Tag Archives: Villagers

13th January 2022

Blue and Pink were the first to arrive, soon joined by Black and Purple. Others quickly rolled up and before long, everyone was discussing what they’d been doing over the holiday. Teal produced a new “Roll and Write” game that everyone could play together, called Trek 12: Himalaya, a game where players are climbing a mountain. He gave a quick summary and demonstrated how he’d raided the stationary cupboard so everyone quickly agreed to give it a go.

– Image by boardGOATS

The game has some prima facie similarities to On Tour which we played remotely a couple of times, in that two dice are rolled and their results combined. In On Tour, the results are simply combined to make a two digit number, so a two and a three can make a twenty-three or a thirty-two. In Trex 12, the numbers are combined by addition, subtraction or multiplication and additionally players can pick either the larger or the smaller individually, with each option available a total of four times during the game.

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Players are trying to make chains of consecutive numbers and groups of the same number—runs and melds, which represent ropes and camps respectively. At the end of the game, players score for the highest number in the rope (or camp), plus one additional point for every other connected point (which must be connected when they are played). Additionally, players score bonus points for the longest rope they make, and the largest camp, and penalties for any isolated numbers that are not part of a rope or a camp.

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It took a couple of turns to get going, but thereafter it was quite quick. The game has a sort of legacy element with alternative maps and envelopes that can be opened once certain challenges have been met, but we played the Dunai map and without any complications. Teal pointed out that although the first number can go anywhere, thereafter numbers must be written next to other numbers so it was wise to keep options open. Pink therefore started at one end, immediately demonstrating how to make the game more challenging.

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Pine and Blue seemed to be working to very similar strategies with a long rope and a large “Four” camp in the middle, though Pine made a better fist of it and finished in second place with sixty-eight. Ivory was the overall winner though, with lots and lots of short bits of rope of high value and a final score of seventy-two, well clear of the total needed to beat the game. Trex 12 had been both quick and enjoyable, so after that aperitif everyone was ready to move on to something a little more filling, and the group split into two, the first playing the “Feature Game“, Streets.

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Streets is a tile laying game by the same people as the very enjoyable Villagers. It is, perhaps, a little lighter and, rather than developing the occupants of a village, players are building a city, transforming it street by street, from a small town into a centre of culture and commerce. The turn structure is similar to more familiar games like Carcassonne: On their turn, the active player chooses a building tile, adds it to the town, places an ownership marker on it and then scores any completed features, in this case, Streets.

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Although there are similarities, there are a lot of differences: players have a hand of three tiles all of which represent buildings; as well as ownership tokens, the active player also places people on the building, then there are the tile placement and scoring rules. The building tiles have a road at the bottom and sky at the top and can be placed such that a Street, a row of houses, is extended by adding the tile to it in the same orientation, or terminated so that the road is perpendicular forming a junction. When both ends of a Street finish in a junction, the Street is closed and scored.

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Different buildings score in different ways, for example some tiles give points for people in the Street and others for the number of building symbols in the Street. There are a few little niggly little rules. For example, when scoring a Street players include the symbols on the street itself, but also any on a tile that terminates the Street and points towards it. There are other ways of scoring buildings as well, for the number of adjacent tiles or copying another building of choice in the Street for example. In addition to the money won for the building itself, players also score for the number of people on the tile scored.

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When a building is scored, the active player moves the people on to different building in another, open Street. This encourages players to terminate Streets even though they might not score themselves, because they can move people onto their own buildings elsewhere which means they will score more later in the game. There are a few other things that contribute to the decision making dilemmas. For example, players only have five ownership tokens, and if they run out, they have to take them from another building without scoring it.

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The game ends when all the tiles have been played and any remaining Streets are scored, but for half points (similar to Carcassonne). The basic game is quite straight forward, but although most people got to grips with it, the combination of small text, symbols, a little confusion of terminology and general tiredness meant others struggled with planning effective moves. Black took what was obviously an early march when he played his micro-brewery tile to “copy” another high-scoring tile in the same street, but Purple, Blue and Pine had their moments too.

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In the end, Black won with a cricket score of a hundred and twenty (well, a score that would have beaten England in the recent Ashes series anyhow). Blue, Purple and Black quite enjoyed the game and could see the its potential for adding expansions too. Definitely one to be played again, though Pine might need some persuading. Meanwhile, on the next table, Ivory, Pink and Teal were getting to grips with a game of Key Flow (Lime having taken an early night after another very early morning).

