17th August 2022

It's a Wednesday afternoon and we're round Simon's for some gaming goodness.

Become a raider in the world of antiquity and attack a bunch of ancient empires by placing meeples on a board!

What's in a game?

• Game board: Raiders of Scythia features a big board that, for lack of a better term is divided into 5 different levels or 'slices'. Each one showing a different scene of a different area of the world with it's own colour palette.
  In the top level players can gain resources, while the 4 lower levels can be - as the name suggests - raided.
  Scythian Village: The top slice depicts the home settlement of the titular raiders.
  There are 8  'spaces' that allow players to perform certain actions.
  Each spot has a place to put 1 worker - some of these are coded to specific colours of workers, there are also places to put starter workers, more on this below.
  Civilisations: The 4 lower slices represent 4 different civilisations that can be raided by players. Each civilisation will have a number of locations that can be raided along with information pertinent to raiding, there are also spaces to place workers meeples and quest tiles.
• Player boards: Each player board is a long piece of card depicting a campsite in a wilderness setting. Each also contains some game information and places to put 6 cards - 1 hero card and 5 crew cards.
• Hero cards: There are 8 of these and as well as a illustration, each one provides some sort of special ability or bonus. I guess they are the leaders of your raiding parties.
• Crew cards: These can be recruited by players for a cost and are a bit similar to hero cards in that they provide a bonus for of the game's 2 actions.
  However, crew cards have hit points and strength and unlike hero card, crew cards can be killed.
• Animal cards: These cards all depict 2 animals, a eagle at the top and a horse at the bottom. Does that mean these are actually 'eagorse' cards or 'horgle' cards?
  Anyway, they can be assigned to crew cards to confer extra bonuses, these will differ if they are used as a eagle or a horse.
• Quest tiles: These square card tiles are double-sided. One side depicts some artwork and the other will show a quest that can be completed for VPs.
• Dice: The game uses six-siders, however as well as featuring numbers, they also contain icons that represent drops of blood. There are a total of 6 dice, 2 each in red, white and yellow.
• Tokens: Raiders of Scythia uses a large variety of tokens and I do mean large which are divided up into 3 types.
  • Workers: These are worker meeples and come in 3 colours, blue, grey and red.
  • Resources: There are 3 types of resource.
    Silver: Depicted by hexagonal card coins.
    Provisions: These brown tokens look a bit like chocolate muffins which I suppose is fairly appropriate.
    Kumis: These beige tokens are cups of kumis, which is apparently a type of alcohol derived from horse milk. However when I was told what the token represented, I misheard it as houmous! So forever from then on I will think of them as cups of houmous.
  • Plunder: There are 4 types of plunder, they are all represented by chunky hexagonal tokens in four colours.
    Black: Livestock.
    Brown: Wagons.
    Grey: Equipment, which is about vague as it gets, but what the hey!
    Yellow: Gold!
  • Wound tokens: Wait, there's a 5th type of token! Red blood droplet tokens used to represent and track wounds.
• Bag: Used to blind draw plunder tokens during setup.

Component quality is good throughout Raiders of Scythia, cards and tiles are exactly as you'd expect them to be.
The tokens are excellent, attention has gone into the creation of the provisions and houmous err... kumis and while the plunder tokens are more generic, they are also very chunky and tactile.

So, I think it looks like whoever owned the copy of Raiders of Scythia we played bought stickers that upgraded the tokens with artwork (As you can see from the photos.). I think that otherwise by default the tokens are plain.
This also means someone had to sit down and attach stickers to a lot of token, that would push me into the deep end!

Regardless of this, the game's art-style is excellent. I'm not an art expert but it uses a sort of line illustration with flat shading that shows a lot of detail and is used to great effect on the board as it shows various situations in the different situations without overly cluttering the board.

While there is a fair amount of iconography, it's mostly do with the tokens and is fairly apparent, I don't think that it will prove to be a problem.

How's it play?
Setup

• Game board: Put out the game board and shuffle the quest tiles into a face-down stack. Place 2 tiles face-up in their allotted spots in the village part of the board.
  Also place quest tile face-down on to their allotted spaces on the other levels of the game board.
• Plunder: Put all the plunder tokens into the bag and give it a good shake. Then draw and place tokens on all the face-down quest tiles and board spaces as determined by the information for each spot.
• Workers: Raiders of Scythia begins with workers already on the board. Place worker meeples by their colours on to their allotted spaces on the game board.
• Player board: Give each player a board in their colour, along with 3 silver, 1 provision and 1 blue worker.
• Cards: Sort the cards by type and shuffle them into face down decks.
  Animal deck: Draw 3 cards and place them in a row adjacent to their deck.
  Hero deck: Draw a number of hero cards equal to the player count +1 and place them in a face-up row.
  Crew Deck: Also draw crew cards equal to the hero cards drawn and place them in a face-up row alongside the hero cards. Thus, creating pairs of hero and crew cards.
• Starting player: Determine the first player:
  Now in reverse order with who would be last, each player should choose a pair of 1 hero and 1 crew card and place them on their spaces on each player's board.
  The remaining hero cards should be discarded out of play and the remaining crew card should be put into the discard pile.
• Crew cards: Now deal 5 more crew cards to every player who should keep 3 of them and discard the other 2.
  Players should now have 1 hero and 4 crew cards on their player board.

On to play
In Raiders of Scythia, players will vying to gain resources which will allow them in turn to raid and pillage which earn VPs, consequently also acquiring plunder which can be used to complete quest tiles which also earn VPs.
Play follows the usual paradigm of the active player taking an action before play progresses to the player on the left.
Broadly speaking, the active player has a choice of 1 of 2 actions each turn.

