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.

4th April 2021

It's Sunday and I'm logged on to Board Game Arena for some gaming.

The first game of the day was Dice Forge, a game about errr forging dice in a mythically themed way! Also about the hunt for glory to impress the gods, which can in part be earned by rolling dice, which may not seem a glorious undertaking, but who am I to judge.

Caveat: This game was played digitally, but the physical version had been played previously.

What's in a game?
There are quite a few components to Dice Forge, so let's get started with the most important.

• Dice: In a game with dice in the title, you'd expect the dice to be significant and you'd be right!
  Rolling these dice allows the player to earn gold, glory, red gems and blue gems (Sun and moon gems if you prefer.). But these are no ordinary 6-sided dice, on these dice, all the faces can be removed and replaced with new and improved faces! Allowing player to get more money, gems and glory.
• Dice faces board: The game comes with a set of extra faces that players can use that come with their own board!
• Game board: The main purpose of this board is to manage the game's cards. There are 2 rows of spaces for the 2 different types of cards.
• Cards: There are numerous 'sets' of cards in the game and each set contains 4 identical cards. They come in 3 different types of card, red or blue cards and a smaller number of cards that are red and blue.
  Not all cards are used in every game.
• Player boards: These boards track the game's 3 currencies as well as the player's glory score. There are also 2 spaces for the player's dice.
  Gold has a limit of 12, while red & blue gems have a limit of 6. This can become significant in the game.
• Tokens: Little glass cubes used on player boards and on the game board.
• Miscellaneous: There are various tokens and tiles that have special uses, dependant on player actions. These includes tiles that increase the spaces on a player's board or give them a small sub-game to play and so on.

The most significant component here are the dice. Every die can have the all of its faces removed and replaced with new faces.
This could easily have proven a real problem but it's not the case. These components are very well made. A little tool is used to remove faces and new faces fit firmly into the dice with a satisfying click, none of the process of changing faces feels flimsy or too fiddly and its doesn't seem like these components would break under normal usage. Finally, the dice always roll smoothly.
It's important that this element of the game always functions correctly and it does.
The remainder of the components as would be expected are of a good quality.

The quality of the art direction on the cards is good and in particular the art on the game boards is quite eye catching, depicting the card spaces as islands the player must visit, which fits the game's mythic quest theme suitably well.
Player boards have the space for a single piece of colourful artwork but most of the board is taken up by the various tracks, however, they are bright and colourfully highlighted.
Overall, Dice Forge is very nice aesthetically, it does a lot to present it's theme of mythic forging.

How's it play?
Setup

• Hand each player 2 dice with the starting faces clipped in and a player board along with it's accompanying markers.
• Set out the game board, put all the sets of chosen cards face-up in their allotted spaces on the different 'islands'.
• Set out the available dice faces and other tokens.
• Select a starting player.

On to play
​At the start of every player's turn, all players roll their dice and acquire whatever resources are shown on the result, this can be gold, red or blue gems or glory points, these are immediately added to the player's board, any resources earned that exceed the player's space limit is lost.
Even though all player's have rolled their dice, only the active player can act and they have a couple options.

• Purchase a die face: This is done using gold. Most starting die faces have a starting value of '1' and can be replaced with higher valued faces which will obviously give better results if and when they come up. Some die faces will give you a choice when it is rolled such as 1 glory or 1 red gem. The prices range from 2-12 gold.
  It should be noted that some of the die faces cannot be bought and must be acquired by getting cards (See below.).
• Acquire a card: Red gems can be spent to get red cards and blue for blue. Costs range from 1-6 gems respectively. There will also be a set of cards available that will cost 5 red & 5 blue gems.
  All cards are worth glory points, there are some cards that only give glory points. All of these points are kept secret, none of them are added to the player's glory point score on their player board. Additionally, cards may have extra effects.
  Once only: Acquiring some cards will grant the player a once-only bonus such as getting one of the special die faces.
  Once per turn: These cards have an ongoing action that a player can choose to activate when relevant, an example might be the ability to turn some gold into glory or roll a die and gain it's benefit again.
• Take another action: The active player may spend 2 red gems to take an additional action from the 2 above, this can be done multiple times if the player has the required red gems.

Once a player has completed their turn, the player to the left becomes the active player, all players roll their dice again and new active player begins their turn.
Once all players have had their turn, the round is completed.

Endgame
Once 9 or 10 rounds have been completed - dependant on the number of players, then the game has ended.
Players tally the glory on their player boards with the glory accumulated on the cards they've acquired.
Highest score wins.

Overall
Dice forge is a bit of a strange beast - sort of an deck building game that uses dice in place of cards - mostly!

Building up dice is unsurprisingly at the core of the game and is very important early in the game as they provide the games currencies and it presents players with options and choices to make. Not only do they have to decide which of gold, gems or glory to upgrade each time, they must decide how to distribute those upgrades.
For example; a player could choose to load 1 die with their first 6 upgrades - this guarantees that 1 die will get a good result, but they will only get 1 good result per roll, spreading the upgrades over 2 dice lessens the chances of upgraded results coming up but increases the chances of getting 2 upgraded results. This can be more important than it initially seems because they're 3 different currencies to consider as well as acquiring glory points.
​It could have been a gimmick but instead it's an interesting proposition.

