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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

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– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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

– Image by boardGOATS

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