Tag Archives: Vanuatu

23rd July 2024

Blue and Pink were still eating when everyone else rolled in and seemed quite content to chat. It took Blue two attempts to get the first game rolling, with Jade leading Cobalt, Crimson and Plum to the other side of the room. Pink moved to join Pine who wanted to play his new acquisition with Black and Purple, which left Blue and Lime to lead Byzantium, Sapphire and Cyan in the “Feature Game“, the Alpine expansion for Forest Shuffle. This is was chosen to mark the announcement of the Spiel des Jahres Awards, as Forest Shuffle, featured on the recommended list and has been popular with the group.

– Image by boardGOATS

Blue made a bit of a meal of explaining the rules, but really they are very simple. On their turn, players either take two cards from the market and add them to their hand (with a hand limit of ten), or play a card from their hand into their tableau. There are three different types of cards. Tree cards are the central cards around which Critter cards are played. Then there is the first set of Critter cards which are divided into two, left and right with an animal on each half. Finally, there are Critter cards which are divided into two, the canopy at the top and the undergrowth at the bottom. The Critter cards are half-tucked under the Tree cards, so only one animal, flora or fauna is visible.

– Image by boardGOATS

The difficult part of the game is getting the cards to work together efficiently to give extra actions and, ultimately, points. The Alpine expansion doesn’t change the game significantly, just adding more variety to the cards, adding more opportunities for scoring. For example, it adds an extra Butterfly which give players more points if they have a complete the set. This time, Blue started with a hand full or Hares, making her initial strategy obvious. Sapphire was less fortunate, so Blue and Lime suggested that starting with Trees was always a good way to go as players can’t do anything without them. He also had some Butterflies, so that was where he went next.

– Image by boardGOATS

Lime built up a collection of Birds, and since he advertised his strategy to the group, everyone else was able to take cards he wanted. This is a key part of the game: some cards give points for the number of something you have, so having more of both multiplies the score. For example, Hares give one point for every Hare a player has. Thus, one Hare gives one point, but Blue’s seven Hares mean that first Hare scored seven points. More to the point, every other Hare also scored seven points giving her forty-nine points just for her Hares. Meanwhile, Byzantium was going Bats, and Cyan was experimenting with Deer.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game ends when the third Winter card is drawn from the deck, so after the second, everyone got very nervy as they tried to complete all their plans and play all the cards they wanted to. Each time someone drew a card from the deck, it was with bated breath. The final stage seemed to last forever, and although the third Winter card wasn’t the last card in the deck, it was close, and when it was drawn the game ended immediately. And then it was time for the scores: everyone assumed that Blue’s husk of Hares would give her victory, but it was actually quite much closer than they thought. Although Blue finished with a hundred and sixty-five, Byzantium was only twenty points behind.

– Image by boardGOATS

Byzantium was ready to leave, but for everyone else there was just time for something really quick. So as everyone else was still playing, the remaining four decided on a quick game of Coloretto. This is an old game, but one that was on the Spiel des Jahres Award “Recommended List” in 2003. Remarkably, Cyan and Sapphire were new to it, but it is a super easy and quick game to play, but with tactical decisions to make. It is also one that can essentially be taught as you go: either turn over the top Chameleon card and add it to one of the Trucks, or take one Truck. Each Truck can contain a maximum of three Chameleons and once everyone has taken a Truck, the round ends.

– Image by boardGOATS

At the end of the game, players score each group of coloured Chameleons, with the largest three groups giving positive points and any others scoring negatively. There are a small number of cards that just give straight points and balancing these with Chameleons is part of the challenge. The end is triggered when the end of game card is drawn and then the round is played to completion. This time, everyone kept their negative scores down, while Cyan went for the pure point cards, collecting fourteen points, more than half his score, by that route. The winner was Lime, however, who was imperious and won by some distance with a total of thirty-three.

