28th March 2023

Tuesday is here again and we're with the Woking Gaming Club at The Sovereigns for an evening of gaming goodness.

Game of the night is Istanbul.

Ah, Istanbul, home of an ancient settlement and exotic gateway between the east and the west...
...Also a place where frenzied merchants rapidly push wheelbarrows around the bazaar, trailed by assistants while looking to acquire rubies in this worker placement game.

The component quality is good for nearly all of Istanbul.
The game makes good use of wooden components and dice which is always good. All the cardboard tokens and tiles are sturdy enough. The cards are also good.
It's all the quality you'd expect from a modern game.
The only criticism I have is that fitting the extensions into the wheelbarrow feels fiddly and when trying to put in the final extension it can be too tight and wont fit properly. It's a minor oversight that doesn't affect the game experience but it could have been a bit better.

There's unique artwork on all the location tiles. Even though it uses a pretty standard style of illustration, I think it looks good and gives the game a eye-catching presence on the table. I also feel that it's quite suitable, being evocative and colourful without obscuring important information.

Iconography in Istanbul is a bit of a mixed bag. Much of it is easily understood but the occasional icon and in particular, bonus cards will find players leafing through the rulebook for clarification.
This is fairly infrequent though and is a minor inconvenience rather than detrimental

How's it play?
Setup

• Players: Give each player the merchant, assistant, family member tokens and cubes in their colour.
  Wheelbarrow: Each player should take a wheelbarrow tile, then place their 4 cubes on the 4 'empty' spaces on their goods tracks.
  When players gain goods, they move the cube along the respective track.
  You will note at the game start, players can only have 2 of each good. By acquiring extensions, players can eventually hold up to 5 of each good.
• Tiles: The 16 location tiles will need to be put out in a 4x4 grid. This can be done either by using 1 of the 2 predetermined setups or randomly - although there are some restrictions using the random method. Additionally, many of the locations will have further setup.
  • Caravansary: Shuffle the bonus cards into a face-down deck and place them close to the caravansary.
  • Fountain: Each player should create a stack of 5 tokens with the the merchant token at the top and 4 assistants beneath and place their stack on the fountain location tile.
    The 5th assistant token should be set aside for the time being, they can be acquired during play.
    Gemstone dealer: Place rubies on the gemstone dealer location tile as per player count.
  • Markets: Sort the demand tiles into their 2 types. Shuffle each into a face-up stack and place them on to their respective market tiles.
  • Mosques: Sort the mosque tiles by type/colour, then sort each stack by goods cost, with the lowest at the top and highest cost at bottom. Then place 2 stacks on each of the 2 mosque tiles.
    Rubies: Finally add rubies to each mosque as per player count.
  • Police station: Each player should place their 'family member' cylindrical token on the police station location tile.
  • Post office: The post office has 2 rows of 4 spaces, place the 4 mail cubes along the upper row on the post office location tile.
  • Sultan's palace: Place rubies on the Sultan's palace location tile as per player count.
  • Wainwright: Place rubies and wheelbarrow extensions on the wainwright location as per player count.
  • Governor & smuggler: Roll the dice for each, then place their tokens on the location with the matching number.
• First player: Determine a starting player.
  The starting player should take 2 Lira, the next player gets 3 Lira, 3rd gets 4 Lira and so forth.
  Bonus card: Each player should draw a bonus card.

On to play
In Istanbul, players are attempting to acquire 5 or 6 rubies (Dependant on player count.) and the game provides a variety of methods to achieve this.
Istanbul follows the usual turn structure with the active player completing their turn before play progresses to their left.

During their turn, the active player will act in 2-4 phases - depending on circumstances.
The 4 phases always occur in the order shown below.

• Movement: The active player can move their stack of tokens up to 2 spaces during this phase, this cannot be diagonal and when the stack reaches its destination, one of the following must occur.
  • Drop off assistant: The active player takes one of the assistant tokens out of their stack and places it elsewhere on the same location tile.
  • Pick up assistant: If the active player already has an assistant token on the location space they stopped at, then they can add it back into their stack.
  • Pass: If the active player cannot or does not want to drop off or pick up an assistant, then their turn ends immediately unless the active player ended up at the fountain!
• Encounter merchant: This phase is conditional and if the active player ended their movement in a location tile with 1 or more merchants that belong to other players, then the active player must pay those players 2 Lira each.
  If they cannot or do no want to pay, then the active player's turn ends immediately, this does not occur if they stopped at the fountain.
• Action: This phase represents the bulk of gameplay and the active player may now choose to undertake the action for the tile they stopped at.
  There a quite a few actions a player can perform.
  • Black market: When the player's merchant is at the black market, they can gain 1 green/red/yellow good.
    Additionally, they should roll the 2 dice, the result will grant them 0-3 blue goods.
  • Caravansary: The active play draws 2 bonus cards into their hand and then discards 1 bonus card.
    When drawing cards from being at the caravansary location, the active player may choose to draw from the discard pile instead.
  • Fountain: When the active player's merchant is at the fountain, they can recall any number of their assistant tokens back into their stack.
  • Gemstone dealer: Here the active player may purchase a ruby. The more rubies that are purchased throughout the game, the more they will cost.
  • Market: When a merchant stops at one of the 2 markets, they can sell goods matching the demands on the current demand card. The more matching goods they sell, the more they earn. Each of the markets will determine how much the player earns.
    Regardless of how many goods are sold, the current demand tile is put at the bottom of the stack and a new demand tile is revealed.
  • Mosques: When a merchant stops at one of the 2 mosques, they can acquire one of the 2 mosque tiles there.
    To do so, the player's wheelbarrow must be carrying the goods that match was is shown on the top mosque tile. However, acquiring a tile costs only 1 good of the displayed tile.
    Once a mosque tile is taken, a more expensive version will be revealed beneath.
    Players can only have copy of each type of tile regardless of where they acquired it from.
  • Police station: When a player's merchant stops at the police station and if their family member is there, then the player can 'free' their family member.
    Since their family member 'knows how to get stuff', the player can immediately place the family member token on any other space and trigger its action. The family member does not have encounters and does not benefit or is restricted in that way.
  • Post Office: If the active player's merchant stops at the post office, they acquire all the items shown on the 4 uncovered spaces.
    After this, they must slide the leftmost cube on the upper row to the space directly below, thus changing the resources earned by the next merchant to stop here.
    When all 4 cubes are on the lower row, the next merchant to stop at the post office will claim their resources and put all 4 cubes back on the upper row.
  • Sultan's palace: When a merchant stops here, the player can trade goods for a ruby.
    As with the gemstone dealer, the more rubies that are acquired here, the more costly they become to trade for.
  • Tea house: Time for some friendly gambling! When a merchant stops here, the player announces a number from 3-12, then they roll both dice.
    If the rolled number is equal to or greater than the announced number, then the active player acquires Lira equal to the number they announced.
    If the number was lower, then they take 2 Lira.
  • Wainwright: Stopping here allows the merchant's player to buy an extension for their wheelbarrow. Once the 3rd and final extension has been acquired, the player can acquire 1 ruby from the wainwright tile.
  • Warehouses: There are 3 warehouses, one each respectively for green, red and yellow goods.
    If a merchant stops at a warehouse, they can fill the related good on their wheelbarrow to the maximum amount.
• Other encounters: As with the other encounter phase, this is conditional and depends on what tokens are also on the location where the active player's merchant stopped.
  • Other players' family members: If a merchant encounters the family member of another player on their location, they must snitch on them to the cops!
    This earns the active player 3 Lira or a bonus card.
  • Governor: When the governor token is on the same location as a player's merchant, the player can draw bonus card, then they must discard a bonus card or pay 2 Lira.
    After encountering the governor, roll 2 dice and move the governor's token to the location with the number that matches the dice roll.
  • Smuggler: When the smuggler is encountered, the active player may gain the good of their choice, they must then discard a good of their choice or play 2 Lira.
    As with the governor, after encountering the smuggler, roll the dice and relocate the smuggler to the new location.
• Bonus cards: These are not part of any phase in particular and the active player may play any number of bonus cards during at any time during their turn.

Endgame
The game end is triggered when any player acquires the required number of rubies.
​Play continues for the current round until all participants have had equal turns.
Finally, each player will have the option to play unused bonus cards, since Lira and goods act as a tie-breaker this can be important.

Rubies are tallied, highest amount wins.

Overall
I don't know whether it's deliberate or not but there's a slightly cynical thread of humour running through Istanbul. 
It's an amusing facet of the game that merchants are useless without assistants to boss around or how everyone has that one shady cousin who 'knows someone' or 'can get you stuff'.
Thematically, the game is presented quite well.
Your merchant and their little band go from place to place, looking to earn money or get goods in order to eventually gain rubies.

Mechanically, Istanbul is relatively straightforward. While there's quite a lot of tiles and consequently a lot going and a lot to think about and possibly remember, none of it in practice is actually overly complex.
Istanbul presents players with the conundrum of balancing the need to increase their abilities via mosque and extension tiles or trying to acquire rubies.
Broadly speaking, the game game provides some one-off way of gaining rubies but two main avenues to accumulating them - which are by spending goods or spending Lira and then providing several ways to acquire goods and Lira.
It means that Istanbul is a game of planning efficient moves and maximising actions. This is particularly the case when dropping off or picking up assistants. Well thought out play will allow a player to do this without visiting the fountain which requires an entire turn to gather assistants.

While the game is essentially a race without direct conflict between players, there's still some interaction that goes on.
There is arguably a higher level of play where players could try and anticipate the actions of their opponent allowing them to block opponents by putting their merchant on specific locations, forcing other players to pay out to go there or preventing them entering all together. However, this tends to occur by accident more than design.
Another area of interaction is at the markets, the more goods sold a player can sell an once at a market, the more money that player earns but taking longer to do this risks being trumped by another player fulfilling the demand tile earlier.
So players will need to occasionally adapt to situations as needed as well as planning their actions.

Istanbul does a good job balancing varied gameplay, strategy and meaningful decisions with ease-of-play, although I'm not sure I would describe it as entirely suitable for non-gamers but core gamers should have no problems comprehending the game
It also has a novel and clever implementation of worker placement mechanics which provide some satisfying moments when used effectively.

This is a mid-weight game with a somewhat lengthy play time - although it never felt overlong or unwelcome. I found it to be an enjoyable worker placement game. Istanbul   is a game that's definitely worth trying.

19th February 2023

It's Sunday evening again and we're logged into Board Game Arena for some gaming goodness.

Paint the Roses, it sounds a strange thing but that's what you do when in the kingdom of The Queen of Hearts in this 'Alice in Wonderland' themed cooperative game of deductive reasoning.