Acquiring cards may give a player several advantages, cards always give players glory points, the most expensive cards normally confer the player a lot of glory points. The bonuses that cards give the player don't seem particularly useful but they tend to tip things in a player's favour in other areas of the game. The are some once-per-turn abilities that can prove useful if acquired early enough in the game.
Of course red gems have an additional use and can be spent to gain additional actions, this can prove very useful considering that usually, players only get 9-10 actions per game.

It's hard to sum up how I feel about Dice Forge, modifying dice forces players into making significant choices, which is a good thing and rolling the the dice was undeniably fun but somehow, it all felt a little unengaging? It's possible that an upgraded die face never gets rolled in a game and maybe that's it, devising a strategy that's at the mercy of luck to succeed will never entirely satisfactory? Or maybe I'm just over thinking it?

It's easy to learn and play Dice Forge, however, I feel that in the long-term, the game is a little shallow and repetitive, the available selection of die faces never changes from game to game and the sets of cards all feel samey and interchangeable.

By no means do I think it's a bad game, if you want a mostly straightforward, light, easy-to-play, undemanding and somewhat luck-based game about optimizing dice rolls, then Dice Forge might be a good choice.

3rd November 2020

It's a Tuesday and I'm not at the Woking Gaming Club, I am however in Woking, in Simon's converted home-office for what would be the last time I play a game with a friend in person before lockdown 2 began.
It was an unusual setup, two us were in Simon's office and Colin was dialling in via Zoom, able to view the game through Simon's phone which was clamped above the table.

​Tonight we played Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, the little sibling of Gloomhaven. Like Gloomhaven, it's a cooperative RPG with a legacy element.

Caveat: This blog post may differ a little from the ones I normally write. When we played the game, a number of the components were not used, instead they were replaced with an app, it also allowed Colin to remotely log into the app and see the same information we did. Additionally, both other players were very familiar with the game.

What's in a game?
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion comes with a lot of components and a lot of cards.

• Player board: The game has 4 player boards, one for each of the different character classes. One side has a backstory for the character and other has a illustration and some information on hit points as well as allocated spaces for item cards, discarded, lost and active cards. The artwork here is good and the board high quality and made of thick card.
• Character decks. Each character has their own deck and there are a lot of cards. Only 10 are ever used in a single scenario, but as a character levels up, they will gain access to a wider selection of cards and more powerful cards too, which can be used to construct the 10 card deck. Each card has 2 actions on it, a top half action and a bottom half action (More on this below.), as well as being  numbered from 1-99.
• Combat decks: Each character also has their own combat deck, which are used to modify attack scores during combat. Generally these range from +2 to -2, there are also x2 cards and a 🚫card (Which basically cancels the attack.). As a character levels up, they will have the opportunity to acquire perks​ that remove negative cards and add positive cards to the deck, thus improving their combat effectiveness. Curse and blessing cards can also be temporarily added to a deck for a single scenario.
• Item cards: Characters can buy item cards, these are single use (Per scenario.), once per turn or continuous use cards. These can represent potions, equipment and magic items. There are limits to the number of item cards a character can have equipped in a scenario.
• Objective cards: At the start of each scenario, each player is given 2 objective cards, they pick 1 and discards the other. If the objective is met during the course of play, it contributes towards acquiring perks.
• City cards: In between scenarios, characters may have a random encounter as determined by these cards. They provide the players with an A or B choice that may aid or hinder the characters in the next scenario.
• Map books: There are two coil-bound books that lie completely flat when opened. They contain all of the maps for the scenarios and can be combined for larger maps. Maps can depict starting points. spawning points, objectives, obstacles and dangerous areas.
• Map tokens: There tokens are placed on to the maps and used to represent details on the maps, such as traps, treasures, damaged areas etc.
• Character models: Each character has a model and an upgraded model (For when they reach level 5.).
• Enemy standees: Monsters and enemies are represented by card standee tokens. There are also white and yellow stands the standees go into, yellow stands are used to represent elite enemies.

Those were pretty much all the components that were used. There are enemy combat decks which are constructed for each scenario that determine how combat goes for enemies as well as how and when any special. There are also tokens used to track health for both characters and enemies. Most of this was handled by the app.

What art there is on the components is good and the components are of a high quality.

How's it play?
The game follows the paradigm of an RPG; there are a series of linked scenarios that form a campaign. As characters progress from scenario to scenario, they accumulate experience points and become stronger. Characters are persistent and they and their progress carry over between scenarios.
There are also legacy elements here, decisions that players make during the game will have some sort of effect later on.

Setup
The setup is fairly quick and simple, mostly because the game uses map books instead of tiles.

• The map book(s) are opened at the relevant pages. Any relevant tokens are placed on to the map.
• Players construct decks for their characters and choose what items to equip. They also alter (If needed.) their combat decks, shuffle it and put it face down.
• Enemies are placed into standees and placed on their starting spots.
• Enemy decks are constructed. The game is designed to scale in difficulty according to how many characters will be participating.

On to playing
In each round, the players will choose 2 cards from their deck to play. Enemy behaviour is dictated by the game.

