28th January 2023

Wogglecon continued with Dominion the deck building game. A game I've played a few times in the past but not since starting this blog.

Rule your kingdom in Dominion by recruiting bureaucrats, moneylenders and spies and others or creating festivals, gardens and more.

How's it play?
Setup

• Base cards:
  Treasure cards: Put out the treasure cards face-up in their 3 denominations.
  Victory cards: Next put out the victory card face-up in their separate decks, the number of cards in each deck will be determined by the player count.
  Trash card: Put the trash card into the central playing area.
• Kingdom cards: Each game of Dominion uses 10 sets of the kingdom cards.
  The rules provide a number of predetermined thematic sets of kingdom cards which can be used.
  Alternatively, the randomiser deck can be shuffled info a face-down deck and 10 cards drawn from it, these will be the 10 sets used in the game.
  Finally, players can collectively choose 10 sets to use if they wish.
  Generally 10 cards from each set are used, but the number of victory cards uses will depend on player count.
• Player cards: Each player takes 7 1 gold treasure cards and 3 1VP victory cards, shuffles them into a face down deck and draws 5 cards for their starting hand.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
Dominion uses a traditional turn order with the active player completing their turn before play moves on the player on their left.

A turn in Dominion is easy as A, B, C - quite literally too. The phases are Action, Buy and Clean up!

• Action: The player player may take 1 action, that is play an action card from their hand. Action cards have a wide variety of uses and can provide gold, more cards and so on to the active player, too many to be described here.
  It should be noted that even if the active player has 2 action cards in their hand, they still only get to perform 1 action unless the action card they play grants them 1 or more extra actions!
  Treasure cards do not count as an action so can be played as needed.
  Victory point cards cannot be played as they have no function other than to score VPs at the game end and clutter up a players hand during play.
• Buy: Once the active player has perform their action(s), they can buy 1 card from the central area using treasure cards or coins on action cards.
  Again, unless an action card that has been played grants the active player more 'buys', they can only buy 1 card.
  Any card bought, goes directly into the active player's discard pile.
• Clean up: Cards that have been played are not immediately put into the active player's discard pile instead they are considered still 'in play' even if they've been resolved until this phase occurs. 
  During this phase, the active player discards all cards played and also all cards still in hand which were not or could not be played. Then the active player draws a new hand of 5 cards.
  Next player: Play then progresses to the next player.

Additional rules: There are a couple of extra rules that need explanation.

• Reaction: Card with a 'Reaction' descriptor can be used during another player's turn. If an opponent plays an attack card, any player who has a reaction card in their hand may reveal it to counter the attack.
  Cards revealed this way are not discarded and are considered not to have been played.
• Reshuffle: If any time a player needs to draw cards but does not have enough or any cards in their deck to do so, then they draw whatever they can and shuffle their discard pile into a new draw deck and draw whatever cards they still need to draw.
  Remember, if the active player has to shuffle a new draw deck from their discard pile in the middle of their turn, any cards in play or in hand are considered still in play and not part of the discard pile.

Endgame
Play continues until one of the following 2 criteria are met.

When the pile of Province (6VP) victory cards has been emptied.
OR
Any 3 of the 10 stacks of cards in the central supply have been emptied.

In either case, when the turn of the player who triggered the endgame is over, the game immediately ends and goes to scoring.
Players then calculate their scores from all victory cards they have acquires.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Dominion has been around for a few years and one I've played in the past but only finally have gotten to blogging about it.

It is the deck builder game, the one that started it all and to honest, it pretty much got everything right the first time.

The only quibble I could argue is that the rules regarding only 1 action and 1 buy per turn unless other cards increase them, forcing players to track their card plays throughout their turn are little fiddly but this is minor and doesn't effect the game's quality.

Otherwise Dominion provides players pretty much everything they could want from a deck builder. 
It provides players with the classic early/late game challenge of creating their engine in the early stage and then exploiting that engine to acquire VPs in the late stage.
Players will look to optimise their card actions, maximise the efficiency of their decks and find effective combos and exploits. This is especially true in Dominion since, victory cards actively hinder player and acquiring them too early can slow a player's deck down.
​Dominion provides a number of predetermined setups that can be used but also has provision for randomising setup, which can give player some unusual, interesting and challenging setups.
It's also worth adding that there's loads of expansions for Dominion which increase its replayability and longevity.

If you like deck builders and for some reason you've not played Dominion, then you should definitely play this. Dominion is one of the best examples of it's genre. In fact, unless you actively hate deck builders, then this is one to try regardless. It's a classic for a reason.

19th November 2022

It's a Saturday morning and we're at Bisley for Wogglecon 5 'It's a alive!' - a day of gaming goodness and a bit of charity.

Have you ever fancied travelling South American highlands with nothing but a cart of goods to keep you company, going from place to place, hunting for fish, chopping down trees, trading and so forth. If the answer is yes, then maybe Altiplano is the game for you.

How's it play?
Setup

• Game area: Set the central playing area up.
  • Location boards: Randomly arrange the 7 location tiles in a ring shape.
    • Tokens: Sort all the tokens as per player count and add them to their pertinent location tiles. Only food and money do not go on to a location tile.
    • Cards: Add the boat, house and order cards face-up to their pertinent location tiles.
  • Extension strip: Put the extension strip in the centre of the ring.
    • Extension tiles: First sort the extension tiles as per player count, then sort them by type (A, B, C and D.) and shuffle each type into face-down stacks. Finally arrange them into a single face-down stack, with the A stack at the top, going down to the D stack at the bottom.
    • Place extension tiles: Draw and place 5 tiles from the stack along the 5 spaces on the edge of the extension strip.
• Players: Give each player an action board, warehouse board and bag.
  • Meeples: Give each player the meeple, cube and container in their colour. Each player's cube should go on the '0' space on the road location.
  • Role tile: Randomly assign a role tile to each player. The tile should be placed adjacent its location on the player's action board.
    Each player should then take their starting resources as indicated on the tile, goods and food should be placed them into their bag. Money should be put to the side in a personal supply.
    Finally each player should take a brown cart cube from the village location and place it in the topmost space in the movement track on their action board.
• First player: Determine a starting player then each player places their meeple on any one of the 7 location tiles. Now we're ready to play.

