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.

10th March 2020

​Tuesday is here and we're at 'The Sovereigns in Woking with the Gaming Club.

The first game of the evening was 'Quacks of Quedlinburg'.
Quacks of QuedlinBurg is not a game about ducks as I thought when I first heard the name.
It's actually a push your luck game about disreputable, dangerous, deplorable and downright dishonest doctors. Actually YOU play the quacks in question trying to create the most amazing and wondrous potions. Amazing and wondrous that is, until they blow up in your face.

What's in a game?
Quacks of Quedlinburg has quite a few components, there is a game board and personal game boards. There are also tokens - and lots of them too, as they are the most important component of the game.

• Game board: The main game board tracks player scores and also tracks the current number of rounds in the game.
• Personal game board: The personal game board is designed to look like a pot filled with a swirling liquid that's just been vigorously stirred, there's a scoring track the follows the lines of the swirling that tracks how many victory points and coins they earn in a round. There're also spots for other components. This board is double-sided for an alternate play style.
• Flasks: There is a flask tile for each player, they are shaped like bottles and are double sided. One side shows the flask as filled, the other as empty.

• Bags: There is a bag for each player.
• Player tokens: Each player receives a rat token and a droplet in their colour. These tokens are made of plastic and are quite chunky.
• Rubies: These are made of translucent acrylic and are 'crystal shaped'  .
• Ingredient tiles. These are used to represent different ingredients that players may gain access to. There are 22 different types of ingredient, depicted in 7 different colours. There are 4 ingredients for yellow, green, red, blue and purple (Arranged in 4 sets of 5 with 1 of each colour). There is 1 black and 1 orange ingredient.
• Ingredient tokens: There tokens for each colour of ingredient (Not type of ingredient.), there are numbered; 1, 2, or 4.  There are also white ingredient tokens numbered 1, 2 or 3.
• Bonus die: A six sided die, but with the numbers replaced by symbols.
• Fortune Teller Cards: A deck of 24 cards that give a one-off bonus when drawn at the start of the round.

The components are all of a good quality. The artwork is colourful and well drawn.
​That the player boards look like pots, flask tiles look like potion bottles and ingredient tiles look like ingredient books shows that some thought, effort and care has been put into the their design. ​

How's it play?
​Setup.

• Set up the ingredients for the game. The black and orange ingredients are used in every game. 1 of the 4 sets (Of 5 ingredients.) is chosen and used as well. Some sets are more 'difficult' to use than others.
• Put out the black and orange ingredient tiles, along with their respective tokens. Then put out the green, red and blue ingredient tiles along with their respective tokens. Put the yellow and purple tiles and tokens to one side for now.
• Shuffle the fortune teller cards and place them down in a face-down stack.
• Give each player a player board (Pot.), a flask tile, a rat token and droplet token. The flask and the rat token go on to their respective spots on the player board. The droplet token goes on to the '0' spot on the scoring track.
• Next give each player a bag, 1 orange token, 1 green token and 7 white tokens (The white tokens consist of 4x1 point tokens, 2x2 point tokens and 1x3 point token.). All of the tokens are placed into the player's bag, which is thoroughly shaken.

Now we're ready to begin.

Quacks of Quedlinburg is played over 9 rounds and something new or different is introduced over several of the rounds.

• At the start of round 2, the yellow ingredients come into play.
• At the start of round 3, the purple ingredients come into play.
• At the start of round 6, each player must add another 1 point white token into their bag.

Now, this is how the first 8 rounds are played.

• ​First a card is drawn from the fortune teller deck and it's action is carried out.
• From round 2 onwards: Determine if players get 'rat-tails' to put into their pot! There are a number of 'rat symbols' on the scoring track on the main board. Every symbol between the player and every other player, means that the other player may place their rat token a space further along the track on their own board, giving them a head start for the round. Essentially a balancing mechanic.
• Then simultaneously, each player begins blindly drawing ingredient tokens, one at a time from their bag and placing them on the scoring track on their board (Starting at the droplet token, 0 at the game start.). The number on the token determines where it goes: If it's a 1, it goes on to the 1st available spot, a 2 goes on the 2nd available spot and so on. Some ingredient tokens have special actions triggered when placed, these actions are carried out immediately.
• Players may continue drawing and placing tokens until either; they choose to stop or they go 'bust'. A player goes bust when the white tokens they drew have a combined value that exceeds 7 (Potion goes boom!).

Once all players have either stopped adding ingredients or have gone bust, play goes on to the next 6 phases.

• In turn order, players who did not go bust can roll the bonus die and acquires whatever bonus the die rolls. Players that went bust skip this phase.
• Some tokens have actions that are triggered in this phase, carry these actions out now, in turn order.
• Players may earn a ruby, depending on where they finished on their scoring track.
• Players who did not go bust score victory points depending on where they finished on their scoring track. Players who went bust, must choose whether to earn victory points or earn coins (See below.).
• Players who did not go bust earn points according to their finishing spot. Players who went bust choose either to earn coins or victory points. Coins can now be spent to buy more ingredients which are added to their bag. Coins cannot be carried over from round to round, use 'em or lose 'em!
• Finally, players may spend rubies to either move their droplet forward on their board (Thus moving their starting spot forward.) or to refill their flask it they used it. 

What the flask does?
When players are drawing ingredients from their bag. They can use their flask to return the token to the bag - provided they had not gone bust because of the token.

Endgame
Play continues normally until the start of the 9th round.
The final round is a little different.

When drawing a token from their bags, each player keeps the token in a closed hand and every player opens their hand at the same time. When a player wants to stop drawing tokens they simply keep their empty hand closed until it's time to reveal it. After that they drop out of further rounds of drawing ingredients.

The phases for spending coins on ingredients and rubies on the droplet/flask are ignored because they are pointless at the end of the game.
Instead; every 5 coins and/or 2 rubies will earn the player a victory point.

After this, victory points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Quacks of Quedlinburg is a fairly easy game to learn and easy to play. It moves along briskly too as there's very little downtime and it doesn't outstay its welcome as it's finished after 9 rounds. When I played it, it felt like a lot was occurring in a short game time.

Pulling ingredients out a bag to put into a pot is a brilliant use of the 'push your luck' mechanic. It fits the game perfectly and surprisingly makes it a lot of fun.

Additionally; unlike most 'push your luck' games, going bust does not totally kill a player's turn, they still reap some of rewards of their potion making and they can still carry out most of the other actions.

The engine building mechanic works well too, as players introduce tokens into their bags, it makes going bust a little harder, giving players longer more productive turns.

Combined, the 2 game mechanics always gives the player meaningful and interesting decisions to make, when to and when not to push your luck? What ingredients to buy? And so on.

I liked it and will definitely play it again.

9th February 2020

It's a Sunday and we're at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking. There's no 50 Fathoms this week as 3 players are absent.

Instead we are playing 'Puerto Rico'.

William Shakespeare wrote:
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.​

Well if you happen to play a plantation owner in Puerto Rico, you will play 7 roles, I dunno about 7 acts though.

