Since I've managed to acquire a massive backlog of games to blog about, some of the games mentioned here won't have links or blogs yet. They'll be added as and when possible.
​
At the start of 2021, I wondered whether my gaming would pick up in '21? The answer is a resounding yes! The breakdown is below.

Number of different games played: 78.
Of which were new (To me.): 46.
Total number of gaming sessions: 333.

2020's numbers.
Total number of different games played: 29. 
Of which were new (To me.): 13.
Total number of gaming sessions: 49.

Why have the numbers have significantly increased? Put simply, it's due to Board Game Arena: Around May 2021, we reconnected with an old friend who had moved abroad and we started playing games on BGA and playing games digitally is really quick! There's no unpacking and packing, or setup and clean up, there's even no need to tally scores, it's all done automatically. As a result, it's easily possible to play 4 or 5 games in a 3-4 hour window and this includes playing a game several times! Hence the six fold increase in game sessions.

Which games were played the most?

1. Love Letter: 42 (+1) sessions
2. The Crew: Mission Deep Sea: 25 sessions.
3. Codex Naturalis: 16 sessions.
4. Railroad Ink: 12 sessions.
5. Forbidden Island, Happy City, Potion Explosion & Martian Dice all came in at 10 sessions.

Love Letter is the clear winner at 43, I've included a +1 because of a session of Love Letter: Batman that we played, which is 95% identical to the original.
Love Letter is a fairly quick game to complete and we probably play 2 or 3 games per session on BGA, so I don't doubt we've played it over a 100 times in 2021; not bad for a game that only consists of 16 cards.
Over 2021, Love Letter became more of a ritual than a game, the calculating, the guessing and double-bluffing, twists of luck and reversal of fortune, along with the banter and bragging made it our mainstay over BGA.

Enough of boring numbers; it's time to now talk about the highly coveted and still world-beating 3 Spellcaster and a Dwarf 2021 game awards!
These are not necessarily new games, but they are games I first encountered in 2021. 

Game of the year: The Crew: Mission Deep Sea.
What a game! It blends analytical, cooperative gameplay and whist-like trick-taking to pack so much longevity and replay value into a 40 card deck, a 96 card task deck and some tokens; it's almost mind boggling.
Even after the final level has been completed it remains re-playable.
We only started playing The Crew: Mission Deep Sea in late October and by the year's end had played 25 sessions.
​It was an instant hit.

Disappointment of the year: New Frontiers.
I find it hard to believe that I'm saying this about a game that shares DNA with the singular Race for the Galaxy, but I found New Frontiers just frustrating to play.
It takes the core concepts of Race for the Galaxy and turns them into a board game, also adding 2 currencies (Money & colonists.) to the mix, this serves to add complexity to the game, yet somehow New Frontiers seems quicker to play and makes for a less satisfactory experience? So quick in fact, that often the game ended before I managed to do anything interesting.
It's not bad because it's based on a great game, just.... disappointing.

Surprise of the year: The Crew: Mission Deep Sea.
I'm going have to give it to The Crew: Mission Deep Sea for the reasons above. 
​
Honourable mention: Railroad Ink.
This roll-and-write, dice-rolling and route-building game is accessible, easy to learn and a pleasure to play. It throws a healthy dose of luck into the game, but because of the way the game plays, this luck affects all players equally, so if a player doesn't score well, they've only got their planning and themselves to blame.

11th September 2021

All day Saturday continues, the next game I played at Wogglecon was Betrayal at the House on the Hill.

​What's more fun than exploring the local haunted house with your disparate band of friends. I mean, what's the worst that could happen? It's not like one of them is going to betray you, right? It's not like it's in the game's title!

• Room tiles: There is a starting tile along with another 44 other room tiles. Each tile depicts a room in the titular house, the back shows which of the house's 3 floors it belongs to.
• Dice: Each one of these six-siders is numbered 0-2 twice.
• Event cards: These are the encounters the characters will experience.
• Item cards: Equipment and gear that characters will acquire during the game.
• Omen cards: These don't sound like good news.
• Tokens: The game has a lot of tokens, hundreds in fact and mostly for monsters!
• Traitor's tome: This book is used during the 'haunt' stage.
• Secrets of survival: Also used during the 'haunt' stage.

