15th June 2021

It's a Tuesday evening at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club. Continuing a  theme, the second and concluding game of the night was another cooperative game.
​
Previously; we'd defended the kingdom from invaders by rolling for adventure. Now, we're going to defend the kingdom from invaders by being tiny... and epic!

What's in a game?
Like all Tiny Epic games, this comes packaged in a small, sturdy box with a bunch of tiny components.

• Player cards: There are 10 of these oversized cards, one for each playable hero. On one side it depicts info on the hero such as health and special ability, on the other is a larger illustration and a short backstory for the character.
• Defender cards: There are 4 defender cards in the player colours, they're also 2 'all-defenders' cards for 1, 2 or 3 player games.
• Artefact deck: There are 10 of these cards, artefacts are magical items that player's characters may equip.
• ITEMeeples: Not meeples, but ITEMeeples, there are 4 of them in the 4 different player colours. Each ITEMeeple has 4 sockets, 2 on the front and 2 on the back, which allow up to 3 artefacts to be attached to the sockets.
• Artefact items: There are 10 of these tiny 3D items that correspond to the 10 artefact cards. Each one has 1 or 2 pins, so that when a player equips them, they can be attached to an ITEMeeple.
• Heart tokens: There are 4 of them in the player colours, used to track a hero's hit points. There's also a 5th health token used to track the epic foe's hit points
• Region cards: There are 7 of these oversized cards. One of them depicts the capital and the other 6 areas are outer regions, they are areas like the plains, coast, mountain etc. Each region also has a threat track and apart from the capitol city, each region has a different special ability on each side.
• Epic foe cards: There are 6 epic foe cards and again, they're oversized. Each epic enemy has a health track and a couple of special rules/abilities and another ability that can be triggered when their health drops to certain points. Each of the 6 epic foes is also associated with a particular outer region.
• Dire enemy cards: These are normal sized cards and therefore only dire enemies instead of epic! Each dire enemy has a special rule/ability and like epic foe cards, each one is associated with one outer region type.
• Enemy cards: These are the games run-of-the-mill enemies. There are 9 of them and each one shows 2 of the 6 outer regions.
• Threat tokens: There're 7 of these flame shaped tokens and they're used to track the threat (Or damage really.) for each region, so it must depict how much everything is burning. My first thought was:
  ​How does Tiny Epic Defenders end? In fire! Thanks Ambassador Kosh! Yes, it's a Babylon 5 reference, deal with it!

The cards are, as would be expected, of a pretty standard quality and totally acceptable. This is a tiny epic game, so invariably, the tokens are all small and fiddly to handle, but that aside, they all look nice. The artefacts slot into the ITEMeeples with out issue, it's a gimmick, but I like gimmicks! Besides, it does away with that question; how many items can my character use?

Artwork on the region cards is nice enough and fairly evocative of their respective regions, meanwhile the art style used for the enemies and player characters reminds of  art used in various fantasy videogames, which is no bad thing, it's bright and colourful, which I like.

How's it play?
Setup

• Player cards: Randomly deal (Or give.) a player card to each player, along with the ITEMeeple in the player's chosen colour.
• Create landscape: The playing area must be created.
  ​First, put the Capital City in the centre of the playing area, then place 2 region cards adjacent to the capital on it's left and right. Then place 2 regions above those 3 and the remaining 2 below the 3, they should sort of form a diamond/circle shape.
• Epic foe: Shuffle the epic foe cards and deal one face-down, keep the epic foe hidden.
• Turn deck: The starting turn deck will contain a mixture of enemy cards and defender cards.
  Select all the defender cards the players' chosen colours and the all-defenders cards as necessary per the number of participating players, shuffle them and place them into a face-down deck.
  Now shuffle the enemy cards and deal 3 face down, place all 3 on top of the defenders deck, this applies for the first turn only, in subsequent turns all the cards are shuffled as usual.
• Horde deck: The horde deck will contain a mixture of enemy and dire enemy cards that appear later in the game.
  ​Deal 3 more cards from the enemy cards face-down into a deck.
  Now shuffle and deal 2-4 dire enemy cards as required face-down, add them to the 3 enemy cards you just dealt.
  Now shuffle all the cards together and then place them on top of the epic foe card.
  ​This is the horde deck.
• Artefact deck: Shuffle the artefacts and create a face-down deck with all of them.

That's more or less it for setup other than setting out some tokens.

On to play
To some degree, play in Tiny Epic Defenders is determined by the turn deck.
In each turn, reveal a card from the turn deck and activate it's action.

• Defender card: If the card revealed is 1 of the 4 coloured defender card, then the player with correspondingly coloured ITEMeeple gets to act and gets 3-4 action points.
  If a 'all-defenders' card is revealed, then the 3-4 action points are divided among all the defending characters as the players see fit.
  What can players use actions points for?
  Move: 1 action point allows the active player to move to an adjacent region. Players can only move to and from the Capital City region from the 2 adjacent left/right region cards, otherwise they move around the outer regions.
  Secure a region: If a player's character is on region that's had it's threat level increased due to enemy attacks, then the active player may spend actions points to lower that threat level at a cost of 1 action per threat level.
  Use special ability: Each character has a special ability that can be used for the cost of action points.
  Use regional ability: Some outer regions also have special abilities that can be triggered by the active player for action points, provided their ITEMeeple is on that region's card. Additionally, some outer regions have abilities that activate automatically.
  Fight epic foe: If the active player's character is on the same space as the epic foe, then they can spend an action point to attack the epic foe.
  Sacrifice health: Not an action per se, but the active character may once per turn sacrifice 1 health to gain an additional action point.
  Once defender actions have been completed, the card is put into the discard pile.
• Enemy card: If an enemy card is revealed, it immediately attacks the 1st and 2nd regions as listed on the card, increasing the threat level on both by 1.
  However, if any player has their character on one of the regions being attacked, that character can lose a point of health to defend the region and prevent the threat level being increased.
  Once the 2 attacks have been resolved, the enemy card is put into the discard pile.
• Dire Enemy card: When a dire enemy card appears, it only attacks a single region, however, dire enemies also have special ability that get triggered.
  When a character defends against a dire enemy, they must lose 2 or maybe 3 health, in doing so, the character gets to draw a card from the artefacts deck and equip it.
  As with enemies, dire enemy cards are put into the discard pile are being resolved.

That's basically how the turn deck works, there are a couple of other rules though .

• Threat levels: When an outer region's maximum threat level is reached, it's permanently destroyed, as is it's special ability. Further damage done to a destroyed region is redirected at the Capital City region and that's not good.
• Health: If a character's health is reduced to 0, they become exhausted, they can no longer defend, fight or secure, they may only move and use certain special abilities.
• Horde deck: Once all the cards from the turn deck have been revealed, take a card from the horde deck, then without revealing it, shuffle it into the turn deck, which is now ready to be used again. The new enemy will then appear at some point.
• Epic foe: Play continues until the last horde card is added to the turn deck. The next time the turn deck is depleted, the epic foe is revealed.
  Fighting the epic foe is hard and there are special rules for doing so. Each epic foe has a special ability and a lot of health, furthermore, when an epic foe's health is reduced to certain numbers, it will trigger epic events; these screw players over even more!

Endgame
When the epic foe is revealed, the endgame is triggered. The turn deck is still used, but no new cards are added and play continues until one of the following conditions is met.
The players must reduce the epic foe's health to 0 in order to win.
If the threat level of the Capital City reaches maximum at any time during play, then the players lose.