What's in a game?

• Game board: Not really a game board speaking conventionally, it's used to display all the game's buildings that available to be purchased by players and to store money.
• Player boards: Each player has their own board. These boards have 12 'city' spaces and 12 'plantation' spaces. There is a spot marked as 'San Juan'. There's also a spot marked with a 'windrose' 
• Role cards: There are cards for the 7 different types of role in Puerto Rico.
• Building tiles: There are a total of 49 buildings, 44 standard sized buildings and 5 large buildings. Each building has 1 to 3 little circular spaces for colonist markers.
• Plantation tiles: There are 5 different types of plantation, corn, indigo, sugar, tobacco and coffee. There are 58 of these tiles, but they are not distributed equally amongst the goods, there are slightly less of the more valuable plantations (Tobacco & Coffee) and slightly more of the less valuable plantations (Indigo & Sugar). Each tile has a little circular space for a colonist marker.
• Quarry tiles: Used to indicate quarries (Explained below.), there are 8 of them.
• Colonist markers: Little wooden discs used to represent colonists.
• Colonist tile: Used in conjunction with colonist markers.
• Goods tokens: Little wooden tokens to represent the 5 types of goods that the plantations produce. There are 50 of these tokens, like the plantation tiles they are not distributed evenly amongst the 5 types of goods.
• Trading tile: This tile has 4 spaces on it for 4 goods (When they are traded.).
• Ship tiles: There are 5 tiles to represent ships, they can store cargo. Each ship has a different amount of storage space, this range from 4 to 8 spaces. Although only 3 ships are ever used at one time.

There are also victory point markers, cash and a first player card, but these are self-explanatory.
The quality of the components is mostly quite good.
What artwork there is in the game is OK, but it's not particularly memorable or interesting.

How's it play?
As always, we begin with setup. It looks quite long, but it's actually straightforward. 

• Put out the game board and place all the building tiles on their allotted places on the board.
• Put all of the money on the bank space on the game board.
• Shuffle all of the plantation tiles face-down and then put them randomly into 5 stacks, Put these stacks in a row next to the board. Then turn over tiles from the stacks face-up. There should a number of face-up plantations equal to the number of players +1.
• Place the quarry tiles in a stack face-up next to the row of plantation stacks.
• Put out the trading tile next to the game board.
• Put out the Colonist tile, place a number of colonists on the tile equal to the number of players. The remaining markers form a supply of colonists (The number used varies according to the number of players.)
• Put out 3 ships, the ships used depend on the number of players.
• Put out victory points chips, the number used depends again on the number of players.
• Put out all 7 role cards.
• Give each player a player board, some starting money and a starting plantation. This too is dependent on the number of players and turn order. Money and goods are stored on the windrose on a player's board.
• Finally determine a starting player.

In Puerto Rico there are 2 ways to earn victory points; by shipping goods out and buying buildings.
Each round, in turn order, each player will assume 1 of the 7 roles and carry out the action associated with that role. When a player chooses a role, all players can the also carry out that action, but the player who chose the role can do it's bonus action instead. When players chose a role, they take the relevant role card from the display.
The roles are:

• ​Settler: Starting with the active player, each may take a plantation from the available face-up tiles and place it on an empty space on their board. Once all players have taken their action, remaining plantation tiles are removed from play, new plantation tiles are drawn from the stacks and placed face-up. Bonus action; the player may take a quarry instead of a plantation (And place it on to an empty plantation space.).
• Mayor: Starting with the active player, each player takes a single colonist marker from the colonist tile, continue going round and doing this until all the colonists have been removed from the tile. Players can now place these colonists on to their plantations, quarries and buildings as they see fit. None of these can become active until at least 1 colonist is placed on them. Excess colonist markers are placed into 'San Juan' and can be moved out San Juan to fill empty spots during this action too. Once every player has take their colonist(s), the colonist tile is refilled, the number of markers placed on the tile is either; equal to all the empty circles on all the players' buildings (Plantations & quarries do not count.) or equal to the number of players - whichever is highest. Bonus action; before taking a colonist from the colonist tile, the active player may take an additional from the supply.
• Builder: Starting with the active player, each player may build (Buy.) 1 building from the game board. The cost for each building is shown on the tile, for each active quarry the player has in their plantation area, the cost is lowered by 1, thus the cost can be lowered to 0, although there are limits on how discount quarries confer. Once bought, the building tile is placed on to the player's city area. Bonus action; the player who chose this role can deduct a further 1 from the building cost.
• Craftsmen: When the Craftsmen role is chosen, starting with the active player, players may produce goods. To produce goods, a player must have both plantations and matching production buildings that are active. Furthermore, there must be at least as many colonists in the production buildings as in the plantations to produce all the goods. The exception is corn, that needs no production buildings All goods produced are placed on the windrose on a players game board. Bonus action; the player may produce 1 extra good of any good that they can already produce.
• Trader: Starting with the active player, each player may trade 1 good for money. The player takes the good from their windrose and places it on a space on the trading tile. Only 1 good can be traded and the same good cannot be traded twice. Nor can goods be traded if there are no spaces on the trading tile. Once all trading has concluded, if the trading tile has all 4 spaces filled with goods, then the goods are all removed. If there is at least 1 space available, then  no goods are removed. Bonus action; the player who chose the Trader role earns an extra coin for their trade.
• Captain: When the active player chooses the Captain role, then players must load all of their goods on to the 3 ships, however there are strict rules on how this is carried out. In turn order, starting with the active player, each player will load 1 type of good on to a ship, they must load as much of that type of good as possible. All of these goods must be loaded on to the same ship. If a ship already contains the type of good that the player is loading, then those goods must be loaded on to that ship. If no ship already has those goods, then they can be loaded on to an empty ship. Goods cannot be loaded on to ships that already have a differing type of good. If a ship is already completely loaded with the type of good a player is trying to load, or there are no empty ships, then that kind of good cannot be loaded. Play continues in turn order with players loading (Or not!) 1 type of good at a time until players have had the opportunity to load all their goods (Or not!). Players earn 1 victory point for each good they load - regardless of what type it is. Victory points are taken from the supply. Any player who has any goods left over when loading has ended must discard all of those goods except each player gets to keep a single good. Then, any ships which are full 'leave Puerto Rico' and a replacement ship arrives, essentially, the ship is emptied of its goods and is now an empty ship. Any ship that still has any space in its hold, remains how it is (Phew! It's not a complicated as it sounds!). Bonus action; the player who chose the Captain role gains an extra victory point when loading goods.
• Prospector: When the active player chooses this role... nothing happens! Really, nothing happens. Bonus action; the player who chose Prospector takes a coin from the supply (And possibly more - see below.).

Once all players have chosen a role for the round, a coin is placed on to any role card that was not selected in that round. A role card can accumulate multiple coins if it not chosen for consecutive round. If that role is taken in a later round, that player also acquires the coin(s). Since there are more role cards than players, coins will always be placed on at least 2 different role cards.

