|
18th October 2022 It's a Tuesday and we're at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club. The Victorian era; a time of expansion, industrial and otherwise. Become a capitalist! Create your business and run your production line. What's in a game?
Component quality ranges from good to very good in Furnace. Cards and card tokens are the pretty standard good quality most games now have while all the wooden tokens are solid and good quality. The bidding tokens in particular standout as really chunky, tactile discs. Artwork is good throughout the game with a nicely illustrated buildings and businesses. It makes good use of a varied and colourful palette which helps to differentiate between the company cards which depict a variety of factories or offices and warehouses etc, which despite all being different sort of look a little samey. Portraits used for capitalist cards are equally good quality. The game's iconography looks a little daunting but in practice is straightforward and fairly practical. There are essentially 5 resources depicted and some basic mathematics mostly saying how to turn one resource into another and how may times it can be done. How's it play? Setup
On to play Note: The rules described below use the 'advanced' variant rules, there's a reason for this which will be discussed further down. The goal in Furnace is to acquire the most money by the end of the game. Furnace is played over 4 rounds. In each round players will be bidding for company cards then adding them to their personal production lines. Next they will run their production to produce goods and ultimately generate money which is what wins the game. The game uses a normal turn order during auction, with the first player bidding first before bidding moving to the player on their left. The production phase can be played out simultaneously.
Endgame Once 4 rounds have been completed, the game is over. Players calculate how much money they have accumulated. Monies are tallied, most money wins Overall
Furnace packs a lot of gameplay options into what is in essence quite a small package. The game consists of a deck of cards, some tokens and that's it Even so, each of the main 2 phases provide players with interesting and meaningful decisions. There are 2 mechanics to the auctioning and both are unique and present players with unusual options and interactions with other players. Using bidding discs instead of money in auctions is an interesting proposition. First it means players only have 4 bids they can make and they can't re-bid on the same card if they get outbid. Players will need to determine what's important to them and bid appropriately. Turn order can make a difference here. A player going first who bids their 4-value disc on a card guarantees they will get it. Going later or last in bidding is not necessarily a bad thing to do, it allows a player to see what opponents are going for and bid accordingly. There's definitely a higher level of play at work here from watching what other players look like they need and potentially taking it or denying it to them. Hate bidding I guess? Which brings me to the other auction mechanic; compensation. Firstly, compensation works as sort of balancing mechanism, if a player loses a bid, they may still get something for their losing bid. Secondly, it's a mechanic that can potentially be exploited by players to gain resources quickly. A player make take the risk of making a lower value bid on a card, hoping to be outbid for the compensation, of course this can backfire and they may end up with a card they don't want to play. Talking of playing cards, the next interesting mechanic how cards are played during the production phase. I'll start by saying that whenever we played Furnace it was always using the 'advanced' variant 'production line' rules. By default the game does not use a production line, instead players just activate cards in any order they choose. In my opinion this makes the game less engaging. I can't stress enough that the variant rules are vital to what makes Furnace a good game. Having to think about where to place company cards is compelling and intriguing. Frequently cards will be useful both at the start and end of a production line forcing players to think hard make meaningful decisions in order to optimise their production lines. Additionally, it's genuinely gratifying to run a production line that has been put together efficiently and ends up generating lots of cash. Furnace is a game with a quick play time. In fact I found that the game's 4 rounds came to a conclusion all too soon, still having the urge to continue building my engine and that's a pretty good sign of a game I enjoy. It's also a sign of good design balance; having a 4 round limit forces players to be as ruthlessly efficient as possible with little room for unnecessary moves. 4 round limits are something I've seen in other engine building games too. So in conclusion; Furnace is pretty easy to learn, has a fast playtime but still manages to present players will a variety options both in auctioning and engine building. If these styles of games interest you, then Furnace is definitely a game to try. I found it a engaging and entertaining experience.
0 Comments
13th October 2022 It's a Thursday and we're in Aldershot for a evening of gaming entertainment. Do you like salads? Do you like points? If so, then maybe you'll like Point Salad, a game about well... about making salads and scoring points with a literal point salad mechanic! What's in a game?