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Ivory and Pink have played Key Flow and its big brother, Keyflower, many times before (including relatively recently in October), but Teal was new to the game though he’d heard good things. In both games, players are building villages and activating the buildings in their villages by playing meeples (or rather Keyples) to generate resources and score points. The games have a lot in common including the artwork, the iconography and the fact both take place over four rounds or seasons, but the underlying game mechanism is different. In Keyflower, players acquire tiles by auction where in Key flow players gain cards by drafting.

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Key Flow is surprisingly straightforward to play, though doing well is a completely different matter. Players who start with a hand of cards, choose one and pass the rest on, adding their chosen card to their village before they get their next, slightly smaller hand. There are three types of card: Village cards, Riverside cards and “Keyple” cards. Village cards are buildings that can be activated by playing Keyples above them, while Riverside cards provide instant resources and skill tiles.

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The cards have to be “connected” together and location can be important. Buildings for example are more productive if they have been upgraded, but upgrading needs resources and the resources need to be moved to the building being upgraded. Similarly, in autumn there are some buildings which score points for resources they are holding. Therefore, it is helpful if the building producing the resources is near to the one being upgraded or used for scoring as moving resources can be expensive and sometimes difficult.

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Simlar to the Keyples in Keyflower, the Keyple cards are used to activate buildings and produce resources. Some can be played either in a neighbour’s village or the player’s own village. Other cards can only be played in the village one side or cannot be played in one’s own village. This is why three players is arguably the sweet-spot for Key Flow—with more players there is at least one village players cannot use, adding a level of randomness that it is difficult to deal with. With three however, everything in play is accessible, though perhaps at a cost.

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At the start of the game players get some winter cards which can act as objectives to guide players’ strategies; at the start of the final round players get to keep one of these with the rest going into the draft. At the end of the game, players score for any autumn cards, any buildings with upgrades as appropriate, any winter cards and finally one point for any otherwise unused gold.

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This time, Pink went for a “Scholar Strategy”, but changed his mind at the last minute to go for the Ranch instead. Teal went for a gold strategy with the Jeweller to double his score, and picking up both the Gold Mine and the Smelter, the latter of which he upgraded so he could exchange one skill tile for three gold. Unfortunately, Pink found that useful too and therefore got in his way somewhat. Ivory didn’t appear to have a strategy early on, but made sure he had plenty of resources he hoped would be useful later in the game.

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In the final round, Pink got his Scholar anyhow then lucked out and got the Trader too, while Teal’s flotilla of boats gave him a lot of options, but somehow he struggled to convert them into points. Ivory who had been keeping all his options open with a scatter-gun approach, managed to finish with a smorgasbord of points from pigs, Keyples, travel, and of course resources.

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It was not a surprise Ivory won as he always does well in this game, but Pink was very pleased to have run him close finishing just five points behind. With that, people started to drift off, a few people hung about for a while, just chatting, amongst other things, discussing what “Cotton Clouds and White Cashmere” smells like and whether the new soap in the Ladies really did smell of it…

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Learning Outcome: “Roll and Write” games aren’t only the preserve of “Remote Gaming”.

Golden GOAT Award Winners – 2019

The second Golden GOAT Award was announced at the boardGOATS 2019 “Un-Christmas Dinner” on Tuesday. As last year, we also gave an award acknowledging our least favourite game of the year, known as the “GOAT Poo” prize. Only games played at a GOATS games night since the 2018 Un-Christmas Dinner could be nominated, and, in a slight change to the rules from last year, everyone had three points to hand out for the Golden GOAT Award (plus a bonus if wearing Festive Attire), and everyone could nominate up to two individual games for the GOAT Poo Prize.

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This year there were a number of popular nominees, including Gingerbread House, Lords of Vegas, Villagers and Tokaido, with Boom Boom Balloon getting several honourable mentions for being very silly, but a lot of fun. There was some surprise that Terraforming Mars, Keyflower and last year’s Golden GOAT winner, Altiplano, had all not been played (we must make sure we rectify that next year). This was perhaps a measure of how strong the field was, and many people commented that there wasn’t a stand-out “bad game” for them. Tapestry was a strong candidate for the unofficial “GOAT Marmite-factor” Award receiving nominations for both prizes and added controversy, with a suspicion that its nomination for the GOAT Poo Prize was based purely on the appearance of complexity rather than any actual experience.