Players return their role cards and the next player in turn becomes the new first player and a new round begins.

There remains one last thing to discuss - what function do buildings serve. Firstly, they earn player points. Some buildings are necessary to process goods. Other buildings confer bonuses when trading and shipping or allow players to 'break the rules' in some way or other. Finally, the 5 large buildings give extra victory points according to the conditions on each individual large building tile.

Endgame
There are 3 manners in which the endgame can be triggered.

• When a player places a building into the 12th and final space in their city.
• All the victory points in the supply are taken (Extra points are still recorded for the remainder of the round.).
• There are not enough colonist markers to sufficiently fill the ship tile after the Mayor action has been executed.

If any of these conditions are met, play continues until the current round has ended.

​Players then tally their scores, highest value wins.

Overall
​​Puerto Rico is not a complicated game, but it is a fairly involved one and the rules are fairly detailed. The game has minimal 'downtime' as it allows players to act in other player's turns. This keeps players on their toes, being able to take advantage of another player's role is key to optimising strategy.

It's also a game of very little luck. The only random element is drawing the plantation tiles, everything else is down to player actions and choices.

Talking of choices, the game mostly provides players with useful and meaningful decisions to make. There's always the balancing act caused by there being one too many actions that players will want to do, pushing them into making tricky choices.

The trading and shipping rules give Puerto Rico a little bit of a competitive edge. Players need to watch what each other are doing, because as mentioned above, a decision that the active player makes can aid another player.

Since the trading tile and ship tiles are not emptied until full and even then only at the end of their respective actions. Players can screw each other (And themselves to be fair.) by initiating trading or shipping at particular times, this can and probably will deny certain players the benefits of trading or shipping. After all there are 5 types of good, but only 4 spaces on the trading tile and 3 ships.

Since the game has 2 ways of scoring points. There are broadly speaking, 2 strategies for winning.
These are; accumulate victory points by shopping goods out, or buy buildings and accumulate victory points that way.
In the few times, we've played it recently, it seems to be that acquiring buildings might be a better way of accumulating victory points. Perhaps the trading approach has a harder learning curve?
This is about the only negative I can think about the game.

But other than this, Puerto Rico is a game that rewards thoughtful play and that's always a good thing.

28th January 2020

Tuesday is here and we're at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking to play board games.

Popular opinion states that most restaurant fail in the first year, so running one is hard work (And believe me I know!). What could be harder? Running a whole chain of restaurants! 

That's where 'Food Chain Magnate' comes in. Now you too can know what it's like to run restaurants without all the 'fun' of inconsistent staff, irritating customers, infuriating regulations and interfering local authorities. 

What's in a game?
There's quite a lot to Food Chain Magnate and quite a lot of components too.

• Tiles: Each tile depicts some buildings (Represented by white areas with grid lines.) and roads (Shown in blue.). A number of tiles are placed together to form the main playing area, essentially representing a neighbourhood.
• Meeples: There are 2 types of food (Burgers and pizzas.) and 3 types of drink (Soft drinks, lemonade and beers.), these are represented by very nice wooden meeples.
• Staff cards: All the staff your chains of restaurants could ever need are depicted on these cards. Delivery boys, chefs, managers, HR and err zeppelin pilots? When staff cards are played, they must be placed in a hierarchy. This hierarchy can have up to 3 rows, but in order to have more rows, a player will need more managers to manage the staff in the lower rows.
• Display stand: Amazingly, the game's lid is flipped over and becomes a display stnd for all the staff cards. This is not just a nice touch, it actually saves a lot of room as displaying all the staff cards flat on the playing area would take up so much space.

How's it play?
First; setup.

• The tiles are randomly placed to form the playing area. This will determine the placement of buildings and roads. The number of tiles used depends on the number of players.
• The staff cards are put in their display
• Players are given 3 restaurants and the starting order is determined.
• Each player is given a 'CEO' staff card.

That's pretty much it for setup, let's get to playing.
A round of Food Chain Magnate is played over 7 rounds.

• Staff hierarchy; during this phase, players put down their staff cards (Face down, they are all revealed at the same time.). At the start, players only have a CEO. The CEO can manage 3 other staff (In the row below) and has the ability to hire another member of staff (This new staff card is not immediately put into play.). The CEO can hire staff like chefs etc, but in the long term the player will also need to hire managers, managers will manage other staff (A bit like a CEO.), so if a CEO gets a couple of managers, they can manage 6 staff. Players will also need to hire trainers, when staff are hired, they are at a 'junior' level, training staff make them more effective; managers can manage more people, cooks can cook more, etc. There are a lot of staff that do a lot of different things. Any staff cards that a player has that are not in their hierarchy spend the day at the beach!
• Determine new player order; the order in which players act is recalculated every turn. Basically, the player who has the most 'empty' spaces in their hierarchy gets t choose where in turn order they go (They could choose to go first or last or anywhere in between.). Then the player who has the 2nd highest number of empty spaces goes next etc.
• Actions; in turn order, each player carries out the actions for the staff they have in their hierarchy. Actions include hiring and training. They also include marketing (Marketing creates a demand for food & drink.), getting food & drink, placing new houses (Creating houses creates customers) and gardens (Gardens are attached to houses and increase demand.) and finally placing new restaurants and moving existing ones.
• Supply the demand; players can carry out actions to create a demand for food & drink. Provided a player has generated food & drink, they can try and then supply that demand. How does this work? Well, 'people' from houses will go to the cheapest restaurant selling the food & drink that they want (Players can hire staff to push the price of their food & drink down.), however the further that 'people' have to travel, the more it costs. Every time customers visit a player's restaurant, that player earns money. 
• Wages: Players now have to pay the wages of their staff.
• Marketing campaign: Even though a player may have created a marketing campaign in the 'Actions' phase, the effect of the campaign doesn't kick in until now, so players need to think ahead. There are various different types of campaign that a player can undertake, that have different ranges and areas of effect and can have differing duration. This includes using billboards, mail shots, radio and even planes for advertising.
• Clean up; excess food & drink is discarded and various other end of round actions are completed here. The game includes 'milestones', these are varied objectives to meet, the player who completes a milestone first, gets an in game benefit for it in this phase. If multiple players achieve a milestone in the same phase, then they all get the benefit.

Endgame
​Play continues until all the allotted money from the 'bank' supply is depleted, in which case any remaining money is paid out from the reserve supply.

The player who has accumulated the most money, wins.

Overall
Food Chain Magnate markets itself as a 'heavy' game and it's not kidding.

The aim of the game is to build housing and create marketing campaigns, this generates a demand for whatever particular food & drink the player decides advertise.
Then the player produces the relevant food & drink to fill that demand, this equals profit.

Except it's not so simple.

There is a lot to think here and all of it is important.

How a player structures their company is crucial.  All of the other actions options will become avaialable based on the staff cards that you recruit and play.
A lot to think about.

