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.

28th July 2021

We were at The Sovereigns in Woking on a Wednesday for an impromptu evening of gaming.

It's a Wonderful World, where you can lead a idyllic, tranquil life, except It's a Wonderful World is anything but!
​It's a dystopian, industrialised future in which competing factions vie for resources to create the most powerful empires. It's a Wonderful World indeed.

What's in a game?

• Gameboard: Unusually, the gameboard is long and thin, it's used to track the game's many resources, certain player status' and turn order.
• Empire cards: These cards are double sided and one is given to each player. Empire cards provide the controlling player with a production benefit and a scoring benefit, they also have a space to stack constructed development cards.
• Development cards: There are 150 development cards and they each display quite a lot of information, including construction cost, recycling value, value of their victory points and production ability. Production ability is a horizontal line at the bottom of the card - which will remain visible when the card is stacked (More on this below.).
• Resource cubes: It's a Wonderful World uses 6(!) different types of resource, all represented by coloured little acrylic cubes. They come in grey, black, green, yellow and blue, the final resource is Krystallium which is red
• Character tokens: These come in 2 flavours, blue which are financiers and red, which are generals.

The gameboard and cards for It's a Wonderful World are of the usual good quality we've come to expect from games today. The same is true of the colourful, translucent acrylic cubes - except for the curiously opaque grey cubes, it guess it's to ensure they remain distinct from one another.
The development cards contain quite a lot of info, but the iconography is consistently clear and they never feel cluttered.
The art used throughout the game is consistently good, colour is also well used, making the game bright and eye catching. It's a bit of a shame that when development cards become stacked, the art is no longer visible.
so a thumbs up for the presentation.

How's it play?
Setup

• Put out the game board, place all the resources and token on their allotted spaces.
• Shuffle the development cards into a face-down deck.
• Give each player an empire card, all players should use the same side (Either A or B.).

That's it for basic setup.

On to play.
It's a Wonderful World is played over 4 rounds and each round has 3 phases, drafting planning and production.
The planning and production phases occur simultaneously and have no turn order

• Drafting: Start by dealing 7 cards to each player.
  Each player chooses a single card to keep, which they put face-down in their area and passes the remaining cards along to the next player. Once all players have picked and put down a card, all players turn their chosen card face-up (For everyone to see!). Repeat this until all players have chosen 7 cards.
  For rounds 1 & 3 this is done clockwise and for rounds 2 & 4, it's done anti-clockwise. This is a slight variation on a pretty standard card drafting mechanic.
• Planning: The planning phase is probably where the bulk of the game's play takes place. In this phase, players have two options on how to use all the cards they drafted. 
  Recycle: A card may be recycled (Discarded in other words.) for whatever resources it's recycling value provides. These resources can be used immediately to contribute to or complete the construction of another can if possible.
  Build: If a player decides to build a card, it is played face-up in their area and is considered in construction until the controlling player can pay all of its construction cost.
  A development card that is constructed is placed on to the controlling player's stack on their empire card.
• Production: In this phase, all players will acquire resources according to their empire card and constructed development cards.
  There are several steps in the production phase, repeated 5 times over in total! Once each for all of the game's 5 main resource types (The 6th resource, Krystallium cannot be produced in this manner.), each resource is dealt with individually in the following order; grey (materials), black (energy), green (science), yellow (gold) and blue (exploration).
  Produce: Starting with grey, each player acquires a number of grey cubes equal to their empire's grey cube production (The sum of their empire card and constructed development cards.).
  Supremacy: If a single player produced more grey cubes than any other player, then they have supremacy in that resources colour and gains a financier token (Other resources will allow a player with supremacy in that resource to gain a general/financier depending on the resource.). What do these tokens do? More on that later.
  Construction: Players now take the grey cubes they've acquired and place them on the allotted spaces on development cards in construction (That need grey cubes.) or on their empire card, they cannot be placed anywhere else or stored. Furthermore construction does not to be completed in a single turn or phase, resources placed on a development card stay until either construction is finished or the card is discarded..
  If a card's construction is completed, it is put into the controlling player's empire card stack immediately. Completed development cards can confer a bonus to the controlling player.
  When cubes are placed on an empire card, they cannot be removed, however as soon as a player acquires 5 resources of any kind they are converted into a krystallium cube, which can be stored on a empire card and used anytime a player wants.
  Once this is all completed for the grey cubes, it's repeated for the black cubes and so on until finally, the blue cubes have been dealt with. Play then goes on to the next round.