On to play
In Altiplano players will be making plans to travel around the location tiles and use their goods to carry out the actions specific to those locations.
This is done over 4 phases:

• Drawing phase: This phase is carried simultaneously with all players drawing tokens from their bag and placing them on their planning spaces.
  At the start of the game, players can only use 4 planning spaces, thus only draw 4 tokens from their bag. However, by moving their cube up the road location, players will unlock more planning spaces which mean they can draw and use more goods tokens.
  Empty bag: If at any time a player needs to draw 1 or more tokens from their bag and it's empty, then they tip the contents of their container into the bag, give it a good shake and continue drawing.
  Taking tokens back: Obviously, this does not apply during the first round but before drawing tokens, a player can choose to take tokens they have previously placed on action spaces but not resolved off of those action spaces. However, these tokens must be placed on planning spaces which consequently lessen the number of tokens they can draw. Money retrieved in this manner is returned to the player's personal play.
• Planning phase: This phase is also performed simultaneously. In this phase players take goods from their planning spaces (Or money from their personal supply.) and place them on action spaces on the board. This includes the movement track and also extension tiles a player may have acquired.
  All actions require specific goods to activate them.
  Most locations have 1 or 2 spaces, except the village which has 3. Some actions require 1 good (And thus may be performed more than once.) while many actions require 2 goods.
  A player may choose not to place all the goods on their action spaces but this would mean they draw less tokens in the following round.
  When placing goods and money, players do not need to complete the action to place them. If an action requires 2 tokens, they can place just one of them even if it won't complete the action. It's a useful way to keep planning spaces free.
• Action phase: This phase represents the bulk of the game's activities and thus has many elements.
  • Turns: Unlike the previous 2 phases, starting with the current first player, actions are carried out in turn order one action at a time. The active player resolves one action, then play progresses to the next player.
    Passing: If a player cannot complete an action, they must pass. Additionally, a player may choose to pass even if they could complete an action. In either case, when a player passes, they are no longer involved in the action phase for the current round.
  • Movement: Movement does not count as an action but can be performed as part of an action.
    Timing: Movement may be performed before or after an action.
    Moving: Each player starts the game with 1 cart cube. A player can slide it to the 'used' side on their movement track to move their meeple up to 3 location either way around the circle of locations.
    Additional movement If a player has put food on to other movement track spaces, they may 'spend' it to move during another action. However they can only move 1 location unless they have acquired additional carts, in which case they can move 3 locations.
  • Actions: There are lot of actions a player can perform and several rules associated with them.
    Location: A player's meeple must be at the action's location in order to perform that action, this includes extension and role tiles.
    Paying tokens: Actions require players to pay the required tokens to resolve them. Other than money, anytime a token is 'spent' the token(s) are not actually spent instead they are put into the player's container and will ultimately end up going back into the player's bag. Only money is actually spent and returned to the central supply.
    Acquiring goods: When acquired, most goods tokens immediately go into a player's container. The exceptions are money which goes into the player's personal supply and corn, which is explained below.
  • Resolving actions: Each location has one or more actions which can be resolved by players.
    • Farm: cloth, food and wool can be acquired here.
    • Forest: cloth, food, glass and wood can be acquired here
    • Harbor: Fish and food can be acquired.
      Boat cards can also be acquired here which allow players to add tokens to their container. A player may choose any available boat card.
    • Market: The market has several actions.
      Sell goods: Some goods can be sold for 1-3 coins each, as with all actions, goods that are sold are actually put into the player's container.
      Buy extension: A player can purchase 1 extension tile per round. The total cost is the cost on the tile plus the cost from it's position on the extension strip. If a extension is bought, it is not replaced until the last phase.
      Order cards: These can be bought here too, which allows the player to choose any available order card.. A player may only have 1 unfulfilled order card at a time.
      Deliver goods: This action allows the player to move goods placed here on to an order card. When a order is completed, it will earn the controlling player VPs during the endgame, generally it will also give the player a corn token, more on these later. 
    • Mine: Silver and stone can be acquired here.
    • Road: Completing the road action may have 1 of 2 effects. Either it unlocks a planning space for a player or it provides them with a corn token, again, more on corn below.
    • Village: The village also has several types of action.
      Buy cart: Players can buy a cart and place it on an available space on their movement track.
      Buy house card: A player can buy any available house card. House cards increase the VP value of the displayed good during the endgame.
      Store goods: This action allows the player to move goods off of the action spaces and into their warehouse. There are however, several restrictions here.
      • No food: Food tokens cannot be placed into the warehouse.
        Same goods: A row can only have 1 type of good in it. Thus if the 1st good in a row is a fish token, all the subsequent tokens in that row must be fish tokens. Additionally, there can only be 1 incomplete per type of good. A row of fish must be completed before a second row can be started.
        Bottom-to-top: When a good is placed in the warehouse, it must be in the lowest available space, either in a new row or an existing one.
        Left-to-right: A good must also be placed into the leftmost open space in the row it is placed into. A row is considered complete when the rightmost space has been filled.
      • Corn: There are several rules regarding corn.
        Store immediately: Regardless of how a player gains a corn token, when they gain it, it must immediately be stored in the warehouse.
        Wildcard: Corn can be used as any type of good for a row that has already been started. E.g., if a player has started a row of fish, it can be added to that row and even complete it.
        If there is no incomplete row to add the corn token to, then it starts it's own row!
        Corn rows takes priority: When storing corn, if there is a row that was started with corn, then corn tokens must go into that row before any other until it's completed!
• End of round phase: Once all players have passed, the game goes to end of round and several events occur.
  New first player: The first player marker is passed on to the player on the left who will be the new first player.
  Reset carts: All carts are put back to their initial positions.
  Manage extension strip: If any extension tiles we bought during the action phase, remaining tiles are slid downwards to fill the gaps and new tiles are added to the gaps now at the top.
  If no extension tiles were brought during the action phase, the bottommost extension tile is discarded, the other tiles are slid down and a new tile is added to the top.
  Now a new round begins with the first phase.

​Endgame
Play continues until one of the following 2 criteria are met.
Any one location becomes fully emptied of all tokens, cards, etc.
Or, a space along the extension strip cannot be filled, i.e., the extension tiles supply has emptied.
In either instance, the current round is completed and 1 further round is played, then the game goes to scoring.

VPs will come from a variety of sources.

• Goods tokens: Tokens can score 0-4 VPs each depending on the type. Tokens on a player's action board, warehouse, in their bag and container all count.
  Tokens on order cards are not counted.
• Warehouse: Each completed row in a player's warehouse will score it's associated VPs.
• Cards: Boat and house cards earn their respective VPs. Completed order cards also earn their VPs.
• Bonus VPs: If a player has house cards, they will earn bonus VPs for the corresponding goods.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
As you can see from the write up so far, there's quite a lot going on in Altiplano and a lot for players to think about.

