https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM4livrJnbU
This time it would be great to put together a video of all of those people who would otherwise be playing games at Spiel, people enjoying Spiel.Digital looking forward to finding out about what's new, playing the Alexander Pfister over Halloween with friends or playing a new solo game whilst pretending their cat isn't aiding with their decision making. We'd like to see all you game lovers, whether you like casual games or brain crushing strategy and find out a bit about you.
So all I asks is you send me a short video between now and the 21st November to iplayredvideos-at-gmail.com I'll start you off.
Hi, I'm Kat and I Play Red
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842re0_IVWw
If you like the idea please feel free to share and remember the more people the
get involved the more hours of editing we'll have to do so keep us busy
:)
Spiel, Digital 2020 is just 4 days away so... here's an updated and trimmed down version of Spiel's full game release / preview list that's a little bit easier to manage than their full list. For me this is a quick way of filtering down what I want to see over the course of the weekend. The full list isn't in yet but this should give many of you a start. What are you looking forward to?
The game includes a lot of cards and some other stuff!
Shuffle each of the card stacks separately and place the decks on the table. So you should have a deck of start cards, a deck of standard cards, a deck of special cards, and a deck of order cards.
Draw four order cards and place them face-up, next to the order deck.
Give each player a player board and a token for each resource. Place them on the space marked 3 for each of your resources, this is what you will start the game with. Give each player three random starting cards and three Patriarch cards. Place a starting card behind each of the patriarch cards so you have three rows, these represent your caravans in the game. Place any leftover player components back in the box.
The starting cards have a number on the bottom right of the card, the player with the lowest numbered card will play first.
In a turn you can do one of three actions:
Caravan actions are on the card with a light coloured background. Sometimes there will be a cost to pay, in which case, move your markers down the resource track. Perform the action and move the card to the back of it’s caravan. If you have taken another card that will also go at the back of the caravan, behind the one that you just used.
These are similar to caravan action, but they have a red background. Pay any costs shown, however, you must now remove the card from the game. Again, any cards gained through this action are placed at the back of the appropriate caravan.
If a player cannot or does not want to play an action, they may choose just to move a card to the back of its caravan. Cards marked with a ‘!’ may not be passed (matriarch, patriarch)
Orders may only be fulfilled when a specific card allows them to. You must always have the amount of mules shown on the left of the card (if any) although you do not have to pay them. Pay the goods shown on the bottom of the card, receive any bonuses shown, and place the card in your playing area so all players can see the points value in the top right corner. Refill the order cards so there are four available again.
The game end triggers when a player reaches a total of 25 or more points through a combination of caravan cards and/or orders. Play to the end of the round, whoever has the most points wins!
Universal Studio Monsters, there, I said it, that’s the only reason I HAD to track down this game!
After all, who doesn’t want to be chased down by Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, Creature from the Black Lagoon and get to star in their own Universal Monster Movie?
Oh, just me then?
In the box you get:
Place the board on the table. Place the Terror Maker on the zero of the Terror Level track (top left side of the board). Shuffle the Monster cards and form a deck, place this with the Villager standees and dice by the side of the board. Choose which Monsters you wish to play against (for a starter game it is recommended to use Dracula and Creature from the Black Lagoon, however, depending on how tough you want it to be you can play with anything up to four monsters!) Take the chosen Monster Mats and place them by the board in frenzy order, from lowest to highest (this is shown on the top left of each monster mat) Place the frenzy marker on the mat with the lowest frenzy order. Complete the set up for each monster as shown on the mats. Return all unused Monsters to the box.
Shuffle up the hero badges and randomly give one to each player along with the matching hero standee and a reference card. Shuffle up the perk cards and give one to each player. Place the rest in a deck by the side of the board.
Place all sixty of the item tokens into the bag. Draw twelve at random and place them on the indicated spaces.
In Horrified, players work together to defeat the Monsters on the board. Each Monster has different defeat conditions, these are detailed on the individual monster mats.
The players lose if one of the following happens:
Terror: Each time a Hero or Villager is defeated, the terror level will increase. If the terror level reaches the end of the track, the players lose.
Out of Time: If you need to draw a card from the monster deck and it is depleted, you have taken too long and the players will lose.
Each turn has two phases, performed in the following order:
Hero Phase - Take as many actions as indicated on the top of your hero badge. There are a total of seven actions you may take and these may be repeated as many times as you wish (obviously limited by the number of actions you have!) You may always use your perk cards in the hero phase, this does not count as taking an action.
Move - Move your hero along a path to an adjacent space. You cannot move onto water spaces and may only cross the river using bridge spaces. You may move a villager with you at no cost.
Guide - You may move a villager from an adjacent space to your heroes space or from your heroes space to an adjacent space.
Special Action - Some heroes have a special action, as shown on their badge. These count as one of your actions but may be taken multiple times.
Pick Up - Take any number of items from a space you are on and place hem in front of you.
Share - You may pass items between heroes that are on the same space.
Advance - At a specific location, you may use an item to advance a Monsters task.
Defeat - In a monsters space you may use your items to defeat a monster as long as their task has been completed.
Monster Phase - Take the top card of the monster deck and resolve the three parts of the card:
Items - Draw the number of items from the bag as shown on the top of the monster card and place them on the board.
Event - This is the centre of the card. Grey cards are about villagers, coloured cards will refer to a specific monster. If that monster is not in the game, ignore the event.
Monster Strike - With each card, certain monsters will move and strike. These are indicated by the symbols at the bottom of the card. From left to right, move and attack with each indicated monster. If a monster is not in play, consider yourself lucky, nothing happens! However, usually, the frenzied monster will attack (the current creature with the frenzied token on) and this can mean the same monster attacking twice in one turn!
The monster moves the indicated number of spaces towards the closest person (Hero or Villager). As soon as the monster enters a space with a person, they stop and will attack. Roll the number of dice indicated. If the exclamation mark is rolled, activate the monster’s power. If the hit symbol is rolled, players may discard an item for each hit shown. If the hero does not have enough items, they are defeated, it only takes one hit to kill a hero (these are monsters after all!) A villager is defeated as soon as they are hit by a monster. When a hero or villager is defeated by a monster, move the terror marker forward one space and remove the marker from the board.
If a hero dies, they place their marker in the hospital location at the start of the next turn and take their turn as normal. They also get to keep all items and perk cards.
Villagers may appear during the Monster phase when you draw cards. They will start at specific locations and will be trying to get to a safe location as stated on the card. You can use move and guide actions to move them around the board. As soon as they arrive at their safe location, players are rewarded for their help. The current player gets to draw a perk card from the deck and the villager is removed from the board.
The game can end in one of three ways:
Terror!
If the Terror level reaches the end of the track, the game ends immediately and the Monsters win!
Out of Time
If you need to draw a card from the Monster deck and it is empty you have taken too long and the game immediately ends, the Monsters win!
Heroes Triumph!
If you manage to defeat all monsters, the game ends immediately and the players have won! Go you - maybe you need to add an extra monster or two next time?
Horrified is a great family-friendly game that feels similar in weight to many other co-operative games, however, the theme really shines through with this one. Turning over the monster card and seeing a Monster come towards you is, truly, horrifying! The artwork is great and stays true to the Monsters classic appearances and the win conditions for each fit well with the characters (discover a cure for the Wolfman, find the hidden lair for the Creature from the Black Lagoon, smash Draculas coffins)
Realistically, as someone who is not a fan of co-op games, this won’t be coming off the shelves to play every week, but it will get played and it will bring a smile to my face when we do play it!
In the box you get:
Shuffle the basic map tiles and place them in a few piles. Place all bonus tiles face-up so all players can see and access them. Shuffle the round cards and create a deck depending on the number of players - if playing with three players use all nine cards, if two or four players use only eight cards (pop the remaining card back in the box)
Place the End Game bonus card on the table with the appropriate bonuses on the card - the railhead tile, railway inspector, a train, and a mailbag.
Shuffle all objective cards and deal one to each player, these are kept secret. Take the appropriate number of player aids for the number of players, making sure to include the one with the conductor symbol on. Deal these out to all players, whoever has the conductor card will be the first player. Place all the commuters in the cotton bag and give it to that player. Place the tourists, trains, mail bags, money, and victory point tokens to the side ready to be used when needed.
Give each player a random starting tile which they should place face up in front of them - this is the start of their rail network so make sure there is plenty of room around it!
Reveal map tiles equal to twice the player count ie. four tiles for two players, six tiles for three players. Starting with the last player, everyone should pick one of these tiles. Once everyone has taken a tile, begin with the start player and everyone takes a second tile. Add these tiles to your network according to the following rules:
Now you’re ready to begin play!
Each round consists of three phases: Preparation, Draft, Clean Up
The starting player should draw the top round card from the deck and place it face up so all players can see it.
First place all wooden elements as shown on the card - tourists, trains, mailbags and commuters (which are drawn randomly from the bag) Then, check the bottom of the card and draw a number of tiles as indicated by the player count, place these face-up.
Starting with the first player and going clockwise around the table, players take it in turns to draft. Choosing one tile or wooden element at a time, play continues until there is only one item left. This remaining item is placed back into the game box (be it a tile or a wooden element)
When you draft a wooden element you must immediately place it on your tracks. Each track may only ever have one tourist and one commuter of each colour on it. You score points immediately as you place these guys.
When you place a tourist, you score the points shown on any landmarks adjacent to the line that the tourist is on. These may be on the same tile or on neighbouring tiles and may be next to the track vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. Take the corresponding number of victory point tokens.
When you place a commuter, trace the track from start to finish and count the number of adjacent districts that match the colour of the commuter, score one point for each (even diagonals!) and take the appropriate number of victory point tokens. Mixed districts count as all colours.
Mailbags and trains are added to your tracks, again, you may only have one of each on a track and will score you points at the end of the game.
At any point, you may discard your drafted element and exchange it for one victory point.
If there are any cards left in the round deck, pass the bag to the next player, they will start next round, if there are no round cards left, you will need to resolve the end game bonus card and score!
This is when you get to place the tiles you drafted previously.
Place your tiles according to the rules. Whenever you place a tile showing a money symbol, place a money token on it. At any time during your turn, you may spend money tokens. There are three things you can do with them:
Purchase a bonus tile - choose a face up bonus tile and add it to your network
Change a commuter colour - when you place a new commuter you can decide it will score a different colour. So, you could place a grey commuter but score for your green districts
Draw an objective card - Draw a new objective card and choose one of the two in your hand to replace at the bottom of the deck.
You may do any of these actions once in a turn and if you have enough cash, you may even do all three in one turn!
When you discard the last round card, the game is finished and end game scoring happens. Start with the bonus card resolution.
Starting with the player on the fewest points, each player gets to choose one end game bonus.
The Railhead - this acts as a special station that can be added to any track.
The Railway Inspector - add it to any track and select a colour, it scores like a commuter of that colour.
Mailbag and Train - work like the others in final scoring.
Score your hidden objective if you have completed it.
Score all finished tracks. A track is considered finished when both ends have a station. Count the number of tiles in the track and score according to the chart shown on your player aid.
A mailbag doubles the score of any finished track.
Tracks with trains on them score for the number of money tokens left adjacent to the track, again, there is a chart on the player aid.
Points are then awarded to the player with the longest track (this doesn’t have to be completed!) The player with the longest track gets six points!
Add up the scores to see who has won.
Now, I have to admit with things as they are currently we have only played this at two player, which does mean the draft choice isn’t as good as it would be with more players, but the choices can still be tough and definitely had us scratching our heads at points. Overall, Traintopia feels like a combination of Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride, both of which I’d consider great lighter-weight games. I loved seeing a lady conductor and the artwork is all super friendly and easy to understand. My one criticism of the game was that the trains didn’t seem that important - in a game about building rail networks. A lot of the time we were using our cash for the extra actions (those bonus tiles are really great!) so the trains aren’t generally high scoring in our games, which, thematically seems a bit odd!
Overall this is a great light weight game with enough decisions to keep all players engaged. I'm looking forward to playing this with more players as soon as we have a chance!
Review copy kindly supplied by Board & Dice
]]>I first discovered this husband/wife team when we played Village. A worker placement game where you need to kill off your workers (yup, honestly!) However, they will be forever remembered in the village chronicles giving you end game points. Every action costs time and when you go round your board, you lose a worker, bringing a whole new meaning to time management!
Now, the first time I played Rajas of the Ganges from them I wasn’t sure about it. It felt like a race game that I’m not a fan of. However, multiple plays have left me loving this game. Over the course of the game, players receive fame and money through various actions on tracks that start different sides of the board. The first player to get their marker on these tracks to meet wins the game. This worker placement game has elements of set collecting, dice manipulation and tile placement.
Most recently they are known for the amazing EXIT games, we’ve now played through all of these and I can’t praise them enough! Ingenious puzzles, logistics and storylines.
These guys are probably best known for Madiera. Though they also worked together on Panamax, Nippon, La Stanza and Arraial (though this is a bit of a departure for them!)
Great crunchy, midweight Euroes full of theme and beautifully presented. I cannot wait for Brasil from them (hopefully later this year)
They are also organisers for LeiraCon, a super interesting board game convention in Portugal that sees the like of Markus and Inka Brand, Mac Gerdts, Tony Boydell and many others visiting with prototypes, some of which end up to be huge hits and probably some that are never sen again! Really hoping to be there next year
Otherwise known as Splotter, these guys produce some of the best heavy games out there. Splotter is a small, boutique company that produces small runs. Food Chain Magnate in 2015 was a huge hit for them leading to multiple reprints and awareness of their previous catalogue. I was one of the many that discovered them when Food Chain was released but have since played quite a few of the others.. Indonesia, Antiquity and The Great Zimbabwe.
Be prepared for some great brain-melting action with any of their games! Generally economic in nature, they’re pretty unforgiving and the kind of game that will have you thinking ‘Ohhh…. I should have done that’ for days after, begging you for another play to try a different strategy, or just begging for another play now you have some idea of what you are doing!
Both Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer have been creating games independently for many years. It is well known that Wolfgang Kramer one of the grand-daddys of modern boardgaming . This duo were collaborating together way before the internet developing games over the telephone and even fax machine in the 1990s. As a pairing they've have multiple nominations for the Spiel des Jahres, and the Kennerspiel des Jahres, but they won the Spiel des Jahres in 1999 and 2000 for Tikal and Torres respectively.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be-n-VfRJXM&feature=youtu.be
Their latest offering, Paris, has recently finished funding on Kickstarter but is still accepting late pledges.
A slight change from the other pairings here! Both had a plethora of work under their belt before coming together for The Gallerist in 2015 and now we all expect to see the two names together! The amazing big box, deluxe editions of Vital Lacerda'ss games are becoming essential for any heavy gamer and all of them look resplendent with Ian O’Tooles artwork. As well as the Gallerist, they have worked on Escape Plan, CO2 Second Chance, Vinhos, Kanban EV, Lisboa and On Mars.
However, Ian O’Toole has also recently worked on Pipeline, Irish Gauge, Clinic deluxe and the upcoming Rococo deluxe edition, his name is becoming as synonymous with heavy games as Vital Lacreda is!
Paris is a two-player tile-laying game that plays in around thirty minutes. You take on the role of a city planner, ensure each building is bathed in as much light as possible, inspire artists and surprise Parisians and visitors with the wonder of the Citys new lighting system!
In the box you get:
9 ‘Special’ Pieces: Painter Pawn, Dancer Pawn, Mixed cobblestone space, Fountain tile, Statue Tile, Streetlight tile, Large Streetlight tile, Annex piece, Botanical Garden tile.
Place the board-box in the centre of the table, randomly choose eight of the twelve action cards to play (there are eight marked with a star that are recommended for your first few games) Place the special pieces on the corresponding cards and put all other special action pieces and leftover action cards to one side. Place the building pieces next to the board.
Each player takes the corresponding pieces - tiles, chimneys and action tokens in their colour. Shuffle up the tiles and draw one into your hand.
The game is played in two different phases:
Beginning with the start player and taking it in turns, players may place their cobblestone tiles onto the game board or take a building tile. There are sixteen squares marked on the board and all tiles must be placed covering exactly one square with no overlap. After placing your tile, draw the next one ready to place next turn. Instead of placing a tile, you may choose instead to draw a building tile and place it in your reserve. Once all sixteen cobblestone tiles are placed and the board is full, this phase ends.
The first player who placed their last cobblestone tile in the last phase will be the starting player in this phase. Once again, players take turns and again, they have two options each turn. They may place one of their building tiles onto the board. It must only occupy squares of their colour or purple squares. It may never be built over a streetlight (they are far too important!) When you place a building, put one of your chimney tokens onto it. Alternatively, players may choose to activate an action postcard. You may use any face up postcards next to the board, use the action shown then flip the card face down and place one of your action tokens on top of it. This action may not be used again. These actions place streetlights, extend buildings and other rule breakers.
When neither player can place any more buildings and all eight action cards have been used, this phase ends.
Once the second phase is complete, players score their points.
Each player gets points for Illuminated Buildings. Multiply the size of the house (the number of spaces it occupies) by the number of streetlights illuminating it. A streetlight illuminates the four squares around it (not the diagonals) A streetlight may only be counted once per building, but may illuminate more than one building. A building that is not illuminated does not score anything.
Each player gets points for their largest building. Building tiles connect if touching another tile owned by the same player (diagonals do not count) It does not matter if this building is illuminated or not.
Each player then loses three points for each unbuilt building tile in their reserve that was taken in the first phase and not placed in the second.
Don’t forget any extra points from action cards!
The player with the highest wins!
Paris: La Citie de la Lumiere is another polyominoes game, but this time with a difference - you are building your placement area. The initial tile placement phase can be tricky as you obviously want to grab the building tiles you’ve planned for but it’s easy for your opponent to scupper your plans! Just how many buildings should you go for to maximise points but not get stung when you can’t place them? This is a very neat puzzle game and playing in the box is a really unusual idea. Great, quick two player game!
Review copy was provided by Devir.
In the box you get:
Place the board in the middle of the table and the food tokens off to one
side. Place the candy dice in the candy jar on the game board.
Give each player a food sack and the dice in their chosen player colour. Choose a start player and give them three sausage tokens, each subsequent player gets one more sausage than the player before them. These tokens go in front of the player, not into their sack.
On a players turn they will roll their dice. After this initial roll, they may choose to re-roll as many dice as they wish, though only once per turn. Then, they may place dice on the board in spaces that match the required number. Players may place as many dice as they want, however, they must place at least one. These dice stay on the game board until the appropriate row or column has been filled, meaning they will probably have less dice to roll on their next turn. If, at any point, a player has no dice left or else wants more dice to roll, they may use a turn to remove dice from one column of the board. They then take this action instead of rolling and placing.
The rules for placing dice are:
Once a player has placed as many dice as they wish, they must check to see if they completed any of the columns. A column is considered complete when there is a dice in the top space. Working from left to right, all players remove their dice on completed rows and gain the rewards shown on the board where their dice was. The player who is having the current turn gains all rewards shown at the top of the filled column(s). Play moves onto the next player.
From left to right, this is the reward for the columns:
Anxious Annie - Take the die from the top space of this column and immediately place it on the bottom square of any other column. The dice does not have to match the required number. If there are already other dice in this column, push them up. If moving these dice up results in a column being filled, the active player also receives that bonus.
Candy Jar - Take one of the candy dice from the jar, if none are available because players already have them, choose a player and take the candy dice from them. You may use the candy dice as a wild card for future rounds. When you place it, make sure the colour that matches your player colour is face up. When a column with a candy dice is filled, it goes back to the candy jar.
Get Sausages - The next four columns simply give you sausages, either for placed dice and/or for completing the row. Place all food gained this way in front of you.
Safeguard Your Food - Having food is purely half the game! This reward lets you take unprotected food and place it safely in your sack (thereby counting towards your end game points!) Add together the highest matching pair of dice and place that much food into your sack. All other food remains in front of you, if you do not have enough food to meet the required amount, then you cannot put any into your sack! Example: If the top two dice were threes, you would be allowed to put exactly six food safely away.
Greedy Gobbler - Target one player and steal half their unprotected food (rounded up) and place it in front of you.
Accountant - All players must hand over half their unprotected food to the player next to them. The player who triggered this effect chooses which direction (left or right)
The Cat Row works differently to the columns (well, obviously, it’s a row for starters!) Any grey spaces here may be filled with any numbered dice of your choosing. As soon as the grey spaces are filled, any other dice that match the one to the left of it must be placed as soon as they are rolled (before and after re-rolling dice in the turn) When the cat row is complete, the cat comes out and hunts all the mice! All players immediately remove all of their dice from the board.
The game ends when a player gets twenty-five food or more in their sack!
Ratzzia is a cute little dice chucker with Yahtzee overtones. The dice staying on the board until columns are filled feels tough at times, especially as there is no way to alter dice rolls. As someone who has the worst luck with dice rolls, this is where the game didn’t gel for me. You end up being forced to place dice that you really rather wouldn’t!
Having said that, Ratzzia doesn’t outstay it’s welcome as a twenty-minute dice chucker, the theme is cute and it doesn’t feel quite as brutal as King of Tokyo. If you don’t mind the luck of the dice or you’re good with them, check it out!
]]>In the box you get:
Put the deceased widow cards to one side for now. Deal one widow card to each player, place it in front of them blue side up. Add a number of widow cards equal to the player count minus one (eg three if you are playing with four players) to the character deck and shuffle them. Put the rest of the widow cards back in the box. Split the character deck into four equal-sized piles, blue side up and place them in the middle of the table.
Shuffle the establishment tiles and draw a number appropriate for the number of players, four for a two-player game, five for three players and seven for four players. Place them face-up on the table and put the rest back in the box.
Decide on a starting player and give them the start player token.
In your turn, you may do one of three actions:
Draw a card from the top of one of the four piles and place it, blue side up, in front of you. You may only ever have five cards in front of you at any time. You may, however, take a card and discard one of your older ones.
To flip over a blue card that is in front of you, you must pay the cost as shown on the bottom. You can pay this with either blue or red cards in front of you, using the symbols in the top left of the card. If you use red cards they stay in front of you, however, if you use blue cards in front of you, you must discard them. Character cards are discarded to the bottom of the smallest pile on the table. When the cost is paid, flip over the card to show it’s red side, it now provides a permanent resource for you.
When you meet the conditions shown on an establishment tile, take the tile and place it in front of you, red side up. If the condition is resources, you must pay them, like you would for recruiting a new member.
Widow cards work the same way as any other, they provide a single resource - diamonds that act as wild. However, when you use a widow card for its resource, she dies. Place a deceased widow card on top of the card and it will still take up one of your five available card slots. You may also flip them in the same way as other character cards. However, they are now worth minus two points at game end.
The game ends when one player has seven character cards red side up in front of them or when there are no more establishment tiles available. Count up all points from flipped character cards and establishment tiles. The player with the most points wins.
Shadows of Macao is, at heart, a fairly simple card game. However, the skill
lies in knowing which cards to take and when, only being allowed five cards
means making some tough choices and if an opponent takes a card you want, you
will need to change your plans and this is something that happens frequently!
I’ve also had a few games where I have finished the game with seven flipped
cards but not won on points. It’s easy to grab the quick and easy cards but you
need to watch carefully what other players are doing as a few bigger point
cards can make all the difference. All of the character cards have special
effects which can also change the game dynamic drastically, for example the
barman allows you an extra blue card, and all of these effects stack. The
establishment tiles give bonuses of five or six points, which is huge in this
game so it’s well worth keeping an eye on them and aiming for one or more early
in the game.
It's a quick and easy game, the cards have a nice linen finish and the unusual shape and artwork just add a touch more class to an already quality game.
In the box you get:
Place the board in the centre of the table, use the side appropriate to the player count. One side is for two players, the other for three to four players.
Give each player all components of their player colour. That is, all eight trees, eight leaf tiles, thirty-six leaf tokens and squirrel token. Place the score track to the side and have each player place a leaf token near it to use as a score marker. The wind board and direction marker will be used later in the game. Give the hiker token to the starting player.
Bosk is played over a year, there are four rounds representing the four seasons, spring, summer, autumn and winter, each of which is played very differently. Summer and Winter are when scoring occurs.
Players take it in turns placing their trees on the board. Trees must be placed on an unoccupied intersection of trails (but not on the edges of the board) Trees may be placed in any order of the players choosing. Tree placement is really important as it will affect all other rounds. Each tree’s value will influence the scoring in summer and its position will influence leaf placement in Autumn. Once each player has placed all eight of their trees, play moves to the Summer Round.
During Summer players will be awarded points for having the most glorious trees on each trail. Add up the value of the trees (not just the number of trees) on each row for each player. Then do the same for the columns. Do NOT move or remove the trees!
The player with the most points scores two points, if players are tied they both receive one point and no points are awarded for second place. If no other players have trees on the row or column, the player in first place receives three points.
The player in second place receives one point, if players are tied they receive no points.
Score for each row and column, marking points on the score track as you go before going into….
The player with the lowest score going into this round goes first. Give them the hiker token.
They get to place the wind board on one of the sides of the game board, selecting which direction the wind will go in. Place the wind direction marker on the first spot of the board and move it each round.
Beginning with the start player, each player will take their turn. Firstly, they choose one of their trees that leaves will fall from this round. They then choose one of their leaf tiles and place it in front of them, determining how many laves will fall from this tree.
During the first four rounds, trees must be chosen matching the number shown on the wind direction board. In the last four rounds (indicated by a star) players may choose any of their trees. The player takes leaf tokens from their supply equal to that number, these are now active leaves. Leaves fall in a continuous path on the board from the tree, in the direction of the wind. The first active leaf is placed at the base of the tree, on either of the two spaces available in the direction of the wind. Each subsequent leaf is placed on one of the three available spots next to the previous one ie. directly in front or on one of the two adjacent diagonal spaces (always in the direction of the wind) After placing the last active leaf, remove the tree they fell from.
Leaves may also fall on top of other players leaves. Place an active leaf token on top of any other leaves in the space, then discard one active leaf for each leaf token already on the tile. So, if there are already two leaves on a square, you must discard two from your active leaf supply to place on that square.
Instead of just placing leaves, players may call a squirrel to their aid using the leaf tile with the squirrel icon. Place the squirrel token up to three spaces away from the chosen tree (again, in the direction of the wind) A squirrel may go on a tile with any number of leaves and may never be covered.
Whichever player played the lowest value tree token becomes start player for the next round. Play continues as shown on the wind board with players always removing a tree after placing leaves (or a squirrel) so at the end of the eight rounds, there should be no trees left on the board, just leaves.
The final, and scoring round!
There are eight regions on the map, differentiated by terrain colour and texture.
In each region count the number of terrain tiles controlled by each player (only the player whose leaf or squirrel is on top of a pile counts) and score as follows
The player in first place gains five points, if players are tied they all receive four points and no points are awarded for second place. If they are the only player in a region, they score eight points.
Players in second place gain three points, in the case of a tie all players get one point each.
Add the points for each region and the player with the most total points wins!
When opening Bosk with the 3D trees you can't help but compare it to Photosynthesis. With that in mind I was intrigued what new direction Bosk could take the tree / forest theme, it's fair to say that the presentation made me think that the gameplay would be very rich in theme. However, the play style comes across as fairly abstract despite the beautiful components. With the placement this comes across perhaps more like multi-player chess, it's about making the optimum placement and preventing your opponent from scoring their rows and columns through out manoeuvring them as you place your trees. The third phase act does the same thing but through the placement of leaves and attempting to get the most optimum spread of leaves in each area for the most control. It's an abstract game and if that is your bag you'll love it and you'll love it that little bit more because it's a work of art.
Anyway, onto the game!
Gates of Delirium is a 2-4 player game with multi-use cards that has area control elements and set collection, all wrapped up in a Cthulhu setting with beautifully illustrated Great Old Ones.
In the box you get:
Place the board in the centre of the table, making sure you have the correct side up for the number of players (one side is for 2 players and the other for 3+)
Shuffle the gate cards and form the supply by placing four cards face up next to the deck. Sort the monstrosity discs into a pile in ascending order (so the highest value is on the top) Shuffle the scroll deck and place one card face down on the appropriate spaces on the top of the board. Put the rest in the box as they will not be used.
Shuffle the action cards and deal five cards to each player. Give each player a player journal, score marker and ten investigators in their chosen colour. Place the score tokens and desperation tokens next to the board.
Determine the starting player and give them the sanity disc.
At the start of a round, the starting player will choose if everyone will play the round as Sane or Insane. Each player, in turn order will then play two cards, using the side determined by the starting player for the round. There are three sane actions available and three insane actions. The available actions are as follows
Collecting Lost Pages
Add the card to the corresponding part of your player journal. At the end of the game, you will score four points for every consecutively numbered page and two points for each non -consecutive page. These are numbered between one and twenty and there is only one of each number.
Collecting Map Fragments
Add the card to the corresponding section of your player journal. It takes four sections (NW, NE, SW and SE) to complete a map. Each completed map is worth twelve points at the end of the game and individual map fragments are worth two points.
Dispatching Investigators
Take the number of investigators as indicated on the card (one or two) and place them in any regions on the map. If you have no investigators left, you may instead, choose to move them from elsewhere on the map.
When you place investigators, you will also be able to take desperation tokens (look for the symbol next to the investigators!) These will allow you to take desperate actions - more on them later!
Placing investigators will allow you to score points by winning area majorities when gates are opened. Points are given to players with the first, second and third most in a given area.
Collect Ancient Runes
Add the card to the corresponding area of your player journal. At the end of the game, points will be given depending on the number of Ancient Runes you have collected. The larger your set, the more points you will gain!
Converting Investigators
Remove an opposing investigator from any region on the board and return it to that players supply. Replace it with one of your own investigators.
If you have none left in your supply, you may instead, swap an opponents investigator with one of your own.
Build Gate Sections
Choose one or two (dictated by the symbol) gate section cards and place them in your play area. When drawing them, you may choose to take from the face-up supply or draw from the top of the deck.
There are five different gate cards, each corresponding to an area of the map. You may have multiple gates in progress at one time but only one of each type. Each gate needs a specific number of cards to complete (this is noted on the cards) These cards also give you desperation tokens (I promise I haven’t forgotten about them!)
When a gate is complete, carry out the steps to score the gate
Release a Monstrosity: The player who opened the gate takes the top Monstrosity disc from the stack and immediately scores the points shown on it.
Reveal a Scroll: If the collected Monstrosity token shows a scroll symbol, reveal the next scroll card from the top of the board.
Score the Region: Determine area majority for the region that corresponds to the opened gate. Score points as shown on the board, then remove all investigators from that area.
I promised I’d come back to these!
Certain cards with give you desperation tokens. You can use these to perform desperate actions at any point in your turn (even halfway through a turn) These are shown on the board.
The game ends when the final Monstrosity Token is taken from a player opening a Gate. The game ends immediately if a player is in the middle of their turn, they don’t take any further actions. Game end scoring then occurs.
Score one point for each investigator on the map. Some scroll effects will grant end game points, score these. Then look at each players journal. Score points for the number of Ancient Runes they have collected as shown on the journal, if you have more than five score for multiple sets. Score for Lost Pages and Map fragments. The player with the most points wins! In the case of a tie, the player with the most Desperation tokens left over wins (these may not be spent during final scoring)
Gates of Delirium has a bit of everything! Dual card use, set collection, area control along with a bit of player conflict (depending on how mean your opponents are!) Being forced to use cards in a particular way on the whim of your opponent is a good way to change up the gameplay and forces the player to make the best possible use of their cards.
Yes, there are a lot of Cthulhu themed games out there but this is something
quite different and this is super accessible for players of all ages and
skills. Everything you need to know is stated clearly on each players journal
and the symbology is easy to understand. The artwork is nice but not
overpowering nor too scary for younger players. The way in which the gate cards
are laid out is just a really nice touch, watching that gate come to life as
you build it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlsMUdgoaAI
So, last year I played just over 200 games total. (BGG says just under 200 but I know I forget to log sometimes!) At least 82 of them were ‘new to me’ games, either games from our shelf of opportunity or new releases. I don’t want to do a ‘top ten of 2019’ or even of the decade as I haven’t played ALL the games and know there will be stuff I’m missing out that deserve to be on there (I am still to play Barrage or Trismegistmus which I think will come in pretty high!) Instead, I’m gonna talk about the games I played last year (yes, it’s another rambling from my brain post this week!)
November and January were my ‘most played’ months, I suspect BGG Con helps to bump November and January was probably a burst of new games from Christmas and my newly listed shelf of opportunity spreadsheet that I do at the start of every year! My poorest month with only four plays logged was October - Essen month believe it or not!
Our most played game of the year was Quacks of Quedlinburg. I picked this up in December 2018 as it had won the Kennerspiel award for the year. It was certainly not what I was expecting, but turned out to be a game we thoroughly enjoyed. I even bought the geek up pieces from BGG for it as our cardboard chits were starting to look a little worn!
Our second most played game of the year came in at a tie, the super quick and easy Ganz Schon Clever alongside Coimbra. I love both of these games for very different reasons. I enjoy games that force you to make the most of every move and Coimbra with its nine actions all game is a perfect example of this. Every action must count! Ganz Schon Clever is the almost polar opposite to Coimbra with it’s quick, dice chucking fun. Something that anyone can easily pick up and enjoy and a great way to kill ten minutes at the start or end of a gaming evening!
Then, I have a three-way tie for third place and again, a mixed bunch! I was late to the party with Underwater Cities, only picking it up midway through the year but it has quickly risen to the top of many lists for me! This beautiful example of engine building has become one of my all-time firm favourites, and only enhanced by the expansion which was released at Essen and was the first thing I bought there this year. Kashgar: Merchants of the Silk Road also came in third, I love the card mechanism used in this game. You have three rows of cards but can only ever use the card at the bottom of one of your rows, once you have used it, it goes back to the top. This leads to some real juggling in terms of getting the cards you want to the bottom of multiple rows at the same time to activate combinations. Lastly in third place is a new game which we purchased at Essen proving how much we love it! Paladins of the West Kingdoms is the second entry in the West Kingdoms saga from Shem Phillips. We really enjoyed Architects but I’m now sure that Paladins is my favourite of the two. Another game that forces you to maximise every action. Starting the round with six workers and spots that require up to three workers to activate, this game is tight, but get the right combos and everything can slot into place beautifully.
Then, we have a huge bulk of games in fourth place, to touch on a few. Alexander Pfister is super represented here with Mombasa, Great Western Trail, and Maracaibo all coming in this position. None of which I feel I’ve played enough to fully explore fully and all of which I’m looking forward to getting multiple games of this year!
Though, onto this year’s challenge!
We have far too many unplayed games on our shelves at the moment, something that has been made more noticeable as we have sorted out our games and now dedicated a room to their storage! So, our plan is to try and play ten ‘new to us’ games each week until clearing the backlog. This is, of course, alongside trying to keep up-to-date with review games (only eleven of them - phew!) So far, this week, we have managed nine of our ten so it’s looking good.
What did you play last year?
]]>Then again, setting goals can become a chore and take some of the joy out of gaming, if you want to play one thing but it’s not on your ‘to do’ list you may feel bad, but you shouldn’t - gaming should be fun, not a chore (as adults we have enough of them to last a lifetime!)
Recently though, I have tried to concentrate on playing our ‘Shelf of Opportunity’ (aka shelf of Shame) Keeping the balance between new games and old favourites can be tough at times (especially if you then add review games into the mix!) There might even be something that becomes an old favourite in the new pile!
With that in mind, at the end of every year, I compile my ‘unplayed list’ for the upcoming year and also try to keep track of how many new to us games we play. The unplayed list goes up and down as new games come into the collection, they get added to the list. I know I was horrified at the start of the year to discover we were over a hundred unplayed games on our shelves and I know at one point it hit around 125. At the end of this year, we are under that mark, with ninety-five currently outstanding (though when I do a proper count it may hit a hundred again - boo!)
According to my spreadsheet, we have played 79 new to us games this year (though I may have forgotten to log some!) which I think is pretty good going. Learning new games takes time and patience, something we don’t always have time for!
Pre-Christmas boardgame collection audit and updating of my #bgg list underway for boring insurance purposes and working through our unplayed games. #boardgames #adulting pic.twitter.com/OrXOj5JqbU
— I Play Red back home for longer than a week - yay! (@IPlayRedGaming) 22 December 2019
I know my collection on BGG is horribly out of date so I have started a full audit of our collection, something that I take no joy in but needs doing for various reasons! Whilst doing this, we have decided to give up on the idea of a ‘spare bedroom’ and move the piles that are currently sat on the front room floor into new Kallax(es) in there. We will have a spare games room instead! In doing this, Rob has had ‘the chat’ with me about when to stop, apparently, when that room is full we shall be following a strict ‘one in, one out’ protocol. Maybe by then, we will have a bigger house?! Lol
So, where do we all draw the line between collecting and playing? Personally, I enjoy both elements of it but space dictates otherwise. Other the last couple of years I have noticed that my collection is leaning towards the heavier side of things. But, yes, we still have a ‘party games’ shelf for when the mythical non-gamers come to visit, and our small games collection is ever-growing, after all, you need something to play at the start and end of a night. However, these are the style of games that are being sacrificed in the name of space. Partly, with that in mind, I Play Red will also be starting to lean that way.
This year was the year I was brave enough to put myself in front of the camera and going into 2020 I will be continuing to do so with my ‘Ten Minute Teach’ series focusing on the mid to heavy weight games that I enjoy. Some of these will be older titles that we love and some will be newer stuff (I still have eleven games in the ‘review’ pile!) If there is anything you would like to see in this series, drop me a line and if I know it/own it I’ll be happy to oblige! The new (ish) schedule will be written content up on a Tuesday with some sort of video release every Thursday, so if you haven’t subscribed on YouTube please do!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oevq0ARDAjI
Now I need to get back to cataloging the games and searching for cheap Kallax(es) on Facebook Marketplace, so I hope everyone has a great festive season, with lots of games (new and old!) played and a massive thank you to my Patreons who help me keep the site alive!
]]>Boardgaming is a luxury hobby, with even the cheapest games costing £12 - £15. Big box games have recently bumped up in price from around £40 - £45 to £50 - £60 a go. A while back I mused on the ‘cost per play’ aspect of gaming and the fact that some of our smaller, cheaper games gave bigger bangs per buck : Can you put a price on gaming?
We now seem to be in the era of the ‘deluxe’ game - we’re not just talking about pimping components as that’s a choice that can be made but the super deluxe, everything is upgraded before you buy it versions.
The most recent example of this is Castles of Burgundy. Yes, we all complained about how dated and drab it looked, but how many great Euro-games can you buy for around £20? The answer was one! I was excited when they spoke about a reprint - a great game getting a great make-over would be brilliant. However, they took the chance to do a deluxe version, all expansions and promos included for around £60. Now, this is great for fans of the game and collectors who want it all, but what happened to that great Euro game for £20?
I remember running to rushing to get a copy of Gentes from Spielworxx at Essen in 2017 as I knew there were limited copies and it was a game I really wanted. Less than a year later, there was a deluxified copy available from TMG, again, at a much higher price.
Now, I pimp games, don’t get me wrong. I love specialised workers, resources and metal coins as much as the next person. I love expansions and promos and all of the extra stuff, but, I also like the thrill of the chase, I like hunting for those things and gradually turning my £20 Castles of Burgundy into a £60 game by adding all that stuff over the course of time.
It’s fine to have deluxe versions but these probably shouldn’t be the only versions available. I will always take a risk on a game for £20, would I take a risk for £60? No way!
We’re now at a point where some games are only available in deluxe editions and are coming in at close to the £100 price point, some of which I’ve played and honestly, they felt like £40 games. The extra money has been spent on nice components. This is making these, admittedly beautiful, games inaccessible to people, for what is already a luxury item.
Now, a special mention has to go to Monumental from Funforge. When they ran the Kickstarter, they had two editions of the game. One with cardboard standees and a more expensive version that came with miniatures, offering people two price points to back the game at. And maybe this is something more publishers should look at.
So I guess my answer to this is yes, there is a market for budget games. By all means publishers should offer deluxified games but this shouldn’t then exclude people. Only offering deluxified versions limits access to games at a time when we are the most attuned to keeping gaming an inclusive experience and that should also include financial status.
Every game can be a deluxe version is you treat yourself to a nice set of metal coins, a set of realistic resources which can be used across the board to numerous games and there are plenty of people out there offering these kinds of sets. Or buy a set for your favourite game and re-use them.
I would say that I would, under the right circumstances, buy a deluxe version of a game, but it would have to be the right game and something very special, Russian Railroads anyone??
]]>I landed in Dallas after a very long day Wednesday and went in on a game of
Pret-a-Porter from stronghold Games
I backed this on Kickstarter, picked my copy up at Essen, but hadn’t had a chance to play it yet so I was happy to jump in on a learning game. There’s a lot going on here, or in my befuddled state, there seemed to be a lot going on! I’d like to play this again soon to really form an opinion, there were a lot of symbols and small text and by the time we finished, I’d been awake for 26 hours!
Going into Wednesday with a little more sleep, my first official game of the Con was Alubari. I’d picked this up at Essen and even muled a copy to Dallas for friends. We’d played it at 2 players so I was able to teach it when I got there but it was a very different game at 4 players! Yes, it does share similarities to Snowdonia but we love the theme and this is great when we don’t want to pull out the huge Snowdonia deluxe box!
I was then lucky enough to play a prototype copy of a new Martin Wallace game called Bloodstones. This is technically a war game, with multi-use tokens that constantly kept me angry (in a good way!) about tiles I wanted to use for one thing and ended up using for another. Then someone would attack me and scupper all my plans! This one is coming to Kickstarter next year from PSC and I can’t wait to see it in its final form.
So, it seemed to be prototype day as I went on to play a prototype of Jason Dingers Arcadians. This will be the third game in his Cajun trilogy (Captains of the Gulf being the first) and the theme shone through, even on this rough prototype version. Wow, there was a lot going on here! Programming and very limited actions ensuring everything about this game was TIGHT. Another one I’m really looking forward to seeing the finished version of!
Waking up early on Thursday, we managed to get into the hot games room first thing where we played a game of The Magnificent. I picked this up at Essen and had managed a two-player learning game of it beforehand (though my memory had obviously faded as it came to teach it!) This game is gorgeous, the dark, brooding board with the bright coloured dice is gorgeous. I also love the theme! During the game you have a total of twelve turns to collect tricks, tents to perform them in, collect the pieces you need for them and perform them *phew* For a game with only three possible actions and twelve turns, there is a lot to think about.
Then onto one of my current favourites - I had the pleasure of teaching Underwater Cities to a group, none of whom had played it before. Damn, I love this game! I think everyone else enjoyed it (well, I hope so!) and it ended up being a pretty close game. I love engine building and worker placement and this sits nicely across both mechanisms. I’m so glad I got to grab the expansion at Essen with the beautiful inlaid boards.
I then ran out for dinner with the lovely folks from Parallel Games who had copies of City of the Big Shoulders flying off the shelves in the traders hall over the weekend - good job!
Hopefully they have gone by now!!! https://t.co/rRvXT8KVKP
— I Play Red at PaxU (@IPlayRedGaming) November 23, 2019
After dinner, I played something new to me - yipee! Wildcatters has been sat on my shelf of opportunity for just over a year now and I had the opportunity to jump in a game with a teacher and another newbie. OK, so I understood what I was trying to do and how to do it, but just how to strategise this, I have no idea (yet!) I need to get our copy to the table soon to get the rules really sunk in. However, I managed to win with a huge one point lead! Great theme leading to great, logical game play made this a winner for me and glad I grabbed it when I could.
So, Friday morning we had a group of five which caused some discussion that eventually led us to playing Bruges with the City on the Zwin expansion. I’m a huge fan of Bruges but pretty sure I initially dismissed the expansion. Now, I have no idea why! I honestly love this game and am always happy to play it so it was great to play it with a new bunch of people and rediscover the expansion. For sure, it’ll be coming out next time we play!
Then onto another new to me game and another on my shelf of opportunity. Brewcrafters! Another super tight game with very few actions to complete everything you want to do. However, a lot of the writing on cards and player aids is tiny and the yellow-ish lighting in the main gaming room made this pretty miserable to play as I just couldn’t see a lot of stuff. When we crack my copy open I think we need to scan and reprint the guides to buildings in a bigger format as I pretty much ignored them in this game!
For the evening, I went back to a firm favourite, Great Western Trail with the Rails to the North Expansion. I LOVE this game! In fact, I love everything Alexander Pfister has done (OK, I haven’t played Expedition to Newdale yet!) I managed to get a decent amount of cows this game leading to some serious Kansas scores, but I just wasn’t set up nicely at the top and ended up taking some negative points there. This actually ended up being a good rehearsal for Saturday…..
I was up early Saturday morning and while getting my coffee was invited to join in on a game of Maracaibo, Alexander Pfister's latest release. I picked this up at Essen but hadn’t played it yet so jumped at the chance! So, there are some similarities to GWT: taking counters off your player board to enhance your action and moving as few or many spaces as you want, end game scoring has an element of Mombasa, each country scores as many VPs as have been revealed by taking cubes off the board. Realistically, the game is nothing like either game though and I’m keen to dig deeper into the strategies of this one. I’ve played it once since getting home and the random city tiles were so different to my first game that it felt completely different! So much opportunity to be had here, can’t wait to play some more!
A random opening in the hot games room led me to teach Paladins of the West Kingdom. This is my favourite of the Shem Phillips games to date (though I said that about Architects!) It is definitely the crunchiest and yet another game where you want to do loads but don’t have the resources or time to do so. (spot a theme here!) The iconography can take a while to get your head round, but when you do the whole game will click into place. We’d picked this up at Essen and have actually also played a couple of games since I got home from BGG Con. This is becoming a firm favourite here!
The evening led onto a few drinks and some silly games including The Game, The Mind and me finally getting roped into playing Two Rooms and a Boom. This is played at a lot of conventions I go to and I am often intrigued by it. The game we played had a lot of people and a lot of different roles so honestly, I was very confused (only added to by the bottle of wine I’d drunk before playing!) Honestly, this really just isn’t my type of game but at least I have now played it and know what all the noise is about!
Sunday I failed to play anything as it was spent checking out of the hotel, chatting to people and generally mooching round and chilling out before saying goodbyes.
I was also lucky enough to come home with some awesome gifts from some awesome people!
My gorgeous dice tray and Dingers Thingers made by the super talented Jason Dinger, I was actually using the dice tray last night!
My great DandD keyring that Tamara Brzuziwski took off her backpack and gave to me after I’d complimented it! Apparently, her super-talented daughter makes them, how awesome is that? This is now proudly hanging from my Board Game Tables bag.
After lamenting that I had left my water bottle at home and having looked in the BGG stand and not seeing any, Mike came up to me with this great water bottle that I’d obviously totally overlooked! This will now be coming on all my travels with me.
Also a shout out to my great roommates Sid and Shawn who also put me up at their house on Sunday night and let me maul their awesome kitties!
I LOVE BGG Con and hope to be there again next year. This was my fifth year and as well as meeting up with an amazing, great and generous group of friends I have made in previous years I made some new ones that I am looking forward to gaming with next year! This is the pure spirit of gaming!
]]>In the box you get:
You’ll need to assemble the token holders when you first open this game, but they are pretty sturdy and easy to put together!
Each player chooses a colour and takes the matching dial token, placing it in front of them with ‘START’ at the top. They also take seven energy cubes. Place the score track on the table and place the score marker for each player on the starting space.
If this is your first game, play with the pre-set decks. There are six decks with matching footprints on the bottom left of the card. Each contains twelve cards. Sort these and place each deck face down and get players to randomly pick one. Each deck has three cards with the footprint icon printed slightly darker - these are your starting active cards and should be placed face up in front of you. The other nine cards are now your hand.
All remaining brown cards should be shuffled to form a deck and all remaining blue cards should be shuffled to form a deck.
Create the initial landscape shown using 1 desert, 1 grassland, and 2 water
tiles. Place the rest of the tiles to one side in their appropriate stacks.
Place the mountain and tree pieces nearby as well as the animal tokens. Put all
of the element tiles into the bag.
You are now ready to play!
The starting player is the ‘Harbinger’. They take the Element bag and draw one tile, announcing what it is to all players. Each players dial shows a list of all available elements and their frequency in the bag. All players may then place just one of their energy cubes onto one of the cards with the element icon just drawn. If you have no element cubes spare, you may choose to move one you had previously placed.
You may also choose, instead of placing a cube, to rotate your player dial by 90 degrees. You must also do this if, for some reason, you are unable to place a cube.
Any cards that now have all their energy spots full must be resolved. Remove all cubes from the card and place them back in the supply. Carry out the effect on the card. If the card has more than one leaf showing at the top then rotate the card 90 degrees so the number of leaves showing at the top of the card is now one less than it was previously. This card may be used for its abilities again. If there is only one leaf showing then this card is discarded after use. If multiple players complete cards in the same turn, card effects are resolved in player order.
Every time an element is drawn, instead of placing a cube you may instead rotate your player dial. Once you have made two rotations, you may choose to gain a card and rotate it back to the start. Alternatively, you may rotate it three times and either play a card from your hand or gain an energy cube from the supply if you use one of these abilities rotate the player dial back to the start position.
When you gain a card you may either look at the top two cards from one of the decks, add one to your hand and place the other face-up next to the deck or you may take any one of the face-up cards. The brown cards tend to be simpler and help to set the board up and the blue cards tend to be more interactive and worth more points.
Playing cards simply means choosing a card from your hand and placing it face-up in front of you ready to start gathering energy cubes.
Once all players have either played cubes or rotated their dials and cards have been resolved, play continues with the Harbinger drawing another element tile from the bag and the process is repeated.
If placing tokens when a card directs you to, the following rules must be obeyed:
Animals marked with a terrain type must be placed on the indicated terrain - you obviously can’t put a shark in the desert!
Animals marked with a feature (mountain or tree) must be placed on terrain with that feature.
If a card tells you to place an animal on the landscape then you can place it on any tile that can support it that does not already have an animal on it. If all appropriate tiles already contain animals then you may place it regardless of any other species on the tile.
All grassland tiles can support one tree, map tiles containing a mountain can support one tree, therefore a grassland tile with a mountain may contain two trees.
Mountains may be placed on any land type (grassland or desert)
If the Harbinger draws a Wild Element token this indicates the end of the round. Players may place a cube on any element space and resolve all card effects as normal. However, all the previously drawn Elemtn Tokens go back in the bag and the bag is passed to the player on the left who becomes the new Harbinger for the round. This is also when you check for game end conditions. If any player has 80 or more points, the game ends and the player with the most points wins! (If you want a shorter game, you can play to 60 points - both these figures are clearly marked on the score track)
Ecos has elements of Rise of Augustus but has a world building building element. While the animal tiles are cute there seems to be a real lack of interaction between them. There is interaction between the animals through card mechanics, however we only came across a handful in the games we played. Given the strong theme it would have been nice to see organic interaction happening e.g between herbivores and carnivores. Logically it would make sense if a carnivore ate herbivores on the hex automatically. On the plus side the placement and territories each animal could live made sense which was nicely thematic, e.g. shark in the water but a hippo in the water and the grassland. The overall quality of the game is fantastic, the land tiles are good thickness and sturdy, wooden trees and mountains are really nice even down to the two different styles of mountain to give an extra sense of character to the board. The trays as you can see above are a really nice touch too.
Ecos is a pleasant world building experience with nice animal artwork and
the simultaneous play that even at six players it doesn't get bogged down.
Review copy kindly provided by Alderac Entertainment Group
]]>In the box you get:
Place the resource supply tray on the table with the resources in the separate slots. Put the multiplier tokens by the side. Put the market tray in the space of the market board and randomly put twelve of the marbles inside it. The remaining marble should go on the slide around the edge.
Divide the development deck into twelve decks of four cards - as indicated on the back. You should have a blue, yellow, purple and green pile for levels 1,2 and 3. Shuffle each deck of four cards and lay them face-up on the table in a three by four grid. Level ones at the bottom, level twos in a row above and finally the level three cards. Shuffle the leader cards and place that deck to the side for now.
The black cross token and the solo action markers are only used for the solo play so pop these back in the box.
Give each player a player board, a faith marker - place this on the zero of the faith track and three Pope Favour tiles which go on the marked spaces of the Faith track.
Deal each player four leader cards. They choose two to keep face down in front of them and discard the other two. All leftover leader cards can go back in the box.
The starting player gets the inkwell token. In a three or four person game, the third and fourth players each receive one faith point as well as the second and third player starting with a resource of their choice and the fourth player receiving two resources of their choice. (chosen resources start in your warehouse, not your depot!)
You are now ready to play!
Starting with the first player, players take turns performing one action out of the possible three.
Choose a row or column from the market and take the associated resources. Grey = stone, yellow = coin, blue = shield, purple = servants, red = faith and white = nothing. After taking resources, you must take the spare marble and insert it into the row or column you took resources from, pushing another one out of the grid.
When taking faith, simply move your marker one space up the faith track. All other resources taken must go into your depot. This is divided into three sections with one, two and three spaces only. You can only place one type of resource in each slot and each slot must contain a different resource. You may move resources around at any point in your turn. You must discard any resources that you can not or do not want to store, however, all other players receive one Faith point for each resource you discard in this manner.
You may buy a card from the display. The cost is shown on the top of the card. Resources can be paid from your warehouse, depot or a combination of both. Place the resources back in the general supply and put the card into one of the three slots on your player board. A level one card must be played into an empty slot, a level two on top of a level one and a level three on top of a level two (the colours don’t matter). Stagger the cards so it is obvious how many cards you have played.
You can activate any number of visible development cards on your player board. Every card has a production power and each player board has a production power printed on it. All of them work in the same way though - pay the resources on the right to receive the resources on the left. Resources used may be from your depot, warehouse or a combination of both. Place all resources generated this way into your warehouse. Your warehouse has no restrictions, you may place any number of resources here and all types. You may only activate each ability once and all abilities are activated at the same time, meaning you can’t use resources generated from one card to activate another. You can never move resources from your depot to your warehouse or vice versa, using production abilities is the only way to ‘move’ resources.
In addition to your one standard action in your turn, you may perform a Leader action. You can discard a leader card to gain one Faith Point or if you satisfy the requirements shown on the top left of a card you may play it. Place it face up next to your player board, it will now give you a special ability for the rest of the game.
During the game, there will be three Vatican Reports, these are marked on the Faith track. When a players Faith marker is on a space within or past one of these areas, a Vatican Report occurs. All players check to see if their Faith Marker is in (or past) the active section. If so, turn the Popes Favour tile in that section face-up. If your marker is before the active report discard the tile from that section. Each section is only activated once in the game, by the player who is first to reach it. At the end of the game, you will score points for each face-up marker on this track.
The game can end in one of two ways. Either when a player reaches the last space of their Faith track or when a player buys their seventh development card. Play to the end of the round so everyone has the same number of turns. Then players calculate their victory points.
Each development card gives you the indicated number of VPs, the final position of your marker on your Faith track (as indicated on the board), VPs from any Popes Favour tiles, each leader card and each set of five resources gives you one VP.
The player with the most VPs wins!
Masters of the Renaissance has some familiar concepts if you’ve played the Lorenzo Il Magnifico board game, however, it is a very different game. The market phase combined with limited storage in your depot leads to some tough decisions. At times, those white marbles can save you. However, there are leaders that give you resources for white marbles so it’s easy to get overwhelmed and end up giving away lots of Faith points to your opponents. Generating an effective engine using only three cards and limited space is tough! This is a great thinky game that plays in under an hour and turns are pretty quick so it’s low on the downtime. We really enjoyed this - a great inclusion in the Lorenzo family!
]]>In the box you get:
Each player chooses a Team Base Card, the matching team deployment token and takes the leader from the asset card deck. Shuffle up the rest of the asset cards.
Place the Death Star board with the six component tiles round the edge, face down and put the Death Star operation counters nearby. Place the deployment Zone Board in the middle of the table with Darth Vader in the centre. Deal out the top nine asset cards around the board (three in each zone) Place all dice, damage counters and Alliance tokens (face down) next to the board. You are now ready to play!
The player who most recently watched a Star Wars movie goes first. A players turn consists on four phases:
The active player chooses where to deploy their team and places their token on that zone.
First, roll the Death Star dice which represents the Empire building the Death Star. Place an Operation Token on the section of the dice rolled, if the completion track is full, it will flip over at the end of the turn and that section of the Death Star is now fully operational. If you roll the colour of an operational section of the Death Star, the effect shown there triggers.
Next, roll the Darth Vader dice. If the Death Star symbol is rolled, re-roll the Death Star die and follow the above resolution. Four of the faces show movement arrows - two to the left and two to the right. Move him in the direction shown. He will then attack all rebels in that area. Add a damage counter to each rebel card in that area, this also includes the active players team if their deployment token is there. Add a damage counter to each member of the team if present. Imperials in this area will then be activated. Resolve all cards, this will usually involve more damage being taken!
If Darth Vader's helmet is rolled, activate all Imperial cards. Start with his location and move around the board clockwise.
Now the active player has their chance to fight back! The active player rolls their dice pool. This is the four dice shown on their team base card plus any others gained from Rebel abilities. They must then choose to assign at least one dice from the pool they rolled else select and forfeit a dice from their pool and roll again. Dice may be assigned to match either the symbols of characters on their teams’ location. That may be to recruit Rebel characters or to attack Imperial characters. Alternatively, dice may be used to trigger abilities of Rebels already on their team.
Triggered abilities happen immediately and may help with subsequent rolls!
The player then continues to roll their dice until all dice are assigned or cannot be assigned.
When a player has either assigned or forfeited all of their dice, they are resolved. When dice assigned match all the symbols on a Rebel character, that character is recruited into a players team. The player takes the card, places it in front of them and removes all damage counters from it.
If it is an Imperial character with all dice assigned, that Imperial is successfully attacked. Add a damage counter to them and the player takes an Alliance token for each damage done. You may only do one damage per Imperial character a turn unless abilities say otherwise.
All Rebels and Imperials with full damage at the end of a turn are placed into a discard pile. All spaces are refilled from the asset deck. Any completed Death star components are flipped operational side up. Then play moves clockwise.
Play continues until either the game or the players have won!
The players
win if, they have defeated enough Imperials, for an easy game defeat seven out
of the eleven in the deck. For increased difficulty up this number!
The game wins if, All components of the Death star become operational, if ten or more Rebels are defeated or if any one player loses all members of their Rebel team.
If you like your co-op games tough, this is one for you, even on the easiest setting (trying to eliminate seven Imperials) it constantly felt like we we’re always a step behind, working for damage limitation rather than making any real progress, reacting rather than acting! It’s never satisfying when something is too easy, and Dark Side Rising gives you a run for your money. You’ll build your team of Rebels and before the end you will have lost half of them in the fight. But anyone who’d watched Rogue One will know that not every Rebel makes it out alive, and yet the fight goes on. I can’t say I know everything about the Star Wars Universe but the artwork appears to present characters from both the films and the animated series (we haven’t seen) together in a pretty consistent art style, and the Darth Vader bust should probably just remain out on your mantlepiece.
50 Clues is an escape room/ adventure style/puzzle game in three parts. Now, this was DARK…… a lot of things we’ve tried in similar scenarios were finally allowed and rewarded here! This is a co-operative game that works alongside an app, you input item numbers to combine them or solve puzzles and input the answer and either you are told to look at another card or you are scored out of five stars for how effective you have been solving the puzzle. We finished the first part on a measly 52% but feel like now we have the swing of the game we can only get better in parts 2 and 3!
We love the EXIT games, each one keeps us excited and interested. Both of these had curious ‘strange objects’ as soon as we opened the box that had us intrigued. These were both ‘easier’ ones but still kept us guessing at times. These would be great ones for people new to the EXIT series or for families. This range is fantastic at all levels (even if we want to throw the hard ones out of the window! lol) It’s hard to say much without giving away spoilers but just buy them and see!
So, we are big fans of The Mind, it’s something everyone can get into and so we play it a lot. Despite never having actually completed it, we felt we were ready for a tougher challenge! In the original The Mind, players have to play their cards in ascending numerical order from 1 to 100 without speaking, just playing cards when they think the time is right. In round one, all players have one card, in round two they have two cards etc. The Mind Extreme has two piles of cards in different colours, one ascending and one descending, each numbered 1-50. Not so tough, huh? Wait until you get to the rounds that are placed face down!
Ka Pai is a roll and write from a Danish designer, Mads Floe. Yes, it’s a typical roll and write but with some little tricks up it’s sleeve. You can read my full write up on it.
From the designers of Santa Maria (which we love!) comes this dice drafting/manipulation, polyomino game with a magical theme! Play is over three rounds, with everyone having four turns in a round, meaning there are only twelve turns throughout the whole game. This game is tight, there is so much you want and need to do and really just not enough time! Players start with four ringmaster cards with special abilities, at the end of each round the choose a new one but must sacrifice one and score points for the requirements. The art and design are beautiful with the dark brooding colours and the bright dice and show posters.
Masters of the Renaissance is sub-titled as Lorenzo Il Magnifico - The Card Game. This really does this game a disservice! This is a great puzzley game. The market mechanism is really neat but tricky. You take the resources shown on one row or column, then push the marble in to change the distribution. There is a very limited amount of storage space and if you take resources you may not have space for them! If you take resources you cannot store, you will give your opponents faith points. You use resources to buy cards which allow you to trade goods and put them into your unlimited storage, allowing you more flexibility.
We love this series of games and none have disappointed us yet! This is
definitely the crunchiest that we’ve played so far with so many choices and
mechanics. Multiple times through the game you will find that you don’t have
the right coloured worker, or you’re not high enough on one of your tracks or
you don’t have enough coins or provisions. It’s a constant balancing act and
one of those games where you are doing on thing in order to do another.
Everything is super tight. After one play I can’t wait to play it again and
actually start investigating strategies properly!
I have the second edition base box which is the base game along with the New Forces and Awakening expansions. There are a lot of cards in this box!
Each player takes a hero at random which consists of three cards at different levels. Your hero grants you a special ability that you can use each turn and also generates water, which is the resource needed to play all cards in this game. A player’s hero starts at level one and can be upgraded during the gain, granting them extra income.
All of the player cards (units and tactics) are shuffled and each player creates a deck by randomly drawing twenty-four cards. The number of cards in a player’s deck and hand is directly connected to the health of their hero. Each damage inflicted on a hero requires a player to discard a card from the top of their deck or their hand. Once a player has no cards in their deck AND hand, they lose the game.
All units and tactic need to be activated to be used, this will mean rotating a card by 90, 180 or even 270 degrees, but each resource only rotates by 90 degrees at the start of your turn so it is important knowing when to use them as some will stay out of action for three turns.
RONE is a CCG masquerading as a LCG and this, for me, is where it falls down a little. There are so many cards and you only ever play with a very small fraction of them. In one way, this is good, as you’ll never see the same deck twice. It also means you’ll probably not have a chance to explore the same strategy more than once. For us, it also meant, after several games, we were seeing cards with new abilities, meaning we needed to look them up rather than the game just flowing. It would be really handy to either explain the ability on the cards or have some sort of player guide so you don’t end up flicking through the rulebook!
RONE: The complete edition is currently on Kickstarter, with new expansions and a big box edition (at a superb price of just 34 Euros!)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bonjour/rone-complete-edition-and-rone-last-stand-expansion
Review copy kindly provided by GREIFERISTO
As with most roll and writes, the components are simple:
Each player gets a score sheet and a pencil. The youngest player goes first so takes the dice and rolls them.
Each turn, one player rolls both dice, and all players use the result by drawing the symbol(s) on their sheet. If both dice show the same symbol, all players must draw both symbols.
If the symbols are different, players choose one of the two rolled symbols to draw.
You can draw your first symbol anywhere on the sheet (but not filled spaces or totem spaces), all subsequent symbols must be put orthogonally adjacent to another symbol. Any symbol can be placed next to any other symbol, they don’t need to match. When identical symbols are rolled and you must draw both, they must be placed next to each other if possible.
When a player has a set of three matching symbols in a vertical or horizontal line, these count as a group. Draw a ring round it to make end game scoring easier. Symbols may never be part of more than one group. Triangles, squares, and circles will all score you points at the end of the game. Any groups with slashes score differently. After making a group of three of these, players mark off a bonus field space on the right of their sheet. These will grant extra points at the end of the game.
The game ends when all players have filled in all the spaces on their sheet and players score.
Players get points for:
Add all the points together and the player with the most points wins!
Now, Ka Pai isn’t adding anything really new or exciting to the roll and write genre, but that’s not to say it’s not good. Tring to join the totems up for those extra points is tough (especially considering there’s five squares in the top and bottom row which then messes up your groups of three!) that square in the middle is tough as diagonal symbols are not considered connected. Choosing where you get bonus points can be tough, especially early game when you have no idea what’s going to show up later. Ganz Schon Clever is one of our favourite roll and writes but we have friends who consider it too ‘mathy’ and in this case the symbols in Ka Pai are a great alternative.
I was also lucky enough to get some alternative scoring pads adding something a little more to this game. A great little filler and a nice game for large player counts as it can be played with unlimited people!
Review copy kindly provided by White Goblin Games
While we obviously came home with a lot of games, we haven’t had a chance to play through many yet. I’d pre-ordered a lot of stuff to avoid disappointment, but then the two things I rushed to grab at show open were Alubari: a nice cup of tea and Food Chain Magnate: The Ketchup Mechanism. (Alubari sold out on day one so that was the right choice!) This was a year packed with expansions for me, Food Chain Magnate, Underwater Cities, Hadara, Heaven and Ale, Railroad Evolution to name a few!
We had a demo of the beautiful Glen More II: Chronicles, I hadn’t played the original (though heard loads about it!) It was far simpler than I’d been led to believe but is a beautifully produced game that we all enjoyed playing. At the close of play on Thursday I held the record for the highest score at 89 points, I need to catch up with Nils to see if I held it for the remainder of the weekend. It would have been nice to investigate the ‘Chronicles’ element of the game but sadly there just wasn’t time!
We had a few games of The Mind: Extreme at the hotel on Saturday night. Wow - is this game frustrating (in the best possible way!) We managed to get to level six on our first attempt and subsequent games we came nowhere close! In the original Not only are there two piles, one going up and one going down but some rounds are placed face down so you have nothing but your intuition to go on. This is the sort of game you play multiple times in an attempt to beat it - good luck with that!
We got a few rounds in of Plunderbund, a game that is currently fulfilling it’s Kickstarter. This was beautifully illustrated with a great looking board. Sadly, it left us wanting but that may have been down to the time constraint rather than anything else. There seemed to be a lot going on: four tracks you were trying to get up (with not enough motivation to do so!), an area control element and a small deck building part. I’d be interested to play through a full game of this before making a final judgment.
The only other game we played was a small card game from NSV (who bought us The Game, The Mind and Illusion amongst other things!) Honestly, I immediately dismissed it from the cover art as a ‘silly kids game’ called Kippelino, it’s a balancing/dexterity game. You have to use small logs to balance cards on top of each other, placing them where the crows tell you to. It’s a little like Rhino Hero but simpler and smaller and a lot of fun! We played this briefly at the show and three people in the group ran and grabbed a copy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etVjtvkCxdA
We all know that Spiel is a cash-heavy environment, each year there are multiple stands targeted by groups of organised thieves. On Thursday morning, within an hour of the show opening, someone we knew came up to us in a complete panic. When buying a game he had lost a bundle of cash (close to 2000 Euroes!) We helped him check his pockets and all his bags to no avail. He headed off to find and talk to security while we all lamented that the money was lost for good. The next day we caught up with him to find a huge smile on his face, someone had found his money and handed it into security! We really couldn’t believe his luck - just goes to show there are some great and honest people in the world that also happen to be gamers!
We got back late Sunday night from Germany and unloaded the car. Exhausted, exhilarated and excited at the amazing array of games we bought back. Now begins the work... Sorting out the content for the stacks of games piled around our house, but I wouldn’t have it any other way!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zMqW_jckUo
Capstone Games are quickly becoming one of my top publishers. Easy to learn games with tough strategies and it seems Cooper Island is going to follow that trend. Place landscape tiles that grant resources and enable you to erect buildings with special abilities. Build statues and supply ships to help you settle on the main island. However, smaller, inshore islands grant valuable benefits. Pre-ordered so I don’t miss it!
There’s not a whole lot of information out about this yet, but designed by Alexander Pfister and published by Capstone games pretty much tells me all I need to know. Played over four rounds, players try to increase their influence with three nations. Sail around the Caribbean performing various actions like delivering goods. Card-based so wondering what interesting new mechanic it will entail!
Orleans took some work for me, the first time I played it I really didn’t enjoy it. However, I loved my second play which turned me round to it! Orleans Stories is a storytelling version of the original game featuring campaign-style rule sets. Players are now settling in the Loire Valley and must farm, produce, found villages, churches, and fortresses. But, they must also fight off hunger and plague, fight off invaders and perhaps conquer foreign lands. Having just started Scythe's Rise of Fenris, I’m getting a similar vibe - legacy without the alteration of anything!
OK, so I know people are getting their Kickstarter copies through, but this is being officially released at Essen (and I opted for collection there!) There’s a lot of us that have been waiting years for this to be re-printed and at long last it’s here with stunning new artwork from an eclectic mix of well-known artists. Described as a cruel and ruthless economic game, what’s not to love?
Quined Games are another of my go-to publishers so of course, this makes the list! Set in the mid to late Bronze Age in Northern Italy, you play as chief of one of these villages. Develop your land, explore further away and trade with other villages, improve your battle strength and discover new technologies to create artifacts. Gain the most development points to win the game. I love a bit of civ building so am really excited for this one.
We’re big fans of the Bruxelles 1893 boardgame so I am really looking forward to seeing this card-driven implementation from the same designer. Use your five architect cards to perform various actions throughout the city. Different actions score you victory points or help you advance up tracks which will score you points at the end of the game.
I played this at Essen two years ago and have been waiting (im)patiently for it ever since. Obviously, we love a nice cup of tea here, but combine it with train games and it’s irresistible! Cultivate and harvest your tea, assist in building the railway and build towns, use Chai to speed up your workers actions. But really, tea and trains, do I need to say more?
Normally, I’d do a separate post for expansions but these are all biggies in my mind so they go on the ‘proper’ list this year!
I’m a little in love with this game, the card-driven engine building is awesome and constantly keeps you adjusting and re-working your strategies depending on what cards you draw or if people go on the spaces you want. This new expansion is adding more of everything! New epoch cards, new personal assistants, new metropolis as well as indented boards to keep your pieces nicely in place. Not only will there be replacements for the current boards, but also some new ones!
I love Splotter games! There, I said it. Therefore this is a must-have for me. The base game doesn’t hit the table as often as I’d like so I’m seeing this as an excuse to brush the dust off. Not only does it add an extra player (up to 6) but it adds loads of other stuff. New milestones, coffee houses and baristas for customers to visit on the way to get food, new food types, new employees and available promotions. Just more of everything, I’m a little excited for this!
Another crunchy game that’s brutal (which makes me love it even more!) This game is totally unforgiven and if you get positive points on your first play, I’ll be impressed. Now, in amongst everything else, your monks are charged with collecting barrels to store the beer and keep a supply of hay for the donkeys to deliver the beer because there isn’t enough to try and juggle in the base game!
Published by Kosmos (who did the EXIT series - our favourite!) and designed by Phil Walker-Harding and Matthew Dunstan, we were excited about these when we heard about them at Essen Spiel last year. We were teased with a little more information at UK Games Expo this year and I got to see a mock-up of them at GenCon.
Kosmos very kindly sent me Monochrome Inc and The Dungeon to have a look at, so here are my initial thoughts after having played through Monochrome Inc!
These are a game in three parts. You can either play through each part separately, taking photos when you finish to track your progress or play them through in one go. We decided to go all out and play in one sitting.
Monochrome Inc felt like a cross between Unlock and Time Stories. (Everything I say here is based on the one game as we’re keeping The Dungeon to play with friends this weekend!)
In Monochrome Inc you are a group of high-tech criminals, given access to the ground floor of Monochrome Incs remote research facility. It’s up to you to find out about ‘Rainbow’ a miracle drug the company is currently testing.
There are five stages to a character's turn.
Explore a location on the level - Read aloud from the adventure book the entry that matches the three-digit location number and follow the instructions
Combine two adventure cards with each other - Simply combine the two numbers to create a four-digit number and read the entry for that number. The smaller number always goes first eg. combining items 12 and 43, you would look up number 1243
Combine an adventure card with a location - Combine the two-digit number from the card with the three-digit one on the location, look it up and read aloud.
You start with one location card on the board. Your characters can then visit different aspects on the card. This may reveal adventure cards or other locations. Each character in Monochrome Inc has a handicap - if they visit location spots showing a matching icon they will increase the alarm level. I’m sure you can imagine what happens if that gets too high!
At the end of each chapter, you are awarded points for specific items found, puzzles solved and not tripping the alarm (too much) At the end of the game you add up your totals and are given an overall rank.
Now, we really enjoyed Monochrome Inc, though I will say it had some ‘issues’ Firstly, from a purely aesthetic point of view, I hate cardboard standees which is what the character markers are. I appreciate not everyone feels like this, but to me, they come across as cheap and a call back to the 80s.
Secondly, the adventure book is small (designed to fit nicely into the small box, I get it) this meant when we were looking up an entry it was all too easy to see another one. If we were trying to combine item number 20 with item 43, it was too easy to see the entry for 2041 for example rather than the 2043 you were looking for.
Lastly, and quite importantly, we managed to break the game! It’s hard to explain without spoilers, but we played it two player. I was incapacitated and Rob couldn’t move anywhere without another player, so we were stuck. We re-started the game and didn’t make those stupid mistakes again!
We did play The Dungeon over the weekend and I have to say out of the two, this was the one I enjoyed most. We played this one four players rather than just the two of us and again, everyone was happy to carry on playing through the three parts of the game rather than packing it up after part one. Instead of alarm levels, each player starts the game with three health points that will go up and down throughout the game. I suspect this was the second of the two made as there seemed to be a lot of improvements. The character tokens were wooden - yay! And the spots on the location cards had completely different numbers so no fear of accidentally reading the next part of the puzzle. This one just seemed to flow a lot better than Monochrome Inc for us, I’m not sure if part of that was the player count. We also scored on rank higher - yippee!