You need food? Pizza chefs will produce pizza and burger chefs will produce burgers.
You want drinks? You need an errand boy to go and collect them.
Want to be more competitively priced? Get a pricing manager.
Need an advertising campaign. You'll have to get marketing staff.
Want to place more housing? A business developer is what you need.
Your staff need training to be more effective? Trainers are what you need.
You got too many staff? Get more managers!
Need to recruit people even quicker? Recruiters are what's needed.

And so on.

Marketing needs to be targeted. There are different types of marketing that target a player's audience at different 'ranges' and they tend to be of varying length. Players will need to optimise creating their demand.
Advertising can have a real sting in the tail. Because other players can benefit from it too. If one player creates a demand for burgers and another player then opens a burger joint closer to the housing that's been targeted, then the customers will go there instead (Customers have absolutely no loyalty!). Or if another player slashes the price of their burgers, then other restaurants will be ignored.
Sly players will definitely try and exploit other player's marketing.

This brings me to 'pricing'. This is a great game mechanic. Instinctively, players will want to increase prices to generate more revenue. But a player really needs to undercut their opponents, because less profit is better than no profit. Pricing is a real race to the bottom and forces players to make horrible choices - always a good thing!

Players will also need to think about food & drink production, as more and more demand appears, players will need to get better and better at production to meet that demand. Also, as demands get more complex, fulfilling those demands gets equally as complex (A house's demands cannot be only partially fulfilled and must be fully met.).

And don't forget milestones, the benefits they can confer can be very important.

When we played this game, the owner explained to us that he thinks at the start there's a couple of different routes to follow for 'opening moves' that there are 'no brainer' moves (These are to do with milestones.). It seems some of the milestones can be completed in the first couple of turns and only the first player(s) that complete them get the benefit, not following the 'no brainer' moves means a player can lose out on those benefits.

This implies that early moves (Or mistakes really!) can affect the entire game.
I'm not sure how I feel about this? I don't like 'no brainers', because what they do is remove choice from a game. On the other hand, maybe it was overstated. I guess the game would need to be played multiple times to see if this is the case

All of this contributes to make Food Chain Magnate a deep game that requires a lot of forethought and strategy. There is no luck or chance in this game. If you like genuinely heavy games, this may interest you.

For me though, I found it to be a little bit difficult to play the game on all the levels it required and mostly ignored the marketing side. It felt a strangely unengaging game, perhaps it was the theme?

7th January 2020

It's the first Tuesday of the year and we're NOT at 'The Sovereigns' (Which is closed for refitting.), instead we're at 'The Wheatsheaf' in Woking for board gaming.

Tonight, we're playing Taverns of Tief....err?
Taverns of Tiefe... err?
It's a game where you run a pub!

So this game tries it's best squeeze in as many game mechanics as it can.
Deck building - yep. Card drafting - yep. Dice drafting - yep. Dice placement - yep. Resource management - yep. Hidden Role - y... wait no, that's about the only thing missing!

What's in a game?
So Taverns of Tiefenthal comes with some optional extras or expansions, apparently we used all of them in the game we played. So there's a lot of components.

• Monastery board: This is a small central board that serves a couple of purposes. It displays what bonus the players receive in each round. There is also a track that players can move their marker round to get bonuses.
• Player tavern board: Each player has their own tavern, therefore each player has their own tavern board. The tavern board looks like a giant misshapen jigsaw puzzle piece. Each tavern board has extra 'bits' that are attached to it, during play they can be upgraded and are flipped to the other side when this is done.
• Tavern attachments: These tiles are the 'bits' that are added to each tavern: Tables, beer storage, beer supplier, barrel, host/reputation, safe, dishwasher, waitress, cash box and monk. 10 in all and all double sided. These will be explained below.
• Entertainer tiles: Periodically throughout the game, entertainers will arrive in your tavern. If you can give them 'schnapps', they will give you a bonus or ability of some kind. These tiles are double sided, each side confers a different bonus.
• Schnapps tokens: Used to ply entertainers.
• Guestbook board: This tile is a way to earn bonuses when it is filled with signatures.
• Signature tiles: Used to fill your guestbook.
• Deck of guest cards: Guest cards are bought with beer! During the game they will be the 'regular' visitors to that player's tavern. When they appear, they can earn the player money.
• Deck of staff cards: These are bought with money. Staff gives the player extra or bonus actions.
• Dice: Normal 6 sided dice. Lots of white dice and 4 sets of dice in player colours, 1 set for each player.
• Beer mats: These little coasters essentially unnecessary, but are used to hold dice.
• Beer mug marker: This is the first player marker.

They are the most important components of the game.
Many of the game's components are made of nice and thick card stock, including the beer mats. The artwork is quite nice and colour and there's some nice detail on the tavern board and tiles.

How's it play?​
We begin with setup.

• Each player takes a tavern board and the 10 other bits that go with it and attaches them to the board with standard side up.
• Each player is given a starting deck of 10 cards, consisting of 7 guests and 3 staff cards, they are shuffled and placed down as a player draw deck.
• Each player takes the 4 dice in their colour, a beer mat then also takes and places 4 white dice on the mat.
• Take all the guest cards that cost 3 'beer' and place them in a face up stack. The remaining guest cards are shuffled and placed down as the guest deck. Deal 4 cards from this deck and place them face up in a line next to the 3 cost cards. Finally place the stack of 'noble' guests face up at the end of the line.
• All staff cards should be sorted into their different types and placed face up in individual stacks in ascending order of cost.

That covers most of the setup.
Now to explain what does what.
Let's start with the tavern board. Many of the abilities on the board are activated by placing dice of a specific value on them.

• Tables; when guests are dealt from a player's deck, they are placed on the tables spaces. Players start with 3 table spaces. This can be upgraded to 4.
• Beer storage; during their turn a player will most likely generate beer. Any beer that is not spent can be stored on this tile. The beer storage holds 2 beer, this can be upgraded to 5.
• Beer supplier; Any dice which are showing a 1 or a 6 can be placed on this tile to generate beer, each die placed here will generate a beer. When upgraded, each die will generate 2 beer.
• Barrel; a die showing any number can be placed here to generate 1 beer. Unlike the beer supplier, only 1 dice can be placed here. When upgraded, it will produce 2 beer.
• Host/reputation; we used the 'reputation' side of this tile. It has a reputation track, when its marker moves round the track it will earn the player various benefits. When the marker reaches the end of the track, it earns a noble guest card and starts round the track again.
• Safe; any unspent money goes here. It stores 2 currency and can be upgraded to store 5.
• Dishwasher; the dishwasher tile does nothing until it is upgraded. When upgraded, it provides the player with a permanent dishwasher (See below for an explanation of what a dishwasher does.).
• Waitress; this tiles too does nothing until upgraded, upon which it provides the player with a permanent waitress.
• Cash box; a single die showing any number can be placed here to earn the player 1 currency, the upgraded version earns 3.
• Monk; any dice showing a 5 here will advance the players marker 1 space along the monastery track. The upgraded version moves the marker along 2 spaces per 5 placed here.