– Image by boardGOATS

Meanwhile, on the next table Jade was teaching Cobalt, Crimson and Plum the Spiel des Jahres 2024 nominee, In the Footsteps of Darwin. The premise of this is that players are naturalists aboard the Beagle helping Charles Darwin finish his book On the Origin of Species, studying animals, carrying out cartographic surveys, publishing their findings, and developing theories. On their turn, players study an animal or take inspiration from a character by choosing one of the three tiles in the row or column marked by the Beagle, and placing it onto their naturalist’s Notebook. This may be an animal to study or a character from the Beagle’s previous journey and will give an immediate bonus or a scoring bonuses.

– Image by boardGOATS

After placing the tile, the Beagle is moved round the market, with the distance dependent on the tile chosen and a new tile is drawn to fill the empty space on the journey board. At the end of the game, the player who contributed the most to On the Origin of Species wins. At it’s heart, In the Footsteps of Darwin is a fairly simple set collection and “make the most of what’s available” game. Players obtain an additional scoring objective when they place a tile on top of a previous one, covering up any icons, so a key part of the game is the conflict between points being gained verses points being lost.

– Image by boardGOATS

There’s also quite a bit of luck invoiced, as a player may need one or two specific tiles that don’t come out, or that get taken by someone else before they have the opportunity to do so. The group found it was very quick to play, taking just forty minutes including teaching. Plum’s starting goal was points for tiles in the upper right quadrant, but in the absence of tiles that fitted that criteria she focused instead on collecting Charts and Compasses as these score points equal to the number of these multiplied together.

– Image by boardGOATS

One advantage of these is that once a Compass has been collected, the tile can be covered without loosing any points. Cobalt didn’t worry about that at all, covering loads of tiles to get more Theories banners which give points. Ultimately, everyone’s score was pretty similar at the end of the first game but Jade took victory as he was most effective with the Chart/Compass scoring. As it was so quick, the group decided to give it a second try—this the scores all improved. This time the victor was Crimson, who was again the most effective with the Charts/Compasses, but also scored well in other areas, as did Cobalt who came second again.

– Image by boardGOATS

From there, the group moved on to a game of Looot, which is too recent a release to have been acknowledged in the Spiel des Jahres awards. It has been popular amongst the members of the group that have played it so far, however, and may well get an award next year. In this game, players gain points by gathering resources and capturing buildings to try to develop their Fjord, fill their long ships and complete buildings. The winner is the player with the most riches and is crowned Jarl of the Vikings. The game is played over several rounds until each player has played all their Vikings, giving a maximum of thirteen turns, each with a simple structure.

– Image by boardGOATS

Players start by placing their Viking on a Resource tile on the central board adjacent to another Viking of any colour. They then take the associated Resource and place it on their personal board. If possible, they then use their Resources to capture a Building and place that on their board, take a Long Ship and also place it on their board, use a Shield, or complete a Construction Site and finally grab a Trophy. Looot is quite a light game, but with enough decision space to be interesting. Last time was a three-player game, but this time, with four, players get another map area, which the group arranged to give a wide play area.

– Image by boardGOATS

The board layout made it easier to get to more areas of the map relatively early in the game, but there was still plenty of competition for the Towers. Like last time, Plum decided not to worry about all the home tiles and focused on gold, which was good, but not enough on its own. Cobalt scored massively for Castles by getting plenty of them plus the equivalent Long Boats. Cobalt started on that strategy largely by accident, before he had got a real understanding of game-play and a full appreciation of how they increased the Castle scoring and matched the requirements he could fulfill.

– Image by boardGOATS

Crimson had a nice balance of increased score for Towers and Houses, while Jade built up a huge pile of Wood. Unlike last time, things didn’t just come together at the end for Plum, and nobody else could compete with Cobalt’s Castles and he took victory with one hundred and twenty-one, fourteen points ahead of Crimson in second. It had been a good game though, and as players become more experienced, they will be increasingly able to determine the best scoring opportunity from the start and how to optimise the mini game that is building their Fjord. With experienced players, this could be quite ruthless with players trying to block each other and prevent objectives.

