2nd April 2021

It was a Friday and I was logged into Board Game Arena on my PC.

As the name suggests, Stone Age is a game about the trials and tribulation faced by the inhabitants of prehistoric communities.

Caveat: The digital version of this game was played at this time, but we had played the physical version on previous occasions.

What's in a game?
Stone Age is a worker placement game and at its core takes place on a central game board which is divided into various different locations, into which workers can be placed to activate the associated action. Some locations may contain any amount of workers, others are limited by numbers.

• Board: A stone age settlement in a wilderness vista is shown on the board, settlement locations are concerned with the advances and inventions and wilderness locations are used for gathering resources. As well as the obligatory scoring track, the board contains the following elements:
  Tool maker: There is only 1 space here for a single worker, using this location allows a player to gain or improve their tools.
  Field: There is also only 1 space herer, this allows a player to increase their tribes agriculture score on the agriculture track.
  Hut: There are 2 spaces here, to utilise the hut a player must place 2 workers on to the 2 spaces at the same time. This allows the player to acquire an additional worker.
  That's right, this is the nookie shed!
  Plains: This is where workers are placed to acquire food, presumably by gathering food or hunting animals. Any amount of workers can be placed here.
  Forest: Workers are placed here to acquire wood. Up to 7 workers can be placed here.
  Clay pit: Players can acquire clay here, also has a maximum of 7 worker spaces.
  Quarry: Used to gain stone, also has a maximum of 7 workers spaces.
  River: Players can place workers here to pan for gold, again, a maximum of 7 workers can be placed here.
  Agriculture track: Used to track the agriculture level of each time. This also represents the advancing knowledge of a tribe and ability to stave off hunger through farming.
• Building tiles: There are 4 spaces on the board for building tiles. Tiles each have a space for a single worker which is used to buy the tile. The cost varies according to the tile, but is always in resources. Tiles score victory points.
• Civilisation cards: As with building tiles, there are 4 spaces on the board for civilisation cards, the cost of civilisation cards is also paid in resources but unlike building tiles, the player can choose which resources to spend. Cost ranges from 1-4 resources and is dictated by which space the card is filling on the board, the leftmost space costs 4 and each space to the right decreases the cost by 1 down to a cost of 1 on the 4th and rightmost space.
  Like building tiles, each card has a single space for a worker, allowing the controlling player to purchase the card.
  Civilisation cards have a variety of benefits, most cards give a one-off bonus, typically resources and most cards can also contribute towards collecting a set for victory points.
• Player board: Each player has their own board, used to store resources and workers. They are also used to display which building tiles and tools they have accumulated, face-down civilisation cards are also placed on the board.
• Meeples: Each player has 10 workers in their colour and starts the game with 5, the remaining workers can be earned during the game.
• Food tokens: Standard round card tokens that are used to represent food.
• Resource tokens: All of the game's 4 resources (Wood, clay, stone & Gold.) are represented by wooden tokens.
• Tool tokens: These double-sided square card tokens show either 1 & 2 or 3 & 4 on their sides.
• Dice: There are 7 dice, used when gathering food or resources.

Components in Stone Age are what you'd expect, the cards, tiles and boards are solid if unremarkable, they do the job and look as if they'll last well, which is all you can ask for. The meeples and the 4 sets of resource tokens in are constructed of wood and are the nicest components.
The game board has a bright and colourful depiction of a stone age community on the edge of the wilderness that's quite eye-catching. The player boards have similar, if plainer artwork, again this is fine since most of the time they'll be covered in components.
The civilisation cards essentially all use the same piece of artwork with elaborate game iconography providing some variation and the same is true of the building tiles. It's nothing to write home about (Or blog about I suppose?) but is perfectly acceptable.
For the most part, the art is good. ​

How's it play?
Setup

• Give each player 5 meeples and a player board, also give each player 12 food.
• Put all the food and resources on to the game board in their allotted places, food goes on the plains, wood on to the forest and so on.
• Shuffle the civilisation cards and place 4 of them on to their 4 allotted spaces face-up. The remainder of the cards should be placed as a face-down deck next to the board.
• All 28 building tiles should be shuffled into 4 stacks of 7. The number of stacks available in a game should equal to the number of players participating. Each stack used should be placed face-up in one of the 4 allotted spaces for them.
• Determine starting player.

That's more or less it, now the game's ready to go.
Gameplay is broken up into 3 phases, place workers, resolve workers and end of round.

• Place workers: Starting with the 1st player and going clockwise, each player may put meeple(s) into a single location, there are some stipulations though:
  Worker limits: Most spaces limit to the number of workers that can be placed there, obviously this cannot be exceeded.
  No reinforcements: Once a player has placed any number of workers into a location, on a later turn they cannot add any more workers to that same location, regardless of how many open spaces might be available.
  No passing: Players cannot pass and must place all of their workers.

Once all players have placed their workers, it's time to resolve those actions.
Again starting with the first player, they must remove all of their workers from one location at a time from every location they've placed workers and immediately resolve the associated actions as they do so, returning the meeple to the player's board. Players are free to remove their meeples in whatever order they see fit (This can have significant impact on game play.). The following actions are available:

• Tool maker: Allows the player to take a tool token or increase a tool token's level. A player may have up to 3 level 4 tools.
  Tools are beneficial when a player's tribe goes gathering food or resources (See below for more information.).
• Hut: Allows the player to take one of their unused meeples and add it to their player board, ready to be deployed in the next round. Players can have a maximum of 10 workers at their disposal.
• Field: Allows the player to increase their agriculture level, (This can be very important, see below.).
• Gather food: The active player may gather food, they take a number of dice equal to the workers they placed on the plains location and roll them. Then divide the result by 2 and round-down, that's how much food they get. Thus with 2 dice, the average result is 7 which would net the player 3 food.
  Tool tokens may be used once per round to increase the value rolled by the value of the tool, which can be very useful.
• Gather resources: Functionally, this is identical to gathering food except it gets harder because the number used to divide the dice roll gets higher.
  Gathering wood requires the player to divide the result of the dice roll by 3 instead, so 2 dice with an average result of 7 would net the player 2 wood. This incrementally increases for all the resources, culminating with gold which requires the dice roll to be divided by 6! 2 dice getting an average of 7 would net the player 1 gold and if they rolled 5 or less (Not that improbable.) then they'd get 0!
  Tools can also be used to increase the value of these rolls.
• Buy building tile: The active player can buy the building tile they placed a worker on by paying its cost as indicated on the tile. This immediately increases the player's score as displayed.
• Buy civilisation card: The active player can buy the civilisation tile they placed a worker on to, paying the 1 - 4 resources as required and placing the card face-down on their player board.

Once the first player has removed all their workers, play proceeds clockwise until all players have retrieved all their workers, then the game goes to the end of round.

• Feeding: Firstly, each player acquires extra food equal to their level on the agriculture track and adds it to their player board.
  Then they must feed their tribe. Feeding a tribe requires spending an amount of food equal to the amount workers a player has available, since all players begin the game with 5 workers, this cost will always be at least 5.
  If a player have used all their food and still doesn't have enough, then they can substitute in resources on a 1-to-1 basis (Which can be pricey!), if a player is unwilling or unable to do this, then they immediately suffer a -10 point penalty! That is undoubtedly harsh.
• Restock civilisation cards: If any civilisation cards were bought during the round, slide cards to right to fill the empty spaces, then deal cards from the deck into the spaces now on the left. This is a typical 'conveyor belt' mechanic.

The first player marker move clockwise and a new round begins.

Endgame
There are 2 conditions that can trigger the endgame.
If any of the building tile stacks have all 7 of their tiles purchased, it triggers the endgame, the current round is concluded and the game goes to the end game and then scoring.
At the end of a round, if there aren't enough civilisation cards to fill a 4 spots on the board, then the game immediately ends and goes to scoring.
In both instances, tribes must be fed for a final time.
Final scores are tallied by adding the score from the victory point track, points that come from sets of civilisation cards and 1 point for each (Non food) resource the player possesses.
Highest score wins.

Overall
If I have one criticism of Stone Age, it's that the first 3 opening moves in any given round are generally always no-brainers, that's because the tool maker, hut & field locations are such a high priority because they confer very good rewards that would usually be stupid for players to pass up. If you're the 4th player, you won't get a look in unless another player is really desperate for something else or doesn't know what they're doing.
I'm not sold on the resource gathering mechanic either, yes it's quite nice but it can leave you at the mercy of the dice rolls that makes low rolls feel frustrating but somehow high rolls not feel satisfying.

Otherwise Stone Age is a mid-to-light worker placement game that is fairly easy to learn but feels perhaps a little generic, however, it does provide a fair level of depth.
The game manages to generally provide a choice or two too many for players to cover with workers, forcing them to prioritise their actions and making meaningful decisions. An extra worker is good, so is the agriculture required to feed them, the tools can help with gathering resources which are useful to buy cards and tiles and so on.

So if you want to play a worker placement game that isn't too taxing on the grey matter, you could do a lot worse than Stone Age.

21st March 2021

Sunday afternoon gaming continues; I'm logged on to Board Game Arena and Zoom, the second game of the day is Tokaido.

I know several people who have visited Japan but to my knowledge none of them had made the 500km trip along the Tokaido route.
If you like the idea of taking a hike to enjoy hot springs or staying at an inn or looking at beautiful scenery, then maybe this is the game for you.

Caveat: We played a digital version of this game, we have also played the physical version previously.

What's in a game?