We really enjoyed both of these, one to try if you are a fan of EXIT and/or Unlock. They are re-usable (unlike the EXIT games) however, I’m not sure if you would replay them - I guess it depends how good your memory is. The puzzles were tough but we didn’t get totally stuck at ant point as there was always somewhere else to investigate (there is a set of handy hints in the rulebook if you get completely stumped)
In Pandoria, each player plays as one of these five tribes, trying to survive, grow and gain the resources necessary to thrive
In the box you get:
5 Player Tableaus
8 Castles (2 in each of the four player colours)
4 Leaders (1 in each player colour)
24 Meeples (6 in each player colour)
4 Wood Markers (1 in each player colour)
4 Crystal Markers (1 in each player colour)
4 Gold Markers (1 in each player colour)
4 Points Markers (1 in each player colour)
2 Double Starting Tiles
48 Double Tiles
8 Single Tiles
4 100+ Point Markers
1 Starting Player Token
13 Monuments
54 Common Cards
1 Game Board
Rulebook
Place the board in the middle of the table. Randomly place the two starting double tiles on the marked spaces on the board. Shuffle the five tableau cards and deal one to each player. The game has two ‘modes’ of play, place side A for the beginners game and B for the advanced game. Make sure everyone has the same side showing. Shuffle the cards and deal four cards to each player as their starting hand. Put the face-down deck on the space on the board. Draw the top four cards and place them face up next to the deck, in the market. Each player chooses a colour and takes all the appropriate pieces in their colour, along with the two castle tiles.
In a two-player game take all six meeples, in a three-player just take five and with four players just take four.
Place the three corresponding resource markers at their starting point on your tableau. These differ for each tribe. Shuffle up the eight single tiles and place them in a stack to the side - these only come into play with specific spell cards. Shuffle up the double tiles and remove some dependant on the number of players, put four back in the box with four players, eight with three and twelve with two players. Each player then draws one tile into their hand that they keep hidden from the other players. Place the monuments in the space on the board with the highest value on top. In a three-player game remove one tile of each value, for a two-player game remove two of each. Place the points tiles next to the board, you are now ready to play.
In a turn, a player places their double tile or one of their castles on the board so that it is adjacent to at least one side of another tile. It must not overlap another tile and cannot be placed on lakes, exit paths or other pre-printed spaces on the board. If this encloses a region, remove all players' figures from it and return them to their owners. You may then place or remove one of your figures onto the tile you have just placed. If you have no other figures left, you may place your leader. You may also choose to remove one of your figures from the board.
Then you can play one of your cards or erect a monument. Cards may be played as either spells or buildings. If playing a building, pay the cost as shown and move your wood marker down on your track for the amount paid. Put your card underneath your player board in one of the five available slots so just the building half is showing. You may not build more than five buildings, but you can always build over one of your existing ones. In this case, you only need to pay the difference between the existing building and the new building. The building's effect stays in play for as long as the building does. You may never have two buildings with the same name in your tableau. Alternatively, cards may be played as spells. Again, pay the cost as shown (this time in crystals), move your marker down and then place the card under the top right of your player board so just the spell part can be seen. Use it’s one-time effect immediately. To build a monument, you must build over an existing building. You must pay eight wood, minus the cost of the building and place the monument tile on top of the building. Then score the applicable number of points.
If you closed one or more regions when placing your tile, these will then be scored. All players with figures adjacent to the area that has been closed will score, regardless of if it’s their turn or not. Add the number of resources from all spaces in the closed region and then multiply it by the number of figures each player has adjacent to that region (A leader counts as two) Players then receive that number of the specific resource. You may only hold ten of any resource at a time, extra are lost. However, you score one point for every three resources (rounded down) that you gain over ten. After all players have scored, the active player may buy a card from the marketplace paying the gold cost indicated. You may only buy a card if you closed a region in your turn.
At the end of your turn, draw a new tile ready to place next turn.
The game ends at the end of the round in which the last double tile is drawn. Play continues to the player on the right of the starting player.
Most points are awarded during the game. However, players also receive one point for each card they have left in their hand and resources grant points, again one point for every three resources of one type (rounded down) Some buildings may also grant additional bonuses. The player with the most points wins!
There are actually two game modes in Pandoria. In the beginners game, players have no special abilities, they just start the game with a specific building and two cards specific to their tribe. In the advanced game, each player uses the special ability of their tribe as shown on the reverse side of their player board. Sadly this is where the differences in the tribes ends, they make little difference to gameplay. Overall the game feels very abstract and seems to be a pattern builder meaning a lot of the flavour is lost. Of the games we played it appeared that one strategy overrides the entire game, whichever player followed that approach won each time by a clear margin. With more plays this might not always be the case, and perhaps different player counts make the difference. I am interested to see what the Pandoria Artifacts expansion adds to the game and if it fixes these problems.
In Mob Sitters, players take on roles as baby sitters for gangsters and mob bosses. Of course, you could take the money from babysitting, but there are all sorts of goodies lying around the house and the boss surely wouldn’t notice if ONE of his gold watches fell into your pocket. However, other players may take that as an opportunity to snitch on you and land you in trouble with the Boss or the Cops! Evade the Cops, the Boss and escape with the most money to win!
This is a prototype copy so nothing here is finalised!
In the box I got:
The finished game will have enough components for eight players so it will include eight player mats and eight player decks.
Each player places a player mat in front of them and takes the deck of the corresponding colour. Everyone shuffles their deck and draws a hand of six cards. If you are not happy with your hand, you get one chance to reshuffle and redraw.
All players decks are identical and everyone will play all but two of their cards during the game so the trick is knowing when and how to play your cards.
There are three main types of cards:
Money Cards - There are two types of these. Jobs for the boss and stealing from the boss. There’s also a bonus card that gets you a small amount of money for actually… babysitting! These are always placed face up in your play area so they can be the target of other players accusation cards.
Accusations - ‘Squeal to the cops’ and ‘rat on ‘em’ These can be used to move money cards from a players mat to Cops or Boss pile (respectively) at the bottom of the mat. At the end of the game the player with the most money in each of these piles is automatically eliminated so beware! These may be placed face up or face down. If they are placed face up they are resolved at the end of that players card placement phase.
Reaction Cards - These are placed face down and can be used to deflect accusations ‘It was you’ After being accused you can reveal one of these to pass the blame onto someone else (as indicated on the card) The person who was blamed can then react and pass it on until either someone has to take the fall, placing the card into their cop or boss pile or until someone uses a ‘phew, got away with it’ card
The player who looks most like a mobster goes first!
At the start of the turn any cards left on a players mat will be resolved. This happens in three stages:
After all resolution has been dealt with players take turns placing three cards on their player mat. Remember, this may be a combination of face up and face down cards. At this point, any face-up accusation cards are resolved and anyone with cards on their mat may be accused or use reaction cards.
After you have placed your three cards, draw back up (remembering that cards are never played from your hand - only cards on your player mat are active!)
We knocked up a rather contrived example of (chain) reaction cards showing how playing Tell 'The Boss' attempts to send 'Steal a passport' to the Blue player's boss discard, but this can in turn be deflected by Blue onto another player (if they have the right cards) and so on until eventually the 'Steal a passport' would end up in another player's Boss pile. Except, luckily Purple had a Phew and banks the Passport in their own safe.
The game ends after six rounds and players discard the last two cards from their deck.
The player with the most money in their Cop pile is eliminated, then the player with the most money in their Boss pile is eliminated. The remaining players count the money in their safe and the player with the most wins!
Although the box says 3+ players, this really is the sort of game that plays better at the higher player counts. Five upwards is great! The accusations can end up going round and round and don’t forget, you can always place a card face-down on your player mat as a bluff. This leads to the whole do you, don’t you accuse someone scenario, are they bluffing or not? Only one way to find out! There is, obviously, a lot of player interaction so even with the larger player numbers, there’s no real down time and the game plays pretty quickly. Every player has the same deck so a lot of the game comes down to playing your cards at the most opportune moment. Mob Sitters will be on Kickstarter from October 3rd 2019.
Review copy kindly provided by East Street Games
UPDATE: Mob Sitter is now live on Kickstarter
The local vineyard owner has passed away, leaving his property available to be fought over by all the local grape pickers. Rather than split the property, a competition will be held and the person producing the best wine over the season will gain control of the vineyard for years to come!
In the box you get:
Set the board up in the middle of the table with the appropriate number of spaces (five for 2 or 4P, four for 3P and six for 5P) The board represents the main thoroughfare of the vineyard and is where players will travel along, collecting grapes as they go. Shuffle the grape cards and place two cards face up, on each side of every space. One card should be on top of the other so the grape variety and number can be seen on the bottom card but nothing else. Any tools available on the bottom card will only be visible when a player takes the top card.
Place the rest of the deck nearby with room for a discard pile.
Each player takes a grape picker card and places the matching worker on the entrance o the vineyard (in a 2P game, each player gets two workers) Randomly choose a starting player and place their worker at the back of the queue, place the others workers in turn order so the last player has their meeple closest to the vineyard entrance.
Each player takes their starting baskets, a small basket that can hold two grape cards and a medium one that can hold three. Players place these next to their grape picker card. Any spare starting baskets are placed back in the box, all other baskets are placed on the table and will be available for players to buy, though you can only ever have two baskets. Barrels are given out according to player count (seven in 2P, six in 3 or 4P and 5 in a 5P game) Place a wildcard grape token and the winemaking co-operative card at the end of the board.
Shuffle up the winery cards and place face up the appropriate number for the player count (five for 2P, six for 3P, seven for 4P and eight for 5P) and place the rest back in the box. Place the tool counters and prestige points out and you are ready to play!
Players will take turns moving their grape picker down the track, choosing which grapes they want to pick and put in their basket. When they come out of the aisle at the bottom, they can deliver the grapes from their basket to a winery so long as they have what that particular winery wants, receiving a reward for doing so. When a player carries out their last deliver, the game ends and points are counted up.
The game is played over a number of rounds, a round ends when all grape pickers have reached the end of the aisle and delivered their grapes.
The player whose picker is at the back of the line is always the next player to move. It is quite possible for the same player to have multiple turns in a row. In their turn, a player must move their grape picker forward. You can move any number of spaces. Each space on the board has two boxes, you may move into either if space is available. Before or after moving the player can take one of the available grape cards from either side on the space. You may choose to discard the card, however, if you keep it you must place it into one of the baskets. Each basket can hold a number of grape cards are shown on it. You may also mix varieties of grapes in a basket (though that may affect your ability to sell them!)
If the card taken shows a tool icon, take the respective tool token and place it on your grape picker card, you may only have a maximum of two tools at any time. There are three types of tools available to players:
Boots - The player may take any card from the space behind them.
Shears - the player may take two cards from the space their grape picker is on.
Billhook - The player may take any card from the space they are on, even if it is uncovered.
Once a tool is used, it goes back into the general supply. Players may combine tools, for example using the boots and shears to take two cards from the space behind them.
There are cards that show empty vines that give you nothing, but you may need to remove them to get to the tasty grapes underneath. If you draw one of these, just discard it. At any point in your turn, you may also ‘dump’ the contents of a basket. Either by discarding them or by putting them into another basket, however, you may only do this if the other basket has room for all the grapes.
When a player reaches the end of the aisle they must sell their grapes. If they are the first player to reach the exit, they take the wildcard grape counter. They may use it in this round or any future rounds by adding it to their delivery as a grape of whatever variety they want.
They must then make a delivery or two if they wish. Each delivery is carried out separately from another, even if it is to the same winery. It is not possible to combine grapes from both baskets or only use some of the grapes in one basket.
Each winery has a minimum delivery value needed for the order to be met. There are two types of wine that will be requested. Monovarietal - these must be all grapes of the requested variety or Coupages - this can be made up of different types of wine, though the majority must be the one shown, this must make up at least half the value of grapes in the delivery. A player may always exceed the requested quota, though they may not receive any extra prestige for it.
The winemaking co-operative is a special winery that will accept any variety or quantity of grapes, however, it only offers a flat x 0.5 multiplier. So if you dropped off a total of ten mixed grapes here, it would give you five prestige.
To make a delivery, the player must place one of their barrel counters on the next empty delivery slot on the winery card. If the card is full, no more deliveries may be made here. Discard the cards from your basket and receive the prestige points indicated. When the last slot is taken by a player, they receive any prestige tokens on the card.
The player may then choose to spend prestige points to upgrade a basket. Trade an empty basket in and pay the difference in cost between the old and new one. Remember you can only ever have two baskets at any time. Once all sales and upgrades are done, the worker moves back to the start of the board. Place the grape picker at the back as the first one in will be the first one to play once everyone else has finished their round.
After all players have exited the aisle, refill the grape cards. Draw cards and add them to the vineyard spaces until there are two on each space again. New cards are placed on top of cards still left from the last round. Then place a prestige token on all wineries that still have at least one empty delivery slot.
Play continues until the end of the round where one player uses their last barrel token. Prestige points are added up and the player with the most is the winner!
There are quite a few winemaking games on the market these days, most of which tend towards the heavier side of things. La Viña is a refreshing white wine that slips down rather than hefty red! You can play it in under 20 minutes. The movement of your workers is reminiscent of Tokaido (player at the back goes first and can move into any available slot ahead of them), which can mean some of your choices are made for you, which is slightly mitigated by the tools you come across. There's enough strategy to keep you thinking while at the same time being a nice simple card game you can enjoy with a glass of wine on the side.
Review copy kindly provided by Devir
]]>Paupers Ladder is his newest game, set in the town of BrightHelm. The local paupers are gathered around the city gates, waiting for the chance to enter Garolium’s tournament. Most have never set foot into the wildlands before, but all are waiting the chance for riches and fame. However, strength or riches on their own will not help you, only through the Virtues of generosity, knowledge, bravery, magnificence, and fellowship can you become ruler of the Royal Court. Be the first to learn three of these skills and you will win!
In the box you get:
Please note that we got to look at a prototype version so all components are not finished versions!
Place the board in the centre of the table. Shuffle separately the beach, forest, swamp, mountain, and mine cards and place them in stacks by the side of the board. Place the gems near the board so everyone can reach them. Randomly place one rarity equipment card on each of the towns on the board, then shuffle up the rest of the equipment deck and place four more items on top of each rarity card. Each town should have a total of five equipment cards available. Then place the equipment deck by the side of the board. Shuffle up the quest cards and place one face up in each town. Shuffle the recipe deck and place it, purple side up, near the board.
The starting player is the person with the least money in their pocket. They pick which pauper they want to play with first. They take the matching pauper card, the matching virtue marker (which they place to one side for now), the matching meeple and bird tokens which they place on their starting town, the matching outcome deck and finally five gems which they place on their purse. In reverse player order, each player chooses a bird companion and places it untrained side up in their aviary. During the game, you will be able to pay four gems to train your bird and flip it over giving it a unique ability.
In player order, each player then takes four cards from the top of the recipe deck The grey side on the reverse shows which ingredients are needed to learn the recipe. Each shows three but you will only ever need two to complete a recipe. Choose one to keep, then pass the remaining cards to the player on the left. Continue doing this until each player has three recipes. Place these, grey side up to the right of your paupers card, these are your recipes in learning. The remaining recipes are then split into four equal stacks. Each player may then buy one equipment card. Pick up and look at the entire deck in your starting town, choose one card, pay the cost (shown in the top left corner) and place it face up in front of you. Then draw a card from the equipment deck to refill the town store. There must always be five cards to choose from in each town at any time.
Now you are ready to play!
There are five virtues that are available to learn through the game, the first player to complete any three of them wins the game. You may complete a virtue at any point in your turn, when you do so move your virtue marker along the track on your paupers board. You may complete multiple virtues in one turn, however, you may only learn each virtue once in the course of the game. The virtues are:
The Virtue of Generosity - Discard gems from your purse to gain this virtue - 40 in a 2P game, 30 in a 3-4P game.
The Virtue of Knowledge - Learn a fifth recipe. You begin the game with three recipes in learning and will choose another from the top of a stack when you complete one. Remember, you only need two of the three shown ingredients to complete a recipe.
The Virtue of Bravery - When you defeat hazards in the game, you will place the cards into your Trophy Room. Discard hazards from here to gain this virtue - 40 in a 2P game, 30 in a 3-4P game.
The Virtue of Magnificence - If you defeat a dragon in the wild, the card will be placed in your trophy room. Discard a dragon card to gain this virtue.
The Virtue of Fellowship - If you complete a quest from a City, take the card and place it in your journal. If you discard three quests, you gain this virtue.
In your turn, you may move both your characters (Pauper and bird) in any order. Your bird may move into a connected region, your pauper may move one but then you may pay one gem per extra region moved. If your character finishes their move in a region with a hazard, they must fight it! Draw the top card from your Outcome deck, the number shown is your strength for this battle. Add any bonuses from equipment or recipes that your Pauper has (your bird has no hands so obviously can’t be carrying these to get any associated bonuses!) You may also choose to pay one gem and roll the lucky charm - add any bonus this gives you. If your total strength is equal or higher than the hazards, you have defeated it! Gain any bonuses shown on the hazard card - this might be gold, equipment (drawn from the top of the appropriate region deck) or it could be an ingredient (place this card next to the recipe in learning you wish to use it towards) Then, place the card in your trophy room and it’s strength will count towards the Virtue of Bravery. If your total was less than that of the hazard, you have failed, the hazard stays in the region until it is beaten.
If you move into a region you may choose to explore it. You may choose a card already in the region and explore it by following the instructions on the card, this may be picking up an ingredient you need, fighting a hazard or taking the actions on an event card. If there is still empty spaces in a region you may draw the top card from the region deck, this will be your encounter for the turn. Follow the instructions according to the type of card you draw. If you pick up the second ingredient you need for a recipe, you may learn that recipe. Flip the card over, discard the ingredients used and choose a new recipe to learn from the top of one of the recipe decks. This becomes a recipe in learning. You may never have more than five recipes in total.
When exploring a city region you have two options. You may buy or sell one piece of equipment at the City’s store. The store will buy equipment from you at half its cost rounded up. Place the card into the store pile. You may also buy equipment by looking through the items available, paying the cost and placing the item in your inventory. If the store is left with less than five items after you have bought from it, refill by placing an item card from the deck face down in the store.
As soon as a player has learned their third Virtue they win the game and will be sworn in as the new ruler of the royal court!
The beauty of Pauper’s Ladder is it simplicity and it’s tribute to classic games, we’ve seen a classic gaming resurgence; re-issue of and re-skinning of Talisman, new Fighting Fantasy books, their spiritual successor in the classic feel dungeon crawler Escape The Dark Castle and Z-Man’s Choose Your Own Adventure adaptations. Pauper’s Ladder sits very much in the same tradition. It’s not a complex game by any means and there is a serious amount of luck involved with dice rolls and combat strength drawers. But it is a game rich in theme, it’s a low stress game of discovery of a fantasy realm that is familiar, and sometimes very silly, but has Paul’s unique vision to colour it to make it something truly special. A family game that any child of the late 70s / early 80s should be more than happy to introduce the younger new generation of gamers to.
Review kindly provided by Paul Stapleton of Bedsit Games. Pre-orders are available until Monday 16th September, and it will be available at Essen Spiel '19.
As I got into board gaming, I loved the feel and vibe of conventions - a chance to try out new games, meet new people and hopefully pick up some bargains while I’m there! I’ve been to UK Games Expo eight times (of their thirteen shows!), this year will be our seventh year at Essen Spiel and my fifth at BGG Con, alongside many smaller, local conventions. (Con Junkie is on my business card for a reason!) But this year I finally got the chance to visit the other mecca of board gaming - Gen Con in Indianapolis!
So, this wasn’t my first convention by a long shot. On arrival at Indianapolis, I was convinced someone had accidentally opened a portal to hell (maybe from playing too much D and D?!) This was 6pm and the heat was unbearable for this very pale Brit! I was staying at the JW Marriott so checked in, cranked up the air con and took some time out to recover from the journey. After cooling off somewhat I headed to the local mall for a bit of shopping and some food before the madness started next day!
Set up day was Wednesday and I woke up bright and early at 5am (well, early for sure!) and ended up heading down to the hall at around 9am. Set up is always a crazy day and it’s super satisfying to watch a show of this size come together. I was helping out Parallel Games so for a nice change, we had one product to get out so no ordering of shelves, worrying about overstocks etc etc. However, we did have two Board Game Tables to piece together! After setting everything up to look beautiful I had a quick wander around the hall to have a look, get my bearings and say hello to a few people.
That evening, the Parallel Games crew met up to run through the game, all introduce ourselves and grab some pizza. This included a pop quiz about the game with Reese's peanut butter cups as prizes (feels like home already!) After that, I ran over to a food swap, organised through the Fans of Gen Con Facebook Group. Sadly, I’d only found out about this a couple of days before leaving, but I managed to stock up on peanut butter m and ms until my next trip to the States! I always find it fascinating which things from the UK people want, the things I took included Cadburys (obviously!), some hard boiled sweets from Marks and Spencer's and some tea bags! I briefly caught up with some friends before heading to bed ready for show open the next morning.
So, on Thursday I was only working one shift in the morning and had the rest of the day to myself. From the moment doors opened, we were rammed, the demo tables were constantly full along with people heading straight over to buy the game. Our beautiful display tower needed constant rebuilding, which, obviously, was a good thing!
At twelve I got to have a look round the show, starting with my important buys of Pipeline and Ragusa from Capstone Games and then taking a wander and trying to take it all in! Gen Con is IMMENSE, I really can’t think of another word! Everywhere you go in the convention centre there is stuff happening. Every little side room has something happening: auctions, retro video gaming, kids play areas, balloon sculptures - there is something for everyone here and enough to keep you busy for weeks, let alone the four show days. Even as someone who is used to shows on a big scale it is overwhelming. Then you go outside and there are the food trucks with people sitting around, the whole town screams geek (in the best possible sense of the word!)
We went out for dinner that evening and even away from the Convention Center there are people in cosplay throughout the town - it’s a sight to see for sure.
After dinner I met up with some friends and got a game in of Underwater Cities, this is becoming a firm favourite for me (and I may have even picked up the awesome geek up pieces for it) At the hotel, we played in the ballroom which was full of people playing games, before you take into account a lot of the side rooms there were full of people playing various RPGs throughout the weekend.
Friday and Saturday were a whirlwind of activity at the stand and trying to see some of the show in my spare time, catching up with a lot of old friends and meeting up with companies I don’t get a chance to see often.
On Friday night I was lucky enough to go to the ‘Renegade Rally’ and have a look at the new and exciting things that Renegade Games will be launching over the next year or two - so much cool stuff! We got to see the upcoming Power Rangers packs, the new Scott Pilgrim miniature game, the new Scott Almes game - Warps Edge as well as an unboxing of the new Clank Legacy game. Loads of stuff to get us excited for! There was the chance to play some of the newly released games too with Terror Below, Clip Cut Parks and Paladins of the West Kingdoms all available to play.
Saturday I had a great chat with USAopoly - a company that I rarely get to see. Ross showed me some great new things in the pipeline including the Kingdom Hearts Talisman (I have friends just waiting on this!) and the very exciting Dark Side Rising - a Star Wars themed version of Thanos Rising, complete with an awesome looking Darth Vadar figure! Sadly, they were all out of copies of IT: Evil Below which I’d obviously been looking forward to seeing but I do have a copy of the Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist Board Game that you’ll all be hearing about soon.
I then went to see my friend Geo from Ankama Board Games who showed me the updated version of Arkeis. I got some sneaky previews of the figures for this at Essen last year but with it’s Kickstarter launch on November 5th, it’s now a bit closer to completion! This is a co-operative, story-driven game set among ancient Egyptian Ruins. It is a campaign-style game with legacy elements and some fearsome beasts to fight off. I’m loving this little backpacks each character has to carry over their loot from game to game, but be careful to not be carrying over ancient curses and scars from game to game! Really looking forward to seeing this at Essen shortly before it's launch!
Sunday was spent working and running round to get in my last-minute purchases and get in the one thing I HAD to do all weekend - I entered a Magic draft, after all, it only seemed fitting to go full circle. The TCG hall was packed, full of people playing Pokemon and Transformers alongside Magic. I got knocked out first round but that gave me enough time to head back to the stand and help with breakdown, which was a lot easier than I am used to, especially as we had sold a huge chunk of our stock!
Sunday night was spent having a few quiet drinks and unwinding with some new friends before preparing for the flight home on Monday.
GenCon was an amazing experience, during the weekend I felt like I just didn’t get anything done, but looking back on it now I understand why I arrived home Tuesday morning exhausted! Even not working, it would be impossible to see even half of what was available (I didn’t even make it over to the open gaming at the stadium at any point!) I had great fun working with the Parallel Games team and I am very much looking forward to again at PAX Unplugged and Origins next year.
If you want to see any more photos from Gen Con 2019, I've post all of the pictures on Facebook.
]]>Spiel, Essen 2019 is just 46 days away so... here's an updated and trimmed down version of Board Game Geek's Essen Preview list that's a little bit easier to manage than their full list. For me this is a quick way of finding where everyone is over that weekend too. The full list isn't in yet but this should give many of you a start. What are you looking forward to?
]]>In the box you get:
Shuffle all the cards together to form a single deck. Deal out five cards to each player and place the remaining in the middle as a draw deck.
Over the course of the game, players will try to win ‘swarms’ ie the stack of cards in the middle. If they win a swarm, they can stash it which will earn them points at the end of the game.
Players take turns placing cards onto the swarm in an escalating sequence of numbers and/or seasons. They may also play traps, goblins and Royal Fairies. When you play a card, use its ability. Some will let you draw cards, stash cards or even both abilities. Goblins have their own special abilities and can be used at any time, traps let you attempt to capture the swarm and Royal Fairies let you break traps. After placing a card, play continues with the player to the left. If the next player cannot follow your play, they flunk. Play then continues and if the next player cannot play a Royal Fairy, well done, you have won the swarm! Place all cards from the swarm into your stash, face up and don’t change the order!
After a swarm has been won, all players draw cards until they have five cards in hand. If you have five or more cards in hand, don’t draw up but you don’t need to discard down either. Play then continues with the player who flunked placing the first card down.
Each of the card types must be played according to the Rules of the Hunt. Fairies are played in an escalating number along the four seasons. The first fairy can be anything a player wishes, after that any fairy played must be the same or higher number of the same season or any number fairy from the next season. The seasons go in order Spring - Summer - Autumn - Winter, you cannot skip a season ie play an Autumn card after a Spring card and Winter does not loop back to Spring ie. Winter 8 is the highest card available. If the number of a fairy you play matches the previous fairy on the swarm you get a bonus, you may either draw a card from the deck or stash a card alongside any bonuses that the card you played gives you. This, therefore, applies if you play an exact matching card ie a Summer 4 on top of a Summer 4 or if you play the next season ie an Autumn 4 on top of a Summer 4. All season fairies allow you to either draw card(s) from the deck or stash a card onto your points pile.
Goblin cards can be played on the top of the swarm at any time, except on top of a trap or royal Fairy. They may be played even if you are unable to use their ability. Play them sideways so all players can still keep track of which fairy is underneath.
Traps are played to try and capture the swarm. The only cards that may be played on top of a trap card is another trap card or a Royal Fairy card. Traps may be played on top of any card except a Royal Fairy. Again, play them sideways. If the next player flunks and the following player cannot play, the swarm is won and placed into the stack of the player who played the trap.
There are only four Royal Fairies in the game - Prince, Princess, King and Queen. If at any time, you have all four of them in your stash you automatically win the game. Royal Fairies may be played on top of any card, however, only season fairies and Royal Fairies may be played on top of them. Royal Fairies are so special, they may even be played out of turn! If a player flunks, then any other player may play a Royal Fairy in order to keep the swarm going. Play continues with the player to the left placing a seasonal fairy according to the rules of the hunt.
When the last card is drawn from the deck, the game is over and players count up points in their stash. Seasonal Fairies are worth one point each and Royal Fairies are each worth two points. Goblin and trap cards are worth nothing. The player with the most points wins! In the case of a tie, the player with the most Royal Fairies wins.
Fairy Season is a pretty typical trick-taking game, however, the gorgeous
artwork and whimsical nature of the game keeps it fresh and original. It’s the
sort of game you get out and end up playing a few games of rather than just the
one you were planning!
Review copy kindly provided by Good Games Publishing
In the box you get:
Give each player a player board, for your first few games stick with the Summer side! The Winter side is a slightly more challenging mode.
Put the appropriate number of dinosaurs in the bag relative to the number of players. For five players use all dinosaurs, four players remove two of each dino species, three players remove four of each and with two players remove two of each species (there is an interesting two-player variant that will require extra dinosaurs)
Give the dice to the youngest player as they will get to roll first. Each player draws six dinosaurs at random from the bag and keeps them hidden from other players (we used some small bowls for this)
The game is played over two rounds, each round consists of six turns so by the end of the game you will have placed twelve dinosaurs in your park.
The player with the die rolls it. All players choose one of their dinosaurs to place. Once everyone has decided, everyone reveals at the same time. All players except the one who rolled the die must obey the placement rule imposed by it. If they cannot, or do not want to place a dinosaur in a pen they may always place their dinosaur in the river. Once everyone has placed, they pass the remaining dinosaurs onto the player on their left without revealing them. The placement die also passes to the player on the left.
Turns are repeated until each player has six dinosaurs in their park.
After six turns the second round begins. Each player draws six dinosaurs and play continues as before. At the end of the second round the game is over and points are scored.
The player board is split into different sections, each of which is represented by a side of the die. The green top of a players board is green and represents the woodlands, the bottom half is brown and represents the grasslands. When the die shows the woodland or grassland symbol, the dinosaurs must be placed in the top or bottom of the board respectively. The right-hand side of the board represents the restroom area and the left the food court, both are shown by signs in the bottom corners of the board. Again, if the die shows these symbols you must place your dinosaur in the left or right-hand side of the board respectively. The other two sides of the die are different. They show an Empty Pen meaning the dinosaur must be placed in an empty pen and a T-Rex meaning the dinosaur must be placed in a pen that does not contain a T-Rex. You may still place a T-Rex if this is shown, but not where there already is one.
There are six pens on the player board, each has a placement condition and each scores in a different way.
The Forest of Sameness: This pen can only hold dinosaurs of the same type, placed from left to right. At the end of the game, it scores points according to how many dinosaurs are in it, as shown on the board.
The Meadow of Differences: This pen can only hold dinosaurs of different species, again placed left to right. At the end of the game, it scores according to how many dinosaurs are in it, as shown on the board.
The Prairie of Love: Any and all dinosaurs can go in this pen, however, at the end of the game you will get five victory points for each same species dinosaur couple in it. You will also score for multiple couples of the same species.
The Woody Trio: This pen can hold up to three dinosaurs in it of any species. At the end of the game you will score six victory points for having exactly three dinosaurs in it. Otherwise, it will score zero.
King of the Jungle: This pen can only hold one dinosaur. At the end of the game it will score you seven points if you have equal or more of this species of dinosaur in your park as any other player.
Solitary Island: This pen can only hold one dinosaur. At the end of the game, it will give you seven victory points if this is the only dinosaur of that species on your player board.
After the second round is finished and all players have twelve dinosaurs on their board, add up the scores as above. Then, add one point for each dinosaur on the river and one point for each pen that contains at least one T-Rex. Add up the totals and the player with the highest score wins! In the case of a tie, the player with the fewest T-Rexes wins.
In a two player game, four rounds are played rather than two. Each player takes six dinosaurs as usual at the start of the round but will only place three. Players take it in turns rolling the dice and the placement condition only applies to the other player. Players then choose one dinosaur to place in their park, then choose one to discard back in the box, then pass the remaining to the other player. All end game points are scored as per the standard game.
When you have mastered the Summer side of the board, you can flip it over and play the Winter side for something a little more challenging!
Draftosaurus adds a neat twist on drafting games and the chunky, wooden dinosaurs are adorable for children and adults alike. Some of the placement options can get pretty tricky as you obviously have no idea what’s going to come up in subsequent rounds. If you place a red dinosaur in the Solitary Grounds and loads come up in the next round, it can be tough or you place a red dinosaur in the Forest of Sameness and none come up!
This is a great little game that brings interesting choices for all.
Review copy kindly provided by Ankama Boardgames
I’ve been looking at the Steam implementation of Lorenzo Il Magnifico from Cranio Creations. This was funded through Kickstarter and backers have had a chance to play it ahead of its actual launch on 30th July.
In Lorenzo, players take on the role of heads of noble Italian families. Your family members are your workers who you send out each round to work for you, but not all family members are created equally! At the beginning of the round, the start player rolls the dice which everyone then uses to assign ‘levels’ to their matching coloured workers, meaning all players have the same level workers for the round. This limits the actions they can take (some actions are just more efficient with higher-level workers) .There’s a lot going on in this game and a lot to keep track of so I was very interested to see it translate to the screen!
It’s been a while since I played so I loaded it up on Steam and went through the tutorial. This takes you through the actions that are available to your workers over the course of the game. As with all Euro games, the actions on their own are only a small part of the game, it’s all about the interactions between them that make the game what is it. Obviously, this is lacking in the tutorial and it’s only through playing that you really get to grips with hows things actually work.
The screen is beautiful and highly thematic, showing the tower where you can obtain characters, ventures, buildings and territories from and the Cathedral is a monumental building looming in the background. That said the screen is very busy and there just isn’t room to show a lot of the information you need throughout the game. The insistence of presenting the city in the way it has been means that the screen lacks the detail at a glance. Your territories and buildings are only visible if you open up a tab accessible at the bottom of the board. This information is presented beautifully in a large tome which you can flip through to see the information. But when it comes to looking at what was your own player board it’s really not that clear.
Lorenzo is played over six rounds, three eras each with two rounds. These are represented by day and night on the app. The ‘night-time’ mode is quite dark and some of the iconography can get a little lost, on top of what I would say lacks clarity already.
Once you know what you’re doing things aren’t so bad, you can run through the game fine. I would have to say that overall I wasn’t overly impressed. As someone who has used licensed sites such as Brett Spiel Welt and Board Game Arena who present games often with the original game artwork with the ability to zoom in and click on areas where a player would normally place their workers I would have said that would have been a better experience. I understand that licensing artwork for use in a Steam game might not be as easy as you might think. Perhaps as someone who has played and loves the tabletop version I am biased, a new player to the game is likely to struggle to get to grips with the gameplay as the options are hidden from view and clicking into 16 individual cards to see their abilities in full in the tome is going to become frustrating. If you really love the game you might stick with it but for me think I’ll be asking a few friends around soon to play the original.
]]>So, what made Pandemic Legacy different for me? (I shall try my best to keep this spoiler-free!)
I demoed for Esdevium / Asmodee here in the UK between 2014 - 2017 at numerous big live events and in store day events and one of the games we always had on show was Pandemic. For some people Pandemic is their first foray into modern gaming that isn’t Monopoly, Scrabble or Risk. Personally, I don’t feel cooperative games are great gateway games. If you have one person at the table that’s played before, they can easily take over, leaving newer gamers wondering what the hell just happened, we certainly experienced that teaching it to a new player with three people that had played before. It left them just going through the motions and following our orders. Obviously, if you have an entire table of people new to the game that’s not the case, and as a demonstrator you had to be cautious to give a group enough information to get started but not play for them!
Honestly, I am just bored with Pandemic. But, after so many great reviews I caved and picked up a copy of Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (peer pressure) and can honestly say I was not disappointed! I partly went for it as a joke - I get to rip up a copy of Pandemic - how awesome! (Don’t worry, no cards were actually harmed during the playing of this game, they were just put to the bottom of the deck!)
But what was it that made this such a different experience? Like a great movie, Pandemic Legacy kept us guessing from game one with so many great twists and turns along the way, things were constantly changing and we really didn’t know what was coming next which kept the game interesting and fresh with each play. So much so that we sat down at 11am on a Sunday and nine games later it was bedtime. This got me thinking, there are a few co-op games out there that I like, what exactly is it I like about those? Maybe there’s something that makes them different.
Now, there’s not many, so bear with me here….The Game, The Mind, Hanabi umm…. Yes, that’s it!
Those three games are solely reliant on player interaction, it’s the plays between people that make them fun (in my mind) While I can see the similarities between them, they have nothing in common with Pandemic Legacy.
So, maybe I don’t hate co-ops after all!
Are there exceptions to every rule? Well, I don’t enjoy games with a space theme but I truly can’t think of an exception to that rule (I’m happy for someone to change my mind!). Hell, I even waited to play Fields of Green to come out because I didn’t want to play Among The Stars.
I don’t like miniature games, partly due to the money sink ‘oh, look expansion number 987 is out!’ I played Magic for enough years to avoid that like the plague, no sir I’m not getting involved in that again! Give me a dry, cube pushing euro over a game dripping with miniatures and theme any day of the week. But wait, after years of hype I gave in (this seems to be a recurring theme!) and tried Scythe. My inner euro gamer snob had dismissed it as being yet another ‘Amerithrash’ type game with all it’s minis, mechs and all.…..So, I love it!
I guess I’ve come to learn that I shouldn’t write off a game based on it’s theme or mechanism that I dislike. For the most part it’s a helpful filter to limit what games I try as I can’t possibly play every game that is released in any one year, but if there’s something you come across that you absolutely think that I should play, that will change my mind, I’d be very happy to try it.
Oh, by the way I started playing Magic The Gathering again.
]]>In the box you get:
Place the main board in the centre of the table with the correct side up (six spaces for 2-3 players and 8 spaces for 4-5 players) Place all the tokens in reach of all players. Find the appropriate discard tile for the number of players (this is shown on the top left) and place this next to the main board. Sort the tiles into piles with identical backs: Ages 1,2,3, Quests and Heroes. Shuffle the three Age piles and place them next to the board. Each player takes a Hero tile at random and places it in front of them to start building their board. Then take the selection cards that match that character and a banner. Take the starting bonus as shown on your character, this will be magic and/or combat points which are placed next to your banner and potions and/or gold. Deal each player three quest tiles. They discard one and place the other two face down in front of them. During their turn a player may play one or two of these tiles before or after taking a tile from the adventure board. They must pay the cost just the same as any other tile. The quests are an optional extra that you may play with or without. Fill the main board up with adventure tiles from the 1 stack. The starting player takes the starting player marker and you are now ready to play!
Each turn consists of obtaining tiles, playing them and taking the appropriate benefits. To start with, each player secretly chooses which tile they want to take. They do this by placing the selection card that matches the tile number face down in front of them. When all players have decided, they reveal their cards simultaneously. Beginning with the start player and taking it in turn order, they take the tile of their choice if they can. Players who were unable to take the tile of their chosen then, in turn order, may choose one of the remaining tiles. Then, the first player marker changes hands. The player who took the tile from the lowest numbered slot takes the first player token and becomes start player from this point on.
In the new turn order, players must pay for and place the tiles they chose. The top left of the tile shows the cost. Any tiles taken from the top row of the main board cost an additional coin or potion. To pay for a tile, a player must have enough coins and/or potions in their personal supply to pay for it. To pay for a tile that shows combat or magic points, a player must have at least that many of the corresponding tokens on their banner. If you do not have enough you may use a potion to lower the cost of either by one. Any number of potions may be spent and are placed back in the supply. If a player cannot or does not want to pay for a tile they selected, they may discard it by placing it on the discard pile and taking one coin, one potion and key which they must use immediately. Rewards from tiles are only granted after they have been placed and therefore cannot be used to pay for tiles.
Once a player has paid for their tile, they can add it to their individual board. All tiles must face in the correct direction, with the illustrations right way up in relation to the player placing them. They must always make at least one connection with another tile. Connections may be empty, form a key or even contain half a key. Tiles may never be placed so a connector is next to a blank edge on an adjacent tile. Once a tile has been correctly placed, you may collect the reward shown on it.
Some cards have an hourglass symbol on them, this indicates end of game points rather than immediate. Place tiles have special connectors if you connect them to the marked tile type you get the bonus shown. Some connectors show half keys. If you make a connection and complete a key, take a key token that you must use immediately to open a chest. This key must be used on one of those tiles or on your Hero Tile. Keys gained from discarding a tile may be used anywhere. Place the key token on the appropriate chest and gain the rewards shown. The rewards from a chest may only be gained once per game, therefore there can never be more than one key on a chest.
After everyone has placed their tiles and gained all rewards, set up for the next round. Discard as many tiles as indicated on the discard tile board (this will vary depending on the number of players) Slide the remaining tiles around the main board, following the arrows. Draw five tiles from the Age 1 pile to refill the board, when this is empty, draw from the Age 2 tiles, then move onto the Age 3 tiles. At the end of ten rounds, you will have used all the tiles, the game will end and final scoring happens!
The player who has the majority in coins, potions, magic point and combat points takes the appropriate majority tile. In the case of a tie, all equal players score the bonus points. Some character tiles score end game points so don’t forget to add these to your total. The player with the most points wins! In the case of a tie, the player with the most coins wins.
Tales of Glory is a fast and fun dungeon crawler. It also gives you an RPG feel without having to rely on a specific group, having someone GMing or having huge rulebooks.
Review copy kindly provided by Ankama Boardgames
I had the chance to play a prototype of this at HeavyCon V back in May 2019 and it was by far my favourite at the Con, this is a good job really as I will be demo-ing it with Parallel Games for the whole weekend. The elevator pitch is that it's an 18xx without trains and with a worker placement phase and you should absolutely come over and let me tell you about it in person.
Pipeline is an economic and industry building game previously funded on Kickstarter from first-time designer Ryan Courtney with artwork by Ian O'Toole (Lisboa, Scarlet Pimpernel). I saw a prototype for Pipeline at HeavyCon III in 2017 and it's finally available to purchase from Capstone Games and will by all accounts take up most of my luggage space.
Draftosaurus is a drafting game with a difference, instead of cards
you're drafting cute as hell chunky dinosaurs. Choose a dino, place them in
your park strategically and pass the remainder to the next player. The game is
appears quite lightweight so a good introduction to drafting for the family.
Ankama are also presenting Monster Slaughter and Tales of Glory which I've
had the pleasure of looking at.
One of the most stunningly presented games I've seen coming up, the player board is actually the painter's palette. Each player is an artist running an art studio (atelier), rolling their four action dice and using them in turn to collect assistants and colours and in order to complete paintings to make the most points.
While the market has been flooded by Roll and Writes at the moment (including Ganz schön clever, Imperial Settlers: Roll & Write, Patchwork Doodle, etc) Welcome To... is one that stands out and still gets frequent plays from us. We even got a 12 player game in at the last Uncon including many familiar faces of the UK gaming scene. There are a number of new themed versions available including Halloween, Outbreak and Winter Wonderland. I am excited to see if they each add any new and interesting flavour (yum, brain flavour).
Having been fans of Evolution since we played it prior to Essen one year and then consequently buying everything North Star Games had when we went to the stand, we then had the pleasure of becoming part of the play testing team for Oceans. It's a new spin on the Evolution mechanic with marine life (including some legendary), operate within the marine ecosystem, feed from the reef, leech from your neighbours species or even straight up eat them with an Apex Predator. This is a standalone addition to the Evolution series from designer Dominic Crapuchettes and well worth a look.
The new game from Sandy Petersen and a return to "apocalyptic horror" where you and up to four others take on the Hordes of Hell. Following in the footsteps of Cthulhu Wars, I would expect it to make as big an impact. This definitely isn't my sort of game but the miniatures are going to be a spectacle, wish I had room on the mantle piece for them. You can take a look at the Print and Play to get a quick taste.
Campaign trail games are not a new thing, however I am always excited to find out about anything Stefan Feld. This political duel between two suitors for the US Presidency relies on each player both winning support from electors and smearing their opponent, which we are all too familiar with in the news of late.
Honarary mention goes to The North Sea Epilogues RPG which is available for GenCon pickup from Renegade.
We love Shards of Infinity from the team that brought us (and is also bringing us another) Ascension. This second expansion adds a new hero, Rez to play alongside the other characters in the base game. But in a more interesting spin they are adding a Battle Book with a branching story that can lead players through a cooperative campaign mode.
Honorary mention goes to Ringmaster: Welcome to the Big Top which is
a quick take that card game from Ascension / Shard's of Infinity designer
Justin Gary
Yes, it's another Roll & Write but considering it's from Marcus and Inka Brand (Village, Exit, Rajas of the Ganges) this is worth a quick play.
Emperor's Choice is a set collection and auction game from designer Hisashi Hayashi (Trains, Yokohama). Each player takes the role of one of the Emperor Qin Shihuang's subordinates in Ancient China promoting his large-scale projects that lasted for centuries beyond his reign. Support the Emperor whilst influencing your own standing in the Imperial Court and earn victory points for your achievements.
Forbidden Games have had great success with Racoon Tycoon and Railroad
Rivals in just the last year. Both excellent quality in terms of gameplay and
components and they have set a standard now which they are going to hit again
with Pirates! It's a deck / pool building game but you navigate your ships
through the Caribbean islands along three different winds tracks towards your
goal in Trinidad, plundering ships and towns for treasure along the way. You
had me at Forbidden Games. P.S. if you visit their booth over GenCon they will
have a special "Fat Cat" blend coffee on the stand.
Honorary Mention: take a look at the Raccoon Tycoon:
Fat Cat Expansion while you're there.
If you've never heard of Talisman then you've been living under a rock for 30 years. Talisman is the classic roll and move fantasy game first introduced by Games Workshop in 1983. Now with Pegasus Spiele due to re-issue the 4th Edition later this year. We also have Talisman: Batman – Super-Villains Edition, Talisman: Kingdom Hearts reigniting the classic game and introducing it to a new generation of gamers with these much loved franchise themes.
We are old enough to have read and enjoyed many of the Choose Your Own Adventure books in the 80s, having played House of Danger which stayed true to the format whilst updating and refreshing it into a cooperative game. Picking up this next instalment is a no-brainer.
]]>Gen Con is about two weeks away, and this will be my first visit where I will be demoing the mighty City of the Big Shoulders for Parallel Games. I've put together a trimmed down version of Board Game Geek's Gen Con 2019 Preview which is a little easier to navigate and search. Gen Con's Exhibition Hall Map is available to view now.
What are you on the lookout for?
]]>In Tribes: Dawn of Humanity, players lead their tribe through early epochs of history, starting in the Stone Age and leading them through to the Bronze Age. In the box you get:
If this is your first game, attach the bag tag to he drawstring on the bag. Place the board in the centre of the table. Give each player the pieces corresponding to their colour - 15 tribe members, 4 progress markers (small cubes) and 12 marking stones (larger cubes) Also give each player one arrow token and five shells. Everyone places their progress markers at the bottom of the four tracks on the left-hand side of the board. Place the fifty land tiles into the bag and mix them up. Each player then draws three tiles to make up their starting territory. If you draw two lands of the same type, redraw until you have three different types. Place the three tiles in a triangle shape so each is touching two sides. The placement is up to the player.
Shuffle the six action tiles and place them in a row next to the game board - this is the action sequence.
Shuffle the achievement tiles according to colour and place four face-down on the corresponding row of the game board. Place the left-over tiles (one of each colour) back in the game box. Turn the tiles in the bottom row face up. Sort the achievement tiles by colour, shuffle each stack and place them next to the appropriate row. Choose a starting player and give them the token. This won’t move during the game but will be used to note the end of the round at game end.
Depending on the number of players, distribute bear teeth to some. In a two player game, the second player starts with one, in a three player game the third player starts with one and in a four player game the third and fourth player start with one.
You are now ready to play the game!
At the start of the first turn, players place a tribe member on one of their tiles. The starting player goes first and players go round the table, each placing one tribe member.
In a turn players select an action tile, perform the action and then move that action tile to the end of the action sequence.
The player must select an action from the action sequence. The first tile in the sequence is free to play. However, if that player chooses a tile further down the sequence, they must place a shell onto each tile they skipped. If someone later takes a tile with shells on, they also receive the shells on that tile. Three of the tiles show a single action, these are procreate, move and explore.
The player takes a number of new tribe members as indicated by their position on the procreation progress track. These tribe members go onto their land tiles. They must, however, go onto a space that already contains tribe members, they cannot be placed onto empty land tiles.
The player can move their tribe members up to as many spaces as indicated by their position on the movement progress track. One movement is one tribe member moving one space. You can split movement however you like between tribe members.
The players draws as many tiles from the bag as indicated by their position on the explore progress track. After drawing all of their tiles, the player places them anywhere they choose as long as they are adjacent to other land tiles.
Three of the action tiles are split and show the above three actions and also have the Complete an Achievement Symbol on them. Using one of these tiles, players may choose to either do the action or complete an achievement, they may not do both.
All players must start by completing achievements in the lowest epoch ie the ones shown in the bottom row. A player must possess the required resources as shown on the achievement tile by having at least one tribe member on a land tile showing that resource, no goods are actually handed over. The player then places one of their marking stones on the first available placement on the tile and receives the number of points shown in bear teeth. If there is a lightning bolt symbol above the space then the top event tile for that epoch is revealed and added to the end of the event sequence. Each achievement tile shows an advancement symbol, move your progress marker up one space on the indicated track. When the first marker is placed on an achievement tile, this unlocks the next level on this column, flip over the tile above it. This achievement is now available to players.
Players are only allowed to complete an achievement when they have unlocked the preceding tile. However, the arrow token each player has allows you to ignore that rule. You may place the arrow token between an achievement you have a marking stone on and a diagonally adjacent one in order to complete it. Also, if you are stuck at any point you may use land tiles as wild resources. You can choose a land tile you currently have tribe members on and flip it over in order to gain a resource of your choice. This land tile is now exhausted and may no longer be used as a resource.
The game ends when a predetermined number of event tiles from the final epoch have been activated (remember, events don’t trigger until they are selected from the action sequence) Then play to the end of the round.
As well as in-game points, there are some extra end game points to award. Depending on how far up the four progress tracks players are, award one, three or six points as indicated on the board. The player with the most tribe members on their board receives two points and the player with the most land tiles in play also receives two points. If there is a tie on either of these, all players tied receive the bonus. Count up all points and the player with the most id the winner!!
I love the fact that Tribes is a thematic civ game that plays in under an hour. There is a page of information detailing the different epochs depicted in the game and the resources. I’m not won over by theme in games but I like it when there is this level of attention to detail, it shows care has been taken with every element of a game. The action sequence mechanic is really nice, something I’ve not seen before and makes your seashells that bit important. Using them for an action you want one turn could mean you are left with a poor choice of actions for the next. Tribes also scales nicely, something that is a bit lacking in civ games, it plays as nicely with two players as it does four.
A great school night game!
Copy of Tribes kindly provided by Kosmos Games UK
I landed at lunchtime and jumped a cab to the historic town of Salem (taking a risk, I know!) After a brief visit to the Witch Museum we had a wander around the town and went past the Witch House, the last structure standing with direct links to the infamous Salem Witch Trials. It was owned by Jonathon Corwin, a local politician and one of the judges who presided over the trials.
At this point, the group separated into two groups - one that wanted to carry on walking around the town and one group that decided ice cream and cocktails were in order. Do I need to say that the home-made ice cream was delicious? We then wandered over to the Bit Bar, a retro arcade and pinball bar with all the old favourites and some excellent themed cocktails!
We then met up and a group of around 23 of us went for an amazing dinner at Turners Seafood, the food was amazing, the vibe was great (if a little loud!) and the staff were super helpful dealing with such a crowd! After that, it was finally back to the hotel to check in, help set things up for the next day and crash.
I woke up stupidly early, excited for a weekend of brain-melting games and headed downstairs, at 9am the room was already buzzing with a lot of games on the go. I grabbed my goody bag, filled my gorgeous HeavyCon mug up with coffee and dived into the rest of my bag. Every attendee got a copy of Warsaw: City of Ruins from North Star Games. I then scored big with my ticket games which were Trade on the Tigris and Food Chain Magnate. Unsurprisingly, I already own FCM so I posted it on the whiteboard to trade, excited to see what offers came in, but nervous about luggage space as I only had hand luggage for this trip!
My first game of the Con was Princes of the Renaissance. This comes with two confessions - firstly, I thought I had an unplayed copy of this, turns out I have Princes of Florence and got confused! Secondly, we played this quite wrong! However, this area influence, bidding game seemed to set the scene for a lot more bidding/auction games I ended up playing over the weekend. Although this was ‘the wrong game’ played incorrectly, it was a great start to the weekend!
I then went straight into a game of Three Kingdoms Redux. Obviously, this has been on my radar for years, but the three player limit means there’s never been the right occasion to play it. When the rules explanation started, I thought it would be too ‘war gamey’ for my tastes, but actually, this economic, worker placement hit all the sweet spots for me! Now, we need to find a single friend to play it with.
I then jumped into a game of Ginkgopolis. Honestly, this just didn’t ‘click’ with me. The rules and gameplay ended up feeling clunky and much slower than they should have been for the weight of game this is. Other players loved it, but this really wasn’t for me. That’s fine though, as there’s plenty more games on the shelves!
I then managed to get in on some games I actually knew! I jumped in on a game of Pixie Queen that was being set up. This is such a great game that’s not talked about enough! It’s a worker placement/resource management game that you spend the entirety of being punished by the Queen. The trick is to be punished less than the other players. A deceptively chunky game considering it has cute pixie meeples.
Then onto another chunky Euro that I love - ZhanGuo from Whats Your Game? This makes Rob's head hurt (a lot!) so doesn’t make it to the table often enough so I jumped on the chance to play it again. So much to do and not enough time with other players actions determining if you get bonus actions or not. Sorry Rob, this needs to come out more often!
Five games in a day - pretty good going for HeavyCon! Off to bed ready for day two
So, we started with what turned out to be the longest game I played all weekend! Celestia with a mammoth six players (four of whom hadn’t played before!) Yet again, Mindclash Games have hit it out the park in terms of production quality and super theming everything. There’s a lot to this game, especially when each pair of players has to learn the way their specific characters play. Not sure I’d want to play it at six again unless everyone was sure about what they were doing, but very much looking forward to playing it at four.
After we had finished that we didn’t have long until the group meal so we started a game of Raccoon Tycoon. Damn, I love this game! Stocks, a fluctuating market and auctions, all presented in a super accessible and super cute way. It’s always a pleasure to introduce new people to this.
Then, onto dinner! What an amazing spread! All hundred of us piled into the grand ballroom and sat down for a classic New England feast including locally caught steamers and mussels, homemade clam chowder, various salads, buttermilk cheese biscuits along with a whole lobster each. I did try the lobster but ended up mostly pigging out on the biscuits and the amazing variety of salads.
This was quite easily the best food I have ever had at a con! After food, coffee and dessert we all headed back to the main room for the door prizes give away. I ended up trading my FCM for a copy of Eminent Domain plus expansions (that all stacked nicely into the main box!)
Then we moved onto one of the hyped games of the weekend, Escape Plan. Having not been out long there was still a lot of buzz about it. I find Vital Lacerda pretty hit or miss, I love Gallerist but really didn’t get on with Lisboa so was interested to see if I’d be gutted I missed the Kickstarter for this one. I actually enjoyed the theme on this, it managed to mesh well with gameplay without being too distracting. I did like it, however, the stupidly high production quality means it comes with a hefty price tag - would I pay that price tag for the gameplay? No. It was fun and I managed to escape, but don’t have FOMO from this one!
Saturday morning I woke up and managed to jump straight into a game of Great Western Trail complete with Rails to the North expansion which I’d only managed to play once before. This is a great game and the expansion adds a tonne of new options so it was nice to play with that and have some idea of what I was doing.
I then jumped straight into a game of Gaia Project. I'm a big fan of Terra Mystica so have been wanting to play this for a while. There are enough similarities to give you a feel of what you’re doing if you’ve played one of these games. I’m not a huge fan of ‘space games’ and definitely prefer the fantasy theme of Terra Mystica. While I enjoyed the game, the plastic pieces were a massive turn off for me and I’m happy to stick with my elves, dwarves, and witches!
Next, I finally got to try a full game of The Estates. Such a clever game. It reminds me a lot of The Climbers, very simple, yet highly strategic. A closed economy game with bidding? Madness I tell you! But it works! Definitely one that benefits from a few plays to get a real idea of what your best plays are at any given time.
As a perfect follow up, I then played Container. Rules simple, yet again, strategy heavy. Such an elegant game! Just five actions you can choose from, yet, every choice seems tough. Again, more bidding (seemed to be a theme for the weekend!) but at least this was an open economy! The jumbo edition is awesome and if nothing else, it’s satisfying to move the huge behemoth ships around the table. Another great game that I feel I will play much better second time around!
Going into the evening I played Blackout: Hong Kong. Alexander Pfister is definitely my designer of choice at the moment and, despite the bad graphic choices in this game that everyone talks about, Blackout didn’t disappoint. While elements of the card play are very similar to Mombasa, there is far more of a ‘puzzle’ element to this. I also think the theme and artwork will be easier for some people to get into rather than Mombasa which can be quite daunting.
Early to bed as tomorrow was my last day and the day I flew back home (albeit on the red eye!) and I still had to work out if everything would squeeze into my hand luggage!
I had managed to pre-organise the one game I had to play over the weekend for Sunday morning. So, after successfully managing to pack everything, I headed downstairs for a game of City of Big Shoulders. I heard about this a couple of years ago and was immediately excited when I heard ‘18XX with worker placement’, I’ve been following it for a while and it was an instaback on Kickstarter for me. I’m also excited to be getting the opportunity to demo it for Parallel Games at GenCon so really wanted to get a game in before then.
Not a lot I can say except I certainly wasn’t disappointed! It certainly scratches both those itches and a lot more - I am excited to be able to show it off to people and can’t wait to get my Kickstarter version in the near future.
Unsurprisingly, that had taken up a large chunk of the day and then left me with the ‘I don’t want to get too involved in anything’ time phase before my flight. So, a Ganz Schon Clever (I love this!) followed by a quick game of Ra before I left the hotel.
An overnight flight on Sunday got me back home Monday lunchtime, with a couple of days rest before heading off to UK Games Expo Thursday morning!
I love the feel of HeavyCon, because it is a smaller scale, there is a really friendly feel that makes the weekend great. Every day there were snacks at 2pm including luxury smores, complete with flames to toast your marshmallows, cinema style popcorn with candy and a good supply of free tea and coffee (all had in my shiny new HeavyCon mug obviously!) Massive thank you to Edward and Jess for organising it all, can’t wait for next year!
]]>In the box you get:
Each player takes the four tokens in their player colour. Shuffle the Pathway deck and deal three cards to each player. This will be their starting hand and they should have three cards in hand at the end of every turn. Shuffle up the Lesson cards and take the top ten from the deck, a new lesson will be revealed each turn so, in effect, these cards act as your round markers (the game is played over ten rounds) However, leave the rest of the deck close by as there is a chance you may need more! Place the first two lesson cards face up on the table, these will determine what type of card you can play each round. Next to each one place a row of Pathway cards appropriate for the number of players, in a two player game you should have two rows of four cards, three players five cards and four players six cards in each row. Place the rest of the Pathway cards nearby. Shuffle each deck of Achievement cards and draw one for each colour (blue, green and brown) Place the lost items nearby and you are ready to play!
Over the course of the game you will be laying cards in a horizontal row to create paths of water, soil and grass and trying to avoid sand. Paths will score as long as they contain three tasks. For grass this is feeding animals, for soil this is watering plants and for water this is cleaning relics. At the end of the game, each path that contains three tasks will score you one point for every connecting square of the same type. Tasks may be of the same type and still score.
During the game, play will alternate between the two rows of cards, so in the first round the top row will be the active row, in the second turn the bottom row will be the active row etc. Decide on a starting player. That player chooses a Pathway card from the top row to take then puts their meeple on it, in turn order all players place a meeple on their chosen card. Player order is now determined by the position of meeples on the active row. The player whose token is farthest left will play first, then along the row until all players have taken their turn. In a players turn they first, collect the Pathway card their meeple was on and add it to their hand. Then they must play a card, following the Lesson card rules. There are also a few rules for playing Pathway cards (that obviously, don’t apply in the first round!) You must place your new Pathway Card over at least one of the three squares of the rightmost column of the previous card. Cards must always be placed over and never under the previous card and must always be played the right way up ie. with the cards symbols at the top. The total height of your Pathway may never go above five rows tall. As you add to your pathway, keep an eye on the achievements you put out at the start of the game, if at any point, you have completed one, place one of your meeples on the first available slot on the card. You will score these points at the end of the game. Some Pathway cards contain lost items. If the card you just placed has one of the symbols on it, take the matching item and place it in front of you.
After you have placed a card, you must then place your meeple on a Pathway card in the inactive row, this will be the card you will take next round.
Once all players have completed their turn, slide the remaining two Pathway Cards in the active row along to the left. Then restock the row from the deck. Take the top card from the lesson deck and place it over the previous one. If there are no more lesson cards in the deck, this next turn will be the final one.
Lesson cards primarily determine which type of card you may play in a turn but there are also a few special ones that have special abilities. These may allow you to play cards rotated, play extra cards or even add extra rounds to the game.
At the end of the game, points come from three places:
Returning Lost items: Return any lost items to the correct locations and score the points shown on those squares.
Completing achievements: Add any points for achievements scored during the game.
Pathways: For every pathway that contains three tasks score points for every matching, connected area. Some squares contain scoring tablets so don’t forget to add those points on.
Add up your totals and the player with the most points wins!
Vadoran Gardens is a real surprise. On initial looks, it is a small card game, however, the rules on placing cards along with the lesson plans each turn can make this tough and you will frequently have to give up on a current plan when things just don’t go the way you want! Vadoran Gardens is a big game in a small box and the number of variations of different pathways cards, the lessons, objectives and lost items mean you won't ever have the same game twice.
I love the concept of constructing an entire world for your games to be set in, yet making those games so very different.
]]>I was so pleased to find Ganz Schon Clever was for sale at Airecon, despite Games Explorers nabbing the last copy before me. It's been a firm favourite since we got our copy, I've even got the app on my tablet. So this is a no-brainer. A roll and write, where you must not only carefully select three dice each turn (and one in your opponents' turns) to fill out your scoresheet (with a variety of strategies based on the die colour) and find the optimal way to score the highest.
A battle royale style party game with negotiation, strategy, silliness and erm....gun actions dictated by your hand gestures in the style of a Western Shootout. Clint Eastwood eat your heart out.
Grifters: Nexus is both an expansion to the Grifters core game and a standalone. Grifters based in the The Dystopian Universe (Coop, Resistance, Etc) is a hand-building game where you build criminal organisations by hiring operatives. Use your operatives skills to steal as much money as possible from the government, corporations and other players to become the wealthiest crime syndicate. The expansion introduces new specialist cards, new mechanisms and a new job card system. I am yet to try Grifters so this seems a good place to start.
BARPIG: After Hours is the sequel to BARPIG and operates as either a
standalone of an expansion to the original game. It will be launching at
UK Games Expo as did its predecessor last year, with events on the convention
floor and sneak previews. After Hours means that the expansion will have a
darker post-watershed side. I heard plenty of good stuff about BARPIG from
Essen last year and we all like a good party game.
Inuit: The Snow Folk is a card-based strategy game of drafting and tableau building, it's not a new game as such as it's a reimplementation of is of Natives, with two additional modular expansions. But the new artwork certainly looks like an improvement and that will appeal more to a new audience.
A family game of perception planning and picturing the beauty of nature. Your objective is to gather a number and types of Butterflies onto a single space in the Meadow. This just looks so pretty, I am intrigued.
World Shapers is a card drafting game for 1–4 players based on the four elements. Players will draft and collect sets collection to create powerful combinations and use power crystals to enhance their drafted sets to make them more powerful.
Imhotep: Duel is a you can guess a two player game based on the original, it offers a unique drafting mechanism with a 3x3 grid system for gathering tiles already loaded on boats and players, having gained their tiles, have make best use of those tiles to build monuments on a player's own moment boards.
The next instalment in the Exit series. We've quite happily worked through every release. So this is no chance we're walking away without this one, if you like puzzles and escape rooms this single use escape room in a box is worthy of your pocket money. I am intrigued that this is "...a 2-part adventure in 1 box...", subsequently the price reflects as longer and more in depth experience which should be about double the standard Exit price.
Yay, yay, yay, yay. Andy and Jenny from YAY Games will be in attendance to showcase their new game Snaggit. Snaggit is a speed-reaction game, a challenge card is revealed at the beginning of a round, and players must Snag as many cards as possible from the table that match the movement, habitat, or not of the depicted animal. Or in a call out round animals can be Snagged because they have are the biggest, quickest, strongest, etc. It is silly but then so are the people at YAY Games.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vawNd2PEkpM
Those of you who didn't back the Kickstarter and therefore haven't received it already, Villagers will be on sale over the weekend. Found your new village from a humble grain field utilising the skills of people looking to settle in a new village and learn how to manage resources, and your villagers skillsets to build, feed and thrive in the middle ages.We had the pleasure of playing Magnate in the middle of last year and I absolutely love it. Its been play-tested and promoted so hard this year that it's now a very lean machine indeed. Magnate is a strategy game for 1-5 players. You'll take turns to grow your property empire by buying land, constructing buildings, marketing, renting to tenants and selling the properties on in order to make a profit. But beware the property types on the surrounding areas will either benefit your investment or impact it negatively.
An interesting Worker Placement and Set Collecting game. You play as one of the Frostrivers tribes gathering at the Sacred Grounds to present your own leader to succeed as the new Neta-Tanka, only the tribal leader that proves it can organise their tribe, are both the most generous and most able to provide for themselves can seek succession to the role. I love a good worker placement game so this is high on my radar.
A neat expansion to last year's Teotihuacan, Late Preclassic Period adds a unique asymmetrical ability to every player, a fourth template that unlocks permanent abilities, effects that vary over each season and eclipse and finally new engineering techniques and renewed plans for beautifying the central Pyramid of the Sun. I can't wait the new challenges this will add.
This expansion for Jamey Stegmaier's Euphoria purports to be a "more stuff" (new recruits and market tiles), "more players" (solo play and improved automata), and an "“improve the rules” expansion (responding to five years of feedback and making some revisions). Picking up this will make us go back and refresh ourselves as it's been a little while since we played the base game.
There are plenty of Roll & Write games coming on to the market at the moment and every one of them needs to offer something unique to stand up against fierce competition. The Gig is a dice drafting game where players make up a jazz improv group where each player is looking to make their solo performance with roll and write mini-puzzles. Colour me interested.
You can't beat a game based on Sushi.....Sushi Dice, Sushi Go, Wasabi. But this time we've got a dexterity game that appears to cross the delicate, cramp inducing art of using chopsticks and using them to flick sushi into the goal of your opponent. Let the food-fight begin.
Sanctum embraces the Hack and Slash genre and brings it into a board game as each player quests to rid the land surrounding the once glorious city (Sanctum), leaving a steaming pile of corpses in their path, building up equipment and combat skill so that they can face the final boss, the Lord of Demons.
Formal Ferret who brought us The Networks are working on High Rise, a strategic city-building game with corruption. Playing over a series of turns where your actions are collecting resources, constructing buildings, and repaying favours. Build your city and gain corruption to get you some tasty bonuses along the way, but beware the most corrupt players will get penalised along the way.
If you don't know anything about what happened in 1066 you've been living under a rock for 950 years. 1066, Tears To Many Mother is a non-collectable, tactical, asymmetrical card game with each card inspired by a real person or event from one of the most critical times in British history. Whether you're on the side of the Normans or the Saxons gather your soldiers and resources to fight it out at the Battle of Hastings.
We found this gem at Essen last year from Pegasus Spiele. It's a game of card management and optimising worker actions. There are two boards, both with a roundabout; one outside the city walls collecting resources and the other operating inside the city gaining popularity so that a player can win over the populace and become the new king of Emara.
If you know Nuno Bizarro Sentiero and Paulo Soledade from their other games. Madeira, Zhanguo (which destroyed my husband) you've got an idea of the depth of strategy and weight involved. In La Stanza you play the part of a Patron of the arts, recruiting characters, investing in art, trade routes and instigating creation of the new wonders of the Renaissance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgvflbuWmc0
Based in the City of Kings universe, this one is a tile placement games which looks simple on the surface but is definitely more of a thinker. Each player selects cards from the available pool and places another according the current rounds placement restriction, each tile overlaps the previously placed one with the aim of building a series of paths of water, earth and grass, and gatherings sets of animals and delivering lost items along the way. Really pretty little game.
We love the base Raccoon Tycoon, Forbidden Games are the company to watch at the moment. Launching on Kickstarter on the 14th May 2019, The Fat Cat Expansion will be taking it up to six players. To cater for the extra player
... we are introduced to the Jack Rabbit railroad (some of you may already have seen these as a promo card) and Badger Baron which acts as a wildcard and can therefore be used as any railroad.
...four new town cards, I think they speak for themselves.
.... a player board each. Can't stand a messy tableau well Forbidden have got you covered and with a slotted player board to keep everything in its place.
The resources are already impeccably presented, and to add to our wooden goodies we now have four different types of meeples. How did we cope with playing a game without meeples?
Animals and Tycoons will be available to all, at a cost of course but the more you get the more points you will receive in final scoring. And the Locomotive and Housing meeples will only be available to players with the corresponding new building tiles. What new building tiles you say? Well the expansion adds another 16 building tiles.
These tiles will add new strategies and extra depth to the game giving you more ways to gain points. The game itself will retain its core mechanics and easy playability, so while there will be more components the intention is make the game just a little richer.
Raccoon Tycoon has probably got one of our favourite start player markers, ever (who wouldn't love a giant wooden Raccoon). But look it's a fricken' cat!!!!
If that really isn't enough stuff for you. Glenn Drover's daughter Emma created a the original Railroad and Town cards artwork while working on the prototype with her farther which here shows the original Fat Cat designs. This alternative artwork will be available with the expansion which is a really nice look at the design process and how this can include family. We hope to see her art in her own game next. You can see some more of Emma's artwork over on our Facebook Page.
I will certainly be backing this myself, Raccoon Tycoon is one of our most played games since Essen 2018, and the cat meeple sells it to me alone. The Fat Cat Expansion launches 14th May 2019 and we will add the link just as soon as it is live.
In the box you get:
Give each player a player mat that shows the scoring icon for every character and one victory point. Deal every player an identity card face down, they may look at this but not reveal it to other players. Place the leftover identity cards to one side face down. Place the bathroom location card in the middle of the table. Shuffle the rest of the location cards and deal out four in a line next to the bathroom. Randomly place two identity tokens on each room that isn’t the bathroom, ensuring that there are not two characters that score on the same symbol both in the same room.
Shuffle the event deck and put it to one side, then shuffle the clue deck, deal four cards to each player and also put that to one side. Place the timer handle on top of the timer card and set it to the correct number of rounds depending on player count (7 for 2 players, 6 for 3 and 5 for 4 players.)
Give the first player the start player token. You are ready to play!
The game is played over a predetermined number of rounds (set on the timer during set-up)
In a players turn they will place two clue cards, one at a time, either face up or face down. These can be on the same or different locations. If a card is placed face down, trigger the ability of the room before playing the second clue card. If the card has an ability, trigger the card's ability before moving onto the ability of the room. Note that some rooms need both cards to be placed there to trigger their effect - these rooms are marked with a symbol showing two cards. Once every player has played two clue cards and all effects have been resolved, players move onto the guessing phase for the turn.
Beginning with the starting player, everyone may take a turn guessing the identity of one of the other players. If a player guesses correctly, they gain a number of points equal to the current round and the other player must reveal their identity. If they made an incorrect guess, the other player receives those points. If your identity is revealed you still remain in the game and play as normal, except with your identity card face up. After everyone has had a guess (right or wrong!) reduce the timer by one and draw an event card. This will be something that affects all players. After this has been dealt with, pass the start player token counter-clockwise and start a new guessing round.
When the timer reaches zero, the game ends and final scoring happens.
Score one point for each card in your character's location. Then reveal any characters that weren’t revealed earlier in the game. Every character has a scoring symbol - this is shown on the player overview card and on the identity cards. Each player scores one point for of their scoring symbols that is face up on the table.
The player with the most points wins!
Noises at Night is a fast paced, easy to play social deduction game with super cute artwork. It’s a great, small box for traveling with. The stand out thing for me here is player count. There are a tonne of social deduction games out there most of which have a minimum player count of three (and don’t even work that well at that count!) Noises at Night even plays well at two players, I can’t think of any other social deduction games that do that!
Review copy provided by B and B Games Studio
We had a look at Promenade earlier in the year. It’s so much more than a deckbuilder with great artwork, yes really, every card is a real piece of art painted by the designer. You can purchase some of the original artwork as one of your pledge items. As you build your desk, there are elements of price manipulation as the value of the cards increase, however, to gain points you need to display paintings in the six available galleries which decreases the overall value of your deck. A clever financial market mechanic blended with a classic deckbuilder. Just 38 USD gets you a copy of this beautiful and innovative game.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tatewu/promenade-the-game-of-impressionist-art
Obviously, we love colour scheme of Bag of Dungeon, you can’t go wrong with Red, Black and White very classic! Bag of Dungeon is a mini RPG/Dungeon Crawler with no DM needed that all fits into a few drawstring bags so great for taking anywhere with you. Explore, Fight monsters, get the loot, and get the hell out. with the possibility of working cooperatively or stabbing your fellow adventurers in the back. No two adventures are the same due to a modular system. Modelling itself on 80s classics but updated for the more contemporary gamer, If you like Escape The Dark Castle this is probably worth a look for you.
Like any good adventurer you rock up to a dungeon with your best armour, trusty wooden sword and bag of holding, except this time your bag is the dungeon.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gunpowder/bag-of-dungeon-a-mini-fantasy-adventure-game-in-a
Set in an era when men wore monocles, ladies had beards and everyone quaffed pints of gin, The Old Hellfire Club is a storytelling card game where you constantly try to impress with your tales of glory while your fellow players try and embarrass you by proving it all a lie! The main deck is a set of boast cards, which has suits such as Places, Weapons, People… At the beginning of the game players decide what adventure they will collectively relate. By playing boast cards from their hand each person takes it in turn to recall their heroic contribution (the high value card the better) and at any point an opponent can challenge the authenticity of your tale (with a lower card). Changing your date with Queen Victoria to with a Street Urchin. You can play as many cards as you like in your turn which adds a push your luck element to the game, however you can be challenged at any time and lose all the points you would have gained this round. Although OHC is in essense a simple card game but the true gaming element to this is in the story-telling.