Overall
Tiny Epic Defenders is quick to set up, learn and play, with those artefact tokens it also looks pretty cool when your ITEMeeple is tooled up.
It seems to play a little different to most other cooperative games I've encountered. Those other games tend to make players choose between working towards an objective or managing an ongoing problem of some kind. Tiny Epic Defenders' is mostly about the kingdom and characters surviving the attrition the game throws at them until the epic foe appears, then players have to balance their actions between defeating the epic foe and defending the kingdom.
Like other cooperative games, managing bad luck is vital to victory, in this case it from the turn deck.
This means it's a game about mostly adapting and optimising tactics in preparation for when the epic foe appears and I feel it's particularly important to defend against dire enemies as its the only way to earn artefacts, which can prove vital to victory.

How the turn deck works in conjunction with the horde deck seems like a clever mechanic; players will know how often they get to act and generally how many times enemies attack, but not the order. It makes the game feel like the luck mechanic isn't too unpredictable, which is no bad thing.
Adding cards from the horde deck however, introduces two further elements into this. Firstly, escalating the threat by adding more enemies and secondly, by also introducing a new random facet to the turn deck because the added cards are hidden until they're revealed.
All of this works to raise stakes and tension as the game continues.

Having said that, when defending against enemies, it felt a little unsatisfying and futile when they were only sent to the discard pile instead of being defeated outright, but I guess that's necessary for the turn deck to work.
I also found the tactics a little on the lighter side, ultimately, there were only 6 total locations that needed defending and decisions tended to be between lowering threat in a region or sitting a region waiting to defend it when it was inevitably attacked in an enemy action.
It's not a gamebreaker, I'm just not sure how well it holds up to repetitive play.

If you're looking for a fairly quick-to-play introductory cooperative game to try, you could do worse than look at Tiny Epic Defenders. Or if you like cooperative games and want something a bit lighter, it might also be for you.

30th May 2021

Sunday night gaming on Board Game Arena continues with Dragonwood.

Those woods there, there be dragons in those woods, that must be why it's named Dragonwood! There are many monsters to capture, so to assemble brave adventurers, take your cards and take your dice and head off into the forests, there're adversaries to be struck, stomped or screamed at!

Caveat: We've only ever played Dragonwood digitally online.

What's in a game?

• Dragonwood cards: These cards consist of creatures to capture, enhancements to earn and events to encounter.
  Creatures: Acquiring creatures earn victory points. Each card has a picture of the creature it represents and also shows how many victory points it's worth.
  Creatures also have a column of 3 numbers, one number each for the strike, stomp, or scream actions.
  For example:
  Grumpy Troll
  Victory points: 4
  Strike: 9
  Stomp: 11
  Scream: 9
  These values are the target numbers that must be met with dice rolls in order to acquire the card, the higher the victory points, the higher the target numbers.
  Which of the 3 values is used for the dice roll is explained below.
  Enhancements: Unlike creatures, enhancements do not score victory points, instead they give the controlling player a bonus that works towards capturing creatures in some way or other, this may be once-only or ongoing.
  Finally, enhancements cannot be used in capturing other enhancements.
  Events: Events can be beneficial or detrimental and are immediately played when revealed during play.
• Adventurer cards: There are 64 adventurer cards in all.
  60 adventurer cards: Numbered 1-12 in 5 different colours.
  4 Lucky Ladybug cards: Drawing one of these cards is lucky! See below for further info.
• Dice: These six siders are NOT numbered 1-6, instead the distribution of numbers goes; 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4. The mathematically astute among you will note that the mean average when rolling 2 of these dice would be 5, the mean average for 2 normal six siders is 7.

That's it for components.
Well, there's not much that can be said since we've only played it digitally. The art on the carts is bright, cartoonish and pleasant, text is clearly written and easy to read.

How's it play?
Setup

• Dragonwood deck: The size of this deck is dependant on the number of players.
  First remove the 2 dragon cards from the deck and shuffle it, discard the required number of cards and then shuffle the dragons back into the bottom half of the deck.
  Deal a row of 5 cards to form what's called 'The landscape'. If any events are dealt during setup, shuffle them back into the deck.
• Adventurer deck: Shuffle the adventurer cards into a face-down deck, deal 5 to each player, these should be kept hidden.
• Starting player: Determine a starting player

On to play
The objective in Dragonwood is to capture creatures cards which are worth 1-7 points each.
Each turn, the active player will have a choice of 2 actions.

• Reload: This is a fancy word for draw a card from the Adventurer deck. If the Lucky Ladybug card is drawn, discard it to the discard pile and draw 2 more cards. Players have a maximum hand size of 9.
  ​If the adventurer deck is depleted, shuffle the discard pile into a new deck. This is done only once per game.
• Capture a card: Players may try to capture a creature or enhancement, mechanically it's identical and there are 3 ways to do this, all methods are done by playing cards, the more card that are played, the more dice can be rolled. Thus the active player plays their cards and chooses one of the 3 capture methods to use.
  Strike: In order to use strike, the active player must play cards that are all in a straight, e.g., a 4, 5, 6, 7 of any colour, because there are 4 cards being played, that would give the active player 4 dice to roll.
  Stomp: To stomp, all card played must have the same value, so two 9s would give the active player 2 dice to roll.
  ​Scream: This requires the active player to play cards all of the same colour, regardless of their numbers; a 2, 3, 8, 10 & 12 all in green would give the active player 5 dice to roll.
  Once the method has been chosen, the active player rolls the relevant dice:
  Fail: if the result is less than the target number for the chosen method, then the capture attempt has failed! The active player takes the cards they played back into their hand and must discard 1 card.
  Success: If the result is equal to or higher than the chosen target number, then the creature is captured and the cards are discarded into the adventurer discard pile.
  A new card is immediately drawn to replace the captured card, if that card is an event, it is immediately played and discarded, another card is drawn, there must always be 5 cards in the landscape if possible.

Play continues until either both dragons have been captured which case the game ends immediately or the adventurer deck has been depleted twice, which triggers a final set of turns.
Then it goes to the endgame.

Endgame
Players score the victory points for each creature they captured.
The player who has captured the most creatures earns an additional 3 points.
Once points are tallied, highest score wins!

Overall
Decisions are based around how much you want or need to push your luck and when to or when not to try and capture cards, managing this is key to Dragonwood.

If a creature has a value of 10 for one of it's target numbers, then it's not hard to figure out that 4 dice will give the active player a 50% chance of capturing it and they'll need to play 4 cards to do this. 9 or lower and the odds swing in the player's favour, 11+ and well, it's not a push your luck game for nothing!
Sure, someone can play it safe and draw cards to get better odds, but this consumes turns while instead, competitors could be capturing those creatures. A handful of adventurer cards scores nothing at the game's end.
Conversely, rashly trying to capture cards and failing will cost players their adventurer cards, it's a clever little balancing mechanic.
Even though the decision to capture a card or not is a simple, almost no brainer decision, the need to outdo other players generally means it never quite a meaningless one.

We found that acquiring enhancements early on (If they appear early on that is.) could be a big advantage. There are enhancements that add 1 or 2 to capture rolls, it might not seem like much, but in a game about averaged dice rolls, it can swing the odds quite a lot.

It's obvious that Dragonwood is a light game that skews towards younger players and with that in mind, I don't think it's appropriate to be overly harsh on it.
With it's fairly simplistic choices and reliance on randomness, fans of 'heavy' games probably won't find much to engage with here, unless they're looking looking for a undemanding filler for around 30 minutes to allow their brains to cool down between other, heavier games.
However, ​I do think that younger players will find the game enjoyable and dice rolling exciting, casual gamers may also find it entertaining.

30th May 2021

It's a Sunday and I'm logged on to Board Game Arena on my PC, time for the first game of the night.

Monk Tybor Kwelein had spent his life cataloguing the 4 kingdoms of plants, fungi, insects and animals in the pages of the titular Codex Naturalis. Now he is no longer with us, will one-to-four other people take up the mantle and carry on his work in the form of a neat little card game.

What's in a game?
Codex Naturalis is a card game and unsurprisingly, has a lot of cards. All the cards are about half the size of normal playing cards which is sensible, as otherwise the game would have a massive footprint, most of the cards share some similar features.

