play with the expansion” as it is perfectly possible that none of the Farmer tiles are introduced into the game. To prevent this, some tiles were drawn explicitly from the Farmers set.
– Image by boardGOATS
The Farmers expansion doesn’t change game play much, it just adds depth by the addition of farm animals as another means to score points. The idea is that animals are kept in the fields that are formed by the roads in a village. Each field that is occupied scores points depending on the type of animal or animals in it. Thus each field with sheep in it scores one point, each field with pigs scores two and each with with cows scores three points. These scores are increased for villages with special tiles, like the Weaver, which increases the sheep score to three per field. Animals in a field another of the same type breed at the end of each season and can be moved in a similar way to resources. The expansion also introduces Corn to the game, which allows players to enhance their movement actions. Otherwise, the game with the expansion plays in much the same way as the basic Keyflower game, takes a similar amount of time and requires a similar blend of tactical decision making and strategic planning.
– Image used with permission of BGG contributor garyjames
Meanwhile, everyone else had divided themselves into two groups of three and had begun to play. Pine joined Red and Mulberry in a game of Finca. Pine had played it before, but a long time ago so Blue took time out from setting up Keyflower to explain how to it worked. It’s a very simple game of set collection with beautiful wooden fruit that’s now nearly ten years old. At its heart is an interesting rondel mechanism. On their turn, players choose one of three possible actions: move around the rondel and collect fruit; use a donkey cart to deliver fruit; or carry out an action with one of the special, single use tokens that each player starts the game with. There are some lovely features about the game. For example, players move as many spaces round the rondel as there are workers on the space they started on and the number of fruit they get depends on the number of workers on the space they finish on. As players have four workers each, there are lots of factors to consider when choosing which worker to move.
– Image by BGG contributor kneumann
Investing wisely is the key to the game, and Pine went for variety while Mulberry specialised more, particularly in figs and oranges. It was the figs and oranges that won the day with Mulberry finishing with fifty-one points, just four ahead of Red who’d had lots of fruity fun with Finca. With that finished, Red spotted Yardmaster in a bag, one of her favourite games, and decided to introduce Mulberry to it. It is quite a simple game and was described by Mulberry as “UNO with trains”. Players are building a locomotive by drawing cargo cards and using them to buy railcar cards from the four face up cards in the middle. The game was very close, but it was Red’s experience that was key, giving her a two-point winning margin over Mulberry in second place. With that done, they moved onto another old favourite, 6 Nimmt!.
– Image used with permission of BGG contributor moonblogger
6 Nimmt! gets played a lot, but it’s unusual that we play it with so few players. The idea is that everyone chooses a card and then players add them to one of the rows, in ascending order adding them to the row ending in the highest card that is below the card they are playing. The catch is that when a sixth card is added to a row, that player picks up the first five cards. The game really is at its best with more players where the simultaneous card selection adds mayhem. They just played the one round; perhaps Mulberry misunderstood and thought the idea was to collect “nimmts”, but either way, she top scored with twenty-one – quite an achievement with only three players and only one round! Red did rather better and finished the winner with just two “nimmts”.
– Image by boardGOATS
On the neighbouring table, Green had joined Black and Purple and they started out with this year’s Spiel des Jahres winner, Azul. This is a really an abstract game with only a loose theme of tiling a palace, but unusually, nobody seems to mind and we’ve played the game a lot with multiple copies in the group. The game is really just a set collection game, similar to Finca and Yardmaster, but with an added spacial factor as tiles have to be placed to score points. Tiles are chosen from “factories” with those that aren’t taken going into a central pool. Since players can only take one colour at a time and must always take all the tiles of that colour in that location, they can easily end up with not quite enough, or even too many scoring negative points. Although it is not really an aggressive game, it is remarkable how much damage players can do to each other. Landing too many tiles is bad, but it is arguably worse to get “not quite enough” as it inhibits options in the next round too and therefore can affect the whole game. As we’ve played it a lot, we all have a good understanding of how to play, so unless someone gets things very wrong, games are often close, making them quite tense affairs. This was no exception, with Purple just taking the honours with sixty-three points.
– Image used with permission of boardgamephotos
To alleviate the stress of Azul, the trio moved on to play Om Nom Nom, a light “dice-chucker” This needs a similar sort of double think to 6 Nimmt!. The idea is that the board is seeded with dice populating the lower levels of three separate food chains. Then players simultaneously select an animal card to play, populating the higher levels of the food chains. The idea is that cards played at the top of a food chain will eat those immediately beneath it. So if there is a juicy bunch of carrots rolled, is it best to play the rabbit and risk getting eaten by a fox, or is it better to play a fox and gamble on everyone else being tempted to play rabbit cards? Often the wisest move is not to get involved, but if everyone adopts that approach, the carrots get left and everyone is now playing in the more confined space of two food chains. Sometimes the game is very tight, but this was not one of those times. Black took five cheeses in one round and finished some twenty points ahead of everyone else.
– Image used with permission of BGG contributor msaari
The other games were still going and nobody fancied anything particularly taxing, so after a brief hiatus, Splendor got the nod. Yet another set collecting game, it is also very simple and surprisingly popular in our group. There is a remarkable amount of thought necessary for the apparently simple choose three different tokens or buy a card. Many people seem to think it is a trivial game, but for us, it has the right balance of strategy and tactical thinking to make it the perfect game when people are tired but still want something that provides a little bit of interest. We’ve played it a lot, and almost inevitably, Burgundy wins. One of the factors in choosing the game was the guarantee that he wouldn’t win this time as he was engaged elsewhere. In the event, it was another close game, with Green and Black very close to finishing, but Purple just getting to fifteen points first and ending the game before they could catch her – her second win of the night.