We’ve been following OHC for close to a year now and watched it improve like a fine gin. Beautiful artwork and extravagant tales all for a bargain £15
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oldhellfireclub/the-old-hellfire-club
Being a massive horror fan, I loved the original Monster Slaughter which I had the pleasure of playing at Essen 2017. Monster Slaughter: Underground is a real monster of an Expansion that is compatible with both the retail and Kickstarter editions of the base game. More actions, objects, a new Basement room board, more minis, doors and barricades have been added to the game and host of optional extras. If you missed out on the original Kickstarter there’s an opportunity to pick the deluxe edition here too with all the amazing stretch goals they reached in the original campaign.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ankamaboardgames/monster-slaughter-underground
]]>As the name suggests, Stockastic is all about stock trading. Build your portfolio to be the wealthiest stock trader by the end of the game.
In the box you get:
Place all four company boards in the middle of the table, choose which sides to play randomly. This is the market. Place the appropriate number of share cards on each board, depending on the number of players. 7/10/12 or 15 for 3/4/5 and 6 players respectively. Place a marker token on each company's starting price, this is marked on the boards. Place another marker token in the centre of the performance indicator on each company board. Randomise the forecast tokens and place one face down on each forecast slot on every company board. Shuffle the rumours deck and the event deck and place them both above the board. Give each player their starting fund (30 coins in a 3 or 4 player game, 25 coins in a 5 or 6 player game) Place a marker token on the round tracker for the first semester of the first year.
You are now ready to play!
The game is played over the course of six rounds, with each round being split into four phases.
At the beginning of the bidding phase, the first unrevealed forecast token on each company is revealed. Then players bid for turn order. Each player places the amount they wish to bid in their hand secretly when everyone has decided, bids are revealed. The player who bid the most goes first, the next highest and so on, they are then given the appropriate turn order marker. In the case of a tie the player who went earlier in the last round goes first.
In a players action phase, they may carry out as many actions as they are willing and/or able to do. There are five different actions a player may do:
Check the forecast token - A player may pay two coins to the bank to peek at one face down forecast token on a company board.
Check the event deck - A player may pay three coins to peek at the top card of the event deck.
Buy/Sell shares with the market - You may buy shares from any company. Pay the shown amount to the bank for each stock you buy. The price of that stock then moves up one for each share you bought. You may also sell stock back to the market. The price you sell for is one less than the current price shown. After selling, move the price marker down one for each share sold. You may not buy and sell shares from the same company in the same turn. Also, if you buy or sell more than five shares from the same company, the price can only move up or down by a total of five.
Buy/Sell shares with another player - Players may buy and sell shares to other players during their turn. All deals must be for cash only, no share trading is allowed. The amount and price of shares is negotiated openly between players. Trading with other players does not affect share price in the market.
Purchase and play a rumour card - A player may pay five coins to purchase a rumour card and place it in their hand. You may play it in this turn or wait and use it in a future turn. To play it, just place it face down next to the company board you wish to apply it to. The card will take effect during the next phase (resolution)
Resolution Phase - After all players have taken their actions, the resolution phase happens, this is where changes to the market are made. First, resolve the current forecast tokens, the arrows indicate if the companies performance increases or decreases, move the marker token for each company appropriately. Then reveal the top card of the event deck and resolve it. These cards affect company performance or stock price, adjust all markers accordingly. If any rumour cards were played on companies, resolve these next.
Then, check each company's performance and adjust the price of that company's shares. Price increases if performance is on the right of the bar and decreases if it is on the left. If a company stock price ever drops to the lowest marked price, that company is declared bankrupt. All shares held by players for that company are returned to the box, any rumour cards or forecast tokens on it are discarded and the board is flipped over. This represents a new company taking over and filling the space left behind by the previous one. Set the starting price and performance indicator and place forecast tokens on the appropriate spaces. Place shares on the company board, ready to start trading straight away.
After all changes have been resolved for each company, each player receives their dividends for companies they have invested in. For each share players have in a company, they receive an amount of money based on each company's current performance.
After six rounds, the game ends. Each player counts up their coins then adds the current value of their stock to the total, the current value of stock is as indicated on the company boards. The player with the most assets wins!
If there is a tie, the player with the most stock wins.
The game comes with character cards which can be added to the game for a little more depth. These mean players start with different amounts of money and have additional benefits. The downside is you also need to pay operational costs at the end of each round (after receiving dividends) If, at any point, a player is unable to pay their operational costs, the player goes bankrupt and is out of the game.
At it's heart Stockastic is a simple stock investing game, buying makes the value of a company go up, selling makes it go down. But life in the stock-market is not that simple or everyone would be doing it. The forecast of each company can be seen, yet Events revealed in the resolution phase and played Rumours affect the performance of the market positively or negatively. It's your job as a savvy Trader to ride out the uncertainty and become the most Stockastic individual.
Place the main board in the centre of the table. Shuffle the 3 Gold cards and place them below the Morisot Banque. Reveal the top two cards, these will be the ones available to purchase. Place the 5 Gold cards face up under the Cassatt Reserve.
Place the orange cost cube marked 1 in the Megan Galerie, then randomly select three other cubs and place them in the three other galleries. Place the remaining cubes above Megan Gallerie in ascending order. Then place the white cubes on the spaces matching their number next to that.
Place three sets of genre tokens into the black bag (15 total) along with the black cubes. Randomly draw them and place them on the invitation spaces on the galleries. Shuffle the end game bonus cards and place one face up in each of the galleries.
Place the market rating board next to the main board and place a set of five genre tokens and the gold disc on the zero space.
Give each player a player board, ten workers in their colour, a set of five genre tokens and a starting deck of gold cards (these are marked P1, 2, 3 and 4 in the bottom left) Each player places the five genre tokens at the one gold value space on their player board. Place a meeple of each colour at zero on the score track.
Shuffle up the painting cards and deal the indicated number into each of the gallery spaces, then deal five to each player. Each player should take some time to have a look at these before shuffling them together with their gold cards to form their deck. Draw five cards as a starting hand. You are now ready to play Promenade!
In a players turn they make take two actions from the three types of action available. They may do these in any order and may even take the same action twice. Place cards used to take an action into the action space above the player board. If at any point a players draw deck is depleted, shuffle the discard pile to form a new deck.
Haggle - Spend one card from your hand and draw two cards.
Choose a card from your hand and place it in one of your available action slots, then draw two cards.
Acquire - Buy one card from the Promenade.
Pay the cost indicated by the cube at the top of the museum you wish to buy from. Discard cards equal to or more than the cost into an action slot and take the desired card, place this into the same action slot. Advance the market rating token that matches the colour card bought by the amount shown on the gallery you just bought from. The value of paintings in a players hand is determined by the position of the matching token on the market rating track (and also on your player board - this should always match up and is just an easier way to keep track of paintings worth) Any overspent gold is lost and cannot be used. If taking two acquire actions in the same turn, paintings cannot be bought from the same location.
Show - Exhibit a painting in a museum.
Pay the cost shown in the museum by discarding cards into an action slot. If this is your first time displaying in a museum, claim one of the bonuses on the left of the board - this may be a coin discount on displaying or immediate points. Place a worker on the space to show it has been taken. After paying the cost, take one a painting from your hand and place it into the museum display. The colour must match one of the invite cubes on the exhibition (black cubes are wild) Place a meeple onto the painting you have just exhibited. Place the invite cube onto the highest point score shown and advance that many points. Advance the market rating token of the appropriate colour by the amount shown on the right of the exhibition name.
Some gold cards have a special ability shown on the bottom of the card. You may remove the card from the game completely to use this ability. These abilities grant you a higher level of gold for a specific action.
Remember whenever a painting is bought or displayed in a museum, the market rating of that colour (genre) of painting must be increased by the shown amount. When a marker advances to the next row and there is an increase in value, that is immediately applied to all paintings of that colour. Mark the increase on players boards. This means that a players first action could increase the value of a specific genre, meaning their hand is more valuable for their second action. Also, whenever gold cards are bought, move the gold market up on the market rating board. Three spaces for a 3 gold and six spaces for a 5 gold. This has no effect during the game but will matter when it comes to end game scoring.
At the end of a turn, place all cards in the actions spaces into that players discard pile. Then, a player may discard as many cards as they want and draw back up to a hand size of five.
If a gallery is now empty, remove the current cost token from it and replace it with the next highest cost cube above the galleries. Then deal cards across the rows until all galleries are back to their maximum paintings. Also, restock the 3 gold if any have been bought so there are always two cards face up.
The game ends when one of three conditions is met at the end of a turn
Play continues to the last player and then final scoring happens.
Move all tokens on the market rating board to the green VP space on the left of the board. Move the gold token to the ratio chart on the right. This indicates how many points cards in players decks will be worth.
Players can then flip their boards to use as a scoring aid. Take all cards from their hand, discard and deck and sort them into types. Place all gold cards to the left of the board. Then place paintings around the board depending on their point value as shown on the market rating board.
Add up the value of players gold cards and using the gold ratio, score accordingly. For example if the gold rating is 3:1 and a player has six gold, they score two points.
Score points for all paintings in a players deck according to their end position on the market rating board.
When a museum exhibition is full, the end game scoring bonus is triggered, it is possible for more than one bonus to trigger. If this is the case, score them in order of gold cards first, then green, then purple. If no museums are full, score the end game bonus for the one with the most paintings in.
The player with the most points wins, in case of a tie the player with the most art in museums wins!
At heart, Promenade is a deck builder but there are a lot of unique elements that make it unlike any other deck builder we’ve played. The ever increasing value of cards in your deck means it escalates quickly, yet the value of your deck then decreases when you start placing works of art into museums (which increases the value of the card you just got rid of!) The process of buying art from the galleries, increasing its value to then show in museums, along with the beautiful impressionist art style makes this an immersive experience where theme does count. The end game bonuses can make for some interesting dilemmas. If an end game bonus is points for seascape (blue) art in museums, but the museum it’s on has no blue invitations, it can be tricky to fill that museum whilst trying to get blue art on the board for example, or getting art into a museum will give you those points but trigger an end game bonus that is helpful to another player.
Promenade launched on Kickstarter on 8th April 2019
Prototype copy supplied by Sunrise Tornado
Three hours after leaving and we were still stuck on the road to hell aka the M25, this wasn’t ever going to be a quick journey but some days are worse than others and this was going to be one of them. Seven and a half hours after leaving, we finally arrived in Huddersfield - our pre AireCon stopover. Here, we collected the first two of our new acquisitions from the weekend, just a couple of little games. Twilight Imperium 3 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shadows of the Past, yup, just a couple of small boxes!
Already bought games before 10am @aireconuk and haven't even left the house yet. pic.twitter.com/mKQ5IR8qI6
— I Play Red @ Airecon (@IPlayRedGaming) March 8, 2019
The next morning, we were up bright and early, ready to make our way to Harrogate (OK, it was early, that part is true!) First order of business was to put our stuff in the bring and buy. This year it had been automated so I had previously put everything into the system, meaning when I arrived all I had to do was give my email address and a load of labels were printed for me. Once they were stuck onto my items everything was ready to go. Of course, I had to have a quick look around while I was there, for science or something, and some games fell into my hands. One was a gift (shhhh! They haven’t received it yet!) and the other was Cupcake Empire, a super cute looking dice-based game that apparently has some bite to it (pun intended!) Then we set off to find our base for the day and play some games. The first thing we played was a learning game of Terraforming Mars. Many thanks to Ian for teaching this to us, but shame on you for doing so with fancy 3D printed pieces as it means I’m going to have to pimp my copy asap! I did enjoy it but definitely felt at a disadvantage being a first-time player. I feel knowing the card combos and what may or may not come up gives you a certain edge. Saying that Rob won it on his first play so maybe I was overthinking it! One I’m looking forward to playing again (with my crappy cardboard tiles!)
After that, I taught Coimbra to another new player. I’m really loving this game at the moment and enjoying spreading the love! Such a great, tight game. With only twelve actions throughout the whole thing, you need to make sure every action counts. As usual, when I’m teaching this, I came in last but the fun is in playing, right?
So, after learning a mid-weight game and teaching another I decided to learn/teach another. We had played Pixie Queen recently for the first time and I was keen to get it to the table again. This was a pretty rocky teach, but we got through it to be constantly punished by the Queen herself! You spend the entirety of this game getting negative points and part of it is to just get less negative points than the other players. This is a brutal game that just doesn’t seem to get the love it deserves!
At this point, the hall was going to be closing up soon so we headed back to our hotel where we managed to get a game of Cupcake Empire in on the tiny bar table. This was one that none of us had played before so it was a learn and teach game with very poor lighting which made some of the colours very tough to tell apart. Some nice mechanics and super cute artwork meaning it was deceptively tough at times. I know I will be able to get people playing this based on looks alone, glad I managed to grab a copy after eyeing it up at Essen and watching it sell out!
And so ended day one of AireCon. The plan had been to fill up my bag with mid weight Euroes and then take my Quiver so we had some smaller, quicker, multiplayer games, however, half an hour into our journey I realised I’d forgotten the Quiver. This meant we only had heavier games to play, oh well! However, this meant quality over quantity for the weekend!
Saturday started with a pre-planned game of Smartphone Inc. II’ve wanted to play this for a while and a previously planned game at HandyCon had fallen through at the last minute a couple of months ago so I was very keen to finally get to this! It’s one of those games that seems far more daunting from the rules explanation than it actually is and after turn one it felt pretty easy going. Massive thanks to Ian for bringing and teaching us this. After selling out at Essen there will be a Kickstarter for this later in the year and it will be an insta-back from me. The tile over laying for action selection is not something I have seen before and the gameplay of logistics, stock control and price manipulation ticks all the right boxes for me!
Then a game I consider to be one of my all-time favourites - Concordia. I will always be up for a game of this. I’d pre-organised meeting someone for a game and as we were setting up had two people ask if they could join - this is what I love about Airecon, just sitting and playing a game with three people I had never met before! I did realise a few turns in that it had been far too long since I played so I did horribly but went away with a determination that it wouldn’t be so long until I played again!
Saturday afternoon/evening was a strange one and there was a lot happening, including my very own Fameeple Fortunes! We sat down for a five-player Rokoko. This game gets overlooked, I know a lot of people who are turned off by the theme of dressmaking. Well, bad luck, you are missing out on a great game that has a bit of deck building, resource management, and area control. We started our game then ran off to get tickets for the Airecon/Board Game Exposure huge raffle. There was a total of five prizes, each consisting of a table loaded with games (you didn’t win the table though!) Tickets were being sold for an hour with the draw then taking place. You bought your tickets and then placed them into the bucket on the table of your choosing. Obviously, every table was full of good stuff but I had my eye on one in particular so dumped most of my tickets in there. We then went back and had a few more rounds of Rokoko before the drawing. Amazingly, we won! There was something like thirty games on the table (good job we’d driven up!) Some that we already owned, we handed over to friends and some were donated to good causes. We’re still working our way through a box that’s currently sat under our table as there’s really no space! So much for not buying new games this year - does this count?! A massive well done to all concerned for raising over £1200 for charity in an hour!
We went back and very hastily finished off our game of Rokoko before the main event - my Fameeple Fortunes game show. We’d previously got loads of people to respond to ten simple questions - the answers from which would be used during the live show. We had the Reviewers team - Watch it Played, Gaming Rules, Polyhedron Collider and Unlucky Frog in competition with the Viewers team - Boardgame Social, Yay Games, Games Explorers and Matt Coward. It ended up being a much closer thing than expected, all coming down to the last, double money round with the reviewers winning that and going through to the grand final. The final was done in a Pointless style with the team trying to come up with an answer that only one person had selected. Their question being ‘What is a good game to teach a non-gamer?’ Sadly, they didn’t win the grand prize of a speedboat (this may be a lie) but they all went home with copies of the Family Fortunes boardgame, so look out for reviews coming soon! After getting past my nerves, I really enjoyed hosting this and want to do something similar in the future - watch this space!
Jason Frowde managed to capture some footage of the show which features in the Gaming Knights Video Log ; My Airecon experience video. If anyone has any more photos or video footage of the event I'd love to hear from them.
After all that excitement, we retreated to the open gaming upstairs which was a lot cooler and quieter than the main hall where we got in a game of Quacks of Quedlingburg. This has been a surprise hit for us. Winner of last years Kennerspiel des Jahres, I picked this up from that award alone. I was very surprised when I first played this that a push your luck game would be awarded what generally goes to a more complex, strategy based game. But Quacks is so much fun! It’s easy to learn/teach and play and the variations in the box mean you won’t get bored easily! We’re having a lot of fun with this and can’t wait to pick up the expansion.
After that everyone was heading off to get ready to check out the next morning, we left, feeling smug that we’d booked the extra night this year!
Sunday was quite quiet, I ran round to get some more photos and catch up with people I'd missed over the last two days. Some friends had picked Alexandria from the library which was funnily enough one of the games that was in my raffle haul! This was a learning game for all of us, so a bit clunky, but this definitely had a lot of interesting ideas with different player powers and end game goals. Looking forward to getting our copy to the table.
After a final rummage through the bring and buy for any last minute bargains and saying goodbye to people who were leaving early, we had enough time for one last game. After discovering two of our group had never played it before, we decided to pull out Concordia again. It ended being pretty chaotic as time was running short with the last few turns being taken stood up as tables were bing collapsed around us. This is a game I love introducing to new players and I hope they fall in love with it as much as we did!
We had a nice relaxing dinner, then back to the hotel to deal with the stacks of boxes in the room before heading home the next morning.
Airecon is my favourite of the UK conventions with loads to offer everyone. Loads of open gaming area with friendly faces, great events, the bring and buy, role playing sessions and lots of prototypes to try out. I can't wait to see it grow and continue to succeed.
King's Forge is a 2-4 player pool building, dice rolling, drafting game. Use your dice to draft and activate cards then any dice remaining can be rolled in an attempt to craft items.
In the box you get:
Place the game board in the centre of the table. Each player takes five black dice and a smithy tile, choosing which side up they wish to have it. This then shows their shops mascot for the game. Place the rest of the dice on the appropriately marked spots on the main game board. Shuffle the craft cards and randomly draw the appropriate number for the number of players - with two players use nine, three players use ten and four players use thirteen cards. Put the rest back in the box as you will not be using them. Sort the selected craft cards in order from low to high based on the number in the top right of the cards. Place the three lowest ranked cards on the space on the board and the rest above them, in rank order but splayed out so the icons on the right-hand side are visible. Look through the gather cards to find the ones marked with an anvil symbol - North Mine, South Mine, East Forest and West Forest. These cards will be used in every game. Shuffle up the rest and draw seven at random. Add these to the other four and shuffle the deck of eleven cards, place this on the spot on the board underneath the crafting cards. Put the rest in the box as they will not be used. Give the anvil token to the start player and you are ready to go!
Each round consists of three phases, players will take it in turns to complete each phase then move onto the next. Once all players have completed the cleanup phase the round ends, the start player anvil moves to the player on the left and a new round begins.
The start player deals four gather cards into the centre of the board and may then choose one of three actions.
Claim a gather card. To do this, they must have the number and types of dice shown on the card to do one of the two actions. Move the card in front of you and place the necessary dice from your supply onto the card. Only one of the actions shown on the card is available to you and those dice may now not be used for the rest of the turn. If the chosen action grants you additional dice, these dice are moved from the supply onto your smithy tile and may not be used for this current round. Resources are finite in the game so if you go to claim a dice and there are none available, take any that are available only, you may not come back later and claim what you couldn’t at the time. If the gather deck has not yet been exhausted, turn over the top card and immediately fill any spaces when cards are taken.
Visit a Dock Location. To visit a dock location, you must take a gather card from the centre of the board and place it face down in front of you. If there are no gather cards available, you may not take a dock action. Select an unclaimed dock action and place the required dice from your pool on that action. All of the dock actions are available to all players, however, if an action has been taken, the same action may not be performed by another player. All areas have two action spaces, one is cheaper than the other so if a player has already taken the cheaper spot, you must pay for the more expensive version of that action. Tokens received from the dock must be used the same turn they are taken and cannot be carried over into subsequent rounds.
Pass. If you decide you do not wish to take any more actions and keep the rest of your dice for the craft phase, you may pass. If you are the first player to pass you may either take one metal dice or one of the +1/-1 tokens for use in this rounds crafting phase. The gather phase ends when either all players have passed or else there are no more face-up gather cards left available.
Beginning with the start player and advancing clockwise, every player has the chance to craft any one item from the three currently on display, or to steal any item that was crafted by another player previously in this round. Roll any unused dice you have from this round. You craft an item by matching your dice by colour and value to the requirements on one of the three craft cards on display. Don’t forget - this is the time to use any card actions or tokens that manipulate your dice! Dice can be raised above a value of six during this phase.
The value of the dice must meet the requirements and can exceed them. Place the card and allocated dice in front of you, you have successfully crafted this item! However, you cannot actually claim the card until the end of the phase. As soon as one of the display cards is crafted, move down the lowest value craft card from the display, this is now available to craft this round. If you have enough dice and are lucky enough with your rolls, you may craft multiple items in a turn. When you have no more dice left that can be used to craft, place any remaining dice on your smithy tile and your crafting phase is over.
Even if you have completed a craft card you are not guaranteed to complete it, other players may steal it later in the round! To steal a craft card you must be able to allocate dice that are all equal in value, but at least one dice must be a higher value. If you successfully steal a craft card from another player, move that players dice onto their smithy card and place the card and dice in front of you. Remember though, this item is still not safe as someone else could steal it from you in their crafting phase! It is possible that you will enter the craft phase with no available dice or that you roll and you are unable to craft any of the available items. If this is the case, your craft phase is over and you must pass. Once all players have either passed or taken a craft turn, this phase ends and the cleanup phase begins.
The game ends in the round a player has crafted their fourth craft card. The player with the most crafted items is the winner! In the case of a tie, the player with the highest number craft card wins.
Our review copy also came with the ‘Gold’ expansion. This not only adds an
extra resource - d’uh gold obviously, but a load more craft cards, gather cards
and introduces the Queens Favour. There is also a lot more modular rules and
scenarios to change up game play.
At heart, Kings Forge is a bagless bag builder. The choices of when and where to use your dice make for interesting game play and mean you never really end up with the wrong dice as there’s always a way to use them and you always know what items need crafting next meaning you can always be prepared. The dice themselves are pretty and great quality making it fun to roll a handful of them. As well as the Gold expansion there are four other expansions adding a ton more content and variations to the game, meaning it will never be samey!
Review copy provided by Starling Games
News Flash: Star Trek Conflick in the Neutral Zone and Conflicting Legends Announces
]]>In Chai, you take on the role of a tea merchant, crafting and combining ingredients to fulfil your customers' orders.
The Kickstarter back in December was a huge hit, raising more than five times the target amount and unlocking a huge number of upgrades, lucky you if you got the deluxe version as it’s pretty fancy!
We have a pretty basic prototype copy, so obviously all components are not the finished version, but in the retail version of the game you will get:
Give each player a tea house of their chosen colour, the matching base tea tokens, customer cards and a player aid. Place the tea tokens in the tea sack on the left of the player board. Each player shuffles their customer deck and places one card face up next to their tea house, a second customer is placed face up in the middle of the table creating the customer pool. The remaining six cards from each player are shuffled together to create the customer deck. Two cards are drawn from the top of this and placed face up into the customer pool.
Place the tea flavour tiles into the bag and the market board in the centre of the table. Draw them, one at a time, and fill up the market board starting on the left of the top row and working your way along each row. Place one of each pantry item (milk, sugar, honey, vanilla and chai spices) onto the pantry board and put the rest of the tokens into the pantry bag. Shuffle the ability cards and place three face up in the play area. Place a number or tea cups equal to the number of players in a row, shuffle up the tip tokens and place one face down in front of each cup. Place the clip on the 0DEGREE C mark to indicate the first round. Give the starting player one coin and all other players two.
The game is played over five rounds as indicated by the thermometer. Each round lasts a varied number of turns and completes when all the teacups are filled.
In each turn, a player gets the choice of three actions:
Visit the Market - When a player declares they are visiting the market they immediately get three coins. Players may buy any tea flavour tile, when they do so they also take any other tiles of the same type that are touching, either horizontally or vertically. They must pay the highest cost shown on the top of the column they have taken from. Remaining tiles all slide to the left and the player may continue to make purchases, always paying the highest cost indicated. Players may never hold more than twelves tiles in their tea house. After a player has finished purchasing, the market board is refilled one tile at a time, starting with the top row and moving left to right.
Visit the Pantry - A player may pay one coin to discard all ingredients from the board and refill before taking goods if they wish. They may then take three items, either from the face up on on the pantry board, may draw blindly from the bag or take a combination. Players may never hold more than six pantry items in their tea house.
Reserve and Use Ability - A player may reserve a customer either from the visible customer pool or blindly from the top of the deck. If taken from the face-up pool, another customer is immediately drawn to replace the one taken. Players take the customer and place them face up next to their tea house. Players may never have more than three customers reserved. After reserving a customer, the player may choose to use one of the face-up ability cards.
At the end of a players turn, they may fulfill a customer order either from the face up pool on the table or from their personal tea house. Take the ingredients needed (tea tiles and pantry items) and place them into a teacup with an unrevealed tip token. Also, place into the cup one base tea token of the cards colour. If it is your colour, take it from your board. If it is another players, you must give them one copper to take one from their board to complete the customers order. They may not refuse the sale. After the order has been fulfilled, flip over the tip token and the player gains that tip bonus. The fulfilled customer card is placed face down next to a players tea house to be scored at the end of the game.
If a player flips the last unrevealed tip token, the round is over (eg. in a four player game, four orders would need to be fulfilled) At this point, prepare for the next round. Do this by shuffling the tip tokens and placing them face down in front of the tea cups. The next clockwise player draws an ability card from the deck and chooses which of the current ability cards to place it on top of. The round tracker moves up one notch and the next round begins!
The game ends when a round has been played at 100 °C on the thermometer ie after five rounds, so in a four player game, a total of twenty customer orders have been fulfilled. Once that order has been completed all other players get one last turn so while they may be able to fulfill orders, no more tips can be earned.
Players add up their totals from completed customer orders and add it to their money total. In three to five player games a diversTEA award is also granted to players, count up the number of different base tea colours in fulfilled orders and add that to the total. The player with the most points wins! If there is a tie, the player with the least number of completed orders is the winner.
Chai is, at heart, a set collecting game. The flavour tile puzzle adds a new and unique element. Sometimes it’s worth paying for a single tile to create a cascade reaction and get exactly what you are after or to prevent someone else getting what they need! The art on the customer cards is beautiful, whimsical and has a touch of Dixit surrealism to it. I was obviously very pleased with the cat lady in the red deck! Chai is one of those games that can be enjoyed by people of all gaming levels - it even has a set of rules for advanced play (along with a solo mode). Kickstarter fulfilment currently under way and Chai will be hitting retail very soon.
]]>In the box you get:
If you are taking this game out of the shrink, you have a few things you need to build before you can play. I’m rubbish at this stuff and got everything together without too much pain! The fun slide will need assembling, the selection wheels will need clipping together and the box separators will need making into an insert.
Place the main board in the centre of the table and the three side boards round it. Depending on the number of players, some of the space on this will not be used. With two players, use the attraction closed markers on spaces A,B,C and D, in a three player game just close off space F. Shuffle up the attraction cards and place one on each of the spaces still open. Place the draw pile in the designated space. Shuffle up the booth tiles and place them on the designated space. Take the nine inspection cards. Place the three cards marked round 8 and put them at the bottom of the deck, then shuffle the three marked round 5/6/7 and place them on top, then shuffle the three marked round 2/3/4 and place them on top of the deck. Place the deck on it’s spot on the board. Place the fun slide on it’s space. Shuffle up the weather tokens and place them in a face down pile on their space. Put the visitor tokens by the side of the board.
Give each player a player board, player aid and the meeples, cylinder and action selection wheel of their chosen colour. They place one meeple on the starting space of each three tracks on the main board. In order of age, from youngest to oldest, each player puts their cylinder on the fun slide. Each player receives a booth at random and places it on any chosen space of their player board.
You are now ready to play!
At the end of round two, and in each subsequent round, an inspection will be held. Your parks will be judged on three things - Laughs (orange balloons), thrills (green skulls) and snacks (pink cupcakes) Each inspection will focus on a specific category and will help you gain visitors and win the game!
Each round is played over four phases
Attractions - Each player simultaneously uses their selection wheel to secretly choose the attraction they want from the main board this round. All players reveal at the same time. Starting from the bottom of the fun slide and working up in turn order, each player takes the attraction they want from the board and places it onto their player board, applying the effect shown at the bottom. Any player who was not able to take the attraction they chose now gets a ‘catch-up’ phase. Again, working from the bottom of the fun slide up, each of these players can take an attraction that is left on the main board. However, to make up for not getting the attraction they wanted they get to choose one of the bonuses printed on the board on either side of the space they took the attraction from. They then place the attraction onto their player board and gain the effect shown.
Weather Events - Turn over the top weather tile and apply its effect. Each attraction and booth has a weather symbol on it. Find all on your player board that correspond to the weather tile shown. Move your meeple forward one space in each category on the main board for each booth or attraction in the matching area of your player board.
Inspection - From the end of round two onwards there will be a park inspection. Each examines players rankings in one of the three categories (Laughs, Thrills or Snacks) The player in the lead for the required category receives the top reward shown on the card, the second highest the second reward and so on. If there is a tie for any reward, the player lowest on the fun slide receives the higher reward. At the end of the eighth (and final) round there are three inspections, one for each category. These must happen in a specific order - Thrills, Laughs then finally Snacks.
Prepare for the Next Round - Draw new attractions and fill the empty spaces on the main board. Reveal the inspection card that will take place at the end of the round.
Once the three inspections have taken place at the end of round eight, players count up their visitor tokens and the player with the most wins. In the case of a tie, the player lowest on the Fun Slide wins!
Trool Park is big, bold and beautiful! The hyper colour palette may not be for all but fits brilliantly with the theme. Some of the colouring could have done with a bit more consistency though. For example, the ‘thrills’ track is green, yet the symbol for it is a black skull (OK, it has green eyes, but that’s a detail you don’t necessarily notice straight up) After a play or two, you just know what things are and the colouring isn’t a problem. I’m a big fan of simultaneous actions and here, Troll Park doesn’t disappoint! The bonus for not getting the card of your choice is a nice touch and makes it worthwhile sometimes. This is a fairly light weight game that just oozes fun from the artwotk, the round cards and the fun slide to determine turn order.
]]>In Duelosaur Island the former corporate giant Moss/Moriya is splitting into two companies. Players take on the roles of the two CEOs battling it out to beat your rival in their latest venture, a dinosaur theme park. Snatch the best DNA and attractions from them in order to generate better PR and beat them at their own game!
In the box you get:
Place the main board and the draft board in the centre of the table. Shuffle the park cards, flip the top three face up. Shuffle the specialist cards and place the deck next to the draft board. Shuffle the plot twist tokens and select four at random. Place these on the four leftmost spaces on the draft board, leaving the far right space empty. Place the unused tokens back in the box. Place the PR marker on the starting space of the track on the main board. Give each player a company board and the ten markers of their colour. Place six of the cubes on the zero spaces of each DNA type, one on the one space of the threat track and on the one on the security track. The last two cubes go on the main board - one on the five space of the visitor track and on the one space of the excitement track. Give each player their three starting park cards. Choose one as a starting dinosaur, tuck this in at the top of the player board so just the dinosaur part is showing and choose one as a starting attraction, tuck this in the bottom of the board so just the attraction part is showing. The remaining card will be your starting hand. Put the dice in the bag and hand it to the starting player.
You are now ready to play!
The game can be played as a short, medium or long game, meaning players need to reach 25,35 or 45 points respectively to win. Agree on what length game you want to play at the start. When scoring occurs at the end of a round, check to see no player has hit this score (there are reminders on the scoring track) if they have, end the round then proceed to end game scoring.
Each round is played over four phases:
Income - Players gain coins and draw cards. Base income is three coins, players gain one extra for each food icon showing on attractions in their park. Also, gain an extra two coins for each income space reached or passed on the income track (These are the spaces marked with a yellow triangle) Before drawing cards, you may pay a coin to discard the three cards on the face-up row. Each player may do this once per round. Then players draw cards in turn order. Each player gets to draw one card plus an additional one for each merch icon showing in their park. Cards may be drawn from the face-up display or from the top of the deck. As soon as a card is taken from the display, it is immediately replaced.
Draft - The starting player will prepare the draft, however, the second player will get first pick. The starting player draws three specialists from the top of the deck and chooses two to place on the draft board. The last one is discarded and not used. Then, they draw five dice from the bag and rolls them. They then place them onto the draft board, pairing them with the plot twists so this can make for some tough decisions. Starting with the second player, players will either choose a DNA dice (along with it’s paired plot twist) or a specialist card until each player has made a total of three selections. If you draft one of the dice, move it to the bottom row to show it has been chosen. Move your cube up on the appropriate DNA track(s) as shown on the dice and gain the plot twist benefit. This may be extra coins, cards or DNA. When you take a specialist card, it may be used in one of two ways. Either place it to the right of your player board to get its ongoing effect or discard it for the one-off bonus as shown on the bottom of the card. You may never have more than three specialists in play, however, if you discard one to take a new one, you do not receive the discard bonus from the card. Once both players have taken three items, there will be either a card or a dice left over. Move this to the threat area of the draft board. The number of dots shown on this will be added to each players threat level when the time comes.
Build - Both [players may take their actions simultaneously here. Players may take as many or as few actions as they want and the phase will end when neither player wishes to do anything else.
Sell DNA - Give up either two basic or one advanced DNA to gain one coin.
Mix DNA - Discard a park card from your hand. Then, either convert two basic DNA into one advanced DNA or vice versa.
Increase Security - Pay the indicated number of coins to increase your security level. You always pay coins equal to where you are moving your marker to.
Create a Dinosaur - Pay the DNA shown on the card. Tuck the card under the top of your player board so only the dinosaur portion is showing. Then, immediately increase your threat level on your player board and excitement level on the main board. The red dots indicate threat and the green triangle represents excitement. These symbols are also clearly marked on the appropriate tracks.
Build an attraction - Spend the required coins as shown on the card. Tuck the card under the bottom of your player board so only the attraction part is showing. Remember that food icons give you extra coins during the income phase and merch icons give you extra cards. Ride icons immediately grant you the bonus shown where the PR marker is on the track. If a card has two ride icons on, remember you get the bonus twice.
Visitors - First, compare threat level vs security level, not forgetting the extra threat from the item that wasn’t drafted. If your security level is equal to or higher than your threat level, nothing happens. If your security level is lower than your threat level, then mayhem ensues! Your dinosaurs escape and start eating your visitors. The number of visitors eaten is twice the difference between your threat and security levels. If you would go below one on the visitor track, remain at one but take a lawsuit token which will be worth minus five points at game end. Then, gain visitors - OK, so some people may have been eaten, but that’s still exciting, right? Gain a number of visitors equal to your excitement level. Then all players receive a PR bonus. Determine which player is lowest on the PR track. This player will choose a PR bonus first. They may choose to take any item from any space to the left of the PR marker. The other player then chooses a bonus, however, their options are now more limited. They may only choose to take a bonus to the left of the space chosen by their opponent. This means if the first player chooses the PR bonus at the start of the track, then the second player receives nothing.
At the end of the round check to see if either player has reached or exceeded the end game points agreed at the start of the game. If not, prepare for the next round. Each player must discard down to three cards in hand, remove all items from the draft board (ensuring all dice are back in the dice bag) and move the PR marker one space to the right. Turn order changes so give the dice bag to the player who went second last turn.
At the end of a round if a player has reached the points, the game ends and final scoring occurs. Players will then gain additional visitors in five different categories.
Dinosaurs - Gain visitors for the dinosaurs in your park, this is listed in the lower left of the card.
Attractions - Again, this is shown in the lower left of the card but only appears on cards with a $5 plus value.
Specialists - Some specialists give end game bonuses.
Attraction Sets - Each set of three different attractions in your park is worth an additional four visitors, you may have multiple sets.
Lawsuits - Lose five visitors for each lawsuit token you have.
The player with the most visitors wins! In the case of a tie, the player with the most dinosaurs in their park wins!
Generally, I'm skeptical about two-player versions of popular games as they can come across as watered down versions of the original. However, Duelosaur Island is different enough to warrant having both games in your collection. While we love Dinosaur island, just set up and pack down can take a while (we need a good insert for it!) Duelosaur Island is a great alternative with some really original game play, but enough in common with its predecessor that it feels like a comfy pair of shoes if you have played the original. The drafting aspect of the game is great, quite often you end up discarding a really great specialist rather than give it to your opponent. If there is a dice you want, you may be tempted to place it in the spot with no bonus to make it less desirable to your opponent, but then you end up getting no bonus. And, of course, there is the usual stress of keeping your security level equal to your threat level so there are times you will draft an item just so that three pip doesn't end up hitting you at the end of the turn.
Once you know what you're doing, you can easily play this in around half an hour which makes it a great little game with all the meat of Dinosaur Island!
Review copy provided by Pandasaurus Games
However, occasionally I like to chuck some dice around with something quick and fun. Qwantum scratches that itch nicely! It doesn’t outstay it’s welcome and everyone can be cursed equally by the dice gods. (plus other people have to deal with my terrible rolls!)
In the box you get:
Give each player a scoring sheet and a pencil. Determine a starting player and give them the dice. You’re ready to play!
The aim of the game is to score points by filling in your score pad. Each row indicates a colour that is matched on the dice. Throughout the game, you will fill the row in with numbers you have rolled. Initially, those numbers must go from high to low so the number to the right must always be higher than the previous number. However, when you hit the solid line on the row the numbers must be lower. When a column is completed, you will score it. You do this by marking the second lowest number in the column into the box at the bottom. These added up, will be your final score of the game.
The start player rolls all the dice. If they are not happy with the roll they may re-roll some or all of the dice. After a second roll, they must then stick with what they have. Place the dice with matching colours next to each other and the white just off to one side. Now the player has to select one colour and enter the total into their score sheet. The score on the white ice is added to each of the four colours. This means if a colour isn’t rolled, the white dice represents the score for that colour. The player who rolled then removes the dice they used from the dice pool (except for the white one) and other players may now choose to take one of the other colours. If the active player used the white dice to represent red (if no other red numbers were rolled) then other players may not do the same. If the active player cannot or does not want to take a number, they must cross out one of the ‘mis-throw’ boxes on the right of their scoresheet. These boxes give you negative points at the end of the game - minus one for your first, minus two for your second etc.. up to a maximum of minus five.
Play continues and the dice are passed onto the next player.
If a player reaches fives mis-throws the game will end. Otherwise, the game will end when one player completes a row.
Add up all scores at the bottom, subtract any negative points and the player with the highest score is the winner.
Qwantum is the third instalment in a trilogy of roll and writes from NSV Games, with Qwixx and Qwinto being the first two. I have played and enjoyed Qwixx, but haven’t played Qwinto. I enjoyed Qwixx, but found the real time element stressful and know I sometimes made the quickest decision rather than the best one. Qwantum takes that stress away and (for me at least!) is more enjoyable.
Review copy provided by NSV
]]>In the box you get:
Give each player the locomotives and character card of their chosen colour. Place the wooden cubes needed for the player count into the goods bag (2-3 players just the brown and yellow, 4 player brown, yellow and black and if playing with 5 players use all the cubes) Take the Chicago, St Louis and Cincinnati city tiles, shuffle them up and randomly pick one. This will be the starting city tile for the game. Place it in the centre of the table and draw randomly and place the appropriate number of cubes on the tile. Shuffle the two city tiles you didn’t pick in with the other city tiles to create a draw deck. Deal two city tiles face down to each player. This is their starting hand. Shuffle the stock tiles to create a draw deck and place it next to the city tiles.
Take the character cards from each player, shuffle them and deal them out left to right, this will be the player order for the first round of the game. Place a locomotive from the starting player on six points on the score track, the second player on eight and each subsequent player two points ahead of the last. Place the stock price markers next to the board. You are now ready to play!
Each round consists of four phases:
Draw a number of city tiles and stock tiles equal to the number of players, so in a four player game you will have a total of eight tiles in the display. These are the tiles players will select this round.
Next, bid for turn order. In the first round this is decided randomly so won’t happen, but in subsequent rounds it will. Starting with the player last in the current turn order players will bid on the chance to go first in the round. Each player must bid or pass, all bids must be higher than the previous bid. Once you pass you may not come back into the bidding. Bidding continues until all but one player has passed. That player pays their bid in points by moving down the score track and their character card is moved to the front of the row. This will be the new turn order.
Beginning with the start player and going in turn order, players may choose to take either a share tile or a city tile. Once all players have made their initial selection, they select a second tile that must be of the other type. So each player gains one city tile and one stock tile each turn. Stock tiles are placed face up in front of you while city tiles go into your hand (you should always have three at this point)
In turn order, beginning with the start player, each player will place a city tile. At least one railroad on the edge must match the railroad on the edge of the city tile you place it next to. When you create a match, you create a link which you now own. To show that, place one of your locomotives across the tiles that match. After placing your city tile and locomotive, blindly draw a number of cubes as shown on the tile and place them there. If you manage to make multiple matches with a city tile, place a locomotive across all edges that match. Wherever possible, you must make a match each tile placement. If you cannot match railroads you must match blank spaces, in this case you do not place a locomotive. If you cannot make a match at all you must pass and not place a city tile this turn.
After placing tiles, players will get a chance to deliver goods. Beginning with the start player and continuing in player order, everyone will get a chance to deliver one goods cube. You may pick a goods cube on any city tile and deliver it across any link to another city tile. If the link is owned by another player that is not you, that player gains two points. The value of the railroad company used to deliver the goods is increased by one. Move that company's stock value marker up one on the stock value board. The player who made the delivery also gets points. Three points if that colour cube has not been delivered yet this turn, two points if it has been delivered once already and one point if it has been delivered twice or more that turn. When you have delivered your goods keep the cube in front of you so players know what has already been delivered this turn. Once all players have made deliveries, place all the cubes back in the bag.
You will get to a point where there aren’t enough city tiles to fill the draft. When this happens, remove any extra city tiles and place two stock tiles per player rather than one city and one stock. Now, players will draft two stock tiles at the beginning of the round.
Place city tiles as before and the last turn is triggered when players place their last city tiles. Continue until the end of the round then start scoring.
Each player scores points for each stock tile they own based on the value of the Railroad as shown on the stock value track. For example if you have two Union Pacific stocks and their value is at four they would grant you eight points. Add the score for all your stocks to your current score. The player with the most points wins!
In the case of a tie, the player with the highest valued stock wins.
We initially learnt and played this at two players and whilst the main game play was good, the bidding for first place didn’t really work. You may get one extra point for delivering goods, but unless there was a stock tile you really wanted it just didn’t seem worthwhile spending points to gain an extra point.
However, at four or five players, that bidding can get fierce and with the extra stock and city tiles to choose from, there will quite often be something you want to pay those extra points for. This is also where you end up giving away points on deliveries to bump up the price of your stocks.
Everything about this game is beautiful, down to the historically accurate Railroad companies with the original logos and trademarks, buildings artwork and the great chunky tiles. The tile stock itself feels ruggedly industrial for thick card. This is a great introduction to the world of train games, introducing a lot of principles and concepts that are used in much heavier games. With an experienced gaming group it plays fairly quickly and makes a great ‘school night’ game.
Forbidden Games are becoming a force to be reckoned with, I am really looking forward to their next game Extraordinary Adventures: Pirates! which is still open for late pledging on Kickstarter. Not to mention they already have an expansion for Railroad Rivals coming to Kickstarter next month.
Taken from Forbidden Games FB Page:
Coming Tuesday February 26th to Kickstarter the Robber Baron expansion for Railroad Rivals.
This expansion will include lots of great stuff, including a 6th Player color (Green), a new commodity (white cubes for mail/passengers), a new railroad stock (NYNH&H), new city tiles along the NYNH&H, upgrade tiles, and stock shenanigan tiles which allow the players to manipulate stocks.
This first revealed tile is the locomotive upgrade tile which has to be drafted instead of a stock, but will give the owning player an extra point for every delivery.
Review copy provided by Forbidden Games
]]>Fed up with cooking for everyone over the festive season? Well, now you can go head to head and create a feast for the halflings and win the title of Master Cook at the Festo!
The box contains:
Place the game board in the centre of the table, making sure you have the correct side - player count is shown in the bottom right of the board. Place fourteen ingredients of each colour on the supply of the matching colour - also place the white cubes onto the magician's supply, place one more cube than the number of players eg four cubes in a three player game. Sort the different dishes and shuffle each pile, place three face up on the marked spaces with the draw pile at the end of each row. With the silver and gold dishes at the top (Roasts and Main Courses) only put as many on each pile as there are the number of players eg in a four player game, have four in each pile.
There are six characters available for worker placement throughout the game, each with a different action.
Give each player a player aid, player board, six workers and two discs in their chosen colour. Give the start player the start player card, the three dice, and the three cover tiles. Shuffle the event cards, draw four of them and place them in a face-down draw pile next to the board and return the rest to the box. You are now ready to play!
The game is played over four rounds, each consisting of four phases.
Preparation Phase - Add ingredients from the supply onto each character (three on each or four in a five player game) upto a maximum of five ingredients each. Add one ingredient to each grocery store shelf. If there are empty spaces in the dishes area, move the remainder to the left and add new dishes. Reveal the top card from the event deck and apply it’s effect (if appropriate) Then the start player may choose a new start player by giving the card to another player of their choice, or they may decide to keep it for themselves. The start player then takes the dice and cover tiles.
Shopping Phase - The shopping phase is split into Morning and afternoon parts. In the morning the start player rolls the dice and places the cover tiles on the numbers rolled. These characters are unavailable for this part of the turn. Beginning with the start player, take it in turns to place any number of workers on an available character space or the grocer. At any point, you can choose to pass and save your remaining workers for the afternoon part. Once all players have passed, move onto the afternoon. Again, the start player rolls the dice and places the cover tiles on the numbers rolled. Play continues until everyone has placed all of their workers.
Action Phase - Starting with the Troll on the left and working along the board, perform the actions for each character in turn. If a player has a majority on the space they may choose to use all of their workers to take all ingredients from the space. Then, all players with one worker on the space may remove one worker to take the characters ability. Finally, for each remaining worker, players may choose to take one ingredient from the space (if left available) Play continues across the board until all six characters have been used. Then, move onto the grocery store. The player with the most workers on here receives the start player card. This changes the turn order from this point in the turn. For each worker you have here, you may take one ingredient. However, they must all be the same colour so the maximum possible to take here is three.
Cooking Phase - In player order, players get to cook up a dish of their choice. Simply, choose an available dish and put the required ingredients back into the supply. Take the dish and place it face up in front of you. You may take multiple dishes in this phase, but only one at a time in turn order. Any dishes with multiple grey squares shown must be paid for with the same ingredients. For example, if a dish shows two blue cubes and two grey cubes you could pay four blues or two blues and two pinks/yellows etc. This phase ends when no players want to cook any more dishes and a new round begins unless this was the fourth round in which case final scoring begins.
Players add up:
In case of a tie, the player with the most dishes wins!
Festo is certainly a feast for the eyes. It is such a nice change to see a great mid-weight game with bright colours and cute characters. Festo is a surprisingly tactical game, you may need specific ingredients that are locked out due to the dice rolls and have to change tactics. Getting majorities in areas can be tough due to only having six workers but the abilities are tasty (yes, bad pun intended!) This game contains elements of worker placement, area control and pick up and deliver and maintains. Festo manages to combine all these mechanisms and not feel a jumbled mess. There are elements of luck in this game due to the event cards and the dice roll, but it can all be mitigated through other actions so never feels too luck based.
At heart, Planet is a tile laying game, only each player has a twelve-sided magnet board on which they place their tiles, how cool is that?
In the box you get:
Give each player an empty planet core and a random, secret objective card. Shuffle up the continent tiles and place them into ten stacks, each containing five tiles. Place these in a line in the middle of the table. Shuffle up the animal cards and draw twenty. Put the rest in the box as they will not be used for the game. Lay out a row of ten animal cards, starting underneath the third stack of tiles and extending two after the tiles. Then lay out seven cards, starting with stack six of the tiles, then finally three cards starting with the tenth stack of tiles. Your final layout should look like this
The game is made up of twelve rounds, each round consists of two phases
Adding Continents - Take the pile of continent tiles for the round and place them face up on the table. The first player chooses a tile and places it on their planet core, then go round the table so everyone takes a tile. The remaining tiles go face down on the next empty space on the continents row. Once the eleventh and twelfth spots each have five tiles, any extra are removed from the game.
The Origin of Life - From the third round onwards, the animal cards become available to the player who best meets their requirements. There are three types of requirements you need to get animals on your planet.
Having the most of one kind of region - Each tile consists of five areas, some of these areas may be the same type of land but you will see five distinct areas. When areas of the same type connect, they form a region.
Having the biggest region of one kind that touches a specified habitat - Count the number of areas in your largest region of that type and ensure it touches the other required habitat.
Having the biggest region of one kind that does not touch a specified habitat - Exactly the same as above but ensure the region is not touching the specified habitat.
If players draw, the card does not go to any player and instead is put at the bottom of the column for the next round to be won later. The player who has the most habitable planet for the animal takes the card and places it in front of them for end game scoring.
At the end of the round, the start player token moves to the left and the next round begins by revealing the tiles.
The game ends after the twelfth round, at which point all players planets should be fully covered.
Each player reveals their objective and scores points accordingly. Then players score their animal cards. You get one point per animal card that has the same natural habitat as your objective card and two points for animal cards that do not match. The player with the most points is the winner, in the case of a tie, the player with the most animal cards wins!
While there are many good and similar tile laying games out there, Planet does it in a new a truly unique way. No other game gives you a 12 sided board to play on! The globe isn't necessarily a gimmick the tile placement is innovative and plays nicely with the theme. This modern take on tile laying has a strong table presence and a real fun element especially when you add in trying to attract animals to your habitat. I watched a table of players passing the tiles around and telling animal facts and that is an element I felt could have been added to enrich the theme. It's nice to see Blue Orange continue with their environmental themes after Photosynthesis and they are making their own environmental impact by planting two trees for each one used in the construction of their wooden games.
Review copy kindly provided by Blue Orange
]]>In the box you get:
Separate the Ookami's den and shuffle up the rest of the tiles. The number of players determines how many tiles you will play with. For two players take 19, three players take 24 and four players use all 29 tiles. Shuffle the Ookami's den in with these tiles, then form a grid with them (pasture side up). In two players a 4x5 grid, three players a 5x5 grid and four players a 6x5 grid. Ensure there is space between the tiles to make in-game actions easier. Place the Ookami token on her den on the board. Place the scoreboard, the action board and the improvement tiles near the game area. Give each player the pieces in their chosen colour and place the score marker (blank side up) on the zero of the score track. Count out the appropriate number of wall pieces for the player count: two players 10 walls, three players 15 walls and four players all twenty walls. The game will end when either this supply of walls run out or when one player hits the required number of points as marked on the score track.
Chose a start player. That player places two of their silk worms onto a dry pasture on the board. They may either place two on the same space or one silkworm onto two different pastures. There may be silkworms of different colours on the same space, but there may never be more than three on a single space. Players go round the table, each placing two silkworms until every player has seven on the board. If all dry pastures are full, you may place on the normal pastures.
Then, beginning with the player who placed the last silkworm and going anti-clockwise around the table, players place their special pieces - their shepherd, mastiff and one of their nurseries. A tile occupied by a shepherd, mastiff or the Ookami may not contain any other pieces. Nurseries must be placed at the intersections between two or four tiles where one of those tiles contains a silkworm of the players colour, they must also be at least two tiles distance from any other nursery, this distance rule applies when placing nurseries in game.
Once everyone has placed you are ready to begin the game.
There are two parts to each players turn:
Firstly, they must place a silkworm onto the board if they have any in their supply and if there is space to place them. They may only be placed only tiles that already contain that players silkworms or a tile that is adjacent to one of that players nurseries.
Then the player must roll the dice and carry out the two actions indicated on the action board. The player may always use silk points to modify the dice roll (one point adjusts the roll by one in either direction) and if they can’t carry out the indicated action, they must adjust the dice roll in order to carry out an action.
The actions are as follows:
Place one silkworm from your supply on any tile that has less than three silkworms on it and is either next to one of your nurseries or already has one of your silkworms on it. If you have run out of silkworms in your supply, you may rescue one from the Ookami's den (if there are any there) If you cannot place a silkworm, you must use silk points to adjust the dice result.
If you are the first player to empty your silkworm supply, flip over the silkworm improvement marker and gain the ten points as shown on the tile.
A player may move their shepherd or mastiff one space. Movement is never diagonally and all pieces except silkworms can wrap around the board. Only the shepherd can move through walls. The shepherd cannot enter a tile containing another players shepherd or the Ookami and the mastiff cannot enter a tile containing another mastiff or shepherd. When these pieces move they will ‘bump’ other pieces regardless of who they belong to.
The shepherd bumps mastiffs and silkworms and the mastiff bumps silkworms and the Ookami. When you bump silkworms, you may distribute them how you like to one or more adjacent tiles of your choosing. If they are at the edge of the board they cannot move to the other side so are lost in the mountains and returned to the players reserve. If they are bumped onto the space with the Ookami, they are captured and placed onto the beast's lair on the action board. If a mastiff if bumped onto a space with the Ookami, this creates a chain reaction and she will also move.
Take a wall from the supply and place it between two tiles where there isn’t already a wall. It must also connect to your nursery, either directly or from another wall. If a player builds a wall that completes a wall segment so both ends are connected to a nursery they immediately score points equal to the length of the wall ie one point for each wall piece. At the end of the game players will also receive points for each enclosure they control. An enclosure is a set of two or more tiles completely surrounded by wall tiles. A player controls an enclosure if they have the most nurseries in contact with the wall. Multiple the number of tiles in the enclosure by the number of nurseries that player controls. There are also two improvement tiles that can be achieved with walls during the game. The first player to build a wall segment that is at least five sections long gains five points and flips over the corresponding improvement tile. Also, the first player who builds an enclosure of three spaces or more receives ten points from the appropriate improvement tile and flips it over.
The first person to build a five wall segment scores five points from the
appropriate improvement tile and flips it over.
Nurseries allow players to place silkworms, build wall segments, score enclosures at endgame and also regenerate barren tiles. Nurseries must be placed at intersections next to a tile containing your shepherd. It must also be at least two tiles away from any other nurseries. The first player to construct all four of their nurseries gains five points and flips the corresponding improvement tile.
Once a player has built all of their nurseries they may use this action to regenerate a barren tile pasture that is next to any of their nurseries. It is not possible to regenerate a tile that contains any pieces. The first person to build all their nurseries receives ten points from the appropriate improvement tile and flips it over.
This action allows a player to earn points by feeding their silkworms. The number of points they receive is equal to the number of silkworms on the tile multiplied by that tiles bonus (as shown on the board) Bump all the silkworms on that spot and flip the tile over, making it a barren tile.
The Ookami bumps shepherd and captures any silkworms, placing them in her den on the action board. She can use a wrap around move but cannot enter a tile occupied by a mastiff
The game ends when a player builds the last available wall, a player hits the score target (30 points in 2 player, 40 points in 3 player or 50 points in 4 player) or if, after a grazing action all of the tiles have become barren.
All other players get one final turn and final scoring is done.
Players receive points for any enclosures they control. A player controls an enclosure if they have the most nurseries in contact with the walls that surround the enclosure. Multiple the number of tiles in the enclosure by the number of nurseries owned and award that number of points. The players also score silk points for every non-barren tile where they have at least one silkworm. Multiple the number of silkworms by the tiles value and award that many points. Each player then loses points equal to the number of silkworms that are in the Ookamis den. The player who has the most points wins!
We initially learned and played this at two players and it didn’t do much for us, the player interaction was quite limited and we pretty much stuck to our separate parts of the board. However, four players is really where this game shines. With four players on the board, pieces are bouncing all over the place and a lot of name calling ensues! The Ookami obviously also moves a lot more at this point, turning this into quite a mean game (I always said I didn’t like co-ops!) With super cute silkworm meeples and loads of player interaction, this is a great game with an unusual theme.
Review copy provided by Devir
]]>In the box you get:
Place the board with the appropriate side up, using the covering tile if you have three players. Remove all greenhouse cards that exceed your player count (marked at the bottom of the cards) Then arrange the remaining greenhouse cards into separate piles by the number of parcels shown on their back. Place these face up by the board. Shuffle the pile of random greenhouses together and put the card with the draw symbol on top.
Choose a set of service cards to play with (A-E) shuffle the set and place five at random at the side of the board. Stack one mushroom, one lettuce and one tomato in that order, and place the stack at one end of the service cards display. If you take one of the last three service cards, you will also get to take the top good in this stack. These will be the cards you use for this game so put the rest back in the box. Place the wooden goods into their (super cute) goods boxes and the goods tiles nearby. Stack the round tiles in ascending order and place them on the marked space on the board. Each player chooses a colour and takes the corresponding manager, workers and player guide. Determine a start player and put their manager at the start of the tourism track, continue in clockwise order and place the other tokens behind them.
You are now ready to play!
The game is played over seven rounds, each round having four phases.
Beginning with the start player, each player places one of their workers on a free action space and immediately performs the action. You must place your worker on an empty space and you must perform the action if you are able to. Some spaces have more than one action and you may place there and perform one of these actions. In the property and town hall columns, some action spaces are marked with a flag. Players can only use one flag action space in each of these columns per round. If a player takes a service card in a 3-4 player it may be shared between players. Choose a service card that one of your neighbours has, slide that service card between the two of you. Now, you may also use it and no one else can join in the sharing of it.
During harvest time, each player removes one good from each of their filled warehouses. If you have a warehouse that contains multiple goods, you may choose which good to harvest.
Starting with the player furthest back on the tourism track. Each player completes their entire turn before the next takes theirs. You may advance your manager as many tables as you want to and can afford. To advance, discards goods from your stock as shown on the signpost of the table and advance forward. Once per round, while advancing your manager, you may use the bonus. Instead of using the goods to advance, advance one table and take the goods shown from the supply. You can use this bonus before or after advancing normally, and you may even use acquired goods to advance further in the same round.
Players retrieve their workers from the board, the top most round tile is flipped over and the start player card is passed to the left.
When the last round tile has been flipped over the game ends. Whoever has advanced their manager furthest on the tourism track is the winner. In the case of a tie, the player at the front of the space is the winner!
As well as the ‘standard’ game mode as above, Reykholt also has a solo mode and a story mode.
You can play story mode with any player count. Story mode follows the rules of the base game with a few small changes.
Before preparing the game round tiles, choose a scenario card. This will determine the number of rounds the game is played over. Shuffle the event cards into a face-down deck and place them next to the board. At the start of the work time phase, reveal the top card from the deck and apply its effect to all players.
Reykholt does feel very simple compared to some of his previous farming games, but part of me thinks that is a great thing. It’s easy to get people to play this and introduce them to key concepts such as worker placement, planting and harvesting, with a view to upgrading them to something heavier at a later stage. Having played both Agricola and Caverna again recently it’s easy to see the similarities. I love the fact this game can be played in a variety of ways, opening up new strategies to play with, ensuring the game feels very different each time you play. The artwork is subtle and beautiful making this even more of a joy to play!
Review Copy Provided by Renegade Game Studios
]]>Fact: Raccoon Tycoon is a game with cats that is good!
Players gain commodities to build towns or to sell when the price is right. These profits are then used to try and win auctions for railroads or to build buildings that provide special effects and power ups. Building the best town in Astoria will help you become ‘top dog’
In the box you get:
Place the board in the centre of the table. Put one of each commodity token on the lowest price on the corresponding market track, $1 for wheat and wood, $2 for iron and coal, and $3 for goods and luxuries. Create the railroad deck by removing specific railroads depending on the number of players. For 5 players use all cards, 4 players remove Skunkworks, 3 players remove Skunkworks and Tycoon and 2 players remove Skunkworks, Sly Fox and Tycoon Railroads. Shuffle the remaining cards to form the Railroad Deck. Place the deck on the marked spot on the board and turn over the top two cards and place them on the spots next to the deck. These will be the cards initially available for auction.
Shuffle the price and production cards and deal three to each player, also give each player $10 starting money. Create the town deck by putting the cards in VP order, with the lowest on top, place the top card face up on the board. This will be the first town card available to buy. (In a 2 player game, remove one card of each VP value)
Shuffle the six basic commodity building tiles and place four of them, at random, on the building locations on the board, make sure they have the +1 side face up. Place the others back in the box. Shuffle the advanced building tiles and place them in a single stack. Whenever a building tile is bought, the display must be replenished from here so there are always four buildings available to buy.
Choose a starting player and give them the (most excellent!) start player marker. They gain one free commodity of their choice, the second player two and so on. No player may choose two matching commodities. You are now ready to play!
During each players turn they will take one action. You have the choice to do one of the five following actions during your turn:
Price and Production - Play a price and production card from your hand. Gain three of the commodities shown on the top half of the card. If more than three are shown, you must choose which ones you want. The bottom half of the card is the ‘price’ section. After taking resources, increase the price of all commodities shown in this bottom half by one dollar. Move the appropriate markers on the commodity market tracks on the game board. After doing the production and price actions, discard the card and draw up from the deck. You should always have three cards in hand (unless you have buildings that allow for more) Each player may only have ten commodities at any time. However, the limit is raised by one for each building they have in play so if you have two buildings in play you may have up to twelve commodities at any time.
Sell a Commodity - You may sell any number of a single type of commodity you have. Return the commodities to the general supply, take the current market value for each. Then reduce the current value of that commodity by one for each unit sold. For example, if you sold four wood, the price of wood would drop by four dollars.
Start a Railroad Auction - Select one of the two available railroad cards and begin an auction for it. The minimum starting bid is shown on the card. Each player bids in turn or passes, if a player passes they may not bid at a later stage. The player who wins the bid places the railroad card in front of them and the display is refilled. If the player who initiated the auction does not win, then they may perform another action, even initiating a second auction if they wish.
Purchase a Building Tile - Select one of the four building tiles on display, pay the cost indicated on it and place it in front of you, you will gain the benefit for the rest of the game. Immediately restock the display. The initial commodity building tiles, as well as some of the advanced building tiles, are double-sided. You may use a purchase building action to upgrade the tile by paying the cost shown on the +2 side and flipping the tile over.
Purchase a Town - All town cards have two purchase prices - either pay the specific commodities as shown on the card or pay the total of ‘any commodities’ as shown on the card. These may be the same or different commodities. Place the town card face up in front of you.
During the game, all players town cards, buildings and railroads are open information and must be kept visible. Money, however, is secret and may be kept hidden from other players.
The games ends when either the last Railroad has been auctioned or if the last Town card is purchased. Play to the end of the round (to the player on the right of the starting player) then scoring occurs.
Each building a player owns is worth one VP
Railroad cards are worth the values printed on them, dependant on the number of them you own
Towns are worth 5, 4, 3 or 2 VPs as shown on the card
Each town and railroad pair owned by a player is worth 2 VPs eg a player owns 4 railroads and 3 towns, they have three pairs so would score six points.
The player with the most victory points is the winner, in the case of a tie, the player with the most money wins!
Raccoon Tycoon is that rare gem of a game - an accessible, economic game. The turns run smoothly and quickly due to it being one single action. Unlike most economic games, it has beautiful artwork, however, it still has tough decisions to be made. There’s loads of player interaction and while you can get stitched up during auctions it never feels like ‘take that’
This is a great game, with beautiful components, artwork and gameplay.
Review Copy Provided by Forbidden Games
News Flash: Aerion Announced, Ravensburger's Christmas Giveaway
In the box you get:
Place the board in the centre of the table and put all the resources and statuettes into the cloth bag. Pick them out one at a time and place them randomly onto the spaces marked with stone circles on the board. Give each player the five wooden huts in their colour and the appropriate number of settler tokens (20 in a 4 player game, 25 in a 3 player and all of them in a 2 player game)
The board shows eights islands of the newly discovered archipelago, during the game you will be trying to explore as many of these islands as possible, claim resources and build your settlements strategically.
The game is played over two distinct phases, scoring occurs at the end of each phase. Gameplay is very simple, however, there are many ways to score and it is easy to get blocked out so it is important to have a goal at the start of each round!
On your turn, players place their pieces (settlers or village) onto an unoccupied space of the board. You must obey the following rules in the exploration phase:
Place your settler onto a sea space, boat side up OR
Place a settler or village onto any space that is next to another of your pieces.
If you place your piece on a space with a resource or statuette, take it from the board and place it in front of you. A village may not be played in the sea, only one piece can occupy any space and pieces placed onto spaces showing stone circles will be removed at the end of the phase.
The Exploration phase ends either when all the resources have been collected from the board (not including statuettes) OR when all players have placed all of their pieces on the board. The first round of scoring then takes place.
Players with pieces on all eight islands score twenty points, players with pieces on seven islands score ten points.
Players earn points from the chain of pieces that link the most islands. For each island linked by this one chain score five points.
The player with the most pieces on each island score the points as indicated on the board. 6,8 or 10 points, in the case of a tie for control points are shared equally among players.
Players score for matching resources, two of a kind score five points, three of a kind ten points and four or more scores twenty points.
If a player succeeded in collecting all four different resources, they score an additional ten points.
For each statuette players collected, they score four points.
After the scores have been totalled up, remove all settlers (keep the villages on the board) and any remaining resources from the board. Drop all resources and statuettes back in the bag and repopulate the board as before.
The player to the left of the player who took the last turn begins play. During the settlement phase, you may only place your piece onto an unoccupied space next to a space you are already occupying. Take resources and statuettes as before. Again, the round ends either when all resources are gone or all players have placed all their pieces.
The score is recorded as before and the totals for the two rounds added up. The player with the most points wins. In the case of a tie, the player with the most resources and statuettes wins.
As with many of Reiner Knizia's designs, this is a deceptive little game. Turns play super quick as you place a single piece. However, which victory points do you go for? Placing those villages in good locations are essential in the Exploration phase to give you a good start in the Settlement phase. We’ve played this at two and four player and it’s felt close at both player counts as it’s very easy to get cut off completely from part of the map. This then limits your bonuses for being on multiple islands and the joining islands bonus.
This game is great, simple to play yet with multiple victory scoring and some tough decisions to be made. The settler chips are nice, sturdy cardboard with a dual sided design so when they are on land they go one face up and on sea, the other. They also have a variety of designs that just make it a bit more interesting to look at!
A great game for beginners and gamers alike.
Review Copy Provided by Blue Orange Games
]]>We will be posting our game each day on Instragram and we'd love to hear what you're going to play on the build up to the day where we all hope we get at least one more game in our stocking. Sounds uncomfortable.
It appears the Build Your Own Board Game Advent Calender Kit is still on sale so there is still time for you to get one in time for this year's main event.
In the box you get:
Place the game board in the centre of the table. Each player then chooses a Slayer to play for the game, either randomly or choosing which they want. Each Slayer card shows their character ability, their strength, shown in a red circle and their health, shown in the red blood drop. Slayers are kept face up in front of players throughout the game. Shuffle the grudge deck and deal each player one grudge card. These will earn your slayer extra renown at the end of the game and are kept face down and secret. Shuffle the fate deck and deal five to each player. Then give everyone two one gold tokens, one six-sided dice, and a player reference card.
Build the Doom Deck dependant on the number of players. Level three Dooms on the bottom (2,3 or 5 if 2,3 or 4 players), then level two (4,6 or 10) and finally, level ones (11,16 or 18) Place the Doom deck on the space indicated on the board and lay the top five cards onto the five battlefield spaces on the board. Shuffle the treasure deck and lay out the top five cards onto the spaces on the board, place the deck where indicated. Note the sixth battlefield and shop space are only used when indicated by in-game effects.
Players decide who will go first and that player is given the Saga card, this will track game rounds and also details special rules that affect the card holder.
You are now ready to play.
On a players turn they perform the following steps:
Draw the top card from the doom deck and add it to their hand
Choose a Doom on the Battlefield to fight this turn
Announce which of the Dooms currently on the battlefield you plan to attack this turn
Each player now has the chance to play a fate card. These will influence what happens on the battlefield. Starting with the player to the left of the active player and proceeding clockwise, each player has a chance to play a Doom card from their hand to change the fight that is about to happen, finishing off with the active player.
When you fight a Doom, roll your six sided dice. Add the roll to the Slayers strength, not forgetting to add or subtract any modifiers from equipment or fate cards. If the total is equal or higher than the strength of the Doom, you have defeated it in battle! Place the defeated Doom face down in a pile next to your Slayer card and gain gold equal to the gold value listed on the Doom. If your total was lower than the strength of the Doom, you lose the fight and take a wound token. Discard the Doom card from the Battlefield. If you roll a one you are automatically defeated regardless of any Fate cards or equipment in play.
Buy any number of cards from the shop that you can afford.
If you have more than five Fate cards in your hand, you must discard down.
Once a turn is completed, play proceeds to the next player. The round ends when each player has had a turn and you are back to the player who holds the Saga card. This is then handed to the player on the left and a new round begins.
If a Slayer gains a number of wound tokens equal to the wounds shown on their card, then they are dead! However, the game doesn’t have to be over!
If a Slayer is killed by a Doom, they add that Doom card to their score pile rather than discarding it, though you do not receive the gold reward. Turn your Slayer card face down though all of your other cards and tokens remain in play. During other players turns you may still play fate cards to influence battles. You do not draw extra Fate cards as part of your turn, though if you play a card that allows you to draw cards you may do so. You may also bet on the outcome of battles. Instead of playing a fate card, you may discard a rune token or a Fate card to bet on the outcome. You will wager that the Slayer will either win or lose the battle. If you are correct, you gain a renown token.
When no Dooms remain in the deck, play proceeds until it reaches the player with the saga card or if there are no Dooms left to fight. All players total their renown, even the dead ones!
The player with the most wins, in the case of a tie the player with the most Doom cards in their scored pile wins.
While the art and style of this game is very true to the Warhammer universe, the game itself felt like a step backwards. Gamers who are used to this universe are at home with complex rule sets and intricate details. Sadly, this game felt very simple, with very little differential between any of the Slayers or the Dooms. It may be this is trying to appeal to people who are unfamiliar with the IP, but then there are dozens of similar games. If you are trying to draw tabletop gamers into a board game hobby, I feel like you need to offer them a bit more. However, this is a game that could be easily expanded to add new depths and strategy that is currently lacking and I hope to see an expansion in the near future.
]]>This was our sixth year at Essen, and I see so many regular faces be they designers, publishers, fellow content creators and friends alike year on year that this was a perfect opportunity for a fun project. I hope you enjoy it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM4livrJnbU
Special thanks to James O'Toole for helping with cleaning up the audio from what was a very loud set of trade halls. Check out his band The Spiral Sequence and get in touch if you need any audio twiddling.
]]>We all know how much I love Concordia and while other people were getting excited over the new Concordia Venus expansion, I found people that had never played Concordia in any form! Of course, it was then my duty to borrow it from the library and teach them. We had an incredibly tight five player game which everyone enjoyed and a copy of Concordia has now joined a new players library - probably the best result possible!
What, you thought it was all serious games?! Quite often you will find yourself waiting for someone or having a bit of time to kill. This great dice chucker, push your luck, set collector is fast and fun with adorable art work. My one gripe is that it only takes four players, adding an extra player or two would make it perfect. I did horribly though, finishing the game with two points.
More silly games! But this one goes to six. One of my favourite pre-Essen releases of the year. Get rid of your cards before your opponents by blaming their animals for the poo on the carpet! Silly, quick fun with the cutest artwork. There’s also a memory element at work as if you name an animal no one has left, you get stuck with the poo! This is one of those games that is guaranteed to have everyone laughing.
I played this a while ago and walked away feeling unsure about it, however, I managed to pick it up for a great price over the weekend so was happy to revisit it before bringing it home. After a second play I am glad I now own it. My first play felt like a race game, yes, I know it is a race to get your points and prestige to cross over on the track, but this play felt far more like a proper engine builder and was much more enjoyable.
My most played game of my Essen purchases to date! This should be in everyone's convention game bag as it can play an unlimited amount of people which was partly why it got pulled out a few times over the week. Roll and write with no dice? This is being called a flip and fill as your decisions are based around cards that are turned over rather than dice. However, it seems to have a lot more bite than most roll and writes I have played in the past.
A long-term favourite of ours and another game I gladly introduced new players to. I remember when I first played and the concept of killing off your workers terrified me as with most worker placement games you want and need more workers. However, once I got my head round that , the concept of different generations of family is very neat and those end game points for the book of remembrance are essential!
I’d seen a few people playing this and heard some interesting things so took a chance and bought it as it was small and light weight enough for my luggage! We managed a very rushed game on Sunday afternoon and it didn’t dissapoint! Beautiful artwork and interesting decisions in 30-45 mins gameplay and of course, that great Space Cowboys production. However, the lack of insert does let it down on that front.
I played this at Airecon back in March of this year and enjoyed the truly brutal beat down it gave me. So I was happy to jump in on a game, especially as I’ve picked up a copy recently! This is one of those games where there just isn’t time to do everything you want to and the end game comes crashing down on you long before you are ready! So much to do, not enough time and a unique end game scoring means this will be back on the table soon.
Confession time - this has been sat on my shelf since Essen last year, so I jumped on the opportunity to finally learn and play it. I’m happy to say it met all my expectations and more. With about an hours teaching time I need to get back to this asap. This had me taking actions one turn knowing my plan wouldn’t come together for another four turns, just the kind of crunchy, deep game I love!
This was a prototype game from Bard Games that I’d seen last year at BGG Con. I love seeing how things change and adapt and this was no exception! Beautifully evocative artwork from Amy Brown adds to the experience. Each player draws three cards then passes them to the next player who has to decide if they want the first card or push their luck for something better on the second or third card. Very neat mechanic.
Rob is a big fan of deck builders so this has been on our radar a while. It has a very neat mechanic of playing just six cards, then upgrading your deck, buying players that are better and have special abilities. However, being someone who has no interest in sport meant I had no idea what was going on a lot of the time and the card terminology meant nothing to me. I was quite happy to go back to pasted on themes after this sadly!
Being that I had muled a copy of this over from Essen, it only seemed right I should teach it! I’m really enjoying this ‘gamers’ version of Azul and again the component quality is beautiful. You can read my full write up on it. I managed to play/teach a few games of this over the week.