• Starter cards: These cards are double-sided, each side will have 1-4 'visible corners', which is to say these are corners which are 'colourless', 'hidden corners' are corners where the card's art fills the corner.
  Each side will also contain symbols which represent 1-4 of the 4 kingdoms, which may be on the visible corners or in the 'middle' of the card.
• Resource cards: Also double sided; on the 'front' side there will be 2-3 visible corners which may or may not contain kingdom symbols, they may or may not also contain 'objective' symbols. These are a quill, inkpot & manuscript, more on them later. Occasionally, resource cards will score a point.
  The 'back' side of resource cards always have 4 visible corners and a kingdom symbol in the middle of the card.
• Gold cards: As the name suggests, these cards are actually decorated with gold foil and again, they are double sided. On the front they will also have 2-3 visible corners, generally there are no kingdom symbols in the corners, although there may well be objective symbols.
  All gold cards have a requirement in kingdom symbols before they can be played, thus if a gold card displays 3 plant symbols, then the active player must have 3 symbols visible in their playing area before the card can be put down.
  Additionally, all gold cards score points and there are a variety of ways to score.
  Finally, identical to resource cards, the backs of gold cards have 4 visible corners and a kingdom symbol in the middle.
• Objective cards: These are the only cards which are not double sided, the front will show objectives that score extra points at the end of the game if the conditions are met.
  ​There's 2 varieties of objective, some require players having certain resource or objective symbols displayed in their area at the end of the game. The other type requires cards to be placed in specific order and colour, these can be quite tricky to achieve.
• Scoring board: A standard board for tracking player scores.
• Tokens: Standard wooden discs used with the board.

The scoring board and tokens are pretty standard quality game components and perfectly acceptable.
The cards feel very thick and sturdy (Maybe because of the smaller size?) and seem to be made to a high standard, all the gold cards and numerous resource cards are embossed in actual gold foil, which is a really nice touch and despite their small size, most of the cards all have charming, highly detailed monochrome illustrations themed by their colour. Finally, all the cards are coated in a glossy finish.
The only criticism I have is of the small symbols at the bottom of the gold cards, they are quite small and some players have complaint that it can be hard to discern between the symbols, particularly the blue and the green.
Otherwise, these are some of the highest quality card components I've seen and it all comes wrapped up in a compact tin.

How's it play?
Setup

• Shuffle the resource cards and deal 2 into the centre of the play area, the remaining resource cards should be placed adjacent in a face-down deck.
• Shuffle the gold cards and deal 2 into the centre of the play area, the remaining resource cards should be placed adjacent in a face-down deck.
• Deal a starter card to all players, each player can choose which side to use as their starting card.
• Each player now draws 2 resource cards and 1 gold cards from the respective decks.
• Shuffle the objective cards into a face-down deck.
  2 objective cards should be drawn and placed into the playing area face-up, these are common objectives, all players can earn points by completing their requirements.
  2 objective cards should then be dealt to all players, these are secret objectives, each player should select one to keep and discard the other to the bottom objective deck. These cards should be hidden from other players, the owning player can earn points by meeting their requirements.
• Determine a starting player.

On to play
The objective in Codex Naturalis is to create an expanding spread of overlapping cards in their playing area. The basic process of actions to achieve this in Codex Naturalis is simple, a player plays a card, then draws a card, of course there's more to it than that. 

points, this card probably scores the most if you can manage to fill the doughnut hole!​

• Draw card: Once a card has been played, the active player must draw a card, this can be any of the 4 face-up cards or drawn blindly from either the resource of gold face-down decks. A player can never have more than 3 cards in their hand.
  If a face-up card is taken, it's immediately replaced by a card from its respective deck.

The player to the left then becomes the active player.
Play continues one player's score reaches 20 or more, then the endgame is triggered.

Endgame
After the endgame is triggered, the current round is completed, then one final round is played.
After this, players count the score from the cards they've played and then calculates the score they get from completing both common objectives and their secret objective.
Score are tallied and highest score wins!

Overall
Codex Naturalis has simple rules, but also a fairly deep level of gameplay. Despite only having a hand of 3 cards, players are given a wide variety of choices and strategies to pursue when placing cards.

A lot of this comes from the objectives, you'll obviously need to play gold cards to score but it's important not to ignore objectives, scoring from the gold cards will generally put your score into the low-to-mid 20s, but objectives which are scored after the end and can push your score higher, especially since they can be scored multiple times. That everyone has a secret objectives means that the final outcome is not known until the final scoring and keeps the stakes high.
Players must also learn to manage their hands and objectives, there are 4 colours of card, but only 2 of each type of card is ever displayed face-up, it's likely that player's won't always see the cards they need.
Codex Naturalis can also give players agonizing choices because they'll frequently be given the option to cover up a resource or objective symbol with the corner of another card. When that symbol is covered up, it's gone for the rest of the game, forcing players to choose which to prioritise. Only symbols that appear in the middle in of a card cannot be covered.
Finally, because face-up cards never have more than 3 visible corners, players will need to think how to place cards with future placement in mind, the visible corner of a card can be 'locked' by placing another card with a hidden corner adjacent to it. This essentially ends that line of expansion, which can limit options later on.

Codex Naturalis is a little too long for a filler and perhaps a little too short for a main game, which is only a minor quibble really. Otherwise, I found it to be a solid, easy-to-learn, mid-to-light game with good replay value and high production values.
Definitely worth a try.

23rd May 2021

It's a Sunday and I'm logged into Skype and Board Game Arena, ready for an evening of gaming.

The first game of the night was Happy City, a cheerful looking, light engine-building card game about building up a city, a happy city no less. 

Caveat: We've only played this game digitally on Board Game Arena.

What's in a game?

• Happy market cards: These 5 starter cards are double-sided, on one side they are white and on the other each one has one of the different colour/symbols. All happy market cards generate 1 income per turn.
• Building cards: These cards have a cost and a symbol/colour for building type, they may also have a income rating and population or happiness rating that ranges from -1 to +3.
  There are 3 'levels' of building cards, the higher the level the better the card, but the higher the cost.
  Level 1: Cost 1-3 coins to buy.
  Level 2: Cost 4-5 coins.
  Level 3: Cost 6-9 coins.
• Dwelling cards: These cards are similar to standard building cards, except they are only dwellings, thus they only have a cost, population rating and the green symbol.
  There are 3 types/levels of identical dwellings.
  Level 1: Cost 1, population 1.
  Level 2: Cost 3, population 2.
  Level 3: Cost 6, population 3.
• Special building cards: These cards have no cost, instead they have a requirement which must be met with colours/symbols.
• Coins: Standard currency.

I can't comment on the physical quality of the components but all the cards are decorated with colourful and interesting illustrations. The art is excellent.
Symbols are clear and easy to read.

How's it play?
At it's core, Happy City is a tableau-building game, adding cards increases income or score. 
Setup

• ​Give each player a happy market card, this should be put with the white side up in the player's area and represents the beginning of their tableau.
  The building cards should be sorted by level, then each deck should be shuffled. All 3 decks should be placed face-down in the central area to form a column.
• The dwelling cards should be sorted by type and placed in 3 face-up stacks, the number of cards in each stack should be equal to the number of players minus one.
• Shuffle the special building cards and place a line of them face-up in the central area, the number of cards used should be equal to the number of players plus two.
• Give each player 2 coins.
• Determine starting player.

On to play
In Happy City, the starting player's first turn is slightly different to subsequent turns, as explained below.

