8th December 2021

The next game of Wednesday afternoon gaming on Board Game Arena was 7 Wonders: Architects, which is essentially a 'spin-off' of and at least a little thematically similar to the titular 7 Wonders drafting game.

Like it's ancestor, 7 Wonders: Architects is all about building one of the world's great wonders and no doubt dabbling in science, politics, religion and warfare while doing it.

Caveat: We've only played this game digitally.

What's in a game?
In the physical game, when players are given/choose wonders to build, they are given that wonder's 'tray'' containing the relevant components for that wonder. However, none of this appears in the digital version

• Wonder: As you would expect, each of the game's 7 wonders is depicted on a set of 5 double-sided tiles which when put together will display the wonder. one side of each tile shows the wonder under construction and the other side the wonder completed.
• Wonder deck: Each of the game's 7 Wonders also comes with its own deck of cards.
• Common deck: This is the game's 8th and final deck.
• Tokens: 7 Wonders: Architects uses quite a few tokens.
  Progress tokens: These green tokens confer benefits or bonuses on the controlling player during the game, or even victory points.
  Conflict tokens: These are used to track the outbreak of war, they have a peace side and a battle side.
  Military victory tokens: These tokens are gained when winning wars.
• Cat pawn: Meow!

The artwork used throughout 7 Wonders: Architects is very similar to the original game which is both understandable and also pretty good, there's a nice variety of colourful illustration used throughout the cards.

The same is true of the game's iconography, it looks identical to 7 Wonders and just like 7 Wonders, there's a lot of it. Most of it is pretty straightforward but players will invariably turn to the rules for an explanation from time-to-time.

How's it play?
Setup

• Wonders: Each player takes a wonder. All players should put together their wonder with all the 'under construction' sides up.
• Cards: The common deck should be shuffled into a face-down stack and placed in the central playing area.
  Player decks: Each player should shuffle their own deck and place it face-up between themselves and the player to their left. Thus all players should have a deck to their left and to their right.
• Progress tokens: Shuffle the progress tokens into a face-down stack and deal 3 face-up into the central playing area.
• Conflict tokens: Put out a number of conflict tokens according to the number of players, these should all be put with the peace side face-up.
• 1st player: Determine a starting player.

There's some other trivial setup to complete, but otherwise, we're good to go.

On to play
Play in 7 Wonders: Architects is pretty straightforward with the active player taking their turn before play proceeds to the player on their left.

• Cat Pawn: There a several ways for a player to acquire the cat pawn and it can changes hand several times over the course of a game. If a player has the cat pawn during their turn, then they can peek under the top card in the common deck.
• Draw Card: The active player must draw a card from either of the face-up decks to their left and right, or draw blindly from the common deck (Unless they have the cat pawn.), they then put the card in front of them face-up and if necessary, resolve it as explained further below.
  There are several types of card:
  Blue cards: These cards provide straight up victory points. They remain with the player until the endgame
  Green cards: These are the scientific progress cards and come in 3 types. When a play acquires a identical pair or a set of all 3 types, they must discard those cards and draw a progress token.
  Grey cards: These are the game's resources and come in 5 types that will be familiar to players of the original 7 Wonders. Players keep hold of resources until they have acquired the specified amount to build one of the tiles in their wonder. When this is the case, they must discard the relevant resources and build that tile.
  Red cards: As players of the original will know, red cards are military cards. These cards will contain a sword-and-shield symbol which represents military strength and possibly 1 or 2 horns which represent - for lack of a better term, aggression.
  When a player acquires, if it has any horns, then they turn over that many conflict tokens from peace to battle side. If all the conflict tokens are flipped to the battle side then you get war.
  Yellow cards: Gold! That's what yellow cards represent. They can be used as any type of resource with regards to building a wonder, as with resources, they must be used when possible and are discarded when used.
• Progress tokens: When a player takes a progress token due to discarding science cards, they can choose to take any of the available face-up tokens or can draw blindly from the stack.
• Building a wonder: When a player has to discard resources to build part of their wonder, they must start at the bottom and work upwards. Additionally, if they have more than 1 tile which require identical resources, they can choose which tile to build.
  Building a tile means flipping it over to its constructed side, generally this will also confer some kind of benefit on the player.
• War: What is good for? The answer is... apparently victory tokens.
  If at the end of any player's turn, all the conflict tokens are on the battle side, then you get war.
  When war breaks out, each player compares their military strength with that of their 2 neighbours. If the player's military strength is higher than their neighbour's, they get a military victory token, thus it's possible for a player to gain 2 of these during war.
  Once war has been resolved, 2 events occur; firstly flip all the conflict tokens back to the peace side, secondly, all red cards with horns must be discarded by all players.
• Next player: Once all cards and associated actions have been resolved, the player to the left becomes the active player.

Endgame
The endgame is triggered at the end of any player's turn when the 5th tile for their wonder is flipped, thus completing it.
Points come from a variety of sources.
Wonder: Flipped tiles on wonders can provide points.
Blue cards: All blue cards score victory points.
Military victory tokens: These tokens contribute victory points.
Progress tokens: These tokens may provide bonus victory points.
Cat pawn: Whoever possess the cat pawn at the game end will earn a small amount of victory tokens.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
It's quite impressive how the 7 Wonders: architects manages to distil so much of its parent game into this simpler product and I also like how the mechanic for flipping the wonder tiles works but I'm going to go ahead and say it; I'm pretty certain that I'm not the target audience for 7 Wonder: Architects. It feels a little like a 'entry-level' game that I found a little too shallow.

When it comes to a players turn, they are fundamentally only given 3 choices.
Take a face-up card from the left, take a face-up card from the right or take a face-down (Unless you have the cat pawn of course.) card from the central area and that's it.
​I suppose that it can force players to adapt, recognise and try to exploit the available cards to their fullest advantage but I feel that the game lacks the flexibility to see this through, there's no synergy between different card types and all of this makes it hard to create any sense of strategy during the game.
In fact, it feels that strategy is reduced to pick a path to victory and hope that the cards which support that strategy appear. That meant it felt my choices had little significance beyond their immediate benefits.