• Work: The active player may put their worker on to a spot in the Scythian Village, there's a bit more to it than that though.
  • ​Place worker: The active player may put their meeple on a available spot in the home settlement part of the board provided the meeple's colour matches the colour requirement of that spot. Most spots require a blue meeple but some require a grey one. Then the player can resolve that spot's action.
  • Take worker: The active player now takes a worker of their choice from a home settlement space and resolves that space's action. The worker that the player takes can be of a different colour and this is a way to get one.
  • Actions: The are a number of actions that can be performed, sometimes these also have costs. Actions include:
    Gaining any of the resources types.
    Gaining a crew or animal card into your hand.
    Playing a card to the player board from your hand.
    Using a hero card's special ability.
    Completing a quest.
• Raid: This is the second action the active player can perform and takes place in the 4 lower parts of the board. Like the Work action, the active player will place a worker, resolve it, then take another worker. However, there are some notable differences.
  • Requirements: The active player must meet the requirements to initiate the raid, this includes:
    Worker: The active must have an appropriately coloured meeple.
    Crew: The active player must have a big enough crew.
    Resources: The active player must have the required resources to initiate the raid.
  • Place worker: The active player may put their on a space they would like to raid. Unlike the home settlement, meeples placed in a raid can never be taken again.
  • Resources: The active player must discard wagon and provision resources equal to the cost as part of the raid.
  • Strength: The active player must calculate their strength; this is done by totting the strength scores of their crew cards, rolling a number of dice as determined by the civilisation they are raiding and how much gold their target has and adding the results to their crew's strength.
    Additionally, the active player may spend Kumis to increase the strength of their raid.
    The final combined strength is then compared to values displayed for that  location which will determine what VPs the active player gains. Generally, the higher the strength, the more VPs are earned.
  • Wounds: According the result of the dice roll and the location attacked, the active player must distribute any wounds they received by adding wound tokens to their crew cards.
    This can be done as the player sees fit. A crew card is only 'killed' if it reaches -1 wounds. Additionally, each wound lowers a crew card's strength by 1.
  • Plunder: The player can take all the plunder tokens from the location they raided.
  • Take meeple: While the meeple placed by the active player cannot be taken, one that was put there during set up can be taken.
    Quest tile: If the location had a quest tile, it should be flipped to it's other side revealing what cost is required to complete the quest and the reward for doing so.
    ​This quest is now available for any player to complete by carrying out the appropriate action in the Scythian Village area of the board.
• Next player: Once the active player has completed their action, play moves on to the player on the left.

​Endgame
Play continues until only to raid spaces or quest tiles remain on the board. After this, all player get 1 more turn and it goes to scoring.
VPs can come from several sources.

• Crew and animal cards may provide VPs.
• Quest tiles will provide VPs.
• Plunder tokens a player has accumulated will also provide VPs.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
​I'm going to start by saying the idea 'of a worker placement game with each player only having only 1 worker' sounds crazy but it works perfectly well in Raiders of Scythia.

There's a clever mechanic at play with the colours of the meeples. E.g., when using the blue meeples to raid, they can't be taken again and players will be taking grey and red meeples instead by by the time player's are doing that, they won't need the blue meeples anymore. Players are never put in a position where they can't use a meeple because of its colour.

Anyway, on to the game.
Players will need to use the village in order to gain resources to raid the civilisation to gain plunder and reveal quest tiles which can then be bought with whatever resources and plunder the player has acquired. Phew!
It's something of a race to do this since once a spot has been raided, that's it, no one can raid that spot again. Action optimisation is important.
Something similar can apply when placing meeples in the village. There can only ever 1 worker on a space and there's some high level play that can be utilised by blocking another player and putting a meeple of your own in spot they want to use first. The same applies when taking a meeple, players can choose not to take a certain meeple just to leave the space blocked.  

Players will also need to take into consideration their crew, not only is it vital in undertaking raids, it also provides players some engine building capacity to their actions.

Finally, the game also provides some opportunities for risk/reward actions during raids as dice rolls are unpredictable.
While it's not possible to fail a raid (Players just gain less or 0 VPs for a bad roll), it's possible to squander resources and kumis for a poor roll. Players will be faced with the choice of raiding earlier with a weaker crew or risk losing a raid to another player by taking the time to increase the strength of their crew.
Furthermore, wounds are also unpredictable, a player's crew cards may take 0 wounds or may take 6 depending on the dice roll, adding the element of risk.

For me, Raiders of Scythia is a good worker placement game. Because players essentially only ever 2 actions per, they need to think about the best way to make use of them, they need to make every decision count. In other words, their decisions are meaningful, which is always a good thing.
I found the game to be a fun experience with a unique mechanic for a worker placement game.

11th August 2022

Thursday is here again and we're in Aldershot for more gaming goodness.

Do you like dungeons (Of the D&D kind of course...)? Do you like interior decoration?
Well now you can channel your inner ​malevolent Changing Rooms desires in this tile laying game of stylish dungeon creation for your fiendish and and most definitely picky overlord!

What's in a game?

• Dungeon tiles: These card tiles are all double-sided and come in 2 types.
  • Generic tiles: These tiles all have a 'grey' background and are also identical, one side features a room and the other, a tunnel passageway.
  • Dungeon tiles: These 120 tiles form the bulk of the game's tiles and they all have black backgrounds.
    Some dungeon tiles will contain assistant icons, more on assistants below.
    Decoration side: This side will display numerous types of icons to represent different decorations. Additionally, the decoration side may also contain a green symbol, this is symbol that can temporarily become a wild symbol when used in conjunction with a ​decorative mimic token. There may also be colour on the corner.
    Curiously, the manner in which the icons are presented on this side also provides information on what dungeon feature will be found on the other side.
    E.g., white icons at the edge mean a entrance way, so 2 white icons opposite edges of the tile would indicate a corridor, a white symbol on the edge of all 4 sides of a tile would indicate a crossroads. 
    This side also contains a unique number.
    Dungeon side: This other side displays various dungeon features such as rooms, junctions, tunnels, etc. Whilst many of the features will be grey, others will have colours.
• Starting tiles: There's one of these crossroad tiles for each player.
• Hourglass tiles: There are 3 of these and they're used to trigger the game end.
• Cards: Cards in Dungeon Decorators provide scoring opportunities to work towards and they also come in 4 types.
  Shape goal cards: This kind of card will score VPs for the player if their dungeon corridors and rooms matches the shape criteria on the card.
  Decoration goal cards: These cards can score VPs, provided the player meets it's decorative criteria.
  Blue boss goal cards: These cards are illustrated with a big bad boss who might be the dungeon's ruler. Boss cards provide a global scoring opportunity, that is, a boss card can score points for all players.
  ​Yellow boss goal cards: Functionally identical to the blue boss cards but providing a different type of global scoring opportunity and... in yellow.​
• Player boards: These come in player colours and each one features a humorous take on dungeon-themed interior decoration along with suitably cartoony artwork.
  Finally, each board contains 2 spaces to contain up to 2 dungeon tiles if a player decides to reserve them.
• Wooden cubes: Wooden cubes! There's only 4 of them though, coming in player colours, they are used to track players' scores.
• Pawns: These are the classic pawns you would find in classic games and come in player colours. They aren't used to move around a board or anything like that. Instead they're used to track turn order.
• Draft board: This board contains 2 rows of 5 spots for player pawns, one row at the top and one at the bottom.
  Between these 2 rows is another row, this time it's a row of 4 box shaped spaces to place dungeon tiles, between boxes 2 and 3 is the special 'middle' space. More on the draft board later.
• Tokens: There are 10 each of these 2 types of token.
  Arcane architect tokens: A round card token.
  Decorative mimic tokens: A colourful square token with a grinning face!
• Bags: Dungeon Decorators comes with not 1 but 2 bags (1 blue and 1 red!) to draw tiles from!

