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.

19th December 2021

The last game of Sunday evening gaming on Board Game Arena was Love Letter. Read my blog about it here.

19th December 2021

Sunday gaming on Board Game Arena rolled on and the next game of the night was Dragonwood.
Read my blog on it here.

19th December 2021

We're on Board Game Arena for some Sunday gaming and the next game of the evening was Forbidden Island.
Read my blog on it here.

19th December 2021

Sunday gaming on Board Game Arena continues with Railroad Ink.

Read my thoughts on it here.

19th December 2021

We continued our Sunday gaming on Board Game Arena with Can't Stop.

Can't stop, addicted to the shindig.
Chop Top, he says I'm gonna win big.

No... wait..., this isn't a song. It's a sharp little push your luck game.

Caveat: We've only ever played this game digitally.

What's in a game?

• Game board: Can't stop uses a diamond shaped board featuring 11 vertical lines numbered 2-11. The number 2 line has 3 spaces, the spaces increase by 2 with every line until reaching 7 which has 13 spaces, then they decrease back to 3 when reaching line 12.
  This particular iteration of Can't Stop shows climbers scaling a mountain in the background.
• Dice: There are 4 normal six-siders in Can't Stop.
• Tokens: There are 4 sets of 11 tokens in 4 player colours.
• Movement tokens: There are 3 of these and they're used to track a player's moves.

That's it for components, there's not too much that can be said about such a minimalistic, almost abstract game.
The only art featured is the mountainous picture on the board which is a nice enough illustration which keeps the board from looking plain. Although it's obviously been used as a theme to fit the mechanic.
There's no iconography to the game unless you count the numbers on the dice!

How's it play?
​Setup

• Tokens: Give a set of 11 tokens of one colour to each player.
• Game board: Set out the remaining components in central playing area.
• First player: Determine the 1st player.

That's it, that's all there is to set up.

​On to play
The objective in Can't Stop is to get 3 of your 11 tokens to the top of the board (Or mountain.) first. 
Each player takes turns rolling the dice and using them to move their tokens up the lines, they can continue doing this until they choose to stop, reach the top or go bust.

• Roll the dice: The active player rolls all 4 dice and then splits them into 2 pairs in a combination of their choosing, thus there will be 2 sets of dice each showing a value between 2-12.
  Then the active player takes the movement tokens and places them on the associated vertical line on the board, either at the bottom if they haven't started on that line or above their personal token on that line.
  Thus a player can introduce/move 1 or 2 tokens per roll, or sometimes they can move 1 token twice.
  Now the active player must choose to continue or stop.
• Stop: Should the active player decide to stop, they then replace all the movement tokens on the board with their personal tokens.
  If a token has reached the stop of a line, then that line becomes 'locked out' and players cannot use that line again.
• Continue: If the active player chooses to continue, then they roll and resolve the 4 dice again.
  If either of the values is the same as a movement token already on the board, then that token is moved up a space.
  If the values do not match a movement token on the board, then a new movement must be introduced to the board if possible
  Remember; there are only 3 movement tokens available to players, once they're in play that's it.
• Bust: If at any time, even on their first roll, the active player cannot move or introduce a movement token to the board, then they go bust. Their turn is over and any movement tokens on the board are removed, their personal tokens do not change position.
• End of turn: Play progresses to the player on the left when the active player either chooses to stop rolling or goes bust.

Endgame
When a player's 3rd personal token reaches the top of a line and they stop, then they immediately win.

Overall
First off; if you don't like push-your-luck games or games that introduce significant amounts of randomness or chance, then you can probably stop read right here! Chances are that you'll hate Can't Stop. Only Joking, please keep reading! Maybe I can convince you that it's worth trying!

I think that Can't Stop is a good 'crossover' game that will appeal to casual-gamers, the luck element is a good balancing mechanism that levels the playing field somewhat and will probably prevent dedicated players from always winning, allowing players of differing levels of experience to play together. Simple rules make the game accessible to anyone.

For such simple rules, there's a few things I want to say about Can't Stop's elegant gameplay that has been stripped down to pure, distilled, unadulterated push-your-luck mechanics. There's no gimmicks here or clever twists, just you and the dice.