I have had this in my hand to buy on multiple occasions and something else has always caught my eye so it was great to get a game in. Despite it feeling very clunky at first, once we started playing we were fine and I suspect I shall be picking it up with no hesitation next time I see it! Each round is played over five phases with players taking turns to choose which round they get a bonus in. Thinky but not crunchy!
Lotus is another game I’ve written about! I suggested this one with a group who wanted something pretty to play. A great little game that combines set collection, area control and hand management that looks gorgeous on the table! I think this ticked all the boxes for the people on the table.
Another beautiful game. We played this at two player and I was sadly underwhelmed. Unfortunately, I felt the same at three players! Having a choice of only two tiles to place makes it very limiting and even the end game scoring is very set. Match tiles to score points, that’s all there is to it so if you get lucky draws you’ll score lots, if not you won’t score much. Meh
Sadly, the rules for this were not good, meaning we were all a couple of rounds in before it clicked with us! Trick taking card game where you are trying to collect different ingredients to score your best Ramen dish. The theme and art were good but the struggle with the rules left us all a bit confused and hungry for more!
Just to prove I don’t buy ALL the games, this is another I have hovered over buying and haven’t. We only played it as a two player and it didn’t really shine but it showed me enough to know this will be great at higher player counts! The attention to detail is stunning with all the book names being different and appropriate to the class of book. Shelf stability and alphabetical order will grant you points, but make sure you don’t have too many banned books on your shelf as they give you negative points.
Decide if you want to buy or sell apples, simple enough right? Then, move the farmer round a matrix that adjusts the price of all four apple types (very clever!) However, if someone else wants to sell the same type of apples as you a bidding war takes place and only one person gets to sell. That person was never me and I failed horribly at this game, nearly being lapped on the score track!
A great little card game about trying to get your music acts to the top of the charts, I can’t think of another game with this theme (correct me if I’m wrong!) Place a matching card from your hand next to your chosen act, when an act has three cards it’s time for the ‘Hit Parade’ and acts get moved up according to the number of cards next to them. Play continues until the deck is empty and you score points for the cards in your hand according to their final chart position.
I’m bad at 18XX games despite enjoying them, therefore I’m always too nervous to play them! So, I bit the bullet and signed up for one this year. I will have forgotten everything I learned during this game before my next 18XX, but a massive thank you for being so patient to my fellow players. And, yes, I went bankrupt, but it’s all about learning for me!
I hate dice games, well, to be fair, dice hate me. That was so evident during this game where I missed out on my first three turns in part due to horrid dice rolls. With a maximum possible dice roll of thirty, I was seeing twelves and elevens. Wager on what you can roll and take cards for points if you are successful, needless to say I wasn’t!
This is an older Pegasus Spiel game reprinted this year by Quined games. I really like both publishers so my interest was piqued. Play as master builders competing to build the finest towers (the tiles actually stack beautifully - very satisfying!) You can build multiple towers at one time, however, adding extra tiles will cost you more and if you don’t add to a tower it will become abandoned and drop in size. Lots to think about - totally my kind of game!
Count Chocula and friends have a game! Even though we don’t have the cereal I’m a fan! Try to score the highest using your cards, placing extra cards may cost you milk tokens, but scoring highest means you don’t get them. Get rid of your cards before the other players to stop them using and scoring those cards. Not forgetting each monster has its own unique abilities. Silly fun with more thought than I expected for a game about breakfast cereal!
So, lots played old and new and I was lucky enough to introduce friends to some of my favourites. BGG Con is definitely my favourite convention of the year. Is it wrong to already be looking forward to next year?
Anyone that knows me knows that I am not a fan of miniatures in games,
partly as I feel they inflate a game's price unnecessarily, however
Monumental offers you the option to pay more for these rather stunning
miniatures or if like me you know you'll never get around to painting them
you can select the standard version with cardboard chips for less money and
still receive the same gameplay experience.
So for you miniatures fans, heres a look at some of the stunning pieces
available in the deluxe version that we saw at Table Gaming Live in September.
There are certainly elements to the game that are used in many other games, but Monumental doesn't feel like any one of these other games. The core game mechanics are CIV building, and 4X which combining the two is creating a pretty monumental experience (get it), and theses are pretty familiar themes on their own. Domination over a modular somewhat randomised setup, with 3 basic resource types (Military, Knowledge, and Production) as well as Gold and Culture.
It then adds in DeckBuilding and card usage like we've not seen before. Cards from a player's deck are laid out in a 3 by 3 grid and one row and one column of that grid are activated in a turn. Meaning that it's often necessary to play a combination of good and not so good cards in the same turn to get what you want. However, cards purchased
are immediately placed on the top of your deck, so when activated cards are removed from the grid and replaced from the deck at the end of the turn the newly purchased cards come into play straight away.
Generating large amounts of resources allow you to build Wonders which give you good one time bonuses when they are built, however they are then put into your deck and grant you great abilities during the game.
Monumental is currently on Kickstarter and live until Thu, November 22 2018 5:00 PM UTC. They're currently heading towards £500,000 and 5,000 backers, with only one stretch goal outstanding. So tomorrow is going to be the last opportunity to get this as it is not going to retail.
In the box you get:
Place the factory displays in the centre of the table, within everyone's reach. Use 5 in a 2 player game, 7 for a 3 player and all 9 for a 4 player game. Each player takes the player board of their colour and everyone places it the same side up - side A or B, each side has slightly different end game scoring. Take the matching coloured pattern strips and shuffle them up and place them above the spires on their player board. Each player has one strip that has two grey joker spaces on, if this is showing, flip the strip over. Place your glazier token at the top of the left most strip. Place one of your player markers at the top of the broken glass track and one at zero on the score track. Take one glass pane of each colour and randomly place them on spaces 2-6 on the round indicator. Put the rest of the panes in the bag and randomly draw one, place this on round one. Then randomly draw and place four panes on each of the factory displays. You are now ready to play.
The game is played over six rounds with a final scoring phase, the player with the most points wins. The first player starts by placing the start player token in the centre, then taking their turn.
On your turn, you may perform one of two actions:
Advance a pattern - Pick all pane pieces from either a factory tile or the centre of the table. When taking from a factory tile, pick all panes of one colour and move the rest into the centre of the display. If taking panes from the centre, again, take all pieces of the same colour. If you are the first player this round to take from the centre, also take the start player token and move your marker down one space on the broken glass track. (this will be negative points at the end of the game) Then place the pane pieces on one of your pattern strips.
The pieces you picked must go onto spaces of the same pattern strip and they cannot go on a strip to the left of where your glazier is. If you do not have enough matching spaces on your chosen strip, any excess pieces are considered ‘broken glass’. For each of these pieces, move your marker one space down the broken glass track and place the ‘broken’ pieces into the glass tower. Then move your glazier to the strip you have just placed onto. Then check to see if your pattern strip is complete. If it is, you get to score some points! First check against the round indicator, if any pieces match the top piece, gain one point for each that does. Next, remove all pieces from the strip, choose one to keep and drop the others into the glass tower. Then, place the pane piece you kept into the palace window below the strip you just completed. If that window is empty, place the piece into the top frame space and flip the pattern strip. If the top frame already has a pane piece in it, place it into the bottom frame space and remove the pattern strip above it and return it to the box. Then score the window - gain the points printed below it and all points printed below frames to the right that have pane pieces in.
Move your Glazier to the leftmost pattern strip - Instead of picking any pieces, you may move your glazier to the leftmost strip in your tableau. Note, you cannot choose this action if your glazier is already in this spot!
The round ends when there are no more pane pieces left to pick. Remove the top pane piece of the round indicator and place it in the glass tower. Refill the factory displays with four pieces each from the bag. If at any point, the bag is empty, refill it with the pieces from the glass tower and continue filling the displays.
After the sixth round, the game ends and final scoring takes place. Gain one point for every three pieces left on your pattern strips. Lose points according to your position on the broken glass track. Then gain bonus points depending on what side of the Palace Board was used.
Side A - There are four ornaments on your board. Count how many frames around each ornament contain a pane piece. If all four spaces contain a piece, gain ten points. For three gain six points, two gain three points and for one or none gain no extra bonus points.
Side B - Count how many completed windows you have on your palace board (ie. both frames hold a pane piece) Choose one colour and count how many panes of that colour you have on your palace board. Multiply the numbers and score that many points.
The player with the most points wins, in the case of a tie the player lowest on the broken glass track wins.
Last year's Azul was a surprise for us. While the gameplay was pretty simple, the strategy ensured it got a lot of play from us, despite being lighter than my usual taste. Stained Glass of Sintra takes the basic mechanism of Azul (taking tiles of one colour) and adds a lot more ‘game’ to it. I know a lot of people loved the simplicity of Azul, but this has more teeth for sure and would make a great follow up. This is more of a ‘gamer's game’ to me.
The crystal pieces have a glass-like look and feel to them and while the patterns are very pretty, they are also there to make the game more accessible to colour blind people, along with a variation on the factory displays.
My one criticism of Azul was the horrid cardboard start player token (which has now been replaced) and this time, that has been done right, meaning the components are great quality. However, I am concerned about how the glass tower will hold up to multiple plays as it is quite flimsy cardboard - time will tell!
Whilst Azul will come out for nights with non gamers, Azul Stained Glass of Sintra has now become a more meaty option for gaming nights. There is definitely room for both Azul games on any gamer's shelf.
]]>In the box you get:
Each player takes a Tea Dragon of their choice and the matching starter deck (these are marked with ‘st’ in the bottom right hand corner) Return all unused Dragons and starter decks to the box. Place your Tea Dragon face up in front of you, next to your deck.
Shuffle the market deck and reveal the top four cards, placing them face up in the middle of the table, these will be the market cards that are available to buy. Whenever a card is taken from here, immediately replace it.
Shuffle up the four stacks of memory cards according to their season. Randomly remove cards from each season depending on the player count and put them back in the box (remove three cards from each season for two player, two from each season for three player and one from each season for four player) Place the Memory cards for Spring face up, under the market cards, set aside the cards for the other seasons for now.
The cost of cards is shown in the top right hand corner of the card, in the mug. The ‘growth’ (your currency) is shown in the top left hand corner in the green leaf and the points you’ll get at game end is shown at the bottom in the middle of the card.
The player teaching the game or the oldest player will go first (I like this as I’m usually both!) Give the Mentors card to the person on their right ie. the person going last.
You are now ready to play.
In your turn, you may do one of three actions:
Draw a Card - Draw a card from your deck and place it face up in front of you. In this game, players do not have hands of cards, all cards are kept face up on the table in your ‘hold’. Trigger any effects that occur. If your draw pile is empty, shuffle your discard pile to form a new draw deck. Don’t forget your Tea Dragons special ability when drawing cards.
Buy a Card from the Market - Discard cards from your hold with growth equal to or more than the cost of the card you want to buy. You don’t get change for overpaying and extra growth cannot be carried over to your next turn. When you buy a card from the market, place it face up in front of you, in your hold. Immediately replace the bought card with the top card from the deck. Be aware that two cards in the deck trigger an effect when they are revealed - Brick and Fickle Dragons. If at any point, the market deck is empty reshuffle the discard pile to form a new deck.
Buy a Memory Card - To buy a Memory Card you must discard cards the same way as when buying a market card. However, when you buy a Memory Card, place it in your discard pile then shuffle your discard pile with your deck to form a new deck.
Then, if only one Memory Card remains in the tableau, change the season. To do this first, discard the remaining Memory Card and flip over all of the Memory Cards for the new season. Discard the four available market cards and replace them with new cards from the market deck.
If you use the Mentors card at any point to pay for a card don’t discard this - pass it onto the player on your right.
The game ends when there is only one Memory Card left in the Winter Season. Players add up their points and the one with the most is the winner!
The Tea Dragon Society Card Game is a super cute deck builder for beginners. Having open information and not a huge amount of text would make this a great game for kids, especially when you combine it with the artwork and easy to grasp iconography. Each player starts with four ‘mischief’ cards in their deck which will force you to discard growth cards meaning there can be an element of push your luck when drawing, do you draw a card to try and buy that Memory Card and risk losing cards from your hold instead? Sadly, the theme didn’t shine as much as I wanted it to, the specific Tea Dragon abilities felt very ‘samey’ and the feeding, grooming, sleeping cards were just a name rather than a specific action that made you feel like you were taking care of your Tea Dragon.
This is, however, a great filler or introduction to deck building that would draw anyone in.
Review copy provided by Renegade Games.
]]>Set Collection - Card Drafting - Dice Rolling
I know this is old stuff for some of you, but I finally got to play it at TTS and was smitten and can’t wait to finally get a copy! Coimbra is a dice rolling, card drafting, set collecting game set in the ancient city of Coimbra, Portugal. The starting player rolls all the dice and players take it in turns to choose a dice, pop it into a die holder of their colour and then place it on the board. Once all dice but one have been chosen and placed, move onto the activation phase. Starting at the top of the board and moving down, players take turns choosing what they will receive. At the top of the board is the castle, here, the player who placed the lowest dice chooses a bonus first. Then, in the seperate parts of the city the player with the highest dice chooses a card first. Cards give you bonuses at different points, some may be instantaneous, some may be later in the turn and some may be end game. Then, gain bonuses according to the colour of the dice you chose, this may be money, shields, VPs or movement. Movement around the city will allow you to place pieces in tourist locations and gain additional bonuses. The game ends after four rounds, adding up end of game bonuses and points for sets of cards. Coimbra is pretty simple once you understand the symbology but filled with meaningful choices - I can’t wait to play it again!
Route Building - Area Enclosure - Set Collection
Blue Orange games publishing a Reiner Knizia title? Honestly, that’s all I need to know! Blue Orange are producing consistently great games - Photosynthesis, Kingdomino and are pledging to plant more trees every time they use trees in game production. They have been around for nearly twenty years but have recently been producing some great ‘gamers games’ as well as their usual family line. I had a sneak peek of this back in February and have been excited for it since then. Using area control and set collection, players manage a group of settlers spreading across a newly discovered group of islands. In the first phase, you may place one of your villager or hut tokens anywhere on the board (ideally collecting resources as you go) However, in the second phase, the board is cleared and you may only place next to your existing villages. At the end of each phase, players score points for the sets of resources they collected. In true Knizia style, it is rule simplistic yet strategy deep.
Roll and Write - Route Building
Roll and write route building, with trains, in a red box! Railroad Ink comes as two different versions Deep Blue or Blazing Red. Each one includes different expansions and special dice that add special rules to the base game. At the start of the round, the dice are rolled, then draw the routes shown on your board to complete routes by connecting your exits. You will lose points at the end of the game for each incomplete route. Do you risk a longer network that will give you more points or play it safe on a shorter route? It’s all about using the dice in a more efficient way than your opponents who are trying to do the same thing. The Blazing Red box comes with meteors and lava that add different challenges to the Deep Blue box which has rivers and lakes. Each individual box plays up to six players but the two can be combined for a massive twelve player game.
Area Movement - Set Collection - Worker Placement - Tile Placement
Stratergize, acrue wealth, gain the favour of the Gods and build the Pyramid of the Sun. In Teotihuacan, you command a set of worker dice that you will utilize to do all that and more! You will move your workers around a modular board and have a choice of two spaces to place them on. One will give you an action and a worker upgrade and the other will offer you a far more powerful action. You will need to build houses for the people in your city, develop new technologies and help build the great Pyramid of the Sun, all while managing your workforce and resources. The game plays over three rounds which end when there is an eclipse or else when the pyramid has been fully built. Loads of great components at a good price, this is super high on everyones list so grab it while you can!
Area Control - Grid Movement - Set Collection
Being British, I obviously like tea, a LOT, and not that weird stuff you guys in Dallas drink! Consequently, any game about tea piques my interest :) Ceylon is now known as the nation of Sri Lanks. In the Nineteenth Century, a deadly fungus killed off the coffee harvest causing an economic crisis. Farmers set about creating tea plantations to counter it. (Interesting history fact I didn’t know!) In Ceylon, you take on the role of one of these tea pioneers (dream job!) You will be planting tea in different districts and at different altitudes - yes, this is an amazing 3D board. You will be producing tea and selling it to different export companies. You will also be trying to win the favour of councillors in each district whilst developing technology to help you advance before your competitors. At the end of the game, points are scored for having plantations in different districts, meeting demands that have been set, reaching levels on technology and money collected.
Card Drafting - Deck Building - Set Collection
More tea? Yes please! This game is beautiful (based on the graphic novels of the same name) and has dragons and tea - do I need to say more? I do, OK then. Each player starts by choosing their own tea dragon that has a unique ability and is given a basic deck of cards. The game is played over four seasons, spring, summer, winter and fall. The market cards are set out on the table along with the memory cards for spring, when there is only one left, place out the cards for summer etc for the four seasons. In your turn, you may do one of two things: draw a card from your deck or buy a card. When you draw cards they go face up in front of you, in your ‘hold’. When you buy cards you may buy as many as you have enough ‘growth’ for. Market cards go face up in your hold while memory cards and the cards you spent go into your discard pile. If you buy a memory card, your discard pile gets shuffled back into your deck. This seems like a pretty simple, friendly deck building game with no attacking of opponents but the cute artwork and simplicity is what will ensure it gets plenty of plays with us!
Hand Management - Tile Placement - Card Drafting - Deck Building
In Newton, players take on the role of young scientists during the scientific revolution of the Seventeenth Century. The time of Galileo, Copernicus and, of course, Newton. Players must travel Europe, visit universities and cities to study new theories, build new tools and earn money. The game is played over six rounds. Each round, players play five cards from their hand. Each card allowing you to perform one of the game's actions. An action has a variety of effects depending on the symbols of that action visible on the board. At the end of a round, a player tales back all of their cards except one, meaning that action will be unavailable to you but will be stronger. However, new cards that you draw may allow you to perform it. The cards are all based around historical figures from the time period and the artwork is highly thematic. This one ticks a lot of boxes for us and I’ve heard nothing but great things since it’s release in the US earlier in the year.
Card Drafting - Set Collection - Worker Placement
Raiders of the North Sea remains a firm favourite in this house, its simple place a worker, take a worker mechanism combined with the elegant upgrading of them makes for great gameplay. Consequently, we’ll always check out new games in this series. Architects of the West Kingdom, as usual, adds an interesting twist on worker placement. For each of your workers placed on an action space, that action becomes more powerful. For example, placing a worker in the forest will give you one wood, the second one will give you two wood and so on. However, players can also capture groups of workers if they believe someone is being greedy! Points are earned by constructing buildings and working on the Cathedral. Throughout the game you will need to make moral choices that will move you up or down the virtue track. A few ‘dodgy’ deals in game won’t be judged harshly but at the end of the game your virtue will be judged!
Bag Building - Area Control - Tile Placement - Dice Rolling
In Dice Settlers, dice action and management form the basis of a 4X game, using map exploration, area control, player conflict and technology development. Your dice represent the people working for you, use their skills to explore, research, trade and expand. The map is hex tiles that will be uncovered as the game progresses and players will use their tents and houses to compete for control of that tile. Tiles will give you bonuses in game and points at the end of the game. All players roll their dice at the same time, then take it in turns to complete two actions dependant on their dice rolls. As with most dice games, there are numerous ways to change the faces and re roll to give you the best opportunities. During any round, you may not take the same action more than once. In addition to your main actions, there are also free actions that may be taken. The hex tile map and industry cards means there is a fair bit of replayability and the bag building is a nice break from deck building for us!
Other things we will be looking at include:
We love a good evolution themed game! We first saw Darwinning! in its infancy back in February and did a walkthrough video . The enthusiasm of the DDP team and the great gameplay meant we backed this immediately. A lot has changed since we saw it, including beautiful new artwork and a ton of stretch goals including making it a 6 player game, extra wild cards and player aids. I love seeing games work through the process and can’t wait to see what this looks like in it’s finished form!
Yes, more trick-taking! But like we said earlier this month, it’s one of our favourite mechanics! But this is bloody, gladiatorial fun that can be played team mode or all out war. Gladiators can be challenged during the round, leading to the trump card being changed. Players compete to win gladiators with favour and avoid those with negative favour. The player with the most favour at the end of the round wins a crowd support, gain three and you’ve won the game. Obviously, we went for the fancy Collectors Edition that has plastic cards with glided edges and deluxe poker chips!
I love a good insert! Shelf space is a premium in our house so all expansions get chucked into main game boxes. This, however, sometimes means we have boxes filled to bursting that take a while to sort out. Folded space are bringing cheap, lightweight inserts to the market so I jumped on their last Kickstarter campaign! We will be collecting inserts for Great Western Trail (with room for the expansion I’ll also be grabbing!), Village and Russian Railroads (at long last!) It will be interesting to see what these Evacore (laminated cardboard/memory foam hybrid) inserts are like, at least we won’t end up with splinters for days like we usually do when making up inserts!
Story telling games have really taken off recently and aren’t something I expected to enjoy as much as I am! The Pulp Detective games are taking this mechanic and adding a bit more ‘game’ to it, along with amazing retro art. Obviously, we will also be picking up the expansion that adds a ton of other stuff and a sidekick on your quest to find out ‘who done it?’ I’m always excited by original ideas and this ticks all the boxes for me. It’s also nice to see games aimed more at adults than ‘families’ so something with a darker theme always has me intrigued.
Roll and write with no roll? Seeing as dice hate me, this seems perfect! Instead of being dice driven, this roll and write is card driven, leading to far more variety. Again, the retro style has me immediately interested. Any game that plays large numbers of players and isn’t a ‘party game’ is welcomed into my collection. Randomised action sets and varying strategies in a small box game is great and I have heard nothing but people praising this so I can’t wait to finally get my hands on a copy.
There’s a real lack of great games with music themes, but I think we may have solved that with Symphony Number 9. Players are rich nobles of the 18th century who patron different musicians and gain ownership of their works. Each turn players take cubes from musicians career track, this will reveal spaces that change their reputation. When those cubes run out, the musician will die. The major patron for each musician will then discard cubes to gain one of their compositions. Each musician has different ways odd scoring for their compositions. During the final phase of each round, players donate money to the concert hall which will determine which musicians will play, a successful concert will earn patrons money. This ticks all the right boxes for me and I can’t wait to get my hands on it!
Team-based, trick taking, social deduction? This combination alone caught my interest and at a bargain price of 13 euros, it seemed silly to pass it up! At the start of the game, players are assigned to the loyalist or rebel team. The two teams then fight it out for control over locations. However, as cards change hands so do alliances. Play cards tactically to establish who is on your team, for now anyway! I love games that can mess with your head and this seems to hit that nail on the head!
Pandoria has a bit of everything! Tile placement, hand management, worker placement all wrapped up in some beautiful looking artwork. Place tiles and claim territory and resources by placing workers. When terrain is completely surrounded, all workers around it will gain resources, so what benefits you will also benefit others. Mining gold allows you to buy cards that can then be used as buildings or spells. This is being called ‘a gamers game’ and with so many decisions to be made, it certainly seems that way. I shall be doing a piece on this soon so come back to find out what I think!
There’s not a huge amount of information out about this yet and it is demo only at Essen, though I should be picking up a review copy. It combines one of my favourite mechanisms (market manipulation) with one of Rob's favourite mechanisms (deck building) so it’s something we’re both excited about. This is all done by acquiring and exhibiting Impressionist paintings meaning it is visually stunning. I can’t wait to tell you guys more about it!
What's on your list? Let me know in the comments, recommend me something I might have missed.
]]>Santa Maria was a surprise hit with us. It’s a great school night game and having dice as actions means you’ll never play the same game twice. This new expansion adds quite a few new modules. The most important is adding that fifth player which is always great. It’s also adding new buildings, scholars and shipping tiles. On top of adding all that base game goodness, we are then also getting cocoa, the specialists, the governor and the Mayan city. All of which will add interesting new elements to an already great game! I’m currently assuming all these modules can be played independently or else all together for a mega game with a tonne of choices.
We love a little push your luck and Celestia is GORGEOUS! (It also plays up to six players which is always a bonus!) And the little airship with moving propellers just adds to the fantasy setting of this game. A Little Initiative adds a 3D rowboat and some special cards, all with the same lovely artwork that makes Celestia so appealing. If you don’t like what the airship captain is doing, you can duck out, into your rowboat and continue the journey alone! The little twists and turns in this game are what has always kept it interesting to us and we can’t wait to see what else this brings.
Essen wouldn’t be complete without a new Concordia map. Concordia is, simple put, the most elegant game out there. A medium weight game with great strategies that only has a four page rule book. Venus comes in a lovely red box which obviously makes it a must have from me! This time, not only are we getting a new map but we’re also getting a whole new way of playing along with a new scoring card. Venus introduces team play. Some of the new cards give options or bonuses when your team mate plays them. The Venus scoring cards will (I think) give you end game points for settlements you have on the map.
The forgotten Folk started as a fan made project on BGG, but time and traction has resulted in everyone coming together and it being released as an official expansion. It consists of eight species packs such as elves and trolls and players get to use these rather than the standard dwarves from the base game. Each species comes with it’s own advantages and disadvantages as well as adding some new resources to the game. There is also four unique rooms which replace others from the base game allowing players to gain the abilities from the other species.
Whats Your Game are one of my favourite publishers and I’m always looking out for anything they release. This Nippon mini-expansion adds twelve new factories for the base game, offering up even more choices for investment. Not a lot has been said about this so I’m not sure if it’s more of the same or if there will be different options to be had.
This seems to be adding a load to an already great game! Rails to the North introduces new railway systems. However, on these tracks will be opportunities to form branches and help establish towns which will make progression on these routes easier. There will also be new station master tiles and new buildings along with extended player boards offering more choices and depth to the original game. I’m genuinely so excited for this one, who would have thought a game about cow herding would be so good?
Shards of Infinity was a really nice surprise for us. It has all the punch of larger deck builders (Dominion, Ascension) but in a much smaller box with the smaller price tag too! The original introduced mastery points which gave cards special abilities. The expansion obviously includes a load of new cards but also Relic cards that can only be used when a player hits ten mastery points. There will also be cards that can be played by any faction but will be super powerful when used by their affiliated faction. Relics of the Future also includes different ways to play the game including a 2 vs 2 team mode, a solo mode and a three-player variant that all damage dealt is done to both opponents rather than just the one.
We love Russian Railroads so much that anything by either of the designers, Helmut Ohley and Lonny Oghler, is an insta-buy for us! First Class is a card game that feels like much more. The base game comes with five base decks, all of which have their quirks and special flavours and module G will just add more variety. A wizard has now entered the train, when you take him from the display you won’t quite know what you’re getting!
Like Concordia, it’s become a tradition to pick up the new 7 Wonders release at Essen and this year doesn’t disappoint! We had a sneak peek at this expansion at UKGE back in May and there’s a lot more to it than some previous expansions! Each player gets a naval board at the start of the game with tracks and boats in red, green, yellow and blue. Additional cards of those colours are shuffled into the deck. Whenever you play a card of the matching colour you may pay an additional cost to move your boat up that track. The bred track represents naval strength and there is an additional combat at the end of each round using this. Yellow and blue advancements give you additional coins and VPs. The green track allows you to discover islands which you can put into play to grant you even more bonuses. Looks like we’re gonna need a bigger box (for 7 Wonders!)
Anything you are excited about or you think I should be excited about that I’ve missed? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter!
]]>So, todays 5 for the 5th looks at our favourite game mechanisms! Beware, I am going to be using the term ‘usually’ a lot as many games have exceptions to the standard rules of these mechanisms, and that’s just what makes gaming so much fun!
Often jokingly referred to as ‘worker denial’ or more seriously ‘action drafting’. Worker placement usually involves having a pool of workers that you use to select actions from a pool available to all other players. Players select actions one at a time and in turn order. Usually there is a limit to the number of times an action can be taken, or a penalty for subsequent placements on a space, leading to blocking - hence the term ‘worker denial’ and leading to cries of ‘did you have to do that?’ Usually, all workers are collected at the end of a round meaning all spaces are available again so going first can be critical in worker placement games.
Some games allow you to ‘bump’ workers off a space giving them bonuses or extra actions eg. Chimera Station, Microbrew, The Gallerist which is a nice twist. In some games, workers may even be dice with numbers determining where you can place and priority on activation of spaces.
Some well known examples of worker placement games include Lords of Waterdeep, Agricola, Russian Railroads and Anarchrony.
We’ve spoken about deck builders before on the 5 by 5 and some of the different varieties that are out there. Usually, players start with a small pool of limited cards that provide a range of limited abilities and/or resources. Deck builders, are at heart, engine builders, as you use your starting, limited resources and abilities. Over time, players build decks that are more developed/specialised in an attempt to win the game. This is usually gaining attack strength or coins in order to gain points. Attacking may be other players in the case of Star Realms or creatures from the main deck in the case of Ascension. In the case of Dominion you are trying to buy points cards with coins.
Deckbuilders can be simple and small, like Shards of Infinity or may involve the use of a board, in the case of Tyrants of the Underdark, there is also an area control element.
They are also one of a few mechanics that work well at all player counts, Dominion is a constant favourite here for just that reason!
Carcassonne was one of the early ‘modern’ board games back in the 90s and has remained a firm favourite, spawning countless expansions and promo tiles since then. Tile placement games have advanced significantly since then but still revolve around a similar principle. Draw a tile (sometimes randomly, sometimes chosen) and place it. Usually aiming to complete groups of the same feature, colour etc. In the case of Carcassonne, you are trying to complete roads, rivers or towns. You may be placing tiles on a communal site or on an independent tableau as in Alhambra. Other games add extra elements such as in the case of Isle of Skye you must pay coins to gain tiles. Essentially all tile placement games are a kind of puzzle, fitting the pieces together to form a tableau that scores you as many points as possible.
The best thing about them is the range of complexity, ranging from something quite basic like Carcassonne, through to the previously mentioned Carpe Diem, that had me scratching my head at times!
Lets face it, we all like having a bit of a flutter, and that’s just what push your luck games are about, without the risk of losing money! Usually, push your luck games involve repeating the same (or similar) action until you decide to stop. The may result in you getting more points or risking getting any at all. It’s all about risk assessment! Obviously, old school games like blackjack and pass the pigs are, at heart, push your luck mechanisms. Whereas modern day examples like Celestia, Incan Gold and Deep Sea Adventure use the same mechanics in a far more advanced way.
These are the sort of games I either do really well at or finish the game with zero points, never any in-between!
A common mechanic, used in card games throughout the ages, trick-taking is all about winning that particular group of cards aka the ‘trick’. Each player takes it in turns to play card(s) from their hand face up. This group of cards is the trick. Usually the aim of trick-taking games is to win these cards, or in some cases to avoid winning them! The most common way to win a trick is by having the highest value card of the suit that was initially played, however, a lot of games will have a ‘trump’ suit that will automatically beat anything.
Trick Taking games have got weird and wonderful of late including Pikoko where you can’t even see your own hand and Custom Heroes where you can upgrade cards to get exactly what you want, though remember they will be dealt out to everyone in the next round! However, For Sale with it’s fairly standard formula still gets a lot of love in our house!
These are some of our favourite mechanisms - what are yours and what game implements it in an unusual way?
]]>The island of Motora is in chaos, as resources become sparce, the tribes turned to the Gods and asked for help. The Gods demand that the Idols scattered across the land are retrieved and united again.
Motora is coming to Kickstarter soon, so bear in mind, this is a prototype version and some elements may change.
In the box you get:
There are two ways to win this game. Either, gather all the idols or eliminate all the other tribes. However, you will be trying to do this whilst managing your tribe's food, water, and shelter.
Take the four board sections and place them together randomly, but so the island is in the middle and makes sense. Separate the tiles into two groups - villages and non-villages. The villages are the ones that show resource values at the bottom. Shuffle the two piles of tiles and then place villages on the designated spots. Fill the rest of the board randomly with the non-village tiles. Shuffle the temple, craftsmen and event decks and place them by the side of the board.
Each player takes a player board and the village and meeples in their chosen player colour. The hungriest player goes first! (No game snacks on the table today!) The first player chooses a village location and places their hut there, go round the table with everyone taking it in turns to place their hut. Use the resources markers to mark your starting resources on your player board. This will be the resources printed on your chosen village tile. Then place six meeples in the ‘active workers’ space on your player board.
Flip over the villages tiles that weren’t chosen and place and Idol on these spaces. You are now ready to play!
Each round is made up of four phases: Placement, Combat, Actions, and Resources
Beginning with the start player, take it in turns to place workers from their ‘active workers’ space onto places on the board. You may only place one worker at a time, later on, workers will take actions or gather resources depending on where they have been placed. Tribe members can be placed, for free, up to five spaces away from their village. You may place further away than that, but each space further out will cost you one shelter. Workers may never travel through, nor be placed on a volcano or ocean space. After everyone has placed two workers, an event card is drawn and resolved before placement proceeds. You may place multiple workers on the same space and you may place workers where someone else has placed (hence the combat phase!) This phase ends when everyone has placed all the available workers they have.
Combat occurs when any two players are occupying the same tile. It is resolved in player order so the first player will resolve all combat first, then the second etc. The player can choose which order to do their combat in if they have multiple combat occuring. The players involved in combat roll 2 D6 (there may be more than two players involved!) If you have multiple workers involved, each extra worker will give you one die reroll. The player who rolled the highest is the winner. Calculate the difference between the highest and lowest roll (if players tie, everyone re-rolls) Depending on what the difference is, depends what happens to the losing worker:
1-2 Worker is placed next to the action section of the player board
3-4 Worker is placed on the ‘Injured’ section of the player board
5-6 Worker is placed on the ‘Seriously Injured’ section of the player board
7-8 Worker is killed and removed from the game
9-10 Worker is captured and placed on the winning player's board
If multiple workers are involved in a combat only one worker can be killed or injured, the rest are placed to the side of the player board when combat has been resolved.
Workers may also raid an opponents village. If the defending player has a worker on their village, combat happens as above (the defending player gets +1 to their roll). If not, pillaging occurs. The attack may roll a D6 and steal that number of food or water or destroy that number of shelter. They may alternatively choose to take back a captured worker, transport an idol or steal a piece of unused gear.
Before carrying out your actions, all previously injured workers move down the ‘injured’ track ie from seriously injured to injured and from injured to active. Workers do not move on the turn they are injured. Then, all workers remaining on the board will carry out the tiles actions. This may be
Gather - Workers gather the shown resources - mark these on your player board
Fishing - Workers fish in an adjacent square (not diagonal) again, mark this on your player board
Transport - If you have workers on a space with an Idol they may transport it one tile per worker on the spot, up to a maximum of two spaces.
Recruit - If you have two or more workers on your village tile, you may hire another worker (they will not consume resources this turn)
Once workers have complete their action they are placed back on the active worker spot on the player board.
So, after gathering all your resources, now comes the time to use them! Each worker needs one food and one water to survive. If, after gathering, you do not have enough food, one of your workers will die and be removed from play. You can cannibalise an opponents worker you have captured at any point for six food. If you do not have enough water for your workers, a worker will die and be removed from play. Therefore the maximum number of workers you can lose in a round is two. If one of your workers is on your village, you do not need to feed or water them this turn.
Each tribe then needs one shelter per round (regardless of the size of the tribe) If you cannot provide the shelter, then your tribe has nowhere to store their goods for the next round and your food and water are reduced to zero, along with losing any equipment cards you have.
Once everyone is fed and watered, the next round begins. Play continues until either someone has taken the required number of Idols back to their camp (between 2 and 4 depending on player count) or until one player is the last tribe standing!
Motora is one of the prettiest, yet brutal games I have ever played. On our first game Rob was left with one active worker for the majority of the game! As well as workers being killed from combat or lack of food/water, there are a few food spots on the board that you must fight in order to get food (Wild boars are tough to kill!) these can also cause you to lose workers.
Give each player a player board, a set of five temple tiles, an altar and an altar claim tile in their chosen colour. Deal each player five random tiles, the altar makes it up to five tiles in hand.
Place an altar of Ominotep in the centre of the table with a random tile of each design around it. This is the start of the Frieze of Ominotep.
Shuffle up the remaining tiles, including any Altar tiles for the symbols not being played if you have less than four players. This will be the draw deck. If this ever runs out, shuffle up the discarded tiles to form a new draw deck.
Players will take it in turns to play as many or as few tiles as they want to try and get four matching tiles. Matching four or more tiles will grant you a blessing from the Gods and that’s what you need to build your temple and that’s how you win the game!
The player who looks most like an Egyptian God goes first! That player gets an additional two tiles, the second player gets an additional one.
In each turn a player can:
From your hand you can choose as few or as many tiles to play, as long as they all have matching symbols. Each tile can be used whichever way round you choose. Altar tiles are played as part of any tile group. Altar tiles cannot be placed next to another Altar tile. When you place an altar that is not your own symbol, place your altar claim tile in the space for it.
A group of tiles score if there are four or more of the same type touching.
Gain a Blessing token for each matching group you have and a blessing for any Altar tiles that group was next to. The owners of the Altars will also gain a Blessing token that corresponds to the Altar. Flip over all matching tiles. This may result in another matching group, if so, distribute Blessing Tokens again as above. If a second match occurs, remove as many of the tiles as possible without breaking the frieze. These tiles are placed in the discard pile.
One temple tile can be traded for any four different blessings at any point in your turn. You may only ever have three blessings of a single type, any extra must be discarded at the end of your turn. The lower four tiles of your temple can be placed in any order, but all four must have the matching blessing placed on them before the final capstone is placed on the temple. The game immediately ends when a player places an Ominotep blessing on their last temple tile.
If you have not won this turn, draw up so you have five tiles in your hand again.
Play continues around the table until someone wins!!
Ominoes Hieroglyphs continues in the Yay Games vein of family-friendly games that are easy to learn and teach, but difficult to master. Hieroglyphs also relies less on luck and more on strategy than Ominoes as you are not restricted by your die rolls. The decision between to place a set of tiles next to an altar to get the blessing you need vs giving that blessing to the altars owner can be tough at times. This small box game packs a neat little puch!
Mentions
Based on the Jules Verne novel of the same name, players are racing to get a message to the Czar's brother. However, you are also racing against an assassin who is also trying to get to him, whilst dealing with the Tartar forces who are trying to reach Moscow. Players must work together to eliminate the threats whilst also trying to be the first to deliver the message.
See, you knew there had to be a catch and I wasn’t really playing co-op games, right?
In the box you get:
Place the board in the middle of the table, separate and shuffle the different types of cards. Place the action cards in the envelope area and the revolution discs next to them. Take the first Ally card and place it in space A of the ally area, place the rest of the cards nearby. Place Sangarra next to the board, near the allies. Place the five ‘area’ (Siberia, Tomsk, Ural Mountains, Russia and Irkutsk) in the appropriate places on the board. Place the black Tartar die on space 9 of the board with a value of three showing.
Place the black meeple in the box that corresponds to the player count. Give each player a player board and the matching colour meeple and disc. Place the energy disc on space six of the player board and the meeple on Moscow - the first space of the journey. Deal five cards to each player that will be their starting hand and draw a Russia card and place it to the right of the character boards to show the start of their journey.
The start player is the last person that wrote and sent a letter and play will proceed clockwise around the table. Place the traitor figure between the last and first player to remind you to play the traitor phase.
The cards really are the main mechanic of this game and can be used in a variety of ways.
The action cards have three elements. The Danger Icon in the top left, the Ally Portrait and the traitors phase at the bottom of the card.
The route cards have three or four elements. They may or may not have an Immediate Danger Icon on the top left (this is represented with a dark background behind the symbol), a Danger Icon in the top right, an ability along the bottom of the card and just above that a penalty icon.
Each turn is fairly quick as players can only take one action. However, before taking actions they may decide to enlist the help of an ally. Over the course of the game characters will come and go and each of these has a special ability that will aid players in their journey. At the start of a turn, a player may discard a card to activate the ability of an ally currently out on the board. You must discard a card that has the matching portrait. A player may only enlist the help of any ally once per turn.
Then, the player must take the action part of their turn. They can choose from the following three actions:
During the game, players take route cards that represent the dangers facing them on their journey. These cards form a line along the right-hand side of their player board. However, if a danger icon on the cards is repeated they are in trouble! The route cards for Russia only have one danger icon, however, as their journey continues it gets more treacherous and the cards will have two icons - one immediate danger and one normal danger.
To advance, a player reduces their energy by one point and advances their meeple to the next square on the journey. They must then draw a card from the area they have advanced into and place it on the right of their board, next to any previously placed route cards.
If the card has an immediate danger icon the player may immediately discard an action card with the same symbol. If you can, place a resolution disc on top of it, that danger is immediately resolved.
Next, check the line of cards for matching danger icons. If there are any repeated icons, the player must activate penalty icons for all cards in their journey (not just the ones with the matching icons!) There are three types of penalties: lose one energy point, chose a card from your hand and discard it or flip this card face down. Whenever a player is unable to fulfill a penalty (not having enough energy or cards in hand) they must flip the card face down instead. If a card has a resolution disc on it and has to be flipped, the disc is lost and the danger will have to be resolved again once the card is face-up.
A player may only choose the advance action if they have enough energy points, they have no face-down route cards or they have no matching danger icons in their route.
You can only suffer penalty activations during the advance phase of your turn. (At other points in the game cards may be added to your route, but these don’t immediately trigger)
If you choose the rest action, you may choose two of the following benefits (you can even choose the same one twice):
Note, a players hand size is seven, if at any point, they have more than seven cards in hand, they must immediately discard.
Using this action, players place resolution discs over danger icons on their route cards. Danger can be resolved in three ways, a player may resolve all the dangers that they can as one action.
Discard an action card with a matching icon. This can only be used on the most recent route card ie. the one on the far right. Discard two cards with matching symbols (even if they don’t match the icon on the route card) This can be used on any route card. Subtract an energy point, again, this can be used on any route card.
When a card has all it’s danger icons resolved, it is removed from the journey. Facing and resolving dangers makes you stronger though. At the end of an action where a player resolved dangers and successfully removed route cards, they may choose one of the resolved cards and place it below their character board so the ability shown becomes available to them for the rest of the game. Abilities are only granted when cards are resolved using the ‘resolve danger’ action and only is allowed a turn.
After all players have taken their turn, the traitor (Ivan Ogareff) has his ‘turn’. Draw a card from the action deck and carry out the actions shown at the bottom of the card. The first action will always be to move Ivan, he will move between one and three spaces along his journey. The last action will be to move the Tartars. Place the die in the indicated square and modify their strength as shown. The middle icon will be one of a few things, each player draws an action card from the deck, roll the white die and all players may perform the abilities that match the result, Draw an ally card and place it in the indicated space (A, B, C or D) or the Sangarra icon. If Sangarra is already on a players journey she is returned to the board. If she is on the board, however, she will visit the player that is furthest ahead on the route. She is placed on the right of their current route cards. While she does not trigger if there are duplicate danger icons, she will prevent a player from advancing until the danger has been resolved.
If Ivan Ogareff reaches the end of his journey, move his piece to square 12. Now, whenever the traitors' phase happens, no action card is drawn. Instead, roll the action dice and activate abilities as usual. Then, the Tartars advance towards Moscow as many spaces as the number shown on the die. If the Tartars enter the Capital, the invasion of Russia is successful and all the players lose the game!
The Tartar troops are represented by a black die whose strength varies. If a player moves into a square they are occupying, they must roll the action die and roll higher than the Tartars strength to succeed. If they fail, they lose one energy point, if they win they are rewarded with an action card. If the Tartars enter a box that a player is in, that player is captured! They must draw a route card from the Tomsk deck. This is placed to the left of their journey and can never be resolved.
If/When a player advances into square 12 of the journey, they do not draw a route card. Instead, the final battle with Ogareff begins that will finish in victory or death! First, they must get rid of all route cards including any Tomsk cards they may have. The player must eliminate each danger icon on every card by discarding an action card from their hand with the same icon. If they don’t have a matching card, they must lose one energy point. Running out of energy on this space results in immediate death (elimination from the game) though!
After getting rid of all their route cards, you must now face Ivan himself! One by one draw and resolve as many Irkutsk cards as are indicated on the board in the zone that Ivan is (between three and five cards) For each card drawn, the player must discard a card from their hand with the matching symbol. For each card, you cannot discard, lose one energy. If at any point you run out of energy, you are eliminated from the game and the rest of the players can continue their journey and try and defeat Ivan themselves!
There are very few games out there based on books, yet a lot on film and T.V. shows. Books provide just as rich and detailed theme and that really shines here.
The rule book contains detailed descriptions for each of the ally cards along with how they fit into the story. The same is also provided for each location on the board, meaning this can be a really immersive trip into the world of Jules Verne if you wish. However, it also plays nicely without that knowledge or insight if you don't want it.
The muted board colours are pleasing, not overwhelming and a great contrast to the cards and sense of danger they bring throughout the game.
This is a very tricky game to beat that has a lot of components in a small size box, don't be deceived!
]]>Players will adapt and evolve their species using traits to survive in an ever-changing eco-system. Plant food may be scarce and carnivores will try to eat you, will you survive, thrive or become extinct?
I’m going to talk about several variations of the game, but let’s start with the basic game, in the box you get (and before anyone says anything the photographs are from our copy of Evolution Climate with the base game conversion kit and Evolution Flight’s Cliffs instead of the original watering hole - we cheated):
Place the watering hole in the middle of the table with the food tokens next to it. Shuffle up the trait cards and have this deck nearby. Give each player a species board with the appropriate cubes in the bottom slot and a food bag.
There are four phases in each round of the game:
Deal each player three cards plus one for each species they currently have (so four cards in this first round)
Every trait card has a number in the bottom right of the card, some are positive and some are negative. This represents an amount of plant food. Each player chooses a trait card and places it face down on the watering hole, this will be revealed later and will be the amount of plant food available for everyone this round.
Trait cards can be used in quite a few different ways.
You may discard a trait card to create a new species. Take a new species board and place markers in the ‘one’ positions on the board. The board must be placed to the left or right of any existing species you have. Placement can be very important when it comes to traits, so pay attention to that when placing a new species!
You may also discard cards to increase the body size or population of an existing species. Simply discard one card to move up one space on the required track. You can discard as many cards as you want to do this, but neither your body size nor population can ever go above six.
The last use for cards is as actual traits on your species. Place these face down above the species you wish to play it on. You may not have two traits the same on any species and you may only ever have three traits attached to one species. You can, however decide to change traits so could discard one to place another.
When everyone has played cards, flip all the trait cards face up.
After all cards have been played comes the last phase in a round
Some trait cards have effects that happen before the feeding cards are revealed (eg long neck, fertile) so check to see if any of these need resolving. Then, reveal the cards on the watering hole and count up the amount of food available this round. Place that many food tokens onto the watering hole. If the total is negative, remove that many tokens from the watering hole if possible. These cards are then placed onto the discard pile.
Beginning with the start player and going clockwise, each player must take plant food to feed their non-carnivorous species. A species is hungry as long as it’s food is lower than it’s population. Take one food and place it on the appropriate space on your species board. Some traits will let you take multiple food in a turn, in this case, take as many as is applicable, however, you may never have more food than your population level. If all your species are full, you cannot take anymore food and must pass. Each food you take during this phase will be worth one point at the end of the game.
Carnivores cannot eat plant food, so must eat other species to survive. An attack can only be made if the carnivores body size is larger than the species it is attacking and if it can get past any defensive traits. When a successful attack happens, reduce the population of the attacked species by one. Take meat food from the food bank (not the watering hole) equal to the body size of the attacked species and place it on the carnivores board. If a carnivore causes a species to go extinct, the player owning the carnivore may take all food off that species board and place it in their bag.
A carnivore may never eat plant food, though there are some trait cards that will allow a non-carnivore to eat meat!
Feeding ends either when all species have food equal to their population or when species are no longer able to eat. If a species did not eat food equal to it’s population, reduce it’s population down to the level it did eat upto. If a species didn’t eat any food that species goes extinct.
If, for any reason, a species hits zero population, it will go extinct. Place any food on the board into the players bag then discard the species board and any trait cards attached to it. Draw a number of trait cards equal to the number discarded.
After feeding and extinction have been dealt with, all players put food tokens from their species board into their player bag, any plant food left on the watering hole stays until the next round and the start player token passes to the left.
If the deck has to be shuffled during the draw cards phase then this is the last round of the game. If the deck runs out at any other point, finish the current round and play one more full round after.
One of the most satisfying things about Evolution is just how well the theme works - the trait cards all just make sense at a thematic level eg. animals with a long neck get to take one food before everyone else, hard shell gives you +3 body size when being attacked, making it harder for carnivores to eat you. On top of that some of the traits compliment each other creating some interesting and powerful combinations. It all just makes sense and the beautiful, evocative artwork really immerses you in the game. Once you know what you are doing, everyone can play their cards at the same time, leaving traits face down until everyone reveals them, meaning a larger player count really doesn’t take that long. Evolution even plays upto six players which is great when you have an extra person or two at game night. It also has the best start player marker ever! See, everything about this game is awesome!
Evolution: Flight is an expansion that can be added to either of the base games (see Climate below) and adds, ummmm, flight! Your species can fly out or into harm’s way and get food that no one else can reach. However, those wings take a lot of energy so will cost you more to begin with (gaining a flying species requires you to discard two cards instead of one) and an upkeep cost. Also, they obviously can’t get too big (ever seen an elephant with wings?) so your maximum body size is three instead of the usual six. This expansion sticks to the core mechanics of the base game so is easy to dive into, yet adds an extra layer of strategy along with a lot of new trait cards (some of which are only available to flying species)
Evolution: Climate is a stand alone game as well as being an expansion to the basic Evolution game. So, instead of just worrying about carnivores and starvation, you now have to worry about the weather that can swing between boiling hot and sub zero. That big fur coat with help you out in the cold, but not so much in the heat! But you don’t need us to tell you too much about it because you can win it below.
Keep an eye out on Kickstarter for Evolution: Oceans, we can’t wait to see what this adds to an already excellent game.
]]>We arrived in Edinburgh around midday on Friday to glorious sunshine so managed to sit, relax and have a few drinks before work officially started. We checked in at our hotel then wandered down to Big Dog Books - a local comic and game store that had offered to host people before the Con officially began on Saturday. Sadly, the shop was pretty small and Friday night Magic was already happening when we got there so there wasn’t really space for a horde of boardgamers as well.
So, instead, we met up with a friend, and had a good meal while discussing boardgames and our plans for the weekend. On our way back to the hotel we saw the Dewars Centre (the venue for the event) was still very busy so decided to have a sneak peek, say hello to people we knew and introduce ourselves to people we didn’t. The venue looked great even in it’s ‘not quite ready’ state and we manage to do a little sneak peek video. We then headed back to our hotel so we could get a good nights sleep and be up and ready to go early on the Saturday (we had a lot we wanted to cram in over the next two days!)
We arrived before show opened on Saturday, ready to attack everything full on, after coffee, of course! So, we were sat in the bar area, perusing the rather lovely Tabletop Scotland 2018 brochure, deciding what we wanted to look at first when mayhem broke out! (Mayhem is a very dramatic word, but a good one that should be used when opportune!) The bring and buy had opened, and almost a running theme, demand had exceeded expectations so the poor volunteers were swamped.
Having worked at the UKGE bring and buy before, I couldn’t stand and watched, so both Rob and I stepped in to help (of course, there’s always the chance a bargain might come your way too!) So, our first couple of hours at TTS were spent working - no change there then! Once the initial rush to check items in had died off, we sneaked away, ready to look at the rest of the show.
We started by doing a general scout round, working out where everything was and what we wanted to look at. A lot of the demo tables were busy and the open gaming was pretty full by this point. Although the show was busy, the noise level was a general hum and never so loud it became too much, though there was a ‘quiet room’ for those who found it too much at any point. We managed to grab a copy of Coimbra by Eggertspiele from the library and have a game. I have been very excited about this for a while, and have to say it lived up to my expectations. Only twelve turns in the game which involves choosing dice and placing them to gain cards which can combo beautifully. Pretty simple in terms of gameplay but difficult to strategise - my favourite kind of game, can’t wait for this to be finally released in the UK!
I then wandered over to the PlayTest zone - this was really nicely set up with a small board displaying everything you needed to know about each game. Areas like this are a great opportunity for all - designers can get their game seen by a lot of people and maybe even iron out those last few tweaks and people can find out and play upcoming releases, meaning they know if they like it before spending the money on Kickstarter! These tables were pretty full most of the weekend but I managed to get a game of Dice Summoners from Decking Awesome Games - a competitive, monster brawling, dice game. This was a fun little game with great artwork that I will hopefully get to review properly before it’s launch on Kickstarter next month.
After that panel was the pub quiz which was a lot of fun and included rounds like ‘what’s in Charlotte's box’ and ‘board game or porno?’
Again, this was organised by the Unlucky Frog Gaming crew, so shout out to them for all their hard work over the weekend! This was suitable rowdy and silly end to Saturday, so off we went back to the hotel, ready to pack up as we’d be leaving Perth after the Con on Sunday.
We started Sunday with a demo of Motora from Twisted Bit Games. I don’t want to say too much about this just yet as I shall be posting a walkthrough in the near future, needless to say we enjoyed it enough to fit it in our very limited luggage for the flight home!
We spent some time looking at the wonderous wall of cats painstakingly reconstructed by Bez. Rob played a game of Wibbell++ and I ran away because I am terrible at word games and anagrams. Kitty Cataclysm (chaos, cardplay, dickery and cat puns) is still in the making so we hope to see that at Essen later this year. In the meantime here you can see Bez in more red than me which just isn't right.
We actually managed to get a good amount of game play in on Sunday - yay! We
had a play of Disney's Villainous. I, of course, played as the Queen of Hearts,
Rob played as Prince John and our friend Chris played as Captain Hook. After
just the one play I’m very on the fence about the actual game play of this,
everyone has different win conditions and some felt far easier than others,
waiting for specific cards to show up in your deck can be frustrating. However,
the artwork and player pieces are amazing! I wouldn’t consider myself a Disney
fan really, but obviously I have childhood memories of the films and the
artwork was spot on and totally immersive and evocative.
We then went and had a demo of Legends Untold from Inspiring Games. This had been on my radar for a while. I have friends that want me to run RPGs for them, but I want to play rather than GM and this seems like the closest equivalent out there. It certainly didn’t disappoint! Our intrepid party of four started out pretty well, tackling monsters and finding treasure. However, by the end of our short demo scenario three out of the four of us were unconscious, leaving our fourth party member to drag our bodies along behind him! On a first play through some of the symbology and dice rolls felt slightly confusing but I also appreciate after a couple of plays things would be a lot easier (like any RPG system out there!) This is by far the closest thing to an RPG I have played that didn’t need someone to run it. Each character has reversible cards so everyone can play as a male or female version of their chosen role. The artwork is gorgeous and totally in line with the theme, there is a great universe being created and I can’t wait to see how it expands over time!
Then came time for our You Tube live stream with Nigel from One Free Elephant. Their game, Microbrew had launched on Kickstarter on Saturday and already hit target by the Sunday morning. Microbrew is a big game in a small tin, a mint tin to be precise! In fact, it came overall second in BGGs 2017 mint tin competition. Nigel sat and taught us the game then left Matt and I to play through. Microbrew is a two player worker placement game where, you guessed it, you are brewing beer. Each character card has a preferred brew that will make them a loyal customer for you (which is what you need to win the game!) but brewing beers that are close to what they like will generate money and help you build an engine. The best part of this is the puzzle element.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5b4q-w9eCI
Each player has a copper kettle containing different kinds of worts, and you can use an action to rearrange these which is a mini puzzle in itself! The lighter coloured worts always rise up while the darker ones always move down, so trying to get the correct combination for your brew can take a fair amount of brain power. Two player worker placement games are tough but Microbrew compensates for this by allowing you to ‘bump off’ an opponent's worker, however, they then get to place that worker again so taking the move you really need will quite often give them an extra move. Lots of things to think about aside from getting your engine working! Check out Microbrew on Kickstarter now!
The trade hall closed at 4pm on Sunday so quite a few people started vanishing around then but the open play was available until 6 so undeterred, we kept on playing! We got to play a friends prototype of Bad Ass Force - a bluffing game with great caricatures of numerous action heroes. It felt like a cross between Coup and The Expendables and was a lot of fun! Can’t wait to see where this goes. I particularly liked the Bad Assometer (aka the score track!) It was also a great fun way to end an amazing weekend of gaming!
Tabletop Scotland was a great weekend and well worth the 1100 mile round trip! (I think Essen is closer for us!) Despite attendance and demand being well over what was expected the weekend ran smoothly (from what we saw!) and the atmosphere was super friendly. Darius from Uncon deserves a special mention for driving all the way from Kent and back to provide the board game library. Initially, this was to be provided by Dice Roll Cafe from Glasgow. However, their library is housed near to the Glasgow School of Art which suffered a devastating fire in June, meaning a lot of nearby buildings are closed for safety reasons. Although they know their games library is safe they are currently unable to access it at the moment so Darius and the Uncon crew stepped in at the last minute and did a gruelling drive to provide games for all at TTS. This makes us even more determined to get our butts to Uncon at some point (stop clashing with everything else please!)
The demo zones from Coiled Spring and Asmodee UK were constantly busy, as
was the Playtest zone and there was a constant buzz of excitement from people
in all areas of the convention. Congratulations to everyone involved,
volunteers, stand holders, designers and organisers who made TTS such a great
event! Looking forward to next year already :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqbrK9KhB34
]]>The inaugural Tabletop Scotland Event, held at the Dewars Centre in Perth on 1st - 2nd September 2018
]]>So, any list of great games should include Concordia! This is a bit of a
cheat as different expansion maps are best suited to different player counts,
but it’s my list so I can cheat if I want! Concordia, simply put, is one of the
most elegant games out there. It has four pages of rules (including pictures)
yet is a solid mid-weight Euro with great play. The map variations vary between
two and five players adding some extra elements to the base game alongside
changing the player count. For us, this is a game that never gets boring!
Despite not being a fan of space themed games, I loved Star Realms. This quick, portable 2 player deck builder travelled a lot with us. Initially, when we played Hero Realms, we were a bit disappointed. Why did we need this when we already had Star Realms? It was the same game with a different theme. However, as time went on we realised just how wrong we were! For starters, Hero Realms plays up to four. Then, you can add class cards - giving each deck something different, then the adventuring packs, they turn it into a fully fledged campaign game. This makes it a great ‘mini DnD’ feel adding to what was an already great two player game!
What can be said about Azul that hasn’t already been said really? With
beautiful components and great gameplay it was a worthy Spiel de Jahres winner
(even though I’m not generally a fan of abstract games)! However, I think it is
worth noting that it also plays well at 2,3 and 4 players, the only difference
being the number of placemats in the middle and therefore the number of tiles
to choose from. This does also mean you are less likely to get stung with a big
handful of tiles from the middle - yay!
OK, we’ve played through all of these now and have loved them all, though it’s hard to say too much without spoiling them for others! The puzzles are really clever and the thought that goes into each and everyone amazes me. When we play these with four players we tend to have two pairs of people working on two different puzzles at a time, however, they work equally well with two people working one puzzle together or on separate things. We’ve solved all of these in a similar time frame, proving that two brains can be just as good as more! The same applies to all the other ‘Escape Room in a box’ games, but Exit have been our favourite range so far.
Yes, an oldie but still a goodie that’s considered a classic with reason. Draw a tile, place a tile, then maybe place a worker - very simple rules that can lead to a very compelling, yet quick game. It’s also a great game for all ages and gaming abilities. Because tiles must be placed next to another, you will always end up interacting and competing with other players. We’ve had battles over castles in two-player games as much as multiplayer ones. Set up and pack down is also sup-quick, making this is a great school night game for everyone.
There are other great games that work well at two, but here I also tried to focus on games that had the least ‘tweaks’ or ‘variations’ to alter the player count. Great area control games should never be played with only two players and some mechanic eg deck building will always work great at two players!
Happy gaming, however many there are of you!
]]>Spiel, Essen 2018 is just 56 days away so... here's an updated and trimmed down version of Board Game Geek's Essen Preview list that's a little bit easier to manage than their full list. For me this is a quick way of finding where everyone is over that weekend too. The full list isn't in yet but this should give many of you a start. What are you looking forward to?
]]>Majesty for the Realm was released at Essen last year and slipped under everyones radar (with so many new games being released, it’s no surprise!) It takes a few simple rules and mechanisms and turns them into a very neat, quick playing strategic game.
In the box you get:
Shuffle up the worker cards and deal one out to each player, the player who gets the card with the Knight on it will be the start player. Give each player five meeples to place on the spaces on their worker card then give everyone a set of location cards (these are all the same).
Each player lays these out in numerical order, for your first few games have all the A sides facing up. After a few games, you can turn them over to the B sides or shuffle and mix them up, just ensure every player has the same layout!
Shuffle all the tier two cards, these will make up the bottom half of the character deck. Shuffle up the tier one cards and use the appropriate number of cards for the player count - with two players use six cards, three players use fourteen cards and four players use twenty six cards. Place these on top of the tier two cards then place the top six cards in a row in front of the deck. This will be the display where characters can be bought from during the game.
The game is played over twelve turns, each turn you will take and place one character in their assigned location card. Each character will grant a bonus when placed, the bonuses are different on the A and B sides of the cards, but here I am going to talk about the basic game - the A sides.
In your turn, choose one character that you want to take from the display. The card nearest the deck is the back of the row, furthest from the deck is the front of the row. The first character is always free to take. To take another card you must pay in meeples. Place one meeple on each card in the row that is in front of the one you want to take. You cannot take a card if you don’t have enough meeples. So, for example, if you wanted to take the third card in the row (here, the dual Guard / Noble) you would have to place meeples on the first and second card (the MIller and the Brewer)
Most character card have a single character on them, there are also dual character cards, one on each half of the card. When you take one choose where to place it and put it face up in the appropriate location. If a dual card is removed from the Infirmary, you may choose again where to place it. If the card you wish to take already has meeples on it, you also take those and place them on your worker card. This can only hold upto five workers, any extra are traded back to the general supply for one point.
When you take the card, place it on the corresponding location card and take the benefits.
Millers (wheat symbol top left of the card) go to the Mill and give you two points for each miller there. So, the first one you place gives you two points, the second one four points and so on.
Brewers (barrel symbol top left) go to the Brewery, these give you two points and a meeple per brewer. Again, trade surplus meeples back to the supply for one point each. They also give two points to every player who has at least miller out.
Witches (potion symbol top left) go to the Cottage, these firstly let you retrieve a card from the Infirmary (more on that later!) but also give you two points per Miller, Brewer and Witch you have in your display.
Guards (shield symbol top left) go to the Guardhouse and give you two points per Guard, Knight and Innkeeper you have in your display. They also help you defend against attacks (keep reading!)
Knights (sword symbol top left) go to the Barracks. These give you three points per Knight but also attack the other players. If any opponent has the same number of Guards or more than you have Knights, your attack fails and nothing happens. If any opponents has fewer, your attack succeeds. That player must move their leftmost character card into the Infirmary (see, this is where those Witches come in handy!)
Innkeeper (utensils symbol top left) go to the Inn. These give you four points for each Innkeeper in your display plus give three points to all players who have a Brewer in their display.
Noble (key symbol top left) go to the Castle. These give you five points and a meeple for each Noble you have.
Your last location is the Infirmary. As stated earlier, this is where characters go after a successful attack. At the end of the game, you will lose one point for each card you have here.
The character you place always counts towards the location bonus, however, cards returning from the Infirmary do not trigger the bonus.
After you have placed your character, slide the cards in the row down and add another card from the deck to the end. There should always be six cards in the display for a player to choose from.
When the last player has taken their twelfth character, final scoring begins.
Points are deducted for characters in the Infirmary.
Points are awarded for variety. Count the number of locations you have characters in and multiply it by itself, gain that many points. So, if you had characters in five locations, you would gain twenty five points, only in three locations, that would give you nine points.
Points are given for the majority in each location. In the bottom right of each card, there is a number in a circle, this is the points awarded to the player with the most characters in that location. Ten for Millers, twelve for Brewers etc. In the case of a tie both players receive this bonus.
Whoever has the most points is the winner and gets to wear the Crown* for a day (or until the next game!) *Crown not included in box contents, but is available separately.
Majesty: for the Realm is one of those games that makes you ask why has no one done this before? Simple mechanisms, quick turns and great replayability make this one of our most played games of the year. We’ll usually have multiples games as we can just flip some or all of the location cards to have a different game experience.
My only complaint with this game is the sheer amount of time bookkeeping takes compared to actual game play. Sorting out everyones points and keeping on top of the display is a job in itself, else things get missed easily - there is a lot of interaction. There really needed to be some five point chips to make things a little easier. The game plays so quickly otherwise!
There is quite a lot of spare room in this box so I am hoping for some expansions soon!
]]>In the box you get:
Sort all the market tiles by the trade symbol on the back and randomly remove one of each type, then shuffle the rest all together. Use these tiles to set up the board, either as the ‘standard’ set up shown in the rulebook or else create your own map after a few plays! Place the four port tiles at the four corners of the board. Remove the ‘closed port’ tile from the pile of victory point tiles and shuffle the rest together then place one on each of the four ports. Take the top five tiles and shuffle in the ‘port closed’ one, place these six tiles at the top of the stack.
Sort the bonus tiles into piles by type - the victory point tiles should be sorted in ascending order, with the six at the top. Shuffle the player boards and distribute them, the first player will be the one who has the special icon on the top right. Each player takes a boat and all twenty outposts of the matching colour, placing them on the marked spaces on their board. In reverse turn order, players choose which starting bonuses they would like from: four yellow, two red, two yellow and one red or one yellow and one green. These get placed on the right hand side of the player boards in the marked spaces.
Place the bowls, containing the spices, in rarity order, with Ginger (yellow) at the bottom, then Chilli (red), then Tea (green) and finally Cloves (brown) at the top. You are now ready to play!
Each player takes one turn each round. During a players turn they may move their boat and then perform an action. You can move your boat one space for free. Then, you may continue moving your boat by placing a single cube onto each space that you move off. If you end your movement on a tile with other player's boat(s) you must pay each of their owners one cube. If you cannot pay, you cannot land there! If you land on a tile with cubes you may pick them up and place them in your hold on your player board. You must, however, pay any other players first.
After moving you may perform one of the following actions:
A Market action if you are on a Market Tile
A Port action if you are on a Port Tile or
A Harvest action on any tile.
Market Action - If you are on a market tile, you first have the option to build an outpost. You may only have one outpost on each tile, but multiple players may build on the same space. The cost to build an outpost is one cube for each outpost already on the tile, so your first one is free, but the longer you leave it, the more expensive it will get! When you build an outpost, take the left-most outpost from the row that matches the trade symbol on the tile. If, after placing an outpost, you empty a vertical column choose a bonus tile and place it next to your board.
There are five types of bonus tiles to choose from:
Once you have an outpost on a tile, you may also take the market action. Trade the cubes listed at the top for those underneath. You may perform this action as many times as you are able to.
Port Action - If you on a port tile and have the required goods, you may claim that VP tile by returning the goods from your hold to the main supply. Take the tile and place it face down next to your player board. Then, take the top VP tile from the stack and place it in that port. If you draw the closed port tile, that port will no longer have a VP tile on it. If a VP tile is claimed from another port, move the closed port tile to it and place a new tile on the space that previously closed.
Harvest Action - Take two yellow cubes and add them to your hold. If, at the end of any turn, you have more cubes than cargo spaces available, you must discard down. Your cargo hold starts at ten but may increase with bonus tiles.
The game ends when one player claims their fourth VP tile. Play continues to the end of the round when points are then added up. Points are gained from VP tiles, bonus tiles, uncovered values on their player board and remaining cubes in their cargo hold, with each non-yellow cube being worth one point. The player with the most points is the winner!
Century:Eastern Wonders is a worthy sequel to Century: Spice Road, while it has a similar feel it is a completely new and fresh game. We’ve come to expect great production quality from Plan B Games and this doesn’t disappoint! As well as being a stand-alone game, Eastern Wonders can also be combined with Spice Road to create ‘From Sand to Sea’, but that’s another post altogether!
]]>Going to five players on the base game is always a great thing, but firstly, this expansion takes Lords of Waterdeep to a huge six player game! Scoundrels of Skullport is actually a two-part expansion - The Undermountain Module and the Skullport Module.
The Undermountain module introduces new quests, intrigue cards and buildings. A lot of these quests need insane amounts of adventurers to complete, however they offer far bigger rewards. The Skullport module introduces corruption to Waterdeep. Each corruption in your tavern at the end of the game will give you negative points. Just how many depends on how corrupt you and your fellow players are! The more that is taken, the higher the negative value is. The placement board is also expanded, giving you some really tasty placement options, but they come with a price in the form of corruption, you can get a lot of goodies, but you are going to pay for them! However, new intrigue cards and quests help you get rid of corruption, or even force your opponents to take it.
Scoundrels of Skullport is all about making things bigger and better, but that also comes at a price!
There aren’t many games that go to seven players that aren’t party games, so 7 Wonders will always be a favourite with us. Leaders takes an already great game and steps it up a notch. Before even looking at era cards, each player is given four leaders and must draft them, just like in the main game, taking one to keep and passing the rest onto the next player. Playing these leaders costs coins rather than resources so each player starts with six coins rather than the usual three. At the start of each era, players choose one leader to play, pay the cost and place them face up in front of them for the game (alternatively, you can discard one for three coins like any other card in the game) Some leaders will give you in game advantages like reducing the cost of a specific card type, some will be end game bonuses. One thing they all have in common is that they are powerful, and they may even help determine your strategy for the rest of the game. We love 7 Wonders so own all the expansions for it, but none of the others change the way you play as much as Leaders.
I guess this is a bit of a cheat as I am talking about two expansions here but I didn’t want to have to choose between them! Russian Railroads is an already great game. These expansions add new player boards as well as new elements of play. The player boards on German Railroads have blank spaces with tiles you can choose from which vary the distance and direction you can go in with your rails. It also introduces coal as a commodity. Coal can be used to improve locomotives and factories. It also includes a solo mode.
American Railroads again, includes new player boards. It also has spaces you need to demolish to get past and introduces a stock market board which grants extra bonuses. The new player boards have two industry tracks, you can split movement between both markers and even trigger the same factory twice in one turn. The new, second track also means you can zoom it up avoiding factories completely if you wish.
Both expansions really shake up the way you play the game, meaning tried and tested strategies are useless and you need to completely re-evaluate your game play.
Settlers of Catan was the first modern boardgame I played back in the mid nineties. At the time, it was new and exciting, however, after many plays those dice rolls just got me down! This is a game where you can do everything right but if those dice gods aren’t watching over you, you’re going to have a pretty miserable game. Cities and Knights adds more strategy and takes away some of the luck elements. As well as the potential of being caught by the robber, here, you have barbarians attacking the land and you risk losing your cities! You also have an improvement chart that can gain you development cards throughout the game. Build knights (using ore, sheep and wheat) to help defend the lands, protect your cities and give you points. Cities on ore, sheep and wood now produce commodities as well as resources. These commodities help you upgrade your improvement chart and give you a better chance of gaining improvement cards which can be super powerful. While I have a soft spot for the original Settlers, I won’t play it now without using this expansion!
To be fair, a lot of the Dominion expansions added something neat and new to the game, but Seaside added a totally new concept to deckbuilders in the form of ‘Duration’ cards.
All deck-builders are pretty fast paced and work on the set formula of draw your hand, do some stuff, discard your hand and redraw. Everything is based around those cards currently in your hand and that current turn. These Duration cards stay in play and may do something at the start or end of your following turn, or they stay in play until the clean-up phase of the last turn in which they're active, meaning far more planning ahead has to be done, leading to a more strategic game with long-term planning. This, along with more lower cost cards than any other expansion means more combinations are available to players earlier on in the game, changing the gameplay significantly.
]]>Brothers is the new tile placement 2-player game from Ankama Boardgames, take a look at it with us and you've even got a chance to win your own copy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eREADT-qRxY
]]>So, even as a cat lover, this is adorable! Dungeons and Doggies is a set of 13 pre-assembled miniatures along with all the rules you need to add them into your standard DandD campaign. This is Painting and Polygons first Kickstarter project so they have kept it simple with just the one pledge level, no add-ons, no stretch goals, making it easier for a first time creator and ensuring everyone is happy.
As well as your 13 figures you also get a rule set, helping you create an intelligent dog along with unique feats and canine class options that means you can jump into any 5th Ed DandD campaign. Alternatively, you’ll also get an independant adventure scenario called ‘Who Let the Dogs Out?’ that can be used with your canine chums or any other party. April Prime has done stunning artwork for this project and alongside everything else, you’ll also get some art prints of her work. All for a bargain 27GBP / 35USD.
This project is due to fulfill in May 2019, but in the meantime there’s talks of a Cats and Catacombs project launching at the end of the year - I’ll be all in on that one for sure!
https://kickstarter.com/projects/russrmc/animal-adventures-tales-of-dungeons-and-doggies
Two of the biggest names in gaming have teamed up to bring us Escape Plan. Designed by Vital Lacerda with artwork by Ian O’Toole. What, you need more than that? After a successful bank heist, you and your fellow criminals are relaxing, enjoying the ‘fruits of your labour’ but somehow the police have got a lead. You need to make it out the city before getting caught, while grabbing as much of your cash en route. You can use all sorts of resources at your disposal: underground contacts, local gangs and disguises to try and get you the hell outta dodge, but your fellow criminals will all have similar ideas. In the end, only the player that escapes with the most loot can win!
While this is being talked about as a ‘lighter’ Lacerda game, it’s very relative and there’s still deep levels of complexity in it. As we’ve come to expect from his Kickstarters, there’s loads of high quality components and a metric tonne of stretch goal goodies (it funded in the first ten minutes of the campaign!)
At around 60GBP / 79USD this is one of the cheaper games, however UK shipping is a steep 20USD pushing it up to the $100 mark. Due to fulfil June 2019.
https://kickstarter.com/projects/eaglegryphon/escape-plan-by-vital-lacerda-with-artwork-by-ian-o
Designed by Chris and Johnny O'Neal in some ways this title couldn't be further than their previous title Boss Monster, the stunning art really shines however the sense of adventure shines through in both games. Call To Adventure is a character crafting game. The designers describe the game as being "...based on character-driven fantasy novels..." where "...facing a childhood rival or meeting your true love can be as important as slaying a dragon...". What if our hero falls in love with a dragon instead of slaying them? So each character's development seems driven by authentic story advancements through the 30 character and 60 story cards. Each character starting from different places, say a lowly Peasant or a high-born Noble with their own Origin, Motivation and Destiny, who then develop skills to take on challenges, or just push their their luck to reap rewards. With an expansion based on the work of NY Times bestselling author Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind there's a whole host of talent involved in this project.
