26th September 2021

Sunday evening gaming on Board Game Arena has drawn to a conclusion. The final game of the night was Love Letter, read my blog about it here.

26th September 2021

Sushi Go! was the next game of Sunday gaming on Board Game Arena.
Read my blog about it here.

26th September 2021

The next game of Gaming Sunday on Board Game Arena was Via Magica. Read my thoughts about it here.

26th September 2021

Sunday gaming on Board Game Arena continued with Dragonwood.
Read my blog about it here.

26th September 2021

Sunday evening gaming on Board Game Arena continued with Cloud City.

Travel around Cloud City and defeat Darth Vader and his stormtroopers... oh wait... what? This is an entirely different Cloud City!

Be an architect and build up tower blocks in your model city to create walkways between them in this 3D tile laying game.

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

What's in a game?

• Tiles: There are 48 tiles in Cloud City, including 4 starter tiles.
  Every tile displays 2 building symbols, either adjacent to each other or diagonally opposite each other. Each building symbols is either blue, green or brown.
  The starting tiles are numbered 1-4.
• Buildings: Cloud City makes uses of building meeples (Beeples?), these also come in 3 heights that correspond to the 3 colours. The blue are the shortest, green are at the middle height and the browns are the tallest.
• Walkways: As with the other components, the walkways come in the same 3 colours and are used with the building meeples of the matching colour.
  There are 31 walkways in each colour and their lengths vary from 1 to 8 (1, 2, 3, 5 & 8.) and they are marked as such, this is also their victory point value.

There's virtually no art in Cloud City, it's plain but functional and to be honest, I can't where you'd put it.
The games iconography is similarly minimal but easily understood.
I will add that since we've only played Cloud City digitally, it's hard to gauge how it would look with physical components, which could be quite good, judging from the photos I've seen.

How's it play?
Setup

• Cloud tiles: Shuffle the cloud tiles (Not including the starting tiles.) into a face-down stack and deal 3 face-up next to the stack.
• Walkways: Put out the walkways according to colour and length.
• Starting tiles: Determine the starting player and give them starting tile 1, give player 2 tile 2 and so on.
  Each player should put their starting tile down in their own play area, then take and place the matching building meeples on their spaces on their tile.
• Hand: Deal 3 tiles to each player.

On to play
In Cloud City each player will create a 3x3 grid of tiles, buildings and walkways. Points are scored from walkways which are worth points according to their length, thus walkways score 1-8 points each.

• ​Play tile: The active player must play one of the tiles from their hand and it must be played adjacent to a tile that has already been played - which in the 1st round would the starting tile.
  When playing a tile, the player's city cannot exceed the 3x3 limitation, in the early rounds there will be a lot of freedom on where to place tiles but towards the end, locations become limited.
• Place walkways: The player may choose to take walkways from the supply and connect 2 buildings of the same height, they are free to connect them as they are built or later. Furthermore, they can take as many walkways in a turn as they can use.
  There are however, some restrictions; a walkway cannot cross over an empty space without a tile and a building cannot be connected by more than 2 walkways, so no T-junctions or crossroads.
  If the supply has run out out of the walkways a player needs, then it's too bad.
• Draw: The active player must fill their hand back up to 3, they may take one of the 3 face-up tiles available or draw blindly from the stack
• Next: Play progresses to the player to the left.

Endgame
Play continues until all players have completed their 3x3 grid, which always takes 8 rounds. Each player's victory points is equal to the value of the totalled numbers on all the walkway tokens they played.
Points are tallied. Highest score wins

Overall
In some ways, Cloud City is a standard tile-laying game: Put down tiles to create links and score points from them.
However, because Cloud City adds a extra dimension (Sic.) to gameplay, the game has that sweet spot of simplicity of rules but depth of choice. Players can choose to try and create single long paths that score big on walkways or zigzagging small paths that score little but often. Players will also want to utilise all the empty space that their tiles inevitably generate. Managing to have walkways pass over or under others is an efficient way to rack up points. It lends Cloud City a almost puzzle-like quality.
The rule limiting walkways to 2 per building is excellent, a good example of less is more, it prevents players from relatively easily creating a web of walkways and forces them to try and anticipate the direction they will need to take when putting down buildings, getting it wrong can cost points. Ideally, players will want to have a single snaking walkway that goes from building to building.