All of the game's tiles and tokens are constructed of thick and study card, the dice are also good quality. The cards are the expected standard quality.
The character tiles are decorated in monochrome illustrations with one colour - the player's colour. Artwork used on the room tiles is a little plain but unobtrusive. The paintjobs on the models is nice addition. Thematically, it all fits though.
The game's iconography was straight forward.

How's it play?
Setup

• Each player should take a character tile, choose a side and set up their starting stats.
• Shuffle the event, item and omen cards face-down into their respective decks
• Put out the starting room tile - the entrance hall, then shuffle the remaining room tiles into a face-down stack.
• Determine the starting player.

On to play
The objective in Betrayal at House on the Hill is to explore the house until the 'haunt' is discovered and then maybe defeat it!
Broadly speaking, the game is divided into 2 stages, the second stage begins once the 'haunt' has manifested.
On their turn, the active player can do the following:

• Move: The active player may move through a number of room tiles equal to their speed stat.
• Explore: When the active player would 'move off' the edge of the playing area, they draw a room tile, place it and move on to it. Their movement immediately ends, regardless of how far they've moved, then they must deal with the room's encounter.
  This involves drawing a card from either the event, item or omen decks.
  The 'house' in the game actually has 3 different floors which will lead to the creation of 3 different tile-maps.
  Event cards: Event cards may be beneficial or detrimental, at times this will involve making a roll using one of the character's 4 stats which may also result in beneficial or negative outcomes.
  Once an event has been encountered, the event card is discarded.
  Item card: This will a item the character may use and typically confers some sort of benefit on the character.
  Items are kept by the character and their benefit can be used once per the player's turn.
  Item cards are kept by the player.
  Omen cards: These are a bit like event and items cards. An omen card might require a player to make a roll or perform an action, but they are also kept by the player and can be used once per turn.
  Anytime an omen card is drawn, the active player must roll 6 dice, if the result is lower than the total number of omen cards that have been drawn, then the 'haunt' is triggered. More on this below.
• The haunt: After the haunt is triggered, it can fundamentally alter the game. The active player looks at a chart in one of the books, it will determine who is revealed as the traitor and which of the game's 50 haunt scenarios will be played out.
  Traitor: The traitor player takes the Traitor's Tome and must move away from the other players, then they read the haunt scenario that was activated. It will tell the traitor what their objective is and why powers they may have acquired and what monsters they may control.
  Heroes: The remaining explorers now become the heroes, with the traitor out of earshot, they can read about the haunt in Secrets of Survival, learn their objectives and discuss their strategy.
  Turn order: Once all players have finished reading their pertinent information, a new turn order is established. Basically the traitor player goes last in the new order, any monsters the traitor controls go after them.
  Play pretty much continues pretty much as it did previously, heroes and the traitor can still move around, explore and draw cards. Crucially, though, heroes' stats may now be reduced to 0, resulting in their untimely demise.

Endgame
The heroes and the traitor continue taking their turns until one or the other complete their objective, in which case they win. 

Overall
Mechanically speaking, Betrayal at the House on the Hill is straightforward, especially in the first stage of the game. Players add tiles to the map and deal with whatever randomly comes with it, it's fun, but players are just reacting to encounters, all a bit unchallenging mentally.
When the traitor is revealed, this all changes though.

The heroes will find themselves having to complete their objectives while invariably having to keep out of the clutches of the traitor and their monstrous allies. They'll probably have to collaborate to have a chance of success.
Meanwhile, the traitor will have their own objectives, this may or may not involve capturing or defeating the heroes. The traitor can be sure that the heroes' objective will be bad news for them and will want to thwart them.
Betrayal at the House on the Hill has now become a very tense game of cat-and-mouse.

However, there are number of things about the game that irk me.
I'm not fond of traitor mechanics, nor am I fond of one-vs-many mechanics and Betrayal at the House on the Hill uses both! It's a bit of a put-off for me, obviously, YMMV.

Additionally, when the haunt is revealed, all the players must split up to secretly read their objective and in the case of the heroes; discuss their actions while the traitor sits around waiting. This creates a strange, pace-breaking awkward pause to the game.

Finally, having the playing area actually split into 3 playing areas, one for each of the house's floors feels somewhat clumsy to me, it's not a dealbreaker, but it does take up table-space.

There's nothing wrong with the game, it's just not really for me and isn't a game I'd pick to play.
If the haunted house theme appeals and you're happy to play with traitor mechanics, Betrayal at the house on the hill will probably be an enjoyable experience.