Caveat: We have only ever played this game digitally.

What's in a game?

• Game board: The central part of this board displays a cluster of hex-shaped spaces, each space contains a hedge or shrub.
  At the top of the board is a very picturesque palace decorated with a heart motif
  Running around the outside edge is what appears to be a scoring track and at regular points along this track are milestones or breakpoints marked out by white rabbits.

• Models: Not pertinent to the digital version of the game but the physical copy comes with 3d models to represent The White Rabbit, The Gardeners and the The Queen of Hearts.
  Additionally, there are 4 petal tokens that are used in conjunction with The Queen of Hearts and one-by-one are slipped beneath her model's base during the game, increasing her speed - which is not a good thing!
• Bag: This is also only part of the physical game and is used to blind draw shrub tokens.

Paint the Roses' artwork is pretty high quality, Art on whim cards and tiles look good and is easily understood but the standout art is on the game board. It's vibrant, colourful and eye catching, everything I think is good in game artwork.

Only 4 colours and 4 shapes are used in Paint the Roses, these are straightforward to comprehend and there's no other iconography.

How's it play?
Setup

• ​Game board: Put out the game board.
  Place The Gardeners tile on the '0' space.
  Place The Queen of Hearts tile on space '44' (Actually 6 spaces behind The Gardeners.).
  Place The White Rabbit on it's first milestone.
  Place the starting shrubs into their determined starting positions.
• Whim cards: Sort the whim cards into their 3 types and shuffle them into 3 face-down decks.
• Shrub tiles: In the physical game, these tiles would go into the bag.
• Greenhouse board: Randomly draw 4 shrub tiles and place them on the 4 available spaces on the greenhouse tile.
• Clue tokens: Give each player the clue tokens in their player colour.
• First player: Determine a starting player.
  Once this has been done, each player in turn order should draw a whim card from 1 of the 3 decks with the proviso that only 1 player can have an easy card at any time.

On to play
In Paint the Roses, the players are trying to collectively fill all 16 empty spaces on the game board while staying ahead of The Queen of Hearts model.
How is this done? By playing tiles, placing clues on them and using those clues to try and guess what is displayed on other player's whim cards.
Players must keep their whim cards hidden from other players, only revealing them when they are correctly guessed.
Paint the Roses uses a traditional turn structure with the active player completing their actions before play progresses to the player on their left. During the active player's turn, the following phases occur.

• Place tile: The active player must take one of the 4 tiles from the greenhouse board and place on any empty space on the board.
• Place clue tokens: All players then place clue tokens on the tile that was just placed.
  The number of clue tokens a player must place should be equal to the the number of ways the currently placed tile matches the colour/shape shown on their whim card.
  E.g., if a diamond shaped bush was just placed next to a spade shaped and any player had a whim card depicting a spade adjacent to a diamond, then that player must put a clue token on the newly placed tile.
  If the placed tile matches a whim card in more than one way, then clue tokens must be placed on the tile for each match. So if a spade was placed adjacent to 2 diamonds, 2 tokens would need to be placed on the tile
  If there are no matches, then no clue tokens are placed on the tile.
• Guess: Once clue tokens have been placed, the players must collaboratively pick any one of the whim cards and try to guess the symbols on that card. That is they're trying to guess which colour/shapes are shown on that particular card. Obviously, players cannot guess the symbols on their own card!
  • Correct!: If the players guess correctly, the following occurs.
    Discard whim card: The whim card that was correctly guessed is discarded.
    Move The Gardeners: The Gardeners figure should be moved a number of spaces equal to the value shown in the bottom right corner of the card that was just guessed. If this moves The Gardeners past The White Rabbit model, add a petal to The Queen of Heart's base (She will move faster from now on!) and move The White Rabbit to it's next milestone.
    Remove clue tokens: All clue tokens related to the correctly guessed whim card are returned to their player's hand.
    Guess again: After making a correct guess, the players may choose to make another guess, this is not mandatory and can be risky - as explained below.
  • Incorrect!: When a incorrect guess is made, the phase immediately ends.
• Move Queen: Once the guessing phase is over, The Queen moves and there are 2 ways this can happened.
  Correct guesses: If all guesses that were made were correct, The Queen moves her speed which is 1 space plus 1 space per petal under her base, thus she can move up to 5 spaces! That's not the worst though!
  Incorrect guess: If the players made a incorrect guess, The Queen of Hearts moves double her speed!
• End of turn: Once the Queen's movement has been resolved and the game has not ended, the following occurs.
  Replenish whim cards: Any player who discarded a whim cad now draws one from any of the 3 decks, the rule about only 1 easy whim card still applies.
  Replenish greenhouse board: A new shrub tile is drawn and placed on the empty space on the greenhouse board.
  Next player: Play progresses to the player left of the active player, who now becomes the new active player and a new turn begins.

Endgame
If the players manage to place shrub tiles in all 16 spaces and survive to the end of the round - that is; survive The Queen's final movement, the players collectively win the game!

If any time The Queen reaches the same space as The Gardeners or overtakes them; it's off with their heads. The players collectively lose the game.

Once a game is concluded, players can record their score, i.e., where they finished on the scoring track.

Overall
Thematically I found Paint the Roses a little abstract. Having The Queen actually chase the player model around the out of the board was a bit silly (Which thinking about matches the absurdness of the source material.) but also reasonably clever.
While I understand how the theme meshes with the mechanics, it all felt a little... detached.

​Mechanically though, Paint the Roses presents players with very tricky decisions and this is twofold.

Firstly, the active player must decide which of 4 shrub tiles to draft and how they can place it on the board to convey the information on their card. I think that there's also a higher level of play here where the active player can choose to play a tile to potentially help another player to convey information.
Secondly, once a tile has been put down, the players must make a guess. It's likely that this will involve a mix of deduction and also blind guessing. Easy whim cards are well... fairly easy to guess which is why players are limited to one easy card at a time, other cards are no so easy. Its important to successfully guess harder cards because it puts more space between the players and The Queen
There's also the element of trying to guess another card after a successful guess but it's genuinely higher stakes: A successful 2nd guess will give the players more breathing room but a wrong guess means that essentially any progress made from a guess has been lost. Double or nothing really.

These mechanics for guessing feel quite unique but also a little obtuse and harder to comprehend than they should be.
I don't think it helped that we were playing the game digitally and clue tokens were added automatically which sort of distanced us from thinking about what was going on.
I also felt being forced to guess every turn was quite harsh and The Queen advanced very quickly after relatively few failures. I feel that if players make a couple of wrong guesses in the early game, they'll be on the back foot for the rest of it - however long that lasts.

This brings me to the rule with the White Rabbit that increases The Queen's speed is quite interesting - although I'm not sure how I feel about it.
If The Queen has a high speed, an incorrect guess can move her a lot of spaces. It increases the stakes as the game progresses, meaning the players can never afford to be complacent.
The drawback is that it felt frustrating and counterintuitive, like we were being punished for being successful.

Between the difficulty and somewhat frustrating way the deduction worked, I found that I did not enjoy Paint the Roses, which is a shame, I like the idea of a cooperative, logic driven game.
I would definitely be open to trying the game physically as I might chance my stance  when actually handling the game but digitally speaking, this is not a game for me.

17th February 2023

It's a Friday and we're at Woking for a night of gaming fun.

Adrenaline, a fast paced head-to-head game inspired by first person shooters.

• Ammo tiles: These smallish square card tiles each display images of  up to 3 ammo cubes in various combinations. Some ammo tiles will display powerup cards.
• Victory points: These large and usually shaped tokens are used to VPs.

Adrenaline uses plastic damage tokens, card ammo tiles, transparent acrylic ammo cubes and skulls; it's an usual mix of materials but it works just fine.
The components are all good quality, the cards are fine as are the tiles and tokens. The plastic components all feel solid.

It's immediately apparent that Adrenaline makes good use of colour. This is particularly true of the game board, where bright colours are used to distinguish between different rooms - this is important for 'line of sight'. The component also look bright and colourful as well as easy distinguish.
The game's art is fairly good if a little underused - illustrations on weapon cards are a little small. Other than that I think the artwork is mostly reserved for character portraits.

There is quite a lot of iconography in Adrenaline, mostly on weapon and powerup cards, the game comes with a separate booklet to explain how they work - which is a little telling. Some of the iconography is intuitive and easy to comprehend, some of it not so much.
Luckily, it's not a gamebreaker and not much of an issue to learn but I do feel it will slow down the game somewhat unless at least 1 person has previously played.

How's it play?
Setup

• Game board: Set up the game board as per player count or as desired.
  Ammo tiles: Shuffle the ammo tiles into a face-down stack. Deal 1 face-up into each space that does not have a spawn point.
  Powerup cards: Shuffle the powerup cards into a face-down deck and place them on their allotted space on the board.
  Weapon cards: Shuffle the weapon cards into a face-down deck and place them in their allotted space. Then deal a total of 9 cards face-up into the spaces adjacent to each of the spawn points.
  Killshot track: Place the skulls on to their spaces on the killshot track. A normal game uses 8 skulls, but less can be used for a shorter game.
• Players: Give each player the board, action tile, damage tokens and model in their colour.
  Put out the player board on the 'normal' side and position the action tile (Also on the normal side.) alongside the board.
  Each player should then add 1 ammo cube in each colour to their player board.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
In Adrenaline, players are trying to earn as many VPs as possible. This is done by killing and more importantly, damaging their opponents.