There's a recognisable quandary going on with the bag building mechanic.
Players will naturally be looking to acquire tokens to carry out actions but invariably there will be times they end up getting pulled from the bag when they're not needed and unneeded tokens can 'water down' a player's strategies.
Unwanted tokens can of course be left on planning spaces but most players will find that irritatingly suboptimal. Alternatively, they can placed on spaces for action that a player does not immediately want to perform but they will eventually end up coming back  to again though. Another option albeit fairly situational, is to put them on to order cards, although removes the goods from the remainder of the game.
Finally, they can be put into the warehouse, this means those tokens have greater scoring opportunities but again, permanently removes them from a player's container/bag which may or may not be a good thing. layers will have judge the merits of storing tokens contextually - except when dealing with glass tokens. The thing with glass tokens is that they don't produce any other type of token, all they do is produce the most VPs per token, storing them in the warehouse where they contribute to more VPs and declutter a player's bag is a no-brainer and usually I consider no-brainers a bad thing for a board game but I feel this is a deliberate decision on the part of the game - more on that below.

If you've been paying attention (And I'm sure you have!) you will also have noticed that several goods such as a cacao, alpacas and even something that seems that it should be common such as fish cannot be produced from the action board.
So how are these acquired?
There's a couple of opportunities to get them, namely boat cards, extension tiles and possibly role tiles.
However, this brings me to a bit of a bugbear I have with this scarcity mechanic. It means there can be a race by experienced players to get those hard-to-produce goods, particularly cacao which produces glass which can be worth so many VPs. In fact I feel the whole of the forest location is especially strong location since cacao alone is used there for 3 separate actions in the same location. A player who can produce cacao and concentrates on doing so can soon be producing lots of goods at the forest.
Having said that, the game is a bit of a point salad with various avenues to scoring VPs, it's just that I feel going for glass is the strongest way and experienced players will end competing in that tactic.

While the bulk of the game's activity takes place during the action phase, the planning phase is where players will do most of their well... planning. They'll look to optimise there actions to get the most out of their available tokens.
Because players will generally need to move around to perform multiple actions, efficient use of the movement track is important, especially so in the early game when food tokens will be scarcer. A player can move their meeple before or after an action may make it seem unimportant but sometimes players will need to think ahead about where they need to be at the start of the next round.
As well as having to think about movement and balancing their goods with their bags, players will also have to think about gaining extensions, house and order cards, as well as boat cards if they are needed. 
Add to this increasing their planning spaces and acquiring corn to fill out their warehouse and players have lot of ways to approach the game
​
In this regard Altiplano does that thing which presents players with lots of options but frequently not enough opportunity to do everything they want, forcing them to make tricky decisions, which I consider a good thing in games.

Altiplano is a mid-to-heavy game with a longish playtime, it's probably not for beginners and perhaps could be criticised for being a bit over-elaborate although personally I didn't find it that much of a problem
In conclusion; the mechanics blend together to give players choices and essentially problems to solve in optimising their actions. If bag-building style games and resource management are your thing, Altiplano is worth a try.

14th May 2022

It's a Saturday and I'm in Aldershot after a impromptu get together with some friends.

Flip City AKA Design Town is a light and uncomplicated push-your-luck deck building game about developing a city.

What's in a game?

• Cards: All the cards in Flip City are double-sided and one side shows a 'basic' building such as a convenience store while the flip side shows the 'upgraded' version, which in this instance is the shopping mall.
  It's easy to tell which side is which, the purchase cost only appears in the top right corner of the basic side. Other than that, cards list their special ability at the bottom and 'flip cost' in the bottom right corner (More on flip costs below.), while in the bottom left it lists whether the card confers coins, VPs or 'unhappiness' (Which is a bad thing, again more on unhappiness below.)
  Residential area: The residential area is the game's 'starter' card and is the only card that does not have a purchase cost. The key thing to note about the residential area is that not only does it generate unhappiness, it forces the player to play it!
  It's essentially a trash card and after flipping it to the other side, it can be flipped again to put it into another player's discard pile.
  Other cards: There are 5 other types of card that come with the game including the expansion. They represent businesses or amenities that can be found in a city. All are double sided and there are about 10 copies of each type.

The cards are all the standard quality you'd expect from a card game.

The game uses brightly coloured stylised art throughout and I always like this kind of artwork and I think it looks good here.
additionally, the cards can be placed next to each to make a city landscape. Yes, it's unnecessary but it's a nice touch and shows some extra thought has gone into the presentation.

Flip City uses some iconography, but all of it is clear and easily learned or understood.

How's it play?
Setup

• Starting cards: Each player gets a starting hand of 9 cards consisting 4 residential areas, an apartment (Which is a flipped, upgraded residential area) and one each of the 4 other types of card (Not including the office which is a 'mini-expansion.).
  These should be shuffled into a deck with those cards face-up. Players must be careful not to inadvertently flip their decks.
  The remaining residential area cards are not used in the game.
• Other cards: Sort all the other cards into their individual types with the 'basic' side face-up and create a deck of each type and place them in the central area. Thus there will be 4 or 5 decks (If the office expansion is included.) in the central area.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
Each's active player's turn will consist of up to 2 phases, a play cards phase in which they play as many cards as they want or go bust and a buying phase.

• Play cards: Unlike other deck-building games, players in Flip City do not have a hand of cards.
  Instead they draw cards one-at-a-time from their deck, immediately resolving it before deciding to draw another. This means that players will always know what the first card will be at the start of their turn and what card is next during their turn.
  The twist here though, is that sometimes, when certain cards are revealed after a  drawing card, the players will be forced to play that card.
  Stop: The active player may choose to stop drawing cards any time they choose unless a revealed card forces the player to draw and play it.
  Go bust: If at any time, the active player plays cards that display 3 or more unhappiness symbols, they go bust and their turn immediately ends.
• Buying phase: Provided the active player has not gone bust, they may potentially perform one of the following three buy actions. The amount they have to spend will be equal to the combined value of coins on the cards they played.
  Buy a card: The active player may buy a card from the supply and add it to their discard.
  Flip a card: the active player may pay the cost to flip a card in their discard pile to its other side.
  When a card is flipped, it may immediately trigger an ability or it will change the cards ability when it's next drawn.
  Develop a card: If the active play can afford both costs, then they can buy a card from the supply and flip it before putting it into their discard pile.
  
• End of turn: Once the active player has completed their turn, all the cards they played are put into their discard pile. 
• Next player: Once the active player has either gone bust or completed their buy action, play moves to the player on their left.

Endgame
Play continues until 1 of 2 winning criteria is met.