Starting from 31GBP / 40USD it is expected to fulfil in November 2018
https://kickstarter.com/projects/brotherwise/call-to-adventure-featuring-name-of-the-wind
We LOVE Halloween! Plus we love games that are small footprint, small price and this ticks both boxes! This is a two or three player card game. Players have a shared pumpkin patch and are competing to collect the most seeds. Each turn has three phases: plant a pumpkin and collect seeds according to what is around it, move a crow to block opponents and then discard pumpkins you don’t want in order to draw some you do want. Easy to learn, strategic to play and one you can throw in your handbag/glove box and take to play anywhere/
The art on this is lovely and it’s a total steal for 7GBP / 9USD.
https://kickstarter.com/projects/brouhahagames/pumpkin-patch-bad-seeds
]]>Since Gen Con is less than a week away I've put together a trimmed down version of Board Game Geek's Gen Con 2018 Preview which is a little easier to navigate and search. Gen Con's Exhibition Hall Map is available to view now.
What are you on the lookout for?
]]>In the box you get:
Shuffle the terrain cards and place the deck with terrain side up, place the crater cards in a pile next to it.
The player boards are double sided, meaning you can play with or without each klans special ability. Place them with the appropriate side up, take a buggy of your chosen colour and place the matching marker into the space on your player board. Each player takes three dice and again, places them in the appropriate space of their player board. Place the vehicles randomly in a line next to each other at one end of the table. Place one terrain card in front of each buggy and on extra on each side. So, in a four player game you will have a row of six cards, three players five cards or two players four cards. Make sure you have room either side as this can easily get much wider!
Finally, deal five cards to each player making sure that you only ever see the terrain side, but your opponents can see the other side - the attack side.
As soon as all players are ready everyone will throw their dice simultaneously, and this is where it gets crazy! Everyone can roll or reroll as many or as few dice as much as they want to get the desired results. However, as soon as one player is happy with what they have and placed them in their panel, they shout ‘WAAAGH!’ and everyone else must stop rolling their dice and be left with what they have! At this point, players are allowed to hide their dice rolls and arrange them strategically without everyone else being able to see them. The player who shouted gets to have their turn first, then play proceeds clockwise round the table. So, let’s have a look at what the dice can get you!
Draw Cards: Simply put, draw two cards from the terrain deck. Add them to your hand without looking at the attack side.
The Eye of Mork: Ask any other player to tell you how many firing cards you have in your hand - they must tell the truth!
Swerve to the Right/Left: Move your buggy to the card that is diagonally right or left. As you move you must place three terrain cards in front of the buggy. One directly in front and one on either side of that.
Klan Ability: If you are playing with Klan abilities, use the action shown on your player board.
Dakka: Attack another players buggy or try to destroy a terrain card.
You must always use all your dice and you must use them in the order you placed them.
To attack after rolling a Dakka, you can choose to attack another players buggy or a terrain card. You can make multiple attacks in the same turn, even on the same target!
To attack a buggy, first declare who you are going to hit. Then choose two cards from your hand and place them, attack side up on the table. If both are Firing cards, your attack was successful, the target vehicle receives a flame token. If you revealed a Problems card, your weapon backfires on you and you place a flame token on your buggy. If you reveal an Explosion card, it all went horribly wrong, discard your entire hand. It is possible to reveal a Problems and an Explosion card, in which case, take both effects!
Attacking terrain works in a similar manner, except you only reveal one card. Problem and Explosion cards have the same effect on you. If you reveal a Firing card, place a crater card on top of the terrain you attacked. Any player entering that space will have to lose two cards!
Oh, and talking of terrain cards, let’s look at them!
Open Terrain: Keep on truckin’ (should that be buggyin’ - not sure that works?) Just keep on moving without any problems, if you have multiple Swerve die you could potentially move three spaces with these cards.
Squig Stampede: Your buggy becomes a tasty snack for wild squigs! Lose one card.
Hidden Scrap Materials: Oh goody, free stuff! It’s buried under dust and dirt so you can’t quite make out what it is though. Draw the shown number of cards without looking at the attack side of the cards.
Junk Materials: Oh, more free stuff! This time it’s not buried so you can see exactly what you’re getting. Drawn the shown number of cards, but this time you get to look at the attack side.
Puddle: Nice cooling water (well, green slime!) This will help cool down your buggy and remove one flame counter.
Warp Clouds: The Ork Weirdboyz obviously think the race isn’t exciting enough so they come along and add a bit of chaos to it! This simple spell confuses the drivers, meaning the player to hit this space gets to take one card of their choice from each opponent.
If, at any point in the game, you end up with over five cards in your hand you must immediately discard down. If your poor little buggy ends up with three flame counters at any point, you must stop racing to put out the flames before it is destroyed! You must discard your entire hand and skip your next turn, if this happens mid-way through a turn just stop there. Before you roll your next dice, you can discard two flame counters and draw a card.
The game ends when one buggy makes it to the seventh row of cards. The round is played out. If there is only one buggy on the last row, they are the winner (even if they have three flame tokens!) If there is more than one buggy in the last line of cards, the player with the fewest flame counters is the winner, if there is still a tie, the player with the most firing cards in hand wins as they use them all to blow up their opponent!
Gretchinz is a fast, fun and furious little game. The mayhem that comes with the real-time dice rolling is a small glimpse into the chaotic world of Orks. The theming is spot-on and stays true to it’s 40k roots. Certainly a silly filler for skirmish game fans.
]]>Look what what arrived this morning thanks the not-at-all chirpy DPD delivery driver (other couriers are available). My first unboxing video, and I'm quite excited about this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML8eR45rdwE
There are a lot of artists now involved with Dixit as there are many versions and expansions available, but it was Marie Cardouat who did the original. She is probably my favourite of the current artists and I will always pick up the expansions with her artwork. Each player has six cards, taking it in turns they will be the ‘storyteller’ for the round. They choose a card from their hand, place it face-down on the table and makes up a phrase or sentence that best describes their card. Each other players chooses a card from their hand that matches that phrase and gives it to the storyteller. All the cards get shuffled and then laid face up on the table. All players except the storyteller, then places bets on which card they think the storyteller originally put in. If everyone or no one guessed correctly, the storyteller doesn’t score. If some people guessed right, they and the storyteller get points.
The thing I love so much about these cards is the amount of details you see as you look deeper into them. What one person sees won’t be the same as someone else which is what makes this game a great family favourite.
I played the original High Society a few years back. I enjoyed it, but didn’t feel the need to rush out and grab a copy. This year, Osprey Games republished it with stunning new artwork from Medusa Dollmaker and I knew now was the time to grab it! High Society is one of those great games you can pick up and start playing in five minutes. Each player starts with a set number of cards all in the same denominations. They then use these cards to bid for luxury items such as champagne and couture that are all valued between 1 and 10. Also in the deck are disgrace cards which players bid to not take and prestige cards that will help bump your end game score. However, be wary of bidding too high for anything in this game as the player with the least amount of their starting money left at the end of the game is out of the scoring.
The new, beautiful art deco style artwork accentuates and compliments this very clever little game, the art is now as elegant as the gameplay is!
I try not to talk about hard to get games, but no list of gorgeous games would be complete without this beautiful Art Nouveau design from Alexandre Roche. Players take on the role of architects in the 19th century trying to achieve the most successful building. You can also create works of art to increase your score. This worker placement game has a modular board, however, not all players will have access to all areas of it each turn. Actions may cost you money or may cause you to lose workers. At the end of the round players gain prestige or coins depending on where they have placed their workers during the round.
There’s a lot to this game and it is the heaviest one on this list for sure. Yet this is one of the few solid Euros that really plays on theme and illustration to draw you into the game. I joke a lot about theme and artwork as in the heavier end of gaming there are few that combine the two. This is one game that does it beautifully!
Everything about this game is beautiful! From the name (which is the earthy scent produced when it rains on dry soil), through to the concept and then the artwork from Sami Laakso and Daniella Attard. Plays take on the role of clouds, floating around and watering plants. You do this by using the cards in your hand that are weather actions - wind, rain, sun or frost. Each card has a specific action and then allows you to vote on which weather condition will occur at the end of the round. If a harvest occurs at the end of a round, players get points for having the majority of water droplets on plants, but you need to make it rain and get those raindrops out the clouds! Petrichor is one of those games where you constantly need to plan moves well ahead of time and execute the perfect strategy despite it’s calming theme.
Art and theme go perfectly hand in hand here with this delightful, yet deceptive game.
We love a bit of push your luck! While the mechanisms in Celestia aren’t very different to other games out there, the beautiful artwork from Gaetan Noir ensures this hits the table regularly.
All players start with their pawns in the airship, ready to fly across the beautiful cities of Celestia. Players start with cards in hand and take it in turns to pilot the ship (complete with rotating propeller!) They roll the dice and see if they can match them with the cards in their hand. Before they declare of they can match, all the other players decide to trust them and stay on the ship or bail out. If you exit you are guaranteed the points from exploring the current city, however the captain could keep that ship flying to the next city for bigger points, or crash and burn, leaving you with nothing to show for your adventures!
The beautiful, evocative art truly makes this feel like a flight of fantasy across the clouds.
We all know that art has no effect on gameplay, however, a beautiful looking
box will stand out on a shelf and make you more likely to buy it in the first
place. The enjoyment you can get from nice board game artwork is similar to the
enjoyment you can get from looking at a piece of fine art. Sometimes theme and
artwork can feel very pasted on and detatched from a game, however, I feel
these five games are all great examples on the art complimenting and helping
the game feel more immersive.
What is your favourite board game art / artists? Lets know in the comments.
https://www.thecompleatstrategist.com/
In their own words "...Established in 1975, New York's gaming headquarters for four decades, called by many a 'gaming mecca' and a must-see spot in NYC, located around the corner from the Empire State Building, with additional locations in PA & VA..."
]]>In the box, you get:
Each player chooses a colour and takes the appropriate pieces - peacock, tokens and confidence cards all in their chosen colour. Put all other player pieces back in the box.
Prepare the deck of feather cards according to the number of players:
Shuffle up the remaining feather cards. Choose a starting player and give them the token. You are now ready to begin the game.
Deal out eight cards to each player. However, do NOT look at your cards! Over the course of this game you will get to see everyone elses cards except your own. Place the remaining cards to one side. Turn over the top card of the deck, this will be the trump colour for the round. Each player places their cards, facing outwards into their peacock so all opponents can see the colours and numbers on each card.
Next comes the bidding phase. In this phase, players will bid on how many tricks they think the other players will win this round. Begin with the starting player as the person being bid on. That player does not participate in the bidding on themselves. Players take their bidding tokens and secretly decide how many to bid, putting that number into their fist. When everyone is ready they reveal their tokens and place them in front of the person that was being bid on. Go round the table with everyone placing bids on the other players. Finally, all players individually bid on themselves. All bids on each player are placed in front of them. Any left over tokens should be placed behind your peacock as they will not be taken into account during the round.
After all bids have been placed, each player secretly chooses one of their confidence cards and places it face down on the table to be revealed at the end of the round. You should play the confidence card that represents the bet you trust the most. At the end of the round, these cards will score you 3 points if they are correct or minus one if you were wrong. If you are unsure about your bids, you can chose the ‘no confidence’ card which will always get you one point!
Now to play your tricks! Remember me saying this didn’t play like any other trick taking game? Well, as you can’t see your own cards, you will be playing cards from the hand of the person sat to your left. Players only ever play cards from the player on their lefts hand!
The start player starts off by playing any card from their ‘hand’
The rules for playing tricks are as follows:
The first card may be any card the player chooses
If able, all other cards must follow the colour of the first card played
If there are no cards of that colour you may play any other, either a trump card or another colour
The card can be any number
The trick is complete after every player has played one card. It is won by either the highest value card of the lead colour or else the highest value trump card. The important thing to note here is the winning player is the person who originally owned the card ie. the person whose peacock the card came from and NOT the player who played the card.
Multicoloured cards are only ever one of the three depicted colours. If they are played as the starting card, the player who placed it declares what colour it is. If it is played during the round it is considered the colour of the lead card if possible.
After the trick is won, the player who won it becomes the start player and gets to place the starting card for the round. After eight tricks everyone should have naked peacocks and scoring for the round starts.
Each player looks at how many tricks they took and how many tokens the other players bid on them. If the bet was correct, the player who placed it scores two points, if the bet was out by one (higher or lower) the player scores one point. If it was a bad bet, that is the bet was out by two or more, then the player scores zero.
Then score the confidence cards, if you placed a correct bet on that colour player, recieve three points. If your bet was out, by even one, then lose a point. If you placed a ‘no-confidence’ card then score one point. Mark the scores on the score sheet provided and begin the round again by shuffling all the cards and dealing eight out to each player.
Pikoko is played over three rounds with the end of round scores being totalled up to find the winner!
]]>In the box you get:
Place all the magical sand tokens into the cloth bag. Shuffle up the dream cards and place a circle of face-up cards in the middle of the table. The number will depend on your number of players - 16 for two players, 21 for three players or 24 for four players. Put the rest of the deck aside for now. Shuffle the discovery cards and put them to one side, then shuffle the goal cards and deal one to each player, put the rest back in the box. You may look at your goal card but keep it hidden from the other players.
Choose a start player. The second player draws one random magical sand token from the bag, the third player draws two and fourth player draws three. These are kept face down in front of you during the game, so other players know how many tokens you have but not what dream components are on them. The player who will be going last places one of the dream pendulums between two cards of their choice, the other one is placed opposite it. You are now ready to play.
The game is played over three rounds with a scoring phase at the end of each round.
Dream cards are related to three different themes, Fairy Tale, Underwater, and Space. Each has between one and three different dream particles on it. A dream particle is an image that relates to the dream card it is on. For example, the astronaut will only be found on the space-themed dream cards. The number of stars on the right-hand side of each card indicates how many points it is worth at the end of the game. If, instead it has a question mark symbol, this means you may draw a discovery card when you place it.
However, there are also nightmare cards! These are a special type of dream card that is not related to any of the themes, however, they have six particles all from different themes so can be really handy. At the end of the game though, you will lose the number of points as indicated on the right-hand side of the card.
During your turn, you may do two or three actions. You must move one of the dream pendulums and take a card and you must then add that card to your dream. Also in your turn, you may add a dream particle to a card on your dream.
You should choose one of the pendulums and move it in a clockwise direction to the card you wish to take. You may choose either of the pendulums to move. The first three cards are always free to take. Each card after that will cost you magical sand tokens, eg the fourth card one token, the fifth card two and so on. You choose which tokens to lose ad these get dropped back into the bag. However, if you take one of the first three cards you will gain tokens. The next card to you gives you two tokens and the second card gives you one token. You must then place the card you have just taken into your dream.
At the start of the game, you haven’t started building your dream so just place your first card in front of you. After that cards must get added to the rightmost point in any layer of a dream. If both cards contain a matching dream particle the dream is considered unbroken. However, if there is not a match, the dream is broken. Draw a random token from the bag and place it face down between the two cards. This dream is now broken and these cards won’t score you so well at the end of the game.
Each dream can have three layers. The deeper the dream card is, the more points you score for it. Cards on the second layer will score you twice their points worth and cards on the third layer three times. To deepen your dream, place a card under the first unbroken pair of cards on the higher level (your finished dream will be a triangle with the point closest to you) Cards on deeper layers may or may not be the same theme as the cards above them but must always be placed under unbroken dreams.
You may also add a sand token to a card. Before you take a card, you may place one of your tokens onto one of the right most cards in your dream. That dream card now counts as having that dream particle until the end of the game.
The round ends if one of the following occurs:
In both cases, the active player finishes their turn and the round ends. Reset the circle as you did at the start of the game. The person to the right of the player who took the last turn gets to place the dream pendulums and the player to the left is the starting player for the next round. Don’t take any extra sand tokens at the start of these rounds.
After three rounds, scoring occurs. All players get victory points for the sum of stars on dream cards in the first layer of their dream, the sum of stars on their cards in the second layer multiplied by two and the sum of star multiplied by three for the third layer of their dream. Any cards that have breaks aren’t multiplied and will just score you the number of stars depicted on the card. Each discovery card in your hand scores you one point. Then check your goal card, each time that dream particle appears on a card in your dream (not on sand tokens) score one victory point.
After that, deduct the negative points for your nightmares, not forgetting to multiply them if they are on a deeper layer of the dream. The player with the most points wins, in the case of a tie the player with the most tokens left wins.
On the surface, Somnicum looks pretty simple, but it is a decidedly thinky game. There may be a few cards you want but you need to work out when is the right to take them, if other players might take them before you can and what order you want them in. I also love the way the tokens become a form of currency in your choosing phase, gaining or losing those tokens can be a hard choice at times. The colour choices in this game are weird, wonderful and work perfectly! Each dream theme has its own colour scheme that is not only beautiful and psychedelic but totally evocative of the scene it is portraying. This is one of those games I’d see being played at a Con and have to ask about because it’s so striking. The gameplay is simple but definitely has some thoughtful decisions to be made. The main criticism I have of this game is tablespace, it is a hog. Having the cards in a circle then needing room for a three-layered pyramid for each player means you need space and lots of it for this game. Though this feels like a pretty minor gripe for what is a solid, fun game!
Review copy provided by Gaga Games
]]>A walkaround for UK Games Expo 2018, a quick idea just to get a feel of what UKGE is and how big it is. Even then, this was by no means everything.
]]>Photos taken over the course of the weekend at UK Games Expo at Birmingham NEC. The UKs biggest gaming event 1st - 3rd June 2018
View the UKGE 2018 gallery on I Play Red's Facebook Page
Right, there is a ton of stuff in this box! (this is a prototype version so final Kickstarter contents may differ!)
Give each player a Nightlancer card and the associated pieces (3 status tokens, 4 action tokens, an ideal slider and a turn summary card) Then check your Nightlancer card for your starting bonuses (health, resolve, money, starting black market and opportunity cards and starting ideal position)
So, the Sniper starts with a silenced rifle and the agenda ‘buy your life back’, two contact cards and two opportunity cards. Five health, six resolve, four ideals and three chips as shown in the picture below. Also, each character has a special ability shown in the bottom right of their card and some cool flavour text on the back.:
Shuffle the contact deck, the black market deck and the opportunity deck and place them in their separate piles at the side of the board. The black market deck is gear that will help you build up your character and help you on missions. The opportunity cards are either skills which will help you power up or are agendas, which are achievements for you to complete, rewarding you in the process. The contact cards can be used in a variety of ways, sometimes an agenda will ask you to discard a specific contact, they will also have an ability that will allow you to draw cards. Then they will have a choice of ability that can be activated in the mission phase. Either you can discard them to help you complete a challenge or they can be used to obstruct other players.Shuffle the high and low profile mission decks and place them on the other side of the board. Shuffle the late round event cards, randomly draw four and place them on the spot marked round cards on the board, then do the same with the early round event cards, placing them on top. The game is played over eight rounds and an event card will be revealed at the start of each so this is your round tracker for the game. Decide the order of play and put one of each players status tokens on the appropriate spot on the turn order track, place another at zero on the prospect track and the final one on the zero of the heat track. Fill the appropriate spaces on the board with black market cards, depending on the number of players. Ensure all tokens are within easy reach. You are now ready to begin playing.
In each round, other than the first, all players gain one health, one resolve and draw two contact cards. Loan interest is also paid, pay one to the bank or else lose three health and three resolve.
Turn over the top card of the event deck and draw the number of high and low profile missions it indicates. These will be the missions players can choose from this round. But before anyone can look at missions, players must complete the event challenge. Challenges all work in the same way, be they on events or missions. A skill will be shown along with a number, roll one of the challenge dice and add that to your skill. If you get equal or higher than the number, congratulations, you have succeeded. If it is lower, you have lost and must suffer the penalty shown on the card.
After the event card for the round has been resolved players will take it in turns to choose which mission they want to go on this round. Starting with the first player, players place their Nightlancer token on the first space on the mission board they want to attempt this round. Other players can take on the same mission, either cooperatively, by becoming part of your crew or competitively by placing on the ‘second crew’ space. We’ll come back to missions during the Mission Phase of the turn.
This is essentially the worker placement part of the game and were you will kit up ready to undertake the mission you chose during the prep phase. Most spots on the board (indicated with a circle) can only take one worker, however, there are a few that any number of workers can go on. These are Hard Work: discard one resolve and one health to gain a chip, Rest Up: take one resolve or one health and Cover Tracks: discard a card to reduce our heat by one.
Black Market spots are attached to two cards. Choose one of these cards to buy, paying the cost at the top right and discard the other card. All the spots on the board are indicated by colour. The black market spots are blue. Dealing with the Euromafia are the red spots, here you can take out a loan, simply place a marker here, take ten money and a loan chip, but don’t forget to pay your interest at the start of every round! Or, you can buy prospects at the cost marked on this rounds event card. The green spaces allow you to take one money, the yellow let you draw one contact card, the purple let you play an opportunity card from your hand. There are also mixed spots on the board, these let you choose which action you want to take but will give you one heat. All actions are taken as workers are placed. Once everyone has placed all of their workers, it is time to move onto…..
Before going onto your mission choose three pieces of kit you want to take with you. Place these in the Loadout spaces above your Nightlancer card. Note that some missions will not allow you to use ‘noisy’ or ‘obvious’ pieces of kit. Each stage of a mission offers you a choice of two routes to attempt, though the penalty for failing is always the same. Each stage is a challenge that should be dealt with the same way as the event challenge at the start of the round. Failing an individual challenge does not mean your mission is over, take the penalty and continue, though you can choose not to continue with a mission after any stage. After each stage of a mission is complete, move your token along and continue to the next challenge. If you are part of a cooperative crew all players make their roll and the highest score determines if the crew succeeds or not. If they fail, all crew members face the consequences. If the crew completes the whole mission, take the rewards as indicated on the right hand side of the mission card. If competing crews are attempting a mission, then the first crew attempts the challenge first. If they succeed, they move onto the next stage, again, in the first crew position. If they fail, they move on, but onto the second crew spot instead. If both crews are still on the mission when they reach phase three they must ‘face-off’. The first crew chooses how they want to fight, melee, gunfight or marksman. The second crew must decide to accept the challenge or abandon the mission. If they accept the challenge, the first crew rolls a die and adds it to their chosen score, this is what the second crew must now beat. The loser of the challenge must drop out of the mission, but also lose five health.
If, at any point, a player runs out of health they must move their token to the ‘shaken’ box on the board. They may restore full health and resolve but will be unable to go on a mission next round.
After all missions have been resolved, players take back their nightlancer tokens (unless they are shaken) and all mission cards are discarded.
Turn order for the next round is determined by players position on the heat track. The player with the least heat will go first. If players are tied on the heat track the previous order is reversed. Players must then discard their hands down to six and a new round can begin.
The player with the most prospects wins! In the case of a tie, the player with the most money wins.
As I said at the start. This is by far the nicest prototype of a game I've ever seen. Things like, for starters, the split-lid box (like Lords of Waterdeep) indicates a real attention to detail that is consistent throughout the whole game. When we sat down to play we chose our characters through colour rather than anything else. Three out of the four characters we'd chosen were women, all of whom were armoured as much as the men, and still looked like they could kick arse. The colours on the black background provide a vivd contrast and were easy to read (black backgrounds can be problematic). Nightlancer is a very well thought out game with good mechanics. However, the fact that all challenges work in the same way means that the game can seem quite repetetive and at 8 rounds that felt a bit too much. Of the very few criticism I have, I'd have to say that the ideals / agendas scoring felt a little superfluous since the highest score you can get is 3 and only one of us scored anything (ie. 1 point) and seemed a lot of work through the course of the game for small to no benefit at the end. I feel that this game is a few tweaks away of being something truly special.
Adversity Games will be at UK Games Expo so we encourage you to go and check it out and make up your own mind. Nightlancer is now live on Kickstarter.
Mentions
Advertsity Games in development games
Summoner's Isle is a game by first time designer Robert Munn, and uses area control, dice rolling and player combat mechanics to dominate the island of Thule. UK Games Expo is a soft launch so there will only be a limited number of 45 copies available prior to the full Kickstarter launch.
Summoner's Isle
Facebook Page
Robert Munn's website
Spice Road was the big hit at UK Games Expo 2017. The second games in the Century series Eastern Wonders will be a standalone as well as an expansion to Spice Road. Will this be another hit securing Plan B's place position as one of the hottest new games companies on the scene.
A nice surprise hit for me, I only expected a little nostalgia and to re-live Fighting Fantasy. But the simplicity and style is captivating and engaging, and we are still yet to beat it. Story telling, dice rolling dungeon
crawler in the style of Choose Your Own adventure books. There are three new expansions planned and coming to Kickstarter soon.
James Hayball is a well-established artist working with multiple game development companies many of which will also be exhibiting at the show including Bezier (upcoming project), Triple Ace Games (Leagues of Cthulhu / Leagues of Gothic Horror: Guide to Mordavia), and Psychic Cactus Games (Is it a plane?) to name a few. Grab theses games at the show and pop by if you want them signed by the man himself who will also have awesome prints and playmats available to buy.
James Hayball Art
Facebook page
James talks to Rogues Gallery Games
Despite it's simplicity, the Ticket to Ride series remains a firm favourite for us. This latest installment is set in 1960s New York, streamlining the game and trading cabs for trains. This will available to demo only at this stage with a full release planned later in the year.
5 Minute Chase is an asymmetrical tile laying game where all players are constantly active either chasing or running away giving a real sense of pursuit in this quick high pressure experience.
Many games offer an augmented experience with an external app and in an age where we want to keep devices from gaming tables, when in Rome offers something different with an Amazon Alexa enabled board game. The first Voice Originals game is a geography based trivia game. I would honestly say that the game does not instantly jump out at me, but the technology is certainly an intriguing turn and I'd love to see what else they have planned with this unique platform.
Voice Originals website
Sensible Object website
Their Essen release Mini Rails is up for the popular choice award at UKGE and it's great to see more unusual titles being put forward for this award. I had hoped to pick up Tulip Bubble also at Essen 2017, but it had unfortunately sold out so I am hoping to pick this up on their rare outing to the UK.
I was very intrigued by Mini Park by these guys, and I'll be taking a look at that. But, while looking at their catalogue I realised they also have this game. Not only is it about cats, but currency in the game is
fish and booze - I’m in! Need I say more.
Adversity are bursting on the scene with their first game Nightlancer, which has clearly been some time in the making. Walkthrough coming soon.
Advertsity Games
NightLancer Walkthrough
Big Potato have been around a while and continue to produce fun casual games for all ages.
Big PotatoBlue Orange has a huge hit with Kingdomino at UK Games Expo last year, followed by Photosynthesis at Essen. With another of their games, Panic Mansion, being nominated for Kinderspiele award this year. I caught up with them Spielwarenmesse in February and saw plenty more in the works, I am really looking forward to seeing what their next hit is going to be.
Blue Orange
Spielwarenmesse
Gallery
Photosynthesis Walkthrough
Kingdomino
Walkthough
Panic
Mansion Walkthrough
With Ice Cool being Brain Games' huge hit with adults and children alike and the winner of Kinderspiel des Jahres 2017, and it's sequel Ice Cool 2 will be being demoed over the weekend. They continue to bring us quality games such as Doodle Rush, Game of Trains and Om Nom Nom.
Doodle Rush Walkthrough
Mostly known for their One Night range, they are also known for their big box titles such as New York Slice and Castles of Mad King Ludvig. Having created a thinky Pizza game I can't wait for a vegan doner kebab worker placement game.
Bezier Games
Werewords
New York
Slice Legacy
They will be releasing their first game, Last One In through Kickstarter in the build up to the Expo. This local (Brighton based) designer is one to watch. A full walkthrough is coming soon.
City Gate Games
Last One In
Walkthrough
Devir has something for every with a full range of games from lightweight card games to euro-games. Looking forward to seeing their re-issue of Phil Walker-Harding's Dungeon Raiders.
Devirhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqPIFfBMPrc
We had the pleasure of meeting these awesome guys at Spielewarenmesse, play their prototype of Darwinning! ahead of it's fulfilment through Kickstarter. We played their prototype and the version going into production is stunning. Also check out the dungeon crawler Perdition's Mouth which is on it's 2nd Edition and of course Tiinaliisa's dwarven persona.
Dragon Dawn
Productions
Darwinning! Walkthrough
Re-launching on Kickstarter soon, this is their 2nd appearance at UK Games
Expo. Grab a demo of this vehilcular game of mayhem, but don't crash and
burn.
Wreck And Ruin
Wreck And
Ruin Walkthrough
Wreck And Ruin Trailer
Yet another talented local designer, the dystopian Oligarchy contains adult themes and plenty of take-that play. While it is not a new game, it's certain deserves recognition.
Entropic GamesA name everyone knows for different reasons and with a whole host of titles under their belt. We love so many of their games that you should always checkout what's coming up especially if you're a fan of their Star Wars, Netrunner, Arkham Horror or Game of Thrones titles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muW_ZoJYAKg
While I won't be working for them at this show you should still check them out. This year they have a large gaming area where you can try out lots of their Kickstarter exclusive games that they have for sale.
Games QuestThey make games that are Ore-Some. Ha Ha. Well their two titles at the moment Carcosa and Ore-Some and you will certainly be able to check them out and even a teaser of their new offering Micro-Brewery which is coming to Kickstarter soon.
One Free ElephantThey will be demoing Villagers by Haakon Gaarder which is currently funded and continuing to do well on Kickstarter. Also checkout their other game Great Scott by Dave Clark and their removable sticker sets for Gloomhaven.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgvflbuWmc0
After phenomenal success with City of Kings, the 2nd Edition is currently on Kickstarter with the chance to also purchase the ultra-cute Vadoran Gardens which expands the City of Kings Universe.
City of Games
Vadoran Gardens playthrough
Ghostel expansions (Ghostel: Weird Guests & More Ghosts!) and other goodies are available on Kickstarter at the moment and I know more is in the works so you should go and speak to them about their upcoming untitled project. They are also running the 24Hr Game Design Hackathon, which I will be on the judging panel for over the weekend.
Tinkerbot Games
Ghostel: Weird Guests & More Ghosts!
24 Hour Game
Design Hackathon
Ghostel
Walkthrough
They will be at UK Games Expo, even though Exploriana has been temporarily cancelled on Kickstarter. They create fun, thematic, quick and easy card games such as Cadaver or Halfling Feast and the wonderful Ironclads: Space Battles in the Victorian Aether.
Triple Ace Games
Exploriana Walkthrough
In the box you will get:
Any additional stretch goals that may be reached during the campaign!
Start by separating the building cards from the rest of the deck. Shuffle these up and deal out two to each player. Shuffle the rest of the cards (the town cards) and deal three to each player. Place the decks at opposite sides of the table. Draw five cards from the town deck and place them face up in the middle.
Decide start player.
Each players turn consists of six phases, some of these are compulsory and there will be times you will be unable to do some of them.
The game ends when one player has fifty civilians in safe houses or if one player has one hundred zombies in their zombie pile.
There are five different card types in Last One in, all with their own function. Within each type there are some special cards with extra abilities, so make sure to read each card text when you draw them!
Building cards - These have a capacity value on the top right of the card that tells you how many civilians it can hold. When you reach exactly that number the building (and civilians in it) is considered safe. There will also be a ‘choose or draw’ effect at the top of the card. Your open building determines how many cards you can draw that round.
Civilian cards - The number on the top right tells you how many civilians this card represents. There are quite a few civilian cards that have special abilities, so remember to check for these!
Zombie cards - The number on the top right tells you how many zombies this card represents. Some of these cards have effects that trigger when they enter the card row, some when they are played and some can even be used as a response to attacks.
Civilian/Zombie cards - These are dual purpose cards that can be used as either type, depending on what you need at the time. Once they come into play as one type they stay as that type for the rest of the game.
Neutralisation cards - Again, these are a dual purpose card that can be used in multiple ways. The ‘Defender’ half of the card can be used to remove zombies from your zombie pile or used as a civilian card. The ‘Lurker’ half can be used on an opponent's open building to force them to lose civilians or else can be used as a zombie card.
Although primarily designed as a two player game, Last One in works well as a three or four player competitive game (with slight tweaks from the rulebook) or as a four-player 2 vs 2 game.
Let’s face it, the zombie genre has been done to death. However, Last One In offers something original. The multiple ways to win something different and the card synergy is, at all times, elegant. With beautifully detailed artwork from Aaron Howdle, this is a KickStarter to watch out for!
Launching at the end of the month, Last One In will also be available to demo at UK Games Expo 31st May - 3rd June.
]]>With 17 days to go until UK Games Expo. Here's the full list of the 352 Exhibitors that will be at the show. Games designers, retailers, well established and indie games companies. Checkout some old games and new and games in varying degrees of completion. Checkout some prototypes of some of those Kickstarters you're backing or damn well should be. There's so much here that you're going to have to get there early to make sure you can see it all. Who's on your list already?
]]>Doxie Dash is a card drafting game for between 2 and 6 people that takes around 20 minutes to play.
In the box you get:
Separate the hero cards from the rest of the deck. Shuffle the cards and draw cards from the deck until a player draws a poo card. This player will get to choose their hero first. They pass the remainder to the left and so on until everyone has one. Each hero has a special item and a special ability so choose wisely! Place them face up on the table in front of you. You will keep your hero for the duration of the game, so any leftovers go back in the box.
Shuffle up the deck and deal eleven cards to all players. Each player chooses a card and when everyone has picked, places it in front of themselves and passes the remainder to the left. Continue to pick and pass until each player has eleven cards in front of them. After all cards have been drafted, players have the opportunity to trade in any undesirable cards. Starting with player one, discard cards you do not want and draw up the same number from the top of the deck.
Then total up your score, not forgetting your hero’ bonus item and ability and mark it on the score pad. The game ends at the end of a round where one or more players reaches a hundred points.
There are loads of combos and sets to collect in Doxie Dash, a lot of which will be painfully familiar to any pet owner! Ever had your skivvies dragged out in front of everyone during that posh dinner party you were hosting? Well here, that’ll get you points! Skivvies come in three types: socks, pants and bra, they will give you 1,5 or 12 points if you get the different types.
Poop on the floor gets you points, but poop on the rug gets you even more points!
This game is silly, but recognises the eternal struggles that every pet owner deals with! The hero powers keep gameplay constantly changing, meaning while this game is easy enough for anyone to pick up and play, advanced players have enough strategy to keep them equally engaged. There are teams play and tournament play options in the back of the rulebook to keep it even fresher. The 8-bit artwork is obviously, just adorable and there is even a pledge level to get your dog in the game as a hero.
]]>We caught up with Frank from City of Games at AireCon 5, Harrogate UK. We're looking at gameplay for Vadoran Gardens and talking in general about the City of Games universe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgvflbuWmc0
The Kickstarter for The City of Kings: Ancient Allies and Vadoran Gardens is now live
]]>Exploriana is set in the late 19th Century. Vast new continents are now open to explorers, containing treasures, new species of plants and wild animals. You are one of those explorers, however, beware, for the more exploring you do, the richer you become but the more hazards you will face!
Exploriana is a 2-5 player game that takes between 45 and 60 minutes to play. Accumulate the most points to win. This will be through exploring the various regions on the board, but beware the perils!
This is a prototype copy so component quantities and quality will differ from the finished version, but ours came with:
Put the board in the middle of the table and have each player take a player board, a set of explorer tokens and six coins. Place everyone's renown marker on zero with the starting players on the top of the stack. Shuffle each deck of discovery cards and place them on the matching region. Turn over the top two cards from each deck and place them overlapping on the board so you can see the icons on each card.
Then prepare the auction decks depending on the number of players. With five players have four decks of four cards, four players have three decks of five cards and two or three players have three piles of six cards. Put any remaining cards back in the box as they will not be used this game. Place a random lost explorer token on the top most spot of each region, face down, and put the rest to the side for now, also keeping them face down.
At the start of a turn, each player takes two coins. Then the auction phase will start, beginning with the player on the highest renown and working down to the player with the lowest. Turn the top card of each stack over. Then players will take turns selecting an item for auction. The player who chose the item gets the first bid, go clockwise round the table and everyone gets one bid for the item. The player who wins it then pays their coins and puts the item face up next to their board. In four or five player games not everyone will get a chance to select an item for auction, though they will get a chance to bid.
After the auctions have happened, players will start exploring! (that’s what we’re here for, after all!)
In renown order (highest to lowest) players take turns placing one of their explorers on the top most space in their chosen region. In a 2-3 player game three spaces are available in each region and in a 4-5 player game four spaces are available. Once all players have placed, explorations can begin.
Turns start in South America, then Africa, and lastly the Far East. Working from the top to the bottom of each area, players may take any or all of the following actions:
Use an item, discarding it for any effect and place it with any cards removed from play.
Pay two coins to the supply an place a guide so it covers one of the hazards shown on a face up card in that region. This action can only be used once per exploration.
Turn over the top card of the region deck and place it face up so it overlaps the previous cards on the row.If after taking the explore action, there are either three different hazards or three hazards the same, your explorer is ‘lost’. Place a random lost explorer token on the topmost space in this region. Return any guides you placed and take two coins back from the bank. Shuffle all cards back into the region deck and reveal the top two. Return the explorer back to the player who receives nothing this turn. You can, at any point, decide to stop exploring and take cards from the display. Take either all the animal cards revealed in the display, any one non-animal card or a lost explorer token. You may turn over up to a total of five cards. If you manage to get a full row of five cards without becoming lost, you may take two picks. Take your cards and place them face down in front of you. If cards give you renown or coins, take that immediately. Any lost explorers that you take give you a choice of renown or coins as well as the end-game points shown on the reverse.
Always restock the region so it has two cards showing before the next explorer sets off on their adventures!
At the end of a round, if any of the region decks or the auction decks are empty, the game ends. Use an explorer pawn to count end game points. Points are awarded for:
Renown: Players are awarded points for placing on the renown track. First place always gets twelve points, and depending on the number of players points are awarded accordingly (there is a chart on each player board)
Coins: Score one VP for every two coins you have
Lost Explorers: Score the number of points shown on the back of each token you have collected.
Locations and Treasures: These are all worth one VP as marked on the card.
Maps: The more map pieces you have, the more points you score!
Orchids: There are three colours of orchids, one for each region. Each scores you two VPs, however, each set of three you have gives you a bonus of nine VPs.
Animals: These are worth between one and three VPs as marked on the cards.
Items: These all score differently and will have instructions on the card.
The player with the most points is the winner, in the case of a tie, the player highest up the renown track gets the win!
We love a bit of push your luck here (despite me being really bad at it!) and Exploriana is no exception to the rule! The artwork is just lovely which makes for a truly engaging theme, it draws you in and makes you feel like you are an explorer on a great adventure.
My main gripes with the game are all things I think will be fixed for the final version. I don’t like the super glossy board, it squeaks when you touch it and glares a lot with too much light. The rulebook needs some tweaks and set up felt too long for what was usually quite a short game. My components were just loose in the box so a good insert will fix that and I’m sure the rulebook will be worked on before the game is considered finished. The gameplay itself always felt exciting and I also love a bit of auctioning so this ticked all the boxes for us.
Exploriana is a venture by Counters
Out - A Bristol-based company making board games that stick in the mind,
and is being launched on Kickstarter on the 24th April in collaboration with
Triple Ace Games and Chaos Publishing.
UPDATE: The
Exploriana Kickstarter campaign is now live
Mentions
Exploriana: A quarter of the way there!
Exploriana: Comments
News Flash: Dead Man's Doubloons Released, Mensa Select Winners
Announced
The cards and parts correspond to each other, there are 9 different parts and four cards and pieces of each. A better explanation of each part will be given later.
Shuffle the cards and reveal eight face up. Beginning with the start player, take turns choosing one card. Do this twice until all cards have been picked. Reveal another eight cards and choose again, do this a total of four times, so each player has eight cards. Then each player chooses the placement of their equipment into the eight available slots shown on their player board.
Place all the shield markers face down on the table, then take and place a random shield token face down on the highest shield spot of each card. Then place another one face down on the highest position of your control board. Place a power token at the 8 position om your power track (higher if you have parts that grant you extra power) Next comes the fun part! Build your weapon of mash destruction!
Grab the matching part for each card you have and insert it into your potato (other vegetables are available!) You can do this anyway you like, however stability is a good thing! Then take turns placing your potato. They must be a minimum of 18 inches apart. You are now ready for battle!
Each card has a ‘minus’ power symbol on it, this is the power you need to use in order to activate it, move your power down that many points on your track. Let’s have a look at the specific parts:
Shield Plates: Use these to absorb damage to weapons up to two spaces away.
Energiequelle: This is a mini reactor that can give you two extra points of energy a turn. However, if it gets destroyed it can blow up and damage your potato.
Treads: Great for movement, but can also be used to ram opponents.
Legs: Great for running towards or away from an enemy! You can also stomp on other potatoes!
Arms: Mostly for damaging or removing parts. However, they can also perform ‘surgery’ to remove parts and place them on your potato.
Scharfschutzengewehr: Effectively, a sniper rifle. Pick off your opponents from afar.
Kartoffel Kanone: A Medium range weapon that does great damage.
Kartoffel Knarre: If you are prepared to get up close and personal, this can do great damage.
In turn order, players use their energy to move and/or attack another player. Their turn ends either when they declare they have finished or when they run out of power. Players may use any combination of actions, including using the same item multiple times.
To attack, the player must first declare who they are attacking and what weapon they are using. Roll the D8 to determine which item you are attacking (as determined by the position on the opponents player board) Then roll the D4 and use the chart on your weapons card to determine how much damage you are dealing. When you deal damage, the defending player must move the shield token on that card down. If a player destroys a part, the attacker receives the shield token that was on the card and the part is removed from the defending potato. Any residual damage is transferred to the defenders control board. Shield tokens are kept as hidden information until the end of the game.
If a player attacks an open slot with no part, the defender receives damage directly on their player board. If the damage is at zero, the attacking player receives the shield token and the game immediately ends.
The winner is the player with the most shield token points, the loser gets to make a lovely ‘Mashed Kartoffel’ for which there is a great recipe in the rulebook!
Kartoffelkrieg is a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously (in case you hadn’t guessed!) It is also a lot of fun. However, the gameplay is actually good. It plays like a lot of tabletop miniature games and would make a great introduction to anything along those lines, but the potatoes add fun for those who see tabletop gaming as purely measuring and rolling dice. The rules are simple and everything is clearly marked on the cards. The initial drafting adds a board game element and variety to each game. And anyway, who wouldn’t want to build their own mechanised potato?!? (for those that don’t, potatoes can be substituted for any other suitable fruit or vegetable)
Kartoffelkrieg is currently available on Kickstarter here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/coreywright/kartoffelkrieg-potato-wars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYai0krC_Ec
]]>We caught up with Dave Clarke from Sinister Fish Games to playthrough Villagers followed by a quick interview.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vawNd2PEkpM
Villagers is expected to land on Kickstarter in May so hopefully this will
give a you a little taster.
Updates
Villagers is now live on Kickstarter
The creators of New York Slice have gone back to the kitchen, beaten that dough to a pulp and fashioned a glorious new dish and I think you're going to savour this edition. New York Slice Legacy takes the original game makes it 100 times more accessible to any gaming group, with no two pizzas alike, it's supporting local businesses and if you don't finish you can reheat it in the morning.
Checkout out their trailer and get your Garlic and Herb dip ready.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B6ya5WodvY
Looks great Bezier Games.
Well, it looks like we didn't make the final cut. But here's our submission video. We had fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HhU4GLTsWs
]]>Those of you who didn't attend AireCon 2018, may not know about Polyhedron Collider's two part podcast featuring a whole host of the UK's gaming media reprobates which we also took part in. We met some great people that we're hoping to collaborate with in the future, here's their podcast in full.
"...At Airecon 2018, the Polyhedron Collider Cast were joined by representatives of No Pun Included, JTR Podcast, Board Game Opinions, Unlucky Frog Gaming, Creaking Shelves, The Broken Meeple, I Play Red and the Game Pit. In front of a live audience we posed them a host of random question drawn from the hat submitted by our listeners and Airecon visitors..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXn3_DNxqDA
Mentions
Random Nerdery - AireCon 2018 - Convention Diary
AireCon 2018 - On the couch with Polyhedron Collider
I Play Red has put together our first podcast. We hope you enjoy
"...A shoddy and ill-prepared first podcast of ramblings after 3 days
away at AireCon 5 - Analog Gaming Convention in Harrogate, UK. We talk about
the con and nonsense. Lots of pictures from the con to distract you from our
mouths..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ461JVCEaU
Here's our walk around the hall to give a feel of how much more impressive AireCon has scaled since last year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W_wF1kqSjc
Mentions
]]>We've put together a quick walkthrough and gameplay video for Illusion by Wolfgang Warsch, we had a long talk with NSV (Nürnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag) at Spielwarenmesse 2018 and saw a number of excellent new releases. This is but one of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J4hYj1o8Qc
Enjoy!
Many conventions sell out quickly, If you want to go, make sure you have a ticket booked in advance. Then make sure you can get there, sounds obvious, right? Trains can be horribly expensive here in the UK and booking last minute means a flight to the US for a Con can be cheaper than a train ticket ‘up north’ for us. Hotels - a lot of the bigger conventions have limited hotels nearby, UKGE and Essen being the obvious two. You’re not going to want to be walking ten miles each day with bags of your new shiny games! (unless you happen upon a shopping cart en route, but that’s a story for another time!)
No, I don't mean a knife. Who would bring a knife to a dice fight anyway. You'll likely playing lots over a con, new games and old. Lots of conventions have tournaments, you've been honing your skills for months so bring your will to triumph, you might win a stonking prize or bag of chips (I mean fries, not chips). Also, if you’re travelling to play with people you don’t see very often you need to win to impress them, don’t let them win. Oh maybe that's why we don't see them very often?!
There are a lot of con essentials you will need to be carrying, hand sanitiser, deodorant, water, pictures of your cats (or ferrets if you're Gil Hova), games to play while you are there. You’ll also need to be able to carry away those bargains you found, as well as the cash needed to buy said ‘bargains’. There’s a tonne of stuff you will need to be lugging around all day so a good bag is essential! Here’s a little-known fact - I started powerlifting purely to carry this stuff round cons with ease. I can deadlift 90kg, carrying those three copies of Antiquity around Essen all day then back to the hotel was a breeze really!
OK, so this is excessive, but this will be my ‘camera bag’ for Airecon this weekend, picture was taken using the camera on my phone, not any of the cameras in the picture! I’m an Instagram addict so love seeing pictures of peoples games on there so please take lots. I should also point out, this is the only occasion it is acceptable to have a phone out at a gaming table. Pictures of games in progress are great as are beautiful pictures of people celebrating their triumphant wins! Looking a pictures of people's dinner while others are waiting for you to take your turn, not so cool.
This is extremely useful at any point, having a little nap in the middle of the day if you stayed up all night playing Mega Civ, TI3, 18XX or any other suitably long titles. However, it serves another great purpose! If, like our group, you have certain AP prone players, just pull out your pillow and take a nap while they are having their turn! Not only does it help with fulfilling your nap quota for the day, but it might also encourage them to hurry the hell up! Take a hint, slow boy! Zzzzzzz
What's on your convention short-list?
]]>In the box you get:
74 Cards
The game is played over three rounds, with your score from each round being totalled up to give a final score that determines the winner. Each round, the aim is to get rid of all your cards. Shuffle the deck and deal nine cards to each player (8 cards in a 5-6 player game), place the deck in the centre of the table as you may have to draw more cards during the round.
Choose a start player. They must play any number of combination of cards that equal one. So, they could simply discard a ‘1’ card or a combination of cards that equalled one eg. two ‘2’ cards and a ‘-3’. These cards are placed in a discard pile in front of that player and will be counted as points at the end of the round.
The next player then must places card(s) to tally two. Play continues in this way until the total hits twelve, then it drops back to one again. In this sample round the first player in the top left plays 1 (3 - 2), and then continuing clockwise the next players play 2, 3 and then 4.
If you cannot or do not want to play cards in your turn, you may skip and draw two new cards from the main deck. Play then continues as normal to the next player.
However, what makes Star Plus more interesting is the special cards and conditions that occur during the game.
A Black Hole is triggered when a player discards three or more cards to make a total. All players from now on must play a minimum of three cards. If a player cannot, they must draw four cards and play resumes back to normal with the next player.
Special Cards are red in colour and numbered 7, 8 and 9. They all have different abilities which are indicated by a symbol on the cards.
7 - When you discard a ‘7’, take two cards off the points pile of the person to your right and add them to your own pile.
8 - When you discard an ‘8’, take two cards off the points pile of the -person to your left and add them to your own pile.
9 - When you discard a ‘9’, reverse the order of play, For example, if you had been going clockwise, start playing in anti-clockwise order.
Zeus - The Zeus card must be played on it’s own. Play it when you wish to skip a turn, even in the case of a Black Hole, then play continues as normal.
The round ends if a player has no cards in their hand or if the last card has been drawn from the main deck. Score one point for each card in your points pile, minus one point for each card left in your hand. Get a bonus five points if you have no cards in your hand. Keep a note of your score, shuffle up the cards, deal out nine to each player and begin round two!
Play three rounds then add up the totals from all three, the player with the highest total is the winner!!
Star Plus is a great little game with a small footprint so it can easily be played on small tables eg. trains, pubs etc. The standard box is a little big for this but pop the cards in a deck box and it's super portable! I really like the simple, yet striking illustrations and the gameplay is quick and easy. It may seem fairly simple but It is deceptively hard to empty your hand at the right moment.
I Play Red is proud to present our first Walkthrough video featuring Darwinning, the evolution themed trick-taking game, here we're taking a look at the prototype version. The game went live on Kickstarter on February 24th 2018 and has already made about 35% of it's target. Check out the video and feel free to subscribe to my channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqPIFfBMPrc
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/509519175/darwinning-card-game-evolve-to-rule-the-food-chain
Dragon Dawn Productions are touring across Europe from February to June 2018, in support of their two most recent games the 2nd Edition of Perdition's Mouth and Darwinning and you can follow their journey on their blog .
The version of the game here is the prototype version, I recommend taking a look at the Kickstarter for a taster of the new look and feel. It's safe to say that on our first video we've learnt plenty of lessons that we will carry forward with our future videos. Thanks for watching.
]]>In the box you will get:
Set up the starting tiles in the appropriate places, depending on the number of players, then place random hexes to form the main board, with a total of seven hexes. Attach the round tracker to the side with the ‘1’ facing up. A 4 player game will last three rounds, 3 player five rounds and 2 player four rounds. Place a salvage token on the four red hexes on the board. Each player takes a set of vehicles, dice, as set of Faction cards (of which they choose one) and a salvage card at random from the deck. The start player sets up their vehicles in their set up area, then player two and so on, until everyone has placed.
The four Factions; The Reapers, The Ruin Army, The Desertkin and The Salvoes, all have their own skills and distinct advantages, with a back story that appears in both the rulebook, and has been expanded upon on various social media.
The aim of the game is to capture salvage tokens. Players capture one by moving a vehicle on top of it during their turn. At the start of the next players turn, all red tokens with vehicles on top are flipped to the green side, if you manage to stay there for a turn, the marker is yours and you also receive a salvage card. However, if at any point that vehicle takes damage, it will flip back over to the red side again as it is a contested site.
When a token is taken, the player whose turn it is must place another on the board so there are always four available. Roll a dice and compare the result to the round tracker - that token must now go on the hex indicated.
The player with the most salvage tokens at the end of the game wins! In case of a tie, the winner is decided by the player with the least damage points.
At the start of a turn, the top event card is revealed, these are brilliantly thematic and will usually be weather conditions that cause problems for all players, be it a sand storm reducing visibility or the sun overheating engines and restricting movement.
During your turn you have 5 action points to use. A single vehicle can only complete two of these actions and they must be different.
All actions cost one action point:
Any vehicle can spend one action point to move up to the number of hexes shown as its ‘move’ value. Turning also counts as one of these points. If you need extra movement in a turn, you may choose to use the ‘Full Throttle’ option. To attempt this, it must be the first, and only, action that vehicle takes this turn. Roll a dice and deduct the vehicles size from the result, you then get that much extra movement.
Every vehicle has a three hex range from the front. You cannot target something that is not in range or is blocked by another obstacle. Roll a number of dice equal to your vehicle's attack value. Compare each roll against the targets armour value. Each roll that is equal or higher is a hit and causes one point of damage. Any sixes count as a hit and grant you a free extra roll. Now, this is the fun part! Each vehicle has a number of small holes equal to the damage they can take - insert a number of flames into the vehicle equal to the amount of damage it has taken. This is a great idea and easily gives you a visual impression of how damaged a vehicle is!
This works in a similar way to attacking as above. Roll a number of dice equal to your armour and compare to the targets armour value. Count up the number of successes and add it to the vehicles size. However, now, the defender has a chance to block some of the damage caused. They roll a number of dice equal to their armour (minus one if rammed from the side or two if rammed from the back) Again, they compare it to the attackers armour value and any rolls equal or higher counts as success and add their vehicle size stat. The two final totals are compared. If the attacker has the higher score they may push the target into one of the three hexes behind it and takes one damage for each difference in the scores. If the defender has a higher score they were lucky this time! If they are larger than the attacker they then do one damage for the difference in size stats and neither vehicle moves.
If you are adjacent to a wreck you can choose to salvage from that wreck. The wreck is then removed from the table and you get to steal a salvage card from the player who owns the wreck. These Salvage cards can be very powerful and will either help you or hinder your opponents.
You’re going to be taking a lot of damage so repairs are a part of everyday life! Any wrecked vehicle can attempt to repair itself. Roll two dice, remove one damage for each roll equal or higher than the vehicles armour. If you roll a six, again, you get a re-roll. You may do this action as many times as you like (Action points allowing!)
In some situations vehicles are removed completely from the board. A player can choose to bring them back on in their starting area by taking this action. It returns fully damaged minus one hit. You can use extra action points to repair it (as above) but it cannot be used for the remainder of that turn.
When a vehicle takes maximum damage it will continue to travel until it comes to a halt, it can also cause damage to nearby vehicles in the process (you didn’t think this was gonna be easy now, did you?) Roll a dice to see which direction is it going to travel in, then roll a dice to see how many squares it will travel. This is where vehicles can crash and burn off the board!
The vehicles themselves are all awesome and each have their own, strengths, weaknessess and special abilities. Each player has five vehicles, two scout bikes, one buggy, one wrecker and one big rig.
Scouts - These are the fastest of all vehicles, however, they are also the most fragile!
Buggy - Not quite as fast as scouts but more armoured, they can also repair other vehicles.
Wrecker - Their job is to ram everything else off the road. They have the best armour available.
Big Rigs - These beasts are slow to move, take up two hexes on the board but can both dish out and take a serious amount of damage.
So now you know what you've got, get out there and grab those salvage tokens, causing as many wrecks and ruins as you can on the way, the route to victory will be a bloody, burning battled. The game as much about preventing your opponents from collecting salvage as securing them for yourself.
The variation of in the salvage deck, the chosen Faction ability and the random events mean that no two games will ever be the same and your strategy will constantly be changing accordingly. Once you have mastered all the basics there are several advanced variations detailed in the back of the rulebook as if things weren't hard enough. Wreck and Ruin creates an immersive and theatrical gameplay experience, which is a complete table top game in a one box.
Look out of the Kickstarter going live on the 6th March 2018. The game's designer Mark McKinnon and the Dream Big team will be demoing at Airecon in the middle of their campaign.
Please note all contents are prototype only and not the finished product
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aHkc7ON15U
UPDATE: Wreck and Ruin is now live on Kickstarter
UPDATE: Wreck and Ruin relaunched on Kickstarter and has reached target
In the box you get:
Each player chooses a hound dog investigator card and takes the matching counter. Shuffle all the score markers face down (some of these are optional rules so you can choose to play with them all or not!) Place the five clue counters in the cloth bag. Each players draws one in secret and chooses which side up they want, then places it underneath their investigator card. Shuffle up the cat suspect cards and place the deck in the middle of the table.
If you are playing with less than five players, shuffle the unused investigator cards into the bottom half of the deck.
Each clue counter has two sides that are the opposite of each other. There are five characteristics that define the identity of the Chief of Spies and each player will start the game knowing one of these. The clues are:
He is wearing a hat or not
He is wearing glasses or not
He is wearing a raincoat or a sweater
He is a grey cat or an orange cat
He has a newspaper or not
Starting with the first player and taking turns, investigators draw a card from the deck and shows it to the other players. Then, using the clue they know they eliminate or keep the suspect in play. If it is eliminated, put the card into the discard pile, if there is a match, place the card face-up in front of you so it is visible to everyone else. Players continue play in this way, revealing suspects until all players but one have made their accusations.
In three or four player games, when a canine investigator card is revealed from the deck, one of the remaining clue counters is taken from the cloth bag and flipped, like a coin. The face up side will show another clue about the suspect that is visible to all players.
Accusing a suspect.
At any point in the game, you may make one accusation in your turn. Based on the revealed suspects, you can deduce what the other players clues are by which suspects they have kept. Along with the knowledge of your clue and any public ones you can figure out what the chief of spies looks like and place your investigator token on top of the card. You may do this at any point, even if it is not your turn but you may do it only once. You may not accuse a suspect that already has a token on. However, if someone has already accused the Chief of Spies you can gain points by identifying the assistants. The assistants have four of the five clues that match the Chief of Spies. Even if you have made an accusation you must carry on drawing cards as before.
The round comes to an end when all but one investigator has made their guess, so in a four player game the round is over when three players have placed their tokens.
When this happens, all players reveal their clue token and check the suspects against the revealed clues.
The player who successfully accused a suspect that matched all five clues has found the Chief of Spies and draws a random gold point marker, players who successfully accused his assistants get a random white marker. The remaining players draws a random black marker. You may look at your scores but they are kept hidden until a player reaches ten points (or after five rounds)
There are a couple of variants included in the game.
Firstly, there are four ‘Cafe Adler’ markers, a gold one, two white and a black one. If you want to use these, substitute them for the appropriate coloured tokens. A player who receives one may choose to swap it immediately with another players matching coloured marker, or may keep it for a subsequent scoring phase and again swap it with another player.
The game also includes the ‘Stasi Officer’. If you use this variant, swap out one of the black scoring markers with the Stasi Officer marker token. If you draw this marker at the end of a round, immediately reveal it to all players and take the matching card and once all players have taken their scoring markers, place the Stasi Officer one back. The card indicates that you are being watched and this limits your investigation. You will have to play the next round with your clue counter uncovered so everyone can see it.
Checkpoint Charlie is a fun deduction game that can be played in as many or as few rounds as you like, making it fit nicely in any gaming session long or short. Every player has to keep a close eye on every card that every other player is placing and try to make that fast deduction, and if you don't pay attention it could be the difference between catching the chief of spies or just one of his minions. The quirky artwork makes it particularly appealing and the variants add an extra challenge.
Review copy kindly provided by Devir Games
Mentions:
Casual Games Revolution - February 2018
Following up on our recent visit to Spielwarenmesse, Nuremberg, we put together a video of some of the shows highlights. There was so much there that this is still just a fraction of what we saw in the gaming halls.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoKtJAYEPHY
Mentions
https://ddptour.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/not-so-fair-toy-fair.html
]]>Last week we visited Spielwarenmesse 2018 (Jan 30th - February 3rd), a vast 5 day Toy and Games Trade Show in Nuremberg, Germany. With many halls to visit our priority was visiting the two halls that focused on Board Games, with many familiar names and even unexpectedly bumping into a few friends whilst wandering the halls.
Mentions
https://ddptour.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/not-so-fair-toy-fair.html
]]>In fifth place is Shadow Hunters with 17 plays. You can read my full walkthrough for this. This is a deduction game that plays up to 8 players. It’s a great way to get to know people at a convention and is easy to teach, meaning it hits the table quite often here when we have unexpected people turn up at games night. It’s a fun game with loads of player interaction and expect to hear the phrase ‘but I’m on your team’ repeatedly numerous times throughout the game. The art is beautiful and really gives a great theme to the game.
In fourth, with 19 plays is Russian Railroads. We love this game! This is a worker placement game where players compete to build the largest and most advanced railway network. Each player board has three routes and an industry track and during the game, you will really need to decide which to focus on. The game is played over seven rounds and there just isn’t time to do everything that you want to do. Of course, being worker placement, there will be plenty of turns where you are blocked from what you want to do and you will have to adapt and change plans accordingly. A great medium-weight euro for 2-4 players that can be expanded on with ‘German Railroads’ and ‘American Railroads’.
For Sale with 21 plays comes in third. Again, you can read my full walkthrough. We do like a bit of trick-taking here and as this plays up to six players, this is a favourite for the beginning or end of an evening. This is a game all about buying and selling real estate. It is played over two rounds. In the first, you are bidding on properties with a limited amount of money you start with. Then, in the second round, you will use these properties to claim money cards. You can go into the second round with some low valued properties and still do well IF you know when to play the right cards!
7 Wonders, in second place, has 24 plays. Part of this is because it goes to seven players. While it is a fairly light game it’s nice to have something that is not a ‘party game’ that can handle so many people. Played over three ages, players draft cards to build a tableau containing military, trade, monument and science cards, making sure they grab enough resources to begin with to place what they want. Each player also has a ‘Wonder’ card that they can build which can grant them various abilities from extra resources, points, military or other unique abilities.
And in first place is Kingdoms with 32 plays. Again, you can read my full walkthrough. This is a super quick, easy to teach game that can be brutal at times, but always gives you an opportunity to get your own back! Played over three rounds, players take turns placing tiles or castles on a five by five grid. The tiles will be either positive or negative points ranging from +6 to -6. Your castles have between one and four turrets. When the grid is full, scoring happens. Each row and column is calculated and you score points equal to the total times the number of turrets you have. A great game to start the evening off, and create grudges that last for the rest of that evenings games when someone places a -6 next to your level four castle, leaving you 24 points down!
Most of these games are pretty quick ones that we use to start or end an evenings gaming and/or to introduce new people to games. I’d be happy to play any of them at any given occasion still, even after all those plays!
]]>The last few years I have been on a mission to clear up our unplayed games. Last year we started with 97 on the ‘unplayed list’, over the course of the year we played 96 games that were new to us. Somehow, at the start of this year we have 151 unplayed games. I have tried something new this year - each of those 151 games has a little post-it note on the side, so I have to sit and look at the wall of shame! In addition to playing more of these, I MUST buy less, I am a terrible sucker for a bargain though, so it might mean leaving a few Facebook Groups and resisting the bring and buys at a few conventions.
While this site has been around a while, it’s only in the last six months or so that I’ve made an effort to write consistently. New posts will now go up every Monday and Thursday, if you are a Patron you will get them early ie. Monday's Patreon post goes on the site Thursday. We also now have a fancy new mic, so once we have worked out software/editing etc look out for the sounds of my dulcet tones! Have a listen to the Essen / BGGCON2017 Podcast by DB94 that I was invited to join if you want to hear them now. I guess under here I should also mention keeping on top of review copies - I still have a few left from Essen, however, I won't put fingers to keyboard until I have played something a few times and getting the games I want to the table isn’t always that easy. Last week I had great plans, then the new T.I.M.E. Stories expansion arrived, so guess what we played.
I guess this one is on everyone's resolution list every year! By the time people have got home from work, had dinner etc it can be late in the evening when we finally start gaming, meaning we only have time for one longer game or a couple of shorter ones. Now we have the gaming table, there is no reason I shouldn’t set a game up earlier in the day, ready to start as soon as everyone arrives. It’s too easy to get sidetracked and chat a bit, this year, let’s just chat around the table!
If you follow this blog, you’ll know I love a good convention. Be it here, in the UK, or thousands of miles away in the US. I’ve played some great games and met a lot of great people at gaming conventions. Our season starts in March at Airecon, but there are plenty more marked on the calendar for the year including the usual UKGE, Essen, BGG Con, Dragonmeet. I’m hoping to get to Origins this year too (despite flying off to a festival in Copenhagen two days after!) I’m determined to go and play more games, meet more people and basically have a lot of fun! (and report back to you guys)
Kolossal Games are a new and exciting company with lots of great things in the works. However, their first Kickstarter has just launched and smashed it’s goal on day one! No surprise there though. Western Legends is an open-world, sandbox tabletop game, with a huge variety of options. Take on the role of a sheriff, an outlaw, a gold prospector, a cattle rancher to name a few, you can also choose which side of the law you want to be on! With beautiful, immersive artwork and great looking miniatures, Western Legends truly takes you into the world of the Wild West. All characters are based on real people with rich history and diversity. I’ve seen the prototype of this game and honestly, it’s just beautiful and it’s really nice to see a game with this theme used so well. It launched on Tuesday 9th January and is already smashing those stretch goals, go and check it out here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kolossalgames/western-legends
I was lucky enough to play a prototype of Eagle Gryphon's "The Scarlet Pimpernel" back in May of last year and have been waiting (im)patiently for it since then! You play as members of the Scarlet Pimpernels league of followers, snatching the innocent away from the guillotine. As with Western Legends, this is a theme that is rarely used well but with historically accurate characters alongside beautiful artwork from Ian O’Toole, this game captures the era nicely. You will complete missions by securing routes and locations along with the required supporters and resources. You will also be unintentionally aiding other players throughout the game too. A solid medium weight euro game as you would expect from EGG, you also know the quality will be awesome based on their previous releases! Due for launch on Kickstarter on January 23rd, you can keep up to date on the latest news here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/295809807605052/
I’ve mentioned Wreck and Ruin before, but I’m mentioning it again! Back up on Kickstarter on 6th March. Mad Max styled vehicular mayhem! Great figures, lots of fun and I love the flame damage markers. I shall be doing a walkthrough for this in the near future, so don’t want to give away too much for now, but check it out here:
https://www.facebook.com/WreckandRuingame/
But, this isn’t all about Kickstarters! With new year comes a new convention season. Ours will be kicking off in March for Airecon.
Airecon was our favourite new festival of last year, this year it will run from the 9th to the 11th March at Harrogate Convention Centre. At just £20 for a weekend ticket, it’s a bargain. Last year the open gaming space was spacious and super friendly, the bring and buy was great and we had fun in the family zone playing giant Ticket to Ride. This year there is loads more space, a separate, larger RPG zone with loads of games running as well as board game tournaments, including the ‘Superboard’, a team tabletop challenge where you can be in with the chance to win loads of great goodies including a trip for all four of your team to Essen! There is also a board game pub quiz and live music. Travelling Man will be bringing a library of over 350 games that will be free to borrow so you don’t have to worry about carrying games there either. I really enjoyed last year and can’t wait to go again this year and see what new fun we’ll have!
Burgle Bros is a co-operative game for 1-4 players that comes with the following all in a very cool looking box!
That’s a lot of stuff packed neatly into a small box! There are various scenarios in the rulebook, but I’d definitely advice starting with one of the more basic ones - this game is tough! I’ll be referencing ‘The Bank Job’ here which is the standard set up for the game.
Set aside the three safe tiles and the three stairs tiles. Shuffle all the other tiles and separate them into three stacks of fourteen, add one safe and one stairs tile to each pile and shuffle again. Each pile of tiles represents one floor of the building, lay each out in a four by four grid, face-down and place the walls as shown in the book or below. When tiles have a wall between them, they are not considered adjacent.
Sort the patrol cards into three decks by their floor, indicated in the bottom right of the cards. Shuffle them up and place a guard token next to each one. Then put a guard dice next to each one, this represents the guards' movements on each of the floors. Floor one should show 2, floor two should show three and floor three should show four. Reveal the top card of the first floor patrol deck and place the guard on that starting position, then reveal the second card and place the dice on it, this will be the guards first destination.
Each player randomly picks a character card. These are double sided with one side marked for Advanced Skill. Each player takes the meeple for their character and three stealth tokens. These represent your ability to hide from guards. If at any point you need to discard one of these and you have none, your group has lost the game!
Choose any tile on the first floor for your team to enter the building. Flip over that tile and place a downstairs token on it to mark it as your entrance. Starting on this tile does not trigger any tile effects, those will start happening though as soon as you move.
On each turn: Take up to four actions, check for events if applicable, move the guard located on your current floor.
Each turn, you may take upto four actions from the list below, you may take them in any order and may take the same action multiple times.
Peek at a tile - Turn over an adjacent tile, remember tiles blocked by walls don’t count! You don’t move onto the tile, but you also don’t trip any of the alarms.
Move to a tile - Go on, be brave! Just move straight onto the tile, flip it over and check for effects. Some tiles have requirements for moving into them or may trigger an alarm. If you move into a tile that the guard is on, you must discard a stealth token. If you move onto a floor that does not yet have a guard, set it up like you did for the first floor. If you trigger an alarm, place an alarm token on it and move the orange guard die to that spot.
Hack a computer - Place a hack token on a computer tile, upto a maximum of six. When any player triggers an alarm, they may choose to discard a hack token of the appropriate type (laser, fingerprint or motion) to cancel the alarm. They will cancel alarms on any floor and you don’t need a player in the computer tile to use them.
Add a die to a safe - Place a die on the safe tile you are in. This costs two actions. Each safe can have upto six die on them.
Crack a safe - Before you can crack a safe, you must discover the combination. Reveal all six tiles in the same row and column of the safe (either by peeking or moving into them). Each tile has a number in the bottom right - these numbers form the combination you will need. Roll all the dice that have been added to the safe tile you are in. If the number of any of the dice matches, place a cracked token over that number on the appropriate tile. It is possible for one die to match multiple tiles. You successfully crack the safe if all six numbers have a cracked token on them. Then, draw a tool card from the deck, draw a loot card from the deck and finally, add one to the movement of each guard on your current floor and any below you. Show this by rotating the orange guard dice to show their new movement. If you did not finish cracking the safe, place all the dice back on the safe tile, you can re-roll them with a later action.
If you used two or fewer actions in your turn, you must draw an event card and follow it’s text immediately. Some events are helpful (and have saved our skin multiple times!) but others may cause trouble.
At the end of each players turn, you must move the guard that is on your current floor. If the guard moves into a space with a player, they must discard a stealth token. The guards movement is shown on the orange dice for that floor and the guard will move that many tiles in this phase. If any alarms are active, the guards movement speed is increased by one for each active alarm. Movement is determined at the start of the phase, so any alarms deactivated during the movement don’t change his speed. The guards destination is always the tile that contains the guard die. The original destination is set by the patrol card last revealed, but alarms will move the guard die. The guard always takes the shortest route to his destination, if multiple routes are the same distance. He will take the path most clockwise. When he arrives at his destination, reveal the top card of the patrol deck and if he has remaining movement start him towards the new location. If at any point you should draw from the patrol deck and it is empty, shuffle that floors discard pile to form a new deck and rotate the orange guard die to permanently increase that guards movement by one.
Once you have cracked all the safes, you can move from the top floors stairs onto the roof and are safe. When all players have escaped, you have successfully completed the heist and have won!
You lose when you need to discard a stealth token and don’t have any to lose. You are arrested by the guards, give up the rest of the Burgle Bros and your team loses.
There are a few things that immediately jump out at you when you look at Burgle Bros, most of which result from the quality of the game. The theme is great and lends itself well to the game, the presentation, the artwork, the components are all of superb quality. Burgle Bros was initially funded on Kickstarter and is now self-published by Fowers Games, meaning the quality has remained consistent through all print runs.
Although we completed the game on our first run, we had plenty of nerve wracking moments and literally breathed a sigh of relief in our last turns as we ran for the exit! Sometimes an event card just managed to save us. However, we haven’t won a game since then. Often co-operatives suffer from being over easy or over tough, this balances nicely in the middle. It also truly carries a sense of fear when those guards start heading in your direction. So far, we have only played the basic ‘Bank Job’ set up though there are multiple additional set ups contained within the rule book along with tips on how to create your own variations. Thematically speaking, everything works beautifully, your great loot that you have just scored will quite often act against you, weighing you down or drawing attention to you (that shiny tiara sparkles in the light!) This game lends itself brilliantly to the co-op genre and every game has resulted in a lot of group planning and forward thinking, really bringing the players together to beat the game.
If you are considering a bank heist in the near future, consider this good training!
Review copy kindly provided by Fowers Games
]]>We started early this year with a trip to see The Last Jedi, followed by some games at a friends house. This was a group of people we have only just started introducing to games so we took round The Climbers and Wits and Wagers. The Climbers is a 3D strategy game. 35 coloured, wooden blocks are placed randomly and players take it, in turn, to move blocks and climb up the tower. You can only move onto blocks that are your colour or grey (neutral) and you have a couple of ladders that will help you up, but they are single use. As usual, we all had fun with this, the chunky blocks and colours make it a beautifully tactile game that anyone will enjoy whilst having a surprising amount of strategy. Wits and Wagers was a new one for us but a lot of fun, and one that came out a few times over the holidays! Everyone is asked the same trivia question, the answer to which is always a number. Players write their answer down on their player board and all are placed face up on the table. Everyone has two betting chips - one for $100 and one for $200. The winning player is the one closest to the answer without going over so place your chips on who you think was right. The winner wins one chip and anyone betting on them gets either one or two chips. This is a great game that everyone can get involved in, even if you have no idea of the answer, you can easily win the game with good bets!
Both hubby and I had time off over Christmas and New Year so we vowed to hit the ‘Shelf of shame’. I got Navigador as a gift from my Heavy Cardboard Secret Santa and couldn’t wait to get it to the table, we are huge fans of Concordia and this is from the same designer, Mac Gerdts. This felt like it had much harder decisions to be made than Concordia (maybe due to our play count!) The player action choice is on a rondel and any action three or fewer spaces in front of you are free, you may take other actions but they come with heavy penalties. Actions include gaining workers, ships, sailing, discovering new colonies and selling goods. We really enjoyed this but need to get it back to the table soon to fully grasp the strategy in it, as a first, two-player game I felt we were putting off the end game condition so we were ready, but not sure how ready we’ll ever be for final scoring!