Point Salad's cards are pretty basic, they don't seem laminated and feel a little flimsy. Although unless you treat them badly, it shouldn't be a problem. There isn't much art to Point Salad, only the illustrations for the 6 types of veggie. These are colourful, chunky illustrations with thick line art. I like it and think it suits the game's light, breezy theme. The game's only iconography is the 6 vegetable types. For the most part, they are clear and distinct. EXCEPT for the onion and tomato images which not only look a little similar but both use shades of red for their associated colour. It's not a gamebreaker by any means but it definitely can be a little confusing and could have been clearer The scoring criteria are pretty easy to understand, it uses a mixture of the icons and text to explain their individual rules. How's it play? Setup
 What the beginning setup might look like.
In Point Salad players will be drafting cards from the central selection. They will be drafting veggies to create sets and drafting scoring cards to score those sets. Point Salad uses the typical turn structure with the active player acting before play progresses to the player on their left. During their turn, the active player must perform 1 of the following 2 draft actions, additionally, they may then also perform a free action.
Endgame Play continues until all cards have been drafted and then goes to scoring. All cards are scored all ways! That means that if for example, a set of carrots can gain VPs from 2 scoring cards, then they are scored twice and so on. Points are tallied, highest score wins.  Each pair of onion & carrot scores 5VPs (25), pairs of carrot & tomato also score 5 (10), each carrot or onion score 1 (11), every 3 onions scores 8 (16) and finally, each carrot or cabbage scores 1 (5) for a grand total of 67VPs. Overall
Point Salad is a easy to learn game, there are only 2 actions (And 1 free action.) to choose from and 1 core tenement to remember; scoring cards score off of veggie cards. The depth comes from what is done with those 2 decisions. Getting scoring cards early on will give a player an objective to aim for but also can limit their drafting options. Conversely, concentrating on veggie cards early will give a player some flexibility when it comes to acquiring scoring cards, the risk here though is that optional scoring cards may never become available because other players may get them first or they may get flipped to the veggie side or in game with a lower player count, may not even be in the game. All of this means that planning ahead can be a two-edged sword. It's definitely worth trying to plan ahead, synergy between scoring cards, i.e., multiple scoring cards that score off 1 type of veggie can led to big scores. However, the drafting area's landscape is likely significantly change from turn-to-turn and players will also need to adapt to circumstances as they arise. Players will also need to mange having to take cards they don't need or want and look to create or exploit new scoring opportunities as they appear. The optional free card flip rule offers players a little flexibility. They'll be times that a points card with a negative may prove a liability might be worth flipping which negates the negative and also provides a veggie for another points cards. Again, this is all contextual. There's also a higher level of play at work here. Players can try and anticipate their opponents are hoping to do and possibly stymy them. Taking specific veggie cards or scoring cards they might want or even taking veggie will cause points cards from the related column to be flipped to replace them It means that Point Salad generally provides players will meaningful decisions and choices to make. I find Point Salad an enjoyable game, it makes a great filler, plays up to 6 and also a good crossover or family game. It's a game that you shouldn't take too seriously, it's a light, fun quick game. In fact it's so quick to play that it seems like the set up time longer than the play time! Which is my only, minor criticism of an otherwise good game. It this sounds like your kind of thing, you should definitely give Point Salad a try. 9th October 2022 Another Sunday and another gaming session on Board Game Arena. Do the roll and bump and put the trick taking back. Do the roll and bump and put the trick taking back. When the dice are good, so are you. Next time you roll, you know what to do. Do the roll and bump and put the trick taking back. OK, dodgy references to 80's adverts aside, Roll'n Bump blends trick taking, set collecting with a dash of push your luck into a interesting little dice game. Caveat: we've only played Roll'n Bump digitally. What's in a game?
 4-of-a-kind, a straight of 3 and a single 3.
Each of the 4 colours used on cards also have a unique pattern associated with them. This is a good accessibility feature. The joker card is of course the exception, having all 4 colours and all 4 pattern types on it. Otherwise, the game has no artwork. There's almost no iconography to the game either. There's only the 3 types of card to learn and that's trivially easy to learn. How's it play? Setup
On to play Players roll dice to create tricks to place on cards and then claim those cards in which in turn scores them VPs. Depending on the available cards, there are 3 ways this can be done. Additionally, the active player has the possibility of 'bumping' other players' dice. I.e., the other player's dice are removed from the card and replacing by those of the active player! Roll'n Bump uses the typical turn order of the active player taking their turn before play progresses to the player on their left. On their turn, the active player takes the following actions.