– Image used with permission of boardgamephotos
We were about an hour into our respective games and Blue was concentrating deeply on her next turn in Keyflower, when her village was suddenly and unexpectedly improved by the addition of a very fine chocolate cake complete with candles. Much to her embarrassment, it was also accompanied by singing. There was a brief interlude while Blue blew out her candles and cut up the cake, admired her quite a-llama-ing card, everyone consumed the really rather delicious cake (Waitrose finest no less), and Burgundy made sure there wasn’t even a pattern left on his plate. And with all that done, the games continued.
– Image by boardGOATS
Keyflower continued after cake and the strategies were beginning to become clear. Ivory, Blue and Pink were going for animals, while Burgundy’s plans had been undermined by both Blue and Ivory and was trying to make something from his very, very small village. With the arrival of Winter, players had to put in their choice of the tiles they’d been given at the start. Much to Ivory’s disgust, someone had put in the Dairy which increases the score for fields with cows in them. Since neither the Cow Shed tile nor the Ranch tile had been drawn in Autumn, nobody had any cows so the Dairy was a waste of a Winter tile. This meant there was even more competition for the other tiles, and there weren’t many of those as players can put only one tile into the mix. Burgundy got his Key Market which nobody else had any real interest in, Blue took the Hillside, but lost out on the lucrative Truffle Orchard to Pink.
– Image by boardGOATS
Ivory took the Mercer’s Guild and the Scribes after a brief tussle with Blue. It was quite tight with everyone getting points from different places and it was clear the tiles everyone picked up in the final round made all the difference. Ivory, Blue and Burgundy had spread their points about, while Pink put all his eggs (or rather pigs) in one basket, but it paid off, giving him a massive forty points and seventy-three points overall, four more than Blue in second place. Everyone had enjoyed playing with the expansion, particularly Ivory who felt it had added more depth. Although Ivory had to go, there was just time for a quick game of 6 Nimmt!, so Pine took his place and the foursome played a couple of hands. In the first round Burgundy and Pine competed for the highest score with twenty-five and twenty-seven points respectively. In the second round, Pine picked up what might be a record score of forty-five. At the other extreme, Blue managed to keep her score down to eleven, and added to the three in the first round that gave her a clear victory—just in time for her birthday at the end of the week.
– Image by boardGOATS
Learning Outcome: Sometimes a pig strategy brings home the bacon!
In what is the latest of a long line of merger and acquisitionsstories, it seems that the really big boys are now getting in on the act: according to a report by Bloomberg, late last year, Hasbro initiated talks with Mattel for what would become the worlds largest toy company. This is not the first time a merger has been proposed; twenty years ago, Mattel attempted to buy Hasbro for $5.2 billion, but Hasbro resisted the deal with what Mattel described as a “scorched earth” campaign. In the end, Mattel withdrew the offer citing an “intolerable climate” created by its competitor’s use of the media and politicians to fight the proposed takeover. Since then, there has been a lot of water under the bridge and representatives for Hasbro and Mattel have declined to comment, so we are left to speculate as to why the subject of a possible merger has arisen once more.
– Image by boardGOATS with components from wikipedia.org
Both Hasbro and Mattel are currently valued at approximately $10 billion with an annual revenue in the region of $5 billion. Hasbro owns brands as divers as Furby, My Little Pony, Playdoh and Nerf, but is perhaps best known amongst gamers for titles like Monopoly, Cluedo, Connect 4, Cranium, Battleship and Jenga. Mattel brands perhaps tend to be aimed slightly more at the toy market with Barbie, Hot Wheels, Matchbox and Fisher-Price some of their biggest sellers. There are also a number of games under the Mattel umbrella though, including UNO, Othello, Scene It?, Apples to Apples and Scrabble. Clearly, both companies have a very similar portfolio, and are essentially direct competitors. This has been very clearly demonstrated with Hasbro recently taking the licensing rights to Disney’s lucrative Frozen and Princess brands from Mattel, a change that will undoubtedly make a dent in their bottom line. While changes are often a sign of a robust market, such seismic shifts are seldom good for the companies involved at least in the short term, often leading to restructuring and job losses – we have seen something similar with Mayfair Games and the recent loss of the distribution rights to the Catan Brand.
– Image used with permission of BGG contributor Susie_Cat
It seems there are two other key driving forces however. Firstly, it would make them much stronger competition for the Danish company, Lego, which has been growing much faster than its U.S. rivals. Secondly, both Hasbro and Mattel are looking to expand their presence in the digital market, with movie and computer game tie-ins similar to those seen with Hasbro’s Transformers franchise, and, according to Bloomberg, a merger would facilitate this. The real question though is, regardless of whether or not Hasbro and Mattel can agree a deal, would the regulators let it happen? In the last year alone, the U.S. Department of Justice has prevented Electrolux’s purchase of GE’s appliance business as well as stopping mergers between Office Depot and Staples, and Sysco and U.S. Foods, all due to concerns about industry concentration and the potential for higher prices resulting from the deals. So it seems quite likely that a deal between Hasbro and Mattel would go the same way. If they do merge, however, the giant Hasbro-Mattel would make Asmodee look like very small minnows indeed, right up until they get gobbled up too.
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boardGOATS 