• Choose cards: Each character can perform 2 actions per round - 1 per card played. They can perform 1 top action and 1 bottom action per round, not 2 top or 2 bottoms actions.
• Determine initiative: All action cards are numbered from 1-99. Players can choose from 1 of the 2 numbers on their chosen cards as their initiative. The lower the number, the faster the character acts. Thus players have some choice of when they act. Enemy initiative is determined by the game.
• Carry out actions: All characters and enemies act in initiative order. When a player acts, the character can do both of their actions in any order the player chooses (Regardless of what card was used for initiative.), moreover players don't have to stick to the actions they wanted to use when they initially chose to the cards they played. That is, if circumstances have changed, players have some flexibility in how they respond. Most actions typically involve attacking either in melee or at range and movement. Each class has its own unique abilities such as healing, pushing enemies away or pulling them in, inflicting conditions such as stunning, poisoning etc. Some actions will fill a room with 1 of 6 types of elemental energy and some actions get bonuses if they consume particular elemental energy. Every card also has a basic default move or attack action they can perform. Finally some particularly powerful cards are lost when used (See below for an explanation.). After the actions are completed, the cards are discarded. Enemy actions are dictated by the game.
• Use item cards: Generally, items, equipment or potions can be used at any time as a free action.
• Rest: When it comes to choosing what cards to play, when a character runs out of action cards (Or only has 1 card left.) then they will need to rest. There are 2 types of rest; short and long rests. For a short rest, the player takes their discard pile back into their hand, shuffles tthem and randomly selects a card which is lost. If a player takes a long rest, they retrieve their discarded cards and choose a card to discard: Additionally they regain 2 hit points, however they also have to skip a turn. Cards that are lost, are permanently removed from play for the remainder of that scenario (They cannot be retrieved during a rest.).
• Combat: A card or action will list its damage and range (If applicable.), this is modified by drawing a card from the relevant combat deck. Mostly this will alter the damage by +2 to -2, occasionally it will be doubled or cancelled. As the campaign progresses, cards will be added to combat decks, these include cards which may inflict conditions or generate elemental energy.

I could go into a lot more detail about how combat and actions work as they are a wide variety different conditions and special moves available. But that's the gist of it.

Endgame
A scenario will end when its win/lose conditions are met.

If the players win the scenario they gain experience points, characters gain experience points according to the scenario. Additionally; certain action cards grant characters experience points when played, these are added up as well.
When a character acquires enough experience points, they will level up and gain whatever benefits it confers.

During the game, enemies that are defeated will drop treasure. If characters collect these treasures, they gain gold after the scenario ends.
Gold can then be spent to acquire more or better item cards.

Next, there is an encounter as determined by a randomly drawn city card.

After this, players are given the choice of what scenario to attempt next. This may involve adding a sticker to the map or some other legacy type action.

Overall
There's a lot to think about here.
There's a lot of components to the game too and it might be a bit fiddly. But it seems to me that most of this occurs during setup. I can't imagined how much setup the full Gloomhaven requires without the map books?

The character-gameplay is actually pretty straightforward, simple to learn and goes smoothly enough.
Enemy behaviour may be a bit trickier and it probably pays to have some one who is familiar with the rules (As we did.) when playing.

The action card mechanic was pretty well implemented, it not only gives players options and a bit of flexibility, but meaningful decisions to make.

The rest mechanic is also a good addition, it forces players to act, be decisive and deters them from trying to play overly safe and spend too many turns resting to regain hit points.
Since a character deck only has 10 cards, it means that a plaery will empty their deck in 5 rounds. Then they have to decide to discard 1 card and miss a turn, or discard one at random and continue, which can be a hard decision.
Now you have 9 cards and only 4 turns before facing the same dilemma. Additionally, some cards are discarded when use and so on.
All of this serves to create sense of urgency, a need to complete the scenario before player decks become too depleted. Players will want to minimise the time they waste carrying out long rests.

Combat is a bit of a mixed bag.
There are a good number of special moves, conditions and effects that play a role in combat. The four different characters can feel different in combat because of it.

I dislike the cancel result on the combat deck that waste an attack, I imagine that if a player has set up a powerful move using a card that gets discarded - only to have that entire attack negated, it must feel gutting.
​
I'm not sure how I feel about using individual decks as a randomizer for combat, I can see the appeal of having a customisable individual randomizer for each player, but it seems like having components for the sake of having components. It works well enough, but I'm sure a similar effect could achieved with a single bunch of dice that are collated for individual rolls.

Gloomhaven/Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion are 2 games that are sort of chasing a board game holy grail. These are games that are trying to an give RPG style gameplay and experience, but without a GM.
It's a tricky goal; too simple and it becomes bland and repetitive, too complex and the game gets bogged down in rules, rules exceptions and components.
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion seems to straddle that line fairly well.

Although as I mentioned above, we did use an app to facilitate play. It did have the advantage of allowing a player to join in a board game where he played over zoom!
Maybe this is the way to go, where an app does the GM heavy lifting, I've seen at least one game that requires an app, no doubt there will be more games that do that.

But this raises the question of legacy, an older game can (And probably will.) be rendered obsolete if the companion app becomes unavailable.

Overall though; I was happy enough to play it and will be continuing with the campaign I joined.

28th January 2020

Tuesday is here and we're at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking to play board games.