During their turn, the active player can perform 2 actions, they can be different or the same action twice. The actions available are determined by what actions are on their action table and which actions have been unlocked on the players adrenaline track.
Broadly speaking, there are 3 types of actions, several actions actually combine different actions

• Move: The basic move action allows the active player to move up to 3 spaces on the board.
  All movement is orthogonally, players may move through doors but obviously not through walls.
• Pick up: Before picking up an item, the active player may optionally move 1 space. Then the active player may pick up an item in their current space. There are 2 types of object that can be picked up.
  Weapon: If the active player is in the same space as a spawn point, they may pick up one of that spawn point's 3 available weapon card and add it to their hand.
  Generally, there's a cost to picking up a weapon - the cost shown in the top left corner. However, when picking up a weapon, the first cost (In brackets, SIC!) is not paid.
  Players may have at most 3 weapon cards in hand.
  Ammo tiles: If there is a ammo tile in the active player's square they can collect the respective ammo cubes/powerup card and discard the tile.
  Players can have a maximum of 3 of each type of ammo cube on their player board and 3 powerup cards in their hand.
• Shoot: Now this what I'm talking about.
  The active player may attack any opposing character in range and line of sight. Generally anyone in the same room or in a room on the other side of a door is in sight. Specific weapons may have range limitations or other special rules.
  Many weapons may allow the active player to spend ammo cubes to have additional effects or damage.
  Once a weapon card has been used, the active player plays it down in front them, it is not discarded.
  • Damage, kills and VPs: The rules for how damage occurs and VPs are earned are fairly elaborate.
    • Damage: Each player board has 12 spaces for damage. When the active player inflicts damage on an opponent, then the active player adds damage tokens of their colour to their targets wound track with the following effects.​
      Marking:  Characters may acquire marks from opposing players during the course of the game. These take the form of damage tokens placed in the marked spot on their player board.
      When a character takes damage from an opponent who has marked them, all that player's damage tokens in the marked space are moved to the wound track!
      First Blood: Whoever first puts a damage token on an opponent's player board immediately earns a VP.
      Adrenaline: As a player's board becomes filled with damage tokens, the associated adrenaline moves become available.
      Kill: When the 11th space on a player's board is filled, their character been killed and points are immediately scored.
      Whoever inflicted the most damage (That is, put the most damage tokens on that player's board.) on the killed player immediately earns VPs equal to the highest visible VP number shown along the bottom row of the killed character's board. 2nd highest token count earns the 2nd highest VP and so on.
      ​Multikills: It is possible to kill multiple enemies in a single action. In this case, the active player earns a bonus VP for each multikill.
      Overkill: If the active player managed to also put a damage token in the 12th and final place, they 'overkilled' the character. This means the target of the attack can 'mark' the active player's character.
      Skull token: Whoever was killed should take a red skull and place it on the highest VP value on their player board. Thus when they are killed again, it will earn other players less VP.
      Once the skull has been taken, whoever got the kill puts one of their damage tokens on the vacated killshot space - this will earn VPs at the game end.
      Respawn: The player who was killed now has to respawn. They remove all damage tokens from their wound track and draw a powerup card. Then they discard any powerup card to respawn at the spawn point indicated on the spawn card they played. All other tokens are unaffected.

• Adrenaline moves: As the player takes more and more damage, some move actions become available.
  Move 2 spaces and pick up.
  Move 1 space and shoot/attack.
  In both instances, the usual rules as explained above apply.
• Reload: Reloading only occurs after the active player has resolved their 2 actions. This is done by spending ammo cubes as per the weapon card's cost. After the cubes are spent, they may take the weapon card back into their hand.
  You will note that since reloading occurs after a player's actions, a weapon cannot be used twice in a single turn.
• Power up: These may be used as described or discarded for the displayed ammo cube, this can only be done when that type of ammo cube cost needs to be paid. Thus a powerup card cannot simply be discarded to gain an ammo cube.
• Next player: Once the active player has completed their actions and reloading, play progresses to the player on their left.

Endgame
Once the final skull has been taken from the board, it triggers the endgame.
Depending on the game mode chosen, they are 2 ways the game can end.
Sudden Death
The game immediately ends and goes to scoring.
Final Frenzy
In this game mode, each player gets one more turn. All players use flip their player board and action tile to the other sides, using those moves and scoring opportunities for the final round.

Regardless of how the game end is resolved, the game then goes to scoring.
Players earn points from the following sources.

• VPs: All the VPs players accumulated throughout the game for killing other players.
• Living characters: Remaining, unresolved damage tokens on player boards for characters that are still alive. This is calculated as if they had been killed.
• Killshots: Players also earn points for their killshots, whoever has the most damage tokens on the killshot track gains the most bonus VPs, 2nd most tokens gets 2nd highest bonus VPs and so on.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.​

Overall
I'm always a bit suspicious when a tabletop game tries to replicate a twitch based computer game or uses it for inspiration, thematically or otherwise.
Fortunately, Adrenaline does a pretty good job of abstracting this for a board game.
You run, you gun and you pick up, that's about it!

Line of sight and range rules are kept very simple and consequently very quick.
​Attacking is also quick; play a card - that's the damage it does, some extra resources can be spent to tweak it but that's about it. Some of the situational rules regarding specific weapons are definitely a bit fiddly and may well require referring to the rules, as mentioned earlier it's not to much of an issue though.

Rules for scoring kills are also a bit peculiar but the payoff is that you get a balanced scoring system that rewards attacking multiple opponents and encourages the free-for-all nature of a deathmatch. As they rulebook states, there's diminishing returns in constantly attacking one opponent, since because skulls placed on killed players' boards cover the higher scores, meaning less VPs are earned off them from then on.
It's also worth noting that the damage mechanic is essentially an area control mechanic and that the areas being controlled are other players' damage tracks!

Rules for picking up and reloading are also straightforward and adds an extra layer of decision making to consider. Should a player burn through ammo to press the attack/do more damage or try conserve or gain more ammo.
It creates these moments where attacks are followed by short lulls.
I also like the rule that when a weapon is used, it doesn't come back into play until the following turn. it stops powerful weapons being overused and incentivises players to look for synergy between weapon cards.

Gameplay wise, Adrenaline is very much a game of reacting to what other players are doing and the landscape will change every turn. Especially as in relative terms, the game board is quite small, players will very much be in each other's faces a lot of the time.
Players will look for opportunities to exploit, such as hitting multiple enemies at once (Damage diversification is key to earning VPs.) or minimising exposure to attacks to themselves (Although this can be very hard considering how focused the game board is.).
It goes without saying that Adrenaline is very much an aggressive game of direct conflict and player interaction. If this isn't your sort of thing, then you probably won't enjoy Adrenaline
The game also feels a little like a miniatures wargame game albeit in a very loose way.

I think that's why I found it a little unengaging. Fun and clever but not quite what I want out of a game.
I can't fault Adrenaline, it does what it sets out to do and if if you're looking for a first-person shooter inspired game with lots of aggressive interactive gameplay then Adrenaline is one to consider.

Personally though, if someone wanted to play it, I would do so without hesitation but it wouldn't be a first pick for me.

7th February 2023

Tuesday has come around again, that means it's time for more gaming goodness with the Woking Gaming Club at The Sovereigns in Woking.

Horrified: American Monsters is the follow up to the excellent Horrified and you can read my blog on it here.
Like the original, this is a cooperative adventure in which the heroes (In this instance investigators from the Federal Bureau of Paranormal Investigation) stop the encroachment of monsters from American folklore into a town/city.

So how does Horrified: American Monsters game stack up against the original?

Monster mats: As with the original game, each of the game's monsters comes with their own mat that manages how to defeat them.

All the components for Horrified: American Monsters are good.
The tokens and tiles feel sturdy while cards are of a normal quality. Because the monster mats are fairly large, they feel a little flimsy but unless you go out of your way to abuse them, they should be fine.
The game uses card standees for both players and citizen which means there's about 20 of them - which is a lot. They're constructed of thick card and will stand up to being handled.
While plastic, the dice with their slightly rounded corners are good quality.
As with the original, each of the game's monsters is represented by a plastic figure in their respective colour. The quality is fairly good, which is to say good enough for a board game.

The game's artwork is high quality with good portraits for the heroes, citizens and monsters. Artwork on the tokens, cards and monster mats also look good and suitably moody.
The game board contains probably the most notable artwork; a eye catching city with recognisable buildings but is importantly, also free of clutter.
Wisely, the game has a sort of mid twentieth century theme to the art which gives it a sort of timeless quality.

Most of the game's iconography can be found on the bottom of the monster cards and generally, the complexity is equal to that of the original. 

How's it play?
Like the original, Horrified: American Monsters is a cooperative game about squaring up to monsters threatening the game's town/city, There's a few differences from the original, most obviously in the interactions with the monsters the manner in which they are rendered vulnerable and defeated
The rules for frenzy work a little differently and the events on the monster cards are tailored for the game and possibly, so are the perk cards.
Otherwise, the game is pretty much identical with its predecessor. I'm not going to blog about at length about the rules or game play.
For that you can just read my original blog.

3rd February 2023

Friday is here! I'm at the office in Woking for some after work gaming.

As the name might suggest, Formula D is a game based on Formula 1 racing - but with dice! It's also the spiritual successor to the fantastic Formula Dé, a game I played 'back in the day'.
How does it hold up? Let's see.

All of Formula D's components are good quality. The game board and player tiles feel sturdy, as does the player board.
While the cars are quite tiny, they are all well sculpted, colourful and overall look great.
I was a bit sceptical of having player boards with pegs and a groove for the gearstick but in practice works well enough and does away the need for pencils and erasers which were needed for the original Formula Dé.
Perhaps the only criticism would be for the tokens, which are a bit small and fiddly. However, there's no other way to fit them on the track so it's a bit of a necessary evil.

The player tiles feature some nice colourful art with F1 drivers on one side and street racers on the other side. The street racers have definite anime look to them.
But the standout artwork appears on the game boards which feature fantastic illustrations of their locales. A lot detail has been put into the art, you can even see crowds of people.

All the iconography on the track are numbers and arrows and are easily understood. The colours/shapes of the gears are also easy to understand.
However, the icons used on player tiles could be a little clearer, I think more stylised icons would have been more helpful.
Finally the positioning of the resource tracks on the player board could have been done differently to improve usability. Specifically, the gearbox, brake and engine tracks could have been put together, since these are spent when skipping gears - more on skipping gears below.

How's it play?
Setup
The setup and rules description here are for the standard version of the game using the F1 setup

• Players: Give each player a player board, holder and associated pegs and gearstick. Put the standard side of the board into the holder.
  Then give each player a player tile and the F1 car with colours that correspond to their player tile. Position the tile alongside the holder. Place the pegs in their corresponding positions as dictated by their player.
• Game board: Put out the game board with the F1 side-up.
• First player: Determine the order on the starting grid and place each player's car in the relevant spot.
  This can be done by players rolling the black 20-sided die.
  Alternatively, the game has rules for getting qualifying times which involve each player doing a lap in the fewest number of moves and shortest time.

On to play
Formula D does not use a traditional turn order, instead a player's position on the track determines when they take their turn in the round. Whoever is in the lead goes first and becomes the active player, whoever is 2nd goes second and so on, until the last player has had their turn.
Then a new round begins and any changes in position will be carried over to the player turn order.
During a player's turn, they must perform the following.