• Income: At the start of their turn, the active player receives coins equal to their income.
• Draw building card(s): ​In this next stage, there must always be a choice of 3 building cards available for the active player to purchase. Thus, since there are no building cards available at the start of the game, the starting player must draw 3 building cards and place them face-up next to the building decks. The player can select cards from any deck.
  In subsequent turns, the active player may discard a face-up building card before drawing more. Thus the active player will always have the option to draw 1 and maybe 2 cards.
• Take action: The active player can choose from 1 of 3 actions.
  Buy a building card: Pay for a building and place it in their tableau.
  Buy a dwelling: Pay for a dwelling and place it in their tableau.
  Pass and gain a coin: Self explanatory.
• Acquire special card: If the active player has cards in their tableau with colours/symbols that meet the the requirements of a special card, then the active player may take that special card as a free action, players can only ever have 1 special card in their tableau.

Once the active player has completed their action, the player to their left becomes the active player.

Expert game
Happy City has 2 levels of play; family & expert. This blog describes the family version.
The expert game differs in 2 ways.
All the happy market cards are flipped to their differently coloured sides and laid out, then the players draft one to become the starting card in their tableau and giving them some choice in how they start the game.
Special buildings also differ; the family Special cards give players a boost to their income, happiness or population. The expert special cards however, are different, they confer different benefits, sometimes variable and situational.

Endgame
The game continues until a player has 10 cards in their tableau, upon which the current round continues until all players have had an equal number of turns.
Each player's score is calculated by multiplying the total value of happiness symbols in their tableau by all the population symbols.
​Highest score wins.

Overall
Gameplay in Happy City gives players the choice between increasing income or accumulating happiness/population. Income will give the player more buying power but happiness/population contributes towards the end score.
Having 3 decks of building cards at different cost ranges is an interesting mechanic when it comes to drawing cards. The player will always have the option to draw 1 or 2 cards, higher level cards will be better, but may prove more risky to draw. E.g., If a player has 4 coins, drawing a level 1 card will be safe as level 1 cards only cost 1-3 coins each, level 2 cards cost 4-5 coins, so there's a risk that a level 2 card will be unaffordable and will have been drawn pointlessly. It can give players a quandary when drawing building cards.
The game's scoring mechanic also adds an extra layer to decisions, failing to pay attention to how the points are spread between happiness/population can lead to lost scoring opportunities.

While Happy City is simple to learn, enjoyable and fast to play, making it a good filler game, it's perhaps also a little too basic for dedicated gamers. After a few games it was fairly easy to spot an optimal strategy to pursue and it became a race to develop that strategy. So I feel that the game doesn't offer a lot of longevity.
Ultimately, because it's such a light game, it's probably a good game for families or more casual players which is probably who the game is aimed at.

We also played the expert level a few times but felt like it added little to the game.
The varied happy markets are nice and offered a little extra strategy but the expert level special cards weren't so good. The problem was that they seemed harder to acquire than the family special cards, which meant they were acquired later in the game and therefore their benefits were limited, we found it wasn't worth specifically trying to get one, getting one by happenstance was fine, but then that sort of makes having a choice of starting happy market card pointless.
We enjoyed the family version more.
​
The family version is a game I'd play, but not too often.

18th May 2021

Lockdown restrictions are easing and we're meeting at Simon's on a Tuesday IN PERSON for the first time THIS YEAR!

​Today's game was Arkham Horror: The Card Game, you too can have fun watching your character's inevitable spiral into madness as they get caught up in unsettling investigations and tangle with unspeakable Lovecraftian ​horrors through the medium of flipping over cards!

What's in a game?
​The first thing to say about Arkham Horror: The Card Game is that it's actually a Living Card Game, what does this mean? It means it's a game that has lots of expansions, extra character decks, add-ons and so on. This is Simon's game and I have no idea what packs were used, but it doesn't really matter for the purposes of this blog post.

​Unsurprisingly, most of the game's components consist of various types of cards.

• Investigator card& mini investigator card: These cards represent the character that a player uses throughout the game. Each investigator has a special ability along with a rating in each of 4 attributes (Willpower, intellect, combat & agility), finally the character will have health and sanity scores.
  The mini card is used in the actual game and placed on locations cards, the main card is kept in front of the player during play.
• Player deck: Each player in the game has their own 30 card player deck that represents a different investigator/character and consists of numerous different types of player cards, including cards unique to each character. All of a player's actions are done through their deck, this means that different characters will not only have different strengths and weaknesses, but they will also employ widely differing strategies when approaching a problem or obstacle.
  Skill cards: These cards will give the investigator a benefit to a specific skill roll and are only played when the player chooses to attempt the pertinent skill roll. Skill cards are discarded after one use.
  ​Event Card: Can be played to give the investigator some sort of situational benefit or bonus, as with skill cards, event cards are discarded after one use.
  Asset cards: Assets can be items, clothes, weapons or even people. When assets cards are played they stay in play and provide an ongoing benefit until destroyed/discarded. There are limits to the number of asset cards a investigator can have in play at any one time.
  Weakness cards: Every investigator has flaws and foibles, these are represented by weakness cards. Every player deck must include them, when they appear, they will hinder the investigator in some way or other.
• Location cards: These double-sided cards represent places that the investigators can go to investigate. Initially, they will be face-down and when an investigator arrives there, they'll be flipped over and the investigator must deal with with whatever is revealed.
• Encounter cards: Inevitably, the players will trigger encounters during play and this being a Cthulhu Mythos game; don't expect them to be pleasant!
• Act cards: This series of cards will represent narrative that drives the characters investigation.
  Agenda cards: As play progresses, so will events in the investigation, represented by the agenda cards.
• Damage tokens: There are 2 types of damage token, for health and sanity.
• Clue/Doom tokens: These double-sided tokens are used to represent clues that the investigators find or the onset of well.... doom!
• Resources: Along with clues, resource tokens are the game's main currency, often spent to activate or track abilities or assets.
• Chaos tokens: Used as the game's randomiser, they range in value from +1 to -8! Some tokens have special symbols that can trigger events in the investigation or investigator abilities.
• Chaos bag: What the tokens go into.

LEGO not included! Some of the photos will include Lego. Let me make it clear; this game does not include any Lego! Simon put together Lego minifigs that looked like the premade character deck portraits. Why? What else is a boardgamer going to do during lockdown.
All of the tokens and cards are made to the typical quality that are expected from games nowadays.
From the cards that I did get to see, they contain a lot of high quality artwork. Iconography is generally easy to read.

How's it play?
In Arkham Horror: The Card Game player's take the role of characters investigating into the Cthulhu Mythos through the form of scenarios and campaigns in a RPG-esque experience that shares the same setting as the seminal Call of Cthulhu RPG.
Setup

• Player decks: Players construct 30 card decks using the available cards. There some restrictions on what cards are used at any time specific time and some cards have levels and must be 'bought' with experience points.
  Alternatively there are several premade character decks that can be bought, which is what we used.
  Player decks are then shuffled and each player draws a hand of 5 cards.
• Resource tokens: each player takes 5 resource tokens.
• Populate chaos bag: Put the pertinent chaos tokens into the chaos bag, not all tokens are used in every scenario, this means that results drawn from the bag will alter according to the scenario's requirements.
  Interestingly; during campaign play, the same spread of tokens is used in the bag throughout the campaign, however, in-game events can cause tokens to be permanently added or removed from the bag, having a ongoing effect during the campaign.
  It's a clever mechanic in my opinion.
• Create scenario location: By placing the location cards face-down the game area is created, they are put in a certain order, such as a 3x3 or 2x3 grid or whatever and is dictated by the scenario. A scenario might take place in a nightclub with cards representing different rooms, a university campus with cards for different facilities or even a town with cards for different buildings.
• Construct act deck: Specific act cards are placed face-up stack in a particular order as dictated by the scenario. 
• Construct agenda deck: Agenda cards placed face up in a stack as dictated by the scenario. 
• Construct encounter deck: Again dictated by the scenario, the encounter deck is however, shuffled and placed face-down.