That brings me to the game's other central mechanic; drafting.
Cloud City employs 2 instances of drafting.
Most obviously, is the tile drafting. Players can choose which tile from 3 to take to replace one they've played or draw blindly. This is a common implementation of drafting in tile placement games.
It's the other type of drafting that's more interesting. Cloud City's rules mean that player's do not need to immediately connect buildings with walkways and this can present players with a conundrum:

If a player does not immediately place walkways on their buildings, they can be taken later and placed in way to optimise scoring. There's a risk though, since there's a limited number of each walkway, particularly the 8 pointers, of which there are only 3 in each colour. Once they're gone, they're gone and to get one later can make a player lose out.
Conversely, players can take and place walkways immediately, this is safer in one regard, but the risk here is that the tiles placed later may provide alternate better ways to score.
This is something that players will always need to bear in mind.

Cloud City mostly presents players with meaningful decisions to make and I found the urge to try and create the perfect network of walkways fairly compelling. It was a enjoyable experience that was easy to learn and played fairly quickly.

26th September 2021

Sunday evening is here and I'm logged into Board Game Arena for some gaming goodness.

Similo: Fables is one of several different Similo games, as you may have surmised from the title, Similo: Fables is themed after folklore and fairy tales.

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

What's in a game?
Similo Fables comes with a deck of 30 cards. Each card depicts a character from fairy tales, folklore and other fantastical stories, characters such as the 'Three Little Pigs', 'Cheshire Cat' and 'Cinderella'.

The artwork on the cards is stylised and cartoony as well as bright and colourful. It suits the game's light tone well
Similo: Fables uses no iconography to speak of.

How's it play?
​Setup

• Clue-giver: Choose one player to be the 'clue-giver', the remaining players become 'guessers'.
• Secret character: The clue-giver should shuffle the deck and draw 1 card, the character on that card will be the secret character.
  Then the clue-giver should draw 11 more cards and shuffle in the secret character card, then lay them out face up in a 4x3.
  The clue-giver then draws 5 cards into their hand.

​On to play
Similo: Fables is a co-operative game where the glue-giver and guessers must work together. The objective is for the guessers to guess which one of the 12 displayed characters is the secret character from clues given by the clue-giver and eliminate the other 11. How is this done? Read on:

• Clue: The clue-giver must play one of their 5 cards and try and use it to provide the guessers some information.
  Vertical: If the clue is played vertically in the portrait orientation, it means that something on the clue-card is in some way the same as or similar to the secret character.
  Horizontal: If the clue is played horizontally or in the landscape orientation then it means something about the clue-card is different to the secret character.
• Draw: The clue-giver draws another card from the deck, so they always have 5 cards in hand.
• Eliminate: Using the information provided by the clue, the guessers must choose a card to remove from the available cards. In the 1st round, the purpose is to remove 1 card which is not the secret character.
  If the guessers ever eliminate the secret character, the game is immediately lost.
• 5 rounds: Similo: Fables is played over a further 4 rounds, at the start of each subsequent round, the clue-giver must provide another clue.
  Round 2: After the clue-giver has provided a 2nd clue, the guessers must now eliminate 2 cards.
  Round 3: The guessers must now eliminate 3 cards after receiving a 3rd clue.
  Round 4: 4 cards must be eliminated.
  Round 5: by the time the game reaches the 5th round, there will only be 2 cards left and the guessers must eliminate one of them.

Endgame
During any of the games 5 rounds, if the players eliminate the secret character card, then the game is collectively lost by all players.
If the game reaches the 5th round and they correctly eliminate the final false card, then by matter of elimination, the players will left with the secret character as the last card, in which case all the players collectively win.

Overall
From the brevity of this blog, you can see that Similo: Fables is a game that manages to be both easy-to-learn and also co-operative, 2 game elements that quite often don't easily sit together.
While the game is uncomplicated, it has some inherent depth that derives from it's interpretive/deductive mechanics which essentially means that with these sorts of game mechanics the players provide the depth.
The clue-giver must agonise about how to give the best clue and try to anticipate how the guesses will receive it. In turn, the guessers must agonise about which cards to eliminate and try to gauge what the clue-giver was thinking. These are all meaningful decisions, which is always a good thing.
Although it has to be said, that the more players know each other, the easier games like this become.
I also like how the stakes increase every round, more and more cards will need to be eliminated and with a dwindling selection to chose from, it gets easier to make a game ending mistake. This keeps the tension high.