Component quality is good throughout Dungeon Decorators as you'd expect from any modern game. The tiles and tokens are all suitable sturdy as the cards, nothing bad here but nothing standout either.
The wooden cubes are a welcome addition and the traditional playing pawns are plastic - and that's fine, although to be honest they feel like a bit of left-field choice but they're also relatively big and practical, so that's good.

Most of the game's art appears on the player boards and cards, particularly the boss cards but it even carries over to some of the tokens. With bright and cartoony character art, it conveys the game's humorous theme and it's an appealing style.
Artwork for the corridors, junctions and rooms is straightforward but always practical.

There's quite a few icons to Dungeon Decorators though and players will need to learn them. This is most apparent with the decoration side of the dungeon tiles where there's the 'double-whammy' of not only having to learn what the various icons represent, but what their positioning in relation to each other means.
It's a bit fiddly and belies the games light theme and rules and will probably require referring to the rules.

How's it player?
Setup

• ​Dungeon tiles: Shuffle the ​dungeons tiles into a face-down stack. Remove 20 tiles from the game, then put 50 tiles into the blue bag, put the other 50 into the red bag, now add the 3 hourglass tiles to the red bag.
  Finally, give both bags a good shake.
• Boss cards: Sort the boss cards into their 2 types and shuffle both into face-down decks.
  Deal 1 card from both decks: These are the global scoring objectives for the game.
• Goal cards: Sort the goal card into their 2 types and shuffle them into 2 face-up decks.
• Players: Give each player the following.
  Pawn and game board in their player colours.
  A starting tile.
  Deal 3 shape goal cards and 3 decoration goal cards to each player, then everyone should discard any 2 of those cards. All discards should be done face-down.
• First player: Randomly determine the turn order for the game's 1st round. Player pawns should be placed accordingly from left-to-right along the top row on the draft board.

On to play
The objective in Dungeon Decorators is to create a dungeon in certain shapes as well as adding decorations to the dungeon in certain positions.
What these shapes and positions will be is determined by the 2 boss cards which will apply to all players and by individual goal cards players have hidden in their hands.
During each round, the active player's turn is split into 5 phases.
Dungeon Decorators does not follow the usual turn structure, once the active player has completed their actions, play does not progress to the player on their left, instead the next player is determined by whose pawn is next in line on the draft board.
The following occurs in a round:

• Draft board: First, any tiles still on the draft board from the previous round should be discarded out of the game.
  Drawing tiles: Tile will initially be drawn from the blue bag. Once all the tiles have been used form this bag, players switch to drawing from the red bag and it's the red bag that contains hourglasses which trigger the game end.
  Draw 4 tiles from the current bag and fill the 4 boxes on the draft board. For this, the decoration side is used. The order the tiles go on to the boxes is determined by the number on each tile. The lowest numbered goes on the leftmost and going rightward in increasing numerical order, so that the highest numbered tile goes on the furthest right.
• Draft tile: Whoever is first on the draft board goes first.
  They decide which tile they want to take and place their pawn on the adjacent spot on the opposite row. This will determine the player's position in the turn order for the next round.
  Middle space: If the player puts their pawn on the middle space which has no tile, the instead randomly draw a tile from the current bag.
  Then they take the tile.
• Activate assistant: Some tiles will display 1 of 4 assistant icons, these are immediately resolved when that tile is chosen.
  Goblin sapper: Allows the active player to take a generic tile which can be stored or played as per the tile placement rules (Explained below.).
  Burrow bro: The active player draws 2 tiles from the current bag, then along with the initial tile they drew, they choose which of the 3 to use, the other 2 are discarded out of play.
  Arcane architect: The active player take a arcane architect token.
  The active player may spend one of these tokens during their build phase. This allows them to reposition a tile that they've already played in a previous build phase, this includes being able to flip from one side to the other. Usual building rules apply.
  ​Decorative mimic: The active player takes one of these tokens, they can be spent during the scoring phase in their turn or during game end scoring.
  In either case, a  token can be used to make a green symbol represent any type of decoration for the purposes of a single scoring opportunity.
• Build: During this phase, the active player can chose one of the following actions.
  • Store: The tile just taken by the player can be put on to a empty box on their personal player board, each player board has room for 2 tiles.
  • Play tile: In this instance, the active player must then add the tile to their personal dungeon. There are of course some restrictions to this.
    Decoration tile: A decoration tile must be placed with at least 1 side adjacent to a wall on a dungeon card. A decoration cannot placed against a open passageway so as to block it.
    Dungeon tile: At least 1 open side of a dungeon tile must connect to another open passageway in the player's actual dungeon - it must be possible to trace a line from the newly placed tile to the starting tile. However a passageway from a dungeon tile cannot lead directly into a decoration.
    Furthermore, there should always be at least 1 unfinished passage way in a players dungeon after placing a tile.
  • Discard: If a player cannot build or store a tile, it must be discarded out of play.
• Score: The active player may reveal 1 or more goal card from their hand and score them. Points are immediately added to the score tracker and the played cards are discarded.
• Refill hand: If the active players has less than 4 goal cards, they draw from either of the decks, one at time until they have 4 in hand.
• Next player: Once the active player has finished their turn, player progresses to the next player on the draft board.
• Next round: Once all player have gone, new tiles are drawn to fill the draft board and a new round begins with a new turn order according to pawn positioning on the draft board.

Endgame
There are 2 ways the game can end.

If the 3rd and final hourglass is drawn from the red bag when refilling the spaces on the draft board, then the game immediately ends.
If the final hourglass is drawn during an action, such as placing a pawn in the middle space on the draft board our using a burrow bro action, then the current round is played out and the game ends with players having had even turns.

There are a variety of ways to score VPs.

• Goal cards: These should already be tracked on the score tracker.
• Boss goals: Boss cards reward VPs to players for having the most of some criteria related to dungeon or decoration tiles. The player with the most gains 10 VPs, 2nd place gets 4.
• Stars: Stars on dungeon tiles in a player's dungeon score VPs.
• Number of colours: Players score VPs for having different colours on dungeon tiles in their dungeon. More different colours means more VPs
• Amount of colour: Players also score VPs for the how many dungeon tiles of a single colour in their dungeon. The large the number of that colour, the more VPs.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
No doubt about it, Dungeon Decorators has a quirky theme along with quirky presentation to go with it.
At it's heart though, it's a pretty straightforward game of it's type, draft a tile and play it into a expanding network of tiles to maximise connections, albeit with a couple of nice little innovative touches in the form tile flipping and personal scoring opportunities, which I'll talk about below.
​
As is typical of this kind of game, players will need to position tiles in order to optimise the points they will score. 
Talking of scoring, Dungeon Decorators provides 2 clear routes to scoring points; how a dungeon is shaped and how decorations are placed which brings to me to the double-sided tiles.
​When placing a tile, players will need to choose which side to use and this will be heavily contextual. Players will need to take into consideration what tiles they already have in play as well as their personal goal cards and global scoring cards.