• Points: If the active player has played cards that score 8 or more VPs, then they win the game.
• Cards: If the active player has played a convienece store and at least 17(!) other cards, then they win the game.

Overall
Flip City describes itself as a microdeckbuilder and it's not really wrong. Most deck-builders come with a supply-market of 10 card types or so but Flip City makes do with 4 types (5 if you include the micro-expansion), although they are double-sided, so there are actually 10 types of card. Even so, it's a very compact feeling game.

For me however, where Flip City differentiates itself from other games of its kind is the implementation of a push-your-luck mechanic.
It works well here, especially in conjunction with meeting the winning conditions, essentially forcing players to continue drawing cards and pushing their luck until they either have 8 VPs or 18 cards in play.
As a result, Flip City is a little different to many deck-builders, which at their core are more-or-less about creating cash-generating engines to purchase cards that will earn them more cash during the early-game or VPs during late-game play.
In Flip City, generating cash is still important because it allows players to acquire more cards but some of those cards will have to work towards being able to draw 8 VPs or 18 cards.

Flip City is a quirky, charming, fairly light and quick to play pocket-sized deck-builder that presents players with some meaningful paths to winning and choices as well as some unusual game play and a nice little risk-and-reward mechanic.
Given it's light nature, I'm not sure how the game will hold up to repeated play but that's sort of missing the point. This is a fun filler game that is good to ply every once in a while.
It's worth a try and if deck-builders are you thing, then this will probably appeal to you. 

4th January 2022

It's a Tuesday and we're round Simon's for the first in-person game of the year!

'Here be dragons', is something you don't want to shout in Clank! Instead you'll want to silently tippy-toe around without waking the damn thing up, then steal its stuff and run! 

NOTE: When we played Clank!, it was with an expansion that took the player count up 6 (Which was useful, as there were 6 of us!) and added characters with individual starting decks.

What's in a game?

• Board: The game board depicts a sort of side-on view of a fortress of sorts and an underground region known as The Depths​. This play area is filled with a dungeon network of chambers linked by a tunnels and many of these tunnels contain 1-or-more symbols related to movement, enemies and locks. Chambers may also contain spaces for tokens or have some effect such as healing. The entrance to the network lies in the top-left corner of the board.
  The board is also double-sided and features a different network on the other side.
  Banner: Used to place and store current clank tokens.
  Tracks: There's also space for a damage track for each player (Known as the clank track.) and the dragon's rage track. Finally, at the top, along the fortress' parapets is a countdown track.
  The expansion adds a supplementary board with 2 more player tracks an updated rage track balanced for 5-6 players.
• Cards: For a deck builder, Clank! doesn't have that many cards, I mean it's less than 200!
  Starter deck: Each player gets an identical starting deck of 10 cards. These cards each provide the player with some of the game's resource types.
  The expansion adds characters with unique starting cards.
  Dungeon cards: This is the most common type of card and includes normal cards and one-off cards as well as enemies, they all provide some sort of benefit. Dungeon cards will have a purchase cost (In skill points.) or value in swords (To be defeated with swords.) and may also confer VPs. Some cards include a 'dragon attacks icon, which triggers an attack by y'know... the dragon!
  Reserve cards: There are 4 types of reserve card and they are placed in piles face-up, reserve cards are essentially default cards and always available to purchase/fight if the active player can't afford something better from the dungeon deck. It's a mechanic which will be familiar to players of deck-builders.
• Market tile: This tile has space for all the game's market tokens.
• Tokens: Clank! makes use of a number of tokens.
  Artefacts: There 7 of these very important tokens, which score 5-30 VPs.
  Secrets: These tokens are divided into major and minor secrets. They usually confer some sort of bonus on to the player such as healing.
  Market tokens: There are 3 types of market items, backpacks and master keys provide some benefit (And some VPs.), while crowns flat-out score more VPs.
  Monkey idol tokens: These score VPs.
  Mastery tokens: More on these identical tokens later, suffice to say; they can be very important.
  Gold!: Cold hard cash, good for VPs in Clank! or buying items from the market.
• Meeples: Each player has a meeple in their colour, which is shaped a little like a... hooded thief?
  The dragon has its own oversized black meeple
  The expansion adds differently shaped meeples for the unique characters, it also adds a new dragon meeple.
• Cubes: Every game can be improved with the addition of little wooden cubes and Clank! scores highly in this department! During the game players will generate clank (Noise in other words.), when this occurs, players may draw the ire of the dragon and cubes are used to track this.
  Player cubes: Each player has 30 cubes in their colour.
  Dragon cubes: The dragon also gets cubes, 25 black cubes to be precise.
• Bag: Used in conjunction with cubes.
• Player boards: These are only used in the expansion and provide 6 different characters with different abilities for each player.

I'm a fan of wooden components, so it's always nice to seem them put to good use in a game. The meeples are the standout here, particularly the big ol' nasty dragons. The other components, the board, cards, tokens and tiles are of the usual quality you'd expect 

Clank features good, colourful artwork throughout, the board has a fairly unique look to it and is clearly illustrated, the cards and tokens also feature good artwork with well illustrated characters and monsters. 

The game uses a fairly small assortment of iconography and it's all easily understood.

How's it play?
​Setup

• Players: All Players should take their meeple, matching cubes and starting cards. The cards should be shuffled into a face down deck and a hand of 5 should be drawn.
• Board: Choose a side to set out the board on.
  Artefacts: These are placed in their designated spots face-up.
  Secrets: Shuffle the major and minor tokens into their respective stacks and place the allotted amount into their spots face-down.
  Market tokens: Place the market tokens on to the market tile face-up. The crowns must be placed in order or descending value with the 10 at the top.
  Monkey idols tokens: All monkey idols are placed face-up in their allotted spot.
  Mastery tokens: place these in a face-up stack next to the entrance.
  Dragon: Place the dragon on to its starting spot as specified by the player count.
  ​Clank cubes: Players must each put some cubes on to the banner, how much is dependant on player order.
• Reserve cards: Put out all four types of reserve cards in face-up stacks.
• Dungeon row: Shuffle the dungeon cards into a face-down deck and deal 6, this becomes the dungeon row.
• Dragon bag: Put all 24 black cubes into the bag.

On to play
The objective in Clank! is to grab an artefact from the depths and escape the out of the dungeon alive! A player cannot leave the dungeon without an artefact neither score points.
Play progress in traditional clockwise order during Clank! and the active player plays cards from their hand to generate resource pools which they can then utilise to perform associated actions.