• Game board: A faint map of Japan is shown on this very wide game board, it also depicts The Tokaido Road as a line that threads its way east/west along the coast.
  From this line there are many branching lines that lead to symbols that represent what are essentially tourist traps that players can visit, each branching line also displays 1 or 2 dots. Dots determine how many players may stop at a particular location at any given time.
  Apart from the starting inn, there are a further 4 inns along the road that sort of divide the game up into 4 rounds.
  Finally the board has spaces for the 7 decks of cards used in Tokaido.
• Cards: Tokaido uses a lot of cards, mostly for the sets that players will be collecting.
  Souvenir card: When a player stops at a village, they will have the option to buy souvenir cards. There are 4 different sets to collect and each set can have up to 4 cards in it.
  Encounter cards: Players may stop at random encounters along their journey, this means drawing an encounter card and following it instructions.
  Hot spring cards: Unsurprisingly, these cards are collected by visiting hot springs, each card is worth either 2 or 3 points.
  Meal cards: When a player reaches an inn, they will have the option of purchasing a meal which will be worth victory points.
  Sea, Mountain & Field panorama cards: These 3 sets of cards form 3 wide vistas of the relevant terrain type. As you collect the cards for a set in numeric sequence, the vistas widen until the set is completed. 3 cards for the fields, 4 for the mountains & 5 for the oceans.
  That's not all!
  Achievement cards: Players earn additional victory points for various achievements
• Meeples: Your standard wooden player meeples that come in a variety of colours.
• Coins: Standard quality card chits themed to look like Japanese coins.
• Character tiles: Each player is randomly given a character tiles that grants them some unique benefit or bonus action.

All of the components are of a reasonable standard quality. Artwork and the art direction is suitably stylised with a Japanese theme, colourful and looks good. The panoramas in particular look very nice.
Art on the board looks quite minimalistic with white as the dominant colour, consequently the Tokaido route draws the eye's attention. However, the symbols used to represent the different destinations along the route are quite small and look samey despite being distinctly coloured from each other. It was something found to occur on both the physical and online version. This is only a minor gripe.

How's it play?
Setup
Each player is given a meeple and a randomly determined character tile, the 7 decks are prepared and placed on to their allotted spaces on the game board. The starting order is determined at the first inn, then money is then given to players according to the starting order.

On to play
Game play is very simple to understand, the purpose of Tokaido is to travel to the eastern end of the road, having the most pleasant journey, this is done by stopping at the various locations along the way.

• Tokaido does not have a round order per se; instead the player at the 'back' (and the furthest from the end destination) is always the active player, if a player is several spaces behind the other players, it is possible that they can have several turns in a row. At the start of the game the fist player is actually at the back.
• The active player decides how far they want to move their meeple along the Tokaido road, up to and including the next inn stop. They may choose to skip branches and other players.
  They can stop at any open available space along one of the branching routes, if a branch has all of its spots already taken, then the active player cannot stop there. 
• Once the player stops, they carry out the action associated with the type of location they stopped at (See below for more info.).
• Play then continues with the player in last place.

Now we know how to move across the board and stop at locations, but what do those locations do?

• Encounters: When a player stops at a encounter location. they draw an encounter card, this will give the player some sort of benefit.
• Farms: Stopping at a farm earns the active player 3 coins, I guess those farms are wealthier than they look!
• Hot springs: Stopping at a hot spring allows the active player to draw a hot spring card, this immediately score them 2 or 3 points.
• Panoramas: There are 3 types of panorama locations, field, mountain & sea. 
  Panorama cards are not randomly drawn. When the active player stops at a one, they take a panorama card of that particular type. All panorama cards are numbered and the player take the lowest numbered car that they do not already posses, thus, the first time they stop at a particular panorama they always take a '1' card, followed by a '2' and so on until they complete a panorama. Players immediately score points equal to the number on the card they just played.
• Temples: A player who stops at a temple can donate 1-3 coins to the temple for an equivalent amount of victory points that are immediately scored.
• Villages: Upon entering a village location, the active player draws a number of souvenir cards, then they can buy any number of them (Provided they have the funds.), remaining cards are put at the bottom of the souvenir deck. Souvenir cards are put into sets and are scored at end of the game.
• Inns: Including the last inn, there are 4 inns that all players must stop at during their journey. The first player at an inn reveals a number of meal cards and can choose to buy one, the remaining are left available for following players to purchase. Thus the early players have the best choice.
  Meal cards cost 1-3 coins and always immediately score 6 points. You may be wondering why the cost of buying meal cards vary when the victory points they confer is always 6? This is explained below.
  When all the players have arrived at the inn and have purchased a meal card (Or not.), then the next leg of the journey can commence. The player who came in last is still considered behind the other players and goes first and so on.

Endgame
Play continues until all players have reached the last inn.
Souvenir sets are now scored.
Then achievements are scored. There are achievements for completing panoramas first, having the most encounters, donating the most money to temples and so on. One achievement earns victory points for spending the most on meals at inns - which explains the varying costs for meals.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Tokaido is a fairly straightforward game to play, on the surface the game gives players a simple decision to make - where to stop and what to collect? It's a little more involved though, the question is; how much do you want to visit a certain spot?
As the active player, someone can choose to move their meeple as far as they need to in order to reach a specific spot, however, moving too far means that a player will end up sitting around as other players get multiple turns. Conversely, moving too slowly risks locations being filled with other players. It feels like quite a balancing act.
Generally we found that there's a basic strategy of moving as little as possible in an attempt to maximise the number of turns that are available and just collect what you can.
The games other balancing act is money; knowing when to keep money and knowing when to spend it is important since spending money can earn victory points and it needs to be done as efficiently as possible.

There's minimal player interaction here and generally player's can't interfere with each other. A canny player can try and predict where other players are looking to go (All cards are kept face-up.) and try to get there first but it mostly it hardly seems worth it.

All of this makes Tokaido a gentle, laid back game to play, it sort of fits the theme of talking a walking holiday.
Players used to heavier games may find that they feel like nothing is happening during the game. This may be partially down to playing online.
The online version doesn't feel as good as the physical one. Being able to collect and build panoramas or complete souvenir sets with physical components feels a lot better than when they're collected in the online version. It's a small sense of achievement but a sense of achievement nonetheless.

If you want a light and chilled game to play though, you can do worse than Tokaido.

21st March 2021

It's a Sunday lunchtime and I'm logged on to my PC in the living Room and signed into Board Game Arena.

The first game of the day was Takenoko, a game about gardening in Japan... and pandas.

Caveat: We played this game online, but I own a physical copy which I've set up for the photos.

​What's in a game?

• Tiles: Hexagonal tiles to be precise, they represent plots of land.
  Pond: This blue tile is the starting tile.
  Plots: Plots come in 3 colours, green, pink and yellow. There are 9 in each colour and some of the plots come with hexagonal improvement symbols (more about improvement symbols below.) that confer special rules. The artwork on these tiles is uniformly bright and colourful. The tiles are printed in thick board and feel sturdy.
• Bamboo segments: There are 3 types of bamboo, green, pink and yellow, corresponding to the 3 types of plot. These are designed to stack up, representing the surging upwards growth of bamboo. Unlike the plot tiles, there is NO even distribution between the different coloured bamboo, green bamboo is the most common and pink is the least common.
  They're made of colourful pieces of plastic and are designed to slot into together, it's a little fiddly as the pieces feel slippery but it's not a deal breaker and they do make the game look nice.
• Irrigation tokens: These little blue wooden sticks are used to track which plots have been irrigated or not.
• Improvement chits: These hexagonal little chits confer special rules when placed on a plot, they are identical to the symbols that come printed on some plot tiles. They are pretty standard quality chits with functional art. There are 3 types of improvement.
  Enclosure: The panda cannot eat bamboo on a plot with an enclosure.
  Fertilizer: When bamboo grows on a tile with a fertilizer improvement, it grows twice as quickly
  Watershed: A plot with a watershed improvement does not require irrigation.
• Objective cards: These cards are smaller than typical playing-card sized cards and are standard quality, the art is fairly functional but continues the game's is bright and colourful art direction. Completing objectives is how players earn points. There are 3 types of objective:
  Plot objective: When plots are placed into the game area in a certain manner (For example; 3 green tiles in a row.) and irrigated, it can be claimed as completing the objective, 
  Gardener objectives: To complete a gardener objective bamboo must be grown to a certain height.
  Panda objective: The panda must eat a certain amount of bamboo of certain colours to complete these objectives cards.
• Emperor card: This is the only other card in the game, it is worth 2 points and the player who triggers the endgame will earn it.
• Action markers: Two of these round wooden markers are used by each player to track their actions each turn.
• Weather die: This is a very nice largish wooden die with rounded corners and special symbols on each face.
• Player boards: These boards are used to track player actions and store bamboo, irrigation and improvement token acquired. They are colourful and nicely illustrated.

How's it play?
Setup

• The starting pond tile is placed in the centre of the play area, the panda and the gardener are both placed on it.
• The plot tiles are shuffled and placed in a face-down stack.
• Each type of objective card is shuffled and placed face-down in its own deck.
• Each player takes a player board and 2 action markers.
• One of each objective card is dealt face-down to each player, these should be kept hidden in hand and only revealed when completed.

Now we're ready to go.

On to play
​After a starting player is chosen, play proceeds clockwise.

• Weather die: Other than in the very first round, at the beginning of their turn each player must roll the weather die, this will usually give the active player a bonus of some sort.
  Sun: When the sun face comes up, the active player can take 3rd action in their turn which must be different from their other 2 actions (More on this below.).
  Rain: The active player may place a bamboo segment on the irrigated plot of their choice.
  Wind: The active player may chose to perform 2 identical actions instead of 2 different actions.
  Storm: The active player can place the panda on the tile of their choice, the panda will eat a segment of bamboo as per usual (See below for more information.).
  Clouds: The active player may take an improvement chit of their choice, this can be immediately put on to a plot tile or on to the player's board to be used later.
  ?: If the ? face comes up, the active player can choice one of the 5 other weather results to apply.