Fantahzee was a very cheap, impulse buy on my part. Yahtzee was one of the games I played as a child with my Grandma so I’ve always had a soft spot for it. I expected this dungeon crawler/tableau builder/Yahtzee cross over to be OK at best, but we actually had a lot of fun with it! Place heroes in front of you and use your dice rolls to activate them to then go kick butt in the dungeon row. Some enemies have counterstrike, so will attack back though so make sure you have enough shields to protect your heroes. If the monster next to the villages isn’t defeated he will attack and leave you with negative points. This was a really pleasant surprise of a game that I can see us having a lot of fun with.
I recently picked up Yamatai, second hand at a bargain price. I’d been looking at it a while but been warned that it was quite ‘lightweight’, I have to say it was a pleasant surprise and the action combination with player order was a nice element. If you take first player, you get the lowest value boat for free and no extra action, if you choose last place you get three boats. Boats of the same colour must be placed next to each other and islands you visit may either be built on (if they are empty) or the resources from them gathered. These resources may be used to buy specialists at the end of the turn, each of which grants a unique ability. No, this isn’t a heavy game but I can see our group enjoying it as an evening game that still has a decent amount of thought required!
We don’t often play as just two players (if we do, it tends to be learning a game to then teach other people!) so I was a bit nervous about Trambahn. Rob picked this one up as it is from one of the Russian Railroads designers. It definitely has a 18XX feel to it despite it being such a quick game. You place one or two passengers in the middle and place carriages into your tableau. You also buy engines that act as multipliers for your carriage score. When a fourth passenger of a specific colour is played, you score your carriages of that colour. You also get an extra scoring round if you get eight carriages of one colour. Not easy considering the numbers only go from one to ten and must always be played in ascending order. Ten main scoring rounds and the game ends. This plays out pretty quickly and we have since picked it back up a few times, whilst waiting for people to come round on game night.
I love Arkwright, so Gentes, also from Stefan Risthaus, was a must buy for me this year! It’s very hard to say much about a game like this after just one play. Each player has a board that shows the number of workers of each type they own and a time track on the top. This determines how many actions you will get each round. Most actions require you to take a tile and then take time tiles for performing that action. Each tile takes up a space on your track. Tiles with two hour glasses aren’t immediately removed at the end of the round, instead, they are turned over to their other side with one hour glass, and then removed the following round. This is fine, but in a game that only has six rounds, each and every action needs to count! You can build cities which give you additional bonuses, buy cards, train workers (which you will need to play cards). All this seems so tough to get done in the available amount of actions. This is one we need to get back on the table as soon as possible, partly so we remember the iconography and partly as it’s one of those games you walk away from thinking ‘if only I’d done that or that instead’!
So, we made a small dent in the shelf of shame! Other things we played were:
Photosynthesis We taught a friend of ours this and while it feels harsh at any player count, three definitely felt a little friendlier than four players!
Hansa Teutonica is a great game that doesn’t get enough play here so we jumped on the chance to play a new map we hadn’t seen before! To place in Wales or Scotland you must have control in Carlisle, Cardiff or London. This is another game that comes across as quite mean at times and the battles for some of those cities was intense. As per usual with HT I thought I was doing quite well until final scoring - this is a game I will eventually master, honest.
Lorenzo Il Magnifico - We really haven’t played this enough! Great worker placement with a lot of tough choices to be had. This was my third game and I finally felt I was on top of everything that needed to be done. This is another game that never seems long enough to do what you want. We own the expansion but every game of this someone has been learning so we haven’t had a play yet. Soon, I promise!
Between this lot and some fun games like Codenames and Custom Heroes, we got a bit of everything in, some old, some new. Now onwards into 2018s challenges!
]]>I enjoy a lot of Martin Wallace's games and this is definitely up there for me. However, that box art is never going to get anyone excited over what is a great game! First published in 2007 this is a game that felt old before it’s time. The newest version from Roxley Games (coming soon!) has a few tweaks to the rules but is mostly a graphic overhaul. A beautiful, well fitting overhaul, turning this into the game it was meant to be! Gone is all the drab beige, replaced with a stunning, realistic looking map. Great background has also been added to all the characters and an extra map. I cannot wait to get a hold of my Kickstarter copy (along with the beautiful poker chips!)
Dare we mention the dreaded words ‘roll and move’? This is purely what Talisman is, but many of us have fond memories of playing it from years past so people have a soft spot for it. Originally published in 1983, the years saw several re prints that glossed it up a bit. Then, in 2007 it got a proper lick of paint courtesy of Fantasy Flight Games. Everything was bigger and brighter - the board is huge compared to the old one, but when you take a good look it’s actually exactly the same. Many of the classic expansions have also been reproduced such as City and Dungeon, but many more new ones have also been added. Sadly no Talisman Timescape.
A lot has changed in thirty years, and 6 editions, and it's pretty clear when you see the difference between the 1986 and the 2016 versions of this! From cardboard standees for characters in the First Edition, one-piece plastic figures and foam-board pitch in the Second Edition through to the stunning Orc and Human teams to be assembled in the Sixth. With the current surge of miniatures board games both retail and Kickstarter, not to mention other games such as Dreadball and Guildball it is no surprise that Games Workshop, followed the re-issue of Space Hulk by revamping this classic.
This is the newest game on this list but it has had plenty of reincarnations since it’s initial release in 2008. In the original game you are trying to save the world from infectious diseases, then came the expansions. Then the chance to play as the diseases in Pandemic:Contagion, then the dice game. In 2015 we truly had old meets new as Pandemic Legacy saw the rise of the new legacy style games. Since then you can try and save the world from Cthulhu and cure diseases in Iberia whilst distilling water and building train lines. Jeroen Doumen from Splotter Spellen recently collaborated on the latest incarnation, Pandemic: Rising Tide where you try and stop water flooding the Netherlands from the North Sea.
I will always have a soft spot for Catan as it was so pivotal in getting me into gaming so many years ago. At the time, it was so exciting and the expansions added more, through the 90s we were treated to various scenario maps too, some great, some not so much! However, Star Trek Catan in 2012 breathed a new lease of life into it and got a whole new group discovering Catan for the first time. At the end of last year came Game of Thrones Catan, that again had people discovering it for the first time but also had old players coming back for new mechanics and strategies. All these years on I’ll still sit down and play a game, though it may well be something more exotic than the base game!
Let’s not talk about our ten by ten as we failed horribly this year only playing thirty eight of our hundred games, maybe it’s time for a different challenge next year?
We did, however, play nearly a hundred new games (92 to be precise) this included a lot from our shelf of shame (more on that later!), quite a few prototypes and a lot of new games with new people at conventions.
We discovered the EXIT and Unlock! games, great escape room style fun. I guess legacy games have made people realise that one-off games aren’t such a bad thing. I look forward to seeing more of these in the future. I still have half an eye on Pandemic Legacy, but as I’m not a massive Pandemic fan I just don’t know if it will hold my attention.
Our shelf of shame has now officially hit the hundred mark, so I guess 2018s plan should be to try and whittle that down. I know when I initially started tracking it, we always did well until convention season started. Too many bargains at UK Games Expos bring and buy, or the hot new releases from Essen, so really December is the worst time to look at that list as we really haven’t had time to play a lot of the Essen haul just yet!
Although I have already done a post about conventions, I feel like I should mention them here too. This years convention season started with Airecon in March, a new but great convention in Harrogate. We had a great time catching up with some old friends as well as meeting some great new ones. Airecon is set to be three times the size next year and I’m really looking forward to it, just hoping it keeps the great atmosphere it had. HeavyCon came next in May, a small invite-only convention run in Denver by the Heavy Cardboard podcast. I had so much fun here, just four days of playing great meaty games! UKGE followed very closely in June, getting bigger each year I feel it’s out growing the venue but not sure where else it could go. Play space is getting harder and harder to find. On the plus side, the bring and buy also gets bigger each year and there are always great bargains to be had there! Next came HandyCon in August, a play focused convention. While the venue was nice, the rooms never felt too crowded or noisy, everyone seemed to stick within their own groups, making it quite difficult to meet new people. Obviously, the highlight of any gamers year is Essen in October. Exhausting and expensive, we wouldn’t have it any other way! So many new games to see, play and buy. Hot on it’s heels was BGG Con in November. This is definitely one of my favourite cons of the year. Every year I meet so many great people and feel like there are more and more people I want to go back and visit each year! And the year is always rounded off with Dragonmeet in December. Sadly, this always seems to clash with something else for us so we end up running through rather than having time to enjoy the day properly, one year we will I promise!
Our most played game of the year was (yet again) Kingdoms by Reiner Knizia, we love this simple, yet brutal little game and we’re on our second copy after the first just gave out after so many plays! Other games with lots of plays included Tyrants of the Underdark, Azul, the original London and Castles of Burgundy.
2017 also saw some major changes for me and I Play Red with the website having a complete facelift and the recording of my first ever podcast in collaboration with Docking Bay 94.
Website content went through the roof with three posts a week to try and get through the backlog of review copies from Essen.
Looking forward to next year with launch of the I Play Red Patreon, offering supporters early access to content, a chance to help choose content plus more podcasts! I’ll be doing a monthly patreon-only session with a special guest talking about what we have been playing over the last month, what we liked, what we didn’t like and what we want to play again. Once Patreon is up and running we are hoping to get some video equipment to put together some walkthrough videos (and I thought the podcast was scary!) and hopefully the chance to visit some more cons to meet more of you excellent people!
]]>The new edition of this comes in a streamlined, thin box but despite that and the small amounts of components, it still packs a punch!
Shuffle up the map tiles and set them in a 3 x 3 grid, so that the middle space is empty. (The tiles are doubled sided, A on one side and B on the other, the A sides are slightly easier!) Each player takes the tokens of their chosen colour and places the cube on the zero of the scoring track. Give the talisman token and all Guardian Cards to the starting player. The start player will change throughout the game so make sure the token moves at the start of each round if necessary.
Each player chooses their starting position. The player currently sitting to the right of the start player chooses first, then going anti clockwise each player places with the start player choosing last. Place one of the player tokens on one of the edges of the four corner tiles. Players may not place where another player has already placed and they must be on a meadow or forest.
The game is played over eight rounds, each round consists of two phases:
Starting with the player with the Talisman token and going clockwise, each player secretly selects a guardian of their choice and passes the remainder onto the next player until everyone has selected a card. The remainder are placed, face down to the side.
1 - Take the Talisman token - you will be the first player for the next round.
2 - Move a Map Tile - move one of the map tiles in a straight line vertically or horizontally so that it moves into the empty space on the grid. It may ‘jump’ over another tile to do so.
3 - Move a Token - move one of your tokens one space into an empty adjacent space.
4 - Rotate a Map Tile - you may rotate any one tile on the board by 90 degrees either clockwise or anti clockwise.
5 - you may perform any of actions 2, 3 or 4
Players get to use three of their tokens each turn. Each token must be placed horizontally or vertically adjacent to one of the players tokens already on the board and nowhere there is already a token. They must be placed on meadow, forests, ruins or volcanos, tokens may never be placed on water, mountains or temple spaces. You may take your Guardian action at any point in your turn.
When placing a token on a forest, the player must sacrifice one of their three tokens for that turn, these are placed in the space next to the score track. If you already are in a forest, you do not need to sacrifice another token at any point. To cross a waterway, you must also sacrifice a token in the same way, however you may move through as much connected water as is there.
Any token on a volcano at the end of a players turn is removed and placed into the sacrifice area.
Players may place a token on ruins, though it may then never be moved. When you place on a ruins, you may then immediately perform one of the Guardian actions on the tile those ruins are on.
The game ends after eight rounds (you only have enough tokens for those turns) Use the victory track to score according to the following and the player with the most is the winner!
Players get:
One point for every ruin they are on
Two points for every small (red) temple they are orthogonally adjacent to
Three points for every large (yellow) temple they are orthogonally adjacent to
Eight points for each map tile on which they have discovered every temple
There are also bonus points for the number of map tiles on which you have discovered a temple ranging from one point for just the one temple, through to a massive twenty seven points if you discover temples on all eight tiles.
Players then get points for having sacrificed more tokens than others, in a our player game players get 5,3,1 and zero points for having the most/least sacrificed tokens.
Dokmus is a great, quick game that involves a lot of decision making during the short, eight rounds. The movement of the tiles both through movement and rotation means the game is ever changing. Whatever your plan or focus is can change really quickly after another player has taken their Guardian action and you need to learn to adapt quickly. The dual sided tiles make for numerous map arrangements, either ‘easy’, ‘tough’ or a mixture of both which allow for great replayablilty.
We have recently purchased the expansion which adds more map tiles, an extra Guardian tile and weather conditions, however, we have been too busy introducing the bas game to new players and haven’t yet had a chance to play it!
]]>This Gift Tree was for Rockinghorse Children's Charity (Making life better for sick children in Sussex). As the official fundraising arm of the Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital they raise money for life-saving and cutting-edge medical equipment, while ensuring that children are treated in an environment better suited to their needs, basically allowing kids to be kids even in a medical environment.
With this Christmas campaign a child is given a tag, they select something they would like to receive and a store that is likely to stock it. People can buy direct from the stores in the centre and hand it into the customer service desk with the tag.
As soon as we saw Board Games on three of these tags, we knew we could do a little better than that. We of course have many games, and some might say too many so we had a hunt through our own collection for some great games that were either brand new or barely used. I think we've put together an enviable stash for each one and with special thanks to Paul at Bet Sit Games that also very kindly donated three copies of ZomBN1.
Here's the final package for each of the children here are the packages we managed to put together and drop off this morning bagged in some of the canvas bags we've picked up at various conventions over the year.
Hopefully next year we'll spot this with more than a few days notice, and keep an eye out for one of these in your local shopping centre / mall if there's still time.
]]>The box contains:
Give each player a player board, light point tracker and the six seeds and matching trees in their chosen colour (8 small, 4 medium and 2 large) Place the light point tracker on zero and place 4 seeds, 4 small trees, 3 medium trees and 2 large trees on the appropriate spaces on the player boards. Everyone should have 2 seeds, 4 small trees and 1 medium tree left over. These are the resources available to players at the start of the game. Put the board in the middle of the table with the sun segment on the side of the board you can see the sun symbol printed. Stack up the scoring tokens into four piles, according to the number of leaves on the back with the highest score on the top of each pile and descending order. Choose a start player and give them the first player token. Then, taking turns players place one of their available small trees on a space on the external edge of the board, do this twice so everyone starts with two small trees on the board. The sun segment will move around the board three times in the game so place the sun revolution tokens near the starting placement and have someone in charge of removing one each time the sun segment gets there.
Each time the sun is in one position, a round is played. A round consists of two phases. The Photosynthesis phase and the Life Cycle phase.
The player with the first player token moves the sun segment clockwise. Light points are then calculated for all players. Players get light points for each tree that is not in the shadow of another tree. All trees cast a shadow even over trees of their own variety. Small trees cast a one space shadow, medium trees two and large trees three spaces. A tree standing in the shadow of another tree will earn light points if it is taller. Players add their light points by moving the light point tracker on their player board. Small trees earn one light point, medium trees two and large trees three.
Starting with the first player, players are now free to spend their light points on any number of actions, however, you may not carry out more than one action on the same space of the main board ie. you may not upgrade the same tree twice in the same turn.
You may purchase trees or seeds from your player board, purchase from bottom to top (cheapest first) Any items you buy go into your available pool.
You may plant a seed, planting an available seed will cost you one light point. You can plant a seed in any direction from a tree, but the size of the tree determines how far away it can be. Only one space away from a small tree, two from a medium and three from a large.
You may grow a tree from one size to the next. A seed to a small tree will cost you one light point, small to medium two points and medium to large three light points. The new tree must be in your available area to upgrade. The tree or seed you take off the board goes back onto your player board and not your available area, however, if there is no available space it is removed from the game. Players may also choose to collect scoring tokens by harvesting their large trees. Remove the large tree from the board, placing it back onto the players board. Take the top scoring token from the pile that matches where the tree was rooted.
After all players have had a turn, the first player token moves around the table clockwise, the sun segment moves and play begins again with a new Photosynthesis Phase.
The game ends when the sun has completed three revolutions around the board. Players then count up their scoring tokens and add one point for every three light points left on their player board. The player with the most points wins!
The first and most important thing to mention about this game is just how pretty it looks on the table! The 3-D trees are beautiful and a joy to behold (and were easy to punch out and build!)
My only criticism with the components is the sun segment, the piece is big, not particularly attractive (compared to everything else anyway!) and is quite clunky to move around the board (make sure you leave enough room for this when you set up)
The player boards are nice and show all the information you need to play the game to save you keep referring to the rulebook.
The gameplay itself is pretty simple but surprisingly thinky. After all, if you plant a seed next to a small tree, it will soon be in the shade and not be bringing in any light points for you. Especially when other people start building trees around it, this game could be considered quite ‘mean’ in that respect. I found it a pleasant surprise that a game this pretty could also be so mean, especially with a full complement of four players. There are also some extra rules for an advanced version of the game including an extra rotation of the sun and restrictions on planting seeds and growing trees in shade. However, I think I’ll try to master it at the ‘basic’ level before trying that!
Review copy kindly provided by Blue Orange
In the box you get:
Place the board in the middle of the table. Shuffle up the glory tokens and randomly place three in each area of the board. Then, arrange them in ascending order, with the lowest token on the 1 space and the highest on the 3. Each player chooses a colour and takes the appropriate markers, placing one on the zero of the score track. Shuffle the setup cards and draw six, these will be the tribes used for this game. Take the tribe decks for those six tribes and shuffle them all together - this will be the deck for this game. Place the appropriate tribe boards and/or tokens on the table.
Deal one card to each player, this will be their starting hand. Then turn over a number of cards from the deck equal to twice the number of players eg, three players=6 cards. These go face-up next to the board and become the market. Split the rest of the deck into half and shuffle the three dragon cards into the bottom half. The game occurs over three rounds, each round ends when the third dragon shows up.
There are two actions you may take in a turn, either:
Draw a card - This may be from the marketplace or you may draw the top card from the deck. If you draw from the marketplace, do not replace the card. You may never have more than ten cards in your hand. If you draw a dragon card from the deck, put it to the side and draw another card to replace it. The first two dragons have no effect, other than to warn you the end of the game is fast approaching. The third dragon indicates the end of the round and play immediately stops and scoring happens (more on that later!) OR
Place a band of allies - A band is a number of cards that are either all the same colour or all the same tribe. A band can be between one and six cards in size. Choose one card to be the band leader and place that card on top. If your band is large enough you may then place a control marker on the kingdom that matches the colour of your leader cards. Markers may only be played if your band has more cards than you have control markers in that area. To place your first marker in an area you only need one card, to place your second two etc. Then, you may use the ability on your leaders card. If you then have any cards left in your hand, you must discard them into the marketplace for other players to possibly pick up. The band of allies will stay in front of you until the end of the round.
Players continue taking turns until the third dragon in the deck is revealed. At this point, the round immediately ends, players discard all cards from their hands and scoring occurs.
Check for who has the most tokens in each kingdom on the board. If it is the first round, the player with the most tokens scores the points on the ‘one’ space, if it is the second round the score the points on the ‘two’ space and the player with the second most scores the points on the one, in the third round you will score first, second and third place.
Then score for each band of allies you have, a band of two scores you one point, three scores you three points etc.. it is clearly marked on the board making it easy for everyone. If this is the first or second round, go through setup as before, all cards are handed in, however, tokens on the boards stay in place. The player with the least points will start the round. If it is your third play through the deck, add the scores and whoever has the most points, has the most glory and wins the game!
The Tribes. Remember you only take the effect of the leader of your band!
Centaurs - If you place a control marker when placing a band, you may immediately place another band.
Dwarves - Scores as if there were an additional card at the end of the round.
Elves - Allow you to keep X cards in hand when X is the size of the band you have just played.
Halflings - Do not allow you to place a control marker on the board, however, due to their numbers you can create large bands for big points at the end of the round.
Minotaurs - Counts as an additional card in the band for placing control markers.
Wizards - Draw X cards when X is the size of the band you have just played.
Wingfolk - Allow you to place your marker in any kingdom on the board.
Trolls - Take an unclaimed troll token of the value of the band you have just placed. These will then break ties for control of a kingdom at the end of the round.
Skeletons - These can never be the leader of a band but count as ‘wild’ cards and can be placed with any race or colour band.
Orcs - You may place a marker on your personal orc board that matches the colour of your orc leader. At the end of each round, you may choose to remove these to score points or keep them to score more points in the next round.
Merfolk - Move your marker up a number of spaces equal to the number of cards in your band. If you reach or pass a space with a marker symbol, you may place a control marker in any kingdom. At the end of each age, score points for the merfolk board as if it were a separate kingdom.
Giants - If you have the largest band of Giants on the table, gain two points and take the Giant token. This may move during the round if people play larger bands. If you still hold it at the end of the round, gain the extra points as indicated.
While the premise of this game is simple, there is so much to love about it! The random tribe selection means your chances of playing the same game twice are super-slim and while I have now played this 5 or 6 times I am yet to explore all twelve of the available tribes. The two main mechanisms - set collection and area control, are both things anyone is familiar with, making it easy to teach/play and even at the full six players, it plays pretty quickly. While the board itself is fairly bland, the artwork on the cards is lovely and the stacking player tokens are nice (not sure about the colour palette though!)
CMON have also produced a lot of lovely back story and flavour text in the rule book, making it a rich and immersive experience.
]]>Listed on BGG with a playtime of 60,000 minutes, CNA plays 8-10 players in two teams. Recommended at ten players with one person in each team taking on the following roles: Commander-in-Chief, Logistics Commander, Rear Area Commander, Air Commander and Front-line Commander. I guess though, with a ten-foot board it’s not that hard to fit everyone round it, you just need a big enough table to play it on!
Listed with a mere 6,000 to 12,000 minute playtime, this could still take you through most of the festive season! Each player is an absolute monarch of a major European power during the Napoleonic Wars of 1805-1815. There are various (shorter) scenarios that can be played, however, the full game last 132 turns with each turn representing a month in real time. With a full set of seven players this game could easily last 150 hours!
Allegedly with a playtime of only 360-720 minutes, this seems pretty short. But with a full complement of 18 players, it could easily hit double that. Although battles and territorial strategy are important, Mega Civ is not technically a war game. The object of play is to gain a level of advancement involving cultural, economic, scientific, political and religious advancement and balancing these will give you the best (and winning) score!
Listed at 240 minutes, but I was determined not to fill this list with purely war games! The Road to Legend is a campaign-style game and we think the 240 minute listing refers to each dungeon rather than the full campaign. There are a lot of dungeons to go through before you take on the Overlord who sits in the biggest dungeon of them all! This only plays up to 5 players though.
A mere 480 minutes! This was reimplemented as Bios: Megafauna and taken down to half the play time. This pits dinosaurs against mammals in ancient America in a game of ecology, evolution, and DNA. Players start as non-descript archetypes but can branch out their species by bidding on genotype and DNA cards as they come up. DNA cards allow players to create strange and wonderful new species of their own design.
No list like this would be complete without at least one 18XX title! Listed at the 600 minute mark, this seems to be one (if not, the) longest one out there. This is a vast self-published title covering mainland USA with 32 corporations and 18 private companies. Yet another huge board, making it easy to fit the maximum six players round it. http://www.designsice.com/18C2C.html
There are rumours out there in internet land about a game of Monopoly that lasted for 70 days straight, this doesn’t seem to be something I can verify sadly, though there are lots of mentions for it. They were obviously playing some house rules for it to playing that long.
]]>Shuffle up the start world cards and deal one face up on the table to each player, any spare are shuffled back into the deck. Set aside 12 VP chips per player (this will be one of the end game triggers, so in a 4 player game use 48 points) Give each player a set of action cards and six cards from the top of the deck, this is their starting hand. Cards are used for many things in this game, they can be used as currency to build worlds or developments, as resources or as their face up world or development.
A game is played over multiple rounds. At the start of the round each player simultaneously and secretly chooses one action card to play this round, placing it face down in front of them. When all players have chosen, turn all the action cards face up. Then the players perform the selected actions in phase order (1 - Explore, 2 - Develop, 3 - Settle, 4 - Consume and 5 - Produce) Each phase has an action which all players get to perform, however the player that chose that phase get a bonus. The bonuses either modifies or is in addition to the base action.
Each player draws two cards and discards one of them into the face-down discard pile. There are two versions of the explore card so the bonus depends on which is played. If you play Explore +5, you explore by drawing seven cards and choosing one to add to your hand, discarding the rest. Explore +1, +1 would mean you would draw three cards and keep two. The powers of an cards can be also upgraded further by cards in your tableau.
Each player places a development card from their hand face down them simultaneously turn them over and pay for them. Each development card has a diamond symbol with it’s cost inside, discard a number of cards equal to that number to pay for it. You cannot build multiple developments with the same name. The number in a hex next to the cost is victory points at the end of the game. 6 cost developments have a ? listed as their VP value, these are worth a variable number of victory points at the end depending on the card text.
Each player places a world card from their hand, face down then simultaneously turn them over and either pay for them or conquer the. Each world has a circle with a cost in it, if it is in black then discard cards to pay the cost the same as you would for development cards. If it is in red, this is the worlds defence, these cannot be placed with payment but must be conquered. To conquer a world, a players military must equal or exceed the defence. Military is granted by powers of various start worlds, development or worlds and is represent by a red plus (or minus in some cases!) Windfall worlds - Some worlds have a coloured ‘halo’ around the circle, meaning they produce a windfall when put into play. If a world produces, place a card from the top of the deck face-down on top of that world. You now have that resource.
All players must use their consume powers if they have them, to discard goods for VPs and/or card draws. Goods are discarded face down. Each good can only be used for one power, though some cards let you discard multiple cards. Consumption is mandatory, though they can be invoked in any order. There are two versions of the consume card so the bonus depends on which you use. Consume:Trade means you must sell one good by discarding it and draw the number of cards depending on what that good is. Consume: 2x VPs double the amount of VP chips that your consume power provides.
Place a good on each production world (the worlds with solid, coloured circles), take a card from the top of the deck and place it face down on top of the world. No world can have more than one good on it.
Remember on every phase to keep an eye on any cards you have down that might give bonuses during specific phases! After all the chosen phases are done, players must discard down to ten cards in hand before starting the next round. The game ends at the end of a round in which either a player has twelve or more face up cards in front of them or the last victory chip is given out. Total up players VPs from chips, developments and worlds. The player with the highest wins!
Race for the Galaxy is a very simple, fast game once you get used to the iconography which can be pretty overwhelming at first. If you’re learning it, take the time to play a few games after each other to really make it ‘click’. The simultaneous action phases are nice and means no one is left waiting for their turn, though, remember you can end up really helping someone else by playing the action card they want! There are now multiple expansions available meaning you could never get bored of this quick, ever changing game!
]]>Place the board in the middle of the table with the power crystal and doomsday device nearby. Each player takes all tokens and cards of their chosen colour.
At the start of every round, both players randomise all their specialists face down, then draw two. They then get to pick one to be active for the round. Note that at the end of each round, the specialist you choose will be removed from the game, even if you didn’t use them, so choose carefully!
Players will take turns being the ‘placer’ or the ‘predictor’ Randomly give one player the keycard, they will be the placer for the first turn. Each turn, the predictor will try to predict where the placer will place a unit (spy or specialist) by choosing the appropriate card and placing it face down on the table. Then the placer will place a spy into an empty room or an active specialist according to their special rule. After the placer has made their move, the predictor turns over their card and reveals if they guessed right. If they did, the move was blocked. A blocked spy is placed back into the supply, however, a blocked specialist is removed from the game. If the prediction was incorrect, the placed unit goes into that position and carries out its action if it is a specialist. The players then swap roles, with the predictor becoming the placer and vice versa. Turns continue until one player gets three in a row or a draw happens.
A draw occurs when it becomes clear neither player can win or when both players win at the same time, in this case, the player with the keycard loses the round. The next round begins - the keycard moves to the other player, specialists are chosen again and play continues as before.
Pocket Ops is played as a ‘best of three’ game, the winner of each round gets a power crystal, when you win the second round you get the Doomsday Device and can power it so you win!
The specialists are a total game changer, use them wisely during the course of the game, waste them and it could easily cost you the round!
Sniper - Remove one enemy spy along an orthogonal path from the sniper.
Courier - Place in a room with a friendly spy, then move into an empty orthogonally adjacent room.
Mole - Swap positions of one friendly and one enemy spy that are both in a row with the spy.
Hacker - In your turn as the predictor, you may place two blueprint cards instead of one. This remains active until you successfully block a placement.
Grappler - You may swap the grappler with an enemy spy in an orthogonally adjacent room.
Ninja - You may remove an enemy spy from an adjacent room.
Pusher - Move the pusher into an orthogonally adjacent room containing any spy, pushing that spy into the next room or even off the board!
Assassin - Place into a room containing an enemy spy, remove that spy from the board.
I genuinely wasn’t initially wow’ed with the concept of this game when we sat down to play it, but we honestly had a lot of fun. For us, the game felt more about the bluff/double bluff element than anything else. We all know the sweet starting spot is the middle placement, but is your opponent is just going to block that, do you go elsewhere or do you risk it thinking they know you won’t try it?! The specialists also add a whole new level of depth, on our first round we both played them early, keen to see how they worked and we finished in a draw, I think leaving them adds an element of unknown for your opponent and can score you a killer, winning move at the right time. The artwork is gorgeous - each space on the board is a specific room that starts with the appropriate letter - A is the Armoury, E is the Elevators etc and that is reflected on the players cards with each having a slightly different, but appropriate artwork.
The other great thing is the games footprint, you could easily play this on a plane tray table and the box is small enough to throw in a carry-on bag.
Pocket Ops was originally released as a Kickstarter and stretch goals allowed the cards to be upgraded to a linen finish and the tokens to be silk screen printed, meaning the components are all of a really nice finish. It’s currently available to pre-order through Grand Gamers Guild with delivery expected very soon, so at a bargain 15USD would make a great add-on or Secret Santa gift!
Review copy kindly provided by Grand Gamers Guild
]]>Alexander Pfister is a relatively new face on the board scene, but what he lacks in quantity, he makes up for in quality! In the last three years, he has designed multiple, award winning games including Broom Service and Isle of Skye. The first Pfister game we played was Port Royale, this and Oh My Goods remain some of our most played filler games. However, with the release of Great Western Trail and Mombasa he has cemented himself as a firm favourite here. Great medium weight euroes always go down well here! We can’t wait to see what comes next from him.
A few years ago, Uwe would have easily been my number one on the list.
2013 was our first year visiting Essen Spiel and Caverna and Glass Road had just come out, I was in heaven! I’m sad to say his latest, tile placing games have fell very flat for me, but he will always hold a place on this list for titles such as Le Havre, Glass Road, Ora et Labora, Caverna and Agricola. I’m yet to get my hands on a copy of Merkator but one day it will be mine!! We’re also fans of Bohnanza (aka the bean game) for when we have more than the standard four players.
As with Uwe, I’m definitely a fan of his older titles which is what earns him a place on this list! Speicherstadt and Castles of Burgundy remain firm favourites after many years and even more plays. I love me some point salad games, so you never get stuck for choices and never truly get blocked from gaining points in one way or another. Again, his most recent releases have fell a bit flat for me, but the previous quality means he will always be up top for me. We've recently picked up the anniversary editions of Year of the Dragon and Notre Dame which I’m super excited to get them to the table.
A few years ago I hadn’t heard of ‘Team Splotter’, then came Food Chain Magnate. After receiving it as a Christmas gift, I fell in love with all things Splotter! I’m now a proud owner of the aforementioned FCM, Indonesia, Antiquity and The Great Zimbabwe. We also mentioned to get hands on a copy of Ur recently, one of their older releases which I can’t wait to get to the table! I appreciate Splotter titles aren’t for everyone but their style of brain burning games have me hooked.
In the box you get:
Each player chooses a colour and takes the six boards of that colour and a drawing marker. Choose the difficulty level you wish to play at - one side of the cards are ‘easy’ words, the other side are ‘difficult’ words. Shuffle the deck and deal out two cards per person with the chosen side face down. Put the sand timer in the middle of the table so everyone can see it and you’re ready to play!
The game consists of three drawing rounds and three guessing rounds, each lasting for one minute. It will start with a drawing round, which is followed by a guessing round, then a drawing round again, and so on.
When everyone is ready, turn over the sand timer and begin the first round. Players look at their cards to see the words they have to draw. (Remember to keep these hidden from the other players) Everyone now has one minute to draw as many of the words from their cards as they choose. You may not use any letters or numbers on your drawing, however, arrows are allowed.
Everyone plays at the same time, using each board to draw one of their words. You may draw as many or as few as you want in the time allotted. As soon as the time has run out the guessing round will begin! Flip the timer straight over and begin. You now have a minute to guess other players drawings correctly. Again, everyone plays simultaneously. You may guess as many other drawings as you want and also help people guess yours. However, you can’t give too much help! You can say ‘yes’ ‘no’ ‘close’, however you cannot give larger hints. As soon as you guess a drawing correctly, take the tile and place it to one side, it’ll give you points at the end of the game. In order for a guess to be correct, it must be the exact word or words on the card. A composite word would not be a correct answer, however, if a player says several separate words and one of them is the word on the card, the guess is correct.
As soon as the first guessing round is finished, someone flips the timer and you will go straight into the second drawing round, there are no gaps between rounds.
The games ends after the third guessing round. Players get one point for each drawing board from another player that they have, however, they lose one point for each of their own boards they have left (because they didn’t draw them or other players failed to guess the words)
The winner is the player with the most points!
Doodle Rush is a quick, fun-filled game. I initially thought it wouldn’t be too great with a group of adult players but we actually had a lot of fun and the group demanded a rematch after our first game! I can see this coming out not only as an intro game or family game but also as a ‘warm-up’ game on regular gaming nights and very much as a drinking game and be as much fun on all those occasions!
This review copy was kindly provided by Brain Games
]]>In the box you get:
To win the game, players must catch enough sweet dreams to put the child into a blissful sleep before the night is over, the group wins when the sweet dream counter reaches the end of the sweet dream scoring track. However, the game is lost if:
Shuffle the power and treasure decks and place them face down next to the play area. Each player chooses/randomly draws a Dream Catcher card and draws four power cards. Put all five cards face up, in front of you. Take a turn reference card each. Place a bedroom tile face up in the centre of the play space. Put the monster counters on the indicated spaces on the time track at the top and the time marker on the far right of that track. Place the sweet dream and nightmare tokens on the appropriate space of their tracks (they are marked 2,3 and 4 depending on the number of players) Shuffle the monster deck and place it next to the bedroom tile. Shuffle the dreams deck and use the top nine cards to form a three by three grid of cards above the bedroom tile (known as the Dreamscape), place the rest of the deck the other side of the bedroom tile. You are now ready to play.
Each player gets two actions a turn, then after everyone has had their turn, play moves onto the night phase. You may also use appropriate character actions during any phase, these do not count towards your two actions a turn. During your turn you may:
Trade a Card - Simply put, you can swap cards with other players
Catch a Sweet Dream - Match cards in your hand with symbols at the bottom of the sweet dream card, discard those cards from your hand, remove the dream from the Dreamscape and move the sweet dream marker one space to the left. Some of these cards have a treasure chest icon on the bottom left, if you remove one of these cards, draw a card from the treasure chest deck and take the bonus immediately.
Catch a Nightmare - Again, match the symbols on the card, but this time you get to remove a nightmare from the Dreamscape. The nightmare score does not change when you catch a nightmare.
Catch a Monster - To catch a monster you need to ensure you have the correct power cards in your hand, then roll the dice. If the dice is equal or higher than the monsters strength (shown in the top right of the card) discard the power cards and the monster card. If the dice roll is lower, the monster evades you! You keep the power cards and could use another action to try again.
After everyone has taken their actions, move onto the night phase. Start with every player drawing back up to four cards in hand. The first thing to happen is time passing, move the time counter one square to the left, if the counter lands on a spot with a monster counter, then a monster attacks! Draw a monster card and place it under the bedroom tile. Beware though, monsters eat sweet dreams! On the top left of the monster card will be a symbol, any sweet dreams in the Dreamscape with this symbol on are immediately removed.
As long as the game is not lost, you can then move onto the next round. Begin by re-filling the Dreamscape. One dream deck card at a time is drawn and placed onto the Dreamscape, resolve each card before moving onto the next one. Refill from the top left hand corner, filling the row before moving down to the second row. If a sweet dream card is spawned, nothing happens and the team is safe, place it down and continue refilling. If it is a nightmare card, it attacks! Check adjacent nightmare cards for any symbols that match. If there are none, the card moves one space in the direction indicated on the bottom left. It will then check again for a match with adjacent cards.
If a match is found, discard the active card and each matching nightmare card around it, move the nightmare counter one space to the left for each card discarded in this way. If the game is not lost carry on refilling the Dreamscape, one card at a time. Continue until it is filled and begin the next round.
Dream Catchers is a delight to play due to it’s amazing artwork and the wooden pieces are also beautiful and cut to a really high quality. While the component quality is super high, some of the grammar and spelling in the rule book let it down a bit (though the illustrations are super helpful) Our first play, with the recommended bedroom tile felt far too easy for a group of adult players, but would be perfect if there were children playing. However, there are different bedroom tiles with varying degrees of difficulty which made it more challenging for sure!
Review copy kindly provided by Play Nation Studios
UPDATE: The Dream Catchers Kickstarter went live on 1st March 2018
UPDATE: The Dream Catchers relaunched on 29th March 2018
]]>Travis is a seasoned games designer with over 20 games previously developed and multiple successful Kickstarter projects under his belt. Kira is a successful marketing professional who has worked with Travis on previous Kickstarter campaigns.
I got a chance to look at their first two projects, both of which will be launching on Kickstarter early next year.
Western Legends by Hervé Lemaîtré is set to launch in January 2018 and is an open-world sandbox game set in the American Wild West. Choose a life of crime as a wanted fugitive or seek justice as a Marshall. All characters are based on historical figures and include people you know like Calamity Jane and Billy the Kid, but also people you never heard of like ‘Stagecoach Mary’ Fields (look her up - she was a badass!) The artwork (by Roland MacDonald) and highly detailed miniatures (by Pure Arts Studios) make for a rich, immersive setting.
The aim of the game is to go down in history as the most legendary figure of all time. Multiple paths to victory with a wide array of options to play with ensure no two games will be the same. Rules and gameplay are straightforward despite the amount of content! Players will need to react to random events, complete objectives and equip themselves to survive and stay on top. Mine for gold, wrangle cattle and even hold up other players. You can choose the path of a wandering gunfighter, a small town sheriff, or a successful lawman looking to retire, just make sure you do it in style!
The game provides an amazingly diverse set of characters, a lot of which you will want to go away and find out more about and all components are made with colour blind players in mind.
Coming to Kickstarter in January 2018, the core game will be around the 70 USD price point which will include 13 unique and stunning looking miniatures, stretch goals will include expansions and promos offering up more characters and events.
Kami-Sama by AJ Lambeth is set to launch in February 2018. In Kami-Sama, inspired by his time living in Japan, ensures that thematically everything is accurately represented.You play as one of the Kami, Gods with unique abilities, seeking favour or nature from the villages and their inhabitants.
Each village has unique challenges and each round has unique goals to help you gain influence over the villagers, all with beautiful illustrations from Gong Studios. Balance our influence over man and nature through careful placement of your shrines to turn the tides in your favour.
Your shrines remain after each round, however, the villages are small so you will have to bend the elements to force out your opponents if you wish to remain victorious.
At the end of each round, you get to claim different villagers, using their skills to help further your influence over the four villages that make up the board. At the end of the third round, one Kami will become Kami-Sama.
Again, beautiful illustration and specially crafted shrine designs make this a visually stunning game. The round board is also really eye-catching. Kami-Sama will be around the 50 USD price point and will again have stretch goals that include expansions and Kickstarter only promos.
These are the first of the projects Kolossal has in store for us in 2018, both of these have stunning (yet very different!) artwork that is very inclusive. Both games have simple, easy to understand rules but a lot of strategies involved and we really can’t wait to see what else they have in store for us!
]]>Obviously, you get lots of cats, but here is what you get in the box!
Depending on the number of players, remove the appropriate number of cards from the main deck, these are marked 3+ or 4 in the top right hand corner. Shuffle the deck and deal out 9 cards in a 3 by 3 grid in the centre of the table. Shuffle up the Stray Cat deck and deal three face up. The player who has the most cats is the starting player.
During your turn, you must take an entire row or column of three cards from the grid, then move the wooden cat next to the row or column you took. The next player cannot take from there. You can also play lost cat and spray bottles at any point in your turn.
When you take a food card, immediately discard it and take the food cube of the appropriate colour, which you will keep until the end of the game to feed your cats, note that the player with the most leftover food will lose 2VPs so be careful not to take more than you need!
If you take a costume card, keep it in your hand until the end of the game - the player with the most will gain 6 VPs, if you don’t have any, you will lose 2VPs.
Toys also stay in your hand until the end of the game, you will gain VPs based on the number of different toys you have. You may gain points for multiple sets.
Catnip acts as a multiplier for your fed cats at the end of the game - 2 or 3 will give you one extra point for each fed cat, 4 or more will give you two extra points for each. Beware though, if you have only one, you will lose 2 VPs.
Then, obviously, you have the cats! When you take a cat card, place it face up in front of you. At the end of the game, all of your cats need to be fed, represented by the food shown on the bottom of their card. If they are fully fed, gain the number of VPs shown on the left-hand side of the card, if they are not, lose 2 VPs. Cats come in a variety of colours, these are represented by letter(s) in the top left of the card. A cat may be black (B), white (W), orange (O) or even a combination of these colours eg. black and white (B+W) Colour is relevant for scoring some cats eg, Florence gives you points for scoring orange cats.
When you take Lost Cat cards, keep them in your hand until you decide to play them. You may discard two of them to either gain a victory point token (worth 2VPs) or discard two to ‘find’ a Stray Cat. When one is taken, do not refill - there are only three available throughout the game. Stray Cats work in the same way as ‘normal’ cats - they go into play in front of you, if they are unfed they will give you minus 2 VPs, but if they are fed they can be worth a lot of points.
The game ends when cards are taken from the grid and it cannot be refilled. Points are awarded for: fed cats, catnip, costumes, toys and VP tokens. Minus points are awarded for unfed cats, having 1 or no catnip, having no costumes and having the most spare food. The winner is the player with the most points. In case of a tie, the player with the most fed cats wins.
Cat Lady, simply put, is adorable! With cute names like Sir Cuddleface through to puns like Chairman Meow, who could resist these cute, fuzzy furballs?
Gameplay is quick and simple, yet engaging. It’s one of those game you play then someone says ‘shall we play again?’ which is always a great sign!
This would make a great secret Santa gift for a cat lover or someone with kids, in fact, it would make a great game to take to a family dinner as the festive season starts.
My only complaint is, it would be really handy to have a little score pad as there is a lot of small elements that need scoring at the end of the game which can get confusing (there is an unofficial one available to download from BGG.Com)
This is probably my favourite cat based game!
Review copy kindly provided by Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG)
]]>In the box you’ll get:
The first thing you will need to do is download the companion app which is available on Android or iOS. The app walks players through the game, chooses your ‘secret word’, provides instructions and acts as a timer!
Take the Mayor, Seer and Werewolf cards and add Villager cards so that the number of cards is one more than the number of players. Shuffle them up and deal one card face down to each player.
The player with the Mayor reveals themself and takes the tokens and the spare hidden role card - this will be their secondary role for the game.
They need access to the app, but making sure other people will be able to see it. Set it up for the correct number of players and decide if they want easy, medium, hard or ridiculous words.
When you start the app, it will tell all players to close their eyes. Then it will tell the Mayor to wake up and tap their secret role. Then it will give the Mayor a selection of words to choose the secret word from. After they have chosen, they will be told to close their eyes. Next, the Seer will wake up and view the secret word. After being told to go back to sleep, the werewolf/werewolves will then be told to wake up and view the word and then close their eyes.
Finally, the app will tell everyone to wake up and start the Day phase of the game.
While the timer is running, players try to guess the secret word. They may ask the Mayor any questions that require a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. The Mayor is not allowed to speak, instead he must use the tokens to answer. The tokens are limited, when the Mayor uses the last yes/no token, the day phase is over. Players may talk with each other during the day phase, but have to ask questions one at a time, while the Mayor cannot talk at all.
After a correct guess, the werewolf/werewolves reveal themself and have a chance to win if they can correctly guess who the Seer is. If they guess correctly, the Werewolf team wins, if they are incorrect the Villagers win.
If the players do not guess the word correctly or run out of tokens, they get to guess who the Werewolf/Werewolves were. They get one minute to discuss among themselves and may even lie about their own role in order to put people off. When the minute is up, everyone must point at who they think the Werewolf was. If the majority of players point at a Werewolf, the Villagers win and the Werewolf team loses. If they guess incorrectly the Werewolf team wins and everyone else loses. Bear in mind, the Mayor could also be a Werewolf or the Seer. In which case, they can mislead or lie to the players to lead them away from the secret word.
The Beholder knows who the Seer is, but does not know the secret word, they are on the Villagers team.
The Minion knows who the Werewolves are but also does not know the secret word, they are on the Werewolf team. If at the end of the day phase they are accused of being a Werewolf, the Villagers win!
The Seer must be careful not to make their knowledge so obvious but can help lead the questions in the right direction. Same with the Werewolf team, but obviously trying to waste questions or lead the team away from the correct word.
This is a great twist on the original Werewolf game and unlike the others, this works pretty well with four players. The words add a whole new element as you are trying to guess that as well as people's roles. I have also recently discovered the extra selections for words, meaning you can have general word, movies, music or a combination of all. There is some community lists available, including (obviously) a games list but also a Klingon word list and I’m sure lots more to come. The guessing of the secret word gets people in the mood for deduction and is a great way to introduce new players to hidden role games. Obviously, it’s also another game that’s great when you have lots of people round!
Review copy kind supplied by Bézier Games, Inc.
]]>Azulejos are the blue and white tiles embraced by the Portuguese when their King visited the Alhambra of Southern Spain and fell in love with them. As a tile-laying artist you have been tasked with decorating the Royal Palace of Evora.
The box contains:
Give each player a board (coloured wall up for the first game, we’ll talk about the variant at the end!) and a score marker which will start on zero. Put the appropriate number of factory displays out (5 for 2 player, 7 for 3 player and all 9 for 4 players), place them in a circle with some room in the middle. Randomly draw tiles from the bag, placing four on each display and the start player marker in the middle.
Taking turns, players take either all tiles of one colour from a factory display, pushing any left over tiles into the centre or take all tiles of one colour from the centre. If you are the first player to take tiles from the centre this round, you must also take the start player token and place it in the leftmost free space in the ‘Floor Line’ at the bottom of your board.
Then, add the tiles you took onto one of the five pattern lines of your board. Place the tiles one by one, from right to left onto the pattern line. If the line already has tiles you may only place the same colour tiles in it. Once all spaces in a row are filled, it is considered complete and any tiles you have picked up that you cannot place must go on the floor line. Obviously as the game progresses there will be tiles you cannot place as they have already been filled, if you are forced to take these, they will also end up in your floor line, resulting in more negative points.
Your goal in this phase is to complete as many pattern lines as possible, because during the next phase you will only be able to move tiles from complete lines onto your wall. This phase ends when there are no more tiles available to take from both the factory displays and the middle of them.
Next comes the wall-tiling phase, all players do this simultaneously. Start at the top of your board and go through your pattern lines top to bottom. For each completed line, move the rightmost tile along and onto the appropriate space on the tile wall. Each time you move a tile, score as follows:
If there are no tiles directly adjacent, gain one point for each tile placed. If there are tiles adjacent, count the number in the row or column (including the one just placed) and gain that many points. Then, check if you have any tiles (including the start player tile!) in your floor line and deduct that number of points from your total score. All tiles are then removed from here. Any incomplete rows stay on your board and all spare tiles go back in the box (for now)
If no one has completed a horizontal row of tiles on their wall, move onto the next round. Begin by re-filling the factory displays with four tiles each. If you run out of tiles in the bag, refill it with the tiles that were previously set aside in the box. Place the start player token back in the middle and start the new round.
The game ends right after the wall tiling phase in which a player completes a horizontal row of five on their tile wall. Continue scoring as you would then end of game scoring is as follows:
2 points for each completed row of your tile wall
7 points for each completed column of your tile wall
10 bonus points for each colour of which you have managed to place all five tiles.
The player with the most points is the winner! In case of a tie, the player with the most completed rows is declared the winner.
The plain side of the player board can be used for an advanced version of the game. Players can choose to place tiles anywhere during the wall-tiling phase, however, the same colour tile cannot appear more than once in each vertical line.
Azul is a really elegant game, simple, easy to pick up rules yet with a surprising amount of depth. There are points in the game that you really need to sit and think about what tiles you take, lest you be stuck taking a huge number of tiles you can’t place and ending up with the negative points. There’s real strategy in this colourful looking game. As with Century: Spice Road, the components and insert are lovely for this, the printed bag adds a real touch to it. While details like this aren’t necessary, they prove thought has gone into this game and that really shines through both in the components and the game play. My only criticism is the little cardboard start player token, we spent ages looking for a tile and realised we had nearly thrown it away on one of the ‘empty’ punch boards. It would have been nice if this was a tile in a similar style to the others. This has been our most played game of our Essen purchases and everyone, regardless of skill level, has enjoyed it.
Review copy kindly provided by Plan B Games, please note this is the German edition so components may vary slightly with the English edition.
]]>Please note all pictures shown are of a prototype copy so may vary from the final version.
In this beast of a box you get:
Randomly choose which sides of the mountain you want to use and build it! This is actually far easier than I was expecting. Set up the conditions board in the stand and place the marker nearby.Shuffle and prepare the event cards according to the number of players in the game. For each player use 1 ‘conditions change’ card and 9 standard event cards ie for four players you will have a deck of forty cards. Give each player their route markers, climber, upgrade board and route locks. Then deal out six climbing routes to each player. They must keep four and discard the remaining ones back into the box. This is the time to have a good look at the mountain, spin it around and have a good look at all sides as some of these will be easier to complete than others. Randomly deal all players two character cards, they can choose between the four available and place them into the slot on their upgrade board.
The start player is the last person that has climbed a mountain! (or done randomly if you have a group like ours lol) Then take it in turns to place your climber marker in a position at the bottom of the board.
A turn consists of two stages:
Draw an event card and resolve it. All players gain or loose supplies as marked in the top left of the card.
Read the top of the card aloud for all players. If it is a ‘conditions
change’ card, mark it appropriately on the conditions board and make sure all
players know what the new conditions are. At the bottom of the card is a bonus
for the active player, if the card was a conditions change card you must use it
or lose it at the end of the turn. If it was a normal event card, lay it face
up on the table next to you and it can be used later on during the game. Some
of these even give you end game points.
Regular and Special Actions - During your turn, you may do between 0 and 2 regular actions. You have three choices:
Climb - to climb the mountain you must pay one supply token and can move to any of the six surrounding points, some of these may even be on a different face of the mountain. Don’t forget the conditions board though as climbing may cost you more than the standard one supply! Pay the required supply token, move your climber to that position, you may then place a route marker in the position you just left. You may also pay an additional supply to place a lock on that route marker (this stops it being sabotaged by other players) When placing route markers, start with the lowest number and work up, this will help you with end game scoring.
Purchase Climbing Upgrades - These are essential to the game. You must pay for the upgrade before being able to use it. All upgrades cost five supplies to purchase. Once you have paid for an upgrade, use the highest number route maker you have to mark it as purchased.
Use a Climbing Upgrade - After an upgrade has been purchased, you may spend one of your regular actions to use it. Pay the cost indicated on the board and use it. You may use as many upgrade actions as you can, as long as they are paid for, additionally, you are not required to use the total movement. Climbing upgrades override the current conditions, but do not override text at the top of an event card.
Special actions are usually event card actions (though some characters have special abilities that count as special actions) You may use one special action per turn. These override climate conditions, but not the restrictions of the current event card.
A game ends after all the event cards have been drawn (so ten turns each) Players should use the circular track on the board base for scoring, Add up points from your route cards, one point for each marker on the mountain and special event cards. Minus any negative points from cards or upgrades.
Routes that were completed, then sabotaged during the game will give you half points.
There is a lot I like about this game! Firstly, it just looks amazing, I also love the fact it’s not just a simple race to the top - there is planning and strategy behind every move you make. Corey Wright, the designer of the game, loves climbing and his love of the sport shines through in every aspect of the game. There are quotes from mountaineers, survival tips and all sorts in various parts of the game (the back of the board has some amazing quotes!) The characters are all based on real climbers (with a great selection of women). All of this just helps the theme shine through.
The baseboard has every type of terrain and feature detailed on it so you know exactly what you are looking for and is on both sides of the board, so no fighting over who gets to sit the right way round. It’s attention to detail like this that means you have a great game!
We’ve only played this four player, with some games we had almost no interaction and were all on different faces of the mountain, the last game we played it seemed that three of us all wanted the same spots on the board, so player interaction varies a lot.
There are three versions of the game available to buy on Kickstarter, the ‘basic’ game that comes with everything described above, the ‘deluxe’ edition that gives you extra mountain faces, 5-6 player pieces and additional routes, events, and characters, then there is the ‘collector's edition’ that adds swanky card and component trays and also has laser engraved wooden pieces!
Go check out the Kickstarter campaign now!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/coreywright/mountaineers-a-3d-board-game
]]>Please note all pictures shown are of a prototype copy so will vary from the final version, however, sustainability is important to these developers so it will be a plastic-free version!
The game contains:
Place the board in the middle of the table and separate the player tiles into the three types. Give out the appropriate number depending on player count, they do not need to be shuffled as they are all the same. With two or three players give five tiles from each stack, four players give four and five or six players give three from each stack. These tiles are double sided so don’t forget that when you come to place them!
The aim of Sectre is to connect like colours together to make shapes which will score you points. Taking turns, the active player may place any one of their tiles anywhere on the board as long as matching colours do not touch. In turns after the first, cards may be covered partially or fully as long as the above placement rule is adhered to.
Once a player has formed a shape that can be scored, that player receives the score cards(s) relevant to that play. It is possible to score multiples with one placement. Not only do you get points for the appropriate shapes, there are points available for connecting 5, 10 or 15 of each specific colour. A shape/number card may not be scored more than once, score cards are placed face up in front of that player and cannot be lost even if that shape is covered up in subsequent turns.
If a shape was completed but not collected on at the time, ie if a player notices a completed shape turns after the fact, that score card can either be discarded from the game or collected by the player who first notices it.
The game ends when all players have placed their final tile, scores are added up and the player with the highest is the winner.
Sectre will appeal to all fans of abstract games,math based games or classic games like chess. The puzzle like element of it makes it surprisingly thinky for a game with such simple rules.
Sectre will be available on Kickstarter the week beginning November 13th. It was designed by Peter Mariutto and will be made entirely in the US and in an attempt to be sustainable it will contain no plastics. It will be available for $25 USD with free domestic shipping and just $5 for international shipping. There are already expansions in the works, some of which may be available during the campaign.
I will put the link up as soon as the project is live so make sure you go check it out!
]]>This is a push your luck, card building, deckbuilder! The initial cards you start with are card and start sleeved, the cards you buy are see-through plastic, they slide in and build up your initial cards. At the start of your turn, you flip over as many cards as you want, looking for mana to buy upgrades, However, if you reveal too many curses, you lose your turn. This adds a really nice twist on an already unique-style game.
Yes, this is an Insane Clown Posse game, and actually, it’s quite good, the theme holds up nicely too. This is a fairly standard deckbuilder with a couple of twists. If you play three cards from the same faction in a turn you get a bonus (dependant on the faction) and it also has a Wheel of Fate mechanism that involves rolling a D12 for a random effect. Also, what other game are you likely to see a Vanilla Ice card in?
A big board and area control in a deckbuilder, really? This was our surprise hit of last year. You use your attack point to either place troops on the board or remove other peoples. If you have the majority in a town that will give you bonuses in game as well as extra points at the end of the game. The figures in this are really nice, work thematically without being overpowering. Another great D and D boardgame!
Everything you need for two players fits inside one small box which makes this perfect to chuck in a bag and take anywhere with you, I’m not so big on space themes but it works really nicely here. The four factions have their own strengths and weaknesses and power up off each other. There are a lot of expansions for this that add events and a whole load of other stuff, but it actually plays beautifully in its simplest form. The app is also rather good!
As a serious MtG player for many years I had to try this out and I finally managed to get a copy. This is the ultimate meta-game! In real time you can buy, sell and trade cards in order to make up a collection which you can trade in for bonus points or make up a deck to play in a ‘tournament’. The desperation to find that one perfect card for your deck felt oh so familiar! Great artwork and loads of variants ensure this will be a firm favourite.
]]>Crazed with excitment! (Or something) pic.twitter.com/sDsUqWhVJN
— I Play Red (@IPlayRedGaming) September 4, 2017
The house on the hill has a reputation for being haunted, people see strange things through the window and the house can be seen shaking and tilting late at night. Will you be able to break the curse and flee the mansion?
Be the first to complete five challenges by gently tilting and shaking your box to place the correct items into the correct room, following the information on the card. Whoever does this first flees the mansion and is declared the winner!
Panic Mansion comes with:
There are a few different ways to play this game, but they all start out the same.
Each player takes 1 adventurer, 2 ghosts, 2 eyeballs, 2 spiders, 2 snakes and 3 treasure chests and puts them in a mansion. Mix them up and pass the box to the player on your right.
Shuffle up the challenge cards.
Each player puts 1 adventurer, 1 ghost and 3 treasure chests in their box and mixes them up. Shuffle the cards and place them in the centre of the table with the object side face up. One player turns over the top card, to reveal the room on the back. All players then race to get the adventurer and the three treasure chests (and only those items) into the room shown on the card. You do this by gently tilting and shaking your box. The first person to complete the challenge shouts 'Panic Mansion'. Another player checks that the challenge is correct and if so, that player wins the card as a point.
In case of a mistake, that player must give back a points card if they have one and the player to the right adds one of the objects initially put aside, making it harder for future rounds. A new round then begins with someone turning over the top card.
Each player puts all of their objects into their mansion and mixes them up. Shuffle the cards and place them with the room side face up.
One player turns over the top card revealing the side with objects and places it next to the pile so there is a room and an object card showing. Players use both visible cards and must race to get the objects shown in the room shown. No other object may be in that room for the challenge to be completed. Again, the first player must shout 'Panic Mansion when completing the task and have it checked by another player. They win the card as a point if correct.
In case of a mistake, that player must give back a point card if they have one, and the round continues until someone completes the challenge.
This is set up the same way as variant 2, but instead of placing the objects shown on the card, you need to place the objects missing from the card in that room.
The first player to reach five points/cards is the winner and flees the mansion, leaving the other players to a fate worse than death *bwahahaha*
This is a very, silly, fun game requiring a lot of patience and a steady hand. Great fun for kids but just as much fun for adults (especially after a few drinks!) The components are lovely, and who could resist a game with cute purple snakes?
]]>In your box you will get:
Set the board up and place all the doors on, shuffle up the cards and place the appropriate number on the spaces for each room, then randomly place one student card on the top of each deck, this determines which student is hiding out in each room. Place the coloured student cubes on the appropriate health point square on the board.
Each player chooses a set of monsters they wish to play with, takes the appropriate figures and cards, they also take a set of student tiles and a ‘target’ token. Place your student tokens face down in front of you in the order you think they are going to die, then place your ‘target’ token on the one you think you will kill yourself. Each Monster card shows the amount of actions that monster has each turn, the number of dice they roll for a challenge and their special ability.
Monsters are played one character each turn and their card is then flipped to show they have been used, only when you have played all three can you re-use any of them.
At the start of every round (except the first one) the top card of the action deck is revealed, this might make life easier or harder for the students or the monsters. This effect remains in play until a new event is revealed at the start of the next round.
Each monster gets one free move action a turn in addition to the actions shown on their card. To enter a new room, they must first roll the ‘monster dice’ one success breaks down the door, which you put to one side as it will be worth one point at the end of a game. You may then use one action to ‘peek’ inside the room, meaning you can look at the top card to see which student is hiding out in there, however, after this action the deck gets shuffled up. (the student has found a better place to hide after being spotted!) You can also use an action to search the room. Roll the appropriate number of monster dice and draw a card from the room for each success. If you draw a student card, they appear in that room! Place the mini next to you and you can begin attacking them if you have any actions left or if you want to! (they might be the person you put as being killed last!)
To attack a student, first declare you are attacking them. All of the other players gets a chance to add them using weapons (cards) they may have drawn. This gives the students a chance to defend them self against the monster. Roll the appropriate number of monster and student dice, count up the number of successes the monster gets and subtract any the student gets, the student then takes that many points of damage (don’t forget the students have special abilities too!) You then earn one flesh token for each point of damage you managed to inflict - these are worth two points at the end of the game. Also, move the appropriate coloured cube down the students health track. If you are lucky enough to completely kill a student you also get a bone token (also worth two points) If a student dies, play temporary halts while everyone checks the death order they selected at the start of the game. If you guessed that particular student's death placement correctly, you gain a brain token (worth three points) If you killed them ands they were your target, you also gain a ‘favourite meal’ token worth an additional five points!
Then, once that has been resolved, play continues with the active players turn.
When each player has used all three of their monsters, they turn the cards over and begin to play with a complete family again.
The game ends either when all five students are dead or at the end of the twelfth round, add up all your points and the player with the most is the best monster!
I only got to play one game of this at Essen Spiel and it was a lot of fun. The minis are great and the weapons are brilliantly thematic - garlic gives a student dice against any monster, but extra against vampires for example. The copy I got to play was a beautiful prototype and from looking at the Kickstarter, things have changed a bit and it seems extra rules have been added, but the amazing artwork is still the same. The current included families are: Vampires, Werewolves, Golems and Zombies but stretch goals in the campaign are hoping to add aliens at least. There are some elements of messing other players up but not enough for it to be a proper ‘take that’ game.
In a world where a horror theme means zombies or Cthulhu, Monster Slaughter is a breath of fresh air!
Check it out on Monster Slaughter on Kickstarter
This has peaked my interest before, but not enough for the price tag. I found this for a bargain 9 euros and look forward to getting it to the table. I have loved civilisation games for as long as I have played Civ 1 on my PC and it has been published by Golden Egg games who are known for their great games.
This has been on my radar for awhile, and it was a must buy as it was at the right price. We love train games and this looks great, it’ll also help towards our target of playing one hundred train games this year!
This is another I have had my eye on for a while, mainly as it comes with so many recommendations from people who I know share similar tastes to me. Being that it is hard to come by in Europe I had to jump on it.
I played the original Avenue at HeavyCon and was then disappointed to find it was out of print, I was then excited to hear about a reprint on Kickstarter, I looked it up and was gutted to discover I had missed it. Finally, that version has come to retail and I couldn’t be happier.
I had heard about this little ten euro card game and it had piqued my interest, however, it wasn’t until I saw it that I realised it was the new Alexander Pfister! We are big fans of his, especially his card games Port Royal and Oh My Goods! Both of which are high on strategy for small games.
We have recently introduced some friends to Dixit and they have been having a lot of fun with it, however, we’ve had this game for a few years so some of the base cards are getting a little stale, this gives us a chance to really mix it up as well as get to see some new amazing artwork!
We love Deep Sea Adventure and Masked Men by Oink so always have a look at what new titles they have. This is a share management game with the cutest art I have seen in an economic game, all in the tiny size box they are known for.
We played this recently at HandyCon and enjoyed this simple action selection, but clever pick up and deliver game. The artwork and theme work beautifully in this solid mid weight game. All this was a bargain for a mere 25 euros.
Who doesn’t love a good swash buckling adventure? Especially when it’s made by GMT, known for their excellent, historically accurate games. Loads of player interaction will mean never a dull game with plenty of grudges held! This was a bargain price so would have been rude to walk away from.
I have also picked up some great games to write about and some great items for competition prizes so keep tuned! You can subscribe for weekly digests keeping you up to date with all the news from us at I Play Red!
4.30am is a pretty dark and miserable time of the morning to be waking up, and after coffee and cat cuddles, we set off in the car just gone 5. We arrived at Folkestone around 6.30am, with just enough time to grab more coffee before boarding our train at 7.20.
The Eurotunnel is a real, no frills experience and I imagine gives you a sense of what cattle must feel like!
After a little nap lasting around an hour, we drove off the train into France, remembering to drive on the wrong side of the road. France was actually quite sunny and welcoming as we headed off onto our grand adventure of four countries in four hours!
The strange thing driving through Europe is there is no border control, so if you blink and miss the sign, it is easy to lose track of what country you’re in! These little signs at the side of the road are easy to miss, especially as the autobahn can be quite fast moving.
This is the best thing to see at this point in the day, our first sign that says Essen! So close at last
At around 4pm German time, we pull into our hotel car park at last. The fabulous Hotel Bredeney which will be our home for the next six days and the site of many evening game plays and wine and beer drinking until far too late in the morning!
The days will be spent wandering the six massive halls at the Messe exhibition centre, demoing games, talking to exhibitors and buying all the games! I have some great meetings set up with people over the weekend to bring you the best from this years Essen. If you’re here, come and say hi :)
As for now, I think a little nap is in order before hitting the bar and playing some games.
]]>When you open the box, don't be overwhelmed by the number of components, this is a much lighter game than initial impressions give!
The aim of the game is to use fragrant notes to create perfums containing the ingredients that the current buyers want. Each perfume is made up of either two or three fragrant notes (top and bottom or top, middle and bottom)
Each round consists of three phases: Wake up, create perfumes and sell perfumes. In the wake up phase players take it in turn to decide when they want to play in the round, 1st, 2nd etc, however, the number of actions decrease the higher up you play. For example in the 4 player version, player one gets 3 actions, player 2 4...
This is actually one of the trickier parts of the game, you may see something on the board that you really need so want to go first but the number of actions means your chances of getting it are lower. The player currently in last place chooses first so it's not advantageous to be a runaway winner during the game.
Next is the create perfumes phase where you will use your assigned number of actions. There are three things you can do here: take an aroma dice, take a water token or restock one of the fragrance notes (usually in the hope of getting something you need!) After choosing your actions you will try to claim fragrance notes using the aroma dice you previously choose. The dice show flasks or flies, the flasks are a successful distillation and the flies are a fail. You can use your water tokens to either re-roll or change your dice rolls. You can use one token to either re-roll all flies of the same colour or re-roll all dice. Alternatively you can discard two tokens to rotate any dice from a fly to a flask. If you successfully distill the aroma required for a fragrance note, you can then claim it. When claiming a fragrance note you also gain the number of points indicated on the tile.
If you complete a perfum you can then claim flacons. For a two part perfume you get two flacons, and a three part, three flacons. Now your perfumes are ready to sell. After everyone has had their create perfumes phase you will move onto the sale phase. Taking it in turns, each player will get the chance to sell to the current buyers for the amount of points indicated or else sell to a bargain hunter for two points for a minor or three points for a major perfume. There are two selling rounds but the buyers don't restock until the end of the round so your choices will be limited second time round. When you sell the last flacon of a perfume is sold you receive two water tokens.
At the end of the round the fragrance notes and customers are restocked and the round starts again with the wake up phase.
The game ends when the 'closing time' token comes up (this was put five customers from the bottom at the start of the game) or when the fragrance notes run out.
Finally all players reveal any points they may have on water tokens and add it to their total.
While Parfum is advertised as a 2-4 player game, the two player version involves each player taking two turns per round so feels clunky and doesn't really work for me so I would advise it as a three or four player game only. Parfum is a solid, but quite simple euro game, sometimes with tough choices to be had. The turn order/number of actions mechanism is really nice as it provides a balance and prevents a runaway winner . The theme works well and is translated to the board and components beautifully.
]]>Based on the super popular show, this is a cooperative game where you get to play as your favourite characters and take on villains. The reached stretch goals now means there are miniatures for all the characters. Each character has their own deck of cards with unique abilities, when a character wins a duel they gain experience and Battle Fury. This enables you to attempt an ultimate attack. Different scenarios and objectives means you’ll never play the same game twice. Rooster Teeth have got Arcane Wonders producing this which means you’re guaranteed a great game based on a great franchise!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/roosterteeth/rwby-combat-ready
We got to play a demo game of this at UK Games Expo earlier this month and boy was it fun! A post-apocalyptic, Mad Max style vehicle miniature game. A modular board and four factions to choose from means you’ll never play the same game twice. Everything you need to play comes complete in the box for a bargain £49, no need to ever buy add-ons or extras. We had loads of fun and knocked out a 2 player game in around an hour. I also love the innovative damage tracking system, that involves sticking flame pegs in your vehicles, making it easy to see just how much damage your opponent has taken.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1358316989/wreck-and-ruin
From the guys at SteamForged who bought us the hugely successful Dark Souls board game comes their next video game adaptation. This immersive, co-operative horror survival game comes filled with minis. With characters we all know and want to kill, you get hours of fun painting all playing for just £70. As with Dark Souls, you can add extra minis to your heart (and wallets) content, with potentially another £150 worth of awesome figures available. These guys make awesome figures so everything you get from them will be top notch! This is now 400% funded so great stretch goals are being unlocked, plus they are a UK company so show them some love!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/steamforged/resident-eviltm-2-the-board-game
In some ways, this is something very different for me to talk about -it’s an RPG, but you play as cats! Not cat people, actual cats! This is a brand new RPG system that seems easier than a lot out there and quick enough to keep the story running along. The art is fantastic and it seems like a lot of work has been put into the background and mythology. Rather than pen/paper and crunching number, all heroes have a life dial, if you fail a roll, your dial goes down a level. Green-Yellow-Red-Black, at certain levels you lose certain abilities (black being dead!) You can also get your own cat drawn into the game! This was debuted at GenCon two years ago and intended as a one-off campaign but people wanted more, so here it is!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2007660791/cataclysm-the-rpg-of-feline-proportions
]]>This is one of those rare games where the insert acts as an aid for the game! Place the trains, according to colour in their appropriate place in the box eg. there are 23 green trains, put them in the slot marked ‘23’. The player cheat sheets tell you how many trains there are of each colour.
There are also places for all the different denomination notes, though this is one of those games we use poker chips for rather than dealing with paper money!
Place the board on the table and place the appropriate coloured trains on the matching coloured spaces on the tracks. Shuffle up the track cards and deal three to each player. Shuffle the share cards (Not the Union Pacific ones!) and deal four to each player and give everyone one Union Pacific share. Each player then chooses one of their shares to place on the table, representing their initial investment in one of the companies. Draw four share cards and place them face up next to the board. Divide the remaining shares into three groups, the first with six cards, the second with eighteen cards and the third being the rest of the cards. Shuffle three dividend cards into the third pile, one into the pile with eighteen cards and place it on top of the bigger pile, then finally put the six cards on the top of the deck.
You are now ready to play.
At the start of your turn you draw a track card, then you make take one of
two actions. You may either build track and draw a share card or play share
cards from your hand.
After drawing a track card, a player may choose to invest, to do so, you place
shares face up on the table. You may either place one or more shares in a
single company or one share from each of two different companies. You finish
the turn by discarding a track card (you may never have more than three in your
hand)
To build a track, select a card which will determine the type of track you will place on. Select a company you want to build for that can use the appropriate track type. The section of track you build on must be connected to the company's main station via track sections where trains have already been placed. You can play trains for any company, you don’t have to have shares in that specific company. After you place a train, you must draw a share card and put it in your hand. This could be one of the face-up cards, or from the top of the deck or could be a Union Pacific share. Immediately replace the face-up share card, if four of the same are on display, remove them from the game and restock. After drawing a card, a player may exchange any share card from their hand for a Union Pacific share card. The exchanged card is removed from the game.
When a player draws a dividend card from the share stack, place it face up in front of them and draw the next card as normal, if that is also a dividend card, a double dividend is paid out. The amount of a company's dividend is based on the number of trains that have been played for that company, then add one to represent the main station. That company is worth that many million dollars. Not all shareholders of a company will receive a dividend. The player with the most shares is the primary shareholder and will receive the current dividend value, the player with the second most gets half of the above amount, rounded down. Other players with shares will receive nothing. If a player is both the primary and secondary shareholder of a company, they will receive both payments. If players are tied for the most shares in a company, the amounts for primary and secondary shareholders are added together and shared, no one else gets any money.
The Union Pacific shares will pay up to five shareholders instead of just two. The value of these grow throughout the game There are four payouts during the game, they occur when the dividend cards are drawn. After the fourth dividend card is drawn and paid out, the game ends. Total up the cash and the player with the most is the winner!
I first came upon Union Pacific a while back and really enjoyed it, years later it still gets a lot of play from us. As I stated at the beginning, it’s a nice point between the easy and tough train games out there, getting used to stock or track actions is a great introduction to some of the 18XX games out there. The plastic trains are a similar style and quality to Ticket to Ride trains. Everything is laid out nicely on the player aids making it easy to crunch numbers when you need to.
I am sure this will continue to hit the table in years to come too!
]]>My first ever gaming convention was GenCon UK in 1996. I was there to play in a MtG Pro Tour qualifier. I’d played board games as a child with my grandmother and even progressed to Risk as a teenager (oh, those drunken Risk games were so much fun!) ‘Modern’ boardgames for adults were still a very new thing at the time, but I was introduced to Settlers of Catan here. It was a German version (not sure the English one was widely available at this time) and this is where my love of boardgames as an adult stems from! I also got to play Grass and Lunch Money, playing it with fifteen one pence pieces in the bar until late in the morning. The following year, I went back (again, mostly for Magic but also to play some of the great new boardgames that were coming out!) I had great fun both years I went and was introduced to great new (for the time!) games by random strangers.
For the next few years I went to WarpCon in Cork, again, mostly for Pro-Tour reasons, but also playing a lot more besides that. I was there as a ‘special guest’ due to my links with the Guild of Melee and Magic in London, but the Irish sure lived up to their reputation for hospitality! Again, the boardgames I was playing were simpler games (well, compared to now!) but we played a lot, met loads of people and had a lot of fun. WarpCon is still going strong and at some point I will get back over to it!