​Talking of the monastery board. It has several functions.

• Turn order; the game is played over 8 rounds and something a little different happens every round, which is all tracked on this board.
• Monastery track: as the player's marker moves round here, they will earn various bonuses.
• Recruit nobles; this table on the monastery board shows the cost (In beer) to recruit nobles.

Now lets go on to what the cards do. Starting with staff cards.

• Beer merchant; when this card is played, it gives the player an extra beer.
• Dishwasher; each dishwasher card played gives the player the ability to increase the result on a single die by 1. Multiple dishwashers allow multiple dice to be increased or 1 die to be increased multiple times. Dice cannot be lowered this way.
• Waitress; each waitress card that is played allows the player to roll an extra die (From their coloured dice.).
• Table; each table card played, grants the player an extra spot to put a guest card.
• Beer supplier; these are different to merchant. They are placed next to the beer supplier tile. Each die used with the beer supplier tile provides 1 extra beer per beer supplier card played.

Now on to guest cards.
Guest cards are acquired by spending beer.

• Guests; guests are recruited by spending beer! When they are placed on your tables, they become extra spots on to which a die may be placed to earn currency. Generally the die which can be placed on a guest is the same as the currency earned. Thus if a guest requires a die showing a 3, it will earn 3 currency. Guests also earn victory points at the end of the game. Some guests also provide a once-only bonus when recruited.

• Noble guests; noble guests always require a 2 to activate and always provide 2 currency. In terms of generating currency, they are amongst the worst guests (I guess it costs so much to please them, players make little profit!), but if more than one noble appears at the same time, then they all go on the same single table and don't take up too much room (They don't like to mingle with the 'rabble' it seems?). The advantage of nobles is that they're worth 10 victory points at the end of the game, which is a lot more than other guests.

​
So at last, finally, we get to how the game plays.
Each round is player over several phases.

• Round set; at the start of each of the 8 rounds, every player will be given a choice of gaining 1 of 2 special actions.
• Deal cards; each player deals cards from their own deck. Staff cards go in specific spots around the tavern board. Guest cards go on to the table spaces. Thus if a player has more table spaces, not only can they accommodate more guests, they have a better chance of drawing more staff cards as well. When all the available tables are filled, the player stops dealing cards.
• Bonus dice: If a player drew and placed any waitress cards in the previous phase (Or they have upgraded their tavern to have a permanent waitress.), they gain a number of bonus dice (In their colour.) equal to the waitresses (Maximum of 3.). These dice are immediately rolled and placed to one side.
• Roll dice; all players roll their 4 white dice and place them on their beer mat. Then in turn order, starting with the current first player, each player removes 1 die and places to to one side. Once all players have removed a die, each player passes the beer mat with the player to their left. Again, starting with the first player, each player removes another die passes the beer mat with the remaining dice to the left. Players continue taking dice and passing beer mats until all dice are gone.
• Place dice; now that players have all their dice, in this phase they choose where to place them. As explained above, dice can be placed on various parts of a tavern board or guest cards in order to activate those actions - provided the number match of course.
• Resolve actions; in turn order, each player resolves their actions, usually this involves generating beer and currency and using them to buy guest and staff cards. Unlike most deck builder games, when new cards are bought they go on top of the player's deck, so they will be played in the next round. Players can also upgrade their tavern, which costs currency. Every time a tile is upgraded, the player gains a noble - which like with other cards, goes on top off their current deck.
• At the end of a turn, all cards that were played (Both guest and staff cards.) are placed into the discard pile and play continues to the next round with a new first player.

That's more or less it for how the game plays.

Endgame
Play continues for 8 rounds. 

Victory points are scored from the cards that players bought
​ Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Taverns of Tiefenthal requires a lot of explanation (As you can see above), but in play is actually quite straightforward.
It's more of a game about optimizing strategies than complex rules.

The game gives you a lot of choices and options. Occasionally these will be meaningless decisions because of how the dice fall, but most of the time you'll have to choose between different actions.
A player will nearly always have more options available than actions to perform them.
​This is makes a good game in my opinion.

There's nothing particularly unique about the game, other than how it blends certain game mechanics together to emulate it's subject quite well. The game's presentation is also very good with well made components and colourful and well produced art.

The game's only drawback is its setup time, there's quite a lot to do. But I think the payoff is worth it as I enjoyed it.

21st December 2019

It's the last Saturday night before Christmas and we're at Matakishi's for some board games. 

This is a game about accumulating stocks in railway companies, running railway companies and paying out dividends.
Yep, this is 'Irish Gauge' and not 1830.

Irish Gauge is a game that simultaneously is the same as and also completely different to 1830.
That is, it shares the same themes as 1830, but is a quite different game.

​What's in a game?
​Irish Gauge components.

• Board: The board is a map that depicts a chunk of Ireland and is covered in hexes (All respectable railway games have hex covered maps.). The map shows cities and towns, as well as difficult terrain. Finally the map shows a 3x8 grid for dividends and info for calculating dividend payouts and managing shares and share order.
• Cubes: 30 Coloured wooden, 10 cubes in each of 3 colours (Little wooden cubes are always welcome in a eurogame.). Cubes serve 2 functions. Firstly they are used to show what goods a city produces and secondly, they are used to dictate the market demand when a player calls for a dividend.
• Bag: The cubes go into the bag.
• Shares: There are 5 companies in Irish Gauge and each company has 2-4 shares. Each share has a 'initial value'. Shares are placed into 5 company stacks, with the lowest value share on the top and the highest on the bottom.
• Train meeples: There are 19 train meeples for each company. 

That's more or less all the components. They are all made to a good standard. There is minimal artwork in the game, but it has a clean and functional look.

How's it play?
​We begin with setup, which is pretty simple.

• Lay out the board and place the 5 stacks of share cards in their allotted places.
• Put 4 cubes of each colour (12 in total.) in the bag and blindly draw out 8 and place them on each of the cities. When this is done add the remaining cubes to the bag.
• Each of the 5 starting companies has a starting city, place 1 train meeple on its respective starting city.
• Give each player 20 currency.

And we're ready to go.

Initial auction
Before normal play commences, there is a 'initial auction' This is where players get to bid on and auction one share from each of the 5 companies.

• Determine a starting player. This player opens bidding on the first share up for auction. They must bid at least the initial value shown on the card or pass. The player can choose to pass.
• Play proceeds to the left. Following players must bid a higher value or pass (Or chooses to pass.). Any player who passes is out of the bidding on that card.
• Bidding continues until all players bar one have passed. That player wins the auction.
• Whoever wins the auction opens bidding on the next card up for auction.
• If every player passes on a share, then the starting player gets the share for free!
• Auctioning continues until all shares have been auctioned.