There're are couple of other important things to note.

• Krystallium: These red cubes can be used as a wild colour, some development cards will also have red in their building costs.
• General/financier tokens: They score victory points at the game end and like krystallium, some cards include tokens in their construction costs.

​Endgame
Once the 4th round has been completed, player calculate their scores.
Some cards will provide a straight victory point score.
General/financier tokens provide a victory point each.
Finally, some cards have scoring combos dependant on other cards or the general/financier tokens.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
It's a Wonderful World is fairly straightforward to learn and play, in truth, having to collect resources 5 times over in a round actually sounds a lot more fiddly than it is in practice.
The game's engine-building, tableau-creating, simultaneous-play, card-game style has some similarities to some other games we've played such as Race for the Galaxy. While it has less depth, it's also more accessible, players will have less trouble creating engines and combos.
The game also has a slightly different take on some of these concepts.

Firstly there's drafting; what's interesting here is that players put cards they've drafted into their area face-up during the drafting phase face-up for everyone to see. In high-level play, it's possible for players to try and anticipate what their opponents might be looking to use and keep cards they might want from them.
Fairly frequently in games (Especially euro-games.) a player trying to screw over an opponent can also screw themselves over, but in It's a Wonderful World, development cards can always be discarded for resources, so sometimes in can be a legitimate move.

Secondly; how the timing of resource acquisition meshes with the game's engine building mechanic is interesting and presents an unusual approach to exploiting those engines.
For example; if a player completes construction of a development card that required grey cubes, that card goes straight into their empire's stack and if that card then produces black cubes, then the player will get those cubes when the black resource production phase comes round and they can then be used to complete development cards which require black cubes.
Knowing when to complete which development card and in which order will greatly increase the building efficiency of an empire. Many engine-builders allow players to do a the perform a wider variety of tasks but the simpler gameplay of It's a Wonderful World has a clear and concise gameplay loop, constructing development cards allows players to gain more resources to construct even more development cards to get even more resources and so on.

In round 1, players will probably end up discarding 5 of the cards they drafted for the resources to try and build 1 or 2 of those development cards. This puts players in the classic quandary of deciding what they have to discard and all the cards will be useful in some way.
By the time round 4 arrives however, it'll probably be the inverse, players will be discarding only 1 or 2 cards to try and build 5 in a round as their engine gets stronger and stronger. It's a satisfying experience to watch it at work.

All of this adds up to make It's a Wonderful World feel different enough to justify it's existence. If you like this style of game, it's definitely work a look, I do and I'd happily play it again.

25th July 2021

Sunday gaming on Board Game Arena continued with Bang!

The American west could be an ornery, dangerous place; friend or foe, it was always hard to tell, particularly when you all sat in circle and pointed pistols at each other, with nothing else but a spittoon between all of you.

Caveat: We have only ever played Bang! digitally.

What's in a game?

• Role cards: ​A hidden role card game has to have hidden role cards! Bang! has 7 of them. A sheriff, deputies, outlaws and a renegade,
• Character cards: Each player takes on the role of one of the characters as well as a hidden role.
  Each character card displays their number of bullets (Hit points.) and has a special ability.
• Playing cards: Used for a variety of purposes in the game, mostly for attacking other players and there are 80 of them.
  They're 2 types of card; brown cards which are once-only and blue cards, which have an ongoing effect.
• Player boards: Player boards have spaces to place, hidden role, character and weapon cards.
• Bullet tokens: These represent hit points.

Bang! utilises a stylised cartoony art style throughout the game cards which is appealing enough and iconography is clear to read.

