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.

10th August 2021

We're with the Woking Gaming Club for board gaming night at The Sovereigns in Woking for the second and final game of the evening.

So apparently, if you're a kid, the most important things to you, other than building a fort, is pizza and toys. Welcome to Fort, a game about very fickle personal relationships!

What's in a game?

• ​Player board: Each player gets one of these groovy recessed game boards used to manage various elements of the game.
  Fort track: In a game called Fort, there better be something about forts and I'm not disappointed here. Every player's fort has a level from 0 to 5 and that's what this tracks, it also shows the cost to level up and associated benefits. Increasing their fort levels allows players to gain special cards, including the fabled Macaroni Sculpture Card and confers victory points.
  Stuff tracks: There are 2 stuff tracks in Fort, with 4 spaces each, they allow players to store tokens. One track is for pizza and the other for toys.
  Pack space: As in backpack I guess. Players can store extra stuff here, the bigger their fort, the more they can store.
  Lookout: On the left side of the board is a semi-circular indentation, to which you can send friends to! The bigger the fort, the friend cards can go to the lookout. Cards placed here can provide a permanent action improvement bonus to cards with a matching suit. More on this below.
  Yard: Finally, along the top edge of the board is space marked out as the Yard.
• Friend cards: In Fort there are 2 types of friend, normal friends and best friends! Apart from one specific rule, they're more or less identical and each card will have the following elements.
  Suit: In the top left of every card, its suit is displayed, Fort features 6 suits and a wildcard. Some cards will have 2 suits. These suits are Skateboard, Shovel, Glue, Squirtgun, Crown & Book. The wildcard is a Coin, money counts in any amount I guess!
  Public action: When a card is played, all players can perform the public action.
  Private action: Conversely, only the active player can undertake the private action.
  Public/Private actions are the card's special abilities, they allow to recruit or trash cards, gain resources, etc.
  Best friend cards: Where would you childhood be without best friends, those friends you'll probably never see again when you see again! However, in fort, they'll never leave you, unless of course, you shun them first!
  Friend cards: your general neighbourhood kids, the ones from a few doors down that you occasionally play with.
• Made up rule cards: These cards score players additional victory points during the endgame, provided they meet the required conditions of course. Any made up rule acquired is kept face-down until the endgame.
• Perk cards: Acquiring a perk card confers some sort of bonus or benefit during the game.
• Victory track: This board tracks players' victory points. There also a space along the bottom edge of the board marked as the park.
• Tokens: There are 3 types of token, for the game's 2 currencies - pizza and toys and for tracking tokens for victory point scores and fort levels
• Macaroni Sculpture card: Scores points for the player who acquires it and also triggers the endgame.

The cards and boards are pretty standard, normal quality components, what you'd expect from a modern game.
​The tokens are anything but average, big, chunky and colourful, they're a great addition to the game.
Stylised child-like art is used throughout Fort to decorate its cards and components, normally against a plain but colourful background, fairly effective art in my opinion.

Fort uses a lot of iconography; between the 7 suits on the cards and a plethora of symbols for card actions, there quite a lot to remember and the stylised art used for icons isn't always instantly clear. It's not a gamebreaker by any means but it does add to the learning curve. 

How's it play?
Setup

• Perk cards: Shuffle the perk cards into a face-down deck. Deal a number of them equal to1 higher than the number of players face-up in a row above the victory park. The remaining cards will not be used.
• Made up Rules cards: Shuffle these into a face-down deck
• Player Board: Give each player a player board, the player should also receive the 2 best friends cards displayed on the flipside of the board.
• Park deck: Shuffle the friend cards into a face-down deck, deal 8 to each player. Then deal 3 friend cards face-up in the area below the victory track (The park area.).
• Player decks: All players should shuffle their 8 friend card and 2 best friend cards into a single 10-card face-down deck and draw 5 cards.
• Leader: Determine a 1st player.

On to play
​A round is pretty standard in Fort, the active player plays a card and the other players react. Then the player to the left becomes the active player.