Similo: Fables didn't quite deliver the gameplay we were looking for though; truth be told, it was perhaps a bit too light for us.
Having said that, from observing the artwork, it seems that the game is targeted at younger players and for them, I think it's a good game, promoting creative thinking and especially with its co-operative nature, where everyone wins or everyone loses. I also think it's can be a good party game for non-gamers to play.

21st September 2021

The final game of Tuesday gaming with the Woking Gaming Club in The Sovereigns in Woking was DC Deck Building Game: Heroes Unite, which is both quite a mouthful and not pirate themed game, unless of course there's a Pyscho-Pirate card in there somewhere or something?

So apparently there are several differently themed DC Deck Building Games out there and Heroes Unite is one of them, it is both an expansion to the core game and a standalone game.
​All these deck-builders make use of a game-engine called the Cerberus System.

What's in a game?

• Superhero cards: There are 7 of these oversized cards, each one representing a DC comics superhero such as Hawkman, Nightwing, Booster Gold and each one has a unique special ability.
  You'll notice that there's no playable Superman, Batman et al, that's because they're all already available in the core set. Anyway, who doesn't want to play as Batgirl over Wonder Woman, right?
• Starter cards: Each player begins with the same set of 10 starter cards.
  7 punch cards: Each punch card provides 1 point of currency, called Power in this game.
  3 vulnerability cards: These are basically trash cards, they do nothing but take up room in a player's hand.
  If you've played a deck-builder before, then I'm sure this will all be familiar to you.
• Cards: These cards are bulk of cards in the game, they contain various types of cards such as heroes, villains, superpowers, locations etc. They all function differently, but basically all have a cost (In power) and confer some sort of bonus such as extra power or extra card draws, some also provide a method of affecting other players or provide defence against attacks.
  Many cards will also provide victory points.
• Kick cards: These are slightly more powerful versions of the starter punch cards, the also provide 1 victory point each and are always available to purchase.
• Supervillains: Supervillain cards are a little like villain cards but differ in 3 ways.
  First appearance: When a supervillain card is flipped and revealed, it immediately has a once-off effect, this is ​typically negative and affects all players with an attack.
  Cost: Like other cards, supervillain cards can be bought with power and added to a player's discard stack, however they coast a significantly higher amount of power.
  Victory points: Supervillain cards also provide victory points, as with the cost, they tend to be higher than victory points provided by normal cards.
• Weakness cards: Every weakness card that a player owns during the game end deducts a point from their victory point total. Obviously players don't buy these, but negative events or attacks will force players to take weakness cards.

That's pretty much it for components.
The cards are standard quality playing cards as you'd expect.
It's also no surprise that they're all decorated with fairly high quality colourful comic book styled artwork, although I'm uncertain if it's been sourced from actual comic books.
There's little iconography, most of the game's information is provided via text on cards which is mostly quite clear.

How's it play?
Setup

• Supervillains: Shuffle the supervillain cards into a face-down deck.
• Kick cards: Put these into a face-up deck
• Weakness cards: Also put these into a face-up deck.
• Cards: Shuffle these into a face-down decks and deal 5 of them, these will become the 'line-up', cards that the active player may purchase.
• Superheroes: Either randomly give each player a superhero card or choose one each.
• Player decks: Give a set of 10 starter cards to each player, who should then shuffle them into a face-down deck and draw 5.
• Begin: Determine the start player.

On to play

• Play cards: The active player may play any or all of the cards in their hand in any order and resolve them accordingly. Cards are played in front of the active player and remain in play until the end of their turn.
  Purchase cards: The active player may use power generated to purchase any available cards including kick cards and revealed supervillains, if they have enough power they can purchase multiple cards. However, any cards bought are not immediately replaced, so there are limits to how many cards can be bought.
  Any cards purchased go into the active player's discard pile.
  Card abilities: Card may allow players to draw more cards, go through their discard pile, attack other players, force them to draw weakness cards and so on. These can be resolved in any order the active player chooses.
• End of turn: Once the active player has finished their turn, the following events occur.
  Discard hand: The active player discards any cards they did not play.
  Powers: Any cards with 'end of turn' powers are now triggered.
  Discard played cards: The active player now discards cars they played, these cards are now no longer considered in play.
  Refresh line-up: Any cards that were purchased from the line-up by the active player are now replaced from the deck.
  Draw cards: The active player (Whose hand should be empty.) draws 5 cards into their hand.
  Supervillain: If no supervillain card is visible; which will be the case in the first turn or if the active player just bought (Defeated!) one, then flip a supervillain card over and put it on top of the supervillain deck. The first appearance action is then immediately triggered.
  Next player: The player to the left of the current player becomes the active player.