• Play cards: The active player plays cards from their hand, some may have special actions but for the the most part it means that 4 types of resources are generated.
  Cards may also generate a negative resource called clank, for each point of clank generated, the player must put a cube in their colour on to the banner space on the board.
  ​Move: Each point of move allows the active player to move their meeple through a tunnel to another chamber, if the tunnel contains any movement icons, then the active player must the additional move cost. It is possible for the active player to move through more than 1 chamber. There are some chambers that immediately stop a player for the turn, some are one-way and some require a master key to pass. Some tunnels will also have enemy icons; more on these below.
  Once a player has moved to a chamber, they may perform the action there, typically that's pick up a token, although some chambers have other actions such as healing.
  It's worth noting that players can only carry 1 artefact unless they have bought a backpack which allows them to carry an additional artefact, nor can they discard an artefact. Collecting artefacts and certain tokens advance the dragon along its rage track, making it more dangerous - and more damaging.
  Fight: These points have 2 uses, they can be spent to defeat an enemy card that has appeared in the dungeon row to discard it and gain its reward or they can fight the enemy that is always available in the reserve cards, the reserve card enemy is never discarded, although the reward is earned.
  Alternatively, some tunnels contain enemy icons, to move through these tunnels will cost fight points, if a player cannot or will not spend the required fight points then they take damage instead and add cubes from their supply to their damage track.
  Skill points: These can be used to buy cards from the dungeon row, which go into their discard pile and will be eventually shuffled into the player's deck
  Gold: Unlike the other resources, gold is not lost at the end of the turn and accumulates over rounds. Gold is worth VPs at the game end but can also be used to purchase items from the market (Provided the player is in the market space.).
• Draw: Once the active player has finished their actions, they draw cards to take their hand up to 5.
• Dungeon row: If any cards were bought or discarded from the dungeon row, they are refilled from the dungeon deck. If any of the cards drawn display the dragon attacks icon... then the dragon attacks!
• Dragon attack: When the dragon does attack, take all the cubes that players have placed on the banner (From generating clank.) and put them into the bag and give it a good shake.
  Cubes must then be blindly drawn from the bag. The position of the dragon meeple on its rage track will determine how many are drawn and it will be 2-5.
  Each black cube pulled can be ignored but each coloured cube drawn is placed on its pertinent damage track. Thus the more 'noise' a player generates, the more of their cubes go into the bag and the greater the chance of them taking damage.
• Damage: When a player takes damage, the cube drawn from the bag is placed on their damage track and as you'd imagine, when the track is filled... it's not good news and they are knocked out! What happens next, well that depends?
  If player is knocked out while in the depths, then it's over for them, they are both out of the game and out of the scoring! Harsh!
  If a player was in the upper levels of the dungeon, then generously-spirited local will come and rescue their unconscious forms. The player is out of the game but will score as normal after the endgame.
  In either case, the first player knocked unconscious will trigger the endgame if it hasn't already been triggered.
• Escape: If a player acquires an artefact and escapes the dungeon, they acquire a mastery token which is worth 20 VPs! Furthermore, the 1st player to escape will trigger the endgame, provided it hasn't already been triggered. After this, they are essentially out of the game.

That's it for the most important rules I think. There are of course lots of exceptions thanks to cards from the dungeon deck but there's no need to go into them here.

Endgame
There are 2 ways to trigger the endgame.
It can be triggered by the 1st player to acquire an artefact and leave the dungeon or the 1st player to be knocked out.

In either circumstance, the player who triggered the endgame places their meeple on the countdown track. Then when they become the active player, all they do move their meeple along the track. This will trigger a worsening dragon attack every round for the next 3 rounds, then on the final round the dragon will knock out all players who are still in the dungeon, regardless of whether they are in the depths or the upper levels.
After this, the game goes to scoring, players who did not acquire an artefact or who were for any reason knocked out while in the depths do not score any points! Points may be accumulated from the following sources:

Artefacts score 5-30 VPS.
Tokens acquired.
Card with VP values that players bought.
Gold; each gold scores 2 VPs.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Clank! has an unusual mix of deck-building and push-your-luck mechanics and it's the push-your-luck element that interests me the most. Clank! makes use of this mechanic in several aspects of the game.

Firstly, there's a definite push-your-luck element to generating clank. Players will obviously want to minimise how much clank they add to the banner and lessen the chances of their cubes being pulled when the dragon attacks. Having said that, lessening the impact of clank may slow a player's progress, sometimes generating clank will give a bonus, the question is; is it worth it? how much do you want to push it. There's also a contextual angle here, if you see other players are generating a lot of clank, that means it should be safer to generate a little bit of clank yourself. If the opposite is true, they you'll need to be even more careful.
The most obvious use of push-your-luck is when collecting an artefact. Every player needs to collect 1 but there's quite a spread of VPs. The higher scoring artefacts are found lower down in the depths. Getting one and getting out will be more risky, but more rewarding. Compounding this is the rule that you can't drop an artefact once it's been picked up. There's no hedging you bet here, if you want a higher value artefact, you have to go for it. It's basically stick-or-twist.
This also ties in with the game's other aspect of push-your-luck.
The countdown mechanic adds an interesting wrinkle to all this, dramatically altering player priorities and objectives. If the countdown is triggered by another player, you'll find yourself wondering whether you can get one last scoring token before heading to the top or not - probably better to run? The penalty for getting caught in the depths is catastrophic and that 20 VP mastery token is pretty good.
Conversely, if you're the player who has an opportunity to escape the dungeon and trigger the countdown, should you do it? Or should you try and get more points? It might seem like a no-brainer, but is it?
Chances are the first player to get out didn't go too deep and got a lower value artefact. The combined value of a mastery token and a 5 point artefact is still less than the highest value artefact and I'm sure this is no coincidence, I put it down to well balanced scoring. Rushing to get out and put pressure on other players may work or it may not​.

The deck-building aspect in Clank! is light-ish and fairly straightforward, which I think is a good thing because it can have quite the influence on a player's turn. There's little in the way of card combos and mostly all the cards stand on their own. The only trash cards (And they're not really trash.) are the secret tomes, which score 7VP at the game end but otherwise clutter up a deck.

This brings me to perhaps the only niggle I have about the deck-building and Clank! 
In most deck-builders, it's all about buying more cards, either to improve your deck or score you points and Clank! is unlike those deck-builders. In Clank! your needs may change from round to round; in a particular round you may want to move a lot, in the next you may want fight points and sometimes, the cards may just not give you what you need. 
Sure, in most deck-builders, the cards will screw you over but somehow it can feel worse in Clank! It can be frustrating when you don't enough quite have the movement you to reach an artefact for example and feels like nothing is going on. It's not a dealbreaker though and I guess learning to adapt as much as possible is key.