• Clean up: At the start of the active player's turn, any cards placed into the yard at the end of their previous turn that are still there, are then placed into the active player's discard pile. This'll make more sense further down.
  Obviously this doesn't occur in a player's first turn.
• Play a card: It's playtime! The active player can choose to play a single card in front of them.
  Actions: Each card has 2 actions, a public action and a private one. The active player may choose to do either action or both in any order they see fit.
  There is one restriction only, the active player must fully perform 1 of the 2 actions, if they can't, then that card cannot be played.
  Improve action: Certain card actions have a variable effect, in this instance, the active player may also play 1 or more cards of a matching suit to increase the effectiveness of that variable action. Cards that a player has placed in their look out provide a permanent bonus that can possibly be used.
  However, the player must still be able to fully complete an action, if an improvement would make it impossible for the active player to do this, then the improvement cannot be used.
  An example of an action might be 'add 2 pizza tokens to the pizza track', if the active player only has 1 space left, then they cannot fully complete the action and cannot choose to do that action. The excess token could not be discarded.
  Follow: Once the active player has completed their action(s), other players may perform the public action the card played, again they must be able to fully complete the action in order to carry it out.

• Recruit: Once action have been completed, the active player must recruit a new friend card.
  This can come from the park or blindly from the park deck, or from another player's yard. The card goes directly into the active player's discard pile.
• Discard: Cards are either discarded into the active player's discard pile or the yard at the top of their player board.
  Discard pile: The played card and any cards played to improve actions are placed directly into the player's discard pile. Best friend cards are always put into the discard pile, regardless of whether they were played or not.
  Yard: Any card left in the active player's hand - that is cards they did not play, must be placed in the active player's yard.
  This means they are vulnerable to being recruited by other players. That's what you get for ignoring your friends.
  ​Any friend cards left in a player's yard at the start of their turn are send to their discard pile as part of clean up.
  
• Draw: This also means the active player's hand is now also empty. As their final action, the active player now draws 5 more cards.
• Play on: Play now moves on to the player to the left, when a round is completed, first player moves one player to the left.

Endgame
There are 3 ways the endgame can be triggered.
If the park deck is depleted.
If any player reaches 25 or higher on the victory track.
If any player reaches fort level 5, they acquire the Macaroni Sculpture Card.
Once one of these criteria have been met, the current round is completed. Points can come the victory track, fort level, made up rule cards and the Macaroni Sculpture Card.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
The central theme and premise behind Fort is quite clever and charming. That is that friend cards are literally friends: Don't play a friend card, then that friend may go hang out with another player, although best friends are always loyal and more potential friends may be found at the park.
Building a fort is of paramount importance as are pizzas and toys. Halcyon days!

Fort blends together a bit of deck-building and a bit of drafting. Broadly speaking it provides players with the choice of performing actions to increase their victory points, or build up their fort. One provides points towards winning and the other confers benefits which hopefully helps later on.
Another very important strategy here is to watch what other players put into their yards, some vulture-like scavenging may net the sharp-eyed player's a useful card, simultaneously denying another player of it.
Thus players will also want to play as many of their 5 cards as possible, minimising the risk of losing friends. The better combos a player can generate, the more cards they can play.

But despite this, I found Fort a finicky game to play, there's lots of suits to remember, somewhat indecipherable iconography to navigate and occasionally overly-complex actions to comprehend.
The rule about having to fully complete an action in order to perform it all was a sticking point for me. I'm sure it's there's for balancing or a legitimate reason, but it felt so unnecessary and counter-intuitive.
It's frustrating being unable to use a card because it's too powerful and having to discard it into the yard, only to watch another player snatch it up. It turns Fort from what could have been light, breezy and quick, into slow, pedestrian grind instead.
Fort is a mechanically sound game with a strong theme and great presentation but somehow becomes a forgettable experience.

1st August 2021

Sunday night gaming on Board Game Arena has come to a conclusion.

The last game of the evening was Via Magica.
Via Magica - the magic way, what is the magic way? Turns out it's a game of errr.... bingo? Not just bingo, but bingo very loosely inspired by Harry Potter.

Players take the role of a student of magic looking to earn their Certificate of Sorcery, this is done by collecting macguffins to open magical portals; the titular Via Magica.

Caveat: We have only ever played Via Magica online.

What's in a game?

• Portal cards: A deck of 80 cards that represent magic portals.
  Each card has a row of 3-6 open spots which each displays an animus symbol and represents the cost to activate it in animus tokens/crystals Each card also displays a reward that the player will earn once activated, this can be straight-up points, situational points calculated at the end or a bonus such as extra crystals and so on.
• Crystals: These are used in conjunction with portal cards.
• Animus tokens: There are 23 of them that make up the 7 different types of token. The astute among you will be thinking that these numbers do not breakdown evenly - and you'd be correct, all the differently coloured animus' have a different rarity as shown below.​
  Air: X6, grey/white.
  Water: X5, blue
  Earth: X4, brown.
  Life: X3, green.
  Fire: X2, red.
  Shadow: X1, black.
  Wildcard: X2, any colour.​​
• Bag: Used with Animus tokens.
• Bonus tiles: Each of these tiles has a condition, that if met, can give a player bonus points if they claim the tile. Bonus tiles can only be claimed directly after a portal has been activated. They come in 2 types
  Colour of portals: These conditions revolve around activating a particular number of portals of a particular colour(s).
  Number of portals: Players can earn bonus points for the total number of cards they activate.
  However, only one tile can ever be claimed from this category and only at the time the criteria is met! This means that players are racing to claim these tokens, the bonus for activating 4 portals cannot be claimed when opening a 5th!