11th September 2021

Wogglecon continued with Just One.
Read my blog about it here.

11th September 2021

The first game of the first Wogglecon for me was Space Cadet.

I wish I hadn't made those Star Trek references in other games, because I could really do with one here!

Caveat: I'm not going to blog about Space Cadet in as much detail as other games, otherwise I'd be here all week!

Space Cadets is a 3-6 player co-operative game where players take on the roles of the bridge crew commanding a starship as they go on various missions.
There are 9 different stations on the bridge which must be manned, thus players will have 1-3 stations they will be responsible for, depending on the number of players.

What's in a game?

• Stations: Each of the game's 9 stations is actually its own minigame and the player who is manning that station must play the relevant minigame in order to control the station. Each station has it's own board and tokens. The stations are:
  Captain: The captain is in charge of the rounds general strategy and also timing.
  Damage control: This station uses cards and dice to manage damage. When damage occurs, they draw cards and roll dice.
  If things get really bad, there's a risk of a core breach, then all players must play a sort of card matching minigame to prevent the starship exploding!
  Engineering: The engineer plays a symbol-matching, tile-laying minigame, each completed symbol generates energy for their relevant station.
  Helm: The helm minigame requires the playing of a programming movement game using a deck of cards. The more energy the helm gains, the more cards can be drawn.
  Jump drive: To use the jump drive, particularly at the end of them game, the player rolls dice and must get five-of-a-kind. The more energy they have, the more rerolls they get. During the game, they can roll dice to acquire cards to assist with the final roll.
  Sensors: To get sensor lock, the player draws cards from a deck. Each card contains the outline of a tetromino shape, the player then has to blindly draw the matching shape out of bag, although they are allowed to 'feel' for it. Successful results will result in sensor locks or even super locks!
  Shields: To power up shields, the player draws numbered and coloured tiles, then assigns them to one of the starship's 4 shields. The aim to power shields by getting poker hands - i.e. 2-of-a-kind, full house, straights etc. The more power assigned to this station, the more tiles the player draws. 
  Tractor beam: Using the tractor beam requires the player to play the classic game memory and turn over and match both shape and number, the higher the number, the further the range of the beam. More energy means turning over more tiles.
  Weapons: Whoever is in charge or weapons actually has two minigames to play, one to load torpedoes and one to fire.
  Loading: The player draws cards which have outlines on them, they try and fill the outline with tetrominos shapes.
  Fire: For each successfully loaded torpedo, the player then plays shove ha'penny, the further they get to the edge, the more damage the torpedo inflicts.
• Map tiles: These 5x5 gridded tiles represent the quadrants of space the player's ship will have to navigate.
• Tokens & cards: Space Cadets uses a variety of tokens and cards to represent enemy ships and their stats, damage, collectibles and so on.

Since Space Cadets employs 9 minigames just to manage what the players are doing, it uses a wide variety of components.
The smaller tiles and tokens are fairly sturdy, but the larger boards and tiles, particularly the map tiles feel quite thin and flimsy, and might prone to warping (Sic.), it's not a deal breaker though.
There's little art to speak off and it's mostly functional. The games iconography is clear and understandable.

How's it play?
At the start of the game, players will be given a mission with certain objectives to complete. They will spend rounds exploring quadrants of the galaxy by turning over map tiles, encountering obstacles that need navigating and enemies that need vanquishing in the pursuit of their mission.

Space Cadets is a real time game but that's not to say that all the players act at the same time. The game is broken down into 9 stages per round, although this has nothing to do with the number of stations in the game. The stages are as follows.

• Discussion & energy distribution: The players discuss their strategy for this round, what their priorities are and so on, then the engineer gives out energy tokens to players of the stations as per the need. This stage lasts 3 minutes
• Preparation: Players prepare their stations, often by assigning the energy tokens given to them, this may involve some setup.
• Action: This stage lasts 30 seconds and the following stations become active.
  Engineering: The player generates energy to be used in the following round.
  Helm: This player programs movement for the round.
  Sensors: Scans for enemies and generates target locks.
  Shields: This player powers up the starship's shields.
  Weapons: This player loads torpedo's, they don't fire them yet though.
  Core breach: Not an action, but if the ship is at risk of core breach, this is when the players try to prevent it.
• Resolution: Once the 30 seconds from the previous round are up, then all the players that acted can resolve the effects of their minigames.
• Tractor beam: The player at this station has 30 seconds to use the tractor beam to pull in items as per mission requirements. Even if there's isn't something to tractor, the player can try to learn which tiles are which. 
• Weapons fire: Now whoever's at the weapons station can play shove ha'penny for 30 seconds to unleash torpedoes. Sensor locks add bonuses to shooting.
• Enemy action: Yep, now the enemies get to go. There is a deck of cards that determine enemy ship strength but basically; enemy ships attempt to get lock the player's ship, move closer and attempt to destroy the player's ship. This is done with dice
• Jump drive: Whoever is in charge of the jump drive has 30 seconds to activate it. Doing so will jump the player's ship off the game map and end the mission for better or worse.
• Repair: Whoever is in charge of damage control has 30 seconds to enact repairs from damage inflicted during the enemy action.