Once the weather die has been rolled, the active player can then take 2 different actions from a choice of 5, depending on the result of the weather die, they may get 3 different actions or a choice of 2 identical actions.
Actions

• Draw plot tile: The active player draws the top 3 plot tiles, keeps 1 and returns the other 2 face-down in any order they choose. Then they must place the tile they kept down in the playing area; either it must go next to the starting pond tile OR next to 2 other tiles.
  The tile will immediately grow a bamboo segment of its colour if it is placed next to the pond OR adjacent to an irrigation token. This can only ever happen once for a tile.
• Take an irrigation token: After taking an irrigation token, the active player may put it on their board for use later or immediately place it on the playing area as per the rules.
  Other than plots directly adjacent to the pond or with watershed symbols, all plots need to need to be irrigated to produce bamboo.
  When placing an irrigation token, it must either start from the pond tile or continue previously laid irrigation token. When laying this token, it runs along the edge of a plot tile or between 2, however it never runs along the edge of the pond tile.
  The token will irrigate the 1 or 2 plots it touches, as per usual, if this is the 1st time a plot is irrigated, it will grow a bamboo segment of its colour.
• Move gardener: The active player can move the gardener. The gardener can only be moved in a straight line and 'through' the 'face' of the hexagonal plot tile, thus there are a maximum of 6 ways he can move. He can move as far as the active player decides and can cross any number of tiles, he cannot however move through any gaps encountered.
  Bamboo will grow on the plot tile that the gardener stops on, additionally bamboo will also grow on any adjacent irrigated plots of the same colour.
• Move panda: Moving the panda follows the exact same rules as moving the gardener. When the panda stops in a plot tile, he will eat 1 segment of bamboo from that tile if available. The active player takes that segment and places it on their player board.
• Take objective card: The active player may take a single objective card of their choice from one of the 3 objective decks into their hand. Players have a 5-card hand limit.

Free actions
Some actions do not count towards the usual 2 action limit. The active player can carry out any number of free actions at any time during their turn.

• Complete objective: The active player may complete one or more objectives by placing the card(s) out of their hand into their playing area.
• Place irrigation token: The active player may place any number of irrigation tokens that are reserved on their player board, following the normal rules for irrigation.
• Place improvement chit: The active player may place any number of improvement chits that are reserved on their player board, following the normal rules for placing  improvement chits.

Endgame
The endgame is triggered after someone has played a certain number of objective cards, dependant on the number of players.
The player that triggered the endgame immediately take the Emperor card and conclude  the rest of their turn normally. Then continuing in clockwise order, every other player has one more turn.
After this, scores are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Firstly I'll mention how the game is uniformly nice, presentation is excellent and component quality is good, nothing to criticise here.

Since there are always objectives to work towards in Takenoko, there are generally always meaningful decisions to make.
The game's player interaction comes from conflicting objectives such as one player getting the gardener to grow bamboo and another getting the panda to eat it.
This is also a game about recognising opportunities and adapting to the card and plot tiles you draw and to a lesser extent the results from the weather die and not about strategizing too much.

There is some strategy regarding the uneven distribution of bamboo (Generally objectives that involve the less common bamboo score more points.) but that's about it. I suppose there could be a high level strategy where you watch what other players are doing and try to anticipate what objectives they're going for and try and scupper them but you'll probably scupper yourself as well in the end.
Optimising your actions per turn seems to be very important.

Takenoko is a relatively simple and straightforward game to play, the concepts behind it should make it a fairly accessible crossover game. For dedicated gamers there might not be enough meat on the bone to satisfy them though.
Ultimately Takenoko is a light somewhat gentle game that you shouldn't take too seriously if you play it. ​If you want something heavy on strategy and direct interaction, it's probably not the game for you. However, if you're in the mood for an undemanding game, it's a reasonable diversion. 

15th January 2020

It's a Friday evening, I'm logged into Zoom on my laptop and I'm sitting in the living room.

So it's time to play Forgotten Waters, a co-operative fantastical pirate exploration game that we've only played over video chat.

Caveat: I've only played this game over video chat and never in person, I've also never actually seen the physical components for the game. So this blog will probably be a bit different to the usual.

Before we begin
Forgotten Waters is one of this new breed of boardgames that requires an app to play, not just an app to help, but actually required to play.
Additionally, the game has a Remote Play Assistant app available. This app is what has allowed us to play online and in this time of Covid-19 is a welcome feature.

What's in a game?
Because I've never seen the game physically and because the remote play assistant app replaces the need for some components, it's hard to gauge what exactly, is what?

• Character sheets; there are 21 of these, each represents a different type of pirate, for example; the lovesick pirate or the assassin pirate, there is a lot of writing and infomation here.
  For remote play this is replaced with a 40+ page PDF file, players will need to print off the 2 pages for their chosen character.
  Backstory; each character has a backstory, this includes 5 blank lines the player needs to fill in, such as the name of a flightless bird, or a plant or a famous pirate or whatever. These are incorporated into the character's story events which is told during the course of the game and their ending.
  Skill matrix; every character has 6 skills, Explore, Brawn, Hunting, Shooting, Swagger and Navigation. Skills have levels that go up to a maximum of 7, although each characters will have different maximums for them. This is represented as a matrix. As a character improves a skill, spaces in the matrix will be filled in, some of these spaces contain stars, when a space with a star is filled in, it allows a space on the character's constellation to be filled in (See below.).
  Constellation; each character also has a constellation that consists of about 18 spaces, these include 5 breakpoint spaces. Each breakpoint space that is filled in gives the character an event, which in turn give them bonuses. Events also contribute towards the character's ending story.
  Events; when an event space is filled in on a constellation, it triggers an event for the character. There are 5 events in order, each one has an amusing little story and a game bonus for the character.
  Endings; If the players successfully complete their mission, their character will have 1 of 3 possible endings, bad, good or legendary. The more events they completed, the better the ending.

• Treasure cards; these confer special abilities or bonuses to the holders, some are in play all the time and some are once use only. Players can hold up to 4 treasure cards.
• Story cards; functionally similar to treasure cards, these can only be acquired as part of a characters story and are never drawn randomly.
• Standees; standard 2d markers for players.
• Twelve sided dice; standard d12, one for each player in the same colour as a standee. d12s are used primarily for skill rolls, but are also used for other random purposes.
• Misfortune token; these are handed out to players according to negative events. When a player makes a roll, they suffer disadvantage and discard a misfortune token.
• Board; a smallish board marked out with empty blue hexes to represent the open seas.
• Encounter tiles; these hexagonal tiles are placed according to story requirements or randomly drawn for encounters which can be islands, unusual weather or other ships, hexes are numbered.
• Encounter book; this is a wire bound book that folds out flat. A 2-page spread is used for each of the games numerous encounters. One half of a spreads is an evocative piece of artwork, the other half contains the available actions for that encounter and rules that are relevant to those actions.
• Objective tiles; Each story-mission utilises a series of objective cards. As the players complete them, the story will unfold, drawing them ever closer towards its conclusion.
• Ship dials; the player's ship has a set of six  statistics; Hull, Supplies, Discontent, Crew, Hunger and Threat that are managed by these dials.
• Cannon tiles; these double-sided tiles represent the ship's cannons. Cannons are rated from 1-4 in quality and have a loaded and unloaded side.
  The player's ship may have up to 4 cannons.
• Infamy track; infamous pirates react quicker! Its true! All characters have position on this track that rises and falls in relation to other characters according to the choices they make. Turn order is determined by the infamy track.
• Enemy dials; challenges presented by enemies or obstacles are tracked by these dials. An enemy ship would have score for Hull, Sails and Crew for example. An obstacle might be storm that needs to navigated .These would be whittled down by the players during their turns.
• Forgotten Waters app; this app is required for play. It contains all the information and entries on encounters, descriptions and dialogue as well as required spot rules. It also serves a sort of choose-you-own-adventure function, encounters will sometimes give players branching choices to make and this is also handled by the app.
• Remote play helper app; Unlike the other app, this isn't mandatory. It browser based and allows the game to be easily played online, it replaces function of a most of the game's components, except for the encounter tiles.

That's it for most of the components, other than some minor tracking tokens (I think!).
It's hard to talk about the quality of these physical components though as I've never see them other than briefly over video chat.

But I can talk about the apps.

It's clear that the game's developers have put a lot of thought and effort into insuring the quality of the game app. It's very slick with professional voice acting and production qualities, scripting and dialogue is very well written and often witty. There were frequent chuckles at gags that hit the mark more often than not.
I'm not sure what to think though, like many people; the idea of a game needing an app to play sits uncomfortably with me. We all know the question, what happens to the game a few years down the line, how long will the developer support the app?
However, I doubt this game would even exist in this form without the app. The game seems to have hundreds of differing encounters that can contextually change according to the story mission being played. It would require a fairly elaborate book to manage all of this physically, slowing the game down and no doubt adding to the cost.

The remote helper does it's job well enough to facilitate remote play and is easy to use, apart from the occasional need to refresh the browser and put everything back in sync, it works perfectly well.
I cannot say enough about how useful it is though. We played a game with 7 players and someone commented how how this was the most people they'd talked to in a year. In these times of self-isolation it has proven to be a godsend.

One minor criticism I have is about the character sheet PDF. It is a slight oversight that it is not form-fillable as it could save on the unnecessary use of paper.

How's it play?
First of all, one of the 5 available missions is selected, this will give the players a series of objectives to aim for, then play can begin.

Essentially, the ship travels from hexspace to hexspace dealing with the encounters that are generated by each space.
Each encounter will have 7 pertinent actions. Players take turns placing their standee on the action they want to perform,
Some actions are mandatory, some can only be completed by one player and others can completed by any number of players.
Additionally, some actions become locked when they are completed whilst others can be repeated.
Some actions are specific to certain encounters or mission objectives and others are generic and frequently appear during encounters.

Players place their standees on the encounter spaces in order of the infamy track, Forgotten Waters utilises a real time mechanic during encounters. If players have not placed their standee/worker in the allotted time, they receive a misfortune token as punishment.

Once all workers have been placed, then actions are carried out but in the order shown on the encounter.

There are a great many different action in the game, related to combat, sailing, exploring, trading, objectives etc.