Endgame Play continues until one of the decks has been emptied (The joker does not count.), when this occurs, all players immediately claim cards they have dice on and the game goes to scoring. Scoring All cards score in 2 ways, firstly they score their base VPs but then they also score as sets as per their colours: The more cards in a colour set, the more bonus VPs it earns. The joker can be added to any single colour set as chosen by the owning player. Points are tallied, highest score wins. Overall
Roll'n Bump is such a pared down game focused on the core of its push-your-luck driven gameplay without almost no 'schticks' that it's hard to find much to write about! It does exactly what it says on the tin. It has fairly straightforward, light rules which can be picked up very quickly, especially since it utilises mechanics which will be familiar in some way or other to many people. Creating straights or sets, rerolling dice twice, it's all common stuff. Roll'n Bump would make a good crossover game. Decision making is also pretty straightforward. Players must recognise and decide when and how to push their luck. Roll'n Bump provides a classic risk-and-reward conundrum; settle for a low-scoring card or risk reducing that score to 0 to potentially score a different, higher value card. Despite the overall simplicity of Roll'n Bump, there is a innovative mechanic to be found in the game; the bonus die. I like how it can give an edge to a player without giving them extra dice to place. Being able to bump other players' used dice from the bonus dice can provide players with meaningful decisions. There will be times when a player might not put a die on a card because it could be used to acquire the bonus die for their next turn. If I had one criticism of Roll'n Bump and considering it's a push-your-luck game, it might be a facetious criticism, it's that there's a lot of luck to the game! Taking some big risks to put some dice on a card only to have another player flippantly bump them with a single lucky roll can be pretty frustrating. Sometimes, someone will win simply because they lucked into a very good roll but that's the nature of the beast and something anyone playing this type of game should come to expect. Roll'n Bump is unremarkable and doesn't really stand out from the crowd however it manages to tick all the right boxes for a push-your-luck trick taking game and offers a solid, simple and fun game without any associated fiddliness. It also has a fairly quick playtime and would serve as a good filler or finisher game which is why we actually play it on a fairly regular basis. If you're on the look out for a push-your-luck, trick taking game, Roll'n Bump is worth considering. 9th October 2022 Another Sunday, another session of gaming goodness on Board Game Arena. Travel around North America, fulfil tickets, draft cards, create routes in Ticket to Ride. Caveat: We've only played Ticket to Ride digitally. What's in a game?
I suppose that you could call the art on the board muted but I would say it's functional and unobtrusive. The board is quite busy as it is with all the routes crossing back and forth, overly elaborate art would just obfuscate important information, so it feels like a good decision to me. Each colour of train card has it's own unique illustration which helps with accessibility issues. The illustrations are perfectly good if a little plain. The destination cards essentially replicate the art on the board. There's no notable iconography in Ticket to Ride and the game is straightforward to comprehend. There's just the 9 types of train car to remember and that's easy and intuitive. I imagine the biggest hurdle to overcome in the game's presentation is finding destinations on the map and the iconography does a lot to make that as easy as it can. How's it play? Setup
On to play In Ticket to Ride, players broadly speaking have 3 objectives, these are; build as many routes as possible, create a connection between the locations on their destination cards and finally, create the longest contiguous set of connections. All of these will contribute VPs towards their final score. This is done by drafting cards which in turn allows players to create routes. Ticket to Ride uses the typical turn structure of the active player taking their action before play progresses to the player on their left. In their turn, the active player can perform exactly 1 of the 3 following actions.