So, if I'm not the target audience for 7 Wonders: Architects, who is? Casual or light gamers? It strikes me that the rules have enough complexity to not be immediately accessible and the game's usage of iconography only compounds this - experienced gamers will be used to this, but casuals gamers, not so much.
I Feel the game sort of straddles a strange middle ground between rules complexity and light gameplay which is the opposite of what you want and makes it less accessible to casual gamers and less compelling to more dedicated gamers.

7th December 2021

The 2nd game of Tuesday night gaming with the Woking Gaming Club at The Sovereigns in Woking was Village Pillage.

The life of a villager is full of strife and woe, mostly due to those other pesky neighbouring villages who covet your turnips and hide away their own!
Village Pillage is about showing those nasty neighbours who's boss!

What's in a game?

• Bank cards: Each player will get 1 of these identical cards, each one has space for 3 relics and 5 turnips.
• Starting cards: Each player begins with the same set of identical 4 cards (Marked with an egg symbol?).
  Broadly speaking their are 4 types of card Farmers, Walls, Raiders & Merchants.
  These cards have their name along the top and to the left of the name will be a symbol, this symbol determines what type of card it is.
  At the bottom of the each card it shows how to resolve its effects against the 4 card types.
• Market cards: This small deck of cards represents other cards that can be recruited to your cause. They fit into the same 4 types of as the starter cards but may possess different abilities at the bottom.
• Relic tokens: These are standard round card tokens are illustrated with 1 of 3 kind of relic.
• Turnip tokens: These card tokens are shaped like turnips, at least what pass turnips in the world of Village Pillage!
• Chicken token: Because every game needs a large round card chicken token!

Village Pillage is a card game with some tokens, the build quality is standard for a modern game and what you'd expect it to be.
The game utilises a strong palette of colours to distinguish the different card types. It also makes use of brash and colourful cartoony artwork throughout the game which suitability fits its not-so-serious theme. All of this makes Village Pillage pleasing on the eye.
Village Pillage only makes use of 4 symbols for the 4 card types, there's also some wording rules as well. It's not particularly complex but for a light game, it's not immediately understandable. Having said that it's in no way any kind of game breaker.

How's it play?
Setup

• Starters: give every player a bank card and the same 4 starter cards. Each player should also get 2 turnips, 1 goes in their bank and the other in their 'stockpile'.
• Market: Shuffle the market cards into a face-down deck and deal 4 face-up, this is the game's market.

Now we're ready to go.

On to play
​In Village Pillage the objective is to acquire 3 relics before any other player does.  However, each player is only directly competing with their 2 neighbours, that is the players directly to their left and right, this means that in a 4 or 5 player game, there will be 1 or 2 players that you might never interact with.
A round ​in Village Pillage is played more or less simultaneously over 3 phases.

• Planning: During this phase, each player decides which 2 of their cards to put  face-down, 1 allotted to the neighbour to their left and 1 allotted to to the neighbour to their right.
  Once all players have done this, all cards are revealed and play moves on to the next phase
• Resolution: Once cards have been revealed, they must be compared to the neighbouring cards that were played by other players and resolved.
  Each card lists how it resolves against the 4 different types of cards.
  For instance, the Farmers card allows the owner who played it to gain 3 turnips against all types of card.
  The Raiders card allows the controlling player to steal 4 turnips from their neighbour if the neighbour played either  Farmers or Merchants. But if raider was played against a Walls card or against other Raiders, then the controlling player gains nothing.
  This is done for all cards.
  Village Pillage also has specific rules about timing and when cards are triggered which are very important about how cards are resolved.
  As well as gaining or stealing turnips, cards will allow players to bank turnips (Which makes them safe from stealing.) or buy either another card from the market or a relic token.
  ​Refresh: Players collect their cards and prepare for the following round.

Endgame
Play continues until a player buys their 3rd relic, in which case, they immediately win the game.

Overall
There's no denying it, Village Pillage is essentially a glorified implementation of rock-paper-scissors with card, that's not a criticism of it, far from it in fact.
​Unlike rock-paper-scissors, which is a context-less exercise in determining a winner, in Village Pillage players will have motivations and objectives for their actions, which can and probably will change from round-to-round. Additionally, the outcome a player will get against a neighbour can be unexpected depending on the context of the resolution, sometimes there is no 'winner'.

It's important to pay attention to what your neighbour is doing. If they have a lot of turnips, it may mean that they're looking to buy a market card or relic, which means that they may not try and interfere with you right now and it might be safe to grow some turnips of your own. Or it might be a good time to try and interfere with them. Provided, of course, that you have correctly anticipated their actions.

Or if a neighbour has no turnips, they may be looking to steal yours and you'll need to prepare appropriately: It's no coincidence that growing turnips gets you 3 but stealing them gets you 4!
It funnels players into interacting and conflicting with each other and that's what is at the core of Village Pillage.
It seems deliberately quite hard to get accumulate turnips to purchase relics without trying to exploit your neighbour.
​
All of this means that players always confronted with the possibility of having to make meaningful decisions and this is always a good thing.
Whilst there are only 4 types of card, the variation within these categories in the market cards keeps the game fresh with just the right amount of unpredictability. 

While this sort of lightweight, chance driven conflict with other players can be a lot of fun, this kind of confrontational style won't be to everyone's taste. For a light game, I also found the rules a little fiddlier than I'd like; pretty much each card has it own rules for how it resolves against the 4 card times which can slow the game down. The timing rules are unavoidably also a little fiddly.

None of this is any kind of deal-breaker and if you want a fairly straightforward, colourful, raucous filler game, then Village Pillage is worth a look.

24th October 2021

We've logged into Board Game Arena for some Sunday night gaming.

The first game of the night was The Crew: Mission Deep Sea.

Clearly the lost continent of Mu has fascinated gamers since times immemorial, so what better than a game about discovering the sunken land: Or at least the plot for a very good trick taking game.​

What's in a game?