Often players will be given 2 or 3 sub-choices for their chosen action and sometimes they will have 2 actions they actions they can perform.

Many actions will increase one of the player's 6 skills, frequently this will then require a roll using the relevant skill, generally there are 3 different levels of outcome depending on how high the final roll is.

Once all actions have been repeated, the turn ends. Depending on the situation, players may have the choice of staying and repeating the parts of the encounter which are not locked (Like foraging for supplies, burying treasure etc.) or they have be forced to move on to another encounter.

This continues until the endgame.

Endgame
There are numerous ways to lose.
If the ship's hull, supplies or crew are reduced to zero then it's game over.
If the crew's discontent value increase to or beyond the crew score, then it's also game over.
Finally there's threat rating. Threat can go up and down; the game will on a fairly regular basis call for threat checks, depending on the result this may generate a threat event, this is another type of encounter. The higher the threat rating, the more likely it is that a threat event will be triggered, when one does occur the threat rating is reduced to zero. If four threat events are triggered, then it's also game over.

If all the objectives of a mission are met then the player's collectively win​.
Each character also has an individual ending though, depending on how many stars they filled in on their constellations, this may be bad, good or legendary. Bad endings are usually very bad comical demises for the character, explosions, drownings etc.
​The good and legendary endings are as comical but obviously better for the character.

Overall
​Forgotten Waters is a long game to play, a mission can take 4 or even more hours to complete and the developers are aware of this, all missions come with a natural breakpoint, which can be used a temporary stopping point and then picked up again at a later date.
Mostly the game gives players meaningful co-operative decisions to make and the timer forces them to think quickly.
It's also a well produced, smart game that is entertaining to to play, the app does add to the atmosphere and help with booking.

but I do have some quibbles to do with game balancing.

Firstly; when undertaking tasks, some tasks are more attractive to complete than others. One example, during ship combat:

• A character can choose to Load Cannons, the player can obviously load cannons or get some rerolls, or a mixture of both.
• Or a character may choose to Fire Cannon, this will immediately give the character a point in  their Aim skill, then  they make a roll, if it's high enough, they earn a treasure.

Why would you ever choose Load Cannon over Fire Cannon? Fire Cannon personally earns characters much more. Rerolls are definitely useful, but skill points contribute towards completing constellations, which increase your character's ending and at breakpoints they extra stuff for characters.
Furthermore it exacerbates and perpetuates the imbalance. Once a character starts firing cannons, thus increasing their aim skill, it makes sense for them to continue doing that action, because they're more likely to get better results. So one player can be stuck loading cannons and earning little to nothing and another firing cannons and getting skill points and treasures.
Sometimes it's not so bad because with some actions, multiple characters can perform it but with single-character actions, it can be irritating.
Maybe its deliberate, it certainly can make the infamy track more important for actions that can only be done by one player.
Forgotten Waters is a mostly co-operative game, but it also a little edge of competitiveness as well, players can steal treasures from other players and so on.
Maybe the game wants to force players to choose between what's good for them and what's good for the mission?

Speaking of which, characters seem out of balance. When they earn bonuses, the usefulness of them seems to vary widely, some characters will get permanent items that confer constant bonuses whilst other characters get one-use-only less useful abilities.
Additionally, it appears that constellations are harder to complete for some characters than others for what appears to be no rhyme or reason why.

Luckily they don't affect the game too much, especially since it's co-operative. Other than that I've found it a fun game to play.

3rd November 2020

It's a Tuesday and I'm not at the Woking Gaming Club, I am however in Woking, in Simon's converted home-office for what would be the last time I play a game with a friend in person before lockdown 2 began.
It was an unusual setup, two us were in Simon's office and Colin was dialling in via Zoom, able to view the game through Simon's phone which was clamped above the table.

​Tonight we played Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, the little sibling of Gloomhaven. Like Gloomhaven, it's a cooperative RPG with a legacy element.

Caveat: This blog post may differ a little from the ones I normally write. When we played the game, a number of the components were not used, instead they were replaced with an app, it also allowed Colin to remotely log into the app and see the same information we did. Additionally, both other players were very familiar with the game.

What's in a game?
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion comes with a lot of components and a lot of cards.

• Player board: The game has 4 player boards, one for each of the different character classes. One side has a backstory for the character and other has a illustration and some information on hit points as well as allocated spaces for item cards, discarded, lost and active cards. The artwork here is good and the board high quality and made of thick card.
• Character decks. Each character has their own deck and there are a lot of cards. Only 10 are ever used in a single scenario, but as a character levels up, they will gain access to a wider selection of cards and more powerful cards too, which can be used to construct the 10 card deck. Each card has 2 actions on it, a top half action and a bottom half action (More on this below.), as well as being  numbered from 1-99.
• Combat decks: Each character also has their own combat deck, which are used to modify attack scores during combat. Generally these range from +2 to -2, there are also x2 cards and a 🚫card (Which basically cancels the attack.). As a character levels up, they will have the opportunity to acquire perks​ that remove negative cards and add positive cards to the deck, thus improving their combat effectiveness. Curse and blessing cards can also be temporarily added to a deck for a single scenario.
• Item cards: Characters can buy item cards, these are single use (Per scenario.), once per turn or continuous use cards. These can represent potions, equipment and magic items. There are limits to the number of item cards a character can have equipped in a scenario.
• Objective cards: At the start of each scenario, each player is given 2 objective cards, they pick 1 and discards the other. If the objective is met during the course of play, it contributes towards acquiring perks.
• City cards: In between scenarios, characters may have a random encounter as determined by these cards. They provide the players with an A or B choice that may aid or hinder the characters in the next scenario.
• Map books: There are two coil-bound books that lie completely flat when opened. They contain all of the maps for the scenarios and can be combined for larger maps. Maps can depict starting points. spawning points, objectives, obstacles and dangerous areas.
• Map tokens: There tokens are placed on to the maps and used to represent details on the maps, such as traps, treasures, damaged areas etc.
• Character models: Each character has a model and an upgraded model (For when they reach level 5.).
• Enemy standees: Monsters and enemies are represented by card standee tokens. There are also white and yellow stands the standees go into, yellow stands are used to represent elite enemies.

Those were pretty much all the components that were used. There are enemy combat decks which are constructed for each scenario that determine how combat goes for enemies as well as how and when any special. There are also tokens used to track health for both characters and enemies. Most of this was handled by the app.

What art there is on the components is good and the components are of a high quality.

How's it play?
The game follows the paradigm of an RPG; there are a series of linked scenarios that form a campaign. As characters progress from scenario to scenario, they accumulate experience points and become stronger. Characters are persistent and they and their progress carry over between scenarios.
There are also legacy elements here, decisions that players make during the game will have some sort of effect later on.

Setup
The setup is fairly quick and simple, mostly because the game uses map books instead of tiles.

• The map book(s) are opened at the relevant pages. Any relevant tokens are placed on to the map.
• Players construct decks for their characters and choose what items to equip. They also alter (If needed.) their combat decks, shuffle it and put it face down.
• Enemies are placed into standees and placed on their starting spots.
• Enemy decks are constructed. The game is designed to scale in difficulty according to how many characters will be participating.

On to playing
In each round, the players will choose 2 cards from their deck to play. Enemy behaviour is dictated by the game.

• Choose cards: Each character can perform 2 actions per round - 1 per card played. They can perform 1 top action and 1 bottom action per round, not 2 top or 2 bottoms actions.
• Determine initiative: All action cards are numbered from 1-99. Players can choose from 1 of the 2 numbers on their chosen cards as their initiative. The lower the number, the faster the character acts. Thus players have some choice of when they act. Enemy initiative is determined by the game.
• Carry out actions: All characters and enemies act in initiative order. When a player acts, the character can do both of their actions in any order the player chooses (Regardless of what card was used for initiative.), moreover players don't have to stick to the actions they wanted to use when they initially chose to the cards they played. That is, if circumstances have changed, players have some flexibility in how they respond. Most actions typically involve attacking either in melee or at range and movement. Each class has its own unique abilities such as healing, pushing enemies away or pulling them in, inflicting conditions such as stunning, poisoning etc. Some actions will fill a room with 1 of 6 types of elemental energy and some actions get bonuses if they consume particular elemental energy. Every card also has a basic default move or attack action they can perform. Finally some particularly powerful cards are lost when used (See below for an explanation.). After the actions are completed, the cards are discarded. Enemy actions are dictated by the game.
• Use item cards: Generally, items, equipment or potions can be used at any time as a free action.
• Rest: When it comes to choosing what cards to play, when a character runs out of action cards (Or only has 1 card left.) then they will need to rest. There are 2 types of rest; short and long rests. For a short rest, the player takes their discard pile back into their hand, shuffles tthem and randomly selects a card which is lost. If a player takes a long rest, they retrieve their discarded cards and choose a card to discard: Additionally they regain 2 hit points, however they also have to skip a turn. Cards that are lost, are permanently removed from play for the remainder of that scenario (They cannot be retrieved during a rest.).
• Combat: A card or action will list its damage and range (If applicable.), this is modified by drawing a card from the relevant combat deck. Mostly this will alter the damage by +2 to -2, occasionally it will be doubled or cancelled. As the campaign progresses, cards will be added to combat decks, these include cards which may inflict conditions or generate elemental energy.

I could go into a lot more detail about how combat and actions work as they are a wide variety different conditions and special moves available. But that's the gist of it.

Endgame
A scenario will end when its win/lose conditions are met.

If the players win the scenario they gain experience points, characters gain experience points according to the scenario. Additionally; certain action cards grant characters experience points when played, these are added up as well.
When a character acquires enough experience points, they will level up and gain whatever benefits it confers.

During the game, enemies that are defeated will drop treasure. If characters collect these treasures, they gain gold after the scenario ends.
Gold can then be spent to acquire more or better item cards.

Next, there is an encounter as determined by a randomly drawn city card.