Overall
Arkham Horror: The Card Game has some interesting gameplay dynamics, the exploration and investigation elements blend quite well the unpredictable changes brought about by the changing of the agenda and act decks. Players can't take anything for granted as twists and unexpected events occur. Challenges and enemies provided by the encounter deck are varied and interesting.
Finally, I like how the chaos bag works, I like how it's stacked against the characters and playing skill and event cards is how tests are overcome, it's suitably pessimistic. I also like how the bag's effect on gameplay can be tailored and can evolve over a campaign. It's a nice mechanic.

This brings me to the campaign play, campaign scenarios seem to feature at least 3-4 outcomes that influence the next scenario with interesting changes, which is pretty good.
Characters also earn experience points from scenarios, these points can be used to buy better cards to swap into the player deck, progressively making characters better.
Being a living card game, there are a lot of accessories, expansions and extra campaigns available to purchase, these can extend the game

Rules-wise, there are a lot of rules in Arkham Horror: The Card Game about specific situations and events. Despite this, as a game it's actually in some ways fairly straightforward, player's have three actions to perform per round, that never quite feels like enough, which makes you have to prioritise and try to come up with optimal strategies, which is a good thing.
However, like other games I've played that try to provide GM-less RPG-like gameplay, the game gets fiddly and complex when managing 'GM' elements and this seems to be where the bulk of the rules are applied, especially to enemy behaviour.
It seems like a lot of effort for what somehow ultimately feels a little bit like average gameplay. The rules and glossary run to over 30 pages, in contrast, there're Cthulhu Mythos inspired pen and paper RPGS that have lower page counts.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy playing Arkham Horror: The Card Game because I did, I'm just glad that I played with someone familiar with the game.

24th March 2021

It's a Wednesday evening and I'm logged into Zoom and Board Game Arena on my PC.

It was time for a game that spanned the ages and the creation of massive monuments and the civilisations they represented. Luckily, it doesn't take that long to play 7 Wonders!

Caveat: We played the game online but have previously played the physical copy. Photos were taken for this blog post.

What's in a game?
​The purpose of the game is for each player to create their own civilisation through the construction of various types of buildings and ultimately create one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World.
7 Wonders is card game played over 3 sets of rounds (or ages). Each age has its own set of cards which are used. There are numerous types of cards, some of these types can be more or less common in different ages.

• Cards: All the different cards share some common elements, such as cost which can be in resources, money or even free. Each card also has its name along its left hand edge (This can be very important in later ages.). Cards also show in small writing what cards they chain with.
  Resource cards: These brown cards represent raw resources such as wood, stone and so on that are foundations of your civilisation. They only appear in ages 1 & 2.
  Goods cards: These are manufactured goods such as cloth or glass, they are important in the construction of advanced buildings for your civilisation. These cards are grey coloured. Like resource cards, these do not appear in age 3.
  Civic buildings: Blue cards are civic buildings such as baths, aqueducts, temples and palaces. Civic buildings score victory points as displayed on each card.
  Science buildings: This is where the games set collecting element comes into play. There are 3 different scientific symbols and collecting a set of all 3 scores victory points but victory points can also be scored by collecting sets of the same kind, 2-of-a-kind, 3-of-a-kind and so on for all 3 symbols. Green is used to represent scientific cards.
  Commercial buildings: These yellow cards represent businesses that allow the player to gain additional resources, goods or money in various manners, sometimes they also allow the player to accumulate victory points.
  Military buildings: Guard towers, archery ranges and training grounds and the like are all red military cards. Unsurprisingly, they increase a civilisation's military strength by 1-3 points. There is no direct combat between different players in 7 Wonders, but there is automatic conflict between neighbouring civilisations at the end of each age.
  Guild cards: These purple cards only appear in age 3, they sort of combine the mechanics of commercial buildings with the scoring of civic buildings.
• Wonder cards: These are not used during play but can be used to randomly determine which wonder board (See below.) each player gets and whether the A or B side is used.
• Wonder boards: As you would expect, there a 7 wonder boards, one for each ancient wonder. Each board is slightly different and also have an A and B side for more variation and complexity but all contain a resource or good they manufacture for the controlling player.
  Nearly all the wonder boards have 3 spaces (One board has 4 and another 2!) at the bottom. When these spaces are filled, they give the controlling player victory points or a special once only or ongoing bonus.
• Conflict tokens: These tokens are valued at +1, +3, +5 or -1 and they modify victory points.
• Coins: Standard currency, comes in 1s or 3s.

The cards, tokens and coins are of the usual quality you'd expect, the wonder boards are made of fairly thick grey board and feel sturdy.
The text and icons are all mostly clear (I tended to confuse stone and ore icons, because the ore icon looks like a pile of stone to me.), the symbology used for special rules on cards is also generally clear, the rulebook does a good job on clarifying these in cases of confusion.
I also like how the layout allows cards to be more or less stacked while still displaying pertinent information.
In terms of art quality, the wonder boards are quite large and very nicely decorated in eye-catching illustrations of the 7 titular wonders. Art on the cards are of a similar quality but obviously on a smaller scale.

How's it play?
Setup
7 Wonders is a 3-7 player game but also contains some special rules to allow 2 player games. This blog post talks about the normal 3-7 player game.

• Shuffle the wonder cards and deal 1 face down to each player, after this each player flips their card, revealing which wonder board they take and the card's orientation will display whether to use the A or B side.
• 3 decks must be constructed for each of the 3 ages. Deck size is dependant on the number of players and each will consist of 21-49 cards. Cards display which game size they are suitable for. Finally 5-9 of the 10 available guild cards are added to the age 3 deck.
  These 3 decks are shuffled.
• Deal all of the age 1 cards face-down to all players, each player should now have 7 cards.
• Give all players 3 currency.

And we're ready to play.

On to play
Each player in 7 Wonders is neighboured by a player to their left and right; why this is important will be explained below.
​Each player takes a card from their hand and plays face down in front of them, then they pass the remaining cards clockwise to the next player, the direction of play alternates between rounds.
Once every player has chosen a card, all player then simultaneously reveal their card, plays it and executes one of the 3 actions below.

• Construct building: The most common action, put the chosen card into play, it may be a resource/good or a building, but the rules are identical. Each card has a cost of some sort shown in top left corner. This may be a combination of the following factors below.
  Free: Some cards have to cost and are free to play.
  Chain: If a building name is displayed next to a card's cost and that player has that named building already built in their game area, then the building cost of the currently played card is reduced to zero.
  Money: Players will have to spend money to construct this building.
  Resources/goods: Some cards will require a single or mixture of resources and goods to build. The player must have cards already in their play area that display the relevant resources or goods they need. Thus if building requires 2 wood to construct, the player must have 2 cards in their playing area showing a wood each, or a card with 2 wood symbols, the symbols on wonder boards contribute to this.
  This also where your neighbours matter. A player can also use the resources and goods of one or both of their neighbours, they have to pay for it though; 2 coins for each used. This is unaffected by how a neighbour is using their own resources and goods, also the neighbour cannot refuse to sell resources - after all, money is money!
• Build their wonder: Wonders are built in stages, typically 3 stages. All wonders are built in a linear fashion from left to right.
  Cost: Each stage of a wonder will have a cost similar to constructing a building.
  Place card: Finally, when a stage has been paid for, it is built. The player takes they card they chose earlier and places it face-down underneath the space on the wonder board they just built, never revealing what card was used. Thus, building part of a wonder replaces the normal build card action.
• Gain money: A player may discard the card they chose for 3 currency, this card is always discarded face-down and is permanently out of the game. I guess players do this if they're really desperate for funds.

Overall
​I'm going to nit-pick a couple of things about 7 Wonders.
Set up feels a little long for a game that's quite short, having to sift through all 3 decks at the game start feels irritating, probably because there's 3 decks to construct instead of 1 and if the player count changes between games, then all 3 decks will need to be rebalanced.
The game is quite involved and perhaps a little too complicated for its expected playtime. I found myself frequently forgetting the rule about chaining buildings
Scoring is convoluted, specifically scoring the scientific cards where each symbol will scored twice. I wouldn't be surprised that more time was spent making sure this was correct than the rest of the scoring.