• Cards: There are a total of 40 cards used in the game:
  Suits: There are 5 suits. In each of 4 of the suits there are cards numbered 1-9.
  Submarine cards: This is the 5th suit, they are numbered 1-4 and are also trump cards, obviously they depict pictures of submarines.
• Task cards: This deck of 96 half-sized cards contains objectives for players to complete. On the back of each card is its 'value', the card's value may differ for 3, 4 & 5 player games.
• Communication tokens: These are double-sided tokens used for... well communicating, they displayed used and unused on either side
• Distress signal: Another double-sided token, again showing used and unused on either side.
• Captain's token: This is a standee and represents first player.
• Logbook: The game comes with a 'logbook', this serves 2 functions, firstly it provides the game's campaign information and secondly, provides space to record the results of those missions, if you like writing in the book that is.

That's more or less it for components.
Quality-wise, they're all pretty average quality and what you'd expect.
Artwork is repeated across the game's 4 main suits which are colour themed and tend to feature monochrome illustrations decorated in the suit's colour. The trump cards all feature submarines of progressively larger size.
The task deck utilises a fair amount of iconography for objectives, mostly it's fairly clear, sometimes some smaller writing appears on a card to clarify, occasionally the rulebook had to be referred to, nothing game breaking.

How's it play?
Setup

• Cards: Shuffle the deck and deal it all out to all the players face-down, in a 3-player game, 1 player will end up with an extra card which will unused by the end of the game.
  Players must keep their hand secret.
• Captain: Whoever was dealt the 4 of submarines becomes the captain and thus first player.
• Communication tokens: Give one token to each player who should put it on the unused side.
• Distress signal: Put the distress signal on its unused side into the central playing area.
• Campaign play: The Crew: Mission Deep Sea plays over a series of over 30 progressively harder and harder missions which is displayed numerically. Each mission has it's own intro story and may have unique rules such as 1 player taking all task cards etc.
• Task deck: Shuffle the task deck and deal task cards face-down.
  The number of task cards dealt depends on the difficulty of the mission, easy missions have low numbers, getting progressively higher as the missions get harder.
  Thus if a mission has a difficulty of 5, keep dealing task cards until their exact value equals 5, any task card with a value that would take the total value over 5 is discarded. This means the number of task cards that appear in a mission will not very in their objectives but also amount of objectives.
  Now task cards must be assigned to players. There are various ways of doing this and it will vary from mission to mission, sometimes players will have option to pass, sometimes the captain assigns them.
  In order to win the mission, the objectives on these task cards must be completed before players run out of cards, some objectives can be failed, which immediately ends the mission in failure.

Once the task cards have been assigned, then the game's ready to play.

​On to play
The Crew: Mission Deep Sea is a trick-taking game where one player starts a round by playing a card and the others must follow suit. 

• Distress signal: Once all cards and task cards have been allotted out and before play begins, any player can choose to trigger the distress signal. 
  When this is done, every player must pass a card to another player, whether it's clockwise or anti-clockwise is decided by the activating player.
  Once the game has started, the distress signal cannot be used.
• Communication token: Before any round begins, any player may use their communication token.
  When a player chooses to do this, they take a card from their hand and place it face-up in front of themselves and place their token on part of the card. This can be done to communicate 1 of 3 pieces of information about that card.
  Top: If the token is placed at the top of card, it means 'this is the highest value card I have in this suit'.
  Bottom: If the token is placed at the bottom of the card, it indicates that 'this is the lowest value card I have in this suit'.
  Middle: If the token is placed in the middle of the card, it communicates 'this is the ONLY card I have in this suit'.
• Opening play: The first round begins with the captain, after that, each subsequent round begins with whoever 'won' the previous round.
  The starting player plays any card of a suit of their choice face-up into the playing area.
• Following: Now, going clockwise, each player must follow.
  This means that if they can, players that follow must play a card of the same suit. They can choose which card to play if they have more than one, but they must follow suit if they can.
  If a player has no cards of the same suit, they then have other options. They may play any other card of a different suit, this includes a submarine - which is a trump, more on trumps below.
• Taking the trick: Once each player has played their card, the winner of the trick must be determined.
  Whoever played the card with the highest value wins the trick and collects all cards played in that round. A player who had to play a card in a different suit can never win the trick.
  Trump: If a submarine was played, then it trumps a card of any value, only a higher value submarine card may trump a trump. Thus the 4 submarine cannot be beaten.
• Win/lose: Once the winner of the trick has been determined, players should check to see if any of their task cards have been completed or failed.
  If all tasks have been completed, the mission is a success. Some tasks can be completed immediately, some are only completed when the round ends.
  Any failure at all ends the mission.

Endgame
Players collectively win or lose at The Crew: Mission Deep Sea.
Ultimately they win when all the missions have been completed.

Overall
A friend described The Crew: Mission Deep Sea as whist with a twist and that's sort of accurate but barely describes how much of a good game this is.

The task cards are what makes so good, there are 96 of them, providing a vast combination of objectives that can appear. Even if you complete the 30-odd missions in the logbook (Which could take a while!), there's nothing to stop players from just choosing a difficulty and playing!

Players must always pay attention during missions, simple mistakes can very quickly end them and each one will provide a distinct randomly generated challenge to face - and pitfalls to avoid! Players will have to silently co-ordinate their efforts, task cards will force them to learn to exploit all the game's rules to be successful, they'll have to learn that winning a trick is not always the way they should go and at times not having the right suit is the right choice!
I could spend ages going on about how we've played the game but instead i'll say: 

The Crew: Mission Deep Sea packs a lot of gameplay into a little package of what is essentially a couple of decks of cards and a handful of tokens. It's a game everyone should definitely try.

12th October 2021

It's a Tuesday and we're at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club.

The first game of the evening was Sushi Go Party!. The big brother and follow up of the excellent Sushi Go!, if you've not read it, check out my blog about Sushi Go! here and then come back.