– Image by boardGOATS

In the third group, meanwhile, Pine was introducing his new acquisition, the old game, Tonga Bonga, to Pink, Black and Purple. This is a sailing race game a bit like the 2008 Spiel des Jahres recommended Jamaica. In Tonga Bonga, players pilot their ship around the archipelago with the goal of visiting four of the five remote islands and returning to Tonga Bonga Bay. Each player has room for three sailors on their ship, each of which represented by dice and indicate how fat the ship will move. At the start of the round, players decide how much they are prepared to pay for the sailors who will serve as their captain and first mate that round (the Cabin Boy always works for nothing).

– Image by boardGOATS

Players then simultaneously roll their dice, and take it in turns assign their dice to the other players’ ships, in return for the money offered. In a mechanism vaguely reminiscent of that in the really rather vicious game, Vanuatu, if a player tries to place a higher value die where someone has already assigned a die, the lower value one is displaced and bumped to a lesser and usually less lucrative role. Thus, all things being equal, the ship offering the most money will get the highest value dice and the most moves, though of course, players can work together to disrupt this behaviour. One side of each die has a Seasick Sailor (effectively zero), so the maximum value dice are five.

– Image by boardGOATS

Once all the dice have been assigned, players move their ships racing to reach the islands, leaving one of their tokens there. Landing on an island, earns $25 from the bank, but the player has to pay $5 to each player who landed there ahead of them. Pine explained the rules and before long, everyone was sailing. Pink got a bit of a lead by using his winnings to buy more moves and visit more islands. He had been feeling that the game was maybe a bit “broken”, but as is usually the case when a game feels like that, it was all down to the “rules malfunction”, but it wasn’t until the final round that the rules were “clarified”.

– Image by boardGOATS

Instead of the winner being the player to cross the line first with any left over money used as a tie-breaker, once a player has visited four islands they return to Tonga Bonga Bay and trigger the game end—and whoever has the most money wins. Pink crossed the line and claimed the moral victory, as he was playing by the original rules. Everyone else was quite happy with the “updated rules” though, which left Pine the victor with Purple in second and Black just behind. Pink blamed “Evil Pine” for the mishap, but was eventually won round with a bottle of dubiously flavoured cider.

– Image by boardGOATS

Although the debate had been audible by the players at the neighbouring tables, ultimately it was all taken in good part and the game had been a lot of fun and showed its age less than Lifeboats that was played a few weeks back and was only five years older. From there though, the group moved on to a game of the 2021 Spiel des Jahres winner, Kingdomino. This is a clever little game where players are building a kingdom made out of double-headed, domino-like tiles. As in Dominoes, the ends of the tiles have to match, or at least it has to match with one tile tile already in the player’s kingdom.

– Image by boardGOATS

The really clever part of the game is the double market, where the tiles are taken in reverse order of value. The double market means that when a player takes the tile for the current round, they choose which tile they will get in the next round. Thus, taking the lowest value tile this round means they will have first choice next round. Players score for each contiguous area of Terrain—the number of points is equal to the number of squares multiplied by the number of Crowns featuring in it. This time, Pink concentrated on Wheat Fields and Sea, Pine focused on Sea and Meadow while Black concentrated on Woodland with a smattering of points from Marsh, Mountain and Wheat fields.

– Image by boardGOATS

In contrast, Purple prioritised her four contiguous areas forfeiting the “Harmony” and “Middle Kingdom” bonus points for using all the tiles to give a square kingdom with a central castle. Pine took victory with a massive seventy-three with Pink and Black tying for second with sixty points. This group wasn’t done by any means and swiftly moved on to a quick game of Sushi Go!. This is one of those games that takes a mechanism that is a relatively minor part of other games and distills it into its purest form in the game. Coloretto does the same for the central market mechanism used in the 2007 Spiel des Jahres winner, Zooloretto, and Sushi Go! does it for the card drafting mechanism in the 2011 Kennerspiel des Jahres winning game, 7 Wonders.