Now normal play can start. The first player is determined by whoever bought a certain share.
In their turn, the active player can perform 1 of 4 actions, these are: Place track, place a special interest, auction a share and call for a dividend.
Place track:
This is probably the most common action in the game

• The active player can only build a railway line for a company that they have at least 1 share in.
• The active player will have 3 points with which to build a railway line for one company.
• The railway line must connect either to the company's starting city, or some other part of the railway line.
• It costs 1 point to build in a empty hex or empty town/city.
• It costs 1.5 points to build in a hex or town/city that already has another railway line going through it.
• It costs 2 points to build in an empty difficult terrain hex. Only 1 railway line can go through a difficult terrain hex.

Place a special interest:

• This allows the active player to turn a town into a city.
• The active player looks in the bag and take out a cube if their choice.
• The active player places the cube in a town of their choice - provided that town is connected to the railway line of a company in which they have at least 1 share.

Auction a share:

• The active player chooses any share to auction and must bid at least the minimum value on the share.
• Play proceeds to the left. Following players must bid a higher value or pass (Or chooses to pass.). Any player who passes is out of the bidding on that card.
• Bidding continues until all players bar one have passed. That player wins the auction.

Call for a dividend:

• When the active player calls for a dividend, the blindly draw 3 cubes from the bag. The 3 cubes go into the 3x8 grid (Along the 3 axis obviously.) These 3 cubes will indicate which cities on the board a playing out.
• If one of each colour is drawn, then all cities pay out. If only 1 or 2 colours are then only those colours pay out. Doubles (Or triples!) count for nothing.
• Then in share order, calculate how much money each company makes. Each city connected to a company's railway line generates 4, each town generates 2. This is the dividend the company pays out.
• The dividend is paid out to the shareholders. If there is only one shareholder, they get all the money. Otherwise it is divided up according to the number of shares owned by players and paid out per share.

Endgame
The game ends when there are no more cubes in the bag, either because of a dividend being called or placing a cube as a special interest on the board.

All players tot up their cash plus the initial value of the shares they own. Highest cash wins.

Overall
Irish Gauge is a railway building game with stocks and shares and companies.
It's actually quite a common theme in board games. But Irish Gauge plays nothing like any of these other games.

It seems like the basic strategy is that players need to build railways, to issue dividends, to buy shares.
Simple, right? Not necessarily.
Whilst players may want to maximise their railway network before calling dividends, to get as much money as possible to have more funds when bidding on shares during an auction.

Waiting a long time to buy shares is a risky move.

Why? There limited opportunities to call for dividends because when the game starts, there will only be 22 cubes in the bag and each dividend uses 3 cubes. So there's maximum of 8 times a dividend can be called - and the last dividend will be with 1 cube! This is of course, provided nobody uses cubes to upgrade towns.

So shares bought later in the game will benefit less because there will be less dividend pay outs. This isn't so bad if you get a shares at the initial value, but that's unlikely to occur. So paying an extra 20 to get a share that only pays out 5 twice is actually a loss of 10!
This means players will want to get shares as quick as possible, but at the same time, it's prudent to wait and see if other players have low funds as this is a great time to trigger an auction, since they may have to pass, giving the active player a share at the initial value.

It's like some sort of horrible balancing act.

There's more as well. If a player thinks they benefit from a dividend more than anyone else, then they might ignore buying shares or improving their network and may just call dividend after dividend and 'run out' the game. However there's a random element to dividends, so they may scupper themselves.

After playing the game a couple of times: It seems to me that how a player places their railway lines is a bit of a 'no-brainer'. But on reflection I don't think this is as much of an issue as I first thought. Perhaps when to call for dividends may seem more vital for the game than anything else - provided the right cubes are pulled from the bag of course.

There's a lot to think about here, which is good.

Finally, Irish Gauge plays as fast as a roadrunner with it's backside on fire.
If you're used to slow and meaty railway games, Irish Gauge may feel quite fresh with it's relatively short play time.

I'm not certain if Irish Gauge will stand up to extended play. But it's worth giving it a couple of plays at least.

3rd December 2019

It's Tuesday at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking with the board game club.

This means board games! And tonight we played 'Wayfinders'.

'Those magnificent men, in their flying machines.'
'They go up tiddly up up.'
'They go down tiddly down down.'

That's enough of that!

Wayfinders is a colourful little game about flying and exploration.
It's also a fairly light worker placement and resource management game.

What's in a game?
Wayfinders is played over a 5x5 grid of tiles:

• Home tile: This is the starting tile for all players and sits in the middle of the 5x5 grid.
• Island tiles: These represent islands that players may explore during the game. There are 3 different types of tile, resource effect, permanent effect and scoring effect tiles. There are 15 of each type for a total of 45. 24 tiles will be used in a single game. Island tiles show what benefit they give, how much it costs to build a hangar and how much it costs to travel to the tile. Finally they show the order in which hangars are built on a tile.
• Hangar board: This board contains 8 different hangars. Above each hanger is a sort of 'raised groove' that holds resources and below each hanger is a space to place worker meeples.
• Resources: There are some quite chunky coloured plastic 5 tokens to represent the 5 types of types of resource: Fuel (Red.), headphones (Blue.), parachute (Green.), propeller (Black.) and tyre (Yellow.). There 12 of each type, so 60 in total.
• Bag: Generally all the resources are kept in this bag and blindly drawn when required.
• Planes: Each player is given a seaplane meeple.
• Hangars: Each player is given 10 hangar meeples.

Apart from the aforementioned worker meeple issue, all the components are solidly made and bright and colourful.

On the island tiles. All the resources are delineated by both colour and symbol except for the resource in the bottom right corner, which is represented only by colour.

However the resource tokens appear to have their symbols printed on them and they may wear off over time and use.

How's it play?
Setup.

• Randomly take 24 island tiles from the 3 types available and shuffle them. Then along with the home tile create a 5x5 grid (With the home tile as the centre tile.).
• Populate the hangar board with resources blindly drawn from the bag. The number of hangars used in a game is equal to the number of players doubled. Each hangar holds 3 resources.
• Give each player the hangers, plane and meeples in their selected colour
• Determine the starting player. Then each player (In turn order.) places a hanger on the home tile. Each player also places their seaplane on the home tile.

So now on to the game.
In Wayfinders, there are only 2 main actions, although the 2nd action has a number of sub actions that can be performed.

1st action, place a worker:

• A player must place a worker on the space beneath one of the available hangars.
• A single player can place up to 3 workers on a hangar space.
• Any number of players can place up to 3 workers on a single hangar space.
• The order in which workers are placed on a hangar does not matter.

The 2nd action has 4 sub actions, carried out in order. First is taking back workers and collecting resources.

• When taking back workers, all workers must be taken back from all hangars that they've been placed on.
• For every worker taken back from a hangar, the active player also gets to take a resource from that hangar.
• If the active player has 3 workers on a hangar, they take all 3 resources. If they have 1 or 2 workers, then they 1 or 2 resources respectively, starting from the top and working down. Then any remaining resources below are slid up the 'groove' to fill the space(s) above.

Now we go on to the 2nd sub action, which is move seaplane and build hangar(s).