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The winner of the “GOAT Poo” award was 7 Wonders, with nearly a third of the group nominating it; it is clearly another Marmite game though as there were plenty of people keen to jump to its defense. The clear winner of the Golden GOAT 2019, however, was Wingspan, with Key Flow an equally clear second (the Silver GOAT perhaps?). Both are excellent games and very deserving choices; we look forward to playing them more next year.

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9th July 2019

The pub was madly busy thanks to a boisterous party and a couple of large groups in the bar area, so we decided to start with a game while we waited for food. The “Feature Game” was to be Forbidden Desert, but as most people were waiting for food, we decided to start with something we could play as a group. 6 Nimmt! was the first suggestion, but in keeping with the cooperative game theme of the Feature, we decided to start with Saboteur. In this game, players are either Dwarves or Saboteurs, where Dwarves are collectively trying to dig a tunnel to find the Gold, while the Saboteurs are trying to stop them.

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On their turn players can play a tunnel card to extend the network, play an action card or discard a card and pass. Action cards come in several flavours. There are red and green tool cards, with red broken tool cards stopping others from digging and green “fixed” tool cards that repair broken tools. There are map cards that allow players to peek at one of the three target cards to see if it holds the gold, and rock-fall cards that enable players to remove a single card from the tunnel network. All the action cards can be used by Dwarves and Saboteurs alike to impede the other team.

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Black was the first to play and began ditching all his rubbish blocking tunnel cards while Pine started off by explaining how Burgundy was always a Saboteur and generally made Burgundy’s life a misery by besetting him with broken tools and reminding everyone how last time we played Burgundy was a Saboteur three times running. This time, we had more players, but it wasn’t long before it became clear that Burgundy was indeed a Saboteur, along with Lime, who was playing it for the first time and was not at all secretive of his position. Eventually, Red found the Gold on behalf of the Saboteurs, and Black was outed as the third and final Saboteur and had apparently all the cards he had been discarding had been good tunnel cards not bad ones.

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The rules as written state that there should be three rounds and players pass gold cards around in an effort to determine who will be the overall winner. We don’t think the game needs a winner in this way, so we play with a “house-rule” that treats each round as a game in its own right. This way, we can stop at two games if it is beginning to outstay its welcome, or carry on and play three or even four rounds, giving more people to join Burgundy as Saboteurs. Everyone had really enjoyed the first round and was keen to go again, so cards were handed out and Pine once again accused Burgundy of a “Saboteury” first move. Blue had loads of blocking cards, but after Black had spent almost all the previous round dumping cards, didn’t dare pass for fear that she would be accused of being a Saboteur.

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Blue asked everyone else for advice and Red suggested that the one thing she could do to convince her that she was a Good Little Dwarf was play a blocking card on Burgundy, which she obligingly did. It didn’t work, however, and it wasn’t long before Red declared Blue a Saboteur. In frustration Blue showed Red all the blocking cards she had and that seemed to stem the tide of accusations, at least for a few turns. With Burgundy buried under a pile of broken tool cards, his delight was evident when Blue revealed her true colours and played a disruptive blocking card. It was just a smidge too late though and Black brought the round to an end by finding the Gold.

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By this time food had been ordered, but was not looking like it was going to arrive immediately, so we decided to see if Burgundy could make it three in a row again. Inevitably, we were only a couple of turns in, therefore, when food turned up and the tunnel network was obstructed by Purple’s enormous bowl of mushroom tagliatelle. Pine confused everyone by indicating his position early, playing a blocking card right in the middle of the map. Perhaps it was the difficulty of playing round a plate of pasta, or perhaps her mind was just elsewhere, but a very curious card placement quickly led to Purple being labeled as a Saboteur joining Burgundy and Pine. Flying well under the radar, if only the real Saboteurs had had helpful cards to play then they might have won, however, it was not to be.

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It turned out that Blue and Black were once again the real Saboteurs (along with the more obvious Pine), but frustratingly there was nothing they could do and Red once again finished the round by finding the Gold for the Dwarf team. By this time everyone was very hungry, so food mostly disappeared quite rapidly and while Black, Purple and Burgundy dealt with their last few mouthfuls, Blue, Lime, Pine and Mulberry took themselves off to the table by the door (ostensibly to get space to play, but partly to take advantage of the respite the cooling draught offered from the humidity), to play the “Feature Game”, Forbidden Desert.