Like other drafting games of this style, early in the game players will struggle to decide what's going to be important to them or not, but by looking at their wonder board, players will see what they need to build their wonder and what benefits it gives them as some guidance.
One interesting feature about 7 Wonders is how players can pay to utilise their neighbours resources and goods and of course, players will want to keep and eye on their neighbours' military forces. It's a nice little spin that adds to the game.
​Since there are 7 ways to score points, players will have a lot of options on which strategy to pursue.
For example, civic buildings give a lot of victory points, but nothing else.
Military strength can score a lot of points (and cost your neighbours a few), but only if you dominate, getting caught in a war of escalation can be distracting and costly.

Quibbles aside, 7 Wonders is a straightforward game to learn that has a quick turnaround and is a fun game to play, players will want to strategize, but the luck of the draw means they will need to adapt to circumstances.
The game always provides players with meaningful choices, which is what you want.

22nd March 2021

Monday night gaming on Board Game Arena continues with the final game of the evening; Sushi Go!

Like sushi? Like conveyor belts? Then you'll like this.... probably!

Caveat: This was played online, but has also been played with the physical game, photos are from my copy.

What's in a game?
Sushi Go! comprises of a single deck of 108 cards with 8 different types of cards. 

• Chopsticks: Chopstick cards allow a player to sacrifice their action in their current turn to have 2 actions in a later turn. Chopsticks are worth 0 points.
• Dumplings: This is a set of cards, the more dumpling cards a player collects, the more points they score at the end of the round
• Maki rolls: Whoever has the most make rolls at the end of the round scores, 2nd place scores half as many points. Maki roll cards each contain 1-3 maki rolls.
• Nigiri: There are egg, salmon and squid nigiri cards, they score 1, 2 or 3 points respectively.
• Puddings: These cards are only ever scored once, they don't score at the end of any of the rounds, instead they are retained between rounds and are scored at the end of the game (Being puddings obviously!). The player with the most puddings scores points, the player with the least or no puddings loses points! Everyone else in between gets 0.
• Sashimi: This is another set, collect 3 sashimi cards to score points, otherwise 0 points are scored.
• Tempura: Another set, collect 2 tempura  to score points.
• Wasabi: On its own, a wasabi card is worthless when played. However, if during a later turn a player puts down a nigiri card, it must go on the wasabi card and the nigiri card's value is then tripled.

There's not much that can be said about the components, it's a deck of standard quality cards.
The art is clear, distinct and colourful with appropriately themed cheerful faces on all the foods.
My copy came in a little steel tin.
The only component that the game is lacking are scoring counters, as it stands, scores at the end of each round need to be recorded somehow on scrap paper or a phone or something. On the other hand, adding scoring tokens would increase the game's size, making it less of a neat compact little package, so your mileage may vary.

How's it play?
Set up
Shuffle and deal a hand of cards face-down to each player, the hand size depends on the number of players, the remaining cards form a draw deck for later rounds, then the game is ready to begin.

On to play

• Each player looks at their hand and plays one card face-down in front of them. Then they pass the remaining cards, still face-down, to their left (Or possibly right, if using optional rules.).
• Then, simultaneously, all players reveal their chosen card.
• All players pick up the cards passed to them, a new turn starts and the two steps above are repeated.
• Play continues until all cards have been played. Then, except for the pudding cards, all cards are scored. The scored cards are all discarded and not shuffled into the draw deck.
• A new round begins, new hands are dealt to the players and the steps above are repeated.
• Play continues for a total of 3 rounds.

Endgame
Once the 3rd round is over and scored, the puddings are scored.
Scores are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
As you can see from the short length of this blog post, Sushi Go!'s rules are simple, accessible and easy to learn. The game's depth comes not from rules complexity but from decisions available to each player, which is great game design in my opinion.
The game also fits the theme of having food going round on a conveyor belt remarkably well.

Sushi Go! constantly forces players to make decisions and some of these decisions will be gambles, based on the hope that another right card will come around further along the game.
Players will also get the right card at the right time on random occasion, but this isn't perceived as a no-brainer, they're seen as spots of good luck to be exploited.
​
Canny players will try to memorise hands that get passed along, they might also spend time looking at what cards others have put down, trying to predict their decisions. If 2 players look like they're trying to collect the same set of cards, then they're going to be a premium and those players aren't going to pass those cards on.
Then there's puddings, the wrinkle in the rules that produces the pudding war of escalation that forces players to think about what cards might be played in the future rounds and play cards just to avoid losing points!

It makes Sushi Go! a blend of calculation and unpredictability. There is no winning strategy, players must adapt to not only the cards dealt to all players but other player's strategies

Sushi Go! comes in compact package, is easy to learn, quick to set up and play and enjoyable experience. A great filler game.

14th March 2020

It's a Sunday night, I'm on my PC in my living, logged on to Zoom and the Tabletopia website.

In Paleo each player controls a tribe of cavemen and is a cooperative card about life & times in a prehistoric times. According to Paleo, our caveman ancestors were pretty obsessed with woolly mammoths, either chasing or running away from them!

Caveat: Paleo was played virtually on the Tabletopia website, so I cannot attest to the quality or lack of regarding the components.

What's in a game?
Paleo is a card game with a lot of different types of cards, the majority are encounter cards (Explained Below) but not all cards and tokens are used in every game.
Paleo uses a base set of encounter cards and also employs a module system which determines which other sets of cards are used, each game uses 2 modules from a selection of 10, this will also affect the games difficulty. The rules suggest combinations to use for easier and harder games ranging from 1 to 7 in difficulty. Ultimately you can even choose your own set ups. Modules can add a narrative flavour to the game as most modules are themed.

• Encounter cards: As the name suggests these are cards that a player's tribe will encounter during a day, there are several different types of encounter cards and when turned over they detail the encounter that tribe has. Each different type of encounter card can be identified by it's own unique illustration, such as a forest on forest cards, a river on river cards and so on. Additionally, there may be extra elements to the illustration, such as a forest containing a woolly mammoth indicating that it is like a mammoth will be encountered. Encounter cards mostly consist of  but are not limited to forest, river & mountain cards and also include:
  Forest: When a forest card is turned over, it is likely (But no guaranteed.) that the tribe will encounter wood & food.
  River: It is likely that players will encounter food & pelts on river cards.
  Mountain: Stone & pelts are mostly encountered on mountain cards.
  Campfire: A campfire will allow a combination of the following actions, crafting, increasing the tribe's size, acquiring a dream card, making a discovery.
  Dreams: These are always beneficial, they sometimes replicate actions on other cards or have their own special action, all are unique.
  Hazard: These red cards always represents danger, be they wild animals, environmental problems or calamities. They can pose a significant threat to members of a tribe
• People cards: These cards form a player's tribe, they each have a number of hearts representing how damage they can take before dying, most also have 1 skill, strength (For fighting/hunting mostly.), awareness (Important to being able to deal with danger.) and skill (Used for crafting). Some come with tokens/tools as well. 
• Discovery cards: The tribes will need to make discoveries in order to succeed, some discoveries are specific to certain modules. These range from learning how to create new types of tools to creating prehistoric art.
• Mission cards: Each module has its own mission card, thus 2 are used in every game, they represent extra requirements that must be met during the night phase.
• Mystery cards: There are 22 of these, which cards are used is determined by which modules are used.
• Meeples: There are 3 types of meeples in the game and they represent the game's resources, food, wood and stone. Food is vital for your tribe, wood and stone are used for crafting.
• Tokens: They represent tools or resources to which a player's tribe has access, There are 3 basic tools that players are always available to craft, torches with confer awareness, flint grants skill and a spear increases strength. Other tokens become available when players make discoveries, they include items that may grant a combination of abilities or will have other affects. Additionally, some tokens are discarded when used and others stay in play permanently.
• Base camp board: This board has spaces for three different decks. the people deck, dreams deck and discovery deck.
• Night board: This used during the night face, it contains the victory and defeat tracks, it also has spots for the mystery and mission cards.
• Discard board: Cards are discarded either face-up or face-down and they are discarded on to this board.
• Discovery rack: This is where revealed discoveries go, I think the physical component is actually a rack that you construct
• Graveyard: Some cards are discarded out of the game entirely, this is where they are put. This is also a thing that is constructed if you have the actual game.
• Victory tokens: There are 5 victory tokens, when all placed together they form a caveman painting and represent winning
• Defeat tokens: 5 skull tokens are used to track defeat, when all 5 are placed on the night board, the players collectively lose.
• Dice: These are custom dice, we didn't use them as some modules don't require them. I believe they determine resources randomly for certain cards/encounters

​I've never seen the physical components other than in photos so can't comment on their quality, however the game's artwork is cheerful and colourful.