• A plane can be moved orthogonally. When a plane enters a tile, the active player must pay the cost (Return the relevant resource back to the bag.) shown in the bottom right corner of the tile.
• If the active player moves on to a tile that has a hangar already on it (From any player.), then the active player does not have to pay the cost.
• The active player can move on to or through as many tiles as they want provided they can pay the cost or they don't need to pay the cost.
• The active player can choose to build a hangar, they can do this before, after, or during their move. Furthermore, they can build multiple hangars during their move. Players can only build 1 hangar per tile.
• When the active player builds a hangar, they must pay the displayed cost. If the active player is the first player to build a hangar on a tile, the resources are paid back to the bank (Go back into the bag.). If they are not the first player to build a hangar on a particular tile, then they must pay the resources to the player that built the first hangar!
• There 3 types of island tile. When a hangar is built by any player (Regardless of order.) then there will be an effect.  A resources effect allows the player to blindly draw a varying number of resources from the bag. A permanent effect grants the player some sort of special ability that is always in effect, such being able to enter certain tiles without paying etc. A scoring effect is bonus way to earn points, that are scored during the end game.

The 3rd and 4th sub actions are just clean up really:

• The 3rd sub action is (If required.) to discard down to 3 resources. Excess resources are returned to the bag.
• The 4th sub action is to refill the spaces in the hangar(s) that become emptied. Since resources slide up the hanger to fill gaps, it's always the lower spaces that gain new resources. This is a variant on the 'conveyor belt' mechanic.

Those are most of the rules, more or less. It's actually quite a straightforward game.
Acquire resources.
Travel.
Build hangars.

​Endgame
The endgame is triggered when a player has 2 or less hangars remaining in their supply.
The current round is completed and scoring commences.
Resource and Permanent effect tiles have a static score.
But scoring tiles tend to have scores dependent on what the player as achieved in the game. For example: A scoring tile might score 3 points for each tile in the same vertical line as itself that the player has put a hangar on to.
Unused resources and workers on the hangar board in the endgame also score.
Final scores are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Wayfinders is a pretty simple game, but there's a couple of interesting things going on in this game.

Acquiring resources is an unusual blend of worker placement and drafting with a dash of push your luck.
Players will probably find themselves competing over certain resources, particularly if that resource is scarce in the hangars.
This can lead to some tricky decisions. A player can keep putting down workers so that when they are returned, the player will get the maximum resources. But if that player needs a certain resource, this delay can lead to them losing that resource to another player.
Or perhaps a player needs a resource that is 3rd in line at the hanger. Do they try and play 3 workers to get at it? Or do they place a single worker and hope that someone takes a resource ahead if it.
Watching where other players put their workers can be insightful.

Whilst there is little direct interaction in Wayfinders, particularly on the tiles. Another reason to watch what other players do, is that when they place a hangar in a tile, that tile becomes accessible to other players for free. This can make it easier to reach tile beyond it and will open up the playing area and also open up more choices and strategies.

Conversely, getting to a tile that may prove popular with other players and putting a hangar on there first is a great way to earn resources as other players must pay to you instead of the bank.
This is a lot more useful than it sounds. After moving a plane and placing hangars, a player can only retain 3 resources. So even if that player maximizes the placement of their workers, they can only start a move and build action with a maximum of 8 resources.
However if during a round other players have to pay out to you to put their hangars down, it's possible to start with a lot more resources.
This can be a great advantage, as being able to put down 2 or 3 hangars in a turn really lays pressure on other players as they'll be forced to play catch up.

Remember, players start with 10 hangars, but 1 goes on the home tile, so in reality everyone starts with 9 hangars. And the endgame is triggered when any player reaches 2 or less hangars left. So a player only needs to place 7 hangars to trigger the endgame.

As well as being a fairly easy game to learn, Wayfinder is a quite short game and playing speeds up over the course of a game as the board inevitably opens up.

Optimizing your actions and taking advantage of circumstances are key to winning. A canny player can end the game abruptly, leaving their competitors in the lurch.

The only criticism I have is that it's a little too long for a filler game, but a little short for a main game.

But that criticism aside, Wayfinders is a easy to learn and fairly fun game to play.

26th November 2019

Tuesday evening at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking continues.

The second and final game of the night was 'Architects of the West Kingdom'.

As an architect it's your job to rebuild the errr.... West Kingdom!
So it appears that in this game, you'll be rubbing shoulders with virtuous members of the clergy and getting 'down and dirty' with shady criminals. The life of an architect, eh?
 
Architects of the West Kingdom is a pretty standard worker placement game, but a worker placement game with a couple of extra little twists.

What's in a game?
There's quite a lot to Architect of the West Kingdom and this is reflected in the components.

• Game board: As you'd expect for a worker placement game, there's lots of spots to place workers. There's also a couple of card tracks, a 'Cathedral track, a 'Guildhall track' as well as a virtue track. Interestingly there's also tax stand and a prison.
• Tax stand: There's a cardboard cut out basic 3d building that is used to represent the tax stand. When certain taxes are paid, they go directly into the tax stand. This is only 3d building in the game, it's bit unnecessary, but it's a nice touch.
• Reward cards: When a player contributes to the construction of the Cathedral, they earn a reward.
• Apprentice cards: Used with one of the card tracks. Apprentices grant the owning player some sort of bonus when acquired.
• Building cards: These cards contain 'plans' for buildings that players can build.
• Multiplier cards:
• Debt cards: These are double sided cards, one side represents being in debt (Not a good thing.) and the other side represents having paid that debt off.
• Black market cards: These cards are also double sided and represent resources that can be acquired via the black market. one side represents 'small' and the other 'large' markets.
• Resources: There are 6 kinds of resources in this game: Clay, wood, stone, silver, gold & marble.
• Player boards: These are double sided. One side is for the standard game and the other for the variable.
• Meeples: Every player gets 20 meeples to use as workers.

The cards are quite nicely illustrated. The artwork on the board is even nicer, depicting the different buildings and areas that workers 'use'. It's clear some effort has gone into the artwork.

Hows it play?
Setup

• Determine the starting player.
• Give each player a personal board, 20 meeples and currency dependant on starting order.
• Give each player 4 building cards. Each player keeps 1 card and passes the remaining cards to the player to the left. This is repeated 4 times.
• Each player puts a marker on the starting spot of the virtue track.
• Construct the tax stand and put 4 coins into it.
• Fill the card tracks with apprentice cards.

Now we're ready to start. But first one of the differences in to normal worker placement games needs to be explained.
There are 3 ways to place workers in the game, this is dependant on the symbol used on the game board:

• First, when placing a worker, the player may have to pay some currency (In the form of tax.) to do it. Depending on where the worker is placed, this currency may go into the tax stand or supply.
• Small circle: Only a single meeple can occupy a small circle at any one time.
• Large circle: Any number of meeples from any number of players can occupy a large circle at any time. Furthermore, the more workers a player places into a large circle, the more they get out of it. If a player puts a worker into the 'forest' region, they will gain 1 wood. If on a later turn they place a 2nd worker into the wood region, they will gain 2 wood, 3 wood for a 3rd worker and so on. Other players' workers do affect each other.
• Guildhall: When a player creates a building, they must place a worker into the Guildhall, this worker is now out of the game.