How's it play?
Setup

• Hidden Roles: The mix of hidden cards used will depend on the number of participating players, but there's always at least the sheriff, an outlaw and a renegade. Randomly deal each player a hidden role card face-down, the player who gets the sheriff role must reveal their card, everyone else keeps their role secret.
• Characters: Deal each player a character card face-up, players now take the relevant number of bullet tokens for their character, fortunately for the sheriff, they start with an extra bullet!
• Playing cards: Shuffle the playing cards and deal cards out to the players, place the remainder in a face-down deck.

On to play
The main purpose in Bang! is to attack your enemies and aid your allies (If you have any.)! This is is not quite so simple as it sounds though, since it's unlikely that players will know who is an enemies or a friend, at least at the start.
Additionally, you may not even be able to reach you enemies, most attacks in Bang! have a range of 1, this means an attack can only target someone 1 space away, i.e., someone adjacent, there are several weapons have extra range and there're also ways to alter ranges.
A turn in Bang! consists of 3 actions.

• Draw cards: The active player draws 2 cards from the player deck.
• Play cards: The active player may play any number of player cards with the exception of Bang! cards, of which only 1 may be played, Bang! cards are the main form of attacking other players.
  Player cards have various actions from attacks to healing, to stealing cards from other players or forcing them to discard etc. Player cards also provide weapons and gear to players.
  Finally, there are a couple of cards that players can use out-of-turn in reaction to the active player, these are the only cards that can be played out-of-turn.
• Discard: The last action performed by the active player is to discard down to their card limit - which is equal to their bullets/hit points.
  Thus, as a player loses hit points, their hand size shrinks correspondingly, it can be a quite nasty death spiral!

Endgame
In Bang!, play continues until one of three win conditions are met, these win conditions will depend what hidden role players have.
Sheriff/deputies: All outlaws and the renegade must be eliminated for the sheriff/deputies to win.
Outlaws: Eliminate the sheriff and the outlaws win.
​Renegade: Win by being the last man standing.

Overall
​Bang! is a pretty straightforward hidden role game, however, unlike some hidden role games, most of the game's 3 factions will start not knowing who their allies might be, with exception of deputies and the renegade (Who has no allies.).
Players will need to observe other players' behaviour to try and gauge their motives, this is made more difficult because the renegade will be looking help or hinder either of the other factions depending on the situation, adding to this are the range restriction rules that can force players to change behaviour. Additionally, in Bang! actions are card driven, i.e. a player's decisions will be to some degree limited by the cards in their hand; no BANG! card - no attack for example, this can mean even more restrictions on player choices.
We found this made for a slightly unsatisfying experience, particularly since there's a a fairly strict rule on hand size and it becomes a case of use-it-or-lose-it with cards. It didn't help that sometimes it felt like the card play made the game a little futile, managing to play a Bang! card only for your target to immediately heal it made for a negative feeling.

We played Bang! with a lower player count and online; with more players and in-person play I'm sure that it would've been a different experience, a game like Bang! will thrive with more players.

I'm not the biggest fan of hidden role games and I don't think Bang! is a bad game but  I can think of other similar games I'd rather play - including it's later companion game; Bang! The Dice Game.

20th July 2021

I'm in Woking at the Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club.

The second and final game of the evening was For Sale; time for some property flipping and stressful auctioning action.

What's in a game?
For Sale is a card game and comes with 2 types of cards.

• Property cards: There are 30 property cards, unsurprisingly numbered from 1-30.
• Currency cards: There are also 30 currency cards, these sort of represent the money in the game's property market and are worth from $2,000 to $15,000, increasing in increments of $1,000 with 2 of each, along with 2 cards worth $0.
• Coins: Standard card tokens that represent $1,000 or $2,000

It's no surprise that quality of the the cards and coin tokens are pretty standard and as you'd expect them.
Artwork on the property cards is pretty good, colourfully depicting 30 different properties ranging from a lowly cardboard box for the 1 card to an orbiting space station for the 30 card. The currency cards all identically depict cheques of various values
​There's not much else to say here.