Endgame When the active player has 2 or less train meeples remaining, the end game is triggered. Every player including the active player has 1 more turn then the game goes to scoring. Players will add points from destination cards to their running total from the game and the player with the longest set of connections gains bonus VPs. Destination cards are now revealed:
Points are tallied, highest score wins. Overall
Ticket to Ride is a very popular, well regarded game and it's easy to see why. Lightweight rules that are genuinely elegant, almost minimalist that're easy to learn, a game that's intuitive to play with a theme anybody can understand. Ticket to Ride is definitely a game with crossover appeal, is a good game for casual play and introduction to board games. It also has a fairly random distribution of destination cards throughout a game which provides a good level of variety to games. This pared down set of rules means that Ticket to Ride also provides players with clear meaningful decisions to make. Basic tactics are pretty straightforward: Players are in a race to connect their personal destinations before they risk getting blocked by other players. They'll need to balance getting cards they need to draft and claiming routes. Since a player's routes do not need to connect, any player essentially can claim any route, anytime if they have the appropriate cards. Completing destination cards can be quite satisfying and they add an extra wrinkle to the gameplay. Being able to acquire more of them during play can be a game changer, earning more VPs but conversely, is also risky, getting a card that is not completed obviously costs VPs. What makes this even more interesting is during the late game this risk/reward mechanic becomes even more pronounced. Acquiring a destination card late in the game can be very risky because the player may not have the required time to complete the connection. However, late in the game is when a player's train network is at it's biggest, consequently it's possible to gain destination cards which have already been connected. There's also a higher level of play in Ticket to Ride. Watching what opponents are doing and successfully anticipating what connections they're trying to make can allow a player to block or slow their progress down by claim routes they might want. If you look at the map, you will see that that there are numerous routes which are only 1 or 2 space grey routes that are very easy for a player to claim, e.g., a 1 space grey route can be claimed with any train rail card. It's obvious this is by design. This brings me to my main contention with Ticket to Ride: It's a game that promotes negative gameplay. What do I mean by that? Claiming a route another player needs will force them to spend additional turns acquiring train car cards and then taking longer to claim routes around the block. In terms of action economy, a player wasting 1 action to make an opponent waste 5 or 6 can be pretty advantageous. Preventing an opponent completing a destination card may earn that player no VPs but for their opponents, it will cost them points. Many Eurogames have mechanics which have sort of a balance to them where if a player screws over an opponent, they will also frequently screw themselves over and only occasionally can they screw an opponent over while advance themselves. Ticket to Ride is not like that! Although, in part this will be down to the type of people playing. Dedicated players will learn and exploit blocking at every opportunity and why not? Games are for winning and getting a score of 1 while opponents get 0 is still winning. More casual players may not care about higher level tactics. Early games will be light and fun but even so, after a while they'll end up realising (Probably by accident!) how powerful blocking can be. Remember, earlier I said how connecting destinations can feel satisfying, well getting blocked can feel equally unsatisfying. There's a lot that's good about Ticket to Ride and I wanted to like it but the negative aspect can just be too frustrating. I understand why the game has a lot of fans, I'm not one of them. 4th October 2022 Tuesday is here again and it means more gaming fun with the Woking Gaming Club at The Sovereigns in Woking. You can't really go wrong when you set your game in ancient Greece! Is that the case here in this drafting, tile laying and city building game? What's in a game?
 Start tile.
 Tiles.
 The tiles that come with Akropolis are possibly the thickest I've ever seen, they are incredibly chunky and solid feeling - fantastic! The little cubes are wooden I think. I don't usually bother mentioning the packaging for games, but the game box comes with inserts already fitted and filled with all the pre-punched tiles. This is excellent packaging. The game uses bird's-eye illustrations of different types of buildings or neighbourhoods crossed with splashes of colours to represent the different districts. The same is true of the plazas. Thus the 5 districts are differentiated by both colour and illustration. There 5 types of plaza each which correspond to a different district, they're also differentiated by the associated colour and have a small illustration similar to their associated district. Finally; quarries are grey. The artwork is fairly subdued but the colour makes it pop. It's perfectly adequate but I wouldn't call it great. The game's iconography is straightforward to learn and intuitive to understand. The districts and their respective plazas are easily associated. How's it play? Setup
On to play In Akropolis, players will be building their own city by drafting tiles from the construction site and adding them to the existing tiles in their personal area. Each type of district scores points differently and additional points can potentially be scored by building upwards! Akropolis uses a standard turn order with the active player taking their action before play moves on to the player on their left. During a turn, the following actions will occur:
Endgame Play continues until only 1 tile remains in the construction site and no stacks remain to refill it. The game immediately ends the final tile is not played (I've seen this happen!) and goes to scoring. Scoring needs to be explained in a little detail. The 5 types of district each score differently (As explained below). Thus, each type will generate it's own base score. Each hex that scores for it's district will score 1VP per hex per level. For the purpose of scoring, tile height does not affect adjacency. This means a house space will still be adjacent to another house space even if they're on different levels. Finally, covered hexes score no points. Once the base score for each district has been established, that score is multiplied by the number of stars on plazas (Not plazas themselves.) of the matching type the player has. E.g., a player who has base barrack score of 5 and 4 stars on their barrack plaza spaces will score (5x4) 20 VPs. Height makes no difference to plaza scoring multipliers: House plaza spaces always have 1 star (And thus a x1 multiplier.), barrack, market and temple plazas always have 2 stars (x2), while garden plaza spaces always have 3 stars (x3). As with districts, covered plazas do not contribute towards multipliers. There are actually 6 ways to score VPs.