Unlike most tile-laying games, there's no connection between different scoring opportunities on the tiles, that is shape and decoration scoring is completely separate to each other with no way to place a tile to score both, it's one or the other. Yet, they also rely on each other or at least decoration tiles rely upon their presence of walls to be placed against. This means players will need to think, how can they can place a dungeon shape that allows me to play decorations.

Personal goal cards are also an interesting addition.
Firstly, they add some asymmetrical scoring opportunities which will lead to player adopting different approaches to what they prioritise and essentially some asymmetrical  tactics.
Secondly, they provide players with some flexibility when deciding how to prioritise certain elements of the game.
E.g., a when scoring goal cards, a player can choose to only draw shape goal cards and concentrate on playing dungeon tiles over decorations.

​However, even with these 2 innovative mechanics, I feel that Dungeon Decorators fails to stand out of the crowd. For me it doesn't feel different enough to other games of s similar type.
It's a perfectly acceptable game with solid core gameplay that provides an entertaining experience and I would happily play this if someone else wanted to but there are other games I would personally choose over Dungeon Decorators.

If you're a big fan of drafting, tile laying games and want to try something familiar but a fresh twist on the mechanics or the fun theme tickles your fancy, then you may want to give this a look-in.

5th August 2022

It's a Friday and we're in Aldershot for some gaming!

​When you go into a national park, you may find yourself hiking along trails.
Which is a slightly tortured segue into how Trails is actually a follow up to the excellent Parks game and shares some similar concepts.

So let's hit the errr... trail and see how it stacks up?

What's in a game?

• Tiles: Trails uses 7 rectangular tiles, which broadly speaking come in 2 types.
  Trailhead & Trail End: These 2 tiles are used to mark the start and end of the hike. Along the top of both of these tiles are several of icons.
  Finally, both of these tiles are double-sided, which sides are used is determined by player count.
  Trail sites: There are 5 of these and they are also double-sided, with one side showing day and the flip side showing night.
  Each trail site features a icon at the bottom that indicates the action associated with it. The night side always has improved versions of those actions.
• Wildlife die: This is not a normal six-sider, instead each side has an icon that relates to one of the 5 trail sites, the 6th and final side is a wild action symbol.
• Canteen tokens: There is 1 canteen in each player colour, one side shows a full canteen and the other, an empty one.
• Sun token: This cheery token depicts a stylised sun, it has an arrow and is used to track the setting sun.
• Resources: Little wooden cubes are used for the game's 3 types of resource.
  Acorn: Red cubes are the acorn resources.
  Leaf: Uses green cubes for resources. 
  Rock: Has grey resources.
• Meeples: Trails uses a handful of wooden meeples.
  Hikers: There's 1 hiker meeple in each player colour, They are sort of hiker shaped and so should be called heeples?
  Bear: A black bear meeple, should it be a beeple? This is also known as the wildlife token. Encountering a bear on a hike usually spells trouble for the hikers but the bear in Trails is a lot more friendly.
• Badge cards: There are about 40 badge cards in the game. Each one has a cost, shown in the middle and a benefit shown at the bottom. This might be VPs in some form or other at the game end or one-off bonuses such as resources.
  ​Most badge cards also have a 'type' which is shown in the top left.
• Photo cards: As well as containing pleasant artwork, photo cards display 2 pieces of information; how many VPs the card is worth and how many 'bird' icons it has.
  More on what 'birds' mean below.
• Bird trophy token: Features a picture of a bird! It's used in conjunction with the 'birds' scoring.

​
For the most part, component quality in Trails is good.
The wooden meeples look and feel good as does the die.
I also like the wooden resource cubes, although I'm not a big fan of the colours which I feel are a little too muted and sometimes in poor light, the grey and the green colours can feel hard to distinguish.
I also found the player colours a little muted too.
All the tiles and tokens are constructed of thick card and feel weighty.
However, I would describe all the cards as average in quality and perhaps a little flimsy. It's not really an issue though, Trails is not a card game and they won't be handled much so should stand up to repeated handling.

Without a doubt, all the art in Trails is excellent.
Much of it is sourced from the Fifty-Nine Parks art project which also provided the same art for Parks and will be familiar to players of that. So even though Trails is reusing artwork, it doesn't matter because it's such good quality.
Having said that, a lot of images are heavily cropped and the fact they're all on relatively small components means they just don't look as impressive.
Original art appears on the badge cards in the form of a series of quite stylised images. It's a different style to art that appears on the tile and photo cards but I have to say I think it looks good.

All the main icons which appear on the tiles and die are easily understood.
It's not quite so obvious with some of the rewards on badge cards and players will need to refer to the rules and clarifications on occasion. It's nothing game breaking though.

How's it play?
Setup

• Game board:
  Trail sites: Take the 5 trail site tiles, shuffle them and place them randomly into a  line with the day side face-up.
  Trail head & end: Put the trail head tile on the left end of the row of trail site tiles 'at the start' and put the trail end tile on the right, 'at the end'.
  Sun token: Position the sun token with its arrow pointing at the rightmost icon on the trail end tile.
  Wildlife token: Place the bear token on the middle tile of the 5 trail sites.
• Badge cards: Shuffle the badge cards into a face-down deck. Draw 2 cards and place them face-up adjacent to the trail head, also draw 2 cards and place them adjacent to the trail end.
• Photo cards: Shuffle the photo cards into a face-down deck.
• Players: Give each player the hiker meeple and canteen token in their colour, the canteen token should be on the full side.
  Also give each player 1 resource cube of each type.
  Deal a badge card to each player face-down, players should keep this hidden from their opponents.
• First player: Determine a starting player.
  Players should put their meeples on their starting tile, which will be dependant on player count. All meeples should start facing the other side of the row of tiles, facing is important in Trails, i.e., the direction they will be hiking.

On to play
In Trails, players will travel back and forth along the path, taking photos and accumulating resources which they will use to buy badge cards.
The game follows a typical turn structure with the active player resolving their turn before play progresses to the left. As their action, the active player can move their meeple and resolve the tile it lands on.