How's it play?
Setup

• ​Shuffle the property cards into a face-down deck, depending on the number of players, some cards will need to be blindly discarded.
• Shuffle the currency deck into a face-down deck, as with property cards, an identical number of currency will need to be blindly discarded.
• Dole out coins to each player, the exact amount will also depend on the number of players.

On to play
For Sale is played over 2 phases, in the 1st, players use their money to buy properties and in the 2nd, they use these to get currency cards, essentially flipping the properties for profit.
Phase 1: Buying properties.

• From the property deck, draw a number of cards equal to the number of players and place them face-up in the playing area.
• Players now bid on these properties in an open auction, although players should keep the number of coins they possess secret from other players.
  The starting player begins with an opening bid of their choice.
  Players that follow must put in a higher bid or pass.
  When a player passes, half of the money they bid (Rounded down.) is returned to them and they acquire the lowest valued card from the currently available selection.
  This bidding and passing continues until only one player remains, who pays their full bid for the last card - which will naturally be the highest valued property.
  Now deal another set of cards and start the bidding again.
  ​This continues until all the property cards have been acquired.

That's it for phase 1.
Phase 2: Flipping those properties.

• From the currency deck, deal a number of cards equal to the number of players and place them face-up into the playing area. I guess these cards sort of represent the buyer's demand for properties and the money they're willing to shell out on them.
  Players now bid in order to sell their properties to these buyers, however, this takes the form of a blind auction. Each player now chooses a property from those they acquired in phase 1 and plays it face-down.
  All properties are simultaneously revealed. The highest valued property will acquire the highest valued currency card for its player, i.e. the nicest property attracts the richest buyer. The 2nd highest valued property acquires the 2nd highest valued currency card and so on until all the currency cards have been acquired.
  Deal another set of cards and continue blind-bidding on them until all currency cards have been acquired.

That's both phases done.

Endgame
​Players tally the values of all the currency cards they acquired and any coins that were unspent from phase 1.
Highest score wins.

Overall
​For Sale is a simple game to play, it features two types of auctioning that're easy to understand, however there are a couple of curveballs that that affect the game's dynamic.
Firstly in phase 1; which is an open auction, there's the rule that states when a player passes, they only get half their bid back and the lowest valued card. It means the classic play of trying to run up someone else's bid is a risky proposition, you may well end up running yourself up for a very low value card as well. Even the act of initially bidding may cost a player more than they want to spend, it's something player's need to think about.
All the property cards drawn have to be acquired by players and it may not seem like it, but sometimes a lower valued card can end up generating more profit. Why? Because the value of a card does not necessarily dictate its worth.

This brings me to phase 2; the blind auction. This is where player's sell their properties to get profit, however the profits that players can potentially generate will contextually change from round to round and depends on the currency cards drawn. No matter how much you paid for a property card, when you use it, it will only generate income according to the currently drawn currency cards.
This is where players have to start watching what other players will do and know when to push high or low valued property.

If a $15,000 currency card had been drawn and you know another player has the 30 point property card, you know they're going to play it - it guarantees them the $15,000 card, so is it a good time for you to use a high value card? On the other hand, the 2nd highest might be worth it, or it might be not.
Conversely; in some circumstances, the lowest value cards can have great worth, if all the currency cards drawn are high value, it can be a good time to play lower value cards, remember it's all about profit not value.
A 30 point property card that costs $8,000 and nets a $15,000 currency card, generates a profit of $7,000.
If 1 point property that cost 0 because somebody passed and took it for free is used to get a $8,000 property, then that's $8,000 profit!
This example is extreme and doesn't realistically occur too often, but the principal is sound; if demand is high (Multiple high value currency cards are drawn.), then it's time to push your lowest value properties for maximum profit; capitalism at its finest!
Conversely, if there are fewer high value currency cards out there, playing a high value property at the right time will outbid other players and score the maximum profit.

All this makes For Sale a very situational, essentially contextually-driven game about managing the game's inherent unpredictability and adapting when it's called for. It becomes about not only knowing when to play which cards, but also watching what properties other players have and trying to predict their strategies, which can profoundly effect yours.