Popular opinion states that most restaurant fail in the first year, so running one is hard work (And believe me I know!). What could be harder? Running a whole chain of restaurants! 

That's where 'Food Chain Magnate' comes in. Now you too can know what it's like to run restaurants without all the 'fun' of inconsistent staff, irritating customers, infuriating regulations and interfering local authorities. 

What's in a game?
There's quite a lot to Food Chain Magnate and quite a lot of components too.

• Tiles: Each tile depicts some buildings (Represented by white areas with grid lines.) and roads (Shown in blue.). A number of tiles are placed together to form the main playing area, essentially representing a neighbourhood.
• Meeples: There are 2 types of food (Burgers and pizzas.) and 3 types of drink (Soft drinks, lemonade and beers.), these are represented by very nice wooden meeples.
• Staff cards: All the staff your chains of restaurants could ever need are depicted on these cards. Delivery boys, chefs, managers, HR and err zeppelin pilots? When staff cards are played, they must be placed in a hierarchy. This hierarchy can have up to 3 rows, but in order to have more rows, a player will need more managers to manage the staff in the lower rows.
• Display stand: Amazingly, the game's lid is flipped over and becomes a display stnd for all the staff cards. This is not just a nice touch, it actually saves a lot of room as displaying all the staff cards flat on the playing area would take up so much space.

How's it play?
First; setup.

• The tiles are randomly placed to form the playing area. This will determine the placement of buildings and roads. The number of tiles used depends on the number of players.
• The staff cards are put in their display
• Players are given 3 restaurants and the starting order is determined.
• Each player is given a 'CEO' staff card.

That's pretty much it for setup, let's get to playing.
A round of Food Chain Magnate is played over 7 rounds.

• Staff hierarchy; during this phase, players put down their staff cards (Face down, they are all revealed at the same time.). At the start, players only have a CEO. The CEO can manage 3 other staff (In the row below) and has the ability to hire another member of staff (This new staff card is not immediately put into play.). The CEO can hire staff like chefs etc, but in the long term the player will also need to hire managers, managers will manage other staff (A bit like a CEO.), so if a CEO gets a couple of managers, they can manage 6 staff. Players will also need to hire trainers, when staff are hired, they are at a 'junior' level, training staff make them more effective; managers can manage more people, cooks can cook more, etc. There are a lot of staff that do a lot of different things. Any staff cards that a player has that are not in their hierarchy spend the day at the beach!
• Determine new player order; the order in which players act is recalculated every turn. Basically, the player who has the most 'empty' spaces in their hierarchy gets t choose where in turn order they go (They could choose to go first or last or anywhere in between.). Then the player who has the 2nd highest number of empty spaces goes next etc.
• Actions; in turn order, each player carries out the actions for the staff they have in their hierarchy. Actions include hiring and training. They also include marketing (Marketing creates a demand for food & drink.), getting food & drink, placing new houses (Creating houses creates customers) and gardens (Gardens are attached to houses and increase demand.) and finally placing new restaurants and moving existing ones.
• Supply the demand; players can carry out actions to create a demand for food & drink. Provided a player has generated food & drink, they can try and then supply that demand. How does this work? Well, 'people' from houses will go to the cheapest restaurant selling the food & drink that they want (Players can hire staff to push the price of their food & drink down.), however the further that 'people' have to travel, the more it costs. Every time customers visit a player's restaurant, that player earns money. 
• Wages: Players now have to pay the wages of their staff.
• Marketing campaign: Even though a player may have created a marketing campaign in the 'Actions' phase, the effect of the campaign doesn't kick in until now, so players need to think ahead. There are various different types of campaign that a player can undertake, that have different ranges and areas of effect and can have differing duration. This includes using billboards, mail shots, radio and even planes for advertising.
• Clean up; excess food & drink is discarded and various other end of round actions are completed here. The game includes 'milestones', these are varied objectives to meet, the player who completes a milestone first, gets an in game benefit for it in this phase. If multiple players achieve a milestone in the same phase, then they all get the benefit.

Endgame
​Play continues until all the allotted money from the 'bank' supply is depleted, in which case any remaining money is paid out from the reserve supply.

The player who has accumulated the most money, wins.

Overall
Food Chain Magnate markets itself as a 'heavy' game and it's not kidding.

The aim of the game is to build housing and create marketing campaigns, this generates a demand for whatever particular food & drink the player decides advertise.
Then the player produces the relevant food & drink to fill that demand, this equals profit.

Except it's not so simple.

There is a lot to think here and all of it is important.

How a player structures their company is crucial.  All of the other actions options will become avaialable based on the staff cards that you recruit and play.
A lot to think about.

You need food? Pizza chefs will produce pizza and burger chefs will produce burgers.
You want drinks? You need an errand boy to go and collect them.
Want to be more competitively priced? Get a pricing manager.
Need an advertising campaign. You'll have to get marketing staff.
Want to place more housing? A business developer is what you need.
Your staff need training to be more effective? Trainers are what you need.
You got too many staff? Get more managers!
Need to recruit people even quicker? Recruiters are what's needed.

And so on.