• Move hiker: The active player may move their hiker 1 or 2 spaces forward in the direction it is facing.
  Canteen: The active player may use their canteen (Flip it from the full side to empty.) to move their hiker as many spaces forward in the direction they are facing as they want.
• Actions: The active player must now resolve the action of the tile to which they moved their hiker.
  All 5 of the trail sites have an action and also a improved version of that action on the night side. The trail head and end tiles also have actions.
  The actions are as follows.
  • Acorn: When a hiker lands on the tile with the acorn symbol, the controlling player takes an acorn resource cube from the supply.
    Improved action: The active player takes 2 acorn cubes.
  • Leaf: The player takes a leaf token.
    Improved action: The player takes 2 leaf tokens.
  • Rock: The player takes a rock token.
    Improved action: The player takes... you guessed it... 2 rock tokens.
  • Exchange: The active player returns a resource cube of their choice to the supply and take 2 cubes of a different type.
    Improved action: When taking 2 resource cubes, they take 1 each of both other types.
  • Take photo: The active player may spend a resource cube to take a photo.
    When doing this the active player may either:
    Draw 2 cards from the deck, keep 1 and discard the other face up, or.
    take the top card on the photo discard pile.
    All photo cards acquired should be kept face-down until scoring at the game end.
    Improved action: Taking a photo no longer costs a resource.
    Empty deck: If the photo deck ever becomes empty, flip the discard pile over to become a new draw deck, the cards are not shuffled.
  • Trail head: Upon reaching the trail head, several actions may occur.
    Turn around: The active player should turn their hiker 180' to face back to the other side of the trail.
    Fill canteen: If the active player's canteen was empty, they should flip to the 'full' side.
    Acquire badge cards: The active player may acquire either or both badge cards adjacent to the trail head by spending the required resources, they may also purchase their secret badge card. It is therefore possible to buy up to 3 badge cards upon stopping on the trail head.
    Additionally, bonus resources acquired from gaining a badge can be used to purchase one of the remaining badge cards. 
  • Trail end: There are also several actions that will occur when a hiker end on the trail end.
    Turn around: The active player should turn their hiker 180' to face back to the other side of the trail.
    Sun action: The active player can resolve the action that the sun token is pointing at.
    If the sun token is above either the trail head or end, then the action will be one of the icons at the top of the tile. If the token is above one of the trail tiles, then that tile's action will be performed. E.g., if sun token is above the leaf tile, the active player gets a leaf resource.
    Move sun token: Once the sun action has been resolved, the sun token is moved 1 space to the left. In the case of the trail head or end icons, it moves to the next icon (Or off the tile.).
    If the token is above a trail site, then it is moved to the tile on the left. That trail site is then flipped from day to night.
    Eventually, the sun token will move over the trail head and then off the final icon, which will trigger the game end.
    Acquire badge card: This identical to acquiring a badge card at the trail head except the cards adjacent to the trail end can be gained.
• Wildlife: If the active player's hiker lands on a trail site which also contains the bear meeple, they should roll the wildlife die, then move the bear to the tile indicated by the result and resolve that tile's action. Thus if the photo icon comes up on the die, move the bear on to the photo tile and immediately resolve the photo action - this could either the day or night version.
  If the bear result comes up on the die, then the active player may choose to move the bear to any of the 5 trail sites and resolve that tile's action.
• End of turn: Once the active player has completed their action(s), they should perform the following:
  Check resources: A player can only have 8 resources in total in hand, if they have too many, they must discard down to 8.
  Replace badge cards: Any cards acquired from either of the end tile must be replaced from the deck,
  Furthermore, if the active player bought their secret badge card, they should draw a new secret badge card from the deck. Players should always have a personal hidden badge card.
  Next Player: The player to the left now becomes the active player and begin their turn by moving their meeple.

Endgame
When a player take as sun action that moves off the last leftmost icon on the trail end, they resolve that action as usual and take the sun token.
Play progresses normally, until the player to the right of sun token holder has completed their action, upon which the game ends. I.e., once sun has taken the sun token, all other players get 1 more turn.

Players now calculate their VPs.

• Cards: VPs will come from badge ​card and photo cards
• Bird token bonus: Now all players count up how many bird icons they have across their badge and photo cards. Whoever has the most birds, gains the bird token which is worth 4 VPs.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
I'm not over fond of comparing one game to another, a game should be taken on it own merits but in this case, there might be some value in doing so.
Parks and Trails come from the same family of games and as such share some thematic elements. Both are about hiking along tiles, collecting resources to acquire photos and cards, as well as using canteens for a bonus.
However, Trails differs in several ways as explained below.

Unlike it's predecessor, hikers from multiple players can happily coexist on the same space so the stress and need to try and anticipate where other players' hikers will go is gone, as the tactic of trying to block other players.
It makes the game a little lighter (By no means a bad thing.) and focuses players on getting badge cards (Which are the game's biggest source of VPs.) and players will encounter something of a conundrum here.
They may have the urge to collect as many resources as possible which can be prudent but at the same time, they'll want to reach the trail head & end tiles quickly to get a certain badge card before other players. Trails is a game about optimisation especially since there are only 3 types to manage - although that 8 cube limit can be punishing.

I also like the addition of the day turning into night mechanic, not only is it visually pleasing to watch the sun set, it adds some momentum to the game, upping the ante by giving players more resources and making it easier to get more badge cards. Players that have done well in the early game are not guaranteed victory.

So is Trails a sufficiently different game to Parks to warrant having both? I would say yes. I bought copies of both and I'm glad I did.
Trails felt like an easy game to learn and despite the fairly lengthy rules writeup above, is a reasonably light game that requires a little less brain power and also a little less directly competitive. Although for a lighter game is has a reasonably long play time - far too long to be considered a filler game.
That's a minor criticism though and ultimately, Trails is a fun experience and is worth trying.

4th August 2022

It's a Thursday and we're round Simon's for a evening of gaming entertainment.
​
Cascadia: 'A land of falling waters,' generally referring to a large wilderness area in the Pacific north-west of the USA.

In Cascadia players vie to create a diverse landscape of habitats and wildlife in this tile placement game.

What's in a game?

• Tiles: Cascadia uses 2 types of hex tile, however, they all share some common features.
  Each hex space will feature 1 or 2 of the game's 5 habitats and 1-3 of the 5 wildlife types. Finally some hex spaces will have a pinecone icon - usually this is a hex that only has 1 habitat and 1 animal on it.
  Starter tiles: There are 5 of these and they are a little different from the main tile in that they are actually 3 hex tiles combined into 1.
  Habitat tiles: There are about 80 of these tiles.
  The game's 5 habitats are:
  Forest
  Mountain
  Prairie
  River
  Wetland
• Tokens: There are a 100 wooden disc tokens in the game that come in 5 types. Each type represents a different animal/colour.
  Bear/brown
  Elk/earthy brown
  Fox/orange
  Hawk/blue
  Salmon/red
• Bag: A small used in conjunction with the tokens.
• Cards: There are 5 types of card in Cascadia for the 5 wildlife types and 4 cards in each type, thus 20 cards in total. One card will be used from each wildlife type during the game.
  Cards provide different scoring opportunities for each wildlife type as explained below. Additionally each of the 4 cards for all wildlife have slightly different scoring criteria and are rated A-D with A being the easiest to score and D the hardest.
  The different types of card score as follows.
  Bear: Bears score for being solitary or in small packs as determined by their card,  generally they cannot be adjacent to other bears.
  Elk: These score by being in herds, the shape the herd must take will be dictated by the elk card used.
  Fox: Foxes score by being adjacent to different wildlife types.
  Hawk: These score by being in line-of-sight of other hawks, generally they cannot be adjacent to other hawks.
  Salmon: Salmon score by being in a continuous line, the longer the better.
• Pinecone tokens: These are standard card tokens that depict pinecones. After being acquired, pinecones may be spent to trigger a couple of special actions or score VPs at the game end.