After this, players are given the choice of what scenario to attempt next. This may involve adding a sticker to the map or some other legacy type action.

Overall
There's a lot to think about here.
There's a lot of components to the game too and it might be a bit fiddly. But it seems to me that most of this occurs during setup. I can't imagined how much setup the full Gloomhaven requires without the map books?

The character-gameplay is actually pretty straightforward, simple to learn and goes smoothly enough.
Enemy behaviour may be a bit trickier and it probably pays to have some one who is familiar with the rules (As we did.) when playing.

The action card mechanic was pretty well implemented, it not only gives players options and a bit of flexibility, but meaningful decisions to make.

The rest mechanic is also a good addition, it forces players to act, be decisive and deters them from trying to play overly safe and spend too many turns resting to regain hit points.
Since a character deck only has 10 cards, it means that a plaery will empty their deck in 5 rounds. Then they have to decide to discard 1 card and miss a turn, or discard one at random and continue, which can be a hard decision.
Now you have 9 cards and only 4 turns before facing the same dilemma. Additionally, some cards are discarded when use and so on.
All of this serves to create sense of urgency, a need to complete the scenario before player decks become too depleted. Players will want to minimise the time they waste carrying out long rests.

Combat is a bit of a mixed bag.
There are a good number of special moves, conditions and effects that play a role in combat. The four different characters can feel different in combat because of it.

I dislike the cancel result on the combat deck that waste an attack, I imagine that if a player has set up a powerful move using a card that gets discarded - only to have that entire attack negated, it must feel gutting.
​
I'm not sure how I feel about using individual decks as a randomizer for combat, I can see the appeal of having a customisable individual randomizer for each player, but it seems like having components for the sake of having components. It works well enough, but I'm sure a similar effect could achieved with a single bunch of dice that are collated for individual rolls.

Gloomhaven/Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion are 2 games that are sort of chasing a board game holy grail. These are games that are trying to an give RPG style gameplay and experience, but without a GM.
It's a tricky goal; too simple and it becomes bland and repetitive, too complex and the game gets bogged down in rules, rules exceptions and components.
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion seems to straddle that line fairly well.

Although as I mentioned above, we did use an app to facilitate play. It did have the advantage of allowing a player to join in a board game where he played over zoom!
Maybe this is the way to go, where an app does the GM heavy lifting, I've seen at least one game that requires an app, no doubt there will be more games that do that.

But this raises the question of legacy, an older game can (And probably will.) be rendered obsolete if the companion app becomes unavailable.

Overall though; I was happy enough to play it and will be continuing with the campaign I joined.

27th October 2020

Tuesday evening is here and I'm at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club.

Time for the first game of the evening; Karuba.

​Have you fancied yourself as an explorer just landed on some unmapped jungle island? Well in Karuba you control not just 1 explorer, but 4! All in a rush from beach to jungle in order to find temples, treasure and ultimately glory first before everybody.

What's in a game?

• Player boards: All player boards have 30 spaces in a 6x5 grid. Half of the grid's perimeter is bordered by the beach and the half by the jungle. Each half of these perimeter's is numbered (In increments of 10.) from 10 to 110, these numbers represent compass degrees. There is little artwork here, but what there is, is nice enough
• Path tiles: Each player has 36 identical numbered tiles. Each tile shows a path or a junction. Some tiles will also display a gold or diamond symbol.
• Meeples: Each player has identical tokens, 4 sets of an explorer and a temple, in 4 colours. These are nice wooden tokens.
• Gold and diamonds: Shiny and translucent little plastic tokens are used to represent gold nuggets and diamonds.
• Scoring tokens: There are 4 sets of 4 scoring tokens in the same 4 colours as the meeples. Iin each set of tokens they are worth from 2 to 5 points.

There's not much to be said about the components. The meeples are good classic wooden tokens and the gold and diamonds are a nice touch too. The rest of the components are well made and sturdy.

How's it play?
Set up
The set up for Karuba very straightforward, if a tiny bit time consuming.

• First choose 1 player as a 'caller'.
• Starting with the caller and clockwise order, each player will put a single explorer down in a beach space numbered from 10 to 110 on their player board, at the edge of the grid. All other players must also put down an explorer of the same colour on the same space on their own player boards. Then the player puts down a temple in the same colour as the explorer, but in one of the jungle spaces numbered from 10 to 110 instead; the only restriction is that it cannot be less than 3 spaces away from the same coloured explorer. Again all other players follow suit. Continue until all explorers and temples have been placed. All players should now have all their meeples in identical spaces.
• The caller is given their set of 36 tiles, these should be shuffled and placed into a face-down stack.
• All remaining players should place their tiles face-up in numerical order around their board so that they can be easily found.
• Gold, diamonds should be placed in an easily accessible spot for all players.
• The amount and value of scoring tokens used will be dependant on the number of player. 1 face-up stack in each colour should be created, with highest value token on top and lowest at the bottom. All 4 stacks should placed in a spot easily reached by all players.

Now were're ready to go.

Gameplay for is very straightforward. Players are trying to move their explorers to the temple of the same colour. Unsurprisingly, this is done by laying tiles and moving the explores along the paths that are created.
Karuba has no turns, everyone makes their choices at the same time.

• The caller will have a stack of face-down tiles. They turn over the top tile and announce the tile's number to all other players. The other players should then find and pick up their matching tile. Now all players have to make 1 of 2 decisions: Lay tile or discard tile to move explorer.
• Lay tile: If a player chooses this option, they must put the tile on to a grid. There is only one rule; tiles cannot be rotated, the number in the corner of tile must always be upwards. Other than this, any placement is ok, you do not have to connect it to another tile or path, you can create dead-ends or block other routes off or send a route off the grid, remember the only player you can screw over... is yourself. Finally if the tile has a gold or diamond symbol on it, then place a corresponding token on to it.
• Discard tile to move: If a player discards a tile, then they can move an explorer along a number of tiles equal to the number of exits on the discarded tile. Thus a straight or bend confers 2 movement points, a T-junction confers 3 and crossroad -4. There are some rules here: Only 1 explorer can be moved, the movement points cannot be split between explorers, an explorer cannot pass through a tile that is already occupied by another explorer nor can they end the round there. If an explorer moves on to a tile with a gold or diamond token on it, the player can choose to pick it up, picking the treasure up ends the explorer's movement irrespective of any remaining movement points.
• Once all players have finished playing a tile or moving explorers. A new round begins and the caller draws another tile.
• When an explorer reaches their temple (By moving off the grid and onto the temple's space.) they collect the topmost scoring token in the same colour as their explorer/temple. If two or more players reach the same coloured temple in the same turn, they all score according to the topmost token, players who take the lower value tokens also take diamonds to make up the difference.

Endgame
Play continues until one player has moved all 4 of their explorers to the relevant temples, or as is more likely until the caller has depleted their entire stack.

Players add the points of all the scoring tokens they've collected and the gold and diamond tokens, gold is worth 2 points and diamonds 1 point.
​Highest score wins.

Overall

Despite the simplicity of the rules, Karuba gives players lots of decisions to make nearly all the time.
​
The most common of these is whether to play a tile or discard it for movement.

This is a very elegant mechanic, the best tile to build paths with is the crossroads, because it gives you the most options. But the crossroad is also the best tile to discard for movement, as it give you most movement. 

Early in the game, you'll obviously be wanting to play the tiles more often to build up your paths, but you can't afford to play them willy-nilly. A meandering path is something players will want to avoid.
You may end up putting tiles in seemingly unconnected, random places, hoping to get the right tiles later on!
Players have limited rounds in Karuba and will want to build their paths as efficiently as possible. The game has an absolute maximum of 36 rounds.

If you look the photo of my gameboard from the end of the game. All 36 tiles were drawn. This means  I played 19 tiles, which means I moved 17 times, whilst I managed to get 3 explorers to their destination, the blue explorer barely managed to leave their starting spot.

Movement may also provide difficult decisions.
For example; you may have an explorer who is just 1 step away from a treasure or a temple but have just drawn a crossroads tile which grants you 4 movement, using it on 1 movement can be a waster. Do you use it to move another explorer to maximise it's value, or do you use 1 movement to complete an objective and waste the rest of the movement?
Also, when moving explorers, players will need think ahead a little, a badly placed explorer can block their colleagues, meaning it might require an entire round to clear the path.

Only towards the end of the game, when I had connected everything up and reached 2 temples, did the decisions become no-brainers. But because the game is played simultaneously and other players were more or less in the same situation: There was little downtime between rounds, which passed very quickly.

Karuba is a quick game to play anyway, if a player spends 1 minute deciding their move, the game has a play time of 36 minutes.

The only small criticism I could level at Karuba is that there is no interaction with other players. Not a problem for me personally, but it can be for others.

Otherwise I thought it was a good game.
Quickly and easy to learn, quick and fun to play.

​Anybody can learn and play Karuba. It's such a visually driven game that players should quickly comprehend what they need to do.

It's a game that's definitely going on my list.

20th October 2020

Tuesday evening in Woking at 'The Sovereigns'.

Time for a boardgame with the Woking Gaming Club.

Tonight's game was 'Ride the Rails'.
Now Ride the Rails looks like a traditional railroad building game set in North America, but it has a few wrinkles that make it play a bit differently.

What's in a game?
Some of the components will seem familiar to any that's played a railroad building game

• Game board: Like all self respecting railroad building games, the board depicts continental North America with a hex map! The map also shows about 50 cities, most are coloured black, but some have other colours related to the rail companies. A scoring track runs around the edge of the board and there's also a section for tracking share price and travel.
• Train meeples: There 27 train meeples in each of 6 colours.
• Passenger meeples: There are about 50 of these. Look closely and you'll that these little meeples are waving their hands!
• Player boards: These player boards track the railroad shares that have been purchased by players.
• Disc components: Used to track turn order, player scores and changing share prices.