Marketing needs to be targeted. There are different types of marketing that target a player's audience at different 'ranges' and they tend to be of varying length. Players will need to optimise creating their demand.
Advertising can have a real sting in the tail. Because other players can benefit from it too. If one player creates a demand for burgers and another player then opens a burger joint closer to the housing that's been targeted, then the customers will go there instead (Customers have absolutely no loyalty!). Or if another player slashes the price of their burgers, then other restaurants will be ignored.
Sly players will definitely try and exploit other player's marketing.

This brings me to 'pricing'. This is a great game mechanic. Instinctively, players will want to increase prices to generate more revenue. But a player really needs to undercut their opponents, because less profit is better than no profit. Pricing is a real race to the bottom and forces players to make horrible choices - always a good thing!

Players will also need to think about food & drink production, as more and more demand appears, players will need to get better and better at production to meet that demand. Also, as demands get more complex, fulfilling those demands gets equally as complex (A house's demands cannot be only partially fulfilled and must be fully met.).

And don't forget milestones, the benefits they can confer can be very important.

When we played this game, the owner explained to us that he thinks at the start there's a couple of different routes to follow for 'opening moves' that there are 'no brainer' moves (These are to do with milestones.). It seems some of the milestones can be completed in the first couple of turns and only the first player(s) that complete them get the benefit, not following the 'no brainer' moves means a player can lose out on those benefits.

This implies that early moves (Or mistakes really!) can affect the entire game.
I'm not sure how I feel about this? I don't like 'no brainers', because what they do is remove choice from a game. On the other hand, maybe it was overstated. I guess the game would need to be played multiple times to see if this is the case

All of this contributes to make Food Chain Magnate a deep game that requires a lot of forethought and strategy. There is no luck or chance in this game. If you like genuinely heavy games, this may interest you.

For me though, I found it to be a little bit difficult to play the game on all the levels it required and mostly ignored the marketing side. It felt a strangely unengaging game, perhaps it was the theme?

7th January 2020

It's the first Tuesday of the year and we're NOT at 'The Sovereigns' (Which is closed for refitting.), instead we're at 'The Wheatsheaf' in Woking for board gaming.

Tonight, we're playing Taverns of Tief....err?
Taverns of Tiefe... err?
It's a game where you run a pub!

So this game tries it's best squeeze in as many game mechanics as it can.
Deck building - yep. Card drafting - yep. Dice drafting - yep. Dice placement - yep. Resource management - yep. Hidden Role - y... wait no, that's about the only thing missing!

What's in a game?
So Taverns of Tiefenthal comes with some optional extras or expansions, apparently we used all of them in the game we played. So there's a lot of components.

• Monastery board: This is a small central board that serves a couple of purposes. It displays what bonus the players receive in each round. There is also a track that players can move their marker round to get bonuses.
• Player tavern board: Each player has their own tavern, therefore each player has their own tavern board. The tavern board looks like a giant misshapen jigsaw puzzle piece. Each tavern board has extra 'bits' that are attached to it, during play they can be upgraded and are flipped to the other side when this is done.
• Tavern attachments: These tiles are the 'bits' that are added to each tavern: Tables, beer storage, beer supplier, barrel, host/reputation, safe, dishwasher, waitress, cash box and monk. 10 in all and all double sided. These will be explained below.
• Entertainer tiles: Periodically throughout the game, entertainers will arrive in your tavern. If you can give them 'schnapps', they will give you a bonus or ability of some kind. These tiles are double sided, each side confers a different bonus.
• Schnapps tokens: Used to ply entertainers.
• Guestbook board: This tile is a way to earn bonuses when it is filled with signatures.
• Signature tiles: Used to fill your guestbook.
• Deck of guest cards: Guest cards are bought with beer! During the game they will be the 'regular' visitors to that player's tavern. When they appear, they can earn the player money.
• Deck of staff cards: These are bought with money. Staff gives the player extra or bonus actions.
• Dice: Normal 6 sided dice. Lots of white dice and 4 sets of dice in player colours, 1 set for each player.
• Beer mats: These little coasters essentially unnecessary, but are used to hold dice.
• Beer mug marker: This is the first player marker.

They are the most important components of the game.
Many of the game's components are made of nice and thick card stock, including the beer mats. The artwork is quite nice and colour and there's some nice detail on the tavern board and tiles.

How's it play?​
We begin with setup.

• Each player takes a tavern board and the 10 other bits that go with it and attaches them to the board with standard side up.
• Each player is given a starting deck of 10 cards, consisting of 7 guests and 3 staff cards, they are shuffled and placed down as a player draw deck.
• Each player takes the 4 dice in their colour, a beer mat then also takes and places 4 white dice on the mat.
• Take all the guest cards that cost 3 'beer' and place them in a face up stack. The remaining guest cards are shuffled and placed down as the guest deck. Deal 4 cards from this deck and place them face up in a line next to the 3 cost cards. Finally place the stack of 'noble' guests face up at the end of the line.
• All staff cards should be sorted into their different types and placed face up in individual stacks in ascending order of cost.

That covers most of the setup.
Now to explain what does what.
Let's start with the tavern board. Many of the abilities on the board are activated by placing dice of a specific value on them.

