5th August 2022

It's a Friday and we're in Aldershot for some gaming!

​When you go into a national park, you may find yourself hiking along trails.
Which is a slightly tortured segue into how Trails is actually a follow up to the excellent Parks game and shares some similar concepts.

So let's hit the errr... trail and see how it stacks up?

What's in a game?

• Tiles: Trails uses 7 rectangular tiles, which broadly speaking come in 2 types.
  Trailhead & Trail End: These 2 tiles are used to mark the start and end of the hike. Along the top of both of these tiles are several of icons.
  Finally, both of these tiles are double-sided, which sides are used is determined by player count.
  Trail sites: There are 5 of these and they are also double-sided, with one side showing day and the flip side showing night.
  Each trail site features a icon at the bottom that indicates the action associated with it. The night side always has improved versions of those actions.
• Wildlife die: This is not a normal six-sider, instead each side has an icon that relates to one of the 5 trail sites, the 6th and final side is a wild action symbol.
• Canteen tokens: There is 1 canteen in each player colour, one side shows a full canteen and the other, an empty one.
• Sun token: This cheery token depicts a stylised sun, it has an arrow and is used to track the setting sun.
• Resources: Little wooden cubes are used for the game's 3 types of resource.
  Acorn: Red cubes are the acorn resources.
  Leaf: Uses green cubes for resources. 
  Rock: Has grey resources.
• Meeples: Trails uses a handful of wooden meeples.
  Hikers: There's 1 hiker meeple in each player colour, They are sort of hiker shaped and so should be called heeples?
  Bear: A black bear meeple, should it be a beeple? This is also known as the wildlife token. Encountering a bear on a hike usually spells trouble for the hikers but the bear in Trails is a lot more friendly.
• Badge cards: There are about 40 badge cards in the game. Each one has a cost, shown in the middle and a benefit shown at the bottom. This might be VPs in some form or other at the game end or one-off bonuses such as resources.
  ​Most badge cards also have a 'type' which is shown in the top left.
• Photo cards: As well as containing pleasant artwork, photo cards display 2 pieces of information; how many VPs the card is worth and how many 'bird' icons it has.
  More on what 'birds' mean below.
• Bird trophy token: Features a picture of a bird! It's used in conjunction with the 'birds' scoring.

​
For the most part, component quality in Trails is good.
The wooden meeples look and feel good as does the die.
I also like the wooden resource cubes, although I'm not a big fan of the colours which I feel are a little too muted and sometimes in poor light, the grey and the green colours can feel hard to distinguish.
I also found the player colours a little muted too.
All the tiles and tokens are constructed of thick card and feel weighty.
However, I would describe all the cards as average in quality and perhaps a little flimsy. It's not really an issue though, Trails is not a card game and they won't be handled much so should stand up to repeated handling.

Without a doubt, all the art in Trails is excellent.
Much of it is sourced from the Fifty-Nine Parks art project which also provided the same art for Parks and will be familiar to players of that. So even though Trails is reusing artwork, it doesn't matter because it's such good quality.
Having said that, a lot of images are heavily cropped and the fact they're all on relatively small components means they just don't look as impressive.
Original art appears on the badge cards in the form of a series of quite stylised images. It's a different style to art that appears on the tile and photo cards but I have to say I think it looks good.

All the main icons which appear on the tiles and die are easily understood.
It's not quite so obvious with some of the rewards on badge cards and players will need to refer to the rules and clarifications on occasion. It's nothing game breaking though.

How's it play?
Setup

• Game board:
  Trail sites: Take the 5 trail site tiles, shuffle them and place them randomly into a  line with the day side face-up.
  Trail head & end: Put the trail head tile on the left end of the row of trail site tiles 'at the start' and put the trail end tile on the right, 'at the end'.
  Sun token: Position the sun token with its arrow pointing at the rightmost icon on the trail end tile.
  Wildlife token: Place the bear token on the middle tile of the 5 trail sites.
• Badge cards: Shuffle the badge cards into a face-down deck. Draw 2 cards and place them face-up adjacent to the trail head, also draw 2 cards and place them adjacent to the trail end.
• Photo cards: Shuffle the photo cards into a face-down deck.
• Players: Give each player the hiker meeple and canteen token in their colour, the canteen token should be on the full side.
  Also give each player 1 resource cube of each type.
  Deal a badge card to each player face-down, players should keep this hidden from their opponents.
• First player: Determine a starting player.
  Players should put their meeples on their starting tile, which will be dependant on player count. All meeples should start facing the other side of the row of tiles, facing is important in Trails, i.e., the direction they will be hiking.