For the most part the components are all high quality. The tiles and tokens are sturdy and the wildlife tokens in particular are chunky and tactile.
The pinecone tokens are average quality by modern standard - which means perfectly acceptable.
The same is true of the cards, they feel a little flimsy but since they're only used to display information and won't really be handled much, they too are perfectly acceptable.

The art used on cards is fantastic, having said that, each set of 4 only uses 2 images which are flipped and used a 2nd time, it's a minor quibble but it feels touch cheap.
Art on the tiles is good too but is hard to appreciate since they are relatively small. Importantly, it's also uncluttered, differences between habitats is for the most part very easy to distinguish. Similarly, the wildlife icons are easy seen.

As a minor aside: Prairies are depicted as yellow, which I guess represent dry grasslands. The yellow definitely does not represent desert! And yes; some of the yellow tiles have salmon icons on them, because, believe it or not, prairies can have water features.
If you ever play the game and someone says, 'why are their fish in the desert', then let them know!!
Anyway, back to talking about components.

The iconography is easily understood in Cascadia. It's obvious what the wildlife ​icons represent and the icon for pinecones is equally as obvious.

How's it play?
Setup

• Starting tiles: Randomly give a starting tile to each player who should put it face-up in their personal playing area.
• Cards: Sort the cards by type and shuffle them into 5 face-down decks. Draw 1 from each deck and put them into a face-up row.
  These will provide players will the scoring criteria for the wildlife tokens.
• Wildlife tokens: Put all the wildlife tokens into the bag and give it a good shake.
• Tiles: Select the number of tiles to use as per player count and shuffle them into some face-down stacks, the exact number of stacks does not matter.
• Drafting area: Draw 4 tiles and place them in a row, next draw 4 wildlife tokens and put them in a row adjacent to the 4 tiles.
  ​Thus there will be 4 pairs each of 1 tile and 1 token.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
In Cascadia, players will draft tiles and wildlife tokens, using them to create a personal landscape by placing tiles adjacent to each other and putting tokens on top of them in order to create habitats and patterns of animals to score points.
Cascadia follows a usual turn order with the active player resolving their action before play progresses to their left.

• Overpopulation: The first thing the active player must do is check the wildlife tokens in the drafting area for overpopulation.
  4 identical tokens: If all 4 wildlife tokens are identical, the active player must remove all of them, put them to one side and draw 4 new wildlife tokens.
  3 identical tokens: If 3 of the 4 tokens are identical, the active player may choose to put the 3 tokens to one side and draw 3 new ones.
  It is possible to trigger overpopulation multiple times dependant on the tokens that are drawn but regardless of this, once overpopulation no longer occurs, return all set aside tokens back to the bag (And give it a good shake!).
• Pinecone tokens: If a player has acquired any pinecone tokens on previous turns (See below for info getting them.) then they can be spent for 1 of 2 actions.
  Take any tile and token: This actions allows the active player to take any tile and any wildlife token, regardless of their positions in the drafting area.
  Remove any wildlife tokens: The active player may set aside any number of wildlife tokens and then draw new tokens to replace them. Rules for overpopulation still apply here.
• Draft: The active player takes one of the 4 pairs of 1 tile and 1 wildlife token and according to the following rules, places them in their playing area.
• Place tile: The active must put the tile with one of it's faces adjacent to the face of a tile already in play. When placing tiles, the habitats on the tiles do not need to match, i.e., you can place mountains next to rivers but's a good idea to do so. Larger habitats score more VPs later on.  
• Place wildlife token: Wildlife tokens can only go on a tile that contains the matching animal icon. E.g., a fox token can only be placed on a tile which has a fox icon.
  If a wildlife token is placed on to a tile with a pinecone icon, then the active player immediately takes a pinecone token and adds it to their personal supply.
• Replacements: A new tile is drawn from a stack and a new wildlife ​token is drawn from the bag to replace those that were drafted.
• Next player: Play now progresses to the player left of the active player.

Endgame
Play continues until all the face-down stacks of tiles have been depleted and only 3 tiles remain in the drafting area, which should also be a even number of player turns.
VPs are scored from several sources.

• Meeting the scoring criteria on the 5 cards.
• Players score VPs for the biggest single grouping of tiles for each of the 5 habitats. If a player has groupings of 2 mountains and 5 mountains, they only score the group of 5 mountains. The bigger the grouping, the more VPS
  Bonus: For each of the 5 habitats, bonus VPs are awarded to the player with the biggest grouping of that habitat and the player with the 2nd biggest grouping.
• Pinecones: Each unspent pinecone contributes a VP.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
The rulebook for Cascadia talks about the real life habitats and biomes that inspired the game and it's obvious that this is one of those games where a bit of extra attention has been put into the details. 

On to the game itself: Cascadia has a nice mixture of quick to learn rules and depth of gameplay.
This depth comes from forcing players to make tricky and meaningful decisions. This occurs because Cascadia has 3 axis' of play which will influence players' choices.

The first comes from wanting tiles with specific habitats on them; players may want to expand their forests or rivers for example and will be looking for tiles that facilitate that.
The second axis comes from also wanting tiles with specific wildlife icons. If a player needs a fox token in a certain spot, then they'll need a tile with a fox icon.
The third and final axis comes from getting the actual wildlife tokens that are needed to score the wildlife cards.

​All of this means that it's unlikely that players will get all 3 that they want when picking a single pair which would be a no-brainer, they'll probably end getting 2 of they want and sometimes only 1.
​Players will need to adapt and re-strategize contextually, look to optimise their picks and finding other scoring opportunities. Players will probably have to gamble a little bit on getting what they need later in the game.

Pinecone tokens can of course change things. Used at the right time they can really open up a player's choices, getting any pair can make a difference, as can clearing all wildlife tokens in the drafting area if a player is really looking for a certain token.

Cascadia also has a fairly quick playtime, although it sort of occupies a game length that's way too long to be a filler but a little too short to fill an entire evening. I don't consider that a bad thing, you could just play twice! The randomness in setup and scoring gives it a lot of replayability.

If I had a criticism of Cascadia, it would be that sometimes the card scoring can be a little unclear and finicky. The rulebook does offer elaborations on this, but it's a definite little niggle.

Otherwise though, I think Cascadia is ab excellent tile-laying and set collectiing game.
For me it ticks a lot of boxes that good games should; straightforward rules, some depth for decision making and a brisk playtime.
It's one of those games I frequently like to carry in my board game bag when going to game events, so if I meet someone who's never met played Cascadia, they can try it.
As should you!