Otherwise, Clank! is hard to fault. Colourful with an interesting theme and mechanics, not too tricky to learn, reasonably fast to play and with a dramatic endgame. What's not to like.
If you like deck-builders or push-your-luck games or both​, Clank! is worth a try.

29th December 2021

We're at Simon's for some Wednesday evening gaming goodness during the mid Christmas break.
The game of the night was Lost Ruins of Arnak.

"That belongs in a museum!"
What does? Cliched old one liners!

​Lost Ruins of Arnak is a game about raiding temples of a long forgotten ancient civilisation on an uncharted island.

What's in a game?

• Game board: The game board for Lost Ruins of Arnak is quite large and has a full sized illustration of an unexplored, fantastical wilderness landscape. It's also quite busy, with spaces and tracks for a lot of components, cards, workers and more.
  Cards: Along the top are spaces for the 3 decks of the game's different card types; artefact, item and fear cards.
  Card track: Directly below, a card track runs runs across the board and will be populated with varying amounts of artefact and item cards during the course of the game. The card track also displays the game's 5 rounds.
  Research track: Running up the right side of the board is the 'research track'. This track has 2 'paths' that lead to the top, where VPs await the players. Going up the track costs various resources but also confers resources or other benefits, including gaining assistants.
  Sites: The bulk of the board is taken up with unexplored wilderness sites, these hidden locations which will be explored by the players' workers come in 2 tiers, the 2nd tier being harder to 'travel' to, each site has space to put a idol token or a tile on it. Below each site it will display 1 or 2 worker spaces and inside each worker space it will list the cost to travel there.
  Dig sites: Below the tier 1 sites is a another row of 5 sites, these are dig sites, they are not explorable and instead can be used by players to generate the game's 5 resources.
  Double-sided: It's worth noting that the board is double-sided and features an alternate setup on the other side with differing travel costs.
• Supply board: This small supplementary board sits along the bottom edge of the main board and contains spaces for 5 of the game's different resources and 4 sets of tiles.
• Player boards:  These boards depict a picture of a campsite and have spaces for each player's deck, 4 'used' idols slots and and 2 assistants when they're recruited. There's also space to place resources.
• Cards: Lost Ruins of Arnak uses 3 types of cards.
  Starter cards: Every player is given these and they can be used to generate coins and compass resources or scores in the game's 4 types of travel.
  Item cards: These provide some sort of bonus to the controlling player. They are always paid for with money and when acquired go to the bottom of the player's deck. Item cards can score VPs.
  Artefact cards: Unlike item cards, artefact cards go directly into the player's hand and can be immediately played for their effect when acquired. Further usage of artefact cards will cost tablet tokens. Like item cards, artefact cards can earn VPs.
  Fear cards: These serve no purpose other than to bloat the player's deck with useless trash cards. Thus getting them is actually a negative. Fear cards also cost players VPs.
• Tiles: Lost Ruins of Arnak makes use of numerous tiles.
  Temple tiles: These are placed at the top of the research track and provide VPs once acquired by players.
  Idol tiles: These are acquired by players when they first explore sites and confer bonuses and VPs, they can then also be 'spent' to get another bonus.
  Site tiles: When players explore a site location, a random site tile from it's respective tier will be placed there.
  Guardian tiles: Once a site tile has been placed, a guardian in the form of a tile will appear on top of the site tile and cause a headache for the worker there!
  Research tiles: Players will accumulate these as they move up the research track and they confer various benefits
  Assistants: These tiles contain assistants which confer a benefit of some sort on to the player who recruited them. They are also doubles-sided, meaning that assistants can be upgraded (Promoted?).
• Tokens: All of the game's resources are represented by tokens.
  Coins: These card tokens are the game's currency.
  Compasses: These are also card tokens.
  Arrowheads: These are little plastic tokens shaped a little like arrow heads.
  Jewels: It looks like translucent acrylic chunks are used to represent jewels.
  Tablets: Plastic is used for these tokens shaped like ancient tablets.
  Moon Staff: This card token is used to track the game's turns.
• Meeples: Each player is given 2 archaeologist wooden meeples for workers as well as a magnifying glass and notebook meeple in their colours. The magnifying glass and notebook are used to track a player's progress along the 2 research tracks. All the meeples are made of wood.

The quality of components in Lost Ruins of Arnak varies from average to great.
The game has really nice plastic pieces for arrowheads, tablets and jewels, along with wooden meeples, magnifying glasses and notebooks, you can never go wrong with wooden components and yet, makes use of unremarkable card tokens for coins and compasses.
Yes it's a minor quibble but it's definitely noticeable.
The game's cards and tiles are standard quality.

From an art perspective, it's all pretty good, cards and tokens all have nice, clear and colourful thematic art. The standout however, is the board, with a pair of lovely landscape images, it's almost a shame that they'll mostly be covered with components during play.

The game contains a fair amount of iconography, none of it was particularly unclear though.

How's it play?
Setup

• Board: Choose a side of the board to play with, one is hard than the other.
  Cards: Shuffle and put the artefacts and items deck face-down. Also put out the fear cards. Deal 1 artefact and 5 item cards into the card row.
  Idol tiles: Randomly assign idol tiles to all sites, tier 1 sites get 1 and tier 2 sites get 2.
  Temple tiles: These are placed at the top of the research track.
  Research tiles: Place these on their allotted spaces as required or randomly.
  ​Assistants: Shuffle these into 3 stacks so their upgraded sides are face-down.
  Site tiles: Sort the site tiles into their 2 tiers and shuffle each tier into a face-down stack.
  Guardian Tiles: Shuffle these into a face-down stack.
  Resources: Should be placed into their allotted spaces.
• Player board: Each player should get a player board; 2 meeples and 2 research tokens in their chosen colour.
  The meeples go on to the player's board and the research tokens on their designated starting spots on the research track.
• Deck: Each player should take the 4 starter cards in their colour, 2 of which will be coin/funding cards, 2 will be compass/exploration cards and then finally, add 2 fear cards to their deck.
  Now shuffle all 6 cards into a face-down deck.
• 1st player: Determine the first player and deal out resources as determined by the turn order.

Looks like we're ready to go exploring in the... Lost Ruins of Arnak.