On to play
In Trails, players will travel back and forth along the path, taking photos and accumulating resources which they will use to buy badge cards.
The game follows a typical turn structure with the active player resolving their turn before play progresses to the left. As their action, the active player can move their meeple and resolve the tile it lands on.

• Move hiker: The active player may move their hiker 1 or 2 spaces forward in the direction it is facing.
  Canteen: The active player may use their canteen (Flip it from the full side to empty.) to move their hiker as many spaces forward in the direction they are facing as they want.
• Actions: The active player must now resolve the action of the tile to which they moved their hiker.
  All 5 of the trail sites have an action and also a improved version of that action on the night side. The trail head and end tiles also have actions.
  The actions are as follows.
  • Acorn: When a hiker lands on the tile with the acorn symbol, the controlling player takes an acorn resource cube from the supply.
    Improved action: The active player takes 2 acorn cubes.
  • Leaf: The player takes a leaf token.
    Improved action: The player takes 2 leaf tokens.
  • Rock: The player takes a rock token.
    Improved action: The player takes... you guessed it... 2 rock tokens.
  • Exchange: The active player returns a resource cube of their choice to the supply and take 2 cubes of a different type.
    Improved action: When taking 2 resource cubes, they take 1 each of both other types.
  • Take photo: The active player may spend a resource cube to take a photo.
    When doing this the active player may either:
    Draw 2 cards from the deck, keep 1 and discard the other face up, or.
    take the top card on the photo discard pile.
    All photo cards acquired should be kept face-down until scoring at the game end.
    Improved action: Taking a photo no longer costs a resource.
    Empty deck: If the photo deck ever becomes empty, flip the discard pile over to become a new draw deck, the cards are not shuffled.
  • Trail head: Upon reaching the trail head, several actions may occur.
    Turn around: The active player should turn their hiker 180' to face back to the other side of the trail.
    Fill canteen: If the active player's canteen was empty, they should flip to the 'full' side.
    Acquire badge cards: The active player may acquire either or both badge cards adjacent to the trail head by spending the required resources, they may also purchase their secret badge card. It is therefore possible to buy up to 3 badge cards upon stopping on the trail head.
    Additionally, bonus resources acquired from gaining a badge can be used to purchase one of the remaining badge cards. 
  • Trail end: There are also several actions that will occur when a hiker end on the trail end.
    Turn around: The active player should turn their hiker 180' to face back to the other side of the trail.
    Sun action: The active player can resolve the action that the sun token is pointing at.
    If the sun token is above either the trail head or end, then the action will be one of the icons at the top of the tile. If the token is above one of the trail tiles, then that tile's action will be performed. E.g., if sun token is above the leaf tile, the active player gets a leaf resource.
    Move sun token: Once the sun action has been resolved, the sun token is moved 1 space to the left. In the case of the trail head or end icons, it moves to the next icon (Or off the tile.).
    If the token is above a trail site, then it is moved to the tile on the left. That trail site is then flipped from day to night.
    Eventually, the sun token will move over the trail head and then off the final icon, which will trigger the game end.
    Acquire badge card: This identical to acquiring a badge card at the trail head except the cards adjacent to the trail end can be gained.
• Wildlife: If the active player's hiker lands on a trail site which also contains the bear meeple, they should roll the wildlife die, then move the bear to the tile indicated by the result and resolve that tile's action. Thus if the photo icon comes up on the die, move the bear on to the photo tile and immediately resolve the photo action - this could either the day or night version.
  If the bear result comes up on the die, then the active player may choose to move the bear to any of the 5 trail sites and resolve that tile's action.
• End of turn: Once the active player has completed their action(s), they should perform the following:
  Check resources: A player can only have 8 resources in total in hand, if they have too many, they must discard down to 8.
  Replace badge cards: Any cards acquired from either of the end tile must be replaced from the deck,
  Furthermore, if the active player bought their secret badge card, they should draw a new secret badge card from the deck. Players should always have a personal hidden badge card.
  Next Player: The player to the left now becomes the active player and begin their turn by moving their meeple.