That's a very quick overview of how a turn works.
The game also includes a countdown mechanic in the form of a nemesis ship, which after a certain time will appear and hound the players. The nemesis ship cannot be destroyed. 

Endgame
Players continue on their mission until they collectively complete or fail their objectives, additionally, their starship may explode, which as you may imagine can be considered a loss.

Overall
Space Cadets is without a doubt a hugely ambitious co-operative game. It works hard to evoke the spirit of the TV shows it attempts to simulate.
During play, there were moments when the players were naturally talking about how they needed energy diverted to their station, or how they'd achieved lock on an enemy ship or torpedoes were loaded. It sounded like a sci-fi TV show. This was pretty awesome.

Players will collectively need to identify and prioritize dangers as well as balance managing these risks with working towards their goals. They'll need to decide which stations need energy the most, it's very hard to power up all systems at the same time and of course, they'll need to play their minigames and all of this needs to be done in real time!
It's also something of a peculiar experience, since most players will be concentrating on their own minigames, they won't spend much time paying attention to what other players are doing - even though a lot of the game's mechanics are interlinked. There's a lot of clever gameplay going here.

Having said that; I can't really recommend Space Cadets to casual players or the casual group. While the individual games are not complex, there are 9 of them! Taking 2 minutes to explain each game takes 18 minutes add a minute of of questions for each game and that's now 27 minutes, add in explaining how the enemy ships work and setting up and you're looking at close to 45 minutes of setup, maybe more!

However, if you've got a group of dedicated players who are all willing to commit to learning the game and then playing it on regular basis, then Space Cadets will probably be a great experience.

11th September 2021

It's a Saturday morning and the inaugural day of Wogglecon. A small gaming con organised by David from Woking Gaming Club​.
Members gathered at the scout hall in Bisley for a day of gaming and socialising.

7th September 2021

​Tuesday night gaming in Woking at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club concluded with Bears Vs Babies!

We all know bears are dangerous wild animals, but few realise that natural enemy of bears... are babies and that's where Bears Vs Babies comes in, a completely true, completely educational card game about bears... and that's a fact!

The cards are the quality you'd expect from cards.
The playmat is made of cloth andtrictly speaking, it's not necessary, but it's a nice touch.
Finally; the furry box, which is a box and furry...

The game's artwork is bright, colourful and brash, exactly what a game like this needs.

What iconography the game has is pretty easy to understand.

How's it play?
Setup

• Deal a bear-head card to each player, shuffle any remaining bear-heads into the deck.
• Give the deck a shuffle and create 3 roughly even face-down decks on the playmat.
• Deal 4 cards to each player, if any of these cards is a baby, put that card face-down into it's assigned space on the playmat and draw another card, repeat if necessary. All players must have 5 cards at the game start.
• Determine first player.

On to play
​The objective in Bears Vs Babies is to accumulate babies cards by errr eating them? This is done by building bear/monsters from the body part cards and chomping down on those babies! The active player has 3 choices in their turn.