• Start: This actually only occurs for each player's first action of the game and determines if they get a good start or not.
  The player rolls the black die, a bad start means they only move 1 space, a flying start means they move 4 spaces, in either instance they end their turn in 1st gear. If they got an average start, they move into 1st gear and roll the 1st gear die.
• Change gear: Other than the race start, at the beginning of every turn, the active player must decide whether to stay in the same gear or go up or down a gear. The gear they are in will determine which die they roll for movement.
  Change up: The active player may go up 1 gear.
  Change down: The active player may go down 1 gear, or possibly more.
  • Skipping gears: When going down gear, a player may choose to skip gears, i.e., go down more than one gear. E.g., skipping a gear allows a player to drop from 5th gear to 3rd by skipping 4th. A player may skip up to a maximum of 3 gears, allowing them to go from 6th to 2nd gear for example.
    However for each gear skipped a resource must be spent, they come from gearbox, brake and engine.
• Roll and move: Once the active player has settled on their gear, they must roll the pertinent die and move their car as many spaces as the die rolls according to the following rules:
  Full move: The active player must use all the movement for their car.
  Traffic: The active player's car cannot move through other cars' spaces, they must go around them instead.
  Arrows: If the active player's car moves on to a space with an arrow, they must follow the direction(s) of that arrow when moving on.
  Straights: If the active player is moving their car along a straight, they cannot zigzag to use up movement. Furthermore, they can only do 2 lane changes and cannot go back into a lane they were already in during the current turn. Essentially players should move their car along the shortest route possible.
  Having said that, players can change lanes to avoid other cars or hazards.
  ​Corners: When a car enters a corner, it must end or 'stop' a number of turns in that corner as determined by the corner's details. Thus, a 2-stop corner requires the player's car to end 2 turns in that corner.
  • Overshooting a corner: If a car is in a 1-stop corner (Or only has 1 stop left in a 2 or 3 stop corner.), then they can go through the corner's exit and overshoot the it to some degree.
    For each space a car overshoots the corner, they must spend 1 tyre WP. Additionally, brake WPs can be spent to lessen movement and thus move less spaces.
    If a car needs to make 2 or more stops in a corner and it overshoots, then it is eliminated from play.
• Additional rules: The description above covers the gist of the game but Formula D has numerous situational rules. Many of these are resolved by using the black 20-sided die.
  Contact: If a car ends its movement adjacent to one or more other cars, there is a chance they will make contact. This costs body WPs
  Overrevving: There's a chance that cars in 5th & 6th gears will lose a engine WP when any car in 5th or 6th gear gets a maximum result on their gear die.
  Debris: Certain events can leave debris on the track, if a car has to go over the debris, there's a chance they can loose a handling WP.
  Pits: In a race with more than 1 lap, there are rules to pitting, which allows a car to recover all their tyre WPs.
• Advanced rules: There are a number of optional advanced rules that can be applied to the game. Mostly these are to do with 3 lap races and running a championship.
  ​Custom cars: Instead of having WPs assigned to a car as per a player tile. With these rules, players can assign WPs to the resources as they see fit.
  Tyres: With these rules, just F1, players can choose different types of tyres, such as hard, soft and wets. They can each have an effect on a car's performance, they are also effected by weather.
  Weather: There are rules for different weather conditions such as dry and rainy or changeable weather. Different weather conditions will effect cars differently. Furthermore different types of tyres will behave differently in differing weather conditions.
  I think that's pretty much it for the F1 rules.

Endgame
The first car to cross the start/finish line after completing the prescribed number of laps, wins! Second across the line finishes 2nd and so on.

Overall
I'll start by mentioning that while not part of the base game, there are 6 map packs for Formula D, each providing 2 additional tracks to the game. generally each pack features a street racing track as well as a real-world inspired circuit.
​It should also be noted that Formula D is almost identical to earlier iterations of the game, this means the game is fully compatible with all the racetracks from those previous games. This is fantastic, because if like me, you have a bunch of tracks from Formula Dé, it greatly increases the longevity of the game.
I'm sure it was deliberate on the part of the producers of Formula D and was a wise move.

I've seen Formula D criticised for being too luck based but without that element of luck, there's no risk and risk is at the heart of what makes Formula D so good.

You see, as a racing game, Formula D is not really a 'simulation', I mean how could it be? However, one thing it does emulate very well is the feel of having to 'push the envelope', how racers try to take it to the edge, how they take risks and how players in Formula D will also need to take risks, or more precisely, when to take risks
Unlike many games, playing too sensibly or prudently is a sure way to finish second in Formula D!

This all ties in with what Formula D is all about - which is managing corners, specifically the gear and consequently the speed of a car when it goes through corners.
This is not quite as simple as it sounds though: ​Ideally, players will want to be in as higher gear as possible for optimal movement at all times. However, players will need to be mindful of their resources, overshooting corners by too much or too often (Especially early in a race.) can have ramifications later. Sometimes overshooting will have an advantage, sometimes it won't it'll just be a waste of WPs.
This is all contextual of course, depending on a car's position relative to a corner, players will need to adapt their tactics to racing through that corner, even the position of opponent's cars can effect the players behind.
Players will also need to be wary of 2 or 3 stop corners and resist the temptation entering the corner in too higher a gear and too fast: In real racing, sometimes going into a corner slower means coming out faster, this can hold true in Formula D too.

Another time a player may take a big is when an opponent is ahead in a corner.
E.g., if that opponent ahead exits the corner in 3rd gear to avoid overshooting, the player behind may want to risk taking going up a gear and exiting in 4th. It's a real advantage to exit corners in a gear higher than your rivals. If you look at the distribution of numbers on the dice, the maximum speed on a gear die is generally the lowest speed on the next highest die.

In terms of negatives, player elimination is a thing here (I'm not a fan of player elimination.) and players can crash out and be sat twiddling their thumbs. Although this sort of thing generally only might occur when approaching the end of a race and back markers push hard to try and get on the podium.
Playing time can also potentially be an issue. Races can last 1-3 laps and you can expect a race to on average last 1 hour per lap. If you decide to play a full race, don't be surprised to lose an entire afternoon or morning to the race. Which is not necessarily a bad if that's what you want.
Also, with it's small components and 6 resources, Formula D can be a little fiddly.

Quibbles aside, Formula D is a fun, game and it's satisfying when you manage pull if risky manoeuvres and manage to fly from corner to corner. There's also a genuine, palpable surge of pleasure when you go into 6th gear, roll that 30-sided die and blasting down that straight.
Formula D is mid-weight game that fits it theme well and presents players with conundrum of when and how much risk to take. Who would have thought roll-and-move mechanics could be so well implemented.
Formula D is a game I have played a lot in its various iterations and I've always enjoyed it. If you want a racing game with a strong thread of push-you-luck running through it, then this is one to try. 

28th January 2023

Wogglecon 6, a day of gaming at the Bisley Scout Hall continues and the next game of the day is Skulk Hollow.

I didn't know that it turns out that little anthropomorphic fox dudes and giant stone creatures seem to really hate each: Which is what Skulk Hollow is all about in this asymmetrical strategy game!

What's in a game?
Skulk Hollow is a 2-player game where one player takes on the role of a 'Foxen' hero who leads a band of Foxen warriors against a lone guardian who is a literal colossal stony force of nature.
​Each player has their own unique decks, components and gameplay.

• Board: Skulk Hollow uses a modestly sized square board which is divided into a 3x3 grid. Unusually, during play the board is rotated 45' diamond configuration, this all the spaces are actually diamond shaped.
  Each of the 9 grid spaces sort of have their own visual theme. Additionally, 2 opposing corners are the 'start spaces'.

• Green wound tokens: These wooden tokens are used to track damage on the guard board.​
  ​

The component quality in Skulk is excellent.
The tokens and meeples all feel solid and look great. Obviously the massive guardian meeple is the notable standout component, yes, perhaps you could call it a gimmick but it fits thematically.
The use of card boxes is a nice touch of presentation.

The art is equally high quality. Skulk Hollow uses a coloured line illustration somewhat cartoonish style that's colourful, bright, detailed and suits the games slight whimsical (At least as whimsical as 2 factions battling each other can get!) nature.
I've found that anthropomorphic art can be divisive as a style but I think the anthropomorphic character art on card looks pretty good regardless of what your stance is.
The game board also looks great and I like how compact it is.

With regards to iconography, Skulk Hollow uses fair amount but it all seems pretty self-explanatory. Icons for movement are easily understood, as are the icons for actions such melee, leap, etc.
I don't imagine players having any problem understanding the game.

How's it play?
Setup

• Roles: First determine who will play the Foxten hero and guardian.
• Board: Put out the game board, as stated earlier, it should positioned in a 'diamond' orientation.
• Guardian player: The guardian chooses a guardian card box of their choice, then they take the relevant guardian player mat and guardian board.
  The player mat will tell the player how to set up for the game.
  Finally the guardian player takes their action deck and shuffles it into a face-down deck and draws cards to their hand limit - which is determined by the guardian player mat.
• Foxen player: This player now chooses one of the Foxen Leaders takes the Foxen player mat.
  ​The Foxen leader and Sentinel cards are immediately put into play and their respective meeples should be placed on their starting spaces.
  Then all the hero unit cards and order cards should be shuffled into a face-down deck, the Foxen player should then draws up to their hand limit - as determined by their Foxen hero mat.

On to play
Being a 2-player game, Skulk Hollow uses a very traditional turn order with one player completing their turn before play moves over to their opponent and continues alternating between them for the entirety of the game.
Additionally, the Foxen hero player always starts.

During their turn, the player will have a number of actions points (AP) available to them which is determined by which Foxen hero/guardian they chose, although typically this is 2-3 APs.