– Image by boardGOATS

In Sushi Go!, players start with a hand of cards, keep one and pass the rest on, repeating until all the cards have been distributed. As well as being a core mechanism in 7 Wonders, this “Card Drafting” is also often used to try to reduce the luck of the draw at the start of games like Terraforming Mars and Agricola (both also acknowledged by the Spiel des Jahres committee). In Sushi Go!, players are using the card drafting to collect sushi and, most importantly Pudding! The game is played over three rounds, with cards drafted to the left, then right and then left again, scoring points at the end of each round.

– Image by boardGOATS

This time, Pink and Black tied for the high-scoring first round, with Pine just behind. Pine made up for it on the second round by taking it convincingly, however, with everyone else scoring very badly. The third round was more even again, this time won by Black with Purple taking second. That resulted in a three-way tie between Black, Pink and Pine, but at the end of the game, the player with the most Pudding cards gains six points, with the one with the fewest losing six points. Unusually for Pink (as he has quite a sweet tooth), he had eschewed Puddings, while Black had the most giving him what ended up being a quite convincing victory.

– Image by boardGOATS

There was just time for a single round of Love Letter (a game from the 2014 Spiel des Jahres recommended list). This is a sixteen card game where players start with a card, draw a second and then play one. The idea is to try to be the last play in or the player with the highest value card when the deck runs out. The theme is all about getting as close as possible to the Princess card, which has the highest value. This led to a discussion about real princesses and how close people had been to them. It turns out that Purple has met a real one, Princess Nina who lives in a massive house in Cheltenham. During the game, Pink was the Princess, but was spotted and knocked out, leaving Black to take another win.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome: The Spiel des Jahres committee may reward lighter games, but they are good games.

31st May 2016

For the first time since he and Cerise’s new arrival, Grey turned up. Everyone was really pleased to see him, and as he fancied a “nasty” game, he joined the group playing the “Feature Game” which was Vanuatu. On the face of it, this is a fairly straightforward role-selection and worker placement game, but with more than the usual amount of interaction. The aim of the game is to obtain prestige in the archipelago of Vanuatu, by moving tourists and goods, fishing, and drawing sand pictures. The game structure is simple enough: players start by choosing a character, then they choose actions they would like to carry out, before the actions are resolved. There are one or two nasty elements that became more apparent as the game progressed.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

The way the actions are chosen and then resolved is particularly unusual. Starting with the Start Player, players take it in turns to place one or more of their action selection tokens. Everyone starts with five tokens and can place tokens on any single action space. Players cannot pass, but if they don’t place all their tokens on their first pass they get another turn to place one or more tokens, and play continues in this fashion until everyone has placed all five tokens. The actions are then resolved with players choosing which actions to take. In order to carry out an action, however, the player must have the most tokens on the action space (with ties resolved using turn order as a tie-breaker). In the event that the player doesn’t have an eligible action to take, they must remove their tokens from a space without taking the action. This makes it particularly nasty as, where a player has multiple options available to them, they can use this to delay other players from taking actions and sometimes cause them to miss actions altogether. In extreme cases players can end up doing nothing for a whole turn.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

In the first round, Blue showed how to score points, garnering a massive fifteen points by using the Collector to enable her to pick up extra beef which she was then able to ship immediately completing a vessel that Burgundy had started. Unfortunately, this left her with no money which meant her game then stalled such that four rounds later she had failed to even double the score she’d had at the end of the first round. Burgundy had watched some video reviews and had a good idea of how the game played, as such, he was the only one who really appreciated what an unusually large haul Blue had managed to take in that first round. Despite the massive deficit, he began to steadily ship visitors and buy huts, something everything else made the mistake of letting him get on with. Black on the other hand, was discovering first hand just how nasty the game can be and really struggled to string actions together and turn them into points. Meanwhile, Blue and Grey engaged in an extended scrap over some fish. Blue came off worst since Grey had a spell as the start player, though he didn’t exactly come off unscathed either.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