• Actions: The active player may perform 2-4 actions in their turn dependent on the total number of players. Each action allows them to perform one of the following.
  Draw: The active player may draw a card from any of the draw decks into their hand. If that card is a baby card, it must be placed face-down on its corresponding space; it still counts as an action.
  As these face-down stacks increase, they start becoming baby armies!
  Play: The active player may put a card down face-up in their playing area to create monsters. A monster's first card must always be a head, this is the start of their bear army. Torsos can be attached to heads and limbs to torsos and so on, special cards will attach to certain body parts, a hat will go on a head for example.
  Players may have more than one bear/monster in play at a time - it wouldn't be much of an army otherwise!
  The coloured number on the bear's head determines which type of baby it fights and the combined value of all the numbers determine its strength.
  Bear-heads are considered all colours.
• Provoke: If the active player decides to provoke, the following occurs.
  Actions: No actions are taken during a provoke.
  Choose baby army: The active player chooses one of the armies and turns those cards face-up and calculates that armies total value, all the players must now fight this baby army.
  Fight: Every bear/monster of every player that matches the colour of the revealed baby army must join the fight against it. Compare the combined value of all the baby cards revealed to the combined value of all the bear/monsters participating in the fight; the highest value wins.
  Bear/monster win: The player who had the highest valued bear/monster army among the players gets to eat the babies, that is keep the baby cards.
  Next, all bear/monsters that participated in the fight are discarded!
  Babies win: In this case all the participating bear/monsters are discarded and the baby army is also discarded. Say goodbye to those points!
• Dumpster dive: This is the 3rd and final choice a player can make. The following occurs:
  Actions: No actions are taken.
  Dumpster dive: The active player takes a card of their choice from the discard pile. Taking a baby card, means putting it on it's relevant face-down stack.
• Once a player has completed their turn, play proceeds to the player to their left.

Endgame
Once all 3 draw decks have been depleted, the game is over.
Players count the value of all the baby cards they've collected.
Point are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Bears Vs Babies is a pretty straightforward game that's easy to learn and comes with an interesting wrinkle: Deciding when to provoke a baby army (Words I never thought I'd type!) has some genuine strategy to it.
Obviously, players will want to provoke when they have the strongest monster army to beat a baby army - that's how points are accumulated. But there are some other plays that can be made.

It pays to watch what other players are doing and trying to gauge what baby cards have been put into their respective stacks.
If a player knows that a baby army is small for example and another player has a strong monster, provoking the baby army will essentially waste that monster, especially if the provoking player won't be involved. Additionally, provoking a strong baby when not being involved will trash both the baby army and the other players' monsters.

But this is also where the game falls down, constantly having discard your monsters as you build them up can feel frustrating, especially when it happens several times in a row. It feels so counterintuitive. It turns an average, light, filler game into a frustrating experience.

7th September 2021

Tuesday evening is here and we're at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club.

The first game of the night was Merv.

What's in a game?

• Game board: Merv is a busy game and consequently has a busy board loaded with information, spaces and tracks!
  City: The central part of the board is dominated by a 5x5 grid, this is the city of Merv. The grid is considered to have a north, east, south and west side. It's also surrounded by 'wall spaces'.
  Caravansary: This is a 'caravan of camels' where players can go to buy spice.
  Influence track: As players complete certain actions, they move along this track which allows them to acquire different types of spice.
  Library: This is where players can acquire scrolls and as they do so, they will also acquire benefits or bonuses called breakthroughs.
  Marketplace: Players can travel to other settlements to buy various goods. The marketplace contains 4 inner cities and 4 outer cities.
  Mosque: Players can move along this track to acquire benefits and bonuses.
  Palace: Players can send courtiers to the palace to earn victory points - at a cost.
  Favour track: Used in conjunction with the Palace.
• City tiles: These are used in the city.
  Camel market: This double-sided tile sits in the centre of the 5x5 grid.
  Building sites: There are 24 of these other tiles that populate the rest of the city. Players will be able to construct buildings on these sites.
  When activated, building sites provide resource cubes in their colours as well as 1 of 6 actions.
• Caravan cards: This deck of cards is used to represent the 4 different types of spice available to purchase, however the distribution of spices is not equal on the cards, some are rarer. From most common to rare, they are; cinnamon, ginger, juniper & pepper. Caravan cards confer 2 bonuses'
  Doubles: Whenever a player completes a pair, they get a bonus depending on what type of spice it is.
  Set collecting: During the endgame, sets of cards score victory points.
• Contract cards: These represent business or trade contracts which players can complete for victory points and other rewards.
  Completing a contract usually requires a mixture of resources, goods and scrolls. Players will also require a minimum level of influence in order to complete contracts.
  Unusually, goods and contracts are not spent when completing a contract, they are simply placed on the card, which prevents them being used for other contracts.
  There are 6 types of contract card.
• Goods tiles: There 24 common and 24 rare goods tiles.
• Scroll tiles: These represent the world of academia in Merv
• Breakthrough tiles: Earn enough scroll tiles and a player will acquire a breakthrough tile, these tiles confer a bonus or benefit of some kind.
• Upgrade tiles: Used to upgrade buildings that are constructed.
• Scoring tiles: These score points at the end of every year and are acquired from the mosque track.
• Camel meeples: Wooden meeples.
• Resources: Little wooden cubes, now you're talking. They come in 5 colours and represent the game's 4 different types of errr resources? The white cubes are considered wild.
• Wall tokens: These wooden tokens are shaped in the style of city walls.
• Buildings: There are 9 each of these wooden tokens in each of the 4 player colours.
• Wooden disks: Merv has a lot of tracks that need tracking and wooden disks are used to track those tracks! There are 10 in each colour.
• Meeples: Each player gets a Master Meeple and 8 worker meeples in their colour.