There are lots of little components here, all of them are of a good quality, the train and waving passengers meeples are particularly nice.
You may have noticed that I mentioned shares, but there are no components for shares and no money either. Well, more on that below...

How's it play?
Set up

• ​Put all of the share price tracking discs on to their starting spots.
• Put a passenger meeple on each city space in the map.
• Sort the train meeples by colour.
• Give each player a player board.
• Determine starting order.

That's it, pretty simple.

Ride the Rails is played over 6 rounds.

It's important to know that there are only 2 train companies (Red & blue.) available from round 1. The orange becomes available from round 2, yellow from round 3, purple from round 4 and black from round 5. No new companies appear in the 6th and final round.
Additionally, each company has it's own rules for the placement of train meeples.

A round consists of 3 actions, which all players will carry out.

• Acquire a share: Each player (In reverse turn order.) can take one share from any available company, thus in round 1 there is choice of 2 companies. When a player takes a share, they take a train meeple of the relevant colour from its supply. These are the same meeples used to build railroads, the more shares that are taken, the less meeples are available to expand the company. It's also worth noting that because there are only 6 rounds, players will only ever acquire 6 shares.
• Build railroads: Going in turn order, each player can build railroads. A player can only build railroads for any companies in which they own shares, but the player can mix the companies they build for. This is done by taking meeples from the supply and either starting at a city or continuing on a railroad. There are rules for which cities a rail company can start from. There are also limits on how many different companies can occupy the same city or hex. Lastly, building through mountains will slow expansion down a little.
• Ride the Rails. Once all players have build railroads, then in turn order, each player can select any meeple in a connected city and move it to any other connected city going thorough as many connections (Cities.) as they want, there is a limitation though. A single journey cannot use the same hex more than once. Then the meeple is immediately scored and removed from the game. Scoring is a little involved. The share value of company is increased for everyone of it's connections used. So if a journey used 3 blue and 1 red connection, the share value for blue would be 3 and for red 1. Every blue share would pay 3 and every red 1, this is for all players for shares that they own. Finally, only the active player earns 1 for each city that was in the journey, this is equal to the total connections plus 1, in the example above, the active player would earn 3+1+1 for a bonus of 5. The share value and journey tracker are then reset to 0 for the next player's journey. The more connections a journey has, the more points are scored.
• New turn order: Once all players have ridden the rails a new turn order is determined based on the players with the lower scores going higher in the turn order.

Players can earn bonus points by being the first to reach certain cities, or being the first to connect the east coast to the west coast.

Endgame
Play continues until the 6th round has been completed. Final scores are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
As you can see, Ride the Rails is pretty straightforward and simple to understand, it also plays quite quickly.
Don't let the simplicity fool you though, there is a fair a amount of depth here.

Firstly; Ride the Rails has the classic dichotomy in which competing players may need to cooperate. If more than one player has spent a turn investing in a certain company, it's to both their benefits to expand that company efficiently.

Being able to gauge which shares will generate the most points is vital to winning, if a player manages to get 2 or 3 shares (Out of their 6) in a rail line that will see a lot of use, they can potentially rake in a lot of points. If a player however invests too quickly in a single company, it can scare off players who might perceive they are helping another player too much. Remember, 2 players can build up a network much quicker than a single player.

Secondly, building rail networks. In the first round, red and blue train meeples can only start in east coast cities and must more or less head west.
Should a player create a meandering network that maximises connections?
Or should they race towards the west coast? No single rail company can cross the entire map, it will probably take the efforts of 3 companies to do that and this will involve crossing the mountains.
This means it's unlikely that more than 2 companies will connect the east and the west. Making this connection first can be very lucrative, it forces other players to either use the rail network you've got shares in, or waste time building a separate network and just like with shares, each player will only have 6 opportunities to build their network.

I think that Ride the Rails is a good game, that has a lot of elements that will be familiar to experienced gamers but actually plays a bit differently.
You buy shares, you just take them and you don't pay to expand a rail network, it just happens. There is no money in the game in fact, money immediately translates into points.

I definitely want to try Ride the Rails again.

13th October 2020

Tuesday is here and we're at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking.

Time for the Woking Gaming Club to play a game and tonight we will be playing 'The Networks'.

This is a game for the budding media mogul inside everybody; create TV shows, hire film stars, fire chat show hosts, stick advert breaks everywhere, well at least during primetime! Fun for everyone.

When we played The Networks, a couple of expansions were also used.

What's in a game?
The Networks is a card game that has some nice additional components.

• Starting cards: Each player is given 3 TV show cards, 1 Star card and 1 Advert card.
• TV show cards: Each show has a production cost/requirements, a possible upkeep cost and a genre. All shows run for 4 seasons and the card will show how many viewers it accumulate have per season.
• Star cards: Stars are everybody from Shakespearean actors to cookery show chefs. Star cards have a hiring cost/requirements and possible upkeep. Stars are hired for up to 4 seasons and can be put on to a show. They add a varying amount to a show's audience for each of those 4 seasons. Some stars will add less audience if they are not put onto a show of specific genre. A talk show host won't add much to a soap opera's audience figures for example.
• Advert cards: Unlike the previous 2 types of card, a player will earn money if they take an advert! Furthermore, if an advert is attached to a show, it will generate money for every season the show runs. Certain adverts will make more money if attached to certain genres.
• Network cards: These cards grant the player a bonus or advantage of some kind, it may immediate, at a certain time or at the game end.
• Player boards: Each player has their own player board. Each player board has 3 spaces on either side. The 3 spaces on the right are used for the 3 timeslots you control (8pm, 9 pm & 10pm.). The 3 left spaces are The Green Room, Reruns and Archive.
• Genre card: Part of an expansion I believe, each card shows the game's 9 genres and also has a bonus track.
• Scoring board: Tracks player's accumulated audience figures and turn order which can change from season to season.
• Tokens: The Networks also includes tokens, including cubes of the soulless little wooden cube variety!
• Currency: Normally I wouldn't bother mentioning a games currency, but The Networks uses little plastic tokens for money, each one looks like a pile of money.

All the cards are very nicely illustrated with cartoony artwork and flavour text that cheerfully spoofs various different TV programs. Our game was played with an expansion that added classic British TV programs, I'm sure you'll recognise 'The IV Crowd', 'Drake's 8', & 'Creepy Puppets Save The World Again'.
All the other components are standard, except the money tokens which are cool.

How's it play?
Setup

• Each player takes a player board and starting cards.
• The 3 TV show cards are put into all 3 slots on the player card. The Star card and advert card are both put into the Green Room.
• Starting player is determined, this also determines starting money for each player.
• All the cards are put into their relative decks and shuffled.

And the game's ready to go.

The Networks is played over 5 'seasons'.
At the start of each season, TV show, star and advert cards a dealt in 3 rows.
Network cards are only dealt out from the 2nd season onwards.
After this, in turn order, players take 1 action each. This continues until there are no more actions that can be performed or all players have chosen to finish for the season, this is called 'drop & budget'.
The actions are:

• Produce a TV show: If a player wants a TV show, they have to pay for it. A TV show must be immediately placed into a time slot, any show that is currently in the chosen slot must be removed and then put into Reruns. Furthermore TV shows may require a star and/or an advert. If a player does not have the required star/advert in their Green Room, they cannot produce it. Some shows allow players to optionally add stars and/or adverts. In either case, any stars or adverts in The Green Room when the show is produced can be added to the show as part of the same action. Each show also has a limit to the number of Stars and Adverts that can be added to it. Finally; the player must put a marker on to the 1st season row on the TV show card.
• Hire a Star: A player must pay to hire a star, the star is then added to the player's Green Room, not added to a TV show.
• Get an Advert: As their action, the active player can take an Advert, unlike acquiring a TV show or star, the active player is paid to take an advert. Like a star card, an Advert cards goes into The Green Room.
• Acquire a Network card: A player can take any available Network card. It's effect may occur immediately or later in the game, or at the endgame. Network cards become available from the 2nd season onwards.
• Move a Star or an Advert: As their action, the active player can move a single star or advert from their Green Room to a TV show. They maybe some other requirements that must be met, otherwise the card might be flipped upside down to it's less effective side.
• Drop & Budget: The active player, as their action can choose to end their turn (Effectively ending their season.). They then choose to either receive either money or an increase in audience figures. The earlier a player does this  - in relation to the other players, the more money/audience they acquire. This also determines the turn order in the next season.

Once all players have ended their seasons, the next steps occur:

• Balance budget: Certain shows and stars require an upkeep and adverts generate profit. Once these are balanced, you may earn extra money or have to pay some money. If you don't have the money to pay your costs, then you lose audience figures instead.
• Calculate audience figures: Each show will generate audience figures for it's current season, plus any bonus conferred by an attached star. Shows in the Rerun slot also generate audience figures for one more season.
• Age shows: All shows in the Rerun slot are moved to the Archive slot. Then all remaining shows are aged. This is done by moving the marker on the current season row down to the next lowest row. If a show was in its last season, then it is put into Reruns.
• Set up new seasons: Any cards which were not taken from the current season are removed and discarded and an entirely new set of shows, starts, adverts and network cards a dealt out. Thus cards are only ever available for a single season before disappearing. Then the new season begins with the new turn order.

There are additional rules about acquiring shows of certain genres, but that's more or less it for the main rules.
​
Endgame
The game continues for 5 seasons, at the end of the 5th season the shows are still aged. Then a 6th season is scored (No new cards or other actions occur).
​Accumulated audience figures are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
The Networks has some cool design choices that give players interesting decisions to make.

A player can keep going and acquire more stars and adverts for as long as they've got money, which can give them an advantage later on because having these cards in their Green Room means that it's easier and quicker to develop shows. But ending your season early gives you more money/audience, more importantly though, it allows the player to be earlier in the turn order for the following season. So when the new cards appear, that player will get first dibs.

Because the game is very much about card drafting, players really have to think about how they prioritize their actions, as all players will be vying for the same cards.