I'm not going to talk too much about Sushi Go Party!, other than where it's different to Sushi Go!. Mechanically, it shares almost exactly the same blend of drafting and set collecting rules as its predecessor. What Sushi Go Party! brings is a bunch of new cards with new ways to collect sets and/or score points.
In fact, Sushi Go Party! brings so many new cards to the game, that they can't be all used at the same time and introduces the concept of menus. More on menus below.

What's in a game?

• Cards: There are about 20 sets of cards in Sushi Go Party! and they are grouped by type such as appetiser, dessert and so on.
  Tiles: Each card also comes with a tile, what're the tiles for? Read on.
• Board: Sushi Go Party adds a thick, chunky board to the game which serves 2 functions:
  Firstly, it serves as scoring track around the outside
  Secondly, in the centre are a number of recessed squares that are large enough to accommodate the tiles mentioned above are named for the types dishes, e.g., appetiser, dessert and so on.

• Meeples: The game comes with 8 colourful plastic pawns.

The components in Sushi Go Party! are all pretty good, the tiles and board feel sturdy enough and the cards made well enough.
The game maintains the same excellent, cheerfully colourful illustrations of cartoonish looking food as it's predecessor. If it ain't broke...
There's not much iconography to the game, it's mostly just numbers.

How's it play?
It plays almost identically to Sushi Go!, the same take-a-card and pass-your-hand and set collecting mechanics played over 3 rounds that made the original so good are found here.
Sushi Go Party! only differs in 2 ways.

In setup, Sushi Go Party! requires the players to create a menu from the available sets of cards. This consists of the nigiri cards (Which are used in every game.), 1 rolls set, 3 appetiser sets, 2 specials sets and a dessert set. The rules provide a large, varied list of menus to use. I guess there's nothing stopping players from creating or randomly selecting their own menus.
After the menu has been finalised, the relevant tiles are placed into the relevant recessed spots on the board so that all players can see what sets will be in the game.
Finally, all the sets in the menu are shuffled together into a face down deck and dealt out to players as per the rules.
​
The second difference: In Sushi Go!; the game goes through the deck without reusing it, i.e., at the end of a round, all played cards are scored, then discarded out of the game - except for puddings of course.
But in Sushi Go Party!, the played cards are shuffled back into the deck, along with more pudding cards to balance out any that were taken players. Then the reshuffled deck is reused in the next round.

It's a subtle difference, but it technically makes Sushi Go Party! a tiny bit more predictable as the composition of cards in the deck will 'reset' from round-to-round. Whereas in the original, once they're played, they're played.

Overall
If you like Sushi Go!, you'll like Sushi Go Party!, no doubt about it and if you play Sushi Go! a lot, then this is probably also worth playing, the extra cards go a long way to increasing the game's longevity.

But there's something that makes Sushi Go Party! less appealing than its predecessor and I think it's immediacy.

​Sushi Go! is pretty much the epitome of a quick, pick-up-and-play game; shuffle the cards, deal them out to players and you're ready to go. Clean up after the game end involves collecting the cards and putting them away.

Conversely, in Sushi Go Party!; the board must be set up, a menu agreed upon and placed the relevant tiles placed on the board, then the pertinent card sets must be taken from the available sets, only then can they be shuffled and dealt to players. It doesn't end there though, when Sushi Go Party! is over, all cards must be put back into their sets before packing away.
​Not only that, Sushi Go Party! by necessity comes in a bigger tin, while the original is compact enough to fit in coat pocket.
Gone is the portability and convenience.

It sounds like I'm dissing Sushi Go Party! but I'm not, it's a great game. It's just that I don't feel the need to play it over the original, it doesn't offer a different enough experience to warrant the extra effort.
However, like I said, if you play a lot of Sushi Go!, you should give this a try and if you've never played Sushi Go! or this, then you should definitely ​try one of them.

5th October 2021

Tuesday night is here and the Woking Gaming Club is at The Sovereigns in Woking.

The first game of the evening was Jump Drive, whisk through the Galaxy instead of racing through it!
Jump Drive is a streamlined version of the great Race for the Galaxy and like it, shares a setting with games New Frontiers and Roll for the Galaxy.

What's in a game?
Jump Drive uses 2 different types of cards which will be familiar to players of Race for the Galaxy. All cards have a cost and may also have icons for exploring, genetics or military, they may also powers, victory points or income.

• Developments: Developments are recognisable from the diamonds in the top left corner which also contain the card's cost, these cards represent technological, scientific or other kinds of advancement.
  Survey team: This is a special type of development card, more is explained below.
• Settlements: These are marked out by circles around the cost.
  Like Race for the Galaxy, settlements come in 4 types, blue (Novelty.), tan (Rare elements.), green (Genes) and yellow (Alien tech.), as well as neutral grey.
  Military worlds: If the circle and the cost are outlined in red, it means the settlement is a military world.
• Exploration tokens: These square tokens are used when performing exploration actions.
• Victory point tokens: These hexagonal tokens will be very familiar to players of any of the games in this setting.

That's it for the components, their quality is pretty good as you'd expect. The cards ae well made and the tokens are suitability thick.
Jump Drive's art style matches that of the other games in the series and at least some of the artwork is recycled and as I've said before, it's not a bad thing as it lends them all a consistent look.
The game's iconography is for the most part straightforward and certainly less intimidating than Race for the Galaxy. 

How's it play
Setup

• Survey teams: Set out a number of Survey Team cards face-up equal to the number of players. Each player may only have 1 survey team card in a game.
• Player hands: Shuffle the cards into a face-down deck and deal 7 to each player. Then all players must discard 2 cards each.

Play is now ready to begin.

On to play
Rounds in Jump Drive are played out simultaneously over 3 phases and players have choice from 3 actions, 2 of which can be completed in 1 turn.