30th June 2022

It's a Thursday and we're at Aldershot for some gaming goodness.

Burger Boss! What's better than being a king? Being a boss of course!
​Be a boss of those burgers in this game of resource management and worker placement or if you want to be specific; dice-placement.

What's in game?

• Cards: Burger Boss is not a card game per se but uses cards as a sort of proxy board and uses them for a variety of functions.
  • Restaurant cards: These come in every player colour and each has a differing humourous restaurant theme.
  • Kitchen cards: Can't have a burger joint without kitchen. Kitchen cards come in each player colour and have spaces for a worker, cold storage (A fridge basically.) and a grill track. Each colour also has a couple of expansion kitchen cards that when unlocked add more fridge spaces and additional grill tracks.
  • Game cards: Each of the game's main 8 actions are managed by a card. Each will have an amount of numbered worker spaces that can be used. Many of these spaces also require dice of specific value.
    More on game cards below.
  • Secret mission cards: Each of these provides players with a secret bonus scoring opportunity only revealed during the game end.
  • Manager's Special Cards: These can be acquired during play and provide players with bonus or special actions including some 'take that!' actions.
  • Meal Size Cards: The longer customers have to wait, the hungrier they get and the more food they'll buy! I'm sure that's how it works in real life?
    These 3 cards give a bonus of $1-$3 per customer respectively and speaking of customers...
  • Customer Cards: There are 30 customers, they're all very fussy and have specific food requirements for their burgers as displayed on their cards. Each card also lists how much they pay for their burger.
  • Turn Order Card: Burger Boss does not use a traditional turn order and it is tracked on this card.
• Dice: There are 4 dice in each player colour. These are typical six-siders.
• Cubes: Burger Boss has little wooden cubes, although there's only 1 in each player colour and they're used in conjunction with the turn order card.
• Ingredients: Ah yes - the meat of the game! (SIC). Ingredients are represented by these sort of tiny - but chunky wooden discs. They come in 5 colours which correspond to the types of 5 ingredients; buns, burger patties, cheese slices, lettuce and tomato.
• Money: Cash is represented by the standard round card tokens.

All the game's cards are finished in vinyl/plastic and as such feel quite sturdy.
The dice plastic, although they have nicely rounded corners.
Wooden components are always a plus in my book. The discs used to represent burgers and ingredients are obviously wrongly proportioned but if they were correctly sized, they'd have to be much bigger, otherwise they'd make the handling ingredients even more fiddly than it already is - which is quite fiddly and is my one criticism of the components.

Presentation wise, Burger Boss uses a cheerfully brash palette along with cartoonish illustrations. It's a bright, colourful art style that suits the game's light-hearted approach perfectly.

There's little iconography used in the game and it's easily understood, mostly consisting of symbol ingredients and and dice values.
The manager's special cards use text to provide information, which is a little sparse and will probably have players referring to the rules. It's not something that will occur too often though.

Packaging
I don't usually talk about a game's packaging - because usually it's just a box.
Burger Boss however, comes in a giant burger! Inside are several layers to hold all of the game's components.
Yes I know that it won't stack with other games and the manual doesn't fit in the burger and it'll just have to be put all back into it's normal, typical box anyway which technically defeats the  purpose of the burger packing - but it gives the game a unique, eye-catching presentation and I like that.
Yes, I also know it's just a gimmick but I like gimmicks!

How's it play?
Setup

• Starting cards: Give each player the restaurant card, kitchen card and 2 dice in their player colour.
• Cash: Give each player their starting $3.
• Secret mission cards: Shuffle the cards and deal 1 face-down to each player. These should be kept hidden until the game end.
• Game cards: Put out the 8 game cards.
• Manager's special cards: Shuffle these cards into a face-down deck.
• Meal size cards: Arrange the 3 cards in a row sequentially with the lowest on the left and highest on the right. Thus going $1, $2 and $3.
  During the game, customer cards will be added in columns beneath the meal size cards and slide rightwards throughout the game.
• Customer cards: Shuffle the customer cards into a face-down deck. 

On to play
The objective in Burger Boss is to fulfil customer orders to earn money, this is done by gaining and cooking the required ingredients. All of these actions are achieved by putting dice on cards, many of these cards will require dice of specific values.
The game does not have a traditional turn order and instead uses a mechanic that mixes randomness and player choice to determine player order. Once player order is established, whenever someone becomes the active player, they can take an action by using a die.
Each round consists of the following phases.

• New customers: Deal 2 customer cards in a column beneath the $1 bonus card.
  There will be no customer cards at the game start but in subsequent rounds any unfulfilled customer cards will be slid 1 space to the right and more customers will be introduced using a sort of conveyor belt mechanic. Thus there can be up to 6 customer cards available at any one time.
  If a customer card has reached the 3rd space and must be slid across, it is instead discarded out of the game. Now that's an unsatisfied customer!
• ​Turn order: Every round, dice are rolled to determine turn order.
  For the first round, the turn order is dictated by players openly rolling their 2 dice, whoever gets the lowest roll goes 1st, 2nd lowest goes 2nd and so on.
  However, in all subsequent rounds, every player rolls their dice in secret and can choose how many and which of their dice they want to use and declares them to the other players.
  This decision will apply to both turn order and to having dice to use as workers and their values during the round.
  It means for example; a player can use 1 die to go earlier in the turn order but will only get 1 worker.
  This becomes more important when players get 3 or 4 dice to use. Generally, having more workers is beneficial, but they'll be times a player will want to go first.
• Actions: Once turn order has been determined, the game goes to actions and players get to each place 1 die at a time in that order.
  Spaces on game cards are limited, furthermore, the actions on many game cards will require a die of a specific number, additionally a couple of actions will require 2 dice.
  Once a the active player has placed a die (Provided it meets the required conditions.) it is immediately resolved. There a numerous actions potentially available to players.
  • Bakery: There are 5 spaces here numbered from 1-5 and they allow the active player to gain 1 or 2 burger buns depending on the value of the die used.
  • Butcher: There also 5 spaces on this card but numbered 2-6, again they allow the player to acquire 1 or 2 burger patties.
  • Cheese shop: There are 4 unnumbered spaces in a row here and they work a little differently. Dice are placed left to right and the 1st die placed here can be of any value but all subsequent dice must have a value equal to or higher than the preceding die.
    This means if the 1st die placed is a 6, then all subsequent dice must be 6's.
  • Fruit & veg: There are 6 spaces here, numbered 1-6. Spaces numbered 1-3 allow the active player to gain lettuce while spaces numbered 4-6 gives them a tomato ingredient.
  • Kitchen expansion: This card can be used exactly twice by all players to gain their kitchen expansion cards.
    The first expansion requires a pair of doubles or a single die of any value and cost of $5.
    The final expansion requires a pair of doubles and $5 or a single die and $10.
  • Manager's specials: There are 8 unnumbered spaces here. The active player may place a die of any value here to draw a manager's special card.
    These will provide players with some sort of bonus of some kind. Manager's special cards can be played at anytime in the active players turn.
  • Supermarket: This card allows players to gain any ingredients of their choice by paying for them.
    There are 3 unnumbered spaces here that allow a player to buy 1, 2 or 3 ingredients of their choice for a respective cost of $2, $4, or $6.
  • Workers: As with the kitchen expansion, this card can be used only twice by each player and allows them to gain more dice for use in later rounds.
    The first worker dice requires a pair of doubles or a single die of any value and cost of $5.
    The final worker requires a pair of doubles and $5 or a single die and $10.
  • Kitchen: The kitchen is where customers' burgers are created. Players must create stacks of ingredients that exactly match the requirements on customer cards. There are a number of rules regarding the kitchen and cooking.
    Gaining ingredients: Whenever a player gains ingredients from the above actions, they go into the storage space on their kitchen card(s), any excess ingredients are discarded. Also: ingredients acquired cannot be used for cooking in the round they were acquired.
    Cooking: To cook food, a die of any value must be placed on to the kitchen card, only 1 die ever required to cook, regardless of the number of kitchen cards a player has. This allows the player to move ingredients from the storage onto the grill, these ingredients cannot be removed, however, in later rounds more ingredients can be added. It's also possible to have multiple food orders cooking at the same time on the grill's 3 spaces.
• Next player: Once the active player has resolved their action, play progresses to the next player in the turn order. If the new active player does not have any dice left to place, they simply pass. Once all workers have used, the game goes to the next phase.
• Sales: This phase only occurs once all players have placed all workers. Then, in turn order players can fulfil customers orders, allowing them to remove the required ingredient stake from their grill, take the customer card and earn the money listed on the card plus the size bonus of the column it was in.
• End of round: Several events occur at the end of a round.
  Ingredients on grills: All ingredients on all grills move 1 space to the right on the grill track. If a stack of ingredients comes off the 3rd and final grill space, they are discarded and the player receives a kingly​ $1 for their troubles!
  ​Dice: All players retrieve their dice from all cards and play returns to the new customers phase.