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Where Saboteur is a “semi-cooperative” game because it has a traitor mechanic, Forbidden Desert is a fully cooperative game. This means everyone plays together against the game, with the same goal. The story is that a helicopter has crash-landed in the desert, and the survivors, in our case, an Archaeologist, a Climber, an Explorer and a very well behaved, cooperative, er, camel (“Water Carrier”), must try to find the buried, missing pieces of a historic air-ship, in order to escape. This, with minimal water, the sun beating down and the growing sand-storm, means that players have to be quick in their hunt, and smart in keeping the keeping the storm from getting out of hand.

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The game is played on a five by five grid made of twenty-four tiles and one gap. The tiles all start face down and must be excavated to reveal their other side. Some tiles will yield clues as to where the missing air ship parts are, others hide potentially useful equipment, while excavating others will yield a launch pad or the entrance to a tunnel. Everything is useful, but all four pieces of the ship must be found together with the launch pad, before the players can escape. On their turn players have four action points per turn which they can use freely to move, remove sand from the tile they are on (or an adjacent one), excavate a cleared tile, or pick up a piece of airship.

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Once all four actions have been completed cards from the storm deck are turned over and tiles are moved in the direction indicated into the eye of the storm reflecting the shifting dunes. As they are moved, sand tiles are placed on each one, building up the dunes and burying the antiquities in sand. There is a finite number of sand tiles and running out triggers the end of the game with the team losing. Running out of sand is only one way to lose however. If any player runs out of water, the whole team loses, and the storm level increasing to its maximum also spells doom. On the other hand, if the team manage to find all the parts and the launch pad, they will be able to escape from the desert.

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One of the problems with cooperative games is “quarter-backing” also known as the “alpha gamer problem”, where one player takes control and tells everyone else what to do. With Blue the only player to have played it before (though Lime had played Forbidden Island some time ago), it would have been easy for her assume the role of Colonel, but that sucks all the fun out of the game. So there was a little discussion as to how we should approach the game (primarily trying to make the best use of our characters’ special abilities and trying to work quickly to excavate tiles) and then we started, with the storm level on “normal”.

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The game began badly, when two of the first tiles we excavated were tunnel tiles. These are very useful because players can use them to shelter from the sun and thus preserve water when a Sun Beats Down card is revealed. They also enable players to travel from one part of the board to another in a single move. Unfortunately, the tiles were adjacent which meant they were much less helpful than usual. Prioritising, digging in order to find parts of the airship, the team found a lot potentially useful equipment, but it seemed ages before the first clue came up, a hint to where the propeller was buried.

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The team soon found the second clue to the location of the propeller which turned out to be relatively conveniently located so Pine, the Climber, quickly picked it up. It was then that Lime pointed out that the number of sand tiles available was getting critical, and something had to be done. A couple of turns and concentrating on the sand problem and use of Mulberry’s Dune Blaster, helped, but a couple of Sun Beats Down cards in the meantime meant there was now a water shortage. so Pine and Blue (the Water Carrier), set out to rectify the situation. Unfortunately, the first of the possible springs turned out to be a mirage. While it didn’t lead to anyone running out of water immediately, valuable time and moves had to be used to excavate another tiles.

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Once a spring had been found, Blue was able to top up her water supply and share water with Pine, before taking some back to the Lime and Magenta (who by this time was hiding in a tunnel to conserve her dwindling water supply). With everyone settling into their roles and assuming the duties associated with their special abilities, it wasn’t long before the second part of the airship had been located. Everyone had water and the sand situation was more or less under control, but it was all taking too long. The storm had picked up and with it, the Sun Beats Down cards were coming round at an increasing speed.

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Worse, the rate of sand deposition was also increasing. and it wasn’t long before the situation was getting desperate again, and clues to the location of the missing parts of the airship were proving impossible to find. Forced into making difficult decisions, Pine and Lime started to take risks. To begin with they seemed to pay off, but it wasn’t long before there was a succession of bad cards, culminating in two Sun Beats Down cards, and Pine and Lime who were left out in the sun ran out of water and sadly perished. It had been good fun though and everyone had enjoyed playing, even though the team had ultimately failed to escape.

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Meanwhile, the other group had been playing Villagers. This is a new card drafting and tableau building game that first got an outing a few weeks ago and was so successful that Lime immediately bought himself a copy. The idea is that players take it in turns to take villager cards from the “road”, then add them to their village tableau. Different villager cards have different advantages; some give money at the end of the game, while others enable players to draw more cards from the road per round or place more cards in their village per round. The clever part of the game is the interplay between the cards caused by the conditions required before they can be played.