• Action phase: In this 1st phase, payers make take one of the 3 actions, alternatively they may take the develop and settle action in the same turn - with a proviso of course.
  Choose: Players privately choose which action(s) to perform. If they want to explore they take an exploration token. If they want to develop, they play a development card face-down, to settle a settlement card must also be played face-down. Finally, if playing both develop and settle, one card of each must be played face-down.
  Reveal: Once all players have chosen, all cards are revealed simultaneously and the 3 actions are played out in the order below. Any cost that must be payed is paid with cards from the acting player's hand. As with Race for the Galaxy, a player's hand is also their currency in Jump Drive. 
• Explore: When performing the explore action, the player takes an exploration token. This allows them to draw 5+ cards from the deck and keep 2, the more explore symbols they have in their tableau, the more they can draw.
• Develop: This action allows players to put development cards into play. If a player is only performing the develop action, then they have -1 to the cost. They do not receive this benefit if also playing the settle action.
  Survey team: Interestingly, as their only action, a player is guaranteed getting a survey team card, which means they'll get an income of 1 no matter what.
• Settle: As you'd imagine, this allows players to put settlement cards into play. If the player is only performing the settle action; once they've paid the cost of the card, they can draw a card from the deck. They do not receive this benefit if they performed the develop action.
  Military worlds: These worlds cannot be bought and must be conquered. A player can only put a military world into play if their military score is equal or higher than the cost of the card. The upside is that there's no other cost to putting a military world into play.
• Victory point phase: During this phase, all players count all the victory points their cards are currently generating and increase their victory point total by that amount. Cards are scored every round after they've been played.
  You'll notice that this will increase players' scores exponentially, e.g., having a 1 VP in round 1 grants 1 VP, adding a 2 VP card in round grants 3 VP and so on.
• Income phase: In this phase, players draw cards into their hands; mechanically, this works identically to accruing VPs with the same exponential increase occurring.
  Hand size: At the end of the round, all players must have no more than 10 cards in their hand, discarding any excess. This may sound like a reasonable amount but when you're drawing 15+ cards a round, it involves a lot of decision making and deck shuffling.

Endgame
When any player's score reaches 50+ VPs, then the game will end with the current round.
All players should calculate their VP total.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Jump Drive plays very quickly and the game can be over in a handful of turns; at the start  50 victory points may seem like a lot but thanks to the exponentially increasing scores, players will suddenly find themselves hitting the endgame.
They cannot afford the luxury of meandering in their decisions or make frivolous choices.
Players must learn to be ruthless with spending their hand of cards, keeping more than 1 or 2 cards back will really slow them down, this is even more true in Jump Drive than Race for the Galaxy as Jump Drive provides players the choice to put down 2 cards a time and that double cost can easily empty a players hand.
Sure, it's fine and prudent to play one card at a time but if opponents are putting down 2 at a time instead, they risk streaking ahead and it may be necessary to keep up with them!
Jump Drive is not only about engine building, it's about optimisation, players have try an exploit the opportunities given to them instead of searching too hard for them.

It's also impressive how Jump Drive manages to distil so much of Race for the Galaxy into a streamlined, more accessible and quicker iteration. Pretty much everything that makes Race for the Galaxy a good game is is present here: The hand of cards as currency, hidden choices, engine building and synergy and so on.

Jump Drive is an enjoyable experience, reasonably easy to learn with a quick set up and play time that provides players with meaningful choices, a game well worth trying: If you like Race for the Galaxy, you'll find a lot to like here.

3rd October 2021

​It's time for more Sunday gaming goodness on Board Game Arena.
The first game of the night was Incan Gold.

Brave the temple, get the gold, avoid the traps, escape!
Indy never had it so easy! He should something really frustrating - like Incan Gold.

 Caveat: We've only ever played Incan Gold digitally.

What's in a game?

• Temple cards: There are 5 of these, they are used collectively to represent the temple, they also act a timer for the game's 5 rounds.
• Treasures: These are collected by intrepid explorers and come in 3 denominations, turquoise, obsidian and gold, respectively worth 1, 5 & 10 points. 
• Torch and camp cards: Used to determine a player's actions.
• Tent cards: In the physical game, these cards unfold to look like tents. There sort of a non-thing in the digital version.
• Artefact cards: Artefacts have special value in the game and there are 5 of these cards.
• Quest cards: There are 30 quest cards.
  15 are beneficial and confer treasures on to the players.
  15 are hazards, there are 5 different types of hazard, 3 cards of each type.

Incan Gold's utilises good, evocative art that suits its theme.

How's it play?
​Set up

• Temple cards: Set out the 5 temple cards to form the picture of the temple.
• Artefact cards: Shuffle the artefact cards and place 1 under each temple card.
• Turn counter: Turn over the temple card for the current round.
• Quest deck: Take the artefact card from under the current round's temple card and shuffle it into the quest deck. Place the quest deck into a face-down stack.
• Torch and camp cards: Give each player a torch card, camp card and tent card.
• 1st player: Determine a first player.

On to play
Incan Gold is played over 5 rounds of varying turn lengths, in each round players decide whether to continue exploring or run away! Cards are drawn from the quest deck by the first player until everyone has chosen to flee or the game goes bust.

• Stay or go: At the start of each turn, every player secretly decides whether they want to continue exploring the temple or retreat back to camp. This is done by playing a torch or camp card face-down, a torch to continue exploring or a camp to return to camp.
  All players then reveal their cards simultaneously. Anyone who chose a camp card is now out of the round, but can score whatever treasure they have collected in this round. Remaining players continue exploring the temple.
• Explore: If any players played a torch then the exploration continues.
  Turn quest card over: A card from the quest deck is revealed. Cards from the quest deck are played in a row starting next to the deck, thus creating a path.
  Treasure: If it's a treasure card, it will list what treasures it contains, this is then split up equally amongst whichever players are still exploring, any treasure(s) which cannot be equally divided is placed on the card that was revealed.
  Player keep the treasures they acquired to hand, they are not banked yet.
  Artefact: If an artefact card is revealed, nothing immediately happens, only 1 player may collect an artefact and this happens at the end of the round (More info below.)
  Hazard: Hazard cards can spell disaster for explorers.
  When the 1st card of any of the 5 types of hazard is revealed, nothing bad will happen. However when a 2nd card of any type of hazard is revealed, all the explorers must flee, the round has busted and is over. The following then occurs:
  Any explorer still in the temple loses all treasures they've acquired this round.
  Any treasures on the path are also discarded.
  Any artefact cards that were drawn are also discarded.
  The 2nd hazard card is removed from the deck for the remainder of play.
  Play proceeds to the next turn (See below.).
• Return to camp: Any players who played the camp card, must immediately return to their tent, they are no longer participating in exploring the temple and the following occurs:
  Treasures: Any treasures that were left on the path are now equally divided up to the retreating players, again, treasures which cannot be equally divided up remain on the path.
  Artefact: The artefact card(s) in the path is collected by the last player to retreat who is also the only player retreating. If 2 players are the last to retreat, the artefact is not collected.
  The first 3 artefacts that are found are worth 5 points each, the last are worth 10 each.
  Tent: Players who retreated many now bank any treasures they acquired, these are safe and cannot be lost.
  End of round: If the round did not bust and all the players escaped. The round is over and if for any reason a revealed artefact was not collected by a player, then it is discarded from play.
• Next round: Flip over the temple card to mark the start of the next round and shuffle the next artefact card into the quest deck. The first player moves to the left