I left the Magic Scene so didn’t really go to any board game cons for a while, though carried on playing amongst friends (some of whom I had met on the Magic scene) The UK board gaming scene was still pretty small, then I heard about UK Games Expo in Birmingham. I think it was around 2008 a group of us trekked up there to have a look. At this point, UKGE was small, the Catan tournament had around 30 people playing in one small room and it didn’t feel like a lot was happening, I then went back in 2014 to demo for Z-Man games and was amazed at how much it had grown. At this point it had moved to the Hilton Hotel (still in Birmingham) but was around 5 times the size it had previously been. I have been for each consecutive year and the rate of growth has been phenomenal! In 2014 there were just under ten thousand attendees and this year there was a staggering thirty one thousand, making it the fourth largest gaming convention in the world - https://iplayred.co.uk/posts/uk-games-expo-2016
We managed our first visit to Essen Spiel in 2013. No matter how much you read up and organise, nothing will prepare you for the spectacle that is Essen! With over a thousand exhibitors from over fifty different countries, every gamer should go at least once! Beware though, with 174,000 people there last year it gets packed and your chances of getting into many demo games are slim! Make sure you get a hotel with good gaming space so you can play your purchases in the evening. We have met people from all over the world here and staying at the same hotel every year means we see some of the same friendly faces each time and get to play games with them. This is the biggest gaming convention in the world, but it is very much a trade show so make sure you go prepared, either with a very strict list of what you will buy or with a very big wallet! There are also some great bargains to be had, especially on the final day so worth holding back some money and luggage space for that. - https://iplayred.co.uk/posts/essen-2017
In 2015 I got the chance to go to BGG.Con in Dallas, Texas. Not only was this my first time visiting the US, it was also my first chance to meet, in person, a lot of the people I had spent years talking to on-line. Now, this is completely opposite to Essen. This is all about playing games. The main hall is open 24 hours a day for people to play and you’ll find me in there until 3/4am most nights (the 24 hour Starbucks helps!) This has quickly turned into my favourite Con and I will be back again for my third time this year. I will be working as part of ‘Team Geek’ this time around (you know, the super helpful people in the hockey shirts?!) - https://iplayred.co.uk/posts/bgg-con
In recent years, with the growth of the hobby, more Cons have been popping up. Great for a day out, to meet people or to buy and sell games!
Dragonmeet has been going a while now and we have been at a couple of its different locations. Every year it gets bigger, adding more stands, events, and visitors. The actual Convention is a one-day event with various games and RPGs running the day before and long into the night on the Saturday. There is a bring and buy as well as a ‘Best of Essen’ demo area where you can try out the years hottest releases.
Airecon is still in it’s infancy but this years event guaranteed them a place in my calendar for next year. Loads of open play space, a good bring and buy and a great, friendly atmosphere and cheap tea! We met quite a few new people here and learnt new games. Tickets have just gone on sale for next year and it’s well worth a visit. Next year will only be bigger and I can see a great future for it. - https://iplayred.co.uk/posts/airecon-4
HandyCon is just a weekend of game playing, with a library that was pretty good you could borrow from. There were quiet room for the heavier games (there was an 18XX tournament over the weekend!) and a family games room where kids (and adults) could be as noisy as they wanted. Everyone did tend to stick to their known groups here but there was enough people we knew to keep us happily playing until the wee hours!
HeavyCon is an invite-only, small-scale convention run by the podcast Heavy Cardboard. I had the privilege of going this year and can easily say this is the friendliest con I have been to. Just solid, heavy game playing. I met loads of new people and played loads of new games. I was honestly a bit nervous going for a variety of reasons but all my fears were put to rest as soon as I hit a table! - https://iplayred.co.uk/posts/a-brief-interlude
I’m maybe looking at trying Origins next year as I’ve heard nothing but great stuff about it, despite the huge visitor numbers! There is a convention for everyone out there, especially as more and more local Cons are popping up, if nothing else it’s a weekend away, a chance to meet some new people, play some new games and have fun!
Tell me what your favourite convention is in the comments below :)
]]>The box contains:
The game is played over ten rounds, you will get three actions each round.
To set up, each player gets a barge, 13 seals and 3 crests in their colour as well as 2 coins, 2 ulm sparrows and an action tile drawn at random from the bag. Randomly choose four of the eight descendant tiles and put them in the Oath Quarter House, shuffle the cards and place them on the board and place the Cathedral on the board. Randomly distribute 1 brown, 2 turquoise, 2 white and 2 gray action tiles in the 3 by 3 grid of the Cathedral area, then put one tile of each colour in the loading docks. Lastly, choose 10 Tower Tiles randomly, these essentially work as your round markers.
At the beginning of the round, the starting player takes one Tower Tile and puts it on the Cathedral. In the basic game, the symbols are placed face down and ignored but in the advanced game the appropriate action is taken.
Then, the active player draws a tile from the bag and pushes it anywhere into the 3 by 3 grid. Then, they carry out the three actions in a row of their choosing. You may only push out where a tile hasn’t been previously pushed, so players start with twelve options that gets reduced as the game goes on until someone takes the white tile action (see below for action explanations) This is the main heart of the game and a really interesting mechanism I haven’t seen anywhere else
There are five different action tiles as follows:
Grey Tile (Money Action) : Take 1 coin
White Tile (Clearaway Action) : Take the pushed out action tiles from any one side of the grid (between one and three)
Blue Tile (Barge Action) : Move your barge forward one space on the river. Spaces containing over peoples barges are skipped and not included in the count.
Brown Tile (Card Action) : You can throw away any two action tiles to draw a card, or, if you discard two tiles of the same colour you may draw the top two cards, keep one and place the other on the discard pile. Alternatively, you may use the card action to play a second card this turn (you are always allowed to play one a turn without using an action)
Orange Tile (Seal Action) : Pay two coins and place one of your seals on an unoccupied space in one of the two city quarters between where your barge currently is. You then receive the corresponding privilege of that quarter as shown on the game board.
During the game you can use an Ulm Sparrow as a joker to get the action tile you want. Discard the Sparrow and exchange the tile you have just drawn from the bag with on that is currently sat in the Loading Docks area.
Cards may be used in one of two ways. You may play it onto the discard pile and use the upper bonus of the card at that point, or you may place a card face-up in front of you and obtain the lower bonus of the card at the end of the game. Cards in hand at the end of the game are discarded and worth nothing. You may place one card per turn, however, you can always use the card action to play additional cards rather than drawing more cards.
At the end of the game, points are added for your placement on the river, cards in front of you and one point for every Ulm Sparrow you have. The player with the most points is the winner!
Ulm is a fairly lightweight euro that is pretty easy to learn and teach - five available actions, you can do three a turn. The rules are split up nicely and you have a copy of the ‘Ulm Chronicle’ that details all the area and card special abilities. The tile pushing in the grid is a fun mechanism.
Now, let’s talk about that Cathedral - damn, it’s pretty! But, ultimately it feels wasted, it has no use other than to hold the round markers.
Gameplay and components are all nice, making this a great intro to Euroes or school night game!
This is a reprint of Capstone Games 2013 release, but it seems it’s impossible to get any of their games here in the UK. Set in the 19th Century you are oil barons trying to develop oil fields, refine it and transport more than other players.
WYG? Have never let us down. While this seems slightly lighter fare from them than normal, it was a mere twenty euros so well worth a risk. This does have a co-op element but overall is a competitive game. Hopefully it’s the pirate themed game I finally fall in love with.
We love train games! This seems to pack much of the feel of an 18XX (stock buying, track laying) into a game that plays in under an hour. Beautifully presented and a bargain price too - what more could you want?
7 Wonders is a guilty pleasure in our house, it’s a great filler game and it plays up to a massive seven players! We currently own every expansion and promo there is for it, so this is an insta-buy!
Currently weighted at 4.43 complexity on BGG and looking stunning, this was a no-brainer. Last year, Quined games had Papa Paolo which I didn’t buy and immediately regretted so I wasn’t making the same mistake again. (I may have also preordered PP too!)
This was a bargain price for a mid weight game that had a tonne of stuff so I couldn’t resist. It looks like a big game in a small box. Each player is a Clan leader trying to do the best they can whilst also messing with their opponents. A worker placement game that also has some secret unit deployment.
Phil Eckland is well known for his Pax games, all of which are big games in
small boxes. In Bios: Genesis players start the game as organic compounds
shortly after earths formation. This is essentially Evolution extreme!
After just seeing the miniatures, I am in love with this game! Influenced by true old school horror the figures are a delight (and I’m really not into minis!) This will be kickstarting on Halloween but I shall be looking at a preview copy at the show and reporting back.
Do I really need to say anything about this? Finally they named a game after me! Collecting cats, cute outfits, toys and food, really what’s not to love? I know this will be a simple little card game but I always need to add to my ever expanding cat game collection.
It’s a bit of a cheat to put these as one entry but it’s tough to talk about them without giving much away! We’ve played all the currently available scenarios for both games and really enjoyed them all. Yes, you only get to play them once but they are a bargain price and a lot of fun.
Rob has developed a love for Lonny Orgler since Russian Railroads! While we love 18XX, we don’t always have the time needed with our regular group for them so an 18XX with a good 2 player rule set is exciting for us. And yes, it’s another train game - who doesn’t need more trains in their life?
Two words - Stefan Risthaus! Despite this being a small card game you know it will have some clout behind it, and at a bargain price it would be rude to ignore! In your turn, you may pick a group of commodities or a building and then build up to three buildings. Depending on where you build though, your commodities will have different values.
So, a lot of us have been waiting for this one! I already own three of the ‘big five’ Splotter games and love them all, so this really is another no brainer for me. Beautiful quality, heavy, economic gameplay, everything we have come to expect from Jereon and Joris at Splotter Spellen.
Plan B Games came storming into the scene earlier this year with Century: Spice Road, Azul is their newest offering. I’m not a huge fan of abstract games but it’s also listed as a tile placement game which we are fond of. This looks so pretty and will hopefully have a similar production quality to Spice Road so I shall be taking a look for sure!
I’ve played and enjoyed a few games of this but am really torn if we need more ‘filler’ games in the house. Love the big wooden, chunky pieces but am torn at the price point. Think I’m going to see if we can get a game in over the weekend and see what Rob thinks and go from there. I know it won’t be easy to pick up unless I grab it here though.
Not sure how to feel about this one. We love the original London, and after seeing the super shiny new Brass I was hoping for something similar for London. However, the removal of the board and the area ‘cards’ seems to take a lot away from the game. Hopefully, I’ll get a play in and be proven wrong.
From first time designer Sophia Wagner, Noria is a stunning looking game with an innovative mechanism called ‘wheel building’. She created an entire steampunk universe that has been beautifully translated to game form. Really looking forward to seeing something new and exciting.
More worker placement, I’m a sucker for it! Players are cloth merchants in medieval Florence, producing and delivering cloth to contribute to the construction and decoration of the city. Nice theme, nice looking artwork and a modular board, all of which excites me!
I love Scythe! I didn’t expect to but when I finally caved I thoroughly enjoyed it. This new expansion adds steam powered airships and a resolution module that changes the game end conditions. Only trouble is, this won’t fit in my beautiful Meeple Realty insert. Really excited by all this is going to add to an already excellent game.
Concordia is one of my top five games. It’s elegant, streamlined and perfect
for school-night gaming, yet it continually has enough strategy to keep the
most seasoned gamer engaged. Yes, we already have a lot of maps for Concordia
but this will be an insta-buy!
Take a look at the full list of Essen 2017 Releases to find out prices and locations across all of the halls.
]]>I love bits, dice, meeples, cubes, cards, give me all and more! This is where Yokohama truly delivers! Packed inside the box is:
This, combined with how big the board is can make this quite an overwhelming game initially, however, this is one of those beautiful games where you play a couple of turns and think ‘I’ve got this, what was I worried about?’ Firstly, randomly layout the area boards and management boards according to the number of players. This is shown nicely in the rulebook and also clearly marked on the back of all the boards. Place the score track in the middle at the top. Shuffle up the building site cards and randomly place one on each area board, do the same with the 5-power tokens. Randomly picked one achievement from the A,B and C piles and put them on the bottom of the score board. Stock up the tech and market boards.
Your board should look a little like this: (4 player)
Now, fill up players warehouses which should leave them with 8 workers and 2 shops free to play with, one of each resource type (green tea, fish, clay and linen) and yen depending on turn order (start player gets three, second place gets four etc) and you are ready to play!
Each players turn consists of three main steps:
1 - The placement step
Place either one assistant on three different areas or two assistants on one area. You may place where there is an opposing president, but you must pay one yen
2 - The movement step
Move your president through as many spaces as you want, though they must control one of your workers, moving through an opposing president again costs you one yen and you may not finish a turn where there is an opposing president.
3 - Area Action Step
The area your president lands on is where you will do your action for the turn. Depending on how much ‘power’ you have on that square, depends on the strength of your action. If you have four assistants and your president on an area that would give you a power of five. In this case you would get five green tea, you would get to take the five power bonus and also the opportunity to build on that area.
Buildings in an area increase your power on subsequent turns and also give you bonus coins if people complete actions in areas you have Trading houses. When you place buildings in areas you will also get the associated bonus. Most of the areas on the board will give you resources, these may help you complete achievements or contracts (which are obtained from other areas on the board). The Employment Agency area allows you to remove pieces from your warehouse, allowing you to then place them on the main board. The Port and Dock allow you to take contract cards, these can be fulfilled in any of your turns and give you points and/or other bonuses. The Laboratory and Research Centre areas give you technology points that can then be spent on cards from the corresponding area, these have a wide variety of bonuses that will help you out during the game, there are also bonus points at the end of the game for the players with the most points spent on technology.The technology and contract cards have flags on them,if you get a matching pair you get a single-use foreign agent, these can be used for an extra action in your turn, and are used the same way as a president would be. The other management boards in the game, the Church and Customs boards, add a bit of area control to the game. On their corresponding area you can sacrifice resources for a place on these boards. At the end of the game, points are awarded for area majorities on these two boards.
The game ends when any players builds their last trading house or shop, when the contract cards run out or when a certain number of assistants have been placed on the Church or Customs House (this number varies with player count) Finish the current round and play one more complete round. Points are then added up. There is a very handy guide to end game scoring on each player aide (useful to watch during the game!) But points are scored for Church and Customs boards, Technology bonus, there is also a bonus depending on the different flags on your contract and technology cards, remaining goods and coins are worth a small amount of points. All the points are tallied and the player with the highest is the winner!
Yokohama looks terrifying when you first lay it out, there is a lot of iconography, a lot of stuff going on and a lot to take in, however the very simple turn sequence means the actual game play really clicks after a turn or two. Several aspects of the game feel ‘familiar’ meaning experienced gamers will have no trouble at all, though overall it feels like a completely different take on any of those games. The bright, thematic artwork is a joy to behold and means everything is easy to read (once you get your head round the icons!) Replayability is massive with the fact the area tiles are laid out randomly, the achievements are randomly selected and of course, the contract and technology cards are all randomly drawn. Being a Euro game fan this obviously ticks all the boxes for me and the ‘trail laying’ of your assistants to allow your president to travel is a really nice twist on other worker placement options.
]]>When you open the box for Black Fleet the first thing that strikes you is its sheer beauty. The components are just gorgeous and look, the insert is a pretty functional, but awesome skull and crossbones!
Each turn you will choose one of your five movement cards to play, allowing you to move your merchant ship, your pirate ship and one of the navy boats. Beware though, the higher movement cards will force you to discard fortune cards, while some will allow you to draw extras (more on fortune cards later!)
The aim of your merchant ships is to transport goods from one port to another, hopefully selling them at a healthy profit. You will be using your pirate ships to hijack goods from other peoples merchant ships and everyone will be using the navy ships to try and intercept their opponents pirate ships. All goods fit nicely on your ships. Your merchant ships can carry three goods, while your pirate ships are limited to one good.
During your turn you can also use the fortune cards which have all sorts of special abilities.
Every time you sell goods or attack another players ship you will get beautiful, shiny (metal) doubloons. Your pirate ships (if they successfully hijack merchants) get to bury their ill gotten gains and gain doubloons depending on where they bury it.
The aim of the game is to turn over cards in your scenario (in any order) and lastly turn over your victory card, as soon as someone does, you are in the last round. Each of your scenario cards give you special abilities that can be used each turn. These abilities are strong, meaning it is useful to get them flipped over as soon as possible. There is a short version of the game with victory cards valued at 10 or a longer version where these cost 20 to flip over. There are six versions of each scenario meaning this game has great replay ability.
While this game, at base level, is very simple, the choices you need to make can be quite complex, which movement card to play, when to use your special moves from fortune cards and scenario bonuses, when to try and attack your opponents and when to run a mile! This means that while it is a great entry level game to play with family, there are enough choices to please the hard core gamer.
This game has so much adaptability, along with the truly lovely components and is a lot of fun. Easy for kids but engaging enough for adults, meaning we give it a solid 8 out of 10.
]]>In the box you get:
The Starting ring has two sides, a smooth side for beginners or a ridged side for those that want a tougher challenge. Choose which side you want and place it in the middle of the table. The starting team turns over the timer and begins, on the first turn they can place up to three pieces, when they are done the timer is flipped and play passes to the next team. On this initial turn however, you may not flip the timer until the sand has passed the black line.
From there on, teams take it in turns playing as many blocks as they want within the time limit, following the block placement rules:
The round ends either if someone knocks a block off, if a teams time runs out or if a team succeeds in placing all of their blocks. If the opposing team knock a block off or run out of time you gain a point, if you succeed in placing all your pieces you gain two points. However, for each point you gain you get to take a block away from the opposing team. This could be a block they really like or one you don’t, these are put to one side and are now nothing more than point markers. The first team to remove four blocks from their opponents wins!
This is a really simple, quick game that we had a surprising amount of fun with. Their are some variant rules given, the one we really like is lining up your opponents blocks and only allowing them to place from either end of the line.
I can see this coming up when we have a lot of people around, non gamers round or just as a fun little end of evening game!
Review copy kindly provided by Sweet Lemon Publishing
]]>This has been one of the most successful games of recent years and has spawned a slew of variations. Initially when I heard the premise I was quite underwhelmed, then I played it and was hooked!
A five by five grid of words is placed on the table, players are split into two teams and each team selects a spy master. Using only single word clues the spy master must get his team to guess their words on the grid avoiding the opposing teams words and the assassin which will lead to an immediate loss if chosen by the team.
Codenames can be played with any number of players over four but plays best around the 6-8 player mark. A round will generally last about fifteen minutes but as the cards are double sided it is easy to flip them over and have a rematch!
Snake Oil is another game where the more, the merrier! Each round, one player takes a role card, this might be something like ‘astronaut’, ‘witch’ or ‘rock star’. The other players use two cards from their hand to create an item that they want and have to really sell it to them. For example a rock star might want a rainbow wig or an endless wardrobe, but the trick to this game is really selling that item!
We usually find in a large group there are two or three stand out items so we then go back to those people for the ‘hard sell’ phase, this is a great game that results in some of the most outlandish story telling you’ll ever hear (and also some great gift ideas!)
This is easily the most non PC game I have ever played, and also the only game I can think of that has had me laugh so hard I had tears streaming down my face!
Twelve suspects are placed face-up on the table and one player is the ‘witness’, only the witness knows the true identity of the suspect. The other players take it in turn to ask questions about the suspect which can only be answered yes or no and eliminate suspects based on the answer. However, unlike Guess Who, these questions are not based on their looks, but their personalities.
So, the players might ask ‘Do they read novels?’, the witness then has to decide if they look like the sort of person that does or not. If the witness says no, you can then eliminate people you think do. If you eliminate the suspect, it’s round over and someone else becomes the witness for the next round. You can eliminate as few or as many people as you want based on one question, and then go on to ask another.
This truly is a game for terrible people who feel comfortable making snap decisions on people's appearances!
So, the heist was a success, your gang escaped with the cash, but now everyone is turning on each other! The game is played over eight rounds and each player is given a set of eight bullets, 5 clicks (blanks) and 3 bangs. Each round, there is a set of loot up for grabs. Everyone chooses a bullet they are going to use for the round and on a count of three points their gun at another player. When everyone knows where the real grudges are, on another count of three people can choose to chicken out or stay in the round! If you got shot with a bang you take a wound and are out for now, remaining players take turns choosing what loot they want. When all the loot has gone, the next round begins.
If you get three wounds over the course of the game you are dead and out for good! After eight rounds players add up the value of their lovely loot and the player with the most is the winner. This goes up to eight players and of course, who doesn’t love playing with foam guns?!
There are a load of different versions of this, but the one we love and I’m going to talk about is Times Up: Title Recall. Players have to guess the same set of words (in this case movies, songs, books) over three rounds in 30 seconds. In the first round anything goes, words, gestures, interpretive dance even! In round two, the same cards are used but the clues must be a single word only, round three no spoken words are allowed.
At this point, you are partly reliant on the memory of your team mates as the clues are the same in all three rounds, this can be really frustrating at times though (especially if everyones had a few drinks!) We tend to play this as a free-for-all with everyone playing to the rest of the group and earn one point for every answer someone gets, though there are specific rules for team play, we enjoy this as a bit of fun when we have large numbers of people round.
These are our five favourite games when we have large groups of people over, most of them work with gamers and non gamers alike but all of them guarantee fun! Feel free to tell me about your favourites in the comments section below!
]]>In your box, you will get:
Choose a set of code cards and take as many as there are players, minus one, then add the chameleon card. So with 6 players you would have 5 code cards and one chameleon card. Shuffle them up and deal them out. Then place a topic card in the middle of the table. Roll the dice and refer to the code card to see what the Secret Word is this round. Obviously, the chameleon has no clue, yet!
Starting with the dealer, each player takes it in turns to say one word related to the secret word. However, too vague and people will suspect you of being the Chameleon, too easy and the Chameleon will know what the secret word is. Once everyone has said their word everyone gets to vote on who they think the Chameleon is, feel free to divert attention away from yourself at this point! Then everyone points at who they think it is.
The person with the majority of votes flips over their code card, if it is just a code card then you have all let the Chameleon escape undetected. If you have managed to catch them, well done you, but they now get to guess at the secret word. In this example Yellow dice 2 and Blue dice 6 would identify Meerkat as our secret word according to the grids.
If the Chameleon escapes undetected, they receive two points, if they are caught but then guess the secret word they get one point, if they are caught and don’t guess the secret word everyone else gets two points. The first player to five points wins. It does state on the rules that scoring is optional and we just play as many rounds as we want to with the winner being whoever has the highest score at the end.
While very basic in its premise, we had a lot of fun with this, it arrived on a day we were set to have movie night, so we had a couple of ‘non-gamers’ round. I cracked it open and they enjoyed it so much we have been asked to bring games (including The Chameleon) round to theirs for movie night this weekend! The standard number of players is 4-6 though there are slight variations for 3 or 7-8 players but I think a lot depends on your group, the 7-8 player variant has the topic card being flipped over after everyone has said their word, making it harder for The Chameleon to guess it, however, we like things to be harder so I think this is a great variant for any number of players.
As with all Big Potato games, the component quality is good and the cards are slightly shiny, meaning they will be slightly ‘spill proof’ which is handy as I can see this coming out with a few drinks for us! I also love the wipe clean board that I can see us getting some serious use out of for either more ‘adult’ themes or topical themes to get non gamers interested.
Review copy kindly provided by Big Potato
]]>We are leaving for Essen in just one month and one day so. Here's an updated and trimmed down version of Board Game Geek's Essen Preview list that's a little bit easier to manage than their full list. For me this is a quick way of finding where everyone is over that weekend too.
UPDATED: I've now compiled the list of Essen 2017 Releases I'm picking up, buying and looking forward to checking out
Last weekend we did a monster amount of driving that wasn’t game related! *shock horror* So, what did we do? We had a look for local board game cafes to go have a nose round! We were staying in Sheffield so that was our first hunt. Currently, there isn’t a board game cafe yet, but Treehouse will be opening later this month. We managed to go and take a sneaky peek inside and a chat with Ruth and Andy, the owners about what is going to be happening in Sheffields first boardgame cafe! The venue was previously a nightclub but is in the process of being brightened up with these beautiful murals at the front.
These are two rooms sectioned off from the rest of the venue which will be great either to keep the noisy ‘party gamers’ in or as a quiet area for people that want to play something heavier that needs a bit more concentration!
The bar in the main area is in the process of being smartened up but will be kept (along with the alcohol license) to provide a great area from which all the yummy food and drink can be served from. Keen on keeping things local, Ruth and Andy are currently sampling loads of delicious food from small local companies to perfect their menu along with looking into stocking beers from micro breweries nearby (hard life guys!)
When we saw them, they were in the process of painting all the ceilings ready for their industrial style lighting to go in, one above each table. They will be starting with a library of around 500 games you can sit and play for a daily fee (reduced in price if you buy a yearly membership!) along with a small selection of games you can buy to take home and carry on playing! You can follow them on Facebook to find out their finalised opening date and show them some love!
https://www.treehousesheffield.com/
https://www.facebook.com/treehousesheffield/
https://www.instagram.com/treehousesheff/
On the drive back from Sheffield, we decided to pop in and have a look at Thirsty Meeples in Oxford. They were the first board game cafe to open in the UK and are regular names at conventions where they provide a library of games you can rent from. The cafe is right in the centre of a busy square, putting it right in the heart of the city. As you enter you are met by a wall of games which are available to buy (which we immediately had a good look through, but more on that later!)
There was a general hum of noise as it was quite busy but not so loud to
make it uncomfortable. We settled in and had a look through their small games
rental section (we only had a couple of hours to spare sadly!)
The menu was sizeable with an amazing list of drinks available, including sea salted caramel latte - yum! They currently boast an impressive library of around 2000 games to play and despite it being a monday afternoon, plenty of them were out on tables being played. We set up the tab for our table, ordered some food and played a couple of smaller, quicker games from the selection. The food was good and my latte was amazing!
A few tables were being taught new to them games by the resident ‘games gurus’ and it seemed everyone was having a lot of fun. Several of the tables we spoke to said they visited regularly (rather than being tourists, like us!)
Hidden away on their store shelf I very happily found a copy of Millennium Blades, something I have been after for a while.
We will be visiting again soon, hopefully for a full day!
http://www.thirstymeeples.co.uk/
https://www.facebook.com/ThirstyMeeples/
https://twitter.com/thirstymeeples
If you want to visit, have a favourite or run a Board Game Cafe visit our Board Game Cafe Map to see what's in your locality or indeed where you're travelling to, share the location of a Cafe and it's contact details. We are looking at improving the map in the near future we need your help.
]]>The box contains:
The aim of the game is to get the most points in a 5 x 5 grid. Points are gained by matching terrains with crowns on. Place your castle on your start tile and take the matching colour king token. Shuffle up the dominoes and place them in the box with the numbers facing out and you are ready to go! Pull out a number of dominoes equal to the number of players and line them up in number order (the numbers are on the back) with the lowest number next to the box.
Choose a start player randomly and that player chooses a tile they want and places their king on it, each player chooses in this way. Then remove another row of dominoes. The player who chose the lowest numbered tile goes first. They perform the following actions:
Firstly, add the domino they choose to their territory following these rules - your territory must be in a 5x5 grid. Each domino must either connect it to their starting domino or to another domino, matching at least one terrain type. If it doesn’t fit or match then it must be discarded.
Then choose a new domino by again placing the king on it. A new row of dominoes are added and play continues as above, when the last dominoes are lined up the players will take one last turn each. In theory, you will have a nice 5x5 grid in front of you (unless you have been forced to discard)
A kingdom is made up of different areas, squares with the same type of terrain that are connected vertically or horizontally. Areas containing no crowns will score you no points. Count the number of connected squares and multiply that number by the number of crowns in that area.
Add up the scores for each of your areas and the player with the highest score is the winner! There are also additional rules that give you extra points for having a perfect 5x5 kingdom and/or for ending the game with your castle in the centre of your kingdom. Our example here would score as follows:
(crowns) x (area)
This is a total of 29 points. If you are playing addition rules. Let's play additional rules :) You would get
44 points, good score. Fancy a rematch?
I played a quick game of this at UK Games Expo in May, and while I enjoyed it, I made the decision that I really didn’t need to buy another filler game. However, as I started seeing the pictures of it crop up on Facebook and Instagram I had an itch to play again so ended
up grabbing a copy. The dominoes themselves are nice, sturdy cardboard with a lovely gloss finish that means just handling them is a delight! The game itself plays quick enough that we usually end up playing a few rounds when it’s out as a warm up or to end an evening off. While the ideas behind the game are fairly simple some of your placements will be tricky! Also, do you take a domino to stop someone else scoring big or take something that might help you later game?
This is a nice, quick game that will appeal to gamers and non gamers, adults and children alike and the duration means it never out stays its welcome. Component quality is nice, along with an insert that functions for game play too. A nice little game with a great price point, well worth picking up!
]]>In each game one super villain with his team of henchmen faces off against a team of super heroes. Each player takes control of a character and spends energy to take actions. Each hero has differing strengths and abilities which are represented by dice with different values. The more energy a character spends, the more dice they can roll, however gaining energy at the start of your turn isn't always easy and if you are too injured, you may need to take some time out to recover your energy and health!
The game play is largely based on that of Conan, with revisions to character abilities, the addition of new dice and a modified two player version.
Now, obviously I love this as I get a chance to play as Catwoman but the gameplay and abilities work really nicely with the theme and even at this stage, the miniatures look stunning. Keep an eye out for demos of this near you if you're in the UK and watch out for it on Kickstarter next year!
While this is a modern day take on Batman, we all know Adam West was the best Batman.
The Kickstarter is now live and Batman™: Gotham City Chronicles is at almost £1million with just an hour into the project.
]]>My first obvious candidate was 1829. This was a surprise, random gift from my husband. As many of you know, I like a good 18XX game. This one is a little special, not only is this the first 18XX but it was produced the year I was born! It’s currently out of print too so a very neat addition to my collection. It also has relevance (surprisingly) to another game on this post! The other notable thing is that it is the first listed game on Heavy Cardboards OOP shirt!
Not looking bad for 43 years old! (the game’s doing OK too!)
My next obvious choice would be some of the Risk boards I have. I spent many drunken nights playing Risk in my teens so have a real love for this game and love grabbing the older versions with slight map differences. I have two ‘old’ copies of Risk, looking these up it seems that one is from 1973 and the other 1963. We used to come back from our local rock club at 3am and start playing Risk, usually finishing either when people had to get to work or when people were falling asleep slumped over the board! Yes, we always played full world domination. So, at 54 years old we have a winner, right? Wrong!
Now, I knew this was an old game but when the final result came in, I was shocked to say the least! My love of board games stems from my Grandma, every Sunday evening we would sit down and play games. Totopoly was a firm favourite with 10 year old me! I have a very dusty copy of this and it was the game I immediately went to when looking for ‘my oldest game’. No where on the rules/box/board does it have a date but my copy has the original (probably lead) metal horses that I loved as a child. So, off to BGG I went trying to date it, turns out Waddingtons went to plastic horses in 1967 so I knew my copy pre-dated that. Did we have a winner? With a bit of research and some google-fu I realised my copy is actually the 1949 release. This game is an amazing 68 years old! And here’s the killer, allegedly Francis Tresham (1829 designer) started designing games in an attempt to ‘fix’ Totopoly so we come full circle!
Yes, a bit battered on the outside by the components are still in beautiful condition!
What’s the oldest game in your collection, is there a reason for hanging onto it, do you still play it? Comment below! (Yes, we have just introduced a comments function!)
]]>The box contains:
Each of the cubes represents a spice yellow - turmeric, red - saffron, green - cardamom and brown - cinnamon, with yellow being the easiest to get and brown being the hardest. During the game you will be drawing merchant cards that help you obtain or upgrade spices in order to fulfil the point cards.
Place six merchant cards out and five points cards. Place a pile of gold tokens equal to twice the number of players next to the first point card and an equal number of silver next to the second card. After my discussion about start players, this game has a great, built in mechanism for determining who goes first. Shuffle up the caravan cards and deal them out randomly, one of them has a special symbol at the bottom, that player goes first. Everyone starts with the same two merchant cards, one lets you take two yellow cubes, the other lets you upgrade cubes twice, so you could upgrade two yellows to two reds or one yellow to a green.
There are four actions you can take in a turn:
Play a card - Take the action granted, then place the card in your discard pile.
Acquire a merchant card - When taking a merchant card, you must first pay for it by placing cubes of your choice on each merchant card to the left of it. The leftmost card is free, however, for example, the third card would cost you two cubes. However, if you take a card with cubes on it, these immediately go onto your caravan card. The merchant card goes into your hand ready to play next turn if you wish. Slide the rest of the cards down the line and refill.
Claim a points card - Pay the cubes shown on the card back to the bowls, place the point card face down in front of you and take a silver or gold coin if it is from either of the first two spaces. Slide the rest of the cards down and refill.
Rest - Take all your previously played cards back into your hand. At the end of the turn you may not have more than ten cubes in your caravan, any extra must be returned to the bowls.
The game ends when a player takes their fifth point card (play to the end of the round) Points are awarded for points cards (obviously!), gold tokens are worth three points, silver are worth one, each non-yellow cube in your caravan also scores you one point. The player with the most points wins!
We really enjoy this game as a quick ‘warm up’ for the evening. It has elements of deck building, engine building and the sheer quality of this game shines through, from the gorgeous card art to the metal coins and very cool component bowls!
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room - is this a ‘Splendor Killer’? Yes, and no! Splendor, in my mind, is a far simpler game and will be played by families and new gamers. Spice Road adds that something that was missing for me. There’s an extra layer of thought of depth here that I really enjoy and it feels far more of an engine builder for me. All of the games we’ve played have been pretty balanced and it’s usually a few points difference between first and second, and not always won by the person with the most point cards. A highly enjoyable ‘family friendly’ game with enough depth for more serious gamers.
Mentions
Century Spice Road - Boomstarter.ru
Century: Eastern Wonders - Walkthrough
The box includes:
I first saw Seven and Seven at BGG Con when the designer, Cory Goff, was walking round with it in his hands. It immediately caught my interest due to the lovely presentation and super cute artwork.
Each player starts with five cards and you have two options each turn. Either play a card (and resolve all associated effects) or draw three cards. At the end of the turn you must have no more than seven cards in your hand.
Most of the cards in the deck are bi-directional ie. they have a sin on one end of the card and a virtue on the other side and can be played either way up.
Each of the seven sins and virtues has a different effect when coming into play which can either help you get more cards to the table or can mess with other peoples set up.
If a card says ‘choose a player’, you may choose yourself at any point. During the game, cards on the table may be ‘converted’, this can only happen with duel sided cards ie. a sin gets converted to a virtue or vice-versa.
The deck also contains wild cards - these may be sins, virtues or both (duel sided). These count as one towards your set of seven, though multiples may be used. The sin and virtue wild cards have special abilities that trigger when they are bought into play.
The other special card in the deck is the ‘Converter’ card, this not only allows you to play an additional card that turn but is played in front of you and can be discarded at any point in the game to convert another card in your play area.
The game ends when one player has a full set of seven sins or seven virtues.
Seven and Seven is a devilishly easy game to play but so much fun! Easy to play with non gamers but engaging enough to keep gamers occupied too. Beautiful artwork and loads of player interaction keeps the game fresh and interesting every time.
Review copy kindly provided by http://www.timesinfinitygames.com/
]]>Heavy Con is very different to most other conventions in that it is intentionally small, invite only and targeted to specific types of games. I actually played 17 games over the course of my six days there, however, some days I only played one or two games. Here is a very brief overview of what I got to play!
Tesla vs Edison (with the Powering Up! expansion) - I played this Wednesday night after a very long day especially when you take the seven hour time difference into account! I have played the base game once and really enjoyed it so this was a great opportunity to refresh. The expansion adds quite a lot to the game and it’s one I look forward to taking off my shelf of shame soon!
The Scarlet Pimpernel - This is currently an Eagle-Gryphon Games prototype that had been bought along. Like Tesla vs Edison it is a solid medium Euro game rather than a true ‘heavy’ game. However, due to time and other players this is what gets played most regularly at home and this is a game I think will go down well with our regular groups. I shall be watching out for this on KickStarter!
Arkwright - My first true ‘heavy’ game of the con. This was a learning game for all four of us that played and we dived straight in with the Water Frame rules. I think this is a game that is quite easy to pick up after your first couple of rounds, but the strategy involved makes it much heavier. I came in a solid second place here despite not really working out what I was doing until a way into the game. Can’t wait to get this to our table soon!
Century: Spice Road - Friday morning a few of us had time to kill before scheduled games so we sat and learnt this. It’s being touted as a ‘Splendor killer’ but for me, I felt it was more like ‘Splendor Plus’. There’s a real engine building element to it that made it feel a lot more than just taking chips. This is actually having it’s soft launch at Expo this weekend and I will be grabbing a copy for sure.
Asbestos - This was a prototype from Larry and crew from The Boardgame Group. The theme and logic behind it are great - pay to protect your workers else they die, if workers die, demand for asbestos drops! Obviously it’s always great to catch up with the TBG guys too. Hopefully I’ll see an updated version of this at BGG Con later in the year.
Indonesia - Being one of the Splotter games I’ve never played I scheduled a game of this. We were lucky enough to play on a custom, large scale map. At 5 players this was tight and everything I have come to expect from a Splotter game. I made a mistake merging when I did which I think cost me the win. However, with two experienced players, the fact I was in with a chance at one point made me happy! This has been on my wish list for a while and I think it just bumped up higher.
Chicago Express - This was a surprise little filler game from Queen Games. Not a company you associate with track laying or shares in my opinion. We played this four players with two of us new to it. One I’d like to play again for sure so I’ll be looking out for it in the Expo bring and buy. Quick and easy to learn but as with most train games, a lot of underlying strategy especially for a sixty minute game.
Wizard - In my defence, there may have been alcohol involved, but who doesn’t love a bit of trick taking? Especially when there’s a few sips of some fine whiskey involved! I love a quick little trick taker and this seems to be one of the originals so it was a great end to the day.
EXIT:The Game - The Secret Lab - We’ve done a physical Escape Room here in Brighton and had a lot of fun so I was intrigued by the concept of one in a box. We were up against the clock and three other teams. We started by being super gentle with things and ended up tearing and ripping pieces furiously! Our team was the fastest of the day but had penalties from using clues. This was great fun and I’ll be on the look out for the other titles in the range.
Lignum (second edition) - I jumped in on a game of this as it is one of many on my ‘shelf of shame’ Apart from a few new additions this plays the same as the first edition I own so was a great chance to learn it. This game is tight, running out of money on your first run round the board is harsh! Lesson learnt… being a lumberjack is not a profitable industry. I shall be packing this in my bag to take away and play again this weekend.
Kaivai - I knew nothing about this except that people with similar tastes to me wanted to play it so grabbed a game of it. A really pretty board with again, really tight game play (a bit of a theme at HeavyCon) Thematically this works really nicely with your fish spoiling and decreasing in value every turn. Tough decision making yet with only five options available makes this a really solid game.
The Climbers - After a very large dinner of all you can eat sushi a simpler title was perfect. Due a reprint soon, this little filler is one I have seen at multiple Cons but never had a chance to play. Great chunky pieces and great game play. At first look you assume it’s a simple game, but again it calls for a lot of tough decisions. I’ll be looking for the reprint when it comes out!
The Gallerist - Another that has been sat on my shelf of shame for too long! I played this with two other players who had only previously played it solo. This was everything I expected and more. We were regularly kicking each other out of spots so I can only imagine how harsh it will be with four players. This is for sure, one that needs multiple plays to master.
Lisboa - Due to be shipped to Kickstarter backers soon, this was a
prototype we played. Not quite sure how I felt about the game overall as I had
a great deal of the game were my actions were really limited due to the cards
that were available. Lots of actions I wanted to take but I just never had the
right resources to do so and no way to get the. Despite my reservations I won
though!
Deep Sea Adventure - A few of us were killing time Monday morning and just waiting to get to the airport so we pulled out a couple of fillers. I’ve talked about DSA before and always have it on hand at Cons as it’s the perfect size to carry and so much fun! As per usual, I pushed my luck too far and ended the game with almost nothing.
Avenue - This reminded me of a pocket sized Karuba. With similar game play but almost no set up or table space needed it has a definite advantage too. We had just finished scoring as the shuttle bus arrived to take us to the airport so had to run out the door on a win! There is a newer version Kokoro: Avenue of the Kodama available on KickStarter at the moment from the publishers of Kodama, so another one to look at!
I had an amazing weekend and mostly learnt games that have been on my shelf of shame or wish list for a while. I even managed to go the whole weekend without teaching anything which was a nice change for me! Thanks go out to everyone who taught me games over the weekend. As usual it was great to catch up with people I know in the US and meeting loads of new friends. Massive thanks to Edward, Amanda and everyone else who helped organise HeavyCon. Special thanks also go to Asher the greyhound for the fusses over the weekend that helped me not miss the cats quite so much.
Now, off to pack for UK Games Expo!
]]>At 2am this morning I will be waking up ready to start a 13 hour journey to Denver for the third annual HeavyCon. Heavy Cardboard is a podcast devoted to medium/heavy weight games, including 18XX, economic and war games and HeavyCon is their annual convention. I get four days of playing the games I love without Rob complaining that his brains are leaking out of his ears! Games I am currently scheduled to play include: 1822, Indonesia, Arkwright and Colonists. Also, some lighter titles like Tesla vs Edison and Great Western Trail. I arrive Wednesday afternoon around 2.30pm local time and will be playing as much as possible through to Sunday night!
I have half of Monday to run into town and pick up the essentials (peanut butter M&M’s, Cheetos, you know, the important stuff!) and land back in the UK 11.30am Tuesday morning!
Thursday morning I will then be setting off for UK Games Expo in Birmingham!
Each and every year I go to Expo and say I won’t work, I’ll go and enjoy the actual show. As per usual, this year I am working, but this time as part of the Expo volunteer team, which will be a new and exciting experience for me. However, I may well be asleep standing up so if you see me and get no response, it might be worth poking me! I’m actually working in the bring and buy each day which can only lead to disaster, good job Rob is bringing the car up so I can carry home my lovely loot. I’ll also be working in a ‘Press’ capacity so hope to go see some new and interesting releases and prototypes.
If you see me at either event, please come and say hello and maybe play a game or two!
]]>So, why buy inserts, should I pimp my ride? In my mind there are two main reasons.
As I mentioned above, Caverna is the perfect example of this! Even though we have many pots for game pieces, taking them all out of baggies and making sure they go back into the right baggies is a pain. Having a tray with everything already organised is a blessing and can easily knock half an hour off set up/pack down times, plus it makes it easier in game to see how many is left of a specific resource (especially important in a game where resources are limited!)
Any game with a lot of pieces makes buying an insert an easy choice!
I’m constantly battling to find space for games. I’d like to say I do ‘one in, one out’ but that’s just not the case. Despite having multiple Kallax in multiple rooms, we usually have a pile of ‘overspill’ game on the floor in the front room. Quite a few inserts now give you room for base game and expansions in one box, meaning room for more games on the shelf, hooray!
The best example of this has to be the 7 Wonders insert that fits base game, Leaders, Cities and Babel all in the one box. OK, I could buy a new game for the cost of the insert but that particular insert just gave me room for two new games on my shelf!
There are, of course, other reason to add inserts. Some of our games are stored on their side and these games end up with all the pieces slid to the bottom. Solution? Get an insert! You might just want your game to look super awesome, in which case, there are plenty of other options!
Various stores do some awesome upgrade packages, everything from meeples to food stuffs included. You can buy complete upgrade kits for big games like Scythe or individual meeples just because they are cute. You can upgrade those boring cubes to smiling little people or realistic resource tokens. This is usually pure ‘pimpage’ at it’s finest with no practical reason, but boy does it look good!
Another practical upgrade is money. Paper notes and cardboard coins are fine, but if a game gets significant plays, wear and tear will start to show. Also, I’m sure we all have that one friend that keeps their pile of money is a complete mess so no one can tell just how much they’ve got. Poker chips are a firm favourite, we actually own this beautiful, linen finish money called The Treasury from Know Chance games. There are also numerous metal coin upgrades available, either generic coins or for specific games. You can spend up to hundreds of pounds on beautiful coins if you want to!
All in all, you can easily spend two, three times the cost of a game just on accessories for it. Is it worth it? You can decide for yourself by visiting some of these sites!
http://www.boardgameextras.co.uk
]]>The game is played over three rounds.
At the start of each round everyone will take a tile that is kept secret. Each turn you may do one of three things. Draw and place a random tile, place a castle of your choice or place your secret tile on an empty square on the board. The bulk of the tiles simply have a negative or positive value from -6 to +6. (More on special tiles later) At the end of a round, when every square is filled, scoring takes place. The net total value of each row and column is added and the player awarded the sum of that value of the amount of towers on their castles. This can, of course be positive or negative.
Here, yellow would score 4 on the row (5-3 x2) The mountain is blocking them scoring the +6.
You have castles with either one, two, three or four towers. (One level 4 castle, two level threes, three level twos and a varied number of level ones, depending on the player count. Simple, right? Not at all! At the end of the round, the only castles you will get back will be your level ones, everything else is only used once in the game, so use them wisely! This is not a game that will win you friends though, your nice level four castle you just placed, your opponent has just popped a -6 tile next to it, meaning you have -24 points from their play!
The special tiles are mountains, which are essentially just a blocker tile, meaning you can block that -6 from your castle or block an opponents castle off from some big points. There is a wizard tile that adds one tower to all adjacent castles, a gold mine which doubles all points (positive and negative) and a dragon which neutralises all positive points. All of these tiles, with the exception of the dragon can be used either to help you or hinder your opponents.
This is a game that plays very well, but very differently at 2,3 or 4 players. At 2 players you are forced to place more castles which can be a good thing or can cost you points. The number of level 1 castles you get to play withis determined by the number of players, with 4 players you only get two but with two players you get to use all four of them.
As with most Reiner Knizia games, this is a number crunching game. The basic
premise is so simple yet the game play is totally absorbing, meaning it is easy
to teach anyone, the direct conflict between players is entertaining and the
board is small enough that we have played this on the train, using pen and
paper to score rather than using the coins. The player castles are beautifully
detailed. Our copy has the official title of the first boardgame we have worn
out, we have played it that much, but its price point means we won't be
upset over buying a new copy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0tpM89_K8s&feature=youtu.be
]]>Currently, Bios: Genesis (2nd Edition) has just over three weeks to go. This reprint of the hugely successful 2016 game is brought to us in partnership by Phil Eklund and Sierra Madre Games (known not only for the Bios series of games, Greenland, and the Pax range). This is a game that has been on my radar for a while and I can't wait to get my grubby little molecules on a copy, as per usual I found out about it after the first edition had already gone out of print. One to four players compete or cooperate to evolve from organic compounds to the first signs of life is this complex beast. While this is not compatible with Bios: Mega Fauna or Bios: Origins due to rules and cards conflicts reprints of these expansions will be coming later this year / early next. Free shipping worldwide always helps make the decision of whether to back a little easier and a bargain at a mere $39.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/684398802/bios-genesis-2nd-edition-begin-evolve-conquer
Who actually knew what this meant before now, what a great word.
petrichor
(noun)
a pleasant smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather.
Who can resist the concept of playing a game as a cloud. A game
demonstrator's dream game, easy to teach which just 4 different actions to
take in each player's turn, but difficult to master. Petrichor by
Mighty Boards is being touted as
Dominant Species in a fraction of the time. Beautiful concept and visually
stunning, manage moving your cloud and raining just the right amount on just
the right fields to achieve a successful harvest.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mightyboards/petrichor
What can be said about this classic that hasn't been said before. While
we're pretty late to the party having only discovered Brass in the last six
month, we're big fans of Martin Wallace here. London, Via Nebula and Age of
Steam are regulars on our gaming table. This re-envisaging of the 2007 behemoth
is absolutely stunning. It's being reprinted by Roxley Games who brought us
Super Motherload, Steampunk Rally and most recently the beautiful Santorini.
Roxley Games are fasting gaining a reputation for polished looking games on
schedule which in Kickstarter land is a rarity. Not only has the artwork been
updated but also comes with a new board Brass: Birmingham which rumoured to
have beer as an additional resource.
This is going live at 10pm Mountain Time on 17th April, which alas is 5AM 18th
April UK time so we won't be able to see what the campaign is offering
until tomorrow morning, in the meantime here some of the new artwork from Mr.
Cuddington.
UPDATE: Looks like it launches before the 10pm Mountain Time and I didn't get the memo.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/roxley/brass-an-industrial-revolution
Well, UK Games Expo is just 50 days away. What can you do in that amount of time?
Here’s my list!
In fifty days a fox could get pregnant and give birth, mice, pigeons and hamsters could do it twice! You could also grow a turnip, or a beet (no, this isn’t the latest Uwe Rosenberg game!)
]]>This little box contains:
Start the game by dealing out one starting province to each player and placing resources on each of the production squares shown on that card. Then deal six map cards to each player.
Honshu is, at base level a trick taking game ie players will all choose a card to play and the highest numbered card will win the ‘trick’ and get first pick of the available cards, second highest gets second pick and so on... This means a big part of the skill here is in manipulating your position and getting the cards you need for your city. You can always add a resource cube onto your bid to give it +60, thus ensuring the win if there is something you really need.
Once you have chosen your card, you place it into your city. There are only a couple of rules here. Firstly, you must cover at least one square of another card and second, you must not cover water spaces. Don’t forget to place resources on the production squares as you place them as these can score you big at the end of the game. After three rounds, your tableau will look something like this.
Here is where Honshu starts to differ! You will now pass your remaining three cards to the player on the left and play out the hand you have been given. After your first hand of six cards has been played out, deal six more cards to each player and start again! Three rounds in you will again be passing on your cards, but this time to the right.
Once all twelve cards have been placed, it’s time to score.
There are lots of ways to score during this game and it’s well worth keeping a score card to hand throughout to keep an eye on.
For each forest square you will score two points, your biggest connected city will score you one point for each square, each factory that can be provided for by a production square gets the amount of points shown and lastly your lakes score. The first lake square of each district is worth zero and each consecutive one is worth three points. The player with the most points wins! In the case of a tie the player with the highest number of fallow squares showing wins.
This is a great little game. I love trick takers but this has so much more, the city building element and the card passing ramp it up a few notches. Easily portable (always handy!) and it has a great two player variant that actually works and doesn’t feel forced like a lot of other variants.
My only criticism is scoring, there is a lot to add up and this really could have done with a little score pad, other than that we’re really enjoying Honshu!
UPDATE: The 2nd Edition actually does come with a scorepad, so my criticism is appeased.
]]>The first part of our trip was not so bad, just over an hour to Bracknell, where we met up with a friend and all switched into his car. With the amount of stuff we were all bringing along it was a bit hairy if it would all fit, but I guess all those games of Patchwork paid off and we were soon underway for the long part of the journey.
As usual for any journey to a games Con, most of the conversation on the way was about the bargains we hoped to grab from the Bring and Buy or the newer releases we were after from traders.
We arrived at the venue at around 1 and unloaded our bring and buy boxes at the front door before parking up. As we approached the front desk we were asked if we were traders! (yes, we had that much stuff!) We got our passes and grabbed the all-important Airecon mug. This was a great idea! Just £6 got you your very own mug (complete with chalk!) and ensured all tea/coffee you bought over the weekend cost you just 50p a cup. As well as the obvious bonus of reducing waste all weekend, it felt very civilised to be drinking out of a proper mug rather than paper or plastic cups. We loved this idea!
We grabbed our maps and programmes and headed straight off to the Bring and Buy to unload ourselves! Firstly, we needed to have a look and see if there were any bargains just waiting for us to arrive, sadly, at that point there wasn’t so we checked in. Despite the amount of stuff we had it was all incredibly smooth and the team there were great. Hopefully those boxes and bags of stuff will bring me in enough money for my air fare for Heavy Con!
After that, it was time to get to some gaming so we sat down ready to start a game of Honshu. Of course, this was the point my local friends (who we would be staying with) showed up so I abandoned game to meet up with them!
We then sat down for some gaming, playing mostly little games before dinner in the hall which was pretty reasonably priced. At 8.30 it was time to head downstairs and join in the board game quiz. While we scored pretty well in a lot of categories, a few had us totally stumped! We failed horribly at the ‘CatchPhrase’ style round and the anagram round well and truly had us scratching our heads! We ended up coming in the middle ground somewhere which I think we were all happy with. After planning some games for Saturday we headed to our home for the weekend in Huddersfield (Thank you Ty!) where we played a couple more games over some tea and strategising for the ‘SuperBoard’ tournament the next day, playing our first games of Karuba in readiness for that.
Ty had previously won two hours VIP gaming on a Geeknson table so we were up early the next morning to get and enjoy that. Though we arrived later than planned, we got a couple of games in our allocated time slot.
We've got @IPlayRedGaming as one of our VIP competition winners here at @aireconuk playing a game of Lock&Key! #tabletop #gaming pic.twitter.com/Erq8DwKwQ6
— Geeknson (@geeknson) March 11, 2017
Team talk done, we headed down for our tournament only to find that teams had dropped out, leaving numbers short. While this wasn’t too bad for some of the games, my allocated game ‘For Sale’ really suffers at the 3-player mark with six cards from each round not coming out. I had a dismal game and came in last, I was then more pleased to discover two of my other teammates had also come in last and Tony then spoilt our track record by winning his game of Splendor.
At least this meant we were knocked out and could do some fun gaming! We had a great five player game of Conquest of the Fallen Lands (a totally underrated game) After finishing that we had a wander round the trade hall, which wasn’t set up on Friday, checked out the Bring and Buy again then wandered off for dinner. The trade area was quite small but contained a lot of interesting things ranging from smaller, indie games including Alley Cat Games (Cauldron Master) and YAY Games (Ominoes) through to larger games retailers, artists and various accessory stands selling everything from dice rolls, card boxes through to wax melts with a Lovecraftian theme from Eldritch Essences! For a change this was a con where I was focused on playing games so I didn’t spend too much time at the stands.
When we came back we had a game of Hansa Teutonica planned that we had scheduled previously for two of us, while Ty and Rob grabbed some games from the Travelling Man library to play. We were joined by a couple of very nice guys who were also looking for a ‘heavier’ game to play so I ended up learning HT in a five player game with four experienced players, which was tough but very satisfying. So, now I know how to play all I have to do is teach my gaming group so my copy can get some plays! After that we had a fun game of Deep Sea Adventure (always a favourite!) We also scheduled a game of Zhanguo for the next morning.
Back to Huddersfield as it was getting late where we chatted about the day over tea and biscuits and started packing as Sunday would be the last day - boo :(
Packing the car with our goodies on Sunday morning was fun as I’m sure it should have been far emptier and we were all hoping we had nothing left to bring back from the Bring and Buy!
We met up with our new friends from Hansa Teutonica and started Zhanguo at around 11am, this is another game that has been sat unplayed on our shelves for far too long. What a great game, if a little brain melting! I came in a respectable second for my first ever play and after a few hours needed something a little ‘lighter’ to play. We then found the IQ Gaming ‘family’ room at the back that we had previously missed and had a quick game of 7 wonders whilst waiting for their giant Ticket to Ride to become available. As soon as it was, we jumped on that which was great fun. They also had a giant Pandemic available to play, diseases also come super sized! We then finished the weekend by playing one of the bargains I had acquired over the weekend - Tutankhamen, a great little Reiner Knizia I’d picked up for only £3 and would accommodate everyone we had.
After that is was sadly time to head home as we had a long drive ahead of us! We said our good byes and started on our way. We picked our car up from Bracknell and arrived back home finally at around 1.30 in the morning.
All in all we had a great time, played some good games, old and new and caught up with friends, again, old and new! Got rid of some old games and bought some new games!
Airecon was a nice convention, this time with nearly 700 unique attendees. I’m already looking forward to next year and seeing it go from strength to strength!
We’ve been there before and I’ve written about it before. But, that was then and this is now, so time for a re-visit. First order of business was to go to the Bastard Cafe and renew my membership! Initial membership is 150 DKR (around £15) but my renewal was a bargain 125 DKR. This enable you and a friend to play for free at anytime. Even if you aren’t a member, there is a selection of ‘free to play’ games or else you can pay the 35 DKR (around £3.50) fee to sit and play all day from their library of around 1700 unique titles! We also dropped off some UK games to add to their every expanding library. Here is Bedsit Games BN1 and Happy Otter's Creature College sat on the ‘Game Gurus’ table ready to learn! The Game Gurus are always available and happy to help suggest and teach games as well as having the unforgiving job of rehoming lost pieces that end up on the floor daily!
It’s been about 18 months since we were last at the Bastard Cafe and it’s great to see it growing and as busy as ever! Since we last visited they have introduced cake - yum and some craft beers. They have also repainted the wall in their back room with this amazing piece from Kim Herlig Holm.
After renewing my membership it was time to go shopping as my new card would give me 10% discount at the amazing Faraos Cigarer. This shop has just about every game you can think of, and many more. The prices are high compared to the UK but when it's games you can't get here, that doesn't matter! I ended up grabbing Saint Petersburg, Panthalos and Honshu. I did have a panic thinking we weren't going to fit them all in our case but managed to wiggle them all in.
We then wandered back to the Bastard Cafe in order to kill time while waiting for our flight. We sat and learnt the new Honshu whilst enjoying a coffee, cake and some of the delicious sweet potato fries. We also chatted to a few people there, a couple of whom were also on holiday from the UK. After spending some time admiring the collector's edition of Smallworld, it was sadly time to leave and head home, jumping on the plane and landing back in the UK at 8.30pm Friday night.
At 8am Saturday morning I was sat on a train going through Gatwick airport towards London, ready to demo for Esdevium Games at the PC Gamer Weekend. Obviously, this is a more video game based event but Esdevium have a table top area at a lot of these type of events. We had six tables this time in a very well sign posted area and was next to a lot of the VR stands which were hugely popular meaning we had a lot of visitors!
Saturday we had Raise Your Goblets, Carcassonne, Potion Explosion, Final Fantasy, King of Tokyo, Star Wars:Destiny and Ticket to Ride out and our tablets were pretty much full all day.
This was the first time I had demoed Raise Your Goblets and it was a lot of fun, if you’re not playing you can spy on the cups and wind the players up about what they may or may not be about to ‘drink’!
We were situated next to Games Quest who had a huge amount of games for sale, though after just coming back from Copenhagen I managed to resist for a change!
In the evening we all got together and played a few games though it was early(ish) to bed as we had another full day on Sunday.
Being that we were mostly set up and ready to go on Sunday morning we had some time to run round the show and look at what else was there, some of the guys had a quick trial on the VR machines. However, the highlight for me had to be the new Sonic game - Sonic Mania, I just about survived the first level and am very excited for the release of it!
Then it was back to work, we had swapped out Potion Explosion for Colt Express today and had the beautiful play mat for it. Again, we had full tables for most of the day. Hopefully, we introduced some new people to board gaming and introduced some new games to people who aren’t just video gamers!
It was at least six months after my initial plan before I came up with the idea of The Mad Katter. I love the original takes of Alice in Wonderland, i love tea and yes, at times I'm 'not right in the head'!
So, decided, I ventured out and have been writing, tweeting and instagramming (is that even a word?!) under that name for nearly two years now. The minute I started hash tagging everything a realisation came to me, everyone uses the same boardgaming, boardgamegeek etc but i started tagging with iplayred, after all, I do! It suddenly hit me that my name had always been easier than I thought and sometimes simple is the cleverest. At this point, The Mad Katter was live and I'd had a huge number of cards printed up so that was what I would stick with.
We bought the domain name for I Play Red a while back and it's been there, lurking for a bit. With a new year and new resolve now seemed a good time for a new name too, and here it is!
Welcome to the old/new 'I Play Red'
]]>‘Game Plan’ takes up half of the upstairs of the museum and is very well advertised around the building, causing much excitement for me, though after travelling into London and being on our feet most of the morning, we did get the lift rather than run up the stairs!
The first (and oldest exhibit) is a game of Senet, dating somewhere between 1550 and 1295 BC. This dates from before 3000BC and was played across all levels of Egyptian society. Complete sets have been found in many tombs, including that of the boy Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The actual rules are unknown but it is assumed to be some sort of race game with each player moving their five pieces across thirty squares. Senet mean ‘passing’ and it is assumed to have some connections with the afterlife. Now, I know many of us have old games with battered boxes, covered in dust, but I wonder if any will stand the test of time this has!
Next up are some ancient versions of games we recognise and still play today. Games like draughts, ludo and snakes and ladders have been around for many years but now we play with cardboard boards and plastic pieces rather than these elegant stone and wooden pieces. Snakes and ladders was especially popular in India where it was considered a valuable life lesson, teaching us that life always has ups and downs!
Pachisi (Ludo) can be dated back to the 15th Century and was usually made of textiles. In the 16th Century Emperor Akbar in India marked out a board in his grounds and used enslaved girls dressed in the appropriate colours as playing pieces!
Throughout the exhibition are quotes about gaming and playing, including one of my favourites from George Bernard Shaw: ‘We don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing’ There is also a mini game throughout - you can spin a spinner and move forward the number of spaces it lands on. I felt this was a bit sad though as you would then miss parts of the exhibition. We did see quite a few children having fun with them though!
We then moved onto the 17th/18th Century where art and printing methods had greatly improved, leading to really elaborate, highly decorated boards. These were usually comprised of nine pieces and educational. Columbia, Land of the West could be played either historically or topographically and chronicles the history of America, starting with Christopher Columbus and ends with the treaty of Independance. There is a huge amount of information on these boards and in the accompanying guide books!
Forward to the 20th Century and games and we start to see older versions of games we know and are still growing strong today. Various versions of Monopoly, Cluedo and Risk, including this version which was the first version I ever played! It’s a little different to todays versions with shaped plastic pieces. Despite the many games available today I still have a huge love for Risk as it was the first board game I played as an adult, spending many drunken nights throwing dice with friends. Now, although it’s been awhile since I played, I own a few variations of ‘classic’ Risk, I love the slight quirks between the different boards. There was also a few copies of Monopoly there, but I loved this Japanese version , complete with a cat piece long before it became a standard piece here!
Going into the 1970s licensed games were the big thing, with Dr Who and Star Wars getting in on the act. I think anyone around my age had the ‘Escape from the Death star’ game shown here. After seeing it I know I played this despite no-one in our house being huge on Star Wars so I wonder who I was nagging to buy me board games then! From a little later comes the Pac Man board game (another I know I had at the time) We actually received a copy of this for Christmas this year and have had great trips down memory lane playing it and introduced a new generation to it!
Next was their ‘Modern Board Games’ section with Ticket to Ride, Catan, Carcassonne and X-Com. After talking about board games that used apps, there was also an opportunity to play the Carcassonne or Catan apps on a giant screen. It would have been nice to see more variety here, we all know just how many games are out there these days but I was glad that modern gaming got a fair representation.
The last exhibit is devoted to Pandemic, there are some awesome early prototypes and workings donated by Matt Leacock. While I am not a fan of co-op games, they are a good introduction into the gaming world for a lot of people and anything that gives me more people to play against is great! It’s always nice to see the work that goes into any game you know, it’s amazing to see the many stages and thought processes they go through to make the finished item we all know and see in the stores!
The final part of the exhibition is a giant wall with a flow chart, detailing what sort of gamer you are. So, I followed it through! I think anyone who knows me, knows where I landed! Yes, I am the ‘Gloating Winner’!
Game Plan: Board Games Revisited is on at the V & A Museum of Childhood until the 23rd April 2017. It is open daily from 10 until 17.45 and is completely free. More details can be found here: http://www.vam.ac.uk/moc/
If you are in the area it was a great way to spend a couple of hours, however, be prepared that it’s not a huge exhibition so plan more for a days outing!
You can see more photos from the exhibit on our
Facebook Photo Gallery
UPDATE 1st July 2018
Game Plan: Board Games Revisited is on at the New Lanark World Heritage Site from July 20th to November 5th 2018. More details can be found on the Game Plan page on their website or on their Facebook Event
To the someone who isn't familiar with the boardgaming hobby, they walk into a store and see a wall of games with a £30, £50 or even £70 price tag. That's a lot of money.
So, how do you put a price on a game? Some of my most expensive games have been played the least. This is usually because they come with a lot of components and/or tend to be heavier/longer games meaning the opportunity to play them is less. However, a lot of them have longer playing times. If a game costs £60 and four people sit down and play it for three hours, that’s a mere £5 per hour each, realistically what else could you do for that kind of money? Play that same game again and that figure is halved. Is that game still considered expensive? However some of my cheapest games have been played the most often - things like The Game and Seven Dragons which both cost me 5 euros get played a lot, and quite often will get played multiple times in a night. Yet time wise, twenty plays of them will be less gaming time than one game of something like Food Chain Magnate. So, which is better value? If you are working it out per play, the smaller games will always will, if you go for an hourly rate, the bigger games always win.
The other important thing to note is ‘resale-ability’. If you spend £50+ for a group of four people to go to the cinema, if the film sucks that’s tough - you’ve wasted your time and money. If you buy a game and it sucks, chances are you can sell it on (unless everyone thinks it sucks, in which case, why the hell did you buy it?!) Even if everyone that played hated a game, you’ve still had quality time with people you like and you still have something physical to show for money spent.
With that in mind here are some of our favourite filler games:
Yes, it’s a silly name (and you’ve all just lost!) but this little card game was nominated for the prestigious Spiel des Jahres award in 2015 which made me curious. This Essen I made a point of going and giving it a try. As the explanation began, my heart sank a little when the word ‘co-op’ was mentioned but we were there so we had to give it a try. The premise is so simple, it is simply a deck of cards numbered from 2 to 99 and all you have to do is discard them onto the correct piles in either ascending or descending order. Easy, right? Wrong! At the start of the game four cards are placed on the table, two marked 100 with a down arrow and two marked 1 with an up arrow. Each turn players must discard at least two of their cards onto a pile with each card being higher or lower than the previous card (higher on the 1 piles and lower on the 100 piles) If you are lucky, you can also ‘bump’ piles closer to the start point as long as it is jumps of exactly ten. Eg. if you have a 54 on the up/1 pile you can drop that to 44. You are allowed to communicate with the other players (it is a co-op after all!) but not allowed to say what you have exactly, so you can ask people to leave specific piles free.
We bought ‘The Game:Extreme’ that adds extra rules like you must play three cards, you cannot talk to the other players etc thinking the base game would be easy and we’d need the extra ‘spice’, however after numerous plays we are yet to complete the game at the basic level!
The first thing that grabs you about this game is just how beautiful it is! This is a little trick taking game with an added element of area control in it. In your turn you may take two actions from the following: place upto two petals on a flower, exchange upto two cards from your hand or move your ‘guardian’ token onto any petal. Each card represents a petal for one of the five types of flowers in the game, all of which need a different number of cards to complete eg an Iris only needs three, a Lily needs six. If you complete a flower you receive all the cards that make it up which are worth one point each at the end of the game. However, each of your petal cards have guardian symbols on them so whoever has the area majority on the flower gains one of their special bonus tiles or an extra five points. Your little guardian token also counts as one towards majority. The special bonus tiles are the same for each player and are: you may hold five cards in hand, you may play three or more petals on a flower or gain your Elder Guardian token (which gives you two points towards a majority)
To add an extra element to the game there is a neutral deck of cards which always has four out on display, instead of drawing up from your own deck you may choose to take cards from here instead. This hits the ‘thinky filler’ category for me, so, you can finish that lotus flower giving you seven points, but someone else has the majority so you’re giving them five points, what do you do? The area control element really adds extra depth to this stunning looking game!
This is a great micro game from Oink games, a Japanese company that make lovely micro games. Deep Sea Adventure is a push your luck style game that is a whole lot of game in a tiny box!
Players are all divers exploring for treasure in the sea, each turn you will roll two D3s to determine how deep you go and decide if you want to collect that treasure you landed on or if you want to continue to the depths for better goodies (you could even do both!) If you take a treasure it becomes a useless space that hinders everyone's movements.
The game is played over three rounds with 25 oxygen assigned to the team each round, every treasure you pick up uses one oxygen and reduces your movement by one. To keep hold of the treasure you must make it back to the submarine with it, else you and your treasure sink to the depths!
At the start of the next round, the blank space tiles are removed and any treasure not successfully brought back to the submarine is put at the lowest part of the track in piles of three, making it tempting to go just that little bit deeper next round.
This game is equal parts frustrating and hilarious and we have had many games where most (if not all) of us have ended up on zero points after the three rounds, yet we always go back for another game!
No Thanks also uses just a deck of numbered cards, this time from 3 to 35. Each turn, you have two options - draw the face up card from the middle, including any chips on it or play one of your chips to avoid picking up that card.
In a reversal of most games, the player to score the lowest wins, however you will score points equal to the face value of cards you have at the end of the game. Runs are only counted for their lowest number, so if you have 8,9 and 10, you will only score 8 points. The twist in the tale is that nine random cards are removed from the deck at the start of the game so you can’t really count on any card to connect a run.
Each chip you have left at the end of the game is also worth -1 point, however hang onto them as you never know when when you’ll need to say No Thanks to a high value card!
This is a great little game that is easily transported and always part of my travelling game box!
Honourable mentions go to Reiner Knizia's Kingdoms and Shadow Hunters
]]>Last year, I set out to reduce my ‘shelf of shame’ (aka the unplayed games list!) At the start of the year there were a monster 87 games on that list. Over the course of 2016 we played 89 games that were brand new to us. Pretty good going, huh? However, our unplayed list stands at 90 now. Any mathematician will tell you there’s something wrong with those numbers, however, any gamer will understand… I buy too many games! From the original 87 games there are 38 that are still unplayed, but then again we only have two unplayed Christmas gifts out of the six we got between us.
Overall, I shall be considering this challenge a success as we did play more than 87 new games, however those 38 games will be getting priority! I’ll be keeping our ‘unplayed’ list going as an interesting project and to either make me play some of the titles on it or to slow down my buying!
I really like the idea of the 10 by 10 challenge as it helps you form new strategies for games or helps you weed them out of the collection if they start getting tired after that many plays so we may undertake that this year, however our definite challenge for the year will be…..
One hundred train games! That is, one hundred plays of any games that involve trains. If you had told me years ago that my favourite games would involve trains or farming I would have laughed at you. However, these days they are firm favourites in our house! It’s also an excuse to get some of the heavier games to the table such as Age of Steam and some 18XX.
To start the year and challenge off in (big) style we cracked out the giant Ticket to Ride anniversary edition on Monday evening. I always forget just how beautiful this set is!
Nice, simple game to start, right? Wrong! Despite there only being four of us on a potentially five player board we all managed to pick starting tickets that were on top of each other meaning the entire right hand side of the board was a struggle with the constant fear of being blocked out. So much for the easy start! Still, the other 99 can’t be that hard, can they?
]]>If you are hosting a games evening when and where will it be? Who will you invite? In our house we have to decide who gets the rickety chair!
Will people eat before or should you provide snacks? Does the group want to order food later, together? What about drinks?
This is all before people even meet up. Once you’re all settled at your gaming location, here comes your next decision - what to play? Sometimes, the number of players limits your choices and it can be an easy decision to make. What happens is you have a group of five people, four of whom love Euros and the fifth player doesn’t? Again, your decision can be made tougher/easier depending on who is in your group. If you have a huge group, then it’s obviously going to be a ‘party game’, something that can involve everyone.
Our regular group now has a ‘pot’. It all started with each of us putting four games on scraps of paper into the pot. When we meet up, we draw one at random and that is what we start by playing. Whoever wins that game gets to put another game in the pot and draw the next choice. It’s nice having a ‘reward’ for winning.
So, you’ve got your group together, you’re all seated, you’ve chosen your game, now - who goes first? Most games have got some sort of decider, usually the oldest or youngest player, but if you play with the same group this gets repetitive. You could always roll a dice, but then, my dice pot is the other side of the room from the gaming table. Rock, paper, scissors just gets frustrating when you’re on the eighth draw! We did buy a copy of Z-Mans ‘Start Player’ which can be fun, it’s simply a deck of 54 cards with random methods of determining starting player. Eg The person who has visited the most countries or The player with the most cats (I like this one!) It also comes with a rather neat oversized ‘Start Player’ meeple. At this time of year, it’s a great ‘stocking’ filler for a gaming friend too!
We instead end up using the ‘Start Player’ app on Android, supports up to 6 players and is free to download. It’s easy, a bit silly and will not only pick start player but also turn order for you. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.ninjan.startplayer
But wait! I got a Secret Santa gift that was sent through Games Surplus in the US that came with this awesome little start player spinner.
Now, how will we decide how to choose start player?
]]>
- Day 1 - Play the newest edition to your gaming collection.
- Day 2 - Play your current favourite game.
- Day 3 - Play a dexterity game.
- Day 4 - Play a game that is in your top 10 games.
- Day 5 - Have your favourite beverage while playing games.
- Day 6 - Play a game with dice.
- Day 7 - Post a comment on another participant's Advent list
- Day 8 - Post a picture of you and the game you will play tonight
- Day 9 - Play a game that requires using pencil and paper
- Day 10 - Play a game that is card driven
- Day 11 - Play your favourite filler
- Day 12 - Wish someone a Merry Christmas today
- Day 13 - Play a game you received last year for Christmas
- Day 14 - Open a door for someone today
- Day 15 - Give someone a hug today
- Day 16 - Rogue One opens at the theatres - Santa doesn't mind if you go see the movie instead of gaming!
- Day 17 - Start player is the first person that put up their Christmas lights
- Day 18 - Have Holiday treats for your gaming guests while you game
- Day 19 - Wear something Christmassy while gaming
- Day 20 - Roll a D6...result 1 = play a Euro 2 = Play a thematic game 3 = Play a dice game 4 = Play a card game 5 = Play a kid's game 6 = Play a dexterity game
- Day 21 - Play a Euro
- Day 22 - Roll a D20 for start player - any crit and that player may choose the start player for the rest of the gaming session
- Day 23 - play a game that you have not yet played in December
- Day 24 - Wish your family a Merry Christmas and congrats on making it this far!
Last year, I bought the fantastic ‘Brettspiel-Adventskalender’ as I owned 16 of the games I would get expansions for. This year I was quite upset as I only owned 4 of the games and with a sad face I decided not to buy it. So, this seems like a great way to countdown to Christmas in a gamey-way!
Day 1 - Play the newest edition to your gaming collection will be interesting as our ‘newest game’ was a suitcase full from BGG Con and three Secret Santa parcels that arrived while I was away! Guess that means decisions need to be made. Battle Monkeys was in fact the last game I bought at BGG.CON on the last day so this is what we decided to go with. It also took one off our unplayed list as per this year's challenge.