In the closing rounds Black finally managed to build himself a hut; Blue finally managed to get her fish, sell them and then took the start player. This enabled her to disrupt Burgundy’s plans by first nicking the character he wanted (Diver) and then pinching the high value treasure from under his nose. It was all way too little and much too late. Although Black had found himself pushed out in the first half of the game and Blue struggled to make good on her early promise (crippled by the exhausting fish wars and a lack of money), the game was quite tight between first and second. In the event, the deciding factor in the game was an almost missed moment when Grey bought resources and shipped allowing Burgundy to follow suit and also pick up the bonus for completing the vessel. With a small difference between first and second (by our scoring) that could easily have given Burgundy the game. In the final scoring, Grey liquidated his huge pile of treasure, though it didn’t yield quite as much as expected leaving Burgundy the winner, six points ahead of Grey.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Delivering tourists to islands is fundamentally very important in this game, which is something we didn’t really appreciate until we got to the final rounds. The rules state that each player scores “two prosperity points for each of their stalls, for every tourist pawn present on their island”. The example in the text clarifies that a player with two stalls on an island where there are four tourist pawns scores eight points per stall, or sixteen points in total. We hadn’t appreciated the extra multiplier, so we evaluated the scores twice using the rules and our original understanding. In the event, it had no effect on the placings, just increasing Burgundy’s majority. It did give us a better understanding of how tough the game is though. The harshness also leads to a lot of “analysis paralysis”, since each move is so very critical. That said, we all enjoyed the game and, by the end could really see how clever it is. An unusually nasty game, this is definitely one to try again soon and is well deserving of its new release.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor henk.rolleman

Meanwhile, the other table were playing Ivor the Engine. This is a great little game that Purple had been itching to play for some time and, since Pine likes sheep, Green was happy to join in. The idea is that players are travelling round Wales collecting sheep and the person with the most sheep at the end of the game is the winner. A single sheep can be collected whenever you start your turn on a town or village with sheep in it, however, more sheep can be collected if you are in a town or village with NO sheep and perform a task to “help Ivor”. Helping Ivor comes at a price, however, as in order to do this you have to play one of the dual-purpose cards from your hand, which means you cannot use it to help you in other ways. At the end of your turn you add one card to your hand from the face up displayed cards, however, when the chosen card is replaced from the draw-pile, the game has a sting in the tail: mixed in with the errand cards are event cards, and these can be nice, or nasty…

– Image by boardGOATS

The game features the iconic art-work from the Ivor cartoons as drawn by Peter Firmin and little wooden sheep. We have variously called the “square five sheep” pieces “flat pack” sheep or “squashed” sheep, however, Pine’s commented that if you get five sheep, you get enough to make a rug! With only three playing we began the game quite spread out. Green and Purple stayed near their starting location to collect the last sheep and thus pick up the lost sheep bonus (an extra two sheep), but Pine got caught out by a double space. He had thought it was only a single space with one sheep and was expecting a bonus which disrupted his plans. Aside from that, it was a fairly quick start and we had all gathered in a number of sheep. Pine was the first to use a card action on somebody else and with both Green and Purple having a similar number of sheep, he let chance decide who was to lose two of their flock. Unfortunate for Purple fate decided it was she who must lose. In the very next round, Green was able to claim his second Grumbly Town card for four more sheep, so perhaps Pine/chance chose the wrong player to kibosh.

– Image by boardGOATS

To compound this mistake, the first event card to turn up resulted one sheep being lost from every region. This left Pine and Purple in cleared regions (good for claiming the cards, but not good for claiming the two-sheep bonus). For Green, however, one sheep remained. This helped him to get the 2-sheep-bonus and the location card. From this point on it was another “Get Green” game. Unfortunately for Purple and Pine, they had little opportunity to do this and the events (which came all together) were fairly benign. Green had one more “nasty” action card to use, which he played on his nearest competitor (well it would be unfair to play it on the losing player), so Purple lost another two sheep. In the end Green claimed his twenty-fifth sheep with a five sheep town card. His event card bonuses brought his total up to thirty-three with Purple close behind with several end of game bonuses. Overall it was a bit of a baaa-rmy game…