Merv has top-notch components; the cards and tiles are all good quality. cubes, tokens and meeples all look good, made of wood and feel solid, the walls are the standout components here and really look nice when set on the on the board and surrounding the city.
​
Despite its busyness, the game board is well illustrated and colourful, artwork on cards is also clear and colourful.

For the most part the iconography is clear and easy to understand.
Unfortunately, this does not extend to the symbols used to represent the game's 6 actions, these were a constant source of confusion and error.

​For example; the mosque action uses a minaret symbol but actually involves moving camel meeples along a track, but the symbols with camels on it is used to represent the caravansary! Why? Because the caravansary used camels to move spices! However, in game, the caravansary action only is used to get spices and has nothing to do with camels
This means that camels are used to represent spices and minarets are used to represent camels! It verges on the ridiculous.
It didn't help that all 6 symbols were the same colour so that it matched the colour theme of the board.

How's it play?
Setup

• City: Randomly choose one side of the camel market tile and place it at the centre of the 5x5 grid.
  Shuffle all of the build site tiles and randomly place them in the city, filling out all 24 spaces.
• Caravansary: shuffle the caravan cards into a face-down deck.
  Draw 8 cards and place them face-up in a row along the edge of the board close to the caravansary space. Then place camels on cards according to the number of players.
• Contract cards: Put the contract cards face-up into their 6 respective decks with the highest value card at the top and in descending order, making the earlier contracts more valuable.
• Library: Place the scroll and breakthrough tokens on their Library spaces.
• Mosque: The upgrade tokens go on to the mosque track, as do 4 camel meeples.
• Marketplace: Place a camel meeple on each of the 4 inner cities in the marketplace.
• Tokens: Give each player their meeples, disks and building tokens.
• Player order: Determine starting player.

I'm sure I've missed some steps, but it's pretty much covered.

On to play
Merv is played over 3 years and in each year there are 4 rounds, players have 1 action per round, thus 12 actions in total.
Taking actions in Merv are quite unusual, play takes place around the 5x5 grid and each round takes place across 1 side of the grid (Starting on the north side.), then in the subsequent round, play moves clockwise to the next side of the grid and so on, so by the 4th round, a complete circuit will have been completed.