Since this game has only been played digitally, it's not possible to comment on the quality of the game components.
The artwork on cards in Via Magica is universally good; cheerfully brash and colourfully cartoonish characters dominate the cards. The animus tokens are also bright and colourful.
The game's iconography is easy to read.

How's it play?
Setup

• Shuffle the deck of portal cards and deal 5 cards face-up in to a central row.
• Then deal 6 to each player, face-down. The remain cards become the portal deck.
  Each player keeps 3 and discards the others. The only restriction is that a player can never have any duplicate cards, doubles must be discarded and new cards dealt in their place.
  Each players places their 3 cards face-up in a row in front of them.
• Give each player 7 crystals.
• Put all 23 animus tokens into the bag and give it a good shake.

That's that, now we're ready to play.
On to play
In Via Magica, all players act simultaneously after the active player who assumes the role of Catcher, which is a fancy name for a bingo caller, draws a token.

• The active player blindly draws a token from the bag, announces to all the other players which of the 7 animus types was drawn and places it in the central (not back in the bag.).
• All players now look at their 3 cards.
  • If a player has an open animus spot on any of their cards that matches the animus token that was just drawn, then that player puts 1 of their 7 crystals on to one of those matching spaces. If a player has no spare crystals, then they may take a crystal they have previously placed and move it over.
  • If a player has no open spaces that match the drawn animus, then they do not place a crystal this time.
• If a player has covered all the spots on their card with crystals, then they have activated the portal and should shout WINGARDI-, er no, they shout BING-, er no they shout INCANTATUM!
  They then return all the crystals from the completed card to their supply and put the card in their completed area.
  If the card has a relevant effect, it is triggered now.
  Next they take a card from the 5 available and add it to their row of 3 and a new card is drawn from the deck to bring the central row back up to 5 cards.
  If multiple players completed cards at the same time, then the player who shouted Incantatum first goes first, followed by other completing players to their left and onwards.
  After a portal is activated, a player will automatically earn a Colour of Portal bonus token they are eligible for and may choose to take a Number of Portals token is they want it.
• If a wildcard token was drawn by the active player, they return all tokens back to the bag, gives it a shake and passes it on to the player to their left. That player is now the active player and the Catcher.
  If no wildcard token was drawn, the active player blindly draws another token and play proceeds on.

Endgame
Play proceeds until a player has activated a 7th portal card.
Players now calculate at all the victory points their portal cards confer, end of game bonuses they earn and points acquired from bonus tiles.
All scores are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
There's no denying it, Via Magica is bingo, the manual says as much. The portal cards are bingo cards and the animus tokens are bingo balls, the twist though, is that whilst there are only 7 'numbers', the odds of them coming up are heavily skewed and is what adds a scintilla of much needed depth to the game. Portal cards with more than 1 or 2 rare openings will generally be much harder to complete, it also means that players should complete the 'rarer' spaces first if they get wildcards.

Additionally, there is a little bit of strategy when using some of the lower cost cards; once a player starts a card, they'll generally want to finish it, as a consequence, quite often there's no decision to be made and players will concentrate on the card they started if they can. However, since players initially have 7 crystals, they'll always have at least 1 surplus crystal (Provided they are only 'going' for 1 card a a time that is.), 'loading' a lower cost card with surplus crystals can prove when a draw goes against the player, allowing them to switch a crystal round to a secondary card which may prove beneficial.
Initial and later card drafts will prove important, the basic dichotomy is choosing between point scoring cards and special ability cards, as well as quick-to-complete lower cost cards and higher value more costly ones.
​During play, we found that picking the highest cost cards seemed to be the most successful approach.
Ultimately though, this is a game of luck and luck will be the biggest factor.

Obviously Via Magica has little to engage players of heavier games and personally I found it an unabsorbing experience.
It's unlikely that I'm the target audience though, the simplicity and bingo theme of Via Magica clearly makes it a crossover game that is accessible enough to appeal to non-gamers and which they will find easy to learn.