– Image by boardGOATS

With the fishing wars still underway in the South Pacific, Purple, Green and Pine moved onto Alhambra, another of of Purple’s favourites and also new to Pine. This is a tile laying game where players are building their city. Basically, on their turn, the active player buy coloured tiles with different coloured money cards and add them to their Alhambra. If they can pay with exactly the correct amount, they can buy another tile, but if they over-pay, they get no change and their turn ends. While this all sounds simple enough, there is the little problem that most of the tiles have walls along one, two or three edges, and when placed, these must match up without partitioning the Alhambra. These walls are critical as poor play in the early stages can mean it is possible to get backed into a corner later in the game. We’ve played Alhambra a few times as well as its predecessor, Stimmt So!, so we decided to play with a couple of expansion modules: The City Gates, which can be placed where there are two adjacent parallel walls enabling the player to build behind the wall, and The Magical Buildings, which provide one tile extra of each type which can be placed in any orientation.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor EndersGame

Purple went for the Purple Towers. She was able to come so dominant in towers that Green was not able to attain any, and Pine only got 3. It seemed that whenever a tower tile came out the bag, it was just before Purple’s turn, and she was not averse to over-paying for them, though often she did not need to. It happened so regularly it was funny and she before long she had to buy the tile just to maintain the magic, even if it was detrimental to her actual game plan! Green went for the Green Garden tiles. He also quickly became dominant in them and was going to stop when he had the unbeatable majority, but when the Garden tile without a wall came out it was such a good fit for his Alhambra that he just had to go for it. Green also took the first two White Palaces, but was unable to get his hands on the others. Pine and Purple snapped them up to equal his two and Purple surpassed Green into the lead, which she then maintained, despite a last minute battle for the last couple of tiles.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor EndersGame

Red and Brown tiles were in very limited supply at the start of the game. Pine managed to collect a single one of each, and that was all he needed to maintain supremacy in these colours for quite some time. In the second half of the game everyone managed to get one red tile so the real battle for red did not happen till the final few turns. The final market board had three red tiles on it, so Green and Pine shared the category. The brown tiles were also loaded towards the end of the game, and Green took the lead briefly before Pine took it back again.
Blue tiles were fought over by Pine and Green. Both had two by the first scoring round and had to share one point (meaning they scored nothing); this was a tight battle, but Pine just clinched ahead at the end. Purple managed to place her Alhambra with some very long walls. She had a 17 point wall by the second scoring, but then had to do several re-designs as she found herself blocked with not enough gates to help her out. In the final scoring, Green romped home with nearly a hundred and fifty points, leaving Pine and Purple to fight it out for second place. For a while, it looked like Pine might take it, but Purple’s Towers and long wall clinched it in the end, in what had been a much tighter game than the scores suggested.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor EndersGame

With the knife-fight in a phone-box that was Vanuatu finally over and not enough time to play anything else really, we degenerated into chit chat. Blue commented that she really wanted to like Alhambra , but found that she preferred the game play of the simpler Stimmt So! and Black concurred though that was far from the majority opinion and the expansions certainly added a bit too. Green had taken two of the gatehouses and used only one as he had been very carefully building his Alhambra not to box himself in. Pine and Purple took and used only one each though Purple could certainly have used an second as she had several re-designs. She didn’t want to “waste” anymore actions “just” taking a gate though. Everyone used and loved the Magical buildings though, Pine got the most (three of them), while Purple used two and Green was only able to get his hands on one. In this game though, we found concentrating on only the highest scoring items is not always a guaranteed route to victory, but should stop you coming last! We finished with a quick discussion of our plans for the weekend, which included a visit to the NEC in Birmingham for several of us who were going to the UK Games Expo. Should be a good weekend!

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor EndersGame

Learning Outcome: Nice or nasty, tight games are the most fun!