​On to play
A round in Lost Ruins of Arnak continues until all players can no longer perform actions (Free actions don't count.) or have passed. The game features a pretty standard turn order that goes clockwise and in their turn, players will get 1 main action and any amount of free actions.
A round proceeds as follows:

• Draw cards: All players draw cards from their player deck to take their hand up to 5, thus in the first round this would be 5 of the 6 starter cards.
• Actions: Starting with the 1st player and going clockwise, each player must perform 1 main action, they can also perform free actions, generally, everything with a lightning bolt symbol is considered a free action.
  Main actions are:
  Travel: A player can move one of their meeples to a site on the board, provided an available worker spot is there and the player can generate the required travel score to pay the travel cost.
  Generally, the player uses the cards in their hand to pay travel costs, even fear cards provide walking scores
  There are 4 types of travel, these are; walking, land, sea and air.
  Walking is the most basic travel action and can only be used to pay for walking costs. Land and sea scores can pay for their relevant costs or can also be used in place of walking - but not for each other. Finally air can be used for any type of travel. Furthermore a player may spend 2 coins to what amounts to chartering a flight, that is get a point air score, which is essentially the same as any token.
  Additionally, if the player is travelling to either of the 2 wilderness tiers for the first time, they will be required also spend the relevant number of compass tokens.
  So what does travelling do? this will depend on where the archaeologist is travelling to.
  Dig site: Sending an archaeologist to a dig site will allow the player to gain some resources.
  ​Unexplored site: When a archaeologist visits a unexplored site, the player immediately gains the idol token(s) located there, along with whatever benefit it confers. as an aside, when a player initially gains an idol it is not placed in any of the 4 idols on their player board
  Then a site tile of the relevant tier is revealed, placed there and immediately resolved. Usually, it confers some benefit or resource on the controlling player
  After this, a guardian tile is revealed and placed there, as you'd imagine, guardians can be bad news. more on this below.
  Defeat guardian: if an archaeologist is on a site with a guardian, then that guardian can be defeated by spending the required resources. That guardian tile is then placed into that player's area and scores VPs at the game end, guardian tiles also have special abilities which have a one-time use.
• Buy card: The active player may purchase a card from the card row.
  Item cards go at the bottom of the purchasing player's deck and artefact cards go straight into their hand.
• Play card: The active player may play a card from their hand for whatever benefit it confers.
  All card are played into the player's play area.
• Research: The active player may move 1 of their 2 research tokens up their relevant track. Sometimes a track may have multiple routes the player can choose. There are some restrictions though.
  Firstly, a player's notebook token cannot go above their magnifying glass token, secondly, there can be a cost to pay for moving up. However there are also usually a benefit for moving along a track. This is generally the only way to acquire assistants.
  If a player reaches the top of the research track, they have reached the temple and get bonus points accordingly, the 1st player to arrive gets the most VPs, later players earn decreasing amounts. Finally players get to choose one of the temple tiles to take when reaching the temple.
• Pass: If the active player cannot perform any other main action, then they must pass. Alternatively, the active player can choose to pass if they so desire.
  Either way, the player is now out of the round and can no longer undertake any  further actions in that round. This means it's likely that players will have uneven actions in a turn and it's possible that someone could be 'last player standing' and get multiple actions in a row.
• Free actions: There are numerous free actions which players can use, they include:
  Cards: Some cards can be played as free actions.
  ​Idol token: A idol can be 'slotted' to confer a benefit to the player as listed on their player board. Since there are only 4 slots, this can only be done 4 times in a game.
  Guardian tiles: A player may flip a guardian tile over to make use of its once-only bonus.
  Assistant tiles: If a player has acquired an assistant or two, then their benefit can be used once per round.
• End of action: After a player has completed their main action and any free actions, play progresses to the player to the left.
• End of round: When the end of a round is reached, a number of actions occur.
  Return archaeologists: Each player takes back their 2 archaeologists, if they are taking back an archaeologist from a site with a guardian tile, then the poor archaeologist has fled in terror and the controlling player adds a fear card to the discarded cards in their player area for each archaeologist fleeing.
  Shuffle cards: Players take all the cards that they played in the round (Which will be in their play area.), shuffles them and puts them at the bottom of their deck. Thus there is no discard pile in Lost Ruins of Arnak. Players can also choose to discard any unplayed cards into their play area before shuffling them to move back into the bottom of their deck.
  Move Moon Staff: Cards around the Moon Staff are discarded out of the game and the staff moves to the right. This means as the 5 rounds progress, more artefact cards will appear in place of diminishing item cards.
• Next round: The starting player moves to the left and the new round starts with all players drawing cards from their deck to take their hand up to 5 cards.

There are some other rules such as for burning cards (Useful for getting rid of fear cards.) and so on, but that's the gist of it.

Endgame
When the 5th round is completed, then so it the game and we go to scoring. There are a variety of opportunities to score.
Research: Research tokens earn VPs depending where they finished on the research track.
Temple tile: Players who reached the temple can score the VPs on these tiles:
Idol tokens: each idol token acquired earns 3 VPs.
Player board idol slots: Each empty slot on a player's player board earns the VPs it displayed. This means when an idol is slotted for a benefit, the VPs it covers are not scored.
Guardian tiles: Each guardian defeated earns the player 5 VPs.
Cards: Aretfact and item cards can also earn the owning player VPs.
Fear cards: Finally; fear cards. Each fear card a player has deducts 1 VP from their total.

Points are tallied, highest score wins!

Overall
Hmmm, what to say about Lost Ruins of Arnak.
It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that this game is sort of a jack of all trades and master of none.
A little bit of deck building, a little bit of worker placement and a little bit of resource management, this game has it all!
Joking aside, this, on a basic level represents 3 different approaches to accumulating VPs. That is; buying cards and using cards, visiting sites and moving up the research track.
Card will get players useful special abilities and travel points, visiting sites will acquire players resources and going up the research track gets other benefits, including assistants.
Players will not want to neglect any of these elements and there's fairly good synergy between different parts of the game, but generally players end up focusing on 1 of them during play.
While the game isn't overly complex, there's quite a lot to consider. Personally, it felt like going up the research track was a good way to score big but it's hard to be sure. 

Another very important factor to think about is turn-economy, there's no set number of turns per round in Lost Ruins and finding ways to get extra main actions is vital. A player who gets 10 actions per round instead of 5 is going to just do better and I have to say, finding way to combo actions into more actions is pretty satisfying. For example, a player might use a card to get resources to move a worker to get different resources to spend on the research which would provide another benefit.
Having said that, taking a single main action at a time can feel frustrating, yes it's a combo system, but it's a slow one - unless you're the only player still with actions.

I found Lost Ruins of Arnak a fun game, but not a particularly compelling one; it's hard to put a finger on. The game's theme fits it's mechanics well and it has great presentation.
I think maybe that all the game's systems, the worker placement and the deck building and so on are all on an individual level, a little uninspiring and bland. The deck building mechanic would never stand on its own for example, neither would the worker placement, on the other hand, they don't need to.