​Endgame
Play continues until 1 of the following conditions is met.

There are no more supervillain cards to flip over, i.e., there are no more supervillain cards.
Or.
There are not enough cards to fill the line-up with 5 cards, i.e., the deck has run out.
When one of these conditions have been, all players put all their cards into their discard stack.
​
Players then total the victory points they get from cards and deduct 1 point for each weakness card they have.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
​Hmm, what to say about DC Deck Building Game: Heroes Unite. 

Players will look to use their cards to generate currency that allows them to buy more cards that generate even more currency, eventually acquiring the most powerful cards confer extra abilities and grant victory points.
It's pretty standard deck-building fare which contains mechanics and elements that will be familiar ground if you've played other deck-builders, which is to say the core mechanic is pretty solid, enjoyable fun and generally always provides players with meaningful choices to ponder.

However, the game adds a few new elements to the traditional formula.
The addition of a line-up mechanic is a definite positive, it forces players to adapt to whatever cards become available instead of falling back on tried and tested strategies.

Even so. it's still quite easy to quickly create combos and it can be very satisfying to do so; but perhaps it's too easy
I was told Ant, the game's owner that sometimes a player gets to build up momentum much quicker than other players and they end up creating more and more combos, allowing them to (In Ant's words.) 'steamroller' their opponents.

Heroes Unite also provides a slightly greater focus on targeting players and attacking, both by players and supervillains! It lends the game a slightly different, more antagonistic feel and offers a extra avenue to strategy to pursue.

It's hard to fault Heroes Unite but at the same time and apart from the theme, it doesn't really stand out from the crowd.
​
If you don't own a deck building game and fancy getting one, you could worse then getting Heroes Unite, it's a good a place to start as anywhere.
If you want a superhero themed deck builder, then this is worth a look.
If you want a DC Comics superhero themed deck builder, then it's definitely worth a harder look.
If you want a DC Comics superhero themed deck builder where you play as side-kicks and 'B-listers', then this really is the game for you!

21st September 2021

Tuesday night game at The Sovereigns in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club.

Continuing the Speak like a Pirate day theme, the next game of the evening was Port Royal. Read my blog about it here.

21st September 2021

It's a Tuesday and I'm at The Sovereigns in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club.

In honour of Talk Like A Pirate Day, the first game of the evening was Jamaica, a game of pirate racing.

However, before we move on:
"My wife's gone to the West Indies."
"Jamaica?"
"No, she went of her own accord!"

With that out of the way, let's continue.

How's it play?
Setup

• Game board: Put all the treasure tokens on to their allotted spaces on the board, then shuffle the treasure cards and remove 3, place the 9 remaining cards in a face-down deck on to their space on the board.
  Put out the dice on their spaces.
• Player decks: Give each player a player deck and put the corresponding ship on to the start/finish space.
  Each player should shuffler their decks into a face-down deck and draw 3 cards.
  Give each player a player board.
• Start player: Determine the start player, who becomes the Captain.

Now we're ready to to begin.

On to play
​In Jamaica, the Captain rolls the dice and assigns them to the game's 2 different phases per turn. Each player then chooses 1 of their 3 available cards to play and then performs the day and night actions on those cards. how effective those actions will be are determined by dice rolled and allocated to day and night.