Endgame
Play continues until 5 rounds have been completed.
Players count points from the 3 types of treasure they might've acquired and any artefact cards they collected.
​Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Incan Gold is a very focused push-you luck game, a couple of cards may be added or removed to the quest deck every round, but broadly speaking the quest deck is split 50/50 between treasures and hazards, flipping a card is like flipping a coin. It really is pushing your luck.

There are also some other interesting things going on in Incan Gold.
At the start of a round, the length of the exploration into the temple will have already been determined by shuffling the deck and there's no way for players to alter this. It means the game's 'luck' affects all players equally, if one player got further into the temple than all the others, it because they had the guts to push their luck further. Conversely, if a player went bust when others got back to camp, then they foolishly pushed their luck too hard!

Of course, there will be occasions when both approaches may prove beneficial and players will have to judge when it's a good idea to return to camp or not.
The artefact rules add a wrinkle to the game; acquiring an artefact can earn a lot of points, especially in games with higher player counts where treasures are split between more people. This of course means outlasting all the other players and surviving, adding a game of 'chicken' to Incan Gold.

Using cards to secretly choose whether to continue or retreat is the final interesting rule for various reasons.
Treasure on the path is split between all retreating players, so sometimes, retreating when it's obvious to retreat may not be the optimal strategy, as those treasures will get split amongst all retreating players. Pushing your luck here may prove beneficial, depending on how much treasure you've already got, but other players are thinking the same thing...​
When an artefact appears, it can add an extra element to this, how far is a player willing to push their luck to get the artefact? Is it worth retreating to collect treasure on the path instead? Can an opponent be bluffed into going too far. Are the other players going to fold? If a player's behaviour and motives can be predicted, it can be exploited.
While a round will have a limited number of turns before it busts, a player doesn't have to reach the end, they need to be last explorer exploring.

Incan Gold is a game with just 2 decisions, but there's always risk and reward behind those decisions, it can give players tricky and meaningful decisions to make.

We've only played Incan Gold digitally and it's a game that employs a significant amount of randomness, something which computers are not very good at handling. It can lead to weird or erroneous results appearing in games, so it's hard to discern if our experience of the game was influenced by this not.

We found Incan Gold to be a frustrating experience. The push-your-luck element of the game felt too harsh, too punishing to be fun. The 2nd hazard card seemed to pop up far too often and players frequently busted very early. Eventually we ended up barely turning over any cards before returning to camp, it seemed the most efficient move to make.
It felt like the risk far outweighed the reward and it made for an unexciting experience, one we didn't feel like repeating.

26th September 2021

Sunday evening is here and I'm logged into Board Game Arena for some gaming goodness.

Similo: Fables is one of several different Similo games, as you may have surmised from the title, Similo: Fables is themed after folklore and fairy tales.

Caveat: We've only ever played this game digitally.

What's in a game?
Similo Fables comes with a deck of 30 cards. Each card depicts a character from fairy tales, folklore and other fantastical stories, characters such as the 'Three Little Pigs', 'Cheshire Cat' and 'Cinderella'.

The artwork on the cards is stylised and cartoony as well as bright and colourful. It suits the game's light tone well
Similo: Fables uses no iconography to speak of.

How's it play?
​Setup

• Clue-giver: Choose one player to be the 'clue-giver', the remaining players become 'guessers'.
• Secret character: The clue-giver should shuffle the deck and draw 1 card, the character on that card will be the secret character.
  Then the clue-giver should draw 11 more cards and shuffle in the secret character card, then lay them out face up in a 4x3.
  The clue-giver then draws 5 cards into their hand.

​On to play
Similo: Fables is a co-operative game where the glue-giver and guessers must work together. The objective is for the guessers to guess which one of the 12 displayed characters is the secret character from clues given by the clue-giver and eliminate the other 11. How is this done? Read on:

• Clue: The clue-giver must play one of their 5 cards and try and use it to provide the guessers some information.
  Vertical: If the clue is played vertically in the portrait orientation, it means that something on the clue-card is in some way the same as or similar to the secret character.
  Horizontal: If the clue is played horizontally or in the landscape orientation then it means something about the clue-card is different to the secret character.
• Draw: The clue-giver draws another card from the deck, so they always have 5 cards in hand.
• Eliminate: Using the information provided by the clue, the guessers must choose a card to remove from the available cards. In the 1st round, the purpose is to remove 1 card which is not the secret character.
  If the guessers ever eliminate the secret character, the game is immediately lost.
• 5 rounds: Similo: Fables is played over a further 4 rounds, at the start of each subsequent round, the clue-giver must provide another clue.
  Round 2: After the clue-giver has provided a 2nd clue, the guessers must now eliminate 2 cards.
  Round 3: The guessers must now eliminate 3 cards after receiving a 3rd clue.
  Round 4: 4 cards must be eliminated.
  Round 5: by the time the game reaches the 5th round, there will only be 2 cards left and the guessers must eliminate one of them.