Points are tallied, highest score wins. Overall
Drafting and tile placement mechanics, differing scoring based on relative positioning, even building upwards: These are game elements we've seen elsewhere lots of times but in Akropolis, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The game manages to wrap all of this into a elegant easy to learn, quick to play package that provides some thoughtful and meaningful decisions to make. Just like city-planning, it pays to think ahead in Akropolis. Players want temples surrounded but they won't want to that with barracks and so on. Because the different scoring criteria pull against each other, players will need to think about where to place districts both immediately and in later turns in the most optimal manner. Maximising scoring while minimising conflict with other districts. In practice, most players will generally end up trying to concentrate on 2 or 3 of the types of district, it's hard to score well in all 5. All of this is of course contextual, depending on what appears where in the construction site. Players may find themselves competing for a particular type of district or if they're lucky, picking a district type being ignored by other players. There's a bit of higher level play going on here that involves watching what other players are concentrating on and either denying it to them or ignoring it to optimise scoring with a different district. It's also worth noting that districts are asymmetrical. While the garden district has flexible placement rules and and has a higher scoring multiplier, garden districts and garden plazas are both less common meaning competition between players for them can be fiercer. Being able to build upwards adds an extra wrinkle into the mix because it can provide greater scoring but can also provide a headache. Sometimes players will need to cover a point-scoring district to get more points from a different district. This bring me to quarries, they're initially mostly useless and can get in the way until covered but managing to put 3 together in a 'triangle' means covering them with a tile will earn 3 stones, very useful. If players aren't careful, they can quickly run out of stones and only being able to take the free first tile during a turn can be painful experience when something so much better is further down the line. Putting together blocks of quarries not only creates a place to build upwards but also earns stones when doing so. All in all, I think that Akropolis is a very good, fun game, it's perhaps a little too long and involved for a filler and short for a whole gaming session, however, when players know what they're doing, it's entirely possibly to play a couple of games in a hour and why wouldn't you? Akropolis immediately became a firm favourite of mine and is liked by pretty much everyone I play it with. If tile-laying games appeal to you, this is definitely worth a try. The gaming totals for September '22 are in. A slight increase in the total number of games played from 45 to 49, however, the variety of games is down a touch, this seem at least partially to do with the number of first plays in September which halved from 12 to 5! Total games: 49 Different games: 33 First plays: 5 Friday 30th Farnborough
Machi Koro 2 - 2 Thursday 29th Aldershot Heroquest - 5 Tuesday 27th at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club Port Royal - 23 Fluxx - 5 Cloud City - 16 Monday 26th Simon's Firefly: The Game - First Play! Sunday 25th on Board Game Arena Lucky Numbers - 44 Martian Dice - 21 Loco Momo - 13 Cloud City - 15 Potion Explosion - 14 Dice Forge - 12 Sea Salt & Paper - First Play! Friday 24th Farnborough Jump Drive - 12 Puerto Rico - 3 Thursday 22nd Aldershot Deep Sea Adventure - 9 Heroquest - 4 Tuesday 20th at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club Valeria: Card Kingdoms - First Play! Monday 19th Simon's Forbidden Desert - 2 It's a Wonderful World - 2 Sunday 18th on Board Game Arena Lucky Numbers - 43 Can't Stop - 25 Railroad Ink - 36 Barenpark - 4 Carcassonne - 10 Sushi Go! - 15 Break the Code - First Play! Saturday 17th on Board Game Arena Jump Drive - 11 Thursday 15th Aldershot Deep Sea Adventure - 8 Heroquest - 3 Tuesday 13th at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club Tiny Epic Dungeons - 3 Sunday 11th on Board Game Arena Lucky Numbers - 42 Railroad Ink - 35 Stella - Dixit Universe - 11 Dragonwood - 12 Via Magica - 11 Azul - 8 Hanabi - 3 Thursday 8th Aldershot Dream Home - First Play! Century: Eastern Wonders - 5 The Crew: Mission Deep Sea - 33 Tuesday 6th at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club Love Letter - 62 Quacks of Quedlinburg - 5 Sunday 4th on Board Game Arena Lucky Numbers - 41 Can't Stop - 24 King of Tokyo - 10 Parks - 12 Burgle Bros - 2 Thursday 1st Aldershot Heckmeck - 14 Heroquest - 2 |
AuthorI play, I paint. Archives
March 2025
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