• Actions: The active player can choose from the following actions.
  • Play card: This is the most common action in Skulk Hollow and there  are a wide variety of actions that can be performed, some common to both players and some unique to each. 
    Gain power: This action is available to the Foxen hero player but only certain guardians. Functionally, it works the same for both players. The player will gain power cubes as listed on the played card. These cubes do not go directly on to either any heroes cards or guardian board, instead they go into a central 'reserve'. More on power later.
    Move: This action allows the Foxen player to move one of their units or the guardian player to move the guardian 1 space. Arrows on the card will indicate how the movement can occur.
    Play hero card: This action is only available to the Foxen hero player. If they have a hero unit card in their hand, they can spend a AP to put it into play. When the card is played, it's pertinent meeple should be placed on the board.
    Use power: This is only available to the guardian player and it allows the guardian to use the power listed on the card and as per it's description on the guardian player mat.
    Guardians have a range of powers but generally they involve dealing wounds to the Foxen heroes.
    Hero actions: Only the Foxen player can use these 3 actions for their units.
    When playing a card, the player choose from the action at the top of the card or the bottom, not both. furthermore, only heroes with a symbol matching the action can use it. Thus, a hero unit must have a boot symbol on their card to use the leap action.
    • Leap: If the hero unit is on the same space as the guardian, they can use the leap action to jump on it! This means their meeple is moved on to the guardian board. Additionally, if a hero unit is already on the guardian board, they can use the leap action to move to a different location, following one of the dotted lines.
    • Melee: A hero unit that is on the guardian board may use the melee action to inflict 1 wound on their current location
    • Missile: This action allows a hero with the missile icon to make a ranged attack on the guardian and they do not need to be on the guardian board to inflict wounds. There are some restrictions including:
      Fire: If a hero has the 'fire' tag, they can only launch a missile attack from a space on the board adjacent to the guardian's space.
      Hurl: This tag allows a hero to launch a missile attack while on the same space as the guardian on the game board.
  • Prepare: This action requires an AP and either player may perform it. It allows the player to discard a card and draw 2 new ones.
  • Spend power: This action does not actually require any APs. Instead it uses a power cube that has been allocated to either a hero or guardian.
    Each cube spent this ways grants the respective player an additional action to the unit/guardian that spend the cube. This allows them to perform an action as displayed on their respective card/board, or to move.
• End of turn: Once the active player has used all their APs, they must do the following.
  Draw cards: The player should draw cards to reach their hand limit. If their current hand is equal to or above the limit, ignore this step.
  Allocate power: If the active player had gained power cubes during this turn, they now allocate them to their units/guardian as they see fit.
  Opponent's turn: Play now progresses to the active player's opponent.

​Additional rules

• Wounds: There are some rules regarding how wounds are manged, which is slightly different for each player:
  • Hero unit: If all the heart spaces on a hero unit's card are filled, that hero is eliminated, it's meeple is removed from play and it's card is placed into the discard pile. Potentially that hero can come back into play if the discard pile is shuffled into a new deck.
  • Foxen leader: If the Foxen leader has all its heart spaces filled, it's pretty bad news for the Foxen player. However, there is something the Foxen leader can do to avoid damage, which is called...
    Banding: Basically, if there are other Foxen hero units in the same game board space as the leader, then the unit(s) take the damage instead, presumably as they throw themselves into harm's way. Thus the leader cannot be targeted when not alone.
  • Guardian: Wounds affect the guardian in 2 ways.
    Powers: On the guardian board, each power's location will have several heart spaces, if all  wound spaces on a power's location are filled, then the guardian player can no longer use that power until they somehow heal at least 1 wound.
    Full wounds: If the guardian board has all it's heart spaces filled, then it's bad news for the guardian player...
• Depleting action deck: If any time a player empties their action deck, they then simply shuffle their discard pile into a new deck.

​Endgame
There are 3 ways the game end can be triggered.

• If the Foxen leader has all the heart spaces on their card filled, they are defeated and the guardian player immediately wins.
• If the guardian board has all it's heart spaces filled, the guardian is defeated and the Foxen heroes player immediately wins.
• Each guardian has their own unique victory condition. If that condition is met, then the guardian player immediately wins.

Overall
Skulk Hollow has asymmetrical and card driven gameplay which presents players with some challenging, meaningful choices and options.

Players will instinctively want to play cards with maximum efficiency to inflict maximum damage but sometimes because of their hand of cards, players won't be guaranteed having the card to make the move they they need and they'll be forced to adapt.
This can be a little frustrating but also makes hand management quite important, sure a player can use a strong card now but sometimes it's worth keeping hold of it for perhaps a more effective use in a later round. It should be mentioned that some of the guardians have smaller hand sizes, meaning they are trickier to play.

Of course, players will also want to watch their opponents, paying attention to which cards they play and when. - There's a bit of higher level play here about tracking opponent's actions, essentially a bit of card counting.

Otherwise it's quite tricky to describe gameplay; with 4 Foxen leaders and 4 guardians, the various combinations will at least to some extent dictate player tactics - as will the actions of opponents. Skulk Hollow feels like it's about playing the player as much as playing the game.

Finally; Skulk Hollow is a 2-player game and I'm always a bit wary of 2-player games as they can revert to a traditional 1-on-1 directly confrontational game, this is definitely the case with Skulk Hollow. While the game is not particularly chess-like, with moving pieces about a board to eliminate your opponent, it does provide something of a chess-like experience and to be honest, it's a playstyle that I'm not personally overly enamoured with. Your mileage will of course vary.

Having said all of that; I like to think that I can recognise a well crafted game when I play one and that's what I think this is.

Thematically, Skulk Hollow is quite strong.
The 'numerous weaker units vs a single giant enemy' gameplay draws inspiration from some classic older games.
While, with its climbing on to, running around and stabbing bits of a colossal monster, it's undeniable that Skulk Hollow also takes some thematic inspiration from a certain videogame and it makes for a entertaining concept to add to a board game.
It adds up to an interesting game, both visually and mechanically.

it is a mid-weight, asymmetrical game that features a lot of player interaction and conflict with moderate tactics and touch of luck. The various combinations of the 2 battling factions also provides a fair bit of replayability.
If you want a 2-player game with those elements, Skulk Hollow is worth a look.

19th November 2022

It's a Saturday morning and we're at Bisley for Wogglecon 5 'It's a alive!' - a day of gaming goodness and a bit of charity.

Have you ever fancied travelling South American highlands with nothing but a cart of goods to keep you company, going from place to place, hunting for fish, chopping down trees, trading and so forth. If the answer is yes, then maybe Altiplano is the game for you.

How's it play?
Setup

• Game area: Set the central playing area up.
  • Location boards: Randomly arrange the 7 location tiles in a ring shape.
    • Tokens: Sort all the tokens as per player count and add them to their pertinent location tiles. Only food and money do not go on to a location tile.
    • Cards: Add the boat, house and order cards face-up to their pertinent location tiles.
  • Extension strip: Put the extension strip in the centre of the ring.
    • Extension tiles: First sort the extension tiles as per player count, then sort them by type (A, B, C and D.) and shuffle each type into face-down stacks. Finally arrange them into a single face-down stack, with the A stack at the top, going down to the D stack at the bottom.
    • Place extension tiles: Draw and place 5 tiles from the stack along the 5 spaces on the edge of the extension strip.
• Players: Give each player an action board, warehouse board and bag.
  • Meeples: Give each player the meeple, cube and container in their colour. Each player's cube should go on the '0' space on the road location.
  • Role tile: Randomly assign a role tile to each player. The tile should be placed adjacent its location on the player's action board.
    Each player should then take their starting resources as indicated on the tile, goods and food should be placed them into their bag. Money should be put to the side in a personal supply.
    Finally each player should take a brown cart cube from the village location and place it in the topmost space in the movement track on their action board.
• First player: Determine a starting player then each player places their meeple on any one of the 7 location tiles. Now we're ready to play.

On to play
In Altiplano players will be making plans to travel around the location tiles and use their goods to carry out the actions specific to those locations.
This is done over 4 phases:

• Drawing phase: This phase is carried simultaneously with all players drawing tokens from their bag and placing them on their planning spaces.
  At the start of the game, players can only use 4 planning spaces, thus only draw 4 tokens from their bag. However, by moving their cube up the road location, players will unlock more planning spaces which mean they can draw and use more goods tokens.
  Empty bag: If at any time a player needs to draw 1 or more tokens from their bag and it's empty, then they tip the contents of their container into the bag, give it a good shake and continue drawing.
  Taking tokens back: Obviously, this does not apply during the first round but before drawing tokens, a player can choose to take tokens they have previously placed on action spaces but not resolved off of those action spaces. However, these tokens must be placed on planning spaces which consequently lessen the number of tokens they can draw. Money retrieved in this manner is returned to the player's personal play.
• Planning phase: This phase is also performed simultaneously. In this phase players take goods from their planning spaces (Or money from their personal supply.) and place them on action spaces on the board. This includes the movement track and also extension tiles a player may have acquired.
  All actions require specific goods to activate them.
  Most locations have 1 or 2 spaces, except the village which has 3. Some actions require 1 good (And thus may be performed more than once.) while many actions require 2 goods.
  A player may choose not to place all the goods on their action spaces but this would mean they draw less tokens in the following round.
  When placing goods and money, players do not need to complete the action to place them. If an action requires 2 tokens, they can place just one of them even if it won't complete the action. It's a useful way to keep planning spaces free.
• Action phase: This phase represents the bulk of the game's activities and thus has many elements.
  • Turns: Unlike the previous 2 phases, starting with the current first player, actions are carried out in turn order one action at a time. The active player resolves one action, then play progresses to the next player.
    Passing: If a player cannot complete an action, they must pass. Additionally, a player may choose to pass even if they could complete an action. In either case, when a player passes, they are no longer involved in the action phase for the current round.
  • Movement: Movement does not count as an action but can be performed as part of an action.
    Timing: Movement may be performed before or after an action.
    Moving: Each player starts the game with 1 cart cube. A player can slide it to the 'used' side on their movement track to move their meeple up to 3 location either way around the circle of locations.
    Additional movement If a player has put food on to other movement track spaces, they may 'spend' it to move during another action. However they can only move 1 location unless they have acquired additional carts, in which case they can move 3 locations.
  • Actions: There are lot of actions a player can perform and several rules associated with them.
    Location: A player's meeple must be at the action's location in order to perform that action, this includes extension and role tiles.
    Paying tokens: Actions require players to pay the required tokens to resolve them. Other than money, anytime a token is 'spent' the token(s) are not actually spent instead they are put into the player's container and will ultimately end up going back into the player's bag. Only money is actually spent and returned to the central supply.
    Acquiring goods: When acquired, most goods tokens immediately go into a player's container. The exceptions are money which goes into the player's personal supply and corn, which is explained below.
  • Resolving actions: Each location has one or more actions which can be resolved by players.
    • Farm: cloth, food and wool can be acquired here.
    • Forest: cloth, food, glass and wood can be acquired here
    • Harbor: Fish and food can be acquired.
      Boat cards can also be acquired here which allow players to add tokens to their container. A player may choose any available boat card.
    • Market: The market has several actions.
      Sell goods: Some goods can be sold for 1-3 coins each, as with all actions, goods that are sold are actually put into the player's container.
      Buy extension: A player can purchase 1 extension tile per round. The total cost is the cost on the tile plus the cost from it's position on the extension strip. If a extension is bought, it is not replaced until the last phase.
      Order cards: These can be bought here too, which allows the player to choose any available order card.. A player may only have 1 unfulfilled order card at a time.
      Deliver goods: This action allows the player to move goods placed here on to an order card. When a order is completed, it will earn the controlling player VPs during the endgame, generally it will also give the player a corn token, more on these later. 
    • Mine: Silver and stone can be acquired here.
    • Road: Completing the road action may have 1 of 2 effects. Either it unlocks a planning space for a player or it provides them with a corn token, again, more on corn below.
    • Village: The village also has several types of action.
      Buy cart: Players can buy a cart and place it on an available space on their movement track.
      Buy house card: A player can buy any available house card. House cards increase the VP value of the displayed good during the endgame.
      Store goods: This action allows the player to move goods off of the action spaces and into their warehouse. There are however, several restrictions here.
      • No food: Food tokens cannot be placed into the warehouse.
        Same goods: A row can only have 1 type of good in it. Thus if the 1st good in a row is a fish token, all the subsequent tokens in that row must be fish tokens. Additionally, there can only be 1 incomplete per type of good. A row of fish must be completed before a second row can be started.
        Bottom-to-top: When a good is placed in the warehouse, it must be in the lowest available space, either in a new row or an existing one.
        Left-to-right: A good must also be placed into the leftmost open space in the row it is placed into. A row is considered complete when the rightmost space has been filled.
      • Corn: There are several rules regarding corn.
        Store immediately: Regardless of how a player gains a corn token, when they gain it, it must immediately be stored in the warehouse.
        Wildcard: Corn can be used as any type of good for a row that has already been started. E.g., if a player has started a row of fish, it can be added to that row and even complete it.
        If there is no incomplete row to add the corn token to, then it starts it's own row!
        Corn rows takes priority: When storing corn, if there is a row that was started with corn, then corn tokens must go into that row before any other until it's completed!
• End of round phase: Once all players have passed, the game goes to end of round and several events occur.
  New first player: The first player marker is passed on to the player on the left who will be the new first player.
  Reset carts: All carts are put back to their initial positions.
  Manage extension strip: If any extension tiles we bought during the action phase, remaining tiles are slid downwards to fill the gaps and new tiles are added to the gaps now at the top.
  If no extension tiles were brought during the action phase, the bottommost extension tile is discarded, the other tiles are slid down and a new tile is added to the top.
  Now a new round begins with the first phase.