Endgame
When a player take as sun action that moves off the last leftmost icon on the trail end, they resolve that action as usual and take the sun token.
Play progresses normally, until the player to the right of sun token holder has completed their action, upon which the game ends. I.e., once sun has taken the sun token, all other players get 1 more turn.

Players now calculate their VPs.

• Cards: VPs will come from badge ​card and photo cards
• Bird token bonus: Now all players count up how many bird icons they have across their badge and photo cards. Whoever has the most birds, gains the bird token which is worth 4 VPs.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
I'm not over fond of comparing one game to another, a game should be taken on it own merits but in this case, there might be some value in doing so.
Parks and Trails come from the same family of games and as such share some thematic elements. Both are about hiking along tiles, collecting resources to acquire photos and cards, as well as using canteens for a bonus.
However, Trails differs in several ways as explained below.

Unlike it's predecessor, hikers from multiple players can happily coexist on the same space so the stress and need to try and anticipate where other players' hikers will go is gone, as the tactic of trying to block other players.
It makes the game a little lighter (By no means a bad thing.) and focuses players on getting badge cards (Which are the game's biggest source of VPs.) and players will encounter something of a conundrum here.
They may have the urge to collect as many resources as possible which can be prudent but at the same time, they'll want to reach the trail head & end tiles quickly to get a certain badge card before other players. Trails is a game about optimisation especially since there are only 3 types to manage - although that 8 cube limit can be punishing.

I also like the addition of the day turning into night mechanic, not only is it visually pleasing to watch the sun set, it adds some momentum to the game, upping the ante by giving players more resources and making it easier to get more badge cards. Players that have done well in the early game are not guaranteed victory.

So is Trails a sufficiently different game to Parks to warrant having both? I would say yes. I bought copies of both and I'm glad I did.
Trails felt like an easy game to learn and despite the fairly lengthy rules writeup above, is a reasonably light game that requires a little less brain power and also a little less directly competitive. Although for a lighter game is has a reasonably long play time - far too long to be considered a filler game.
That's a minor criticism though and ultimately, Trails is a fun experience and is worth trying.

4th August 2022

It's a Thursday and we're round Simon's for a evening of gaming entertainment.
​
Cascadia: 'A land of falling waters,' generally referring to a large wilderness area in the Pacific north-west of the USA.

In Cascadia players vie to create a diverse landscape of habitats and wildlife in this tile placement game.

What's in a game?

• Tiles: Cascadia uses 2 types of hex tile, however, they all share some common features.
  Each hex space will feature 1 or 2 of the game's 5 habitats and 1-3 of the 5 wildlife types. Finally some hex spaces will have a pinecone icon - usually this is a hex that only has 1 habitat and 1 animal on it.
  Starter tiles: There are 5 of these and they are a little different from the main tile in that they are actually 3 hex tiles combined into 1.
  Habitat tiles: There are about 80 of these tiles.
  The game's 5 habitats are:
  Forest
  Mountain
  Prairie
  River
  Wetland
• Tokens: There are a 100 wooden disc tokens in the game that come in 5 types. Each type represents a different animal/colour.
  Bear/brown
  Elk/earthy brown
  Fox/orange
  Hawk/blue
  Salmon/red
• Bag: A small used in conjunction with the tokens.
• Cards: There are 5 types of card in Cascadia for the 5 wildlife types and 4 cards in each type, thus 20 cards in total. One card will be used from each wildlife type during the game.
  Cards provide different scoring opportunities for each wildlife type as explained below. Additionally each of the 4 cards for all wildlife have slightly different scoring criteria and are rated A-D with A being the easiest to score and D the hardest.
  The different types of card score as follows.
  Bear: Bears score for being solitary or in small packs as determined by their card,  generally they cannot be adjacent to other bears.
  Elk: These score by being in herds, the shape the herd must take will be dictated by the elk card used.
  Fox: Foxes score by being adjacent to different wildlife types.
  Hawk: These score by being in line-of-sight of other hawks, generally they cannot be adjacent to other hawks.
  Salmon: Salmon score by being in a continuous line, the longer the better.
• Pinecone tokens: These are standard card tokens that depict pinecones. After being acquired, pinecones may be spent to trigger a couple of special actions or score VPs at the game end.

For the most part the components are all high quality. The tiles and tokens are sturdy and the wildlife tokens in particular are chunky and tactile.
The pinecone tokens are average quality by modern standard - which means perfectly acceptable.
The same is true of the cards, they feel a little flimsy but since they're only used to display information and won't really be handled much, they too are perfectly acceptable.