Players have to try and use their actions as efficiently as possible, there's a fine balance between doing all the actions you want to do and ending your turn quickly.

All in all, The Networks gives players important decisions to make throughout the game and that's a good thing.

6th October 2020

It's Tuesday evening at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking and it's time for a boardgame.

The main game this evening was 'Pan Am', a game about building up airline companies over the years and then watching as they bought out by Pan Am in exchange for shares!

What's in a game?
​This game is set in 'The Golden Age of Air Travel', which I guess covers from the 'inter-war years' to the late 1960's.
This is reflected in the games look and art, which has a cool retro look to it.

• Board; Pan Am's board is a very distinctive looking map. It may seem strange, but it's a map depicting the globe - just displayed from an unusual angle! The board displays a lot of important information. It displays spaces and tracks for workers and share values. It also displays all the available air routes, 4 'lines' of these routes are marked with special symbols
• Hangars; these 4 trays are used to hold the 4 different classes of aeroplanes available.
• Aeroplanes; there are 4 classes of aeroplane, only the first 2 classes are available at the game start. The other classes become available during the course of play. The models used to depict the aeroplanes are quite nicely made. They start with the class 1 aeroplanes which look a bit like a DC10, up to the class 4 model that looks like an early jumbo jet.
• Meeples; each player will have a number of meeples to represent airports and engineers (Engineers are your workers.).
• Destination cards; these cards depict different cities throughout the world that form the game's routes. Cards also belong to a region such as Europe or America. The art on all of these is great, having the look of classic airline posters from the era.
• Directive cards; these cards usually give the player some sort of special action or bonus, sometimes these are dependant on an in game criteria, which sort of gives the player an objective to work for. Even though these cards only have text, they are printed in a typewriter font, which is a nice touch
• Event cards; Pan Am is played over 7 rounds, at the start of each round an event card is drawn, there 4 for each round and the art on them is very good. Event cards look like newspaper front pages from those times. The art is thematically appropriate.
• Player boards: These are simple card boards, they show a brake down of how a round works and give players a spot to place the unused aeroplanes in their air fleet. Most importantly, player boards display the player's income track.
• Pan Am die; this is used to determine the actions taken by Pan Am at the end of each round.
• Pan Am tokens; as Pan Am spreads throughout the map, it will take over any route that it reaches, these tokens are used to track that expansion.
• Money & shares; currency is represented by thick card tokens and shares are bit like paper money.

Of course they are some other components, but they are fairly minor.
The game's components are all good and the game's art direction and quality are worth noting. This shows the game's attention to detail.

How's it play?
Setup
The set up for Pan Am is pretty straight forward.

• Shuffle the destination cards and deal 2 to each player, these are placed face up in each player's area. Deal 4 face up on to the appropriate spots on the board. The remaining cards form a draw deck on the board
• Shuffle the directive cards and deal 1 to each player, the remainder become a draw deck.
• Prepare the event deck, there are 4 cards for each of the game's 7 rounds. Randomly draw 1 card from each of the sets to form a 7 card deck, with the round 1 card on top.
• Give a player board to each player along with their starting aeroplanes, engineers and starting money.
• All airport meeples are placed next to the airport worker track on the board.
• Determine the first player (Last player to fly on a aeroplane.) and we're ready to go.

​Event card
Every round begins by turning over that round's event card. This determines some actions that will occur in the game.

• Event; each card will have a specific event that occurs, this can be quite different from card to card.
• Stock price; the event card may raise or lower the value of shares. An event card may even reset the stock value to a new value.
• Pan Am activity; this is how many times the Pan Am die is rolled at the end of a round for their expansion.

Worker placement
This is where the majority of the game occurs;
Usually placing workers starts with the 1st player, but there is something called priority. This is explained in detail below, but basically any workers that were placed into the directive spaces in the previous round go first in placement order.

There are 2 types of spaces a worker can be placed into. 

• Auction track; These are vertical tracks. All spaces on an auction track have a cost associated with them. The first player putting a worker on to an auction track, it can choose to place it anywhere. Subsequent players must place their worker above any worker already there (Thus outbidding them.), the worker in the lower space must be removed. This means that only one player can benefit from a particular auction track. Additionally, if a worker is placed into the topmost spot in an auction track, no one can outbid them.
• Placement order track; these are horizontal tracks. All workers placed here are put into the leftmost empty space. When they are resolved later on, it is done in order of placement, which is potentially very important.

So we go on to the five different types of worker action available to players. Players can obviously place down their workers in any other, but below is the order in which they are resolved

• A: Airports; this uses an auction track. When a player acquires an airport, they can place on any open city space and it grants them permanent landing rights at that city, it also prevents any other player from placing an airport on that space. Finally an airport increases a player's income by 1.
• B: Destination cards; destination cards use auction tracks. There always 4 different destination cards that can be bid on. Destination cards give players permanent landing rights in the relevant city. They can also be discarded to gain temporary landing rights in other cities (More on this below.). All destination cards are displayed face-up in the player's area.
• C: Aeroplanes; aeroplanes also use auction tracks. Winning an auction for a aeroplane grants the player an aeroplane of that class. Aeroplanes are not unlimited, as the class increases, the amount of aeroplanes available to each player decreases. At the start of the game only class 1 & 2 aeroplanes are available, class 3 aeroplanes unlock on the 3rd round and class 4 on the 6th. Each class of aeroplane has its own auction track. Better aeroplanes are needed for longer flight routes.
• D: Routes; uses the placement order track, this track determines the order in which players can claim routes. A player can claim one route per worker placed in routes. In order to claim a route a player needs 2 things; landing rights for 2 'linked' cities with a route between them and a aeroplane that can fly that route. Landing rights come from having airports or destination cards for relevant cities. Alternatively if a player has a destination card for the same region as one of the cities, then that card can be discarded for temporary landing rights. If a player has 2 destination cards from the same region, then both can be discarded to get landing rights in any city in any region. Finally, every route is rated for length from 1 to 4, the player must place a aeroplane with and equal or higher class on the route to claim it. The aeroplane stays there until the route is bought by Pan Am. When a route is claimed, the player increases their income by the route number. Since only one player may claim a route, going before another player can be very important.
• E: Directives; also uses a placement order track. In placement order, players draw a directive card. Unlike all the other tracks, workers are not removed when the action is resolved. Instead they stay there until the next turn. Then in placement order, they can be placed on the board before the first player begins. Thus if you really need to go first in the next turn, you can use the directives track to do it. Directive cards should be kept hidden from other players until they are used.

That's it for worker placement.

Expansion
Pan Am airlines starts the game in the Miami city space. The die is used to determine how and where Pan Am expands. The number of times the active player rolls it is dictated by the event card.
When the die is rolled, it will show one of two types of action.

• Pan Am symbol; when this symbol comes up, any player may sell any route they have claimed to Pan Am (See below for more info on selling routes.).
• Routes; the die can show a face which will have 2 symbols that match symbols on certain routes on the board. When this happens, Pan Am will travel along the lines with matching symbols. They will claim any routes they reach. If Pan Am reaches a route that a player has claimed, then the player is forced to sell it. They have no choice in this, Pan Am is just too big and powerful to refuse!

Selling routes
Selling (Or being forced to sell.) routes is not necessarily a bad thing, it can be vital to winning the game.
This is because Pan Am actually offers reasonably good money for a route.
A 1 point route will earn a player 1 per round, thus if a player has it for all 7 rounds it will earn a maximum of 7 throughout the game. Pan Am pays 5 for a 1 point route. So long term, keeping a route earns more, but it's a slow drip of money. Selling to Pan Am gives the player a lump sum that can immediately be re-invested into claiming more routes (Or buying shares.).
A 1 point route is worth 5.
A 2 point route is worth 9.
A 3 point route is worth 12.
A 4 point route is worth 14.
Obviously, there are diminishing returns here, but remember the class 4 aeroplanes will not appear until turn 6 (Unless an event card changes this.) and will only generate income for 2 turns.
When a route is sold to Pan Am, the player reduces their income track by the value of the route and the aeroplane on the route is replaced by a Pan Am token. The aeroplane is returned to the player which is actually very useful. The amount of aeroplanes a player can have is limited to the number of aeroplanes available. Each player only has 1 class 4 aeroplane, so being able to use it, sell the route it's on and then use it again is the way to go.
Players not only get the opportunity to sell routes during expansion, event cards and directive cards can also allow players to sell routes.

Income
Players earn an amount of money equal to their position along their income track.

Buy shares
Players can now buy shares, because this is the airline business, the only shares that matter are Pan Am shares.
Players may buy as much Pan Am stock as they can afford, the price of the shares is influenced by the event card played at the start of the round.
Since there is only ever 7 opportunities to buy shares, it's probably a good idea to try and buy them at every opportunity.

Once all players have bought all the shares they want, the round ends. The first player marker is moved left to the next player and new round begins.

Endgame
In this game, no one cares about the little routes that you create, they only care about Pan Am.
​After the end of the 7th round, players tally up the shares they have bought. Highest number of shares win. Remaining money counts as a tie breaker.

Overall
Pam Am does a good job of blending accessibility, depth and player options.
Very rarely was there a meaningless choice in the game. Most of the time I felt that I could do with an extra worker or two.
Maximising your workers is very important, as is knowing when to bid for something or not. The destination card and class 1 aeroplane auction tracks have a minimum bid of 0. There's potential to get stuff for free when other players have minimal interest in it.

The key to the game I think, is selling routes to Pan Am at the right time, the prices are set a sweet spot of being good but not too good. Generally it's prudent to sell routes to Pan Am, but it's never a no-brainer - and that's a good thing.
Ideally players will want to try and build routes close to Pam Am, hoping to get bought  out. It's almost a counter-intuitive way to play.

Since the game is ultimately all about Pan Am shares, you obviously need to buy as many as possible and the game only gives players 7 opportunities to do this.