• Tables; when guests are dealt from a player's deck, they are placed on the tables spaces. Players start with 3 table spaces. This can be upgraded to 4.
• Beer storage; during their turn a player will most likely generate beer. Any beer that is not spent can be stored on this tile. The beer storage holds 2 beer, this can be upgraded to 5.
• Beer supplier; Any dice which are showing a 1 or a 6 can be placed on this tile to generate beer, each die placed here will generate a beer. When upgraded, each die will generate 2 beer.
• Barrel; a die showing any number can be placed here to generate 1 beer. Unlike the beer supplier, only 1 dice can be placed here. When upgraded, it will produce 2 beer.
• Host/reputation; we used the 'reputation' side of this tile. It has a reputation track, when its marker moves round the track it will earn the player various benefits. When the marker reaches the end of the track, it earns a noble guest card and starts round the track again.
• Safe; any unspent money goes here. It stores 2 currency and can be upgraded to store 5.
• Dishwasher; the dishwasher tile does nothing until it is upgraded. When upgraded, it provides the player with a permanent dishwasher (See below for an explanation of what a dishwasher does.).
• Waitress; this tiles too does nothing until upgraded, upon which it provides the player with a permanent waitress.
• Cash box; a single die showing any number can be placed here to earn the player 1 currency, the upgraded version earns 3.
• Monk; any dice showing a 5 here will advance the players marker 1 space along the monastery track. The upgraded version moves the marker along 2 spaces per 5 placed here.

​Talking of the monastery board. It has several functions.

• Turn order; the game is played over 8 rounds and something a little different happens every round, which is all tracked on this board.
• Monastery track: as the player's marker moves round here, they will earn various bonuses.
• Recruit nobles; this table on the monastery board shows the cost (In beer) to recruit nobles.

Now lets go on to what the cards do. Starting with staff cards.

• Beer merchant; when this card is played, it gives the player an extra beer.
• Dishwasher; each dishwasher card played gives the player the ability to increase the result on a single die by 1. Multiple dishwashers allow multiple dice to be increased or 1 die to be increased multiple times. Dice cannot be lowered this way.
• Waitress; each waitress card that is played allows the player to roll an extra die (From their coloured dice.).
• Table; each table card played, grants the player an extra spot to put a guest card.
• Beer supplier; these are different to merchant. They are placed next to the beer supplier tile. Each die used with the beer supplier tile provides 1 extra beer per beer supplier card played.

Now on to guest cards.
Guest cards are acquired by spending beer.

• Guests; guests are recruited by spending beer! When they are placed on your tables, they become extra spots on to which a die may be placed to earn currency. Generally the die which can be placed on a guest is the same as the currency earned. Thus if a guest requires a die showing a 3, it will earn 3 currency. Guests also earn victory points at the end of the game. Some guests also provide a once-only bonus when recruited.

• Noble guests; noble guests always require a 2 to activate and always provide 2 currency. In terms of generating currency, they are amongst the worst guests (I guess it costs so much to please them, players make little profit!), but if more than one noble appears at the same time, then they all go on the same single table and don't take up too much room (They don't like to mingle with the 'rabble' it seems?). The advantage of nobles is that they're worth 10 victory points at the end of the game, which is a lot more than other guests.

​
So at last, finally, we get to how the game plays.
Each round is player over several phases.

• Round set; at the start of each of the 8 rounds, every player will be given a choice of gaining 1 of 2 special actions.
• Deal cards; each player deals cards from their own deck. Staff cards go in specific spots around the tavern board. Guest cards go on to the table spaces. Thus if a player has more table spaces, not only can they accommodate more guests, they have a better chance of drawing more staff cards as well. When all the available tables are filled, the player stops dealing cards.
• Bonus dice: If a player drew and placed any waitress cards in the previous phase (Or they have upgraded their tavern to have a permanent waitress.), they gain a number of bonus dice (In their colour.) equal to the waitresses (Maximum of 3.). These dice are immediately rolled and placed to one side.
• Roll dice; all players roll their 4 white dice and place them on their beer mat. Then in turn order, starting with the current first player, each player removes 1 die and places to to one side. Once all players have removed a die, each player passes the beer mat with the player to their left. Again, starting with the first player, each player removes another die passes the beer mat with the remaining dice to the left. Players continue taking dice and passing beer mats until all dice are gone.
• Place dice; now that players have all their dice, in this phase they choose where to place them. As explained above, dice can be placed on various parts of a tavern board or guest cards in order to activate those actions - provided the number match of course.
• Resolve actions; in turn order, each player resolves their actions, usually this involves generating beer and currency and using them to buy guest and staff cards. Unlike most deck builder games, when new cards are bought they go on top of the player's deck, so they will be played in the next round. Players can also upgrade their tavern, which costs currency. Every time a tile is upgraded, the player gains a noble - which like with other cards, goes on top off their current deck.
• At the end of a turn, all cards that were played (Both guest and staff cards.) are placed into the discard pile and play continues to the next round with a new first player.

That's more or less it for how the game plays.

Endgame
Play continues for 8 rounds. 

Victory points are scored from the cards that players bought
​ Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Taverns of Tiefenthal requires a lot of explanation (As you can see above), but in play is actually quite straightforward.
It's more of a game about optimizing strategies than complex rules.

The game gives you a lot of choices and options. Occasionally these will be meaningless decisions because of how the dice fall, but most of the time you'll have to choose between different actions.
A player will nearly always have more options available than actions to perform them.
​This is makes a good game in my opinion.