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For example, a Blacksmith cannot be added to a village unless there is a Miner already present. The cards are then played in a tree structure such that the Blacksmith is placed over the Miner card, superseding any icons depicted on it. Many villager cards, especially the more valuable ones, also require a payment of two gold to another specific villager. The money then sits on that villager card until a scoring round. Ideally, the payment would be made to a villagers in the player’s own village, so that the money ultimately remains theirs, but if the active player does not have the necessary villager and someone else does then the money is paid to the opponent.

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Like a lot of card games, there is a lot of luck in the game and there is a knack to surfing it. Although many of the the group have played it before, Black had missed out, and he struggled waiting for a Grazier to become available. In general, everyone went for a range of different types of villagers, everyone except Burgundy who went mad for Mining, because it “seemed like a good idea at the time”. He started with a Seeker and then when he added an Ore Muler his income increased spectacularly and he looked like he was going to romp away with it. Red and Black eventually managed to play Monks which helped to grease the wheels for them, but it was too late. Burgundy had the edge over Red in almost every department beating her into second place by twenty gold.

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Villagers and Forbidden Desert finished at about the same time, and as time was getting on, Mulberry took Red home, and Pine and Lime didn’t want a late night so went their separate ways too. That just left Blue, Burgundy, Black and Purple; Purple fancied a game of Bosk, and, as there wasn’t time to debate it, everyone else went along with her suggestion without debate. This is a really pretty game, and although Black and Purple have played it quite a bit since they picked it up at the UK Games Expo, Blue and Burgundy were new to it.

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The game is played in two parts: first players place their trees in the forest on a grid, then each tree sheds its leaves and players try to control where the leaves fall to give them the most leaves in each of the areas of the forest. The first phase is really just an hors d’oeuvre; the second phase is the guts of the game. At the end of the first phase, players score for having the majority in each row or column. Purple was at the back, so went first in the second phase, and more importantly, the direction the wind goes in. This is important because if the wind is in the wrong direction, any player with trees of the same number wedged up against the same edge will find their options severely restricted.

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An awful lot of time was spent by all staring at the board, but this is no hardship as it really is a very picturesque game. Blue and Burgundy were feeling their way, but it was always advantage to Black with his greater experience. In the end, it was surprisingly close, though that was possibly due to Blue confused by the “S-shaped” score board, screwing up the scoring. The margin of victory was still significant though as Black finished with thirty-five points while Blue and Burgundy tussled for second place with thirty-one and thirty respectively. It was then that the group realised the half hour game had taken twice that and everyone quickly left before they out-stayed their welcome and the landlord threw them out.

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Learning Outcome: Working together is fun, though it helps to know who is on your side.

11th June 2019

It was clear from the off that there were going to be two games, the “Feature Game” (the Exploits Expansion from Endeavor: Age of Sail) and something else. That meant there were two things to establish, what the second game was going to be and who was going to play what. Red, on her first visit for ages, had brought the product of a recent successful KickStarter project. Villagers is a card game that has proven quite popular since fulfilment and Red thought the others would enjoy playing it. Most people had played Endeavor and, although it is not usually a very long game, with the expansion there were a few people who ruled themselves out, ultimately making the groups relatively self-selecting.

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There were two candidate games for the “alternative” table, but as Black pointed out, it was quite possible they would have time to play both if they got on with it, so they did. The first game therefore was Villagers, a card-drafting and tableau building card game. The idea is that players take it in turns to take villager cards from the “road”, then add them to their village tableau. Different villager cards have different advantages; some give money at the end of the game, while others enable players to draw more cards from the road per round or place more cards in their village per round.

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The clever part of the game are the conditions required before cards can be played. For example, a Blacksmith cannot be added to a village unless there is a miner already present. The cards are then played in a tree structure such that the Blacksmith is placed over the Miner card, superseding any icons depicted on it. There are four types of card, basic villagers (the start of a tree), standard villagers (can only be played on other villager cards), solitary villagers (cards that are not played on other cards and do not support other cards, but are useful in their own right), and special cards that allow players to do special things and break all the rules.