I have love/hate relationship with auction games, the unpredictably always worries me and For Sale is more unpredictable than most in my opinion.
Even so, it's an enjoyable game and definitely worth a try, if you're a fan of auction games, you should really try it.

11th July 2021

Sunday night is here again and I'm logged into Board Game Arena.

"The only constant is change." - Heraclitus' review of Fluxx from about 500 BC!
He knew what he was talking about when it comes to the first game of the evening.

What's in a game?
​Fluxx comes with a deck of just over 80 cards. which is about 50% bigger than a pack of regular playing cards, there 4 types of card in Fluxx along with the basic rules card:

• Basic rules card: Fluxx begins with this card face-up in the playing area, it displays the game's basic starting rules which are; draw 1, play 1.
• New rule: as the name suggests, when a new rule card is played it will change a rule in some way, this may increase or decrease the draw, play or hand limits, it may even change the win conditions etc.
• Goal: These types of card set a game's victory condition when played. Generally there's only 1 Goal card in play at a time, typically goals involve collecting a set of keepers (More on Keepers below.), e.g., the Death by Chocolate goal with requires the Chocolate and Death keepers to win. There are some goals that require certain keepers not be in be in play!
• Keepers: Keepers are cards that you err.... keep in front of you when played, they're basically nouns.
• Actions: When an action card is played it will trigger an event, this may include making players pick up, discard or swap cards or keepers, it may effect turns etc.

In terms of quality, the cards in Fluxx are comparable to that of a standard set of playing cards, which is acceptable.
Large easy-to-read text is used throughout Fluxx, which is a boon considering the kind of game it is.
Cards in Fluxx, other than the action cards it seems, contain some sort of mostly monochrome line illustrations. The artwork is a bit plain, but doesn't detract from the cards or interfere with the clarity of the text. All cards also have a splash of colour which indicates which of the 4 kinds of card they are.
​Its functional more than pretty, but I don't have a problem with that.

How's it play?
Setup

• Set out the basic rules card face-up in the central playing area. For the start of the game, draw is 1 and play is also 1.
• Shuffle the deck and deal 3 cards out to each player, put the remaining cards into a face-down deck.
• Determine the starting player.

On to play

• Draw: The active player draws cards equal to the draw rule, which at the game start is 1.
• Play: The active player must play cards equal to the current play rule.
  New Rule: When a new rule is played, it takes effect immediately, even affecting the active player! A draw/play change is played on the relevant corner of the basic rules card, replacing any card that's already there, which is discarded. Other rules are played next to the basic rules card, sometimes this will cause other new rule cards to be discarded.
  Goal: When played, goal cards are placed into the central game area, generally there's only ever one goal card in play, a previous goal card is discarded when a new one is played.
  Keeper: When the active player plays a keeper cards, it's placed into their personal area.
  Action: Action cards are one-and-done, when played by the active player, their affect is completed they are put into the discard pile.

That's the basics for Fluxx, bear in mind that all of those rules can and will be varied or changed!

Overall
There's not much I can say about Fluxx, it's clearly a light, fun and unpredictable experience which favours opportunistic play. Players will want to keep a sharp eye out for the changes that occur when the situation inevitably shifts from one rule to another, this is especially true since any player can win at any time.
An easy game to pick up that plays quickly (Probably!), This makes it an excellent filler, the version 5.0 rules state that players can just drop in and out, making it a good opener for a longer session of gaming or a finisher.
If you want a quick diversion, it's hard to go wrong with Fluxx

24th June 2021

It's a Thursday evening and we're round Simon's for a couple of games.

The first game of the night was Paper Tales.
As the name implies, create the tale of building a kingdom and warring with your neighbours over 4 generations or in Paper Tales' terms - 4 rounds!

What's in a game?