Now we know how worker placement works, it's time to explain what all the buildings and areas do:

• Black market: The black market consists of 3 small circles. Using a black market space allows a player to carry out the action shown below the 3 circles. This is either acquire the good(s) shown on either the small card stack or large market card stack. Or the player can acquire a apprentice or building card. No matter they choose to do, the must lose 1 virtue when using the black market.
• Cathedral: Players can 'contribute' to the building of the cathedral. This is done by paying the cost and moving their piece up the track, this also grants the player a reward card and whatever benefit it confers. At the end of the game, the further up the cathedral track a player is, the more victory points they acquire during the endgame.
• Town centre: The town centre has a large circle. Amusingly, the town centre allows you to capture workers belong to other players (Or even your own!) and place them on your personal board. Each worker a player has in the town centre allows them to capture all the workers of a single colour on a space. Putting more workers on the town centre allows the player to capture even more workers. Why would a player want to capture workers, well see below.
• Guardhouse: Has a large circle. There are several different actions you can perform when putting a worker on the guardhouse. Firstly you can put workers you've captured in prison! For money! That's right, capturing workers and imprisoning them is a way to make money. Secondly, if the active player has workers in prison, they can release them back on to their personal board. Thirdly, pay money (Or get a debt card.) and lose 1 virtue to take back workers from another player's board. Finally, the active player can pay off a debt card.
• Quarry, Forest, Mine & Silversmith: These 4 locations all have large circles and are used to acquire resources. Placing workers on the quarry gets the active player clay, forest gets wood, mine gets stone or gold and silversmith gets silver.
• King's storehouse: Has a large circle. Placing workers here allows the active player to buy virtue and/or marble with resources.
• Guildhall: Putting a worker here allows the active player to play a building card (Provided they also pay the resources required.).
• Workshop: Has a large circle. Placing a worker here allows the active player to recruit an apprentice. There are 2 tracks of 4 apprentices. To recruit apprentice further along to the right of the track, you either need to have more workers in the circle, or pay. The track behaves like a conveyor belt, so when an apprentice is taken, cards slide to the left to fill the gap and new cards are added to the right.
• Tax stand: Has a large circle. As stated above, money will be paid into the tax stand. If the active player places a worker here they can take (OK steal actually!) all the currency in the tax stand. Doing this costs 2 points of virtue.

Overall
There are a couple of interesting mechanics in Architects of the West Kingdom, particularly how they interact with each other.

Being able to put multiple workers into a space to gain increasing results seems overpowered. But when a player puts a lot of workers into a single space, they can just become a target for another player to capture. Obviously when capturing workers, players will want to do it as efficiently as possible, because there's money to be made when putting them in prison.
If a player can predict their opponent's moves, stealing their workers can really screw with them.
Another thing to consider is that players have no way to get their workers back other than having them captured by other players or capturing them themselves.
Being able to manage your workers in this way can avoid those pesky debt cards, which themselves are a clever little addition to the game.
The virtue track, black market and cathedral also add an extra element that helps differentiate the game.

I enjoyed this game, I think it's fairly good.Generally I felt like I always had options and meaningful decisions to make. Which all I really want from a game.
​
If you really like worker placement games, you'll probably like Architects of the West Kingdom. It's just different enough to justify its existence.
Or, if you don't own any worker placement games and you want one. You may want to consider this game, 

26th November 2019

Tuesday gaming night at 'The Sovereigns' is here.

The first game of the evening was 'Nine Tile Panic'.

Nine Tile Panic is a game that comes in a little box that delivers a lot of stress!
This is a game all about building a city but not just building a city. It's a game about building a city in a strict time limit!
Thinking about it, maybe we should get real city planners to play this game? You won't find any unoccupied roadworks in Nine Tile panic let me tell you.

What's in a game?
'Nine Tile Panic' has few components:

• ​Tiles: 45 double sided tiles, 5 identical sets of 9 cards for each player. The tiles depict different types of roads such as crossroads, T-junctions etc. The tiles also depict dogs, men-in-black, aliens, ufos, burgers, buildings etc.
• Objective cards: 26 cards that have objectives that need to be met each round.
• Order markers: There are 5 of these that are used to rank the finishing order at the end of every round.
• Scoreboard: Tracks scores!

The components are reasonably colourful with simple illustrations.

How's it play?
Before playing, give each player a set of tiles.
Nine Tile Panic is played over a series of rounds. Each round is scored before play proceeds to the following round.
A round goes like this:

• Set out order markers, according to the number of players.
• 3 objective cards are drawn. These objectives tend to be quite diverse and unusual. Each objective has variable levels of success. The better each objective is completed, the more points are earned. An objective might be 'have as many men in black pointing their guns at aliens as possible.
• Players now have to place their 9 tiles down in a 3x3 grid in such a way as to maximise scoring from the objective cards (Both sides can be used.). Players must however, follow this rule: Any roads on the tiles must enter and exit the 3x3 grid and must be connected to each other as required, there can be no 'dead ends'.
• Players can choose when to 'stop' building their city. The first player to 'stop', takes the highest value order marker and turns over the hourglass timer.
• All remaining players have 90 seconds to complete their cities. When a player stops building their city, they take the next highest value order marker. This continues until all players have taken an order marker, or the timer runs out.
• Once the 90 seconds are over, any player who has not claimed an order marker is eliminated. Furthermore, any city that does not meet the criteria for connected roads is eliminated from that rounds scoring.

Scoring:

• Scoring is based on the number of players participating. For a 5 player game, scores vary from 1 to 5, for a 4 player game it's 1 to 4 and so on.
• Each of the 3 objectives is scored separately. The player who has achieved the most of an objective will score the maximum points for it (5 points for a 5 player game.), the second best player to achieve the objective will get the second highest score. This continues until the lowest achieving player receives 1 point. Obviously, players who were eliminated in this round will score 0 (In all objectives.). Ties are settled using the order marker (Highest value wins ties.).
• This is done for all 3 objectives. Thus; in a 5 player game, a player who gets highest in all 3 objectives would score 15 points.
• Once all 3 objectives have been scored, a new round with 3 new objectives will begin.

Endgame
Play continues until the score limit has been reached. For a 5 player game this is 25 points.
Final scores are tallied, highest score wins. 

Overall
Nine Tile Panic is a small, quick to learn and quick to play game. A game can be 20 more than 20 minutes.

The game is supposed to be fun, but it should be called 'Nine Tile Stress!'. Why? Because there will always be that one player who's going to finish their city too quickly just to watch the other players suffer! That's why. Always!
You'll be swearing under your breath as any strategy you've concocted will fly out of the window and you'll just be trying to make any city you can!

And seriously, that's what makes Nine Tile Panic a good game and fun too.
If you have friends who like real time games, you should play this with them.
And if you have friends who hate real time games you should definitely play this with them!