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The tree structure isn’t the only dependency players have to watch for when placing cards in their village; many villager cards, especially the more valuable ones, require a payment of two gold to another specific villager. The required villager depends on the card, but it could, for example, be a Cooper. The money then sits on that villager card until a scoring round. Ideally, the Cooper would be in the player’s own village, so that the money ultimately remains theirs. If nobody has a Cooper in their village though, the money goes to the bank. The worst situation is where the active player does not have the necessary Cooper and someone else has one in their village, as then the money is given to the opponent,

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There are two scoring rounds, one at the end, and one a third of the way through – only the simple “gold” scores in the latter, while the final scoring is more comprehensive and includes conditional scoring cards leading to potentially high scores. So, some cards just give gold, while others give an amount of gold for, say, the number of food or cottage icons in the village. The game started quite slowly as people struggled to get their heads round the requirements for playing villager cards. It gradually became clear that increasing the number of cards drawn from the road per round by getting food is critical, an aspect Pine and Lime, failed to appreciate early on in the game. Players can also get a bit stymied if they have high value cards, as they generally don’t then have anything else. Thus, Pine’s village with with a jeweller and nothing much else was pretty useless as the Jeweller gives money (and quite a lot of it too), but only twice during the game.

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The tree structure seemed to cause some frustration too, as it’s not helpful if one player has a Milkmaid and needs a Grazier (Pine, say) and the person next to them has a Grazier and needs a Milkmaid (not Pine, obviously…). While everyone seemed to struggle, Purple just collected lots and lots of villager cards which she ultimately managed to add to her village giving her lots and lots of money totalling a score of seventy-one. Pine, despite all his moaning about the poor quality of his village, came second with sixty-four.

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As Endeavor was still underway, the group moved on to the alternative game, Bosk. This was an “Expo Special”, picked up a couple of weeks back at the UK Games Expo at the NEC in Birmingham. Bosk is an archaic term for a small wood or thicket and in the game, players spend the spring, carefully growing their trees, scoring points as hikers enjoy travelling the trails during the summer months. When autumn comes, leaves fall in the ever-changing direction of the wind, guided to cover the terrain and other players’ leaves. Points are awarded in winter for the most coverage of each area in the park. So the game is played in two parts, the first involves placing trees on the game board at the intersections of the grid (spring).

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Each player has eight trees, each numbered one to four. At the end of spring, each row and column on the board is scored with the player with the highest total in each row or column scoring two points and the player in second place in each case gets one point. The player in last place at this point (in our case, Pine as everyone else was joint first), chooses where to place the wind guide and then chooses one of their number one tree to start shedding its leaves. As it does so, the player chooses one of their “leaf cards” (numbered one to eight) to decide how many leaves it drops. Little wooden leaf-eeples are then placed to form a path from one of the squares next to the tree in the direction wind is blowing, dropping as many leaves as given on the tile, after which, the tree is removed.

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The wind blows eight times (twice in each of the four different directions), and in each case, the player who went last last time, goes first next time. When paths cross, a leaf is placed on top of previously placed leaves, with a penalty of one leaf paid to the “bank”. Players can also place a squirrel which means players cannot place anything on top, so much hilarity ensued when Pine commented, “I think I’m going to have to put my squirrel down,” to which someone on the next table asked, “Why? Is it ill?!?!” When all the trees are gone, players count up the number of leaves in each of the scoring areas, with five points going to the player with the most leaves in a region, three points to the player with the second largest number of leaves in an area, and if a player is the only one with leaves in an area they get all eight points.

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Bosk is really beautiful little game and plays quickly with a nice feel. For a really very simple idea there is an awful lot of strategy to consider making it a really solid little game. This was its first outing on a Tuesday, but it is certain it will get more. This time round, Pine won with thirty-eight points, but he was only just ahead of Lime who finished with thirty-six. As they packed up Pine commented that he might have screwed up the scoring or maybe he just did much better on his leaf strewing… Meanwhile on the next table, Endeavor was just coming to an end as well. Playing with the recent Commodore edition, this is another beautifully produced game, that has actually had a few outings in this version and the original edition.

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The game is played over eight rounds, each consisting of four basic phases: Build, Populate, Payment and Action. There are four technology tracks roughly corresponding to each phase, which dictate what a player can do during that phase. For example, how far along the building track a player is dictates what they can build: the further along they are, the more buildings they have to choose from. Similarly, a player who is further along the population (or culture) track, can move more people into their harbour for use in the Action phase. Payment also increases the number of people available as it moves population markers from the action spaces into the harbour. More importantly, however, it makes the action spaces available again for use later in the round.