There's nothing particularly unique about the game, other than how it blends certain game mechanics together to emulate it's subject quite well. The game's presentation is also very good with well made components and colourful and well produced art.

The game's only drawback is its setup time, there's quite a lot to do. But I think the payoff is worth it as I enjoyed it.

17th November 2019

Sunday lunch time has rolled around and we're at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking. The 50 Fathoms hiatus continues.

Today we played 'Concordia'

Concordia is a resource gathering and economic expansion game set in the Roman era Mediterranean and surrounding areas.
Ah, where would 'euro style' games be without the Roman era Mediterranean? Probably set even more in Renaissance Europe!

What's in a game?
Concordia has quite a lot of components.

• Game board: The main game board is actually double-sided, one side depicts a map of the Mediterranean and surrounding regions, the other is of the Italy peninsula. Regardless of which side is used, they both contain the same features. There are about a dozen different provincial regions and each province contains 2 or 3 cities, each city is labelled A, B, C or D. The map also shows roads and sea-routes between cities. The board also features a status box for each province. There's a card track for 'personality' cards and finally a scoring track.
• City tokens: On one side of these tiles it shows one of the games 5 different resources. On the other side it is labelled A, B, C or D.
• Bonus markers: These are used in conjunction with the provincial status boxes. One side has a resource on it and the other shows some currency.
• Personality cards: There a 5 different decks of personality cards.
• Starter decks: There are identical 'starter' decks for each player.
• Personal board: Each player is given their own board that represents their storehouses. Each personal board has 12 spaces. All resources and meeples must be stored on the player's storehouse.
• Meeples: Lots of meeples, each player has 6 of them! 3 are 'person' meeples and the other 3 are 'ship' meeples.
• Houses: Each player has 15 house tokens.
• Resources: Concordia has 5 different types of resource represented by tokens. In order of lowest value to highest; brick, food, tool, wine and cloth.
• Coins: The game's currency.

Concordia has its fair share of its components and their fairly good quality too. 

It's worth mentioning the games resource tokens, normally it would be typical for the components to be coloured wooden blocks. Not so in Concordia, the tokens are shaped like the resource they represent. Thus the brick tokens look like clay bricks, wine tokens look like wine jugs and so on. It's a nice touch.

Hows it play?
Concordia has a fairly detailed setup. So, here we go.

• After deciding which side of the board to use, turn all the city tokens to the 'letter' side and shuffle them. Then put the 'A' tokens on the 'A' cities, 'B' tokens on the 'B' cities and so on. Turn over all the tokens and it will which resource all the cities will produce.
• Now put a bonus marker in each province's status box. The type of resource that should be put into a province box is the same as the highest value resource produced in any city in that particular province. All bonus markers are initially placed with the resource side-up.
• Shuffle all 5 individual personality decks. Then put them together to create 1 large deck, with the '1' deck at the top and the '5' deck at the bottom. Then draw personality cards and place them on all the spaces on the card track.
• Give each player a storehouse board, 15 houses and 6 meeples in their colour. Each player should place 1 person and 1 ship on the starter city. The remaining 4 meeples go into their storehouse, each meeple takes up 1 space in the storehouse.
• Each player is given some starting currency and resources, the resources must go on to the storehouse board.
• Finally, give a starting deck to each player. Players keep their entire deck in their hand at all times, when cards are played, they go into a discard pile.

So now we can go on to the actual game play.

The very basics of Concordia are simple: The active player plays a card from their hand carries out the action(s) listed on it.
Personality cards can be acquired which perform other actions or are better versions of the starter cards.
The starter cards are: 

• Architect: Playing the Architect card allows the active player to move their colonists (Meeples). The amount of spaces that meeples can be moved is equal to the number of meeples the active player has on the board (At the start a player will have 2 moves.), This can be split amongst the players meeples as they see fit. Movement is a little unusual in Concordia. Obviously 'person' meeples travel by road and 'ship' meeples by sea. But when meeples move they don't move from city to city, they stop on the route between 2 cities instead. A meeple cannot occupy the same space as another meeple. Once the active player has finished moving their meeples, they can build a house on any city that is adjacent to any road/sea route that the active player has a meeple positioned on. Building a house costs currency and resources (The resources required depend upon what the city produces.). Building a house on a city that already has another player's house on it is possible, but costs more currency (But not more resources.).
• Diplomat: Playing the Diplomat allows the active player to copy the topmost card in any other player's discard pile and thus use it's abilities.
• Mercator: Playing the Mercator allows the active player to take 3 currency from the bank. The active player can also perform exactly 2 trades. Each trade allows the active player to buy/sell any amount of a single resource provided they have enough currency/storehouse space to manage it.
• Prefect: Every player starts with 2 of these cards. This card gives the active player the choice to perform one of two different but related actions. The first action is to collect resources. The active player chooses a province and receives the resource displayed on the bonus marker in the province's status box, additionally every player who has a house on a city in the chosen region will receive a resource of the type that the city produces. Then the bonus marker is turned over to the side that shows currency. The second action is to collect currency equal to what is shown on all the 'flipped' bonus markers. When this action is chosen, all bonus markers are put on to their 'resource side.
• Senator: The Senator card allows the active player to buy up to 2 cards from the personality card track. Obviously there is a cost, this is determined from 2 sources, first the cost on the card and secondly the cost on the card track, cards on the left are cheaper than those on the right. When cards are bought, the remaining cards to the right are slid left to fill the gap and new cards are added to spaces on the right. This is a 'conveyor belt' mechanic seen in several other games.
• Tribune: When played, the Tribune card does 3 actions. It allows the active player to take their discard pile and return it to their hand. Secondly, if the active player is retrieving more than 3 cards from the discard pile, they acquire currency. Thirdly, the player can choose to add a new person or ship meeple to the board, after paying the resource cost.