So is the sum greater than the parts? The jury's out.
When I encounter a game I like, I get the urge to buy a copy and I don't get that with Lost Ruins of Arnak.
The game was entertaining but it wouldn't be first choice of mine to play but I happily play it if someone else wanted to.

21st September 2021

The final game of Tuesday gaming with the Woking Gaming Club in The Sovereigns in Woking was DC Deck Building Game: Heroes Unite, which is both quite a mouthful and not pirate themed game, unless of course there's a Pyscho-Pirate card in there somewhere or something?

So apparently there are several differently themed DC Deck Building Games out there and Heroes Unite is one of them, it is both an expansion to the core game and a standalone game.
​All these deck-builders make use of a game-engine called the Cerberus System.

What's in a game?

• Superhero cards: There are 7 of these oversized cards, each one representing a DC comics superhero such as Hawkman, Nightwing, Booster Gold and each one has a unique special ability.
  You'll notice that there's no playable Superman, Batman et al, that's because they're all already available in the core set. Anyway, who doesn't want to play as Batgirl over Wonder Woman, right?
• Starter cards: Each player begins with the same set of 10 starter cards.
  7 punch cards: Each punch card provides 1 point of currency, called Power in this game.
  3 vulnerability cards: These are basically trash cards, they do nothing but take up room in a player's hand.
  If you've played a deck-builder before, then I'm sure this will all be familiar to you.
• Cards: These cards are bulk of cards in the game, they contain various types of cards such as heroes, villains, superpowers, locations etc. They all function differently, but basically all have a cost (In power) and confer some sort of bonus such as extra power or extra card draws, some also provide a method of affecting other players or provide defence against attacks.
  Many cards will also provide victory points.
• Kick cards: These are slightly more powerful versions of the starter punch cards, the also provide 1 victory point each and are always available to purchase.
• Supervillains: Supervillain cards are a little like villain cards but differ in 3 ways.
  First appearance: When a supervillain card is flipped and revealed, it immediately has a once-off effect, this is ​typically negative and affects all players with an attack.
  Cost: Like other cards, supervillain cards can be bought with power and added to a player's discard stack, however they coast a significantly higher amount of power.
  Victory points: Supervillain cards also provide victory points, as with the cost, they tend to be higher than victory points provided by normal cards.
• Weakness cards: Every weakness card that a player owns during the game end deducts a point from their victory point total. Obviously players don't buy these, but negative events or attacks will force players to take weakness cards.

That's pretty much it for components.
The cards are standard quality playing cards as you'd expect.
It's also no surprise that they're all decorated with fairly high quality colourful comic book styled artwork, although I'm uncertain if it's been sourced from actual comic books.
There's little iconography, most of the game's information is provided via text on cards which is mostly quite clear.

How's it play?
Setup

• Supervillains: Shuffle the supervillain cards into a face-down deck.
• Kick cards: Put these into a face-up deck
• Weakness cards: Also put these into a face-up deck.
• Cards: Shuffle these into a face-down decks and deal 5 of them, these will become the 'line-up', cards that the active player may purchase.
• Superheroes: Either randomly give each player a superhero card or choose one each.
• Player decks: Give a set of 10 starter cards to each player, who should then shuffle them into a face-down deck and draw 5.
• Begin: Determine the start player.

On to play

• Play cards: The active player may play any or all of the cards in their hand in any order and resolve them accordingly. Cards are played in front of the active player and remain in play until the end of their turn.
  Purchase cards: The active player may use power generated to purchase any available cards including kick cards and revealed supervillains, if they have enough power they can purchase multiple cards. However, any cards bought are not immediately replaced, so there are limits to how many cards can be bought.
  Any cards purchased go into the active player's discard pile.
  Card abilities: Card may allow players to draw more cards, go through their discard pile, attack other players, force them to draw weakness cards and so on. These can be resolved in any order the active player chooses.
• End of turn: Once the active player has finished their turn, the following events occur.
  Discard hand: The active player discards any cards they did not play.
  Powers: Any cards with 'end of turn' powers are now triggered.
  Discard played cards: The active player now discards cars they played, these cards are now no longer considered in play.
  Refresh line-up: Any cards that were purchased from the line-up by the active player are now replaced from the deck.
  Draw cards: The active player (Whose hand should be empty.) draws 5 cards into their hand.
  Supervillain: If no supervillain card is visible; which will be the case in the first turn or if the active player just bought (Defeated!) one, then flip a supervillain card over and put it on top of the supervillain deck. The first appearance action is then immediately triggered.
  Next player: The player to the left of the current player becomes the active player.

​Endgame
Play continues until 1 of the following conditions is met.

There are no more supervillain cards to flip over, i.e., there are no more supervillain cards.
Or.
There are not enough cards to fill the line-up with 5 cards, i.e., the deck has run out.
When one of these conditions have been, all players put all their cards into their discard stack.
​
Players then total the victory points they get from cards and deduct 1 point for each weakness card they have.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
​Hmm, what to say about DC Deck Building Game: Heroes Unite. 

Players will look to use their cards to generate currency that allows them to buy more cards that generate even more currency, eventually acquiring the most powerful cards confer extra abilities and grant victory points.
It's pretty standard deck-building fare which contains mechanics and elements that will be familiar ground if you've played other deck-builders, which is to say the core mechanic is pretty solid, enjoyable fun and generally always provides players with meaningful choices to ponder.

However, the game adds a few new elements to the traditional formula.
The addition of a line-up mechanic is a definite positive, it forces players to adapt to whatever cards become available instead of falling back on tried and tested strategies.

Even so. it's still quite easy to quickly create combos and it can be very satisfying to do so; but perhaps it's too easy
I was told Ant, the game's owner that sometimes a player gets to build up momentum much quicker than other players and they end up creating more and more combos, allowing them to (In Ant's words.) 'steamroller' their opponents.

Heroes Unite also provides a slightly greater focus on targeting players and attacking, both by players and supervillains! It lends the game a slightly different, more antagonistic feel and offers a extra avenue to strategy to pursue.

It's hard to fault Heroes Unite but at the same time and apart from the theme, it doesn't really stand out from the crowd.
​
If you don't own a deck building game and fancy getting one, you could worse then getting Heroes Unite, it's a good a place to start as anywhere.
If you want a superhero themed deck builder, then this is worth a look.
If you want a DC Comics superhero themed deck builder, then it's definitely worth a harder look.
If you want a DC Comics superhero themed deck builder where you play as side-kicks and 'B-listers', then this really is the game for you!

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?