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The first phase consists of passing round the tray of buildings rather like a box of chocolates, but after that, the second and third phases are more or less carried out simultaneously. The guts of the game, however, is the Action phase. In this round, players can place population markers on their buildings to activate them and carry out one of the five actions: Colonise, Ship, Attack, Plunder Assets, and Pay Workers. These are generally based round the central board which is divided up into seven regions representing the seven continents. Each continent comprises several cities, a shipping route and a deck of cards. At the start of the game there is a Trade token on each city and each shipping space, but also on many of the connections between cities (these are taken if a player occupies both cities either side).

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Players cannot Colonise a city until they have a presence in a region, which they can do by Shipping. In this case, they activate their building that provides the shipping action by placing one population marker on it, then place a second population marker on the shipping track. Thus, players need to have two markers available to be able to Ship. The second population marker is placed in the furthest unoccupied space from the deck of Asset cards in the region of their choice, and the player takes the Trade token on that space. Most trade tokens add to one of the four technology tracks, though a small number provide one off actions instead.

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Players also need two population markers to Colonise (one for the action and one to occupy the city) and three if they are going to attack an already occupied city (one is collateral damage). Once a player has a presence in a region they can take an Asset card, so long as the number of the top card is not higher than the number of population markers that player has in the region. This is one of the few areas where there has been a rule change between this edition and the first edition: it used to be necessary for the shipping track to have been completely occupied (i.e. the region was “open”) before the Assets of a region could be plundered. This rule changed with the new edition, and now players can plunder at will, as long as they have a presence in the region (they still cannot Colonise until the region is “open” however).

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Essentially, that’s all there is to the game, but the rules are deceptively simple and, for a game with so very little randomness (only the layout of the Trade tokens on the map), there is a surprising amount of variability. However, with the new interest in the game that came with the new edition, a new Expansion primarily comprising a new set of buildings is currently subject to a crowd funding campaign. The new, Commodore edition came with a couple little extras though, Exploits and Charter Companies, and we wanted to try more of these before considering any new buildings. The Exploits are special conditions that only come into force when both of the regions involved are opened. The idea is that three of these are drawn at random at the start of the game, however, we picked three that were not used last time we played on a Tuesday: Spanish Main (North & South America); Manila Galleons (Far East & North America), and Spice Trade (Africa & India).

Endeavor: Age of Sail - Charter Companies

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This time, we additionally made the Charter Companies available for the first time. These are special, powerful buildings that a player can build (instead of the usual buildings) as long as they have at least six of their population markers in the given region. Green began by going for cards and targetted North America as it appeared on two of the Exploits and he thought everyone else would be keen to help him out. Blue, who normally focusses on getting buildings first decided to try something a little different and instead went for Population in a very big way. This meant she really struggled getting good buildings, but made up for it with lots of Asset cards. In order to keep them, she had to focus on increasing her influence (the blue and white shields), but this meant she neglected both the building track and Colonising. Black also missed the “building boat” and without the more powerful actions that come with the more advanced buildings, really struggled to make any headway.

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Ivory had been a little sceptical about playing having played the original edition where the maps were not as “tight” making it less of a struggle. This time it was clear that that was not going to be a problem. Accelerating his Build ability meant that Ivory was able to take a Cartographer which gave him a double Ship action which he used to great effect getting a particularly strong presence in Africa, India and the Far East. This was critical because with the exploit activated, players with one marker in the open sea space for Africa would score an extra point for each disk of his on the Africa shipping track. Moreover, this scoring was also applied to India and the Far East, making very lucrative for him indeed.

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Ivory was quite convinced that Blue had the game in the bag as she had a lot of points from her Asset cards, however, she knew she had a shortage of Colonies compared to everyone else. As things hadn’t been going according to plan for Green, and nobody seemed to be targetting Asset cards in Europe, he resorted to Slavery so it seemed appropriate that he wasn’t quite in the running for the top spot. Blue who was having a bit of a blonde day, recounted her scores three times, to convince herself that it was in fact a draw as she finished level with Ivory on sixty-nine points. Although both Bosk and Endeavor finished at much the same time, it was too late to play anything else, and as the group settled their bills and packed up, someone pointed out that the next meeting is 25^th June – exactly six month till Christmas. And with that cheery thought, everyone went home.

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Learning Outcome: Some villages are very inbred.