• Gameboard: Used to track player victory points and turns.
• Building cards: There are 5 sets of 5 identical cards, a set is given to each player and they represent structures that can be built in a player's kingdom. Each building card is also double-sided, with the other side being an upgraded version of the building.
  Buildings can provide resources or other benefits and are also worth victory points.
• Unit cards: These represent characters that a player may recruit into their kingdom and each one has a deployment cost in gold, they may also have a combat value. Unit cards also ​frequently provide resources or possess a special ability.
• Currency tokens: These card tokens are themed to look like gold pieces.
• Age tokens: Used to track age. More on these card tokens below.

The game also has various score and turn tracking counters.
The quality of the game's components is to the usual standard as you would expect, which is fine.
The building and unit cards feature some bright, colourful and stylised artwork which I found quite charming.

How's it play?
Setup

• Give each player a set of 5 building cards and 3 gold.
• Shuffle the unit cards into a face-down deck.

​That's it for setup, pretty straightforward.

On to play
Paper Tales is played over 4 rounds and there are 6 stages to each round. Other than the drafting in the Recruitment stage, each stage is played simultaneously by players

• Recruitment: 5 unit cards are dealt to all players.
  Then, each player chooses 1 card to keep and passes the remainder to the next player clockwise or anti-clockwise (As determined by the turn.). Each player now chooses a card to keep from 4 cards they just received and passes on the 3 remaining cards.
  This continues until all players have chosen their 5 cards.
• Deployment: Each player now places up to 4 of their 5 cards face-down in a 2x2 grid in front of them. Where they're placed will be very important in the next stage.
  Once this is completed, all players simultaneously reveal their cards and pay their respective deployment costs. Any cards that cannot be bought must be discarded, furthermore any cards above the allowed number must also be discarded.
  Players are additionally allowed to keep 1 card 'in hand', any excess cards must be discarded.
• Wars: Now all the unit cards have been revealed, it's time to war on your neighbours! That's right, in Paper Tales there is.... only war, well sort of.
  Only the 2 cards in the top row of the 2x2 grid can participate in wars, although some cards have the ability fight from the second row. Each player adds up the combat values of all the cards that are participating in wars into a single kingdom value and compares that value to their 2 neighbouring players' kingdom values.
  Players earn 3 victory points for equalling or exceeding the kingdom value of each neighbour; thus a player can earn 0-6 victory points in the wars stage.
  There are no detrimental effects to losing a war.

Overall
​So, Paper Tales is something of a curious beast.
It feels like a deliberately small scale game that merges a little bit of card drafting, a little engine building and card combo mechanics with a little bit of resource management.

The game broadly presents 2 routes to scoring victory points.
Using unit cards with high combat values in war can theoretically score a player 24 victory points and in a game if this scale, that can be a sizable score.
The other way to generate victory points is from the abilities that unit cards may possess, maximising the usage of those abilities can require careful consideration.
​
It's also a somewhat challenging game, not that this is a bad thing. That's because when playing Paper Tales, it never feels like there's enough gold to deploy all the cards you want or enough turns/resources to construct buildings you want. There's 5 buildings to construct and only 4 turns, and that's not including upgrades!
It's worth noting that decisions made in the 1st round may have a significant impact on options and decisions in the final round.
Players are forced to make tricky, meaningful decisions, which is always good.

The aging mechanic is unusual and represents the transitory passage of time and is something players need to watch out for, those unit cards are only around for 2 rounds! However, there are also ways for a player to exploit this mechanic to their benefit with card abilities.
For a game that only gives players 4 or possibly 5 cards to work with, there's quite often a combo that can be created.

Paper Tales has in terms of rounds a quite short playtime, yet somehow feels a little fiddly for a game of this scope and the handful of times we played it, the short playtime made the game feel a little unsatisfactory.
It's all about maximising resources and exploiting card combos, but as I said above, because it's a challenging game, it can be hard to optimise your strategies in early plays, i.e., it has a steep learning curve despite it's apparent simplicity.

That's not to say it's a bad game, because it's not, but it sits towards the heavier end of a what might be considered 'light' or 'filler' game in my opinion, which is considering what I'd consider it to be.
I'd have no reservations about playing it again.
It's worth a look, but I think it needs playing at least a couple times before passing judgement on it.