Day 2 - Play your current favourite game. is a toughie as my favourite game changes from day to day, but let’s see what I fancy on that day! Bearing in mind there was only two of us, we needed something that worked well at two players. So decided to go with Concordia. Not only is this one of my favourite games at the moment but the Britannia / Germania map is perfect for a two player game.
Day 3 - Play a dexterity game. Having seven cats living in the house with is not conducive with playing dexterity games. However we do have a couple on the shelves. We'd spent the day in London at Dragonmeet and wanted to try and play Rhino Hero on the train on the way home to make it just that little more challenging. Sadly the train was packed so we had to wait until later
You can keep up with the Advent Challenge on Instragram ]]>Day 4 - Play a game that is in your top 10 games. Another tough choice as my top ten changes from day to day, partly depending with what mood I am in and who I am playing with. However whenever we play Castles of Burgundy I complain that we don't play it enough so this seemed like the perfect opportunity and also an opportunity to show off our beautiful new insert from Daedalus Productions Inc. Now we've all gone to bed trying to work what what our favourite drink is before tomorrow.
For those that don’t know, Spiel, at Essen in Germany is the biggest board gaming event in the world. As with every year there were more traders and higher attendance than last year. 1,021 traders from 50 different countries all spread over seven halls (rather than the usual three halls!) There was over 1,200 new releases on show and obviously attendance is always on the up. 174,000 gamers from around the world attended this year (compared to 162,000 last year)
All of this shows our hobby is gaining popularity everywhere.
Obviously, the one thing on everyones lips is the games, however, the thing that makes events great for me is the people. You can play the worst game ever with great people and still have fun.
Our con started Tuesday night, when our friend, Stuart came over ready for the long drive to Germany. We sat up (until far too late!) discussing our picks for the show, the games that were ‘must-buys’ and the games we wanted to look at/try to demo over the weekend. Wednesday morning came and off we set to Folkestone where we met up with the lovely Orhan from Happy Otter Games and his friend Gary who would be our ‘SatNav’ for the journey (this was our first time driving so we were going to follow him in convoy!) After catching up, we chatted games before boarding our train.
The train ride was really quick and pretty smooth and we were soon in France. After driving through France, Belgium and The Netherlands we finally made it to Germany, and Essen! We dropped Orhan off at his hotel and went onto ours. After checking in and winding down after the drive I checked in on Daniel, who is another admin for The Boardgame Group and had made the trip from Costa Rica. We met up with him in the gaming room and played a few games with him and Stuart before going to bed ready for the first day of the show.
Thursday is always a bit of a whirlwind as you fight your way through the crowds to get the hyped games from the show that you know will sell out so faces were blurred and hellos were quick!
This is our fourth year at Essen and for three of those years we have stayed in the same hotel (as many people do!) so a lot of people at the hotel are familiar faces. After dinner we returned to the hotel where we caught up with Peter from the Netherlands and played a few small games with him.
Friday was a bit quieter but with four of us and seven halls to investigate it was still pretty non-stop! However, that evening was the Heavy Cardboard "Heavy Card Boat" meetup with a great chance to catch up with some old friends and meet some new faces.
Saturday was a more relaxed day, knowing how busy it gets we had a little lie-in and took our time getting to the show. Starting to get nervous about space we all limited our buys a little but had a chance to demo some games. We got to play Ominoes by Yay Games - a small indie British company that I see all the time but never get to play as I am usually working. A nice little dice game, but it was even nicer to meet up with Andy the designer.
We also went to say hello to the Steamforged Games and congratulate them on their success with the Dark Souls Kickstarter (which we got a sneak peak at), picked up a copy of Shadow Games and got a sneak preview of the new Guild Ball Kick Off! Starter Set. Such a nice bunch of guys and we love Guild Ball!
Saturday night we all did some packing to work out just how much space we had left so we could make the most of some bargains on the Sunday!
Sunday is always a bitter sweet day as not only is it the last day of the show but it’s the last day to catch up with people. Sunday daytime was spent hunting for bargains that would fit in luggage and then running around for the last minute price reductions as the show closed. We helped Orhan pack down his stand then all headed off for a last meal together. Seven of us sat round the table and discussed the highs and lows of the show, the things we’d seen and the things we missed out on!
As we were leaving early Monday morning we said some sad goodbyes Sunday night, but happy knowing some of the people we’d chatted to over the weekend we would see at future gaming events. A few at BGG Con (which is now only a week away!), some at UK Games Expo in May and some next year at Essen. Despite all the amazing games out there, it really is the amazing people out there that make the community what it is!
]]>Part of this has been down to the home renovations we have had done. We had a solid two weeks of builders, dust, dirt and plaster everywhere in our home. This meant, of course, that the precious things needed to leave the house. Much easier said than done when your gaming collection takes up half your living room and half the spare bedroom! So, with the electricians due to arrive at 8am Tuesday morning we booked a storage unit and proceeded to load the car with games from all four of the full Kallax units.
After a few lectures about safe driving, which were the precious games, not to stack games too high etc etc hubby set off with car load number one.
As any gamer will understand, you can't possibly deal with the thought of having no games at all in the house so we decided to keep one 'cubes' worth. So, with so many games to choose from, how to do you go about whittling that down to five or six MUST haves? How do you choose which you want to keep? Will the other games get jealous? What if no one else wants to play the few games you have left in the house?
OK, calm down, think about this logically! Four/five players tends to be our sweet spot and they are typically players that like the heavier end of games, but will we want to play heavier games in the midst of the building madness?
The very precious and unopened Food Chain Magnate cannot leave the house. I was lucky enough to win a copy of Pandemic Cthulhu at UK Games Expo in May and a lot of people are keen to play that ahead of it's release so that should stay. Two down already! Concordia is a game loved by a lot of our game group and goes up to five players, so again it needs to stay. We should also use this opportunity to help me reduce the 'Unplayed Games List' (see here: 2016 challenge ) so Madeira and Rome:Rise to Power stay. Now I feel just one more for luck. Castles of Burgundy is great at 2, 3 and 4 player counts and doesn't see enough love so that's last on the list!
(Our Concordia box contains all the expansions so doesn't do well on it's side. Going flat also didn't count towards my 'one cubes worth'.)
So, while we knew it wouldn't be easy living in a building site I don't think either of us had quite anticipated the mayhem that we would be living amidst. We had kept our gaming table but were now sitting on collapsable garden furniture rather than our comfy, padded usual chairs, we had to clean inches of dust off the table before we could use it and quite often we were playing by lamp light as the overhead lighting was being worked on. But carry on playing we did, despite much of our house looking like this:
We did, of course visit friends for gaming and our local games cafe to have a brief respite from the works. The minute the new lighting above our table was fitted it made all the stress worthwhile. I don't think any of us realised how much we had struggled to read cards and boards before.
After two and a half weeks, the messy work was done and it was time to bring the babies back home at last. Three cars later and a four person chain gang and they were all finally back inside the house. Then began the task of getting them back on the shelves! Now, I'm sure we'll all admit to a bit of 'overflow' but I'm pretty sure all those games came off those shelves so why, oh why do they not fit back in it?
Got them all back in? Have you looked over there, on the table?
aarrrrggghhhh... this is like some abstract game in it's own right now, piles of games in every corner of the room that just won't fit anywhere! At this point, our two little red cupboard doors get removed and the two cubes worth of 'small games' are removed to make more room. At this point everything just about fits as the small games are relegated to a storage box in the corner of the room!
Now, everything fits nicely, though it's strange that things aren't where you aren't used to them being, but it fits, hooray!
Next morning, the doorbell rings and stood on the doorstep is the postman with a box in his hand, smiling as he hands me a Kickstarter game I'd forgotten was due to arrive. He looks confused as I break down and cry......
]]>Each Starter Box comes with:
4 decks, each of 50 cards and comprising of two factions each
8 faction spinners to track your power levels
4 status spinners to track your Affluence and Influence levels
An assortment of tokens and dice
A game manual and quickstart guide to get you playing
Each deck is comprised of two factions that are designed to compliment each other. The factions are: Corporate, Crime, Eco, Government, Illuminati, Media, Military and Religious. Obviously each has it's own strengths and weaknesses but each of them just ooze theme, even down to the flavour text. The aim of Oligarchy is to be last man standing, to do this you must reduce each players Power Base from twelve to zero. Each player starts the game with twelve points split across the factions you are playing. These starter decks are designed with an even split across both factions, so in an Illuminati/Religious deck you would start the game with six points in each faction.
The game begins with every player drawing seven cards. You then have a chance to discard and redraw once if you are unhappy with your initial hand.
The turn begins with a player drawing a card.
Like any card game there are many different types of cards available, these are:
Resources, Incidents, Scenarios, Items, Professions, Characters and Status cards. Characters and status cards may only be played into your realm, other cards, the text will tell you where they should be played or will be most useful. Most cards may only be deployed during your turn, there are, of course, exceptions to every rule. At the bottom of each card, alongside the cost it will state 'your sphere' (these cards can only be played in your turn) or 'all spheres' (these cards can be played at any point)
The most important cards in Oligarchy are your status cards - Influence and Affluence, these are what power your deck and every other card will have a cost to pay made up of one or both as shown in the bottom corners. Each round you may play one of these status cards. Then you gain status equal to the number of appropriate cards in play eg. If you have three affluence and two influence you add both to the total already on your status spinner. You may then use them to buy and place further cards from your hand. This is called the deployment phase, the only limit to the number of cards you can play is your resources.
Characters can be used in a few different ways, starting from the turn they come into play. Many have abilities that will have a number next to them. To use these abilities you must have that number of Power Base in the faction that character belongs to, in the case of the following card with a starting Power Base of 6 you could perform both abilities, but if you your Power Base fell to below 5 you could only perform the 2+ ability.
If you use a characters ability you cannot then use it to attack on the same turn. Characters do not directly attack opponents cards (unless stated otherwise), they attack an opponent who may then either choose to block with one or more character cards or else concede damage directly from their power base. If a character is blocked, both take damage equal to the enemies power base (shown on the top right of the card) Damage taken is permanent and represented by markers.
One unique feature of Oligarchy is 'Power Plays'. These occur when you attack with three characters from the same faction and are a super charged ability specific to that faction. For example attack with three Military characters and your opponent looses two power base points.
Whilst attacking opponents is the main way to deplete your opponents power base, there are many items and events that also deal damage. You also lose the game if you are unable to draw cards when required and again there are items, characters and events that can mill through your deck quickly (watching a great card go directly into your discard pile is horrible!)
The decks in the starter box are everything you need to play this game for between two and four players, but it doesn't stop there, Oligarchy is a trading card game so additional boosters are also available to expand your game. The decks all consist of two factions, however you could always add another if you wanted (remembering you still only get twelve points to split across them though) There are also cards that are non faction specific and can be used in any deck.
Generally theme in games doesn't worry me, I'd rather have a great game with a pasted on theme than a theme heavy mediocre game, however Oligarchy has both. The cards are wonderfully thematic in their names, artwork,functions and flavour text and this leads to a true sense of immersion in the game.
The Kickstarter went live on June 1st and reached 15% of it's target within a few hours, if you are attending the UK Games Expo over the first weekend of June be sure to drop by and try it for yourself.
]]>UK Games Expo is in it's tenth year this year, and aside from that it is a special year for both Expo and myself!
Originally held at the Clarendon Suites in Birmingham, we visited Expo in 2008 (ish, my memory is hazy!) Myself and two friends entered a Settlers of Catan tournament that had around 30 participants (enough to fill a small room). Evening gaming was limited to a small room at a nearby hotel so unless you had a room there it wasn't easy to get involved in. Whilst we had a great weekend, checking out new releases and getting to demo some games we didn't (yet) own, it felt quite small compared to UK GenCon that we had previously been to.
Fast forward to 2014 and I revisited Expo, this time to demo for Z-Man games (my first official demoing experience!) I got to demo Helios and a prototype of Battle at Kembles Cascade. Expo had, by this time, moved to the Hilton NEC Metropole and was huge in comparison to my previous visit! There was a massive open gaming room open all hours, alongside multiple trade halls and the opportunity for a game at every corner. Being that I was working, however, I didn't get as much gaming time in as I would have liked so last year I vowed to go and just have fun.
The week before Expo last year was spent frantically putting the final pieces into place to launch this site in time. So, on not a lot of sleep but a huge amount of coffee I set of to Expo as 'The Mad Katter'. On the train from London to Birmingham I overheard the guys behind me talking about boardgames and spent the rest of the journey chatting to them. I then met up with friends at Expo as well as many people I knew from on line. Most nights were spent gaming until the early hours of the morning and a good time was had by all. A special mantion goes to the roll and move train game that came in the Virgin Trains kids pack that we played on the way home (despite three of us having cases full of new games!)
This year, as I said, is a big one for Expo. Due to it's ever increasing size changes have been made to accommodate even more people/traders/games! The trade hall is being moved over to the NEC with over 10,000 sqm and over 150 traders whilst the Hilton will still be the home for evening gaming, events and the famous bring and buy. Though, determined not to spend the whole event working, I will be helping out our friends at Happy Otter Games for some of the time. Don't forget to come and get your promo if you already own a copy of the Creature College. This will also be my first event with an official press badge so I hope to bring you lots of news from great UK companies.;
Some of things I'm looking forward to seeing
Oligarchy - a "...new trading card game for two or more players set in a dystopian near-future..." created by fellow Brightonian and friend Gary Wareham which will be launching on Kickstarter over the weekend. Entropic Games. In fact it's live now.
Imhotep - Spiel de Jahres nomination by Phil Walker-Harding which I'm hoping to try out. KOSMOS
The Networks - a tabletop strategy game in which the players are all running competing television networks. Formal Ferret Games.
The Dark Room - live on stage Choose Your Own Adventure inspired game of madness performed by John Robertson.
What UK Games Expo would be complete without a trip to the Bring and Buy stall, I have a huge amount going in to sell and hoping to find copies of a few from of my wist list; Dominant Species, Troyes, Age of Steam, Euphoria and Container
UK Games Expo
Birmingham NEC
Friday 3rd June (11am - 5pm)
Saturday 4th June (9am - 5pm)
Sunday 5th June (9am - 5pm)
The Dell House is run by Kevin and Elizabeth, both boardgamers who organise residential weekends for fellow gamers.
After having been to Rome the week before and having seen the Colosseum, it seemed appropriate to do a slight detour on way and visit another of the Seven Wonders, StoneHenge, which led to this classic shot.
This meant we didn't arrive until the evening on Friday, when we arrived there were around eight people playing. A game of Istanbul and a game of Fresco was underway, so we had a game of Quadropolis with Kevin and Elizabeth, all of us learning it together, then some players swapped and Rob went and learnt Fresco while we played Puerto Rico. After everyone had finished their games it was getting late but we had time for a couple of lighter games with some of the other guests so we played some For Sale and Schroedinger's Cat. Then it was time for bed ready for a full days gaming on Saturday. We were staying in the appropriate red suite which was lovely and we got a good nights sleep.
Saturday morning we got up and had breakfast with a few of the other guests began to arrive. Including the lovely Orhan of Creature College fame. We played Bruges, Manhattan Project and took a quick break from Russian Railroads so we could sit and have lunch with the full compliment of all 17 guests!
We went back and finished our game at the same time as a lot of other people, so Codenames seemed an obvious choice to get everyone involved. Seeing as there were piles of games scattered around the place it was a perfect opportunity to tryout a few rounds of Code games, using 25 boardgames in place of the word cards. This actually proved to be a lot trickier than it seemed, with lots of the games having themes or mechanics in common.
Again, we all got together for dinner after which we enjoyed a game of Suburbia followed by another couple of rounds of For Sale before bed!
On Sunday our numbers were lower and many people were heading off early-ish to begin their drives home. We started the day with a game of Village followed by lunch. After that we had a game of Codenames proper and finished the afternoon with a Fresco before we begun our drive home.
We met and played with a great bunch of new people ranging in ages from 20s through to 60s and had a great weekend of gaming with all the stress of 'hosting' taken away. Tea, coffee, soft drinks and snacks were readily available (and taken advantage of!) all weekend and what we saw of the local area was a truly stunning setting.
Not only do we hope to be visiting again for another Dellcon, but I hope we can get a large group of friends together for our own gaming weekend!
http://www.thedellhouse.co.uk/dellcon.html
While most women going away for a weekend would be worrying about what clothes to take, I'm busy worrying about what games to take. With close to 500 games currently in our library it's a tough one. There are a few games people want to play (Kevin has requested Quadropolis and Orhan has requested Concordia) but what else to take? Currently i have Mombasa, For Sale, Russian Railroads, Manhattan Project and Schroedinger's Cat in the box and am also eyeing up Chinatown and Rokoko. Should i also take some bigger multiplayer games to encourage interaction with everyone? Do I take some games we haven't yet cracked open in the hope someone there knows how to play them? This box is now over flowing!
Will the games we take but don't play be upset, will the games we leave behind get jealous they weren't chosen? Will there be room in the car for us, let alone any clothes for the weekend? Will we end up playing naked Munchkin?
Keep an eye on Instagram for photos of what we play over the weekend and I'm sure they'll be a full report here next week!
]]>The box contains:
To start the game, place the two derelict ships (the grey ones) on the yellow spaces (numbers 26 and 36) Place the round tracking marker on the start bubble at the bottom of the board. Each player takes a ship and places it on the singularity in the middle of the board and an emergency stop card of the same colour. Shuffle the 26 fuel cards and deal out cards face down equal to the number of players times three. (ie 9 piles in a three player game, 12 in a four player) Then place a second card face up on top of each. The set up shown would be for a three player game.
The game starts with each player mining these fuel cards. In the first round the youngest player goes first. Each player chooses a stack of two cards in turn until they have six cards in hand. Each round consists of six movement phases using one card of your choice from your hand each phase.
At the start of the phase each player chooses a card and flips them over simultaneously.
All cards revealed are played in alphabetical order, ie carbon would go before oxygen. (There is a handy distribution chart on the board). Hopefully you noticed there are three different colour cards which all represent different types of movement. Fuel cards are yellow and have a number between 1 and 10, your ship will move that number of spaces. However, your ship will always move towards the nearest spaceship so this movement may be forward or backward. Purple cards are repulsor fuel cards. Instead of moving towards the nearest ship, you will move the appropriate number of spaces away from it. Tractor beam cards (teal) do not move your ships, instead they move every other ship towards you. Start with the ship closest to you and work round the track, including the derelict ships.
During your turn you may also choose to use your emergency stop card. This starts face up in front of you each round. Once per round you may flip this card to prevent having to use a fuel card to avoid going backwards at the wrong time. However, bear in mind that at the start of the next round the player in last place will pick their cards first so it can be advantageous to be in last place at the end of a round. A round ends when each player has played all six of their fuel cards. All emergency stop cards are flipped over, all fuel cards are shuffled together and the round marker is moved up. To start the new round players mine cards again taking it in turns beginning with the player in last place and working in order so the player in first place chooses last.
Play continues either until a player has made it to the warpgate or until six rounds have been played, at this point the player closest is considered the winner.
Gravwell comes with six variants of the base rules including a solo variant, a lot of these can be mixed and matched for some really interesting scenarios, meaning there is a lot of re playability if you get bored with the base version of the game.
This is a very clever little game that can leave you incredibly frustrated (in a good way!) especially if you have been forced to use your emergency stop card earlier in the round and end up being pulled backwards. It also gets very messy when people are getting close to winning! This game has loads of player interaction which makes it a great 'warm up' game at the start of an evening.
]]>The final product will come with:
The guest cards are shuffled and the first nine placed on the rooms marked on the board. Each player starts with their ghost marker, score marker, the dice in their colour, one scare tactics card and one spookie favour card. Everyone rolls three of their six sided dice and turn order is determined with the highest total going first and the lowest last. These are the dice you will use for the first day. Each guest has a number on the bottom right of the card, this is the total dice pips you will need to scare the guest off. On the bottom left are the points players will gain for successfully scaring them out of their rooms, with points for first, second and third place shown.
The first player places one of their dice and their ghost marker on a guest of their choice, then each player takes a turn, going back to the first player who can then move their ghost one space horizontally or vertically and place a die on the next guest. Play continues until everyone has placed all three of their dice. Some guests have special abilities on the top left of the cards (there is a handy little cheat sheet for these) and some have phobias on the top right. These relate to your scare tactics cards. Each card shows two different phobias on it, during your turn you can play one of these that matches the guests phobia and place a phobia token under your dice to double the score of it.
At the end of the night phase, all ghosts retire to the attic of the hotel and the scores are totalled. If the total number of pips on a guest equals or exceeds it the guest is scared out of the room and the players score. First place scores the highest points, second the second highest and anyone else with a die on the card receives the third place points. Any guests not successfully scared remain on the board but have a chance to 'calm down' so all dice on them are turned down by one.
The day phase then begins, each player, starting with the player in the lead then gets a chance to buy cards (these cost points to buy) Scare tactics and Spookie favours cost two points to buy and terror dice cards cost three. Spookie favour cards give you special, rule breaking abilities, like allowing you to move in all directions and terror dice cards let you upgrade to your D8 or add more dice to your pool (although you only ever get three actions, this lets you choose your best numbers to use). The day phase is then over and night begins again with everyone rolling their die. Play ends when the hotel cannot be restocked with guests and the player with the most points is declared the winner.
Ghostel is charming and thematic with great artwork. It is simple to teach and play with some surprisingly strategic planning needed, sometimes you will need help with a guest so it's not worth going all out, sometimes it's worth popping a sneaky die on a guest to grab a few extra points. It makes for a great family game or a filler for adult gamers who will spot the Ghostbusters references and have a lot of laughs with it.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/catlab/ghostel-the-board-game
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/169475/ghostel
When I started I Play Red I always wanted it to be more than another review site so there has always been a lot of things I wanted to do. The new Board Game Cafe Map was one of those things. My poor, ever suffering husband, Rob, is a programmer by day (so all credit for anything on this site goes to him!) Consequently, he would never be happy with a google map for this.
Finally, after his hard work our map went up on Tuesday night (around midnight our time!) with around 30 submissions. This was to see what people thought of the idea, if they liked the layout etc etc.
Well, Wednesday was hectic! I shared the post in two Facebook Groups (The Boardgame Group and Board Games Cafes) and asked for feedback and submissions. Everytime I finished inputting the lists people were giving me, more were added (in both groups) My email was coming in non-stop - we had created a monster! Over the course of yesterday I proceeded to input another 60-something cafes.
The one piece of feedback we got was people would like to make their own submissions (something I was beginning to agree with!) So, my Technical Team (aka Rob) sat up late last night and made that happen.
Now, at the end of Thursday night we have over a hundred pins on our map, with cafes in South Africa, Australia, Brazil and Japan, to name a few of the far flung locations.
This will continue to be a work in progress while we continue to update and perfect it and hopefully it will be a great resource for people to use and enjoy. So, please continue to add submissions and send us feedback on how it can be improved.
All I need now is to win the lottery so I can go on a world tour and visit some of the awesome places I have seen!
]]>Included in the box is:
Super Motherload is a deck builder with a difference, it comes with a board. As with all deck builders you will start with a very basic deck (7 cards in this case), you will gain more powerful cards to add to your deck over the course of the game. You will use these cards to drill and bomb minerals from the game board and then use these minerals to train your pilots (buy more cards) Each new card you buy is worth victory points and you may also gain points from achievement cards throughout the game.
Place the board marked number one in the middle of the table with the mineral tiles, bombs, tunnels and artifacts close at hand. Shuffle the major achievement deck and draw three of these face up, place the rest in the box as they will not be used this game. Shuffle the minor achievements and again turn three if these face up.
Each player chooses one of the available decks (these are differentiated by colour on the back and are all different) Shuffle the seven basic cards and they lay out the other cards into their appropriate piles with the cheapest cards at the top. Draw four cards from your basic deck and you are ready to play the game.
During each players turn they may perform two actions. You may choose to perform any of the following:
Draw two cards, Drill an area or bomb an area, you may perform the same action multiple times in a turn.
Drill an area: Discard any number of cards with a drill symbol of a matching colour, then take tunnel tiles with a matching length from the supply and place them on the game board in a straight line. Collect all minerals andany bonuses from the spaces you have covered.
Bomb an area: Discard a bomb token and a red pilot card. Place tunnel tokens on the board in the exact pattern shown on the left hand side of the card. Again collect any minerals and/or bonuses shown.
Tunnel tiles must be placed alongside existing tunnels but cannot overlap them. (At the start of the game you must drill from the planets surface) There are three types of terrain on the board, shown below in order.
Dirt - has no special rules, can be drilled or bombed.
Steel Plate - cannot be bombed, can only be drilled. The colour of the drill icons you use must match the border on the plate.
Rock - cannot be drilled, must be bombed.
When you gain mineral tiles you must place them on one of your available pilot stacks. If at any point, the value of mineral tiles on any of your cards meets or exceeds the cards cost you may buy that card by placing the mineral tiles back in the supply and the card into your discard pile. A lot of the cards feature bonuses that are received when you buy them, these are shown in the middle at the bottom of the card.
If at any point during your turn you fulfill the goal shown on any of the faceup achievement cards, you place the card face down in your play area to be counted up at the end of the game.
When the last artifact on a board is covered a new board comes into play. These are numbered 1 to 4 and must be placed in that order, though the orientation of it is decided by the current player. When a third board is to be added, the top board is removed so there is only ever two in play at a time. When the last artifact on board four is covered, the current turn is finished and the game ends.
Points are added up from cards, achievements and artifacts and the player with the highest is declared the winner.
Super Motherload adds a lot of depth to the average deck builder with the inclusion of the board. The variables (achievement cards, boards and decks) add a huge amount of re playability to this game and the artwork is simply stunning.
]]>Chinatown comes with the following :
The game is played over six rounds with each player using their skills of negotiation to build an empire and earn money from the businesses they build in their territory over the six rounds of the game.
Each player takes a player aid, the tokens of their colour and $50,000 dollars. The board represents the New York Chinatown of the mid 60s and is divided into six districts with the squares numbered 1 to 85. The building cards are shuffled and a number dealt out to everyone depending on the number of players. (All shown on the player aid)
Each player receives the highest number of cards as shown on the left, the second number is the number of cards each player keeps. The discarded cards are removed from the game. Everyone puts one of their markers on the properties they have kept.
Each player then randomly draws a number of tiles from the bag as shown in red on the player aid.
Then the negotiations begin! This is the fun part of the game, especially with the right group. Anything can be traded and negotiated: buildings (with or without shop tiles), shop tiles and money, all in any quantity or combination. When a building is traded the owners exchange the appropriate cards to help keep track. The only rule is that once a shop tile has been placed on the board it must remain there.
Starting with the first player and working clockwise round the table each person can build any number of shop tiles on their buildings.
After each player has placed shop tiles everyone receives income as shown on the back of the player aid.
Income is distributed according to the size of the business and if it's completed or not.
Each shop tile has a number (between 3 to 6) that indicates the number of adjacent tiles needed to complete a business. In the game, each type of tile includes three more copies than its maximum size. For example a factory needs six tiles for completion and there are nine in the game.
In this example purple will receive 60,000 for the four dim sum spaces, however if they can trade that fifth one with white it would become worth 110,000. So that would be a tricky trade!
In essence this is a very simple game but the fun of it lies in the negotiation phase. When choosing your buildings at the start of the round you need to not only look for spaces that are useful to you but also what might be useful to someone else and therefore put you in a good trading position this turn.
We have a pretty 'vocal' gaming group and this is a game that turns the air blue in our house (but in the nicest possible way!)
While the board is pretty basic looking, it does its job and is soon covered with shop tiles which have nicely themed artwork. My one criticism of this game is how similar the money looks, there just isn't enough differential between the different denominations. This gets a fair bit of play in our house, firstly as it takes five players and secondly because its a lot of fun!
The very neat little box contains:
The game is played in two halves, the first half using the property cards and the second using the currency cards.
Each player starts with an amount of money dependent on how many are playing (3-4 players receive $18000, 5-6 players $14000) The property deck is shuffled and a number if cards drawn face up equal to the number of players ie. four cards in a four player game. All of the face up properties will be auctioned so each player will receive a property.
The starting player decides on an amount of money to bid for the highest property and places it visible on the table. Play continues clockwise with each player deciding if they want to increase the bid or pass. If a player passes they take the lowest value property and takes back half their bid (rounded down) The rest of the bid is returned to the bank and removed from the game. When only one player is left, they pay the full amount of their bid and take the highest value property. You don't have to place a bid on a property. You can pass, pay nothing and take the least valuable property at no cost. All available money is kept secret during this part of the game. Purchased properties are kept face down in front of players who purchased them. When all cards are taken, the next set are turned over and the previous winner decides to bid or pass.
This continues until all property cards are sold. The first half of the game is now over, unused coins are kept and added to each players end game score.
The second half of the game involves selling the properties you got in the first half of the game. As with the property cards, a number of currency cards are revealed equal to the number of players. Each player chooses one of their property cards and places it face down in front of them. All players reveal their property cards simultaneously. The player with the highest value property cqrd takes the highest valued currency card, the second most valuable property takes the second highest currency and so on. Property cards are then discarded from the game.
The game ends when all the properties have been sold. Players add up the value of their currency cards, add any coins left from the first half of the game and the richest player wins.
This is a great little game with a nice mixture of mechanics, choosing the right property at the right time in the second round is critical and can make the difference between ending up with $0 or $15000.
Quality components and quality game play, along with the fact thus goes up to six players make this a great game!
]]>On 16th January last year I set out to complete the 'ten by ten' challenge. As of 1st January this year I have played 96 of those games, I will make sure I get those last four games in before the 16th and consider the challenge complete. We had to tweak our list as we realised Smallworld just wasn't going to get those plays, mainly down to the sheer quantity of pieces for it (I have quite a few expansions for it!) and I have now come to realise that inserts are a must for some games. As we were running out of time, we chose to replace it with Splendor, a quick and easy alternative that almost anyone can play. Some of the games on that list have now cemented themselves as firm favourites (Russian Railroads, Bruges) and it now means we can crack them out and get playing super quick. Some we have sadly now 'overplayed' (Sorry, DC deckbuilder but you are now on your way to a new home!)
The ten by ten has been an interesting exercise and something I will do again, however the 'need' to play specific games has meant a lot of our newer games have been overlooked in order to play games from the challenge. Our BGG list currently shows nearly four hundred games and around one hundred expansions. I always thought of our unplayed games as a percentage rather than a number (10% sounds much better than 50, right?) So, this year I have decided our challenge should be to play all our unplayed games. The start of this was to make a list of them and oops! I may have underestimated a bit!
Counting through our 'big box' games we currently have 87 unplayed games, plus six expansions (I haven't yet gone through the two shelves of 'small games') It seems this years challenge should be simple then, instead of playing 100 games, we only have 87 to play.
Events like the UK Games Expo, Essen and BGGCon really haven't helped this year and we now have a FLGS with great choices and good prices. I've also had an influx of quality KickStarter games arrive recently.
I'm guessing we need to implement some sort of 'play three unopened games before buying a new one' rule, though I can't see that happening.
Let's just hope that in a years time I'll be posting that this years challenge was a success!
**terms and conditions may apply to this challenge, for example excessive buying at Essen in October means some games will be sealed at the end of the year, small games currently uncounted may not be included in this deal.....
Here's the list....
We have invited many friends to come and either pop in and out for a few games or come for the full 24 hour run (we shall see who's up for what when they arrive!)
Discussions over what games we will play are tough as it will partly depend on how many people are around at any given time, but we have decided two things:
I have five games left to play to complete my ten by ten this year so hoping we can knock a couple of them off the list, and next year I have made a vow to play everything I currently have unplayed so it would be good to cheat and do some of them in advance! Other than that, we are both pretty much omnigamers so thinking we'll manage to get a bit of everything in there.
You can follow our progress on Instagram, mine is @IPlayRed, I also log my plays on BGG.com which upload on my twitter: IPlayRedGaming, or look out for #BrightonGaming24in24
]]>I have to admit I read about this prior to release and felt a little underwhelmed and unsure if this game would get any play with our group. I picked a copy of it up in October and it has rapidly become our most played game of 2015!
The premise is simple. Twenty five cards are laid out on the table, each card has a single word on it. Two players take on the role of Spymasters and they know the secret identity of all 25 agents. Using single word clues they must get their team to identify the agents on their team. The rival spymaster needs to do the same first. Both teams need to avoid guessing the opponents cards, but must also beware of the assassin hidden on the table else itis game over for them! Sounds simple, right? This has been described as the quietest party game you will ever play and after one round you will understand why! As a spymaster it can be infuriating as your team comes up with answers you'd never imagine! (I gave my team the clue 'dinner, three words' wanting them to guess jacket, plate and time, instead they answered with ice cream!)
Great (and frustrating!) fun for all ages and gamer abilities.
I'm a sucker for games that look beautiful, I admit, but this not only looks beautiful but also has great game play. This is a push your luck game where everyone takes turns piloting a skyboat. When you are the captain you roll the dice and see if you can match the symbols on the dice with the cards in your hand. The passengers (other players) decide if they think you can match and stay in the boat or decide to abandon ship if they don't think the captain can do it. Each stop grants you points if you jump out in time, increasing as you go further up the line. Of course, if the captain fails and you are still in the ship you crash and burn with him, get no points and go back to the start again.
Again, this is a pretty easy game, but has enough strategy and fun for the most seasoned gamer. The looks alone are enough to get anyone interested!
Yes, it's another tile placement game but this one has a lot to make it quite different from any that have gone before. Each round you will draw three tiles and secretly decide what to do with them. One, you will decide to discard straight away, the other two you will put a price on. Beginning with the start player, everyone has a chance to buy a tile from someone else, at the price they have set. Then, if no one has bought your tiles you can buy them (again, at the price you set at the start of the round). Any tiles you have at the end of the round you then use to build your clans territory. There are four scoring tiles that are picked randomly at the start of the game (if playing with non gamers or younger players, the more complex ones can be left out). At the end of each round you will score one, two or three of these tiles. At the end of the round you will also gain coins depending on how many barrels of whiskey connect to your city ( this is based in the Scottish Highlands after all!)
This has a lot of features that regular gamers will be familiar with but i love the idea of naming your price on each tile. There are a total of sixteen scoring tiles that can be used with four randomly chosen for each game, meaning you'll never play the same game twice.
This is a great little game that is small enough to chuck in your bag, glove box and take anywhere. Its also small and quick enough to play anywhere. It is played with a deck of cards numbered 3 to 35.
Each turn you have one of two options, either play one of your chips to avoid picking up the face up card or pick up the face up card, along with any chips that have been placed on it. The aim is to get the lowest possible score, each card counts for its face value but runs of two or more cards only count for the lowest score, however, nine cards are removed at the start of the game so you aren't always guaranteed to find the connecting card you need. Chips are worth minus 1 point at the end of the game but can be even more valuable when trying to dodge an unwanted card.
The joy of this game is in it's sheer simplicity, however, beware of taking too many cards in order to block opponents!
These are just a few of my favourites for playing with family and/or non gamers that are simple enough to teach quickly while still being fun for the heaviest of gamers. They're also all small enough to easily pop in a bag to carry anywhere.
Hope everyone has a great Christmas with lots of gaming time, i have a 24 hour games marathon planned between Christmas and New Year in an attempt to catch up with some of the unopened boxes on my shelf!
]]>I'd almost forgotten about it when, in late April I received a geek mail stating I had been chosen. Wow! It took a few days to sink in then preparations began. I first applied for my ESTA , without that I wouldn't be going anywhere! After a nervous few weeks I got the all clear so preparations began in earnest. With only a month between returning from Essen and heading off to the states I was going to be having a hectic October/November!
I spent most of Summer like a giddy child looking forward to it, however, in the month lead up I did nothing but worry! How would I cope with a ten hour flight? (I had only ever flown within Europe before) How would America handle a crazy, red haired, tattooed Brit? Would I have enough/the right sort of clothes? Would there be any food choice for a veggie in Dallas? What would BGG con be like compared to other European cons, would the people be friendly, would the game choice be good?
I flew into Dallas the Monday before the Con started with Anna (another Brit on the same scholarship as me) We landed in Fort Worth with the intention of seeing some of Dallas before the convention started. However, we arrived at a hotel in downtown in he middle of a horrendous storm (bad even by our standards) Thunder, lightning and four inches of rain settling on the pavements meant we arrived knackered and soaked right through, fit pretty much for dinner and nothing else!
The next morning we found breakfast and got on a hotel shuttle bus to visit a mall (well, it had to be done!) After wandering round there for a bit we headed to the Hyatt Regency, the home of BGG Con and what would be our home for the coming week.
We checked in and my first call was the con library (which I had volunteered for a few shifts in during the week!) I was there to help unpack the games and load them on the shelves ready for the attendees.
It was great to meet some of Team Geek, have a look through the library and get an idea of the layout the day before registration.
After that I meet up with Mark Sierens who is a TBG member and had a chance to play his game Evil Genius: Deathray, a ridiculous, funny take that game. Then there was a quick chance to change while I waited for my fellow TBG admins to arrive. Once they had arrived and settled in we all went for dinner, as we finished up the rest of the scholarship girls arrived so I got to meet everyone briefly before they ate. We organised the room allocations (seven of us in two rooms meant we needed organising) At this point it was getting late so we just hung round and chatted about our plans or the con. Registration started at ten the next morning which meant we all wanted to be up early to see what free games would be up for grabs. I had learnt that evening that there would be four games for free and that some of the titles would be in very limited supply.
I actually woke up early on Wednesday morning, around 7am and decided to wander downstairs and see what the registration queue was like. I bumped into another Brit I knew and we decided to join the queue early. He had a copy of Codenames that he hadn't played yet so we cracked it open and I taught it to some people behind us in the queue. Playing that and chatting to people in the queue meant that time went quickly and it was soon time to get our registration badges and let the Con begin! I went straight to the trade halls to hit up Broken Token for some of their awesome inserts. Sadly, shipping to the UK makes them impractical to ship so I knew I wanted to make the most of it!
I picked up four inserts from them pus these awesome people meeples for Lords of Waterdeep. This, of course, meant some of our games could be condensed, giving us more room on the shelves so time for some shopping in the trade halls! After dumping off the days goodies I met up for a game of Euro Crisis. I had seen lots of people walking round Essen with this tucked under their arm so was intrigued. A game is played over three years divided into four quarters. Each player takes n the role of a bank trying to enrich themselves at the expense of struggling states. Actions are chosen simultaneously and then taken in turn order. With all four of us playing being lovers of tactical games this was great with a definite take that element, two of us being knocked out in the penultimate turn. Then, that evening it was time to get my TbG tattoo from the lovely Dre! Obviously, it had to go next to my meeple :)
During the evening I managed to get in another game of Evil Genius: Deathray but mostly spent the time catching up with people.
Thursday morning I managed to get in on a game of Tiny Epic Westerns, the new micro game from Gamelyn games. As with their other games, it packs a powerful punch for such a small box. Their games seem to get better each time, this one combines worker placement with poker tactics and was great fun. In the evening it was the Heavy Cardboard meetup closely followed by the TBG one so it was mainly about socialising though I did get to play Neue Heimet and a couple of games of Deep Sea Adventure.
Early Friday morning I managed to get a demo game of Tesla Vs Edison in, this was great as I haven't had a chance to crack open my Kickstarter version yet. I also managed to get a demo game of Prodigals Club and Nefarious. Wandering around the play halls later I ended up teaching some people Grand Austria Hotel and played/taught another game of Prodigals Club while it was still fresh in my mind!
Saturday was the last full day of the con so we had lots of people meaning we played quite a few party games to include everyone, the old faithful Codenames came out again, along with the Unusual Suspects and a round of Port Royal.
Sunday, being the last day meant their were some bargains to be had in the trade halls and sadly meant saying goodbye to a lot of people. In the afternoon the lovely Janelle and Lynette (instigators of the whole Crazy Love scholarship program) took Anna and I on a tour of Dallas to see some of the sights. After that we went out for a great meal and had a chance to properly chat and catch up after the whirlwind that had been the Con.
Monday was a panic to get to the post office to send out my TBG secret santa and check out of the hotel. On initial weigh in my hold luggage was a huge 6kg (13lbs) overweight so most of the morning was spent sprawled out across the hotel lobby trying to juggle packing so I didn't have to pay a $100 surcharge! After a couple of hours, a lot of throwing away of non essential items, I managed to come in exactly on weight so our trip home began! We left Dallas Fort Worth at around 6.30pm and landed back in London at 10.30am Tuesday morning.
All in all, this was an amazing experience, unlike any convention I have previously been to (partly as I wasn't working!) Everyone I meet was amazing, friendly and happy to game until 4am! Obviously, the 24 hour Starbucks helped and became a regular pitstop over the week. Obviously, I didn't play as many games as I wanted to but I met so many brilliant people and had a great time that even this many words can't do the experience justice!
]]>It includes:
Role cards are distributed in secret to all players and placed face down on their player board. However many players there are, there will always be an equal number of shadows and hunters, the number of civilians will vary. For example in a 7 player game thete will be 2 shadows, 2 hunters and 3 civilians, in a 6 player game there is two of each faction. Each players places one of their wooden pieces at zero on the damage track and one in the middle of the board and the game begins. Each character card contains a fair bit of information. The name of your character is at the top, their affiliation is middle left, hit points middle righ and their win condition and special ability is at the bottom.
Each players turn consists of three actions: move your character (mandatory), action on the area card (optional) and attack other players (optional)
To move your character you roll both dice, add the total and move to the allocated area, if you roll a seven you may move to any area you choose, you must, however, move whenever you roll the dice so roll again if you roll the number you are already on.You may then take the action on the area card. There are six different area cards, each with a different action. The black ,white and green spaces (Cemetery, Church and Hermit's Cave) allow you to draw a card of the same colour (more about cards in a bit!). The Underworld Gate allows you to choose a card pile to draw from, The Erstwhile Altar allows you to steal a piece of equipment from another player and finally The Weird Woods allows you to either deal two points of damage to someone or heal one point of damage.
White and black cards are either single use or equipment that stays face up in front of you. Green cards help you identify which side other players are on. Read the card and pass it, face down to another player of your choice who should follow the instructions on it. For example, this ca, you would pas to someone, if they took a point of damage they are a hunter, if not they are either a shadow or a civilian.
At the end of your turn, you may attack any player in the same area as
you. You simply roll the two dice and deal an amount of damage equal to
the difference between the two dice. If the two dice roll the same number
your attack is unsuccessful.
Your character dies when they take damage equal or more their health value, when that happens reveal your card, you are out of the game.
If any of the win conditions on your card are fulfilled, immediately reveal your card as the winner, it is however possible for multiple characters to win the game at the same time.
This is a great and pretty simple game, though the role deduction makes it great fun with the right group. The art on it is lovely and the game board has a lovely finish. One major problem with this game is the player pieces, the colours on the boards and tokens just don't match (the pink board has purple tokens) and some of the colours are tough to tell apart (the black and dark blue for example ) That said, this is a great gem of a game and plays up to eight players, which alone makes it worth having. The accusations and promises that occur during a game make it a great social game.
]]>The components are beautiful, but a word of warning, be gentle when punching them out! A lot of people have had them tear.
42 visitors (7 each in 6 colours)
18 rides (a small, medium and large ride in 6 colours)
4 starting ground tiles
20 additional ground tiles
4 turn order tiles
20 stands (4 each of the 5 different types)
34 bonus cards
4 reference cards
1 turn track
1 turn counter
1 final dirt track
4 pig boards
24 dice (6 for each player)
48 dirt tokens
84 bank notes (in 4 denominations)
Steam Park is played over six days. Each day is made up of four phases: roll, dirt, actions and income.
The roll phase happens simultaneously for everyone, after a countdown each player rolls their dice. You can then either re-roll your dice or place any that you want to keep on your pig board. If a dice is on your pig board it cannot be re-rolled. All of the dice are the same and have six different sides, as shown below.
In left to right order:
Build rides, with this dice you can build rides (obviously!) For each one of these dice you have one visitor space ie. 2 of these lets you either build 2 one space (small) rides or a single 2 space (medium) ride
Clean dirt, for each of these dice you have, you can discard two dirt tokens (more on dirt later!)
Play bonus cards, well, does exactly that! Each one of these you have lets you play one bonus card.
Attract visitors, this is what the game is alla bout and what will generate you income (and dirt!) For each one of these dice you have, take one visitor of your choice from the pool and drop him in the bag. You then draw out an equal number of visitors. If you have space on a ride of the same colour, they will sit on the ride until the end of the game.
Build stands each stand costs you one of these dice to build. There are five different types of stand, each with a special ability.
Empty side does absolutely nothing, boo!
When you are happy with your dice results you then grab the lowest available order tile. These tiles affect what order you will play your turns in, and may help you clean up dirt or give you dirt. Talking of dirt, that's the next phase!
For each dirt symbol on your dice, take a dirt token, now take a dirt token for each visitor in your park. Finally, apply the bonus/penalty from your turn order tile. (Feeling grubby yet?)
Next comes the actions phase, where, in turn order you get to action your dice rolls from earlier. At any point you can utilise one of your dice to 'buy' an additional ground tile, which you will soon need due to placement rules. All those lovely rides and stands you want to buy, have rules for placement meaning you will run out of space on that little starting board you have! When you build a ride, it must not touch any stand or ride of a different colour. If they are the same colour they must connect at one space. Stands are similar, the only thing they can touch is another stand of the same type.
There are five types of stands, all of which do various cool stuff, from helping you clean dirt to allowing you to change your dice roll.
Playing cards give you extra cash and every time you use a card you get to draw two and pick one to keep so even if you don't max out on them it's sometimes worth getting a bit of cash and cycling through cards to get something better!
Last, and most importantly, is the income phase. At this point you will get three cash for each visitor on one of your rides.
At the end of 6 days, add your cash totals up and, using the final dirt track, deduct money for the amount of dirt you have, whoever has the most cash is the winner!
Steam Park is a great light game, with beautiful components and a great theme. Once everyone gets the hang of the dice you can play a game in around half an hour. There is a nice balance between luck and skill (dice rolls, drawing visitors vs stand and ride placement and card plays)
The rule book is not only beautifully illustrated and fun but also easy to understand. A great all-rounder!
As with the rest of the games there is a great set of components in a small box:
Each player starts with 4 ships, 1 culture token, 1 empire token and 1 energy token in their chosen colour and a galaxy mat. Start with two ships in the centre of the mat and two on the ship track marked with squares. Start the game with 1 culture and 2 energy. Your empire token starts at the bottom of the empire track on the right hand side. This also indicates how many dice and ships you can use in a turn. Deal out two secret mission cards to each player who chooses one to keep and discards the other.
Shuffle the planet cards and lay out one for each player plus an additional two eg for three players, put out five cards. The control mat and dice go in the centre of the table.
To win the game you need to be the first to reach 21 points, you get points by colonizing planets and upgrading your colony.
The start player rolls the dice and and can choose a number to activate according to their empire track. At the start of the game will be four actions. The dice actions are as follows:
Move a Ship - there are two actions you can take using this dice, you can either land on a planets surface by standing your ship upright an the planet to perform the action marked on the card or you can orbit a planet, place your ship on the starting position of the cards colony track. The symbol at the end of the track tells you what type of planet it is and therefore if you need the diplomacy or economic dice to move further up the track. When you get to the end of the track you have successfully colonised the planet.
Acquire Resources - Energy or Culture - Each planet produces different resources, as shown on the top right of the card. If you choose one of these dice you can take one resource of the appropriate type for each ship you have on a planet of that type. If you chose energy you also receive an extra energy for each ship left on your galaxy mat.
Advance Colonisation - Diplomacy and Economy - In order to colonise a planet you need to reach the end of the colony track. Depending on the type of planet you can activate one of these dice to advance one space up the appropriate planet track.when you reach the end of the track you have successfully colonised the planet. Take the planet card and slide it under your galaxy mat so its points and ability are visible. Any ships that were on the card are returned to your galaxy mat and you immediately restock the planet cards.
Utilise a Colony - Activate this dice to use either the action on your galaxy mat or from any of the planets you have colonised
After a player has activated a dice all other players get a chance to copy that action by paying one culture.
Other actions - you can convert dice as shown on the control mat. Place any two inactive dice here to change the face of a third dice to that of your choice. This action may only be used once a turn.
You can also upgrade your empire. Use an amount of resources equal to the next level on your empire track. The cost must be made in either energy or culture and not a combination. Upgrading your empire increases the number of dice you can activate and the number of ships you can use, it also increases the number of victory points your empire is worth.
Once a player hits 21 points the end of the game is triggered and play continues to the end of the round. Points are then added up, including any points from secret missions and the winner is declared.
As with the rest of this range, this is a beautiful game in a small box with a lot of game for its size. There is a neat planet over view in the lid of the box and the bottom is a beautifully illustrated 'dice tray'. All in all there is a lot of game and components for your money and the size of this. The secret missions and variety of the planet cards mean that every game is quite different giving a great deal of replay-ability.
Mentions
Let's start the list with some old friends :)
Lords of War (from Black Box Games) were a force to be reckoned with in hall two with their huge banner and plenty of demo tables which were full every time I went past! They were there to display their usual array of products along with their new expansion which recently funded on Kickstarter. If you don't know , LoW is a two player fantasy card based skirmish game. They have fabulous art that just catches your eye from the start and draws you into the game. Each base pack contains two decks of cards with everything you need to start playing. The base packs are available in three sets: Orcs vs Dwarves, Templars vs Undead or Elves vs Lizardmen. Each race has it's own unique advantages (and disadvantages) and you can mix and match all races to make mercenary decks. There are also expansions for Orcs v Dwarves and Elves v Lizardmen that include magic users and monstrous beasts. Their beautiful artwork is also available on a larger scale on their beautiful play mats. Don't be fooled by this game, it packs a mean punch for a small game with a small price tag. It's easy to learn but tricky to master, making it one that all gamers can enjoy, especially those that like combat based games. Everything you need to play comes in a base pack for £12.99 on the Lords of War website, including free world wide shipping.
Creature College (from Happy Otter Games) has recently launched on Kickstarter and they are all about promoting and demoing this amazingly cute and well made game that has dragons, talking trees, were gerbils, teddy bears and really big guns. I really wanted to sit down and finally give this a go but still didn't manage to, however a lot of my friends did on my recommendation! Having not gone into production yet there are limited copies so only one demo table was available all weekend meaning Orhan was busy all weekend. He was also running a competition to win a copy of Tigris and Euphrates. Creature College is a game that both adults and children can enjoy (both my friend and her nine year old daughter enjoyed it!) In fact, they have just won the Father Geek award, only given to games that are great for children, parent and gamer geeks! The components are lovely and the artwork for the characters is amazing so, do yourself a favour and run over to KickStarter and back this one!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/864424565/creature-college
Now, onto some newer friends!
Big Potato Games have a range of very silly and fun games, suitable for children, a family meal or, better still, a drunken night of silliness! Their big title is Bucket of Doom which is essentially Snake Oil with a morbid twist, and it comes in a bright pink bucket! You are dealt out eight totally useless objects and have to come up with a scenario on how they would help you escape from a doom laden scenario. Card game meets story telling with a dollop of black humour. They also had Qwordie, a neat combination of word game and quiz game, each question has multiple answers, spell out the short ones for ease or the longer ones but risk dodgy spelling errors for extra points. Mr Listers Quiz Shootout s a quiz where every question has multiple answers and the aim is to be the last man standing with a correct answer up your sleeve. And, how could I forget the very silly Obama Llama? You have thirty seconds to mime or describe rhymes while your team guesses. What other game includes Tinkerbell going to hell, George Clooney doing a moony or Tom Cruise in platform shoes? Keep an eye on the walkthrough page for full details of some of their games!
Osprey Games had two big titles on show at Spiel. They Come Unseen is a strategy game using bluffing and deception for two teams. One team uses submarines to sneak behind enemy lines and destroy vital targets while the other team uses surface fleets to hunt the subs down and protect supply lines. There are two boards, one for surface actions that is open to everyone and one for underwater movement visible only to the submarine commanders. I`m not a huge fan of war games but I have heard nothing but great things from this with people saying they had the same sense of claustrophobia the submarine captains must have felt. The title of theirs I am excited about is The King is Dead. While I did have this on pre order I noticed my FLGS had it in stock the day before we left for essen at a slightly lower price, so I will be grabbing it from there! Set in Britain in the chaotic period after King Arthur's death, players are members of the court trying to gain influence among the ranks. A leader must emerge and unite everyone, not through conquest but by diplomacy. I will be picking this up for sure!
Honorary mentions go to:
Guild Ball - we have been looking into this as there is a lot of people playing it our way so we went and looked at their stall. Great guys with a great sense of humour, but again, slightly cheaper at our FLGS so we will be picking some up from there for sure! (Though we may have picked up a few special treats from the stand as well!)
Battlefoam - having recently revisited Malifaux (now 2nd edition) I was looking at cases for my figures, they had an amazing case but only in brown. The lovely Jemma mentioned they also had it in red but only back at the warehouse, so we ordered one and am currently waiting for it to be delivered. So nice to see something other than the standard black and khaki colours available, can't wait for it to arrive! (There will be pictures for sure!)
Now, tonight we go and play some of these new games we picked up so watch out for more blogs and walkthroughs all about essen!
When I started this blog I was determined to review games, as time has gone on, I have realised this is a bad thing. Hang on, let me explain. Games are so subjective, in the same way that Rob is really looking forward to the new Star Wars movie, I'm not bothered. Talking to someone in our hotel in Essen on the first night, they were saying what a great game Mysterium was, now i know this game wont be popular in our group. That doesn't make it a bad game, just one that won't get a lot of play for us. Some people like co ops, some like deck builders, some heavy euroes and for each of those players there is someone who doesn't like those games.
I feel to give a game a fair review you need to have played it through multiple times and if you play a game and don't like it, it's likely to go back on the shelf to gather dust, be involved in a math trade or end up at a bring and buy sale. Therefore I think a lot of reviewers only ever give glowing reviews. This is understandable but leads to a bias towards good reviews, meaning not only are bad reviews scarse but tend to be criticised.
I have therefore made a conscious decision to rename my reviews section to 'walkthroughs'. I can't tell you if you will like a game, I can, however tell you what the components are, how it plays, what style of game it is and show you some (hopefully) neat and useful photos. Then you can decide if you or your game group will like it.
]]>For some reason I have a distinct feeling of DREAD, (not just dread!) I am putting it down to the fact I am over organised and therefore have nothing left to do! Catsitters are booked, confirmed and the cats have enough food to survive a nuclear apocalypse. We have passports, boarding passes, money and print out for the few games *cough* that I have pre ordered.
I mostly packed yesterday, though with an array of t-shirts for Mayfair Games, Lords of War and The Boardgame Group I can't possibly need anything else, surely?
I have with me my rather lengthy list of games I either need to collect, buy or check out and print out of the halls, during the flight I shall attempt to collate the two into some sort of mega map of all necessary information ever!
Games to play at the airport/on the plane and tonight are sparse but include Port Royal, Seven Dragons as these can be unboxed and put into one single card box!
As I will be working the first part of Thursday, there are a few things hubby has explicit orders to run for (yes, Rob, you are expected to run, after all you will have to live with the misery that will be me without German Railroads!)
Now for the restless night that lies before me, wondering what it is I have forgot!
TBG meetup is arranged for Thursday evening so hope to see some of you there.
Keep an eye on here and my Instagram for all the updates while we are there and come play a game or two with me at the Mayfair stand one morning.
]]>Creature College
Orhan is a friend, fellow member of The Boardgame Group and all round great guy! His Kickstarter for Creature College has just, well, kicked off. I didn't get a chance to have a game of this at Expo so I am going to be bringing my friends daughter to come along so she can probably beat me at it! Visually it looks stunning and I know how much work has been put into this (if you don't get to play it at Essen you can have a look and back it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/864424565/creature-college)
The Gallerist
I was really torn over backing this on Kickstarter due to the very high postage costs (on what was already a quite pricey game) Vital Lacerda has a great pedigree though (Kanban, CO2 and Vinhos) and I love these style of heavier Euros. Also, The Gallerist just looks divine! It's also a game with an interesting theme. Being a 'Gallerist' involves a variety of things like being an art dealer, a museum curator and an artist manager. You win the game by having visitors in your gallery, exhibiting and selling art, investing in artists and achieving trends and notoriety. While I loved Kanban, I felt the rulebook was one of the worst written I have come across so I think a playtest of this has to be on the cards.
Trickerion
I backed this on Kickstarter back in January. Not only were there hundreds of pieces (making it a must-have in my mind!) but I love the theme! You play rival magicians battling it out in a grand contest for fame and fortune. You have a choice of eight magicians, all of whom have their own specialist tricks. Not only is the theme great on this but the artwork is simply stunning. This is due to ship later in the month but I am keen to have a play through to save us working through the rules when it arrives.
Tesla vs Edison
Another Kickstarter, however, this one arrived a few weeks ago but hasn't made it to the table yet. You play an investor teaming up with one of the visionary inventors from the 1880s/1890s, trying to claim electric projects across the US, whilst trying to advance your technologies, engage in propaganda wars and trading stock in both your company and your competitors. This is one of a scary number of yet to be played games in our house so hoping a play through will rectify that!
As I mentioned yesterday, this year it's all about the expansions, so that's what a lot of these are. There are expansions for some of my real favourites so I'm busting to get my hands on them. Some of these were previously released at GenCon so are old hat for those of you in the US, but still new to us in Europe!
Builders: Antiquity
Builders of the middle ages is a great game that packs a great punch for a small game. I played it once and had to track it down, easier said than done! We ended up paying as much in import tax as we did for the game itself as its just not available here. This is essentially a reskin of Middle Ages with some extra tweaks including the ability to train workers and free slaves.
Ticket to Ride: UK and Pennsylvania
Ticket to Ride is just an all round solid game that entry level and strategic players can enjoy. It's a map of my home country, of course I'm going to buy it! Last years TtR entry (Netherlands) was disappointing as the elaborate font used for the town names made it impossible to read place names, hoping this has been changed, although I know locations in the UK a bit better!
For Sale
A great little card game with bidding and push your luck elements. Sadly, out of print for ages meaning it has had an over inflated price for a long time. Hoping to finally grab this at a suitable price with this print run.
Brettspiel Adventkalender
Now this is a total must for me! I haven't had an advent calendar for years and this is probably my dream one. 24 mini expansions for games including colt express, Castles of Burgandy, Splendor, Rokoko to name a few. Even I won't own all 24 of the games, but I am sure I will find someone who wants the ones that are no good to me!
Carcassonne: Star Wars
This is one of few games on this list that is specifically for my ever patient husband/web designer/games partner. He is a massive Star Wars fan (I'm more a Trek girl myself!) and he is also a Carcassonne fan, so it's a no brainer.
German Railroads
This is my top priority of the weekend! Russian Railroads was on my ten by ten list for the year and it made me appreciate what a great game it is. GR introduces a new main board and new player boards. It also brings coal into the game which can be used to power up your engines and factories. Hopefully, a great addition to a great game.
Takenoko: Chibis
It has baby pandas, what more could anyone want from a game? This is, literally my entire knowledge of this expansion and I need nothing more to encourage me to buy it! Another solid base game.
Concordia: Salsa
I have only recently discovered Concordia but immediately fell in love. It has everything I love in a game without too much down time for the even the most AP prone players. Hoping the new board is as beautiful as the base game.
Castles of Mad King Ludwig: Secrets
Castles is a great game that is a lot of fun (especially with a good group) This expansion adds swans, moats and secret passages with thirty new rooms to play around with, adding more decision making and helping you build even more crazy castles.
Istanbul: Moacha and Baksheesh
Istanbul is another all round solid game that is easy enough for beginners but has enough strategy for seasoned gamers. This expansion includes new place tiles (that introduce coffee as a good!) and tavern tiles where you can hire extra workers, for a cost, of course!
Port Royal: Ein Auftrag geht noch
This translates roughly as 'an order goes', there seems to be very little information about this one, other than the fact it contains four expansion modules for the base game. I have only recently discovered Port Royal but its a great little game that you can throw in your bag and get out almost anywhere.
Spiel in Essen is the Worlds biggest board game event with over 150,000 people expected through the doors over a four day period. With just five days until we get on a plane headed for Germany, I thought I should give you a little taste of what's to come!
This will be my third year at Spiel and the first one I have been organised enough to look at what I might want in advance! Today I am going to give you a run down on my pre-ordered items!
7 Wonders: Duel - This was always a 'must-have' despite my general ambivalence towards 2 player games,mainly as they just don't get enough play here! Essen this year seems to be the year of the Expansion (something I will discuss in the coming days!) 7 Wonders is just a great all round solid game with so many great elements: card drafting, city building, warfare, trading, it really does have a bit of everything. I cannot wait to see how this plays!
More ca$h and more guns - This is a game I demo a lot and I still never get bored with it, both playing it and running it! One of the best 'party games' out there and one of few games that doesn't slow down with a lot of players (the original game goes up to 8 players) besides, who doesn't love waving around foam guns?! This expansion comes with four new foam guns, new loot cards and more special abilities. I can't wait!
Codenames - There has been a lot of hype around this since GenCon where it was a massive hit. From what I have read it seems like a cross between minesweeper/mastermind and some other deduction games I can't think of right now! Party games don't get too much play in our house but I figured for é15 it was worth seeing what all the fuss was about and if we don't like it I am sure there will be plenty of people willing to take it off our hands!
The Prodigals Club - First off, a confession - I am a child of the 80s, I love cheesy 80s films, including 'Brewsters Millions', hence why I HAD to own Last Will. In The Prodigals Club, you can choose to loose an election, get rid of all your possessions or offend the most influential people in society. This sounds great fun! Prodigals Club is thematically similar and can be combined with Last Will for a mega 'loose it all' game.
The King is Dead - Politics and power struggles in Britain, yes please! Set after the death of King Arthur, players are members of the court using power to gain influence, winning control by diplomacy rather than conquest. This game hits the sweet spot time wise (30-50 minutes) and looks lovely. Also, an absolute bargain at 24 euros. Think this will get a lot of play in our house.
Thrash 'n' Roll - OK, I admit I know very little about the game play on this, but the theme appeals. You have to train your band members, play gigs, record albums etc in an attempt to gain as much fame as possible over 6-8 rounds, all whilst banging your head! (I may have made that last bit up) It's the theme alone that appeals to me on this one so I'd really like to see the game play before commiting to it.
Signoire - Another power and political struggle game, this time as the head of a Renaissance period family. Dice are rolled at the start of the round and chosen one at a time by players. Higher valued dice means paying less for your actions but lower value dice means rewards at the end of the round. I've only just realised this is pre-order only but I suspect I may come home with it!
That's all for today folks, but I shall be writing up stuff every day between now and when we go, there's so much stuff I'm excited for it's impossible to fit it all in just one post.
Checkout the simplified full Essen 2015 Games Release List preview.
We moved house four years ago which was a perfect opportunity to re evaluate our storage. We had a carpenter friend build us some shelves in a floor to ceiling alcove in our front room. This worked brilliantly, for a while! The cupboard next to it was our next target and that space was quickly filled, then all those little games that were getting lost and buried got moved into their own shelf. Then the piles started, on top of another unit, by the side of the TV, and then in front of the shelves. We then got to the point where the piles in front of the shelves were half as tall as the floor to ceiling shelves! Sadly, this meant more and more gems were getting buried and forgotten about.
Our trouble then comes as we are not only board game fans but also big film fans so half our front room is DVD shelves!
Time for a total rethink! Then I started seeing lots of shelfies, all on various sized 'Kallax' shelves from Ikea. So, obviously we had to go investigate. I think these shelves were designed for vinyls (for those of you old enough to remember that!) This also makes them perfect box size.
The Kallax range comes in various colours and sizes, sadly only the smaller units came in the bright red!
Off we went to Ikea and grabbed the biggest of the units they did, five cubes by five. It was late when we got back so the logistics had to wait for another night!
So, we started by emptying the current board game shelves (no mean feat) and our poor table was bowing under the weight. Precarious piles and inquisitive cats meant they couldn't stay like that for long.
Then, emptying the CD and DVD shelves onto the now empty game shelves. The huge beast of a unit had to be built in the front room as it wouldn't go through any of our doorways built, so on our hands and knees building it in the front room, with help from afore mentioned inquisitive cats of course.
Once it was up came the joy of filling it with games, we had also bought two doors to keep all the little games separate (and all those little associated bits and pieces.) It also meant i managed to sneak some red in. We also bought some little lights to stick in the top of those spaces.
Sadly, after the unit was filled we had a lot of left over games, so we had to go back to Ikea and pick up another, smaller unit to fit on top.
We now officially have no more space for any more units and precious little space in the units, so not sure what happens at the end of the year when i have a *few* kickstarters due to arrive and we don't even think about Essen! However, there is a board game bring and buy sale locally next weekend so maybe we should start looking at some of the stuff that has been buried for a while now we can see it!
This is the first year I have made the ten by ten commitment and I thought the half way point of the year was the perfect time to have a look at it.
In January I sat down with Rob, my husband and therefore primary gaming partner and we came up with a list that included games we both liked and we thought would be achievable.
7 Wonders, this was one of the first games we introduced our friend Katie to, therefore it got a lot of plays at the time. However,it has got left behind as we have introduced her to tougher challenges! This had both our votes.
Seasons, a fairly new one for us that went under our radar at the time. We've played it a lot online but felt the physical version needed more love. Again, votes from both of us.
Star Realms, believe it or not, we don't get much play from 2 player games as we often have friends round or else use a 2 player evening to learn something ready to bring it to a bigger table. Rob is a big fan of deck builders so this was our first choice using that mechanic. Another one that gets a fair bit of online play but we thought a nice opportunity for us to have some quality one on one game play.
Russian Railroads, I'm a massive euro and worker placement fan, whereas they tend to make Robs head hurt! This is one I know he enjoys and it has a very unique and interesting scoring mechanic. Definitely my pick!
Bruges, there are a lot of great Stefan Feld games to choose from and Castles of Burgandy tends to be the one that always gets pulled out. Bruges has some harsh hand manipulation that makes it a toughie at times. Another of my picks.
Alhambra, this used to get a lot of plays but has been pushed to the back of the shelf of late. Easy to play but hard to strategise at times. Tile placement can be key but you're also reliant on seeing the right tiles when you want them and hoping no one else grabs them before you get a chance to. Another joint pick.
DC Deckbuilder, as i said earlier, Rob likes his deck builders so there was bound to be a couple of them on this list! Works the same as Dominion but with great DC artwork. Robs pick.
Ticket to Ride, another classic that has got left behind and deserves some love. We got the tenth anniversary edition which is truly a work of art and a joy to play. Beautiful components and a big board which makes spotting your routes a lot easier. Joint decision.
Kingdoms, a hugely under rated little game from Reiner Knizia, simple to pick up but tough to master and most certainly not a friendly game! See my overview here:
Smallworld, a great area control game (a mechanic we didn't already have in this list!) and beautiful artwork, trouble is we have a lot of expansions with no sensible way to store all the tiles therefore it doesn't come out often enough. This was a good excuse to get it to the table regardless. Someone needs to do a good component box for it!
Of course, the Cult of New has held us back and at half way through the year we are only 32% into our ten by ten with a mounting pile of games in shrink that need tackling! I think we need to dedicate a weekend to this list of fine games and rack these games up!
]]>Obviously, our first evening in town involved a trip straight there!
Set in Huset-KBH (a community art centre) the first thing that grabs you is the sense of space, every time we visited (which was quite a few over our five day trip!) there were people playing yet the space never felt cramped or loud.
Our first evening (Thursday) we were just totally overwhelmed by the huge choice of games on offer (over 800 titles, old and new) and while stood at the shelves umming and arring started chatting to a couple of locals who invited us to sit down and play something with them. It turned out that he was originally from the US and she was originally from Sweden so we had a truly cosmopolitan game happening! We sat down with a few drinks and had a great game of Lords of Waterdeep with them (which I barely won by a single point!)
There is a huge range of 'top titles' you can play for free or else pay a cover charge of 25DKK per person (around £2.50) being that we could tell we would like the place I opted for a full years membership at a very reasonable 125DKK (£12.50) This not only means I can take a guest for free at any time but in any games that you tie for victory, membership cards are used to determine an overall winner (lowest membership number wins!)
As you walk in the cafe there is a table for the resident 'game geeks', these guys are on hand to teach you a new game, help you pick something you might like. (Many thanks to Jakob who taught us Targi, a game that has been on my 'to try' list for a while!)
The food and drink was quite pricey for us, but pretty reasonable for Copenhagen (around 50DKK/£5 for a beer, 150DKK/£15 for a bottle of house wine).
Friday we had other plans for the day so didn't make it back until Saturday (which we had been warned got quite busy) so we hopped over there late afternoon and sampled some of the food we had been eyeing up previously. Again, compared to the UK prices were high, but pretty standard for Copenhagen. We ordered a plate of nachos to share which came smothered in cheese and jalapenos and with generous portions of sour cream, salsa and guacamole, delicious and very filling!
On the walls they have 'colour diplomas', as they were starting out they sold the 'rights' to use specific colour pieces for any game. Wish I had known about this as I would have snapped up the red one without a moments hesitation!
Another great perk of membership is 10% discount in some of the local games stores, so obviously I had to go on a hunt for a boardgame bargain! Here is where we made a BIG mistake by discovering the most amazing Faraos Cigarer Aps. They have three stores, one for comic books and related stuff (figureines, etc), there is also a LARP, costuming shop and then the board games store *hallelujah* Initially you walk in and see the floor to ceiling shelving, alongside a wall of dice. Like a kid in a candy store I was scanning it all, then I discovered the back room! This place is what dieing and going to heaven must feel like. ALL of the games! So much stuff that is out of print and impossible to get here, in fact, just so much stuff. Some of the prices were well above what they would be here, yet some of the rarer games were priced very reasonably. I did well to resist and walked out only with a copy of Lanterns (if only we had taken a bigger suitcase!)
Walking round the corner we then discovered Games!, which while it had a lot of chess boards in the window also had a huge wall of board games, sadly, it was closed on Sunday so we made a point to go visit it on Monday. While a lot of the store is taken up with very nice looking backgammon, chess sets, cards etc their board game selection was also pretty impressive. They also had a lovely wooden D6 as their door handle.
All in all, Copenhagen made for a perfect city break for a pair of gamers. It was really nice to have somewhere to sit down and relax after walking round admiring the rest of the city during the day!
At the start of the weekend, everyone is given a sheet with the list of nominees and is encouraged to vote for their favourite. In the weeks leading up to Expo games are rated by judges in a range of categories. Half the marks come from those judges, the other half from the voting public.
So, without any further ado, here are the nominees and winners in all thirteen categories.
A game which is ideal for children and adults to play together and all enjoy equally. Something for parents and kids to have fun together with.
And the Winner is:
A game which is specifically designed for children to play with or without adult supervision.
And the Winner is:
The defining components are cards or dice in a game involving significant choices.
And the Winner is:
Game with a target age of 12+ which uses a variety of components rather than just cards/dice. Might not have a board.
And the Winner is:
Game with a target age of 12+ which uses a board as it's main element with a strong theme and significant strategic choices.
And the Winner is:
This covers expansions to existing games or new versions of any games, army packs etc
And the Winner is:
A game in which the main idea is for the players to act out roles of characters in a fictional setting/story.
And the Winner is:
A wargame system and/or miniatures range where the core part of the game is using miniature figures to fight out battles or RPG encounters.
And the Winner is:
A game that minimizes luck, does not rely on a theme and typically focuses on strategy.
And the Winner is:
The defining components are cards or dice in a lighter, simpler game.
And the Winner is:
Anything gaming related not covered in the other areas eg. game storage solutions, dice bags, play mats, apps etc
And the Winner is:
A game which is usually light and easy to play, with simple rules and designed for larger groups or a party.
And the Winner is:
A game where the core part of the game is using miniature figures to resolve action and conflict.
And the Winner is:
The MCM Comic Cons are the biggest dates of the year in any geeks calender. Whatever flavour your geekdom is, there is something here for you, cosplay, video games old and new, movies, artists, kawaaii, comic books and, of course, board games!
The sheer amount of effort people put into their costumes is amazing and you know these guys go home from one event and start planning for the next!There were a lot of Poison Ivy and Harley Quinns around but the costumes I liked included a Lego Batman, Pyramid Head, Skeletor, Sarah Conner and the Terminator and an entire family of Transformers (even their baby in the buggy was dressed as Bumblebee!)
I spent the three days demoing for Esdevium games, nicely in the middle of the hall. We had 8 people on the stand Friday and 9 on Saturday and Sunday, even then, there were times where we could have put more to work!
The games played over the weekend were Dobble, Batman and Standard Love Letter, Timeline, Black Fleet, Loony Quest, Machi Koro, Colt Express, Munchkin, Ca$h n Guns, Legendary, Sheriff of Nottingham and Star Wars: Armada. Friday, being quieter I managed to play a couple of games of Machi Koro and Colt Express. When we got back to the hotel that evening we all enjoyed a game of Shadow Hunters (my team, the Shadows won!)
Saturday, being the busiest day meant none of us got to sit and play in any of the games but introduced a lot of people to some new games and (hopefully) got some people interested in modern board gaming for the first time!
Ca$h n Guns and Sheriff of Nottingham were full all day everyday, they are both such great party games and people have a lot of fun with them!
Sunday was slightly quieter and on a couple of occasions I stepped into games of Ca$h n Guns to help make the numbers up. As a demoer you always get those guns pointed at you a lot more than in a 'normal' game at home!
I spoke to a mother and her eight year old daughter who wanted some games to play with her ten year old nephews, after chatting to the girl for a while it turned out she loved horror and monster films so King of Tokyo was a must for them! I also steered a train driver in the direction of Ticket to Ride as an entry level game for his family! I taught Dobble to three and four year olds who were both beaten by older siblings, though, I hope in a couple of years that won't always be the case!
There were at least five stands selling board games and from the empty shelves I saw on Sunday, they obviously did a roaring trade!
Gamerz Nexus had an open display of Snake Oil on their stand and I suggested that to several people who were Cards against Humanity fans, hopefully I converted a few!
Also there, were Japanime with the beautiful Krosmaster Arena, they had multiple versions of the game on demo, including their giant sized one which is a thing of beauty, the figures are just amazing!
All in all, it was a great, but very tiring weekend. I got home late Sunday, in time to start all my planning for UK Games Expo this coming weekend!!