Setup

• First choose the modules you will be using. This will determine which mystery, mission & discovery cards are used.
• Put out the people deck & dream deck face-down
• Shuffle the base encounter cards with the modules' encounter cards, then deal the entire deck out to the players as evenly as possible. Each player has their own encounter deck.
• Each player draws 2 cards from the people deck, this represents their tribe, they may also acquire tokens, depending on what people they drew.
• Collectively, the players start with 5 food.

That's it for the important parts of setup.

How's it play?
Paleo is played over any number of rounds, each round has a day phase and a night phase. The vast majority of gameplay occurs during the day phase, the night phase is mostly for managing what happened during the previous phase.

Day phase
What actions a player can under take will depend on the situation and what encounters they errr.... encounter!

• Sleep: Before choosing an encounter a player may elect to end their day and send their tribe to sleep instead, this means not drawing 3 cards from their encounter deck but discarding the remaining deck face-down on to the discard board. If a player only has hazard cards left, they may want to do this.
  If a player has no more cards left, their tribe must go to sleep.
  When a tribes goes to sleep, that player no longer participates in the remaining day phase and their tribe cannot help other tribes.
• Choose an encounter: Each player draws the top 3 cards from their encounter deck and puts them in a row face-down. Then without looking at them, they choose 1 to encounter and return the other 2 to their encounter deck in any order they see fit.
  Since different types of encounter cards have different backs, players will have an idea of what kind of encounter they will have, but not the exact type. For example, if a player chooses a card with a forest back, it's like (But not guaranteed.) that they'll find food or wood.
  A player's encounter deck also represents the time they have left during the day (More is explained on this below.).
  Before choosing this card, all the players will most likely want to have a discussion about what cards everybody should choose.
• Reveal encounter cards: All players simultaneously turn over their cards, now each player must deal with their encounter.
• Complete encounter: Most encounter cards will have 2 or 3 manners in which a encounter can be completed, all a player has to do is meet the conditions one of these encounters demands and then they will earn it's reward.
  For example, if you reveal a wood card, you may discard 1 card from you encounter deck to gain 1 wood OR discard 2 cards to gain 3 wood.
  Encounters can have varied requirements, a player might need to have a certain strength to fight an animal for example or certain tools
• Ignore: Generally a player can choose to (Or may have to.) ignore a card, unless the card is a danger (See below.)!
• Help: If a card shows an illustration of shaking hands, then that player can choose to help another player and ignore their own card, allowing them to lend the other player their abilities and tools. This option appears on many cards and is a critical strategy to winning the game.
• Danger: Some cards are dangerous, they cannot be ignored and the action must be completed, if the player cannot complete it, then typically their tribe takes damage. All hazard cards are dangerous and some innocent looking encounters will also place a tribe in danger.
• Discard: When a encounter is either completed or ignored it is discarded face-up on the discard board.
  Some cards that are completed must be discarded to the graveyard, they are now permanently out of this game.
  Frequently players will be required to discard cards from the top of their encounter deck, mostly to complete actions. They are discarded face-down on to the discard board.
  Any hazard cards discarded this way inflict damage on the player's tribe, so it's not necessarily a good way to try and avoid them.
• Discovery: Some encounters allow the player to draw a card from the discovery deck and put it on to the discovery rack.
  Frequently a discovery makes a new type of tool available to be crafted by the tribes. Some discoveries can be completed to gain a victory token.
• Craft: Craft encounters give the player the opportunity to craft 1 or 2 tools, this usually requires specific types of resources and crafting ability. 
• Collect people card: Some encounters allow people to be recruited to a tribe.
• Mystery: When completed, the player turned over a card on the mystery deck and has that encounter, which can be beneficial or negative.
• Collect rewards: When an encounter is completed, they player's tribe will gain a reward, usually this is contextual to the card, often its a basic resource - food, wood or stone, sometimes it's a tool. If player's are lucky it might be a victory token.
• Damage: Dangers & hazard cards in particular can inflict damage, this is distributed to people cards as they player sees fit. 
• Death: If a people card loses all it's health, it is discarded to the graveyard and a skull is added to the night board.

Once all encounters have been dealt with one way or another, then players once more draw 3 cards from their encounter deck and choose another encounter to have.
Play continues during the day phase until all player tribes have gone to sleep, the day phase is now over and the night phase commences.

Night phase
The night phase is much shorter than the day.
All tribes must collectively discard an amount of food equal to the number of people cards in all their tribes. If they cannot manage this, a skull is added to the night board.
Furthermore they must also meet the conditions required on the 2 module specific missions. Each one they fail adds another skull to the night board.
Once the night phase is concluded, all the cards on the discard board are put into a single deck, shuffled and dealt out to the players again, then the next day phase begins.

Endgame
Play continues until the players have accumulated all 5 victory tokens, in which case they immediately all win.
If 5 skull tokens are placed on to the night board, then the players immediately lose.
​Some mystery cards may contain alternate ways to win the game.

Overall
First thing I'm going to talk about are 2 interlinked mechanics.

The exploration mechanic of drawing 3 face-down cards and choosing one from the card back is excellent. It feels a bit like exploring, does a player choose to go to the forest or the mountains? They'll have a pretty good idea what to expect but it's not guaranteed. They most likely will get the wood or stone or whatever they're looking for but they might encounter a rockfall or a dangerous animal.
Additionally, players will also get an idea of what's coming in future turns
It's a great mechanic.

The other equally great mechanic is how each player's own deck also represents their tribe's time & energy, completing encounters frequently forces a player to discard 1 or 2 cards from their deck, so when it's depleted - so is the tribe for the day. When the game begins on day 1, players will have 15 cards, so it's possible to burn through a deck very quickly, why is that significant?
Essentially the encounter deck is another resource that needs to be managed. In most games, my instinct would be to gather as much food/wood/stone/resource as possible but in Paleo you sometimes have to fight that urge. You have to ask the question, what resource do I really need?
For example; near the end of a day I had 3 cards left, 2 in my deck and a forest encounter. Turning the card over, I had the option to discard 2 cards for 3 wood, 1 card for one wood or help another tribe. The others didn't need help from me, so I was free to collect wood but collecting 3 wood would send my tribe to bed. Because we knew the top 2 cards on everyone's deck, I knew that another player potentially had a mammoth hunt coming and would probably need help. We didn't need the wood for now so I chose to ignore my card and I also ignored my other 2 encounter cards just so my tribe would be around for 3 more turns to help other tribes if needed. Realising this gave me an appreciation of the game's subtleties.

As well as managing encounters, players will need to ensure they generate enough resources to pass the night as well manage discoveries and crafting.
Creating a few tools gives the game a good sense of progress as it increases the capabilities of a tribe significantly. You can almost feel a the game transition from scrabbling to survive encounters to being able to go on mammoth hunts, it's quite gratifying to complete encounters that had to be ignored earlier in the game.