Speaking of dice; using 4 of them was a piece of inspiration. If the game was played with only 2 dice, it'd be too easy to predict outcomes. Any dice-slinger worth their salt would know that getting 2 or 12 is a 1-in-36 chance, or getting a 7 is 1-in-6.
Adding an extra 2 dice into the mix that need to be paired off changes everything but also sort of keeps it the same!
While it would take a little effort to try and figure out the probabilities with 4 dice, it doesn't change the fact that 7s will still be more common than 2s or 12s. The probability curve is now just skewed to some degree, how much, I don't know, l haven't bothered to make that effort to figure it out.

This is reflected in the game's design. You only need 3 2s or 12s to to reach the top, while you require 13 7s to do the same.

While luck undoubtedly plays a big part in Can't Stop, there's also some strategy involved. Like many chance based games, it's important to employ good judgement on when to push-your-luck and when not to.
It also pays to think about how dice are paired off. Generally, when you get movement markers in the 6-8 range, it's the best time to push it, there're no guarantees though...
And the longer a player can go without putting all 3 movement markers on the board, by managing the dice pairing, the better.

If I have a criticism, it's that the game can slow down towards the end as columns become locked off. We've played this 3-player frequently and at times, when players have captured 2 lines each it means 6 out of 11 lines are no longer in play so everybody ends up going bust a lot more often.

As a filler, I think Can't Stop is pretty good fun, it provides some entertainment which allows me to turn my brain off and chill out for a little while  (Provided bad rolls don't infuriate me!).
​I don't take it too seriously and neither should you.

19th December 2021

Sunday evening is here again and it's time for some gaming on Board Game Arena.

The first game of the night was The Crew: Mission Deep Sea. Read my blog on it here.

16th December 2021

It's a Thursday and we're round Simon's for some gaming.

​The game of the night was Le Harve; have you ever had the urge to run a business on the French coast, construct buildings and ships, manage goods, feed your ever expanding workforce and avoid going into debt?
If the answer is yes, then maybe, just maybe, Le Havre is the game you're lookng for.

What's in a game?
Le Havre uses a lot of components, I mean it, A LOT!

• Game board: The game board is composed of 3 large tiles that are placed down together to form the board. It depicts the titular harbour with a wharf and warehouses and it's a fairly busy board too with a lot of spots and locations.
  Resource spaces: There are 6 spaces for the games 8 resources, wait, did I say 8 resources, since the resource tiles are double-sided that means the game actually has 16 resources. Finally there's a spot for the 17th resource - money.
  Supply spaces: There a row of seven of these circular spaces directly beneath the resource spaces.
  Offer spaces: And beneath the port spaces are 7 offer spaces. As the game progresses, goods will move from the resources down to the offer spaces.
  Special buildings: this is where the special buildings deck goes.
  Building proposals: These are 3 spaces which will contain regular building cards which can be built but not bought.
  Ship spaces: There are 4 spaces for the 4 different types of ship that will appear during a game.
  Round cards space: Finally, there's a space for the round cards, there not actually round but are used to track the game's round.

• Cards: Le Havre uses numerous decks of cards.
  ​Round cards/Ship cards: Not all of these are used during a game, depending on player count.
  ​They are arranged in numerical order and are used to not only track rounds, but other events such as harvesting and bringing special buildings into play. They are also double sided and on the other side are ships. When a round is over, the round card is flipped to the other side and becomes a ship available to be bought, thus more and more (And better.) ships become available as a game progresses.
  Ship cards are very useful cards, they allow players to trade resources for cash and also provide food when needed.
  Building cards: These come in 3 types, starter, standard and special and can be bought or used by players. They are functionally more or less identical though. Each card has a cost to buy in some combination of resources and money, it may also have a symbol for it's type. Then the card lists what ability it has, typically this is generate or upgrade resources, although some will construct buildings or ships. 
  Standard cards have a couple of bits of extra info, first, in the top right corner it shows a number, this is the sort order number and determines the order in which cards appear. Finally, at the bottom it repeats the buying info, which will be displayed when the cards are put out.
  Loan cards: If a player runs of cash, then they can take a load card to acquire more money, although this comes at a price...
  Buttery/Player guide: This double-sided card has a buttery on one side and a quick guide to the rules on the other.
• Tokens: As with cards, Le Havre makes use of a lot of tokens. All of them are made of card.
  Cash: These round tokens represent francs.
  Resources: All of these are double-sided, with the basic resource on one side and the upgraded resource on the other. Resources provide food and energy amongst other things and include.
  Cattle/Meat: Produces more cattle and food on the upgraded side.
  Grain/Bread: Produces more grain and also produces food
  Iron/Steel: Used for building.
  Clay/Brick: Also used for building.
  Wood/Charcoal: Produces energy.
  Fish/Smoked fish: Produces food.
  Coal/Coke: Produces energy.
  Hide/Leather​: Can be sold.
• Meeples: Each player is given 2 wooden meeples in their colour, a ship which is used in the port and a disc, which is essentially a worker and placed in buildings.
• Supply tiles: There are 7 of these circular tiles that fit on the supply spaces. Each tile displays an action that must be resolved during the game.