The art used on cards is fantastic, having said that, each set of 4 only uses 2 images which are flipped and used a 2nd time, it's a minor quibble but it feels touch cheap.
Art on the tiles is good too but is hard to appreciate since they are relatively small. Importantly, it's also uncluttered, differences between habitats is for the most part very easy to distinguish. Similarly, the wildlife icons are easy seen.

As a minor aside: Prairies are depicted as yellow, which I guess represent dry grasslands. The yellow definitely does not represent desert! And yes; some of the yellow tiles have salmon icons on them, because, believe it or not, prairies can have water features.
If you ever play the game and someone says, 'why are their fish in the desert', then let them know!!
Anyway, back to talking about components.

The iconography is easily understood in Cascadia. It's obvious what the wildlife ​icons represent and the icon for pinecones is equally as obvious.

How's it play?
Setup

• Starting tiles: Randomly give a starting tile to each player who should put it face-up in their personal playing area.
• Cards: Sort the cards by type and shuffle them into 5 face-down decks. Draw 1 from each deck and put them into a face-up row.
  These will provide players will the scoring criteria for the wildlife tokens.
• Wildlife tokens: Put all the wildlife tokens into the bag and give it a good shake.
• Tiles: Select the number of tiles to use as per player count and shuffle them into some face-down stacks, the exact number of stacks does not matter.
• Drafting area: Draw 4 tiles and place them in a row, next draw 4 wildlife tokens and put them in a row adjacent to the 4 tiles.
  ​Thus there will be 4 pairs each of 1 tile and 1 token.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
In Cascadia, players will draft tiles and wildlife tokens, using them to create a personal landscape by placing tiles adjacent to each other and putting tokens on top of them in order to create habitats and patterns of animals to score points.
Cascadia follows a usual turn order with the active player resolving their action before play progresses to their left.

• Overpopulation: The first thing the active player must do is check the wildlife tokens in the drafting area for overpopulation.
  4 identical tokens: If all 4 wildlife tokens are identical, the active player must remove all of them, put them to one side and draw 4 new wildlife tokens.
  3 identical tokens: If 3 of the 4 tokens are identical, the active player may choose to put the 3 tokens to one side and draw 3 new ones.
  It is possible to trigger overpopulation multiple times dependant on the tokens that are drawn but regardless of this, once overpopulation no longer occurs, return all set aside tokens back to the bag (And give it a good shake!).
• Pinecone tokens: If a player has acquired any pinecone tokens on previous turns (See below for info getting them.) then they can be spent for 1 of 2 actions.
  Take any tile and token: This actions allows the active player to take any tile and any wildlife token, regardless of their positions in the drafting area.
  Remove any wildlife tokens: The active player may set aside any number of wildlife tokens and then draw new tokens to replace them. Rules for overpopulation still apply here.
• Draft: The active player takes one of the 4 pairs of 1 tile and 1 wildlife token and according to the following rules, places them in their playing area.
• Place tile: The active must put the tile with one of it's faces adjacent to the face of a tile already in play. When placing tiles, the habitats on the tiles do not need to match, i.e., you can place mountains next to rivers but's a good idea to do so. Larger habitats score more VPs later on.  
• Place wildlife token: Wildlife tokens can only go on a tile that contains the matching animal icon. E.g., a fox token can only be placed on a tile which has a fox icon.
  If a wildlife token is placed on to a tile with a pinecone icon, then the active player immediately takes a pinecone token and adds it to their personal supply.
• Replacements: A new tile is drawn from a stack and a new wildlife ​token is drawn from the bag to replace those that were drafted.
• Next player: Play now progresses to the player left of the active player.

Endgame
Play continues until all the face-down stacks of tiles have been depleted and only 3 tiles remain in the drafting area, which should also be a even number of player turns.
VPs are scored from several sources.

• Meeting the scoring criteria on the 5 cards.
• Players score VPs for the biggest single grouping of tiles for each of the 5 habitats. If a player has groupings of 2 mountains and 5 mountains, they only score the group of 5 mountains. The bigger the grouping, the more VPS
  Bonus: For each of the 5 habitats, bonus VPs are awarded to the player with the biggest grouping of that habitat and the player with the 2nd biggest grouping.
• Pinecones: Each unspent pinecone contributes a VP.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
The rulebook for Cascadia talks about the real life habitats and biomes that inspired the game and it's obvious that this is one of those games where a bit of extra attention has been put into the details. 