Stock prices generally start low in the game and rise continually throughout the game, this can put players in a quandary.
Do you buy shares in earlier rounds when they are much cheaper and run the risk of lacking funds to compete in bidding?
Or do you buy them later, hoping that your early investments pay off and give you more money to buy the invariably more expensive shares.

Finally, it's quite interesting watching as Pan Am unfailingly spreads across the board, consuming everything in its way.

I have the urge to play Pan Am again, that's always a solid indicator of a  good game in my opinion. It's definitely worth trying.

 21st March 2020

Saturday is here and normal Saturday gaming has not resumed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

On the last meeting of the Woking Gaming Club, Simon & Colin invited us to play a final game, provided that an opportunity would present itself. And that opportunity did present itself - on Saturday 21st March.

So we're at Simon's for a Saturday as his wife and children are away.

The game of the night was 'Maracaibo'.

​If you've ever favoured yourself as an adventurer, explorer or trader jobbing your way round and round in circles for years in the Caribbean. Then maybe, just maybe. This is a game for you.

What's in a game?
Maracaibo is a big game with a lot of components, cards and tiles:

• Game board: It depicts a big and colourful map of the Caribbean, that shows 22 different ports, islands and locations within the Caribbean. It also depicts a victory track, 2 'economy' tracks for income and victory points, an influence track aaaand finally a exploration track. That's right, lots of tracks.
• Personal boards: These represent each player's individual board, the board is full of abilities that can be unlocked through upgrades
• Meeples: Each player gets 8 meeples, an explorer meeple, a ship meeple and some discs and cubes in their colour.
• More discs: Used to track ship upgrades.
• More cubes: In 3 colours (Red, blue & white.), used to track the influence of the 3 competing nations (Spain, France & England.) in the game.
• Player cards: These are given to players and gives them individual objectives in the game. Each objective card has 3 meeples placed on it, when an objective is met, it's meeple is moved to the player's board and becomes usable by that player.
• Project cards: These are tasks that players can complete for bonuses and victory points. Project cards also count as a type of good and can be spent to supply that type of good.
• Prestige buildings: These objective cards are harder to complete and are 'communal' and can be completed by multiple players.
• Quest tiles: These are quests that appear in the game that can be completed by players.
• City tiles: City tiles give player 2 extra actions to perform when they reach those city tiles. One of these actions is always supplying a good for a reward.
• Combat tokens: When combat occurs, these tokens act as randomisers.
• Synergy tokens: Some project cards give the player a synergy token when completed. Then there are other project cards that grant bonuses if the player has certain synergy tokens. Thus there is synergy between cards!
• Automata cards: Used for the solo mode.
• Story card: Mostly used in campaign.
• Story tiles: Used in the campaign mode.
• Legacy tiles: Used in the campaign mode.
• Bag: Used in the campaign mode.

As you can see, there are a lot of components. The component quality and artwork are all good.

How's it play?
There's quite a lot of setup to this game.
Since we're not playing the campaign, some of the components will be left out.

• Place all the influence cubes on to their relevant tracks for each of the countries.
• Shuffle the project cards and place them into a face-down stack, deal 4 of them face-up in a line next to the stack.
• Shuffle the quest tiles and place 3 face-up in the relevant spots on the exploration track.
• Place more quest tiles in the relevant spots along the main track.
• Place the city tiles on to their relevant spaces along the main track.
• Shuffle the prestige buildings and deal 1 face-up and 3 face-down in the playing area.

OK, that's it for board setup, now on to player setup.

• Each player places their ship meeple on to the starting spot (In Havana.) on the main track.
• Each player puts their explorer at the start of the exploration track.
• Next, each player puts a marker on the '8' spot on the money 'economy' track and 2nd marker on to the '0' spot on the victory point 'economy' track.
• Give each player a player board and 24 discs, 2 disc go on each of the board's 12 upgrades. Then place 2 meeples on to the board. Finally, place a cube on to the combat track.
• Shuffle the player deck and deal 2 to each player. Each player chooses 1 to keep and discards the other. Each card has 3 objectives, place 1 meeple on to each of the objectives.
• Nearly there! Finally deal 8 project cards to each player. Each player may then keep 4 of them, they can also put a card into the 'in progress' area next to their player board. Remaining project cards are discarded.
• Wait, one more thing. Deal out money to each player. How much depends on the starting turn order.

So now we're ready!
The basic principle of Maracaibo is to travel from location to location in a loop from and back to Havana. Stopping at different places will allow players to perform different actions in pursuit of victory points.
A player's turn consists of 3 phases, sailing, main action & drawing cards.

• Sailing: A player can choose to move their ship meeple 1-7 spaces on the main track.
• Main action: A player's main action will depend on where they stopped their ship meeple. Generally, ships will stop at cities or villages. But can be quest tiles or 'assistant' actions. 
• Drawing cards: Once a player has completed their main action; if the project cards in their hand is below their card limit, they can acquire project cards up to that limit. This can be done by drawing blindly from the deck, or buying any of the face-up project cards.

​Now let's talk about the different types of 'stops'.

• City tiles: When a player stops at a city, they can spend the appropriate project cards to supply the city with what it wants. Upon doing this, the active player removes one of the discs from their player board and places it on the relevant city tile. That need has now been met and no other player can supply that good in this turn. City tiles have a second action that players can complete (See below for more information.).
• Village spaces: In most cases, an 'empty' space on the main track is usually a village. A player who stops in a village space can potentially have more than one action at their disposal. The further they moved, the more actions they get. They get 1-3 actions. When at a village, there are 3 different actions a player can perform. 1, discard all project cards and gain 1 coin. 2, gain a coin. 3, buy a project card, either from their hand or planning area. Alternatively, the active player may invest in a prestige building instead of buying a project card.
• Quest tile: If a player stops on a space with a quest tile and they have the required resources, then they can buy the quest tile and place it on their player board.
• Assistant: Players will be given the opportunity (By Project cards or quest tiles.) to place assistants (Meeples.) on certain spaces. When they come around again and stop on that space, they can choose to activate the assistant. What the assistant does depends on what card/tile was used to place it in the first place.

Actions perform a variety of actions as explained below and can be triggered in a variety of ways, such as project cards, quest tiles and locations, as well as assistants.
Let's start with city actions:

• Gain victory points.
• Gain money.
• Gain meeples: Players only start with 2 meeples, which can quickly be used up as an assistant or to pay a cost.
• Remove a disc from a player board.
• Gain noble rank with a nation (More on this below.).
• Increase a nation's reputation (More on this below.).
• Gain combat points (More on combat below.).
• Move the the player's explorer meeple: Moving an explorer meeple along the exploration track will earn player's other things from this list!
• Increase victory point economy: Victory point economy is different to gaining victory points. Victory points earned on the economy track are scored at the end of each of the 4 rounds in the game. Thus points earned early on will be scored multiple times.
• Increase coin economy: This works a bit like the victory point economy, except players start at '8' on the track and it earns players money at the start of each subsequent round (Except for the end of the 4th round, in which case it scores victory points.).

So I've mentioned influence, reputation and combat above, how do they work?

• Reputation: There are 3 nations (England, France & Spain.) vying for influence in the region. The more 'rank' a player has with a nation, the more points they score from that nation during the endgame.
• Influence: Each nation has an influence track that shows the level of their influence. Why is this important to the players? The victory points a player scores from a nation can be multiplied if that nation's influence is high enough. Reputation is tracked by removing influence markers from a nations influence track and placing it on to a location on the board.
• Combat: When combat it initiated a combat token is drawn, then the player who initiated combat can choose which faction to support (There may be a cost or reward associated with this according to the token.), then the player can spend their points to increase their rank with the nation they supported. They can also spend combat points to put influence markers on to the board. This can 'oust' another nation's influence (Only 1 influence marker is allowed per location.). 

Players keep taking turns until a round ends. A round continues until any player reaches space 22. There's a game mechanism that prevents a player immediately ending a round (Players must stop at space 21 first.). Then the following actions occur.
Players can purchase a project card or gain 2 VP.
The money and victory point economy tracks are dealt with.
A new prestige building is revealed and new quest cards are placed on the board as required.
The new first player is the player who ended the previous turn.

Endgame
Play continues until the end of the final round.

Points can come from project cards, player boards, prestige buildings, rank with nations and of course the scoring track.
Final points are tallied and highest score wins. ​

Overall
TLDR; right? Although I've probably made it sound more complicated than it actually is.

Maracaibo definitely sits at the heavier end of the complexity scale.
Some of this complexity is down to rules, but much of it is due to having so many things going on at the same time. Not only is there the main track and project cards and ship grades and personal objectives, there's the exploration track. Then there's the influence and rank tracks. I've probably missed something too!

All of these are ways to score points

It's a lot for a player to think about and take in, particularly with potentially very  limited turns!
There may be 22 spaces on the main track, but if a player races round, they can end the round after about 4 turns. A sneaky player can end the game quite quickly and if players don't pay attention, they may get caught flat footed.

So players need to think of ways to optimise their strategy, manage their resources and play to the strengths of their personal objectives.

They also need to keep an eye on what other players may be doing with regards movement and also to influence and rank, high rank with a high influence nation can be the source of a lot of victory points.
This is not a confrontational game by any means, but influence represents the only way players can mess with each other (Even though it's indirectly.). Lowering a nation's influence after another player has increased their rank with that nation can cost them a lot of victory points.

Its mechanics suits its themes fairly well as what players are doing is following trade routes whilst buying and selling.

Whilst Maracaibo is not the most complex or heaviest of games, but it's complex enough.
It's a game that will take a couple plays to understand a learn, so it's not very accessible. But if you like heavier games, then you'll be used to that.

If you like heavier games and you like the theme, you'll probably like Maracaibo, although it typically requires a few hours to complete, around 3 hours I'd say.

For me, I'd like to play it again, but it sits close to the upper limits of complexity I like dealing with.