​The art in Le Havre is a bit of a mixed bag. The game board uses fairly simplistic and colourful illustrations that I personally found clear, distinct and looked quite evocative, the same is true of illustrations on the cards. However, the tokens used monochromic artwork which is a little old school. Having said that, it was always clear what they represented.
Which brings me to iconography. Between all the different actions on all the building cards in particular, Le Havre uses a fair amount of iconography. Much of it is straightforward and apparent but some of it will require looking up in the rules. none of it game-breaking though.

How's it play?
Setup

• Round cards: Take the round cards appropriate for the number of players and place them face-up in numerical order on their allotted space. Round cards come into affect at the end of each round.
• Supply tokens: Shuffle the supply tokens into a face-down stack and then place 1 of each face-down on the row of supply spaces.
• Starter buildings: Put out the 3 starter building cards next to the board. These are owned by the town. Furthermore any buildings that are built by players are also owned by the town (Until players purchase them, that is.).
• Building cards: Shuffle the standard building cards into a face-down deck, then deal the cards into 3 smaller face-down stacks.
  Now turn each stack over and sort it buy its sort order number in the top right corner. Thus certain cards will appear earlier in the game than others. Each of the 3 stacks goes into a space on the board but they do not sit stacks. Instead, spread each stack up, so that the info on the bottom of each card is visible and players can see the cost of upcoming cards. Only the top card in each proposal space are available to be built by players.
  Special building cards: Shuffle the deck of special building card and deal 6 cards face-down into a deck on their space on the board. The rest of the deck will not be used in this game.
• Resources: Put all the resources into their specified spaces, then place 2 money, 2 fish, 2 wood and 1 clay token into their respective offer spaces.
• Player: Give each player a ship and disc meeple in their colour as well as 5 cash and 1 coal. Each player's ship should be placed just left of the first supply tile.
• First player: Determine a first player.

On to play
Acquisition of wealth is goal in Le Havre and money becomes victory points at the game end.
The game is played over a number rounds dependant on the number of players. In each round there are 7 turns, you will note that this means that players will not have an equal number of turns and this is by design.
In their turn each player must perform the supply action and has a single main action they can also perform, in addition the active player can also perform buy/sell actions.
When all 7 turns have been completed, there are some end of round actions to resolve before moving on to the next round.
Free actions: These can be performed by the active player at any time.

• Loan: If a player does not have the money to pay for something, then they can take a loan card which gives them 4 currency to spend, paying off a loan card costs 5. Every loan card that a player has during the game end will essentially cost them 7 victory points, so you don't want to keep them!
  Additionally, sometimes players with loan cards will have to pay interest to the supply.
• Buying/Selling: The active player may buy or sell any number of available buildings or ships at any time in their turn, provided they meet the requirements of course. Players cannot buy buildings in the building proposal spaces, because they're not built yet.
  When something is sold, it is at half the cash cost for the building and is sold to the town who will now own it.