​Endgame
Play continues until one of the following 2 criteria are met.
Any one location becomes fully emptied of all tokens, cards, etc.
Or, a space along the extension strip cannot be filled, i.e., the extension tiles supply has emptied.
In either instance, the current round is completed and 1 further round is played, then the game goes to scoring.

VPs will come from a variety of sources.

• Goods tokens: Tokens can score 0-4 VPs each depending on the type. Tokens on a player's action board, warehouse, in their bag and container all count.
  Tokens on order cards are not counted.
• Warehouse: Each completed row in a player's warehouse will score it's associated VPs.
• Cards: Boat and house cards earn their respective VPs. Completed order cards also earn their VPs.
• Bonus VPs: If a player has house cards, they will earn bonus VPs for the corresponding goods.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
As you can see from the write up so far, there's quite a lot going on in Altiplano and a lot for players to think about.

There's a recognisable quandary going on with the bag building mechanic.
Players will naturally be looking to acquire tokens to carry out actions but invariably there will be times they end up getting pulled from the bag when they're not needed and unneeded tokens can 'water down' a player's strategies.
Unwanted tokens can of course be left on planning spaces but most players will find that irritatingly suboptimal. Alternatively, they can placed on spaces for action that a player does not immediately want to perform but they will eventually end up coming back  to again though. Another option albeit fairly situational, is to put them on to order cards, although removes the goods from the remainder of the game.
Finally, they can be put into the warehouse, this means those tokens have greater scoring opportunities but again, permanently removes them from a player's container/bag which may or may not be a good thing. layers will have judge the merits of storing tokens contextually - except when dealing with glass tokens. The thing with glass tokens is that they don't produce any other type of token, all they do is produce the most VPs per token, storing them in the warehouse where they contribute to more VPs and declutter a player's bag is a no-brainer and usually I consider no-brainers a bad thing for a board game but I feel this is a deliberate decision on the part of the game - more on that below.

If you've been paying attention (And I'm sure you have!) you will also have noticed that several goods such as a cacao, alpacas and even something that seems that it should be common such as fish cannot be produced from the action board.
So how are these acquired?
There's a couple of opportunities to get them, namely boat cards, extension tiles and possibly role tiles.
However, this brings me to a bit of a bugbear I have with this scarcity mechanic. It means there can be a race by experienced players to get those hard-to-produce goods, particularly cacao which produces glass which can be worth so many VPs. In fact I feel the whole of the forest location is especially strong location since cacao alone is used there for 3 separate actions in the same location. A player who can produce cacao and concentrates on doing so can soon be producing lots of goods at the forest.
Having said that, the game is a bit of a point salad with various avenues to scoring VPs, it's just that I feel going for glass is the strongest way and experienced players will end competing in that tactic.

While the bulk of the game's activity takes place during the action phase, the planning phase is where players will do most of their well... planning. They'll look to optimise there actions to get the most out of their available tokens.
Because players will generally need to move around to perform multiple actions, efficient use of the movement track is important, especially so in the early game when food tokens will be scarcer. A player can move their meeple before or after an action may make it seem unimportant but sometimes players will need to think ahead about where they need to be at the start of the next round.
As well as having to think about movement and balancing their goods with their bags, players will also have to think about gaining extensions, house and order cards, as well as boat cards if they are needed. 
Add to this increasing their planning spaces and acquiring corn to fill out their warehouse and players have lot of ways to approach the game
​
In this regard Altiplano does that thing which presents players with lots of options but frequently not enough opportunity to do everything they want, forcing them to make tricky decisions, which I consider a good thing in games.

Altiplano is a mid-to-heavy game with a longish playtime, it's probably not for beginners and perhaps could be criticised for being a bit over-elaborate although personally I didn't find it that much of a problem
In conclusion; the mechanics blend together to give players choices and essentially problems to solve in optimising their actions. If bag-building style games and resource management are your thing, Altiplano is worth a try.

9th October 2022

Another Sunday, another session of gaming goodness on Board Game Arena.

Travel around North America, fulfil tickets, draft cards, create routes in Ticket to Ride. 

• Cards: Ticket to Ride uses 2 types of cards:
  Train car cards: These cards come in 8 different colours that correspond to the connection colours on the board and each colour also displays a different type of train car such a freight or passenger car.
  There also 14 'locomotion' cards, which are 'wild' cards.
  Destination cards: Each one of the destination cards shows the same map of North America as shown on the game board, 2 of the destinations on the card will be highlighted. Finally, each destination card has a associated victory point (VP) value.
• Train meeples: Should these be called 'treeples'? Hmm maybe not, could be confused with trees!
  ​There are 45 trains in each of the game's 5 player colours. The trains are sized so that 1 train meeple fits on 1 segment in a route.

I suppose that you could call the art on the board muted but I would say it's functional and unobtrusive. The board is quite busy as it is with all the routes crossing back and forth, overly elaborate art would just obfuscate important information, so it feels like a good decision to me.
Each colour of train card has it's own unique illustration which helps with accessibility issues. The illustrations are perfectly good if a little plain.
The destination cards essentially replicate the art on the board.

There's no notable iconography in Ticket to Ride and the game is straightforward to comprehend. There's just the 9 types of train car to remember and that's easy and intuitive. I imagine the biggest hurdle to overcome in the game's presentation is finding destinations on the map and the iconography does a lot to make that as easy as it can.

How's it play?
Setup

• ​Game board: Put out the game board.
• Train car cards: Shuffle the cards into a face-down deck, deal 5 cards face-up adjacent to the board.
• Destination cards: Also shuffle these into a face-down deck.
• Players: First give each player all the train meeples in their player colour.
  Train car cards: Deal 4 to each player, this is their starting hand.
  Destination cards: Deal 3 destination cards to each player. Everyone decides how many to keep. A player must keep 1-3 destination cards.
  Destination cards should be kept secret players until the end game scoring, only then should they be revealed.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
In Ticket to Ride, players broadly speaking have 3 objectives, these are; build as many routes as possible, create a connection between the locations on their destination cards and finally, create the longest contiguous set of connections.
All of these will contribute VPs towards their final score.
This is done by drafting cards which in turn allows players to create routes.
Ticket to Ride uses the typical turn structure of the active player taking their action before play progresses to the player on their left.
In their turn, the active player can perform exactly 1 of the 3 following actions.

• Draft train car cards: This action allows the player to draw 2 of the standard 8 types of train car cards. This can be done by taking it from the 5 available face-up cards or drawing blindly from the deck.
  Locomotion cards: A player can only claim 1 locomotion card as their enntire drafting action.
  Shuffling: If at anytime there's 3 or more locomotion cards in the face-up line of cards, then all 5 are discarded and 5 new cards are drawn. Additionally, if the train car card deck becomes empty, the discard pile is shuffled into a new deck.
• Claim route: A route is a line of oblong spaces between 2 destinations. A route may a have a colour or may be 'grey'.
  To claim a route, the active player must discard train car cards of the matching colour and equal number of spaces to the route. A grey route can be claimed with cards of any colour provided they are all of the same colour.
  Locomotion cards: These can be used as train car cards of any colour.
  Place train meeples: Once a route has been claimed, the active player places a train meeple on every space on the route.
  ​This also means that no other player may claim this route.
  Some adjacent destinations will have 2 routes running in parallel, in games with 4+ players, the 2nd route can be also claimed. In 2 or 3 player games, 2nd routes are not in play.
  Scoring: When a route is claimed, it is immediately scored on the tracker. Routes run 1-6 spaces in length and correspondingly score 1-15 VPs.
• Draw destination cards: As their action, the active player may draw 3 cards and keep 1-3 of them, providing them with additional scoring opportunities (Or not as explained below!).
  Discarded cards are returned to the bottom of the destination deck.
• Next player: Once the active player has completed their action, play progresses to the player on their left.

Endgame
When the active player has 2 or less train meeples remaining, the end game is triggered. Every player including the active player has 1 more turn then the game goes to scoring.

Players will add points from destination cards to their running total from the game and the player with the longest set of connections gains bonus VPs.

Destination cards are now revealed:

• Completed destination cards: Players earn the listed VPs for every destination card that they have completed (That is; any destination card where the owning player may trace a connection of their routes between the 2 destinations.).
• Incomplete destination cards: Every incomplete destination a play has will deduct VPs from that player's total.

Finally, whichever players has the longest contiguous set of routes earns a bonus 10 VPs!

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Ticket to Ride is a very popular, well regarded game and it's easy to see why. Lightweight rules that are genuinely elegant, almost minimalist that're easy to learn, a game that's intuitive to play with a theme anybody can understand. Ticket to Ride is definitely a game with crossover appeal, is a good game for casual play and introduction to board games.
It also has a fairly random distribution of destination cards throughout a game which provides a good level of variety to games.