Endgame
During any of the games 5 rounds, if the players eliminate the secret character card, then the game is collectively lost by all players.
If the game reaches the 5th round and they correctly eliminate the final false card, then by matter of elimination, the players will left with the secret character as the last card, in which case all the players collectively win.

Overall
From the brevity of this blog, you can see that Similo: Fables is a game that manages to be both easy-to-learn and also co-operative, 2 game elements that quite often don't easily sit together.
While the game is uncomplicated, it has some inherent depth that derives from it's interpretive/deductive mechanics which essentially means that with these sorts of game mechanics the players provide the depth.
The clue-giver must agonise about how to give the best clue and try to anticipate how the guesses will receive it. In turn, the guessers must agonise about which cards to eliminate and try to gauge what the clue-giver was thinking. These are all meaningful decisions, which is always a good thing.
Although it has to be said, that the more players know each other, the easier games like this become.
I also like how the stakes increase every round, more and more cards will need to be eliminated and with a dwindling selection to chose from, it gets easier to make a game ending mistake. This keeps the tension high.

Similo: Fables didn't quite deliver the gameplay we were looking for though; truth be told, it was perhaps a bit too light for us.
Having said that, from observing the artwork, it seems that the game is targeted at younger players and for them, I think it's a good game, promoting creative thinking and especially with its co-operative nature, where everyone wins or everyone loses. I also think it's can be a good party game for non-gamers to play.

19th September 2021

Sunday afternoon gaming at The Sovereigns continued with Love Letter: Batman.

Love Letter: Batman is of course a licensed reskin of the most excellent Love Letter, a game that we've played a lot of in the past.
I'm not going to talk about Love Letter: Batman too much because it differs from the original in only 2 ways - more on that later.
Love Letter: Batman cleverly maps characters from the Batman milieu into the game.
​Batman becomes the guard, which when you think about it makes sense, since he's able to immediately take out enemies if he's smart enough.
The Joker becomes the princess, power in some situations, but liability in others and he's one everyone's looking.
Robin becomes the handmaiden, protecting the player by drawing enemy attacks away with his brightly coloured garb!

The cards in Love Letter: Batman pretty standard quality and are all illustrated with suitably comic book styled artwork which all looks the part.
The game also utilises bat-symbol themed scoring tokens - pretty cool.

The rule changes
Love Letter: batman changes 2 rules from the original.

• 7 points to win: Winning Love Letter: Batman requires players to score 7 points, whereas the original required 7-4 points for 2-4 player games. This ties in with the other change, which is...
• Batman can score extra points: This makes Batman overpowered and well, I suppose this is at least thematically accurate!
  This occurs whenever the active player uses a Batman card to successfully guess an opponent's card and that card was a villain - which it most likely will be as Batman cards can't be targeted this way and the only other hero is Robin. If this condition is met, the active player immediately scores a point.

Those are the rule changes and once again a rule has been introduced which allows players to score points mid-round, it's a concept I really don't like. It ruins the game's tension by allowing players to reach the victory threshold and essentially win the game before the round is over. It's so anti-climatic.
I've heard it said that it this rule makes the game play quicker, but the higher victory threshold for 3-4 player kind of negates that.

Conversely; in classic Love Letter, even if one player is 1 point away from winning and all the other players are at 0 points, until that player has won that final hand to win that final point, it's not over. Yes, it'd be a hard turnaround and a longshot, but it doesn't change the fact that nothing is over 'til everything is over.

Want my opinion? Just play Love Letter: Batman as classic Love Letter. Yes, it does make having this version sort of of pointless, but the classic version is the best version and there's nothing stopping you yelling dinner, dinner, dinner dinner, BATMAN when you play a card.

11th September 2021 

Wogglecon was drawing to a close and the final game of the day was co-operative word-puzzler Letter Jam.

What's in a game?

• Letter cards: This deck of 65 cards displays 1 letter per card. Not ever letter from the alphabet is present, 'J', 'Q', 'V', 'X' & 'Z' are not used.
• Wildcard... card: The wildcard card can be used as any letter.
• Setup cards: These cards hold clue tokens and are stylised to look like flowers.
• Clue tokens: These translucent little acrylic discs come in bright green and bright  red.
• Numbered Tokens: Numbered from 1 to 8.
• Standees: Used to hold a single letter card.
• Guessing sheets: Players use these paper sheets to track info acquired through play.

The cards are the standard quality that you'd expect, as are the study acrylic tokens are study components. While the numbered tokens are basically poker chips with fruit themed art, they are excellent components.
The numbered token are bright and colourful art-wise and while simplistic, the setup cards are pleasant enough. Otherwise, there's pretty much no more art, but this is a word game, how much art is needed?
The game has practically no iconography that needs learning.

How's it play?
In Letter Jam each player is given a 5-letter word in the form of 5 face-down letter cards. Then the players have to collectively guess their individual words by looking at the clues given by other players and filling in the gaps.
Setup

• Setup card: Take the setup card that matches the number of players and put it into the central playing area. Put the green and red clue tokens on to their allotted spaces.
• Wildcard: Put the wildcard into the central playing area.
• Letter cards: Deal out all the letter cards to the players as evenly as possible.
  Then, using these cards, each player creates a 5-letter word, then shuffles these cards and passes them face-down to the player to their right. The remaining cards are discarded into a deck in the central playing area.
  Each player now takes the 5 cards given to them and without looking at them, places them into a face-down row in front of them.
• Letters: Then each player takes the 1st of their letter cards and slots it into a standee, with the card facing away, so only the other players can see it. Conversely, players can see the letters of all other players,.

Letter Jam is always played with 6 players; if playing with less than 6 people, nonplayer stands are added to the game to make up the numbers. Nonplayer stands have their own rules which aren't really important for the purposes of this blog.