On to the game itself: Cascadia has a nice mixture of quick to learn rules and depth of gameplay.
This depth comes from forcing players to make tricky and meaningful decisions. This occurs because Cascadia has 3 axis' of play which will influence players' choices.

The first comes from wanting tiles with specific habitats on them; players may want to expand their forests or rivers for example and will be looking for tiles that facilitate that.
The second axis comes from also wanting tiles with specific wildlife icons. If a player needs a fox token in a certain spot, then they'll need a tile with a fox icon.
The third and final axis comes from getting the actual wildlife tokens that are needed to score the wildlife cards.

​All of this means that it's unlikely that players will get all 3 that they want when picking a single pair which would be a no-brainer, they'll probably end getting 2 of they want and sometimes only 1.
​Players will need to adapt and re-strategize contextually, look to optimise their picks and finding other scoring opportunities. Players will probably have to gamble a little bit on getting what they need later in the game.

Pinecone tokens can of course change things. Used at the right time they can really open up a player's choices, getting any pair can make a difference, as can clearing all wildlife tokens in the drafting area if a player is really looking for a certain token.

Cascadia also has a fairly quick playtime, although it sort of occupies a game length that's way too long to be a filler but a little too short to fill an entire evening. I don't consider that a bad thing, you could just play twice! The randomness in setup and scoring gives it a lot of replayability.

If I had a criticism of Cascadia, it would be that sometimes the card scoring can be a little unclear and finicky. The rulebook does offer elaborations on this, but it's a definite little niggle.

Otherwise though, I think Cascadia is ab excellent tile-laying and set collectiing game.
For me it ticks a lot of boxes that good games should; straightforward rules, some depth for decision making and a brisk playtime.
It's one of those games I frequently like to carry in my board game bag when going to game events, so if I meet someone who's never met played Cascadia, they can try it.
As should you!

Gaming totals for July '22 are below.
It was a slow month for first plays but an overall increase in games played.
Looks like we fell back on playing games we knew and loved.

Total games: 57
Different games: 31
​First plays: 5

Saturday 2nd on Board Game Arena
Martian Dice - 16
Lucky Numbers - 28

Sunday 3rd on Board Game Arena
Pandemic - 3
Codex Naturalis - 22
Can't Stop - 17
Stella - Dixit Universe - 9
Lucky Numbers - 29

Tuesday 5th at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club
Raccoon Tycoon - First Play!
Paper Tales - 4

Thursday 7th Aldershot
Race for the Galaxy - 15
Honshu - 4
Heckmeck - 12
Sushi Roll - 6

Saturday 9th on Board Game Arena
Lucky Numbers - 30
Regicide - 2
Martian Dice - 17

Sunday 10th on Board Game Arena
Regicide - 3
Jump Drive - 9
Dragonwood - 11
Fruit Picking - 5
Azul - 6
Lucky Numbers - 31
Martian Dice - 18

Tuesday 12th at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club
Hellapagos - 2
Muffin Time - 3
In Vino Morte - First Play!

Thursday 14th Aldershot
The Crew: Deep Sea Mission - 31
Railroad Ink - 30

Saturday 16th on Board Game Arena
Regicide - 4
Lucky Numbers - 32

Sunday 17th on Board Game Arena
Regicide - 5
Railroad Ink - 31
Parks - 10
Can't Stop - 18
Lucky Numbers - 33

Tuesday 19th at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club
Switch & Signal - 2

Saturday 23rd on Board Game Arena
Race for the Galaxy - 16
Lucky Numbers - 34
Regicide - 6
Martian Dice - 19

Sunday 24th at The Sovereigns
Love Letter: Adventure Time - First Play! -
Switch & Signal - 3

Sunday 24th on Board Game Arena
Regicide - 7
Loco Momo - 10
Barenpark - 3
Sushi Go! - 14
Can't Stop - 19
Lucky Numbers - 35

Tuesday 26th at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club
Escape: The curse of the Temple  - First Play! -
Space Base - 13

Sunday 31st on Board Game Arena
Regicide - 8
Chromino  - First Play!
Space Base - 14
Railroad Ink - 32
Azul - 7
Can't Stop - 20
Lucky Numbers - 36