• Place meeple: When a player takes their turn, they place their Master Meeple on one of the 5 spaces on the currently active side of the grid and activates one of the 5 building sites in that column/row. When this happens, the following occurs.
  Build: If there is no building on the activated site, then the active player must put one of their buildings there.
  Resources: The active player gains a resource in the colour indicated on the site they activated, furthermore they also gain resources from any sites of the same colour in the same column/row, provided those sites also have buildings. Thus it pays to position buildings in certain ways over turns to be able to generate multiple resources at a time as the game progresses.
  If those buildings belong to other players, then those players additionally acquire resources.
  Then one of the following is chosen.
  Deploy soldier: The active player may place one of their soldiers on to a tile with a building that is not already protected, this protects the building and earns them influence. What is protection for? More on this later.
  Gain favour: Move a space along the favour track at the palace.
  Action: The player use the action on the activated site, actions are the main staple of Merv and players will be using them most of the time.
  Camel market: If the active player has chosen the middle space of the 5, then they can access the camel market tile. The active player may use one of the tiles 4 special abilities by placing a camel meeple on the abilities' space, alternatively, they may collect all the camel meeples previously placed on the camel market tile.
• Actions: There are 6 types of action in Merv.
  Caravansary: This action allows the active player to purchase caravan cards by spending resource cubes, they will also acquire camel meeples if they're on the purchased caravan card.
  Caravan cards come in 4 types, the number of different types a player can hold at any time depends on how far they've travelled along the influence track.
  Every pair of caravan cards earns the player a bonus and sets earn victory points at the end of the game.
  Library: When a player takes the library action, they can spend resources to purchase scrolls. For every 2 scrolls a player acquires, they also acquire a breakthrough.
  Scrolls also have uses elsewhere.
  Marketplace: This grants the active player access to the marketplace which consists of 8 cities, this requires establishing a camp in one of the 4 inner cities. The first player to do this acquires the camel on the city.
  Once a camp has been built, the player can spend resources to buy goods from that city, they may also buy goods from adjacent cities by spending the required goods and a camel meeple. In later actions the player can expand their network of camps and thus do away with the need to spend camels to reach those cities.
  Camels spent this way are placed on caravan cards in the caravansary.
  Mosque: There are 4 camel meeples on the mosque track and taking this action allows the active player to move them. They may move as far as they want, provided they can pay the cost in resource cubes for each move. Every time a player advances along the track, it earns them a bonus; this might be a building upgrade, scoring upgrade and so on.
  Palace: The palace consists of 2 elements; the 4 halls and the favour track.
  Moving up the favour track scores victory points for the active player.
  Each of the 4 halls has 3 spaces and a cost, paying the associated cost allows the player to place meeples in these halls, which will score the player victory points at the end of every year for either scrolls, spices, good or buildings on mosque building sites. Points are earned by spending the advancements made on the favour track.
  Wall: This action allows the active player to build walls around the 5x5 grid, they can build as many segments in action as they can afford in resource points.
  Walls provide protection to the buildings they shield and also earn the player influence.
• Complete contract: If a player has the required mix of influence, resources cubes, goods, spices and scrolls, they may complete a contract in their turn and immediately score the contract's victory points.
  Completing a contract generally requires multiple actions, fortunately completing a contract itself is a free action.
• End of round: At the end of the round a new turn order may be established for the following round.
• End of year: Once the 4th round has been completed, the year has reached its end, but it's not quite over. There are still a couple matters to conclude.
  Invasion: In years 2 & 3, the Mongol horde invades and every unprotected building is destroyed! Although players may bribe the Mongols to leave a building alone with a resource cube matching the site's colour.
  End of year scoring: At the end of each year players score points, these come from several sources.
  Buildings: Each building scores the player a point.
  Scoring tiles: Scoring tiles acquired from the mosque track score points.

Endgame
Once the 3rd year is over and has been scored, there is there final scoring to calculate.
Sets of caravan cards score points.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Merv has several approaches to acquiring victory points but resource cubes is key to nearly all of them and the resource cube economy is very important. Acquiring cubes may conflict with choosing actions if the building site a player wants to activate produces cubes of a different colour, players will have to make choices and adapt.
Having said that, it pays to diversify but it also pays to pursue one one strategy such as the caravansary or mosque track.
Completing contracts feels like more of a bonus for sharp-eyed players than a long-term approach.
Players also need to consider palace actions, placing workers into the right spaces in halls and moving along the favour track can be a good source of points.

Players will need to also look towards defending Merv from attackers, losing buildings also loses the ability to gain resource cubes in later turns and of course loses victory points for the affected player(s).

Merv is definitely on the heavier side of board games, but to be honest it didn't feel deep, just fiddly.
I never got the feeling that I was making clever plays, instead I got the feeling that Merv was a heavy game made for the sake of being a heavy game.
When I took an action, it often felt like I was doing 2 half actions instead of 1 whole one and it took multiple different actions to achieve something.

E.g., I would undertake the marketplace action and acquire a good, Was I able to sell that good? No!
What about spices, what if I'd acquired spices? Can't sell them either.
To sell something, that is to complete a contract, I needed influence, which earned by building walls and also scrolls, which are acquired by visiting the library. Of course I also needed resources cubes.
​I know that some people will love this idea but I found it unengaging and a little dull and verging on tedious. Merv feels a little dry, unexciting and detached.

5th September 2021

Sunday gaming on Board Game Arena reached it's conclusion and the final game of the evening was Love Letter.

Read my blog about it here.

5th September 2021

Sunday gaming continued and Forbidden Island was the next game on Board Game Arena.

Read my thoughts on it here.

5th September 2021

Sunday evening gaming on Board Game Arena continued with Codex Naturalis.

Read my blog about it here.