This pared down set of rules means that Ticket to Ride also provides players with clear meaningful decisions to make.
Basic tactics are pretty straightforward: Players are in a race to connect their personal destinations before they risk getting blocked by other players. They'll need to balance getting cards they need to draft and claiming routes.
Since a player's routes do not need to connect, any player essentially can claim any route, anytime if they have the appropriate cards.

Completing destination cards can be quite satisfying and they add an extra wrinkle to the gameplay. Being able to acquire more of them during play can be a game changer, earning more VPs but conversely, is also risky, getting a card that is not completed obviously costs VPs.
What makes this even more interesting is during the late game this risk/reward mechanic becomes even more pronounced.
Acquiring a destination card late in the game can be very risky because the player may not have the required time to complete the connection. However, late in the game is when a player's train network is at it's biggest, consequently it's possible to gain destination cards which have already​ been connected.

There's also a higher level of play in Ticket to Ride. Watching what opponents are doing and successfully anticipating what connections they're trying to make can allow a player to block or slow their progress down by claim routes they might want. If you look at the map, you will see that that there are numerous routes which are only 1 or 2 space grey routes that are very easy for a player to claim, e.g., a 1 space grey route can be claimed with any train rail card. It's obvious this is by design.

This brings me to my main contention with Ticket to Ride: It's a game that promotes negative gameplay. What do I mean by that?
Claiming a route another player needs will force them to spend additional turns acquiring train car cards and then taking longer to claim routes around the block.
In terms of action economy, a player wasting 1 action to make an opponent waste 5 or 6 can be pretty advantageous.
Preventing an opponent completing a destination card may earn that player no VPs but for their opponents, it will cost them points.

Many Eurogames have mechanics which have sort of a balance to them where if a player screws over an opponent, they will also frequently screw themselves over and only occasionally can they screw an opponent over while advance themselves.
Ticket to Ride is not like that!

Although, in part this will be down to the type of people playing.
Dedicated players will learn and exploit blocking at every opportunity and why not? Games are for winning and getting a score of 1 while opponents get 0 is still winning.

More casual players may not care about higher level tactics. Early games will be light and fun but even so, after a while they'll end up realising (Probably by accident!) how powerful blocking can be.

Remember, earlier I said how connecting destinations can feel satisfying, well getting blocked can feel equally unsatisfying.

There's a lot that's good about Ticket to Ride and I wanted to like it but the negative aspect can just be too frustrating. I understand why the game has a lot of fans, I'm not one of them.

26th September 2022

It's a Monday and we're round Simon's for Firefly: The Game.
It 'aint' the time to misbehave, it's actually time to play a Sandbox board game in the world of the cult short lived sci-fi show, Firefly.
Now with the requisite joke quote out of the way, it's time to get down to business.

• Cards: Firefly: The Game uses cards to power the game play and a lot of them too, about 400 cards in fact! Mostly in 13 decks at my counting!
  • Story cards: Objectives and winning criteria will vary from game to game and the story card selected at the game start will determine the objectives.
  • Starter Cards: There are 2 types of starter card and each player will have one of each
    Leader cards: These are captains that each player will be given. Leader cards are illustrated and are also similar to crew cards, they have professions, skills and special abilities.
    Drive Core cards: Each player will also have one of these which are placed in the respective slot on their ship board. The drive core determines how far a ship can move.
  • Supply cards: There are 5 decks of supply cards, 1 deck corresponds to a specific sector on the maps. Supply cards are broken down into 3 types.
    Crew: These are characters that can be hired by players. Crew have various stats, including profession, skills and special abilities. Crew can be 'moral' (Or not.), they also have a hiring cost.
    Gear: These can be weapons or other items which can be assigned to crew.
    Upgrades: These cards can be assigned to the player's ship to improve it's capabilities or add new ones.
  • Contract cards: There are another 5 decks of contract cards, again 1 each for each of a specific sector. Contracts represent 'jobs' or 'missions' that players can undertake. Usually this is a delivery of some sort or committing a criminal enterprise.
  • Nav cards: There's a mere 2 decks of nav cards! One deck for Alliance space and the other for border space.
    When player's move their ships through space, they will draw a card from the relevant deck and resolve it. Mostly these have no effect but sometimes they will be an encounter or problem to overcome. Sometimes it'll move the Alliance ship (Bad news.) or the Reaver ship (Really bad news!).
  • Misbehave cards: This is the final deck! Players be frequently directed to 'misbehave', this involves drawing and resolving these cards. They represent crimes or capers that players will need to successfully complete. Usually players will be presented to 2 different capers which will present a different task each to achieve.
• Tokens: Firefly: The Game also makes use of a lot of tokens.
  • Cargo/Contraband: These square cardboard tokens each fit on to 1 space in the ship's hold and can be shipped or smuggled.
  • Passenger/fugitive: Again these are square tokens that fill 1 space on a ship board.
  • Fuel: These card tokens are oblong and half the size of square tokens, thus 2 can fit in 1 space in a hold. Fuel is spent to power a ship's drive core.
  • Parts: These are also oblong tokens and are spent to fix problem with a ship.
  • Disgruntled tokens: These round card tokens feature a unhappy face and are used to track crew when they become unhappy.
  • Goal tokens: These are also round tokens. Story cards will have multiple goals that must be completed. Whenever a player completes one of the goals, they acquire a goal token.
  • Warrant tokens: When a player commits crime or misbehaves badly, they may acquire one of these round tokens. It means that the authorities have noticed the player and may make life hard for the ship or crew.
• Models: There are no meeples here, instead there are little plastic models to represent space ships.
  • Firefly ships: There's 4 firefly ship models on stands, 1 in each of the player colours.
  • Reaver ship: Used to represent Reavers who prowl Border Space, these models are also on stands.
  • Alliance ship: This model is relatively and suitably huge compared to the others and represents an Alliance cruiser.
• Money: Firefly: The Game uses paper money! That's both unusual for a modern game and also pretty cool.
• Dice: There are 2 dice that come with the game. They are normal six-siders except the '6' has been replaced with a firefly ship logo, although it still counts as a '6'.

I don't usually talk about this because it has no impact on the game itself but Firefly: The game has a huge footprint, i.e., it takes up a lot of table space.

How's it play?
Setup

• Board: Put out the game board and complete the following steps.
  • Ships: Put the Alliance and Reaver ships in their respective starting spots.
  • Supply cards: Sort the supply cards into their 5 types and shuffle each into a face-down deck. Finally draw 3 cards from each deck to form a discard pile for each supply deck.
  • Contract cards: Also sort contract cards by type and shuffle them into 5 face-down decks. Again draw and discard 3 cards from each deck for create their  respective discard piles.
  • Nav decks: Sort the nav decks by type, then shuffle the remaining cards into face-down decks.
  • Misbehave deck: Shuffle the misbehave cards into a face-down deck.
  • Story card: Shuffle all the story cards into a face-down deck and draw one. This will be this game's objective.
    Alternatively, players may collectively decide on a story card to use.
• Players: Put out the starter cards and shipboards. Players then roll off with a die to determine the order in which they choose their starter cards and ship boards.
  Then in reverse player order, players choose where to place their ships on the game board.​
  The player to last put their firefly model on the board starts the game as the first player.
  Next, give each player 3,000 credits, 6 fuel tokens and 2 parts tokens. The tokens should all be placed on cargo spaces on each player's ship board.
  Finally, all players draw 1 contract card from each contract deck, giving them 5 contract cards. Players are allowed to keep up to 3 contract cards in hand and may have up to 3 active contracts at a time.

On to play
Firefly: The Game doesn't have set objective, instead it has differing story cards, one of which will be used during a game. Each story card will have a series of goals that must be completed and whoever does them all first, wins!

Firefly: The Game follows the usual turn structure with the active player taking their turn before play progresses to the player on their left.

• Actions: During the active player's turn, they can perform 2 actions as described below. They may perform 2 different actions or repeat the same action twice.
  • ​Move: There are 2 types of movement a player can chose when moving their ship.
    Mosey: The player can move their ship 1 sector, this is slow but safe movement. If a player is adjacent to their destination, they'll probably mosey there.
    Full burn: Now this is more like it. This requires the player to spend a fuel but allows them to move their ship a number of sectors equal to the range of their drive core.
    There's a consequence for doing this though...
    Every time their ship enters a sector, they must draw a card from the nav deck for the region of space they entered.
    Nav cards mostly have no effect and allow the active player to continue moving but some will give them encounters to resolve or problems to address, usually in the form of a skill roll (More on skill rolls below.) or may force them to full stop which means their movement for that action ends. Sometimes it will allow the active player - or another player move the Alliance or Reaver ship a space and sometimes it will pull the ship directly on to the players sector, in which case they must deal with it.
    The Alliance ship will search the player's ship but won't do much to a player unless they're carrying contraband/fugitives or there's a warrant on the ship or crew. In this they'll lose the contraband/fugitives and may lose outlaw crew, they'll also have to bribe the Alliance to get rid of warrants.
    Encountering Reavers is much simpler, if deadlier. They Reavers will kill all passengers/fugitives and kill some of the crew too! However, if the player has the right crew and fuel, they can evade the Reavers.
  • Buy: If the player's ship is in a sector with a supply deck, they may buy stuff!
    Players may look through the pertinent supply deck discard pile for cards they want or draw from the deck until they have 3 cards, then they may buy up to 2 of them. returning any unbought cards to the discard pile.
    Additionally, the buy action also allows the active player to purchase fuel or parts.
    ​If for any reason, any of the crew has disgruntled tokens, the active player may spend credits to remove them with shore leave.
  • Deal: When the active player is in sector with a contract deck, they may use an action to look at 3 cards from either the discard pile or drawn from the deck and keep 2 of them to complete at a later stage of the game.
    Players can also buy or sell contraband if they have a 'solid' reputation i.e., good reputation in that sector.
  • Work: The active player may spend an action to work, there are several types of work that can be undertaken.
    Cash: If they active player is in a sector with a planet, they may spend an action to earn some credits.
    Job: Each active job a player has will require several steps that need completing in order to finish that contract. An action may be spent to complete a step, sometimes this requires a skill roll.
• End turn: Once the active player has completed their 2 actions, player progresses to the player on their left.
• Other rules: There are a whole bunch of situational rules, some of which are touched upon below.
  • Skill rolls: Many tasks and actions will require a skill roll to complete. Some tasks will offer a choice in how to resolve it with differing difficulties and outcomes. Some tasks may also require certain prerequisites before rolling.
    Difficulty: A skill roll's difficulty is determined by a number, the higher the number, the harder it is to successfully complete.
    Bonuses: A player may gain bonuses from various sources, predominantly, this will come from characters. Every point a character has in the relevant skill will be added to the roll. Gear cards may also add to a skill roll.
    ​​​​​Roll the dice: When a skill roll is attempted, the active player rolls a single die. If the result (Plus any applicable bonus.) is equal or higher than the difficulty, they succeed. If the active player rolls the firefly icon icon it counts as a 6, then they get to roll the die again and add it to the result of the first roll (Which will be a 6.), thus, no matter the difficulty, there's always the possibility of succeeding at the roll.