Turn actions:

• Supply action: The active player must perform the supply action. This involves moving their ship meeple on to the first available supply token (Going from left to right.), turning over the tile and resolving its action. Usually this involves moving tokens from one resource supply to it's respective offer space.
  Supply tiles are only turned over once during a game and when revealed stay in the same order for the remainder of the game.
• Main action: There are 2 main actions available to the active player and they can perform 1 of them only.
  Take offer: The active player take all the resources on 1 offer space which they can use immediately.
  Enter building: The active player may take their disc and place in any available unoccupied building and use that building's ability.
  Available buildings include any buildings owned by the town or the player, furthermore, a disc may be placed in another player's building, but this will incur a entry fee that must be payed to that player.
  Next player: Once a player has completed their actions, play progresses to the player to the left.

A round ends when the player on the last supply token finishes their turn and leads directly into the end of round actions. This involves resolving the actions on the current round card and include the following.

• Harvest: If this action occurs, players with cattle or grain increase them respectively.
• Feeding: All players must feed their populations, this requires discarding food, how much is needed depends on the round card and a ship lowers this requirement. Money can be used in place of food and must be used if a player does not have enough food.
• Construction: A building from the standard or special buildings may be built by the town and now becomes available to be used or bought players.
• Ship: The round card is flipped over and becomes a ship, it is placed into its relevant spot and can bought by players.
• Next round: All player ship meeples are placed back at the start of the supply track and a new round begins. Whoever was last in the previous round is the starting player in this one, thus they get a double-turn.

Endgame
When the final round is completed, all players have 1 final main action they can perform, after this, the game goes to scoring.
Now each player calculates their wealth which are victory points. This is done by totting up the following:
Value of all building and ships a player owns.
Cash they possess.
Every loan card a player still possess at the game end deducts from the total.
Scores are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
When playing Le Havre players will need to pay attention to several areas of the game. Buildings are very important and players will probably spent a significant number of actions on them, not only do they have to think about to what they've built, what the town owns and what it available to build but what other players have built. Being able to make use of other player's building adds an interesting spin on the game.
Players will need to adapt their strategy to the buildings that become available and while there is a ordering number for buildings, it's still no guarantee of the actual order they become available.

That doesn't mean you can risk ignoring ships or acquiring resources of course, food is vital, probably the single most important thing in the game, you'll constantly need food otherwise you'll eventually be plunged into spiralling debt.
Managing all the resources is also key and the game deliberately forces players to make the hard choice between using a building or taking a resource from an offer space. Resources tend to be relatively scarce at the start of the game and player's will want to optimise their strategies.
Generally money can be used in place of some resources but it's essentially sucking up victory points and getting players closer to having to take a loan, something to avoid if you can.

Players will need to also pay attention to the supply track and their position on it and when their turns will come up, as well as when resources will be moved into the offer spaces.

Even though there were some more rules which I skipped over describing, I wouldn't call La Havre a very heavy game. I did find it a little fiddly with the occasional little rule popping up here or there and at the start I did find the game a little obtuse.
​Once you get over that hump Le Havre becomes a mostly straightforward game and proves a challenging game with meaningful decisions to make.

I do have a criticism of Le Havre though - and that's the playtime, it's just too long! This is a known issue too as the rules contain a 'shortened' variant of the game!
A 5-player game is expected to take 210 minutes over 20 rounds, that's 3 ½ hours and quite frankly, that's an underestimation.
Think about it; 210 minutes over 20 rounds is 10 minutes 30 seconds per round and each round has 7 turns, that works out at 90 seconds per turn. Do you think that the kind of players that like this type of game spend just 90 seconds per turn? If every player spends 2 minutes taking their turn instead of 90 seconds, it would add 70 minutes to the playtime. 😭

It meant that the down time between turns felt like it lasted forever and at times was just more frustrating than fun or compelling, which was what I ultimately took away from it.

If you like resource-management games that are slightly on the heavy side, then Le Havre might be worth a look, provided you can commit the time.
To be honest, it's a game that rainy, chilled Sunday afternoons are perfect for.

15th December 2021

Wednesday afternoon gaming goodness on Board Game Arena has reached the end and the final game of the day was Love Letter.

Read my blog on Love Letter here.

15th December 2021

Wednesday afternoon gaming on Board Game Arena continued with Martian Dice.
Read my blog on it here.