Additional cards
There are more types of cards available in the personality deck. There are specialist cards for each type of resource that allows the player possibly gain extra resources. There are also improved versions of starter cards and cards that make certain actions easier to perform.

There are some more rules, but this is the gist of it

Endgame
There are 2 ways to trigger the endgame. If all the personality cards are bought or if a player builds or their houses. Then the final round is completed.

Scoring is quite detailed and involved, in fact almost convoluted.
All cards are attributed to 1 of 6 Roman gods such as Saturn, Jupiter, Mars etc.
Each 'god' is scored differently: Mars for example, will score a player 2 victory points per meeple they have on the board per Mars card​.

All victory points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Here's the thing, I quite like Concordia, but I can't put my finger on exactly why?

Maybe it's because it's a game about expansion and empire building, but a mercantile empire and not a military one. There is no direct conflict and the worse you can do to another player is to buy a personality card they want, or maybe block a route they want to use. It's all feels very 'eurogame'.

Or maybe it's the deck building element. I feel there's something engrossing about having limited actions and needing to optimise strategies accordingly.
Thinking about it, if there was too much direct competition between players, the deck building and planning wouldn't work so well within the game.

Finally, I thought I would mention the scoring. Because there's 6 different ways to score, it's almost as if you don't need to think about the scoring and can just concentrate on building up your trade empire and let the points take care of themselves.

But anyway, all in all, Concordia is a game I enjoy playing.

6th April 2019

It's a Saturday evening, so it's an evening of gaming at Matakishi's.

And on this particular evening we played Trains: Rising Sun.

Trains: Rising Sun combines 3 key elements to make it what is is:

• Board gaming.
• Deck building.
• Trains (you may have got this bit from the imaginative name' Trains'). You know if a game-mechanic has become big when a 'rail-laying, train-running' game uses that mechanic. Which in this case combines deck building with trains, toot toot!

This game is a expansion/standard alone game (I guess that's where the imaginative name 'Rising Sun' comes from).

What's in a game?
Trains: Rising Sun uses a game board which depicts a map, a map that is overlaid with hexes (familiar territory for the players' of many, many train games) and you can build cities, connect rail links etc. Definitely familiar territory!

However the actions you take on the board are dictated by the cards you play from your hand of cards.

The Cards
Each player begins the game with a deck of 10 cards, 7 of which generate currency and 3 of which 'do things'. Each player draws 5 cards from their deck into their hand. So far so 'Dominion'!

Currency cards generate money that allow you to buy cards from a selection of cards to add to your discard pile. These cards give you extra abilities, more revenue etc.

When your draw deck runs out, your discard pile is shuffled into a draw deck, allowing you to draw and use the newly acquired cards.

Other cards such as 'Lay Rails' allows the player to errr lay rails! However it costs to lay rails. So your currency cards are also required to build railways. This is great as it forces you to make choices. 'Do I want to make use of the lay rails in my hand right now and miss out on that card I want?' For example.

There's an additional mechanic in this game called 'Waste'. Certain actions and cards generate waste. Each time waste is generated by a player, they take a 'Waste' card from the relevant stack and add it to your discard pile. Sooner or later you'll start drawing waste cards into your hand. What do waste cards do for you? As you probably surmised, they do nothing for you and clog up space in your hand and just get in the way.
There are various cards and actions that allow you to take waste cards out of your deck and return them to their stack.
It's a clever little mechanic that adds an extra layer of consideration when choosing your actions.

The Board
The board is double sided and features different terrain. It has hexes, rail links at the edges, cities, rivers etc. It's all very familiar. You use the board to build and connect cities to score points according to the cards that you play.

That's the rules  in a nutshell.

This hybridization of 2 different game styles works perfectly well. Without going into specifics about the rules, there's little more to write about the game.

Tuesday 8th January 2019; the first evening back at the 'Woking Board Game Club' at 'The Sovereigns' pub.

Several games were played during the evening, including much talked about Wingspan. However we played Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle.

This is a co-operative deck builder in the vein of Dominion.
You start with a deck of 10 cards and use your turns to buy more cards to make your deck stronger.
The objective is to defeat various villainous characters such as Draco Malfoy before certain conditions are met and the game is lost.

Mechanically the game is quite solid - if a little shallow. The game has 7 'chapters' of increasing difficulty (and also match the number number of books).
We played level 2. Twice we collectively got our arses kicked, but on the 3rd try we romped to victory. I think we got better at the game, but also that luck (or bad luck in our cases) plays a big part too. But to be fair, that's generally always the case with co-operative games.

I'm not a particular fan of Harry Potter, but of the game had a slight increase in complexity, I'd definitely be interested in it.