Endgame
Firefly: The game works hard to replicate the feel of the show and to a certain extent, it does this very well. It successfully captures the feel of hustling round a system, wheeling and dealing, dodging authorities and making profit.
All of this though, is only half of what the TV show was, the show was also about the family you make and the stories they collectively create, stuff that's quite hard to replicate in a game and is missing here since players are each playing separate crews. Having said that, there's definitely a bit of emergent gameplay and some elements of storytelling going on here but his brings me to one of my bugbears about the game.

When you're playing it feels a bit like a single-player game that happens to have other players in it. There's a little bit of interaction here and there that comes from sending the Alliance or Reavers after other players or trading and crew poaching but it doesn't feel significant.

Firefly: The Game is sandbox game that appears to offer a lot of choice, is a lot of game with a lot of rules and rules exceptions and also a lot of components which I feel will be off putting to more casual gamers. A fan of the show who isn't a gamer will probably find Firefly: The Game hard going at the start.

Despite the breadth of rules, the game is fairly straightforward in what it asks players to do.

One of my other bugbears is that players will often find themselves delivering something, this might be legal or illegal or performing a crime/misbehaving. All of this will involve travelling around and risking running into the Alliance or Reavers or other obstacles and so on.
The consequence of this is that because the game is so single-player driven that ultimately, it's a race to complete the goals as efficiently as possible and even though it's meant to be have open sandbox gameplay, players are being somewhat funnelled through the game by those goals. I.e., the game-winning goals are all the same, it's how those goals are achieved that will differ between player.

The game also has a fairly long playtime, we played a beginner story card with a low player count and it still took 2 hours. Although, to be fair, that's not really uncommon with this style of play so it comes with the territory but be prepared to commit a few hours to a playthrough.

If you're a fan of the Firefly TV show and are prepared to prepared to invest some effort learning the rules time to play, you'll probably enjoy this.
Personally, I'm not sure how I feel about Firefly: The Game overall, it was a fun experience and my decisions generally felt meaningful, it also fairly involved and having players run around dong their own thing also felt a little unengaging. However, if someone else wanted to play it, I wouldn't object.

8th September 2022

It's a Thursday evening, it's Aldershot, it's time for some gaming goodness.

​Channel your inner Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and Kevin McCloud as you attempt to build your... Dream Home in this drafting, set collecting game.

What's in the game?

• Game board: This is not really a game board but more of a drafting board.
  There are 2 rows of 6 card spaces each, the first space of each row is dedicated to placing the game's 2 deck of cards.
  Thus the top row is the resource card row and the bottom row is the room card row.
• Home board: These are actually player boards. Each one depicts a 3 level idyllic suburban home.
  The bottom floor depicts a porch or entrance (Which essentially uses up 3 spaces) along with a 'garage' (Which is actually the basement) and consists of 2 card spaces. 
  The middle floor has 5 card spaces.
  Finally, the top floor also have 5 card spaces - giving a total of 12
• Cards: Dream Home uses 2 decks of cards.
  Room cards: These cards all show various rooms you would find in a typical house, bathrooms, kitchens and so on. Room cards are used by players create their home and are colour-coded according to type. There are normal rooms, basement rooms and unique rooms.
  Many types of room cards can be placed adjacent to cards of the identical type. 
  At the bottom of each room card it will display 1 or more numbers, which indicate both the maximum 'size' that room can reach and also victory point (VP) value of that card for reaching the that size if other cards of the same type are placed adjacent to it.
  Resource cards: This type of card provides players with benefits or bonuses, which may be once-only, ongoing or game end VPs.
  There are roof cards, décor cards, tool and helper cards.
• Tokens: These are décor tokens, each one is uniquely shaped according to the resource card it corresponds to and will also display a VP value.
• First player token: I don't usually write about the first player token but this is a fairly chunky wooden styled in the shape of a house.

​Component quality is the usual good standard found in most modern board games. The cards are fine, the board and tokens are constructed from sturdy cardboard. The first player token is chunky and made from wood, it's obviously a bit of a gimmick but it's the kind of gimmick I'm a sucker for!

Dream Home has fantastic artwork throughout. The Illustration used on the home board is good, however, the standouts are the cards and tokens which feature excellent colourful and distinct depictions of home spaces. Interestingly, many cards will feature children hidden among the furniture. This is more than just a aesthetic choice which will be explained below.

Most information is conveyed via text and there's no iconography that needs learning.

How's it play?
​Setup
This is the setup for 4-player games, in game with lower player counts, some cards will be discarded after being placed on the game board.

• Game board: Sort the cards by type and shuffle them into 2 face-down decks.
  Resource row: Place the resource deck on to the leftmost space on the top row.
  Next, leave the 1st space to the right of the deck empty, it's used to indicate the first player token, a resource card never goes here.
  Finally deal 4 face-up cards on to the 4 remaining spaces in the row.
  Rooms row: Put the room deck on the leftmost space on the bottom row, deal 5 face-up cards on to the 5 spaces in this row.
• Player board: Give each player a player board.
• First player: Determine a starting player and give them the first player token.

On to play
Dream Home is played over exactly 12 rounds and players will be putting room cards on to their personal game board to build their home and gaining resource cards.
This is done by drafting pairs of cards from the same column, that is, 1 resource and 1 room card - except for the leftmost space, in which case they acquire a room card and the first player token.

Turn order is slightly different to the usual here: The player with the first player token goes first and play progresses to the left until all players have taken their turn. However, it's possible that the first player token will change hands during a round, consequently, in the following round a new turn order would be established.

During their turn, the active player takes the following actions.

• Take cards: The active player must choose a column and take the resource and room card from that column.
  First player token: If the active player chooses the first column, they only get a room card, however, they also gain the first player marker and will go first in the next round.
• Place room: The active player must place the room card they just drafted with the following restrictions:
  Basement: Basement cards must go on to 1 of the 2 basement spaces.
  Build up: All other room cards must be placed on top of the porch or on top of another room card, this can a basement card or be another room card in the case of placing room cards on the top floor.
  ​Size limit: Players will want to put cards of the same type adjacent to each other to maximise VP scoring but a room cannot exceed it's size limit. E.g., a bedroom can consist of 2 adjacent bedroom cards, a 3rd bedroom card cannot be placed adjacent to that room.
  ​Can't play: If for any reason, the active player cannot play a card, they can place it face-down as an empty room which will score 0 VPs. Empty rooms follow the same placement rules as explained above.
• Resource cards: There are 4 types of resource card.
  Décor cards: When one of these cards is taken, the active player also takes the corresponding décor token. The token must immediately be placed on a room that matches the token and can provide bonus VPs at the game end. When this is done, the room is considered finished, that is, no more room cards can be added to that room.
  If a décor token cannot be placed on a matching room, it is discarded.
  Helper cards: These cards generally provide some sort of bonus scoring criteria during the game end.
  Roof cards: These come in several different colours and when a player acquires a roof, they turn it face-down and place it on their home board's roof.
  These cards cannot be looked at again until final scoring at game end!
  4 Roof cards can score bonus VPs at the game end and more if they are of a matching colour. This means players will need to memorise those colours.
  Tool cards: These usually provide some sort of benefit during the game.
• Next player: Once the active player has resolved the cards they took, play progresses to the player on their left.
• Next round: Once all player's have taken their turn, play progresses to the next round and the following occur.
  Clear board: All face-up cards remaining on the game board are discarded out of play. 4 new resource and 5 new room cards are drawn and placed as per the setup rules.
  Turn order: Whoever has the first player token will be the starting player in the new round. If the first player token did not change hands because nobody chose the left most column, then whoever retained the token will be the starting player again in the new round.

Endgame
Dream Home is played over 12 rounds and after the last round, the game goes to scoring. There are various avenues to earning VPs.

• ​Room cards: These score points according to their type and size. E.g., a living room consisting of 3 cards will score 9 VPs.
• Décor: These tokens will score points as listed on them.
• Functionality: Players earn points for having certain type of rooms in their home. A home with a bathroom, bedroom and kitchen will earn VPs for example.
• Roof: Players can now look at their roof cards. If a player has at least 4 roof cards on their roof, they score 3 points. If a player can have set of at least 4 roof cards of the same colour then they earn 8 VPs.
  Windows: Every roof card that has a window scores and additional VP.
• Additionally; certain cards can also provide VPs.

Points are tallied, highest score wins. In the case of a tie, the player with home board showing the most children on the cards wins!

Overall
Dream Home strikes a balance between ease of play and depth. Players will be faced with the conundrum of having to build outwards before building upwards.
It might not seem like much but it's unlikely that players will get all the cards they need at the time they need them.
The larger room sets will score more points per card but unless a player gets the right cards at the right time, it's likely that they will have to leave gaps when collecting bigger sets, which can make it tricky to build upwards.

The drafting mechanic also provides players with a meaningful choice. Again, it's unlikely that players will always get the 2 cards they want, often they will need to compromise on which resource and room card to take as well as adapt to circumstances as they are occur.

Finally, the first player mechanic is also interesting. Gaining the first player token feels costly because the player only gets a room card but it can play dividends in the following turn. There will times when going first can be extremely useful.
Conversely going last can be painful as the last player will only ever have a choice of 2 columns to pick from.

None of this is ever too complicated, the sets are never too big and intricacies that can arise from syncing resource cards such as décor cards with room cards is never too complex.

Dream Home also doesn't outstay its welcome. Being played over 12 rounds keeps it moving along briskly and provides a fairly concise experience, unless you're playing with a sufferer of analysis paralysis!

It's fair to say that Dream Home is a lightweight and accessible iteration of the 'draft-and-place' multiple components, set collecting mechanic seen in quite a few games.
This accessibility along with it's top-notch presentation means that it's probably a good game to play with younger participants or more casual gamers.

For me though: While I feel that Dream Home does provide a good experience for younger and more casual gamers, I'm not sure it has long term appeal to more dedicated gamers. I enjoyed the game but it's fairly simplistic nature means I'm not sure how often I'd like to play it.