Like all good games, collectively there were always meaningful decisions to make. Before long we learnt that we needed to communication and coordinate on which encounter cards to keep and when they were then revealed we frequently had to coordinate on which encounters to complete, rarely did all players manage to individually complete their encounters.
For example; if all players for some reason chose mammoth hunt encounters, it would be most likely that all bar one would be ignored. Mammoth hunts generally required a lot of strength thus cooperation but also gave significant rewards, including on occasion victory tokens. Coordination is vital and it feels like players coordinating.

As a result I liked Paleo quite a lot, it's a game I'd happily play again.

27th October 2020

Gaming night at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking continues in what would the last game of the last meetup before Lockdown 2 came into effect.

The third and final game of the evening was 'Skulls of Sedlec', in what seems to be a game about digging up skulls and then errr... proudly displaying them in a pile for all to see?

Skulls of Sedlec is a microgame that comes from microgame publisher Button Shy who appear to specialise in creating games with 18 cards.
Their games are hand crafted and they aim to release 1 a month.

What's in a game?
As is befitting the name microgame, Skulls of Sedlec is small enough to fit in your pocket. 

• ​Cards: Skulls of Sedlec consists of 18 cards and that's it! Each card displays 2 'layers' of skulls (one in the top half and the other in the bottom.) and each skull is from 1 of 5 'classes'.
• Plastic wallet: The game fits into this tiny wallet, it's not strictly a game component, but it's cool enough to be worth mentioning.

The cards has nice and colourful skulls! There's not more I can really add, that's it - 18 cards.
The wallet is of course a bit of a gimmick, but it's a nice addition and I like it.

How's it play?
Set up

• Shuffle the cards and place them into 6 face-down stacks of 3 cards each, arranged in a 3x2 grid.
• There are no more steps, I just added this to justify putting the set up into bullet-point format!

The objective of ​Skulls of Sedlec is to create a pyramid shaped layout of cards. Points are scored depending on how cards are placed in relation to other cards.
The size of the pyramid depends on the number of players but always has 3 layers of cards and thus 6 layers of skulls. Layers of cards are 'offset' (Like bricks in a wall.), this is important when calculating which cards are 'adjacent' to other cards.


On to playing
When 'building' a pyramid, players must start at the bottom and work up, thus there must be at least 2 cards in a layer before a card can be placed on the layer above.

In their turn, a player can perform 1 of 3 actions.

• Dig: The active player can turn over 2 face-down cards, then they take 1 of the 2 into their hand.
• Take card: The active player can take 1 face-up card (If face-up cards are available.) into their hand.
• Play: The active player can play a card from their card into their pyramid. There's a maximum hand size of 2, so if a player has two cards in their hand at the start of their turn, they must play a card.

​​Endgame
Play continues until all cards have been taken and played into pyramids.
Then pyramids are scored, there are 5 class of skull and thus 5 ways to score points.

• Peasant: Each 'peasant' skull in the pyramid scores a point.
• ​Royalty: A 'royal' skull scores a point for each other royal and peasant skull in a layer below it. I guess they like to lord it over other cards.
• Priest: Each layer that has a priest skull score 2 points, additional priest cards in the same layer score 0. Remember there's 6 layers in a pyramid.
• Rogue: A 'rogue' skull scores 2 point for each priest card it is adjacent to. Typically, the church always has all the wealth.
• Lover: When a 'lover' is adjacent to another 'lover' card, they score 3 points each (Collectively scoring 6.), 'lover's' can only be scored once. If a 'lover' is adjacent to 2 other 'lover' cards No extra points are scored. Infidelity's worth nothing in this game!

Points are tallied.
Highest score wins.

Overall

Simple to learn, but lots to think about. Skulls of Sedlec packs a some solid gameplay into a tiny package.

I really like that the face-down stacks of cards visually represent a graveyard and 'digging' turns them over. It's a clever touch and good example of maximising what's available in a game. Less can be more.

The 2 card hand limit is a great mechanic too: It gives players enough choice  to give them tricky decisions, but it stops players from hording cards - making their decisions easier.
Every card can potentially score points, so every decision when playing a card is meaningful and you really can't ask for more from a game in my opinion.

Skulls of Sedlec is a 2 or 3 player game. It's worth noting that that there's an expansion that takes the player count to 4, adds a new class and increases the deck size up to a heady 24 cards! 

A good little microgame that is a perfect filler with some depth. One I'd like to own and that's not just because it comes in a neat wallet (Although it does add to the appeal.).
​
​I'm just glad that the publisher hasn't started numbering their wallet games, that would be too hard on my real wallet!

6th October 2020

For the first time in nearly 7 months we're in Woking at 'The Sovereigns'. The last we were here was the 17th March!

The Woking Gaming Club isn't really back up-and-running yet, but a few of us have raised our heads above the parapets to wave the flag and of course; play some games.

The first game of the night was 'Medium', a light word-association card game.

What's in a game?

• ​Medium cards; there are 270 of these, each card displays a single word, written normally and upside down so two people can easily read them at the same time.
• Crystal ball cards; there are 3 of these, each one has an illustration of a crystal ball.
• Scoring tokens; there are 3 types of double sided scoring token, scoring 5-6, 3-4 or 1-2 points. On the other side they are numbered 1, 2 or 3.

That's it for the components, the quality is perfectly acceptable and the small amount of art used in the game is also OK.

How's it play?
Before play begins the deck must be created, the number of cards used depends on the number of players. The deck is shuffled and the 3 crystal ball cards are shuffled into the bottom third of this deck.
6 cards are then deal to each player.
Finally, the scoring tokens are laid out with the scores face down and the 1, 2 and 3 numbers displayed.

• Medium is both a competitive and cooperative game, this means that the active player will partner up with the player to their left.
• The active player and their partner in turn each play a single card facing each other. Thus there will be 2 words displayed. 
• Now both players try to think of a common word between the 2 displayed words (It can't be a word on the two cards.). When they're both ready, they both count down 3... 2... 1... and both say their word simultaneously.
• If the 2 words match; then a number 1 token (Worth 5-6 points.) is placed between the 2 players and play progresses to the next player.
• If the 2 words don't match; then the 2 players must guess again. Except this time they must try and find a common word between the 2 different words they just spoke, not the words on the cards, furthermore they can't use the words on the cards or any previously spoken words as the common word. If the 2nd guess succeeds, then a number 2 token (Scoring 3-4 points.) is taken. If they failed again, they get a 3rd and final attempt using the last 2 words they spoke, the same rules above still apply. Success means a token scoring 1-2 points is taken, failing a 3rd time means they score 0 points.
• Play progresses until all players have been the active player, then all players draw cards to refill their hands.

Endgame
Play continues until the 3rd crystal ball card is drawn, which triggers the endgame. The game then continues until the current round is completed and all players have had an equal number of turns.

Each player then tallies up the scores from the tokens to their left and right​, highest score wins!

Overall
There's not much to say. As you can see from above, Medium is a light game that may appeal to casual players, it is a game that can be quickly learnt.

It's not a deep game either, random chance can play a part and sometimes you'll get 2 words that have no obvious commonality. There is some room for strategy in Medium though. The player that goes 2nd will have the opportunity to play a hopefully suitable second word.

We didn't play the game extensively, but it seemed if a common word wasn't guessed first time, the 2nd and 3rd guesses weren't going to be any better.

It's a strangely stressful game, I think it's because your guess will also affect your partner's score.
Conversely; when it's not your time, observing how other people play is fun.

One potential issue was the scoring, each 'level' of scoring has a 1-point variation in its score and some people are not fond of it. We house ruled it and used the other side of the tokens for scoring, a successful first guess would get 3 points, down to 1 for a successful 3rd guess.

If you like somewhat stressful word-association games, then you might like this. Easy to learn and play, it's a reasonable little filler game.