• Captain rolls: The player who is The captain rolls the 2 normal six-siders, then they assign 1 die to the 'day' phase and the other to the 'night' phase, they are free to consult their hand of cards before doing so.
• Play cards: Once the dice have been allocated to the 2 phases, each player must play one of their 3 available cards face-down in front of them. Once this is done, all cards are revealed.
  Actions: Starting with the captain, who becomes the active player, all players perform their 2 actions. The day action is fully completed first, then the night action is completed.
  There are 2 types of action - movement and loading with a total of 5 different actions.
• Loading: There are 3 loading actions for the 3 types of resource - food, gold and gunpowder, they all function identically.
  The active player loads a number of resources into their hold equal to the dice for that phase. If they are loading food as the night action and the die for the night phase is a 3, then they load 3 food tokens.
  Holds: There are however, some restrictions on loading. Resources must be loaded into empty holds, if the active player has no empty holds then they must discard all the resources from a hold to make room, furthermore, the resource being discarded cannot match the resource being loaded.
• ​Movement: There are 2 types of movement.
  Forward arrow: The green arrow pointing right represents forward movement, this allow the player's ship to move forward a number of spaces equal to the dice on the pertinent space. E.g., if the die on the morning space is a 4 and the played card has a green arrow for the morning action, then they can move forward 4 spaces.
  Back Arrow: The red arrow that points left represents backwards movement. The player must mover their ship backwards a number of spaces equal to the relevant die!
  Stopping: Once a ship has ended its movement, the player must deal with the space they have stopped at, this can be detrimental if player's aren't careful. There are 3 types of space.
  Port: If a player's ship ends movement on a port space, they must pay the cost shown in gold.
  At sea: If the player's ship ends movement on a space where they are at sea, indicated by the squares, they must pay the cost in food.
  Can't pay: In either instance above, if they active player cannot pay the cost of the space they have ended movement on, they must move their ship backwards until they land on a space where they can pay the cost, or on to a pirate lair where there is no cost, see below for more info.
  If a ship does not move this turn because they played a card with 2 load actions, then they do not have to pay any cost.
  Pirate lair: If player stops at a pirate lair and there's a treasure token there. They can discard the token to draw a treasure card. If the token here has already been taken then nothing happens. In both situations there's nothing to pay.
  Combat: What happens if a ship moves on to the same space as another ship, glad you asked; see below.
• Combat: When a ship moves on the same space as another ship, then combat ensues!
  The player who moved on to an already occupied space is considered the attacker, the player who was already there is the defender.
  The attacker decides how many gunpowder tokens they want to commit, rolls the combat die and adds the 2 values together, this is their combat strength.
  The defender then decides how many gunpowder tokens to commit and rolls the combat die, adding the 2 values together to generate their own combat strength.
  Whoever has the highest combat strength; wins (See below)! In the case of a draw, nothing happens.
  Star: If the star result is rolled, it can dramatically change the outcome of combat.
  If the attacker rolls the star, they immediately win the combat, the defender doesn't even get to roll!
  If the defender rolls the star, then they win the combat regardless of the attackers combat strength.
  The winner: The winner of combat may chose 1 of the following 3 actions.
  Take resources: They winner may take all the contents from one of the loser's holds.
  Plunder treasure: the winner may take one of the loser's face-down treasure cards.
  Curses: The winner may give one of their cursed face-down treasure cards to the loser, curses indeed!
• Next player: Once the active player has completed their 2 actions, play progresses to the player to their left until all players have completed their actions. All players draw another player card and the compass token moves 1 player to the left and a new round begins.

​
Endgame
Play continues until a ship reaches the start/finish, upon which the current turn is completed and the game goes to scoring. There are 4 sources of scoring.
Players score points according to where their ship finished, the start/finish scores 15 and points go downwards from there. If a ship failed to pass the -5 space, then they lose 5 points.
Every gold token a player has on their player board scores a points.
Treasure cards score their points and cursed treasure cards deducts from the player's score.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
In Jamaica, players must balance the need to load resources with the need to move along the game track, doing too much of one or the other will probably be detrimental. They'll need to judge when it's the right time to move with the right amount of resources. The rules limiting how players fill their holds forces players to make decisions about what they carry on their ships.
Players will also need to mitigate bad rolls and unfavourable cards, e.g., playing a red arrow backwards move when the die shows a 1.

At the same time it's also a good idea to keep an eye out for other players. If another player is 3 spaces away and one of the dice rolled a 3, there's always the risk that opponent will end moving on to your space, provoking a fight, which could prove costly. Perhaps it might be a good time to load some gunpowder...

Obviously, all of this is to some extent is influenced by the dice rolls, having all the gold in the world wont help if a player can't reach a port! It means players will need to adapt to this randomiser and change strategies when the dice - and sometimes the captain don't give player the results they need.

Jamaica is a cheerfully colourful game with fairly light programming game where players 'only' have to think 2 moves ahead, with a theme that fits well with the mechanics. Jamaica also has elements of resource management and a touch of player interaction and conflict. It's an easy to learn programming game that is fun to play, particularly if you like a little bit of jostling between players and generally presents them with meaningful choices to make.

19th September 2021

The last game of Sunday evening gaming on Board Game Arena was Love Letter.

Read my blog about it here.