On to play

• Discuss: After looking at the other players' letters, everyone should think of a clue (A word.) that they could give. Players then discuss who should be the cluegiver, they can talk about how many people they can help and so on. Player should be careful not to reveal too much.
• Cluegiver: Once the cluegiver has been chosen, they must take a clue token, the first clue token they take must be red, if they take further clue tokens, they must always take a green clue token, they can never take another red. This means that all player must participate in cluegiving at least a little bit.
  The cluegiver then takes numbered tokens and uses them to spell out the word they thought of.
  For example; the cluegiver sees the letters S, E, U, M & O. They put the 1 next to the M, 2 next to the O, 3 the U, 4 the S and 4 the E, this would be M, O, U, S, E or mouse. The cluegiver could also spell Moose, by putting numbers 2 & 3 both next to the O.
  The cluegiver can put tokens next to the wildcard, although they cannot say which letter they are using it for.
  
• Guessing: Using the guessing sheets, players write down what they can see. Thus the player who has the U in front of them would write down MO?SE, since that player cannot see the U, they put a '?' in it's place. Now players try and guess what their letter could be. In this instance, the missing letter could be a U (For MOUSE.) or a O (Spelling MOOSE.), this is noted on the guessing sheet.  Once everybody is happy with their guess, play progresses to the next round.
• Next round: Players now decide whether to stick with the same letter (If they're not sure what it is.) or move on to the next letter (If they feel confident enough.), in which case the current letter is removed from the standee and placed face-down, the new one is then slotted in its place on the standee. Once a player moves on, they can't go back to a previous letter.
  Then the discussion and cluegiving occur again.

The objective here is for each player to try and deduce what 5 letters they have.

Endgame
Discussion and cluegiving continue until one of the following 2 conditions are met.
There are no more clue tokens or players are happy with their deductions and want to guess their words.
Now all players take their 5 cards and keeping them face-down, rearrange them to spell the word they were originally given.
Once this is done all players simultaneously reveal their words.
If everyone has spelt a word, then everyone wins! Interestingly, it does not have to be the word that was given, so long as it's a real word, it counts!
If one or more players hasn't spelt a word... well... there's always next time.

Overall
Letter Jam is a pretty clever little game that will tax players' grammatical and spelling abilities.
​Players will want to try and spell out distinct or unusual words so that there's less ambiguity for other players who will then have a better opportunity to guess their own letters. Ultimately though, players will probably end up having to employ deductive reasoning and make educated guesses and hope for the best. If you're an analytical player who sees all the possible variations in a situation, you'll probably end up overthinking Letter Jam.
There's not much more that can be said about Letter Jam, the game's depth doesn't arise from mechanics, it comes from players' abilities to spell words.

Letter Jam is a light game to play, has a lot of replay value and plays up to 6. If I have any criticism of Letter Jam, it might that the game feels a bit too overlong for what it is and rules are slightly fiddly. Otherwise it's mostly straight forward to learn and the game will have crossover appeal to non-gamers and is a reasonably fun cooperative game to play.

15th August 2021

Sunday evening is here again and I'm my living room logged into Board Game Arena on my PC for some gaming goodness.

First up was 6 nimmit!. 6 nimmit! is 6 takes in German, it's quite an abstract game and the name will make sense when you seen the rules.

What's in a game?
6 nimmit is a card game and comes with a deck of 104 cards number from 1 to... you guessed it... 104 and that's it for game components. Each card also displays one or more symbols which are endearingly known as ​bullheads. Bullheads are bad.

The cards are normal quality as you'd expect.
There's pretty much no artwork to speak off, other than the symbol for bullheads and colours used to mark out cards which have more than 1 bullhead symbol.
The game has no iconography other than numbers and bullheads and being an abstract game, doesn't need anything else.

How's it play?
Setup

• Shuffle all the cards into a face-down deck.
• Draw 4 cards and place them face-up into a column in the central play area. These form the beginnings of the 4 rows into which players will place their cards
• Deal 10 face-down cards to each player.

On to play
6 nimmit! is played over several rounds and the goal is for players to empty their hand of cards and avoid collecting other cards as much as possible each round, which is not as easy as you might think...
How is this done, well read on.

• Pick a card: Each player chooses a card and plays it face-down in front of them. Once everybody done this, all cards are simultaneously ​turned face-up.
• Lowest first: Whoever played the lowest valued card, plays their card first, play then progresses to the player of the highest card, who goes last.
• Play a card: The active player must play their card on to one of the 4 rows, going from left to right and using the following rules.
  Go higher: When playing a card, it's value must be higher than the card it is placed next to.
  Go closer: Also when playing card, it must be placed next card that is closest in value to it. E.G., if 40 is played, it must be placed next to a 30 instead of a 25.
  Go low: If the card played is not higher than any row, then the active player must take all the cards in a row of their choice and place the played card as the first card in a new row.
  6 takes: If a player would place a 6th card into a row, they instead collect all the cards in that row and place what would've been the 6th card and place it as the first card in a new row.
  Who played the 6th card takes the row; 6 takes - geddit!
• Round end: Play continues until all players have played the 10 cards in their hand.
  Players tally the bullheads they've acquired this round, then all cards are shuffled back into a new deck and a new round is set up.

Endgame
Play continues through rounds until at the end of a round, in which at least one player has accumulated 66 or more bullheads..
Points are tallied, the player who has collected the lowest number of bullheads wins.

Overall
As per the brevity of this blog post, 6 nimmit! is a very simple game to learn, it's also a curious mix of strategy and unpredictability.

The objective is obviously to try and not collect cards, they'll be times that a player will want to play lower value cards to 'get into' a row before it gets to 5 cards, conversely, they'll times they want to play higher cards to go later and hope someone plays the 6th card in a row to clear it out.
Sometimes players will want to play very low and choose which row to take because it's the best of a bad set of choices, the bullheads a row may contain can vary greatly. Also choosing which row to take presents a player with the opportunity to mess with other players.
Watching a row you planned to play a card into vanish and leave a much worse alternative is quite the surprise.

And that's the thing, while some card plays can be much safer than others, it's almost always never 100% safe and it's other players bring that element of aforementioned of unpredictability to the game.

Quick to pick-up-and-play, 6 nimmit! can be a lot of fun with its surprises and reversals -of-fortune, provided you don't find playing fairly randomised games frustrating and you're not too much of a serious gamer.