Endgame
The endgame is triggered when the customer card deck is depleted - although there will be customer cards in play. There is then 1 final round of playing then the game goes to scoring.

Players total money from the following:
Money earned from selling food to customers.
Money earned from their secret objective card.
Anything still on the grill earns $1 apiece; food in storage earns nothing.

Cash is tallied, highest amount wins.

Overall
Burger Boss is a light-to-midweight game, as written above, the rules seem a bit complex but in practice they're fairly straightforward. That's not say it's a good game for beginners - because it's not!

There are several mechanics and concepts in Burger Boss that that require thinking ahead and someone nuanced decisionmaking.
Quite often, it'll be impossible to complete a customer's order in a single round and generally there isn't enough cold storage to hold the required ingredients. This means that players will probably have to put ingredients on to their grill and hope to complete them in a later round. Mistake's can be costly and $1 is scant compensation for losing food.
Which brings me to customers. There's a balance to be found between completing a customer order as quickly as possible and waiting for a later turn to earn more money but risking another player getting that customer first!

While there is no direct interaction between players in Burger Boss, the game has a lot of open information and it definitely pays to watch what other players are doing; what they've got on their grills, where they're putting their workers and responding to this.

This ties in with the turn order mechanic, sometimes players will want to use less workers to go earlier.
​Worker spaces to gain ingredients are limited and turn order can play a vital role when fulfilling customer orders, in both cases, going later and being stymied by other players' actions (Whether accidentally or deliberately.) can be infuriating.

Burger Boss also has a a bit of the unexpected, manager's special card can also throw spanners into the works with unexpected special actions, especially when used judiciously.

Despite this, the game provides options to gaining other benefits - or benefits other ways, if the baker or butcher is inaccessible for any reason, there's always the supermarket. There's a pretty generous number of worker spaces on the card for the aforementioned manager's cards.
All of these means that rarely is a player presented with meaningless decisions which is always a good thing in games.

I found Burger Boss to be a colourful, visually appealing game of making burger (OK, they stacks of ingredients, but still it looks good.) and fun worker placement and resource management game with a reasonable play time and gameplay that's tricky enough to tax the brain enough to be engaging, along with a side order (SIC) of competitiveness.

23rd June 2022

It's another Thursday evening and we're in Aldershot for another gaming night.

​Village Green - a local game for local people?
It turns out that competitions between local villages to have the best village green can be serious business!

What's in a game?

• Green cards: These cards each depict some garden feature such as trees, a fountain or a gazebo.
  In the top-left of most cards is a symbol which dictates the card's flower type and colour.
  At the bottom of the card may be one or more of various icons, such as types of trees, lawns etc. These are mainly used to meet scoring criteria, although some symbols have special actions associated with them.
• Award cards: These cards all contain scoring criteria, that is, ways to score points from green cards. There's a pretty diverse selection of scoring methods here. Some of the cards include ways to lose VPs which player will obviously want to avoid.
• Village cards: There are 5 of these double sided cards. The 'front' of each card depicts a individual village in full colour (Along with 1 VP.), while the flip side show's the same village but monotone and missing the VP.

​Well that's it for the components - a deck of cards.
The card quality average and what you'd expect from games nowadays.

Watercolour styled artwork is used throughout the game on the green and village cards. depicting various items that could be found on an English village green (SIC). It's a pleasant style and the artwork all looks appropriately good, fitting it's theme quite nicely.

The iconography is not so well implemented though. I felt the symbols used for the different types of flower could have been a bit more distinct or individual, especially since the icons are quite small.
I also felt the 3 different types of tree icon displayed on the bottom of the green cards and award cards could have had been more distinctive.
Otherwise, the iconography is fine.

How's it play?
Set up

• Village cards: Randomly deal a village cards to each player. Each should put it down face-up with the side showing 1 VPS.
  This will constitute the top-left of their 'tableau' in their personal playing area.
• Green cards: Take the allotted number of green cards (As determined by player count.) and shuffle them into a face-down deck.
  Next; deal 3 green cards face-down to each player.
  Finally, draw 3 cards from the deck and place in them face-up in a row next to the deck.
• Award cards: Shuffle the award cards into a face-down deck. Unlike the starting green cards, 3 award cards are dealt FACE-UP to each and placed in a row next each player's respective village card and are considered already in play.
  Then, as with the green cards, draw 3 award cards and place them face-up in a row next to the award card deck.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
The objective in Village Green is to construct a tableau of 3x3 green cards while on the 'outside' of this 3x3 grid create a row and column of award cards to score points off of the green cards. Thus creating an overall 4x4 grid - including the village card which will be in the top-left corner.
Village Green uses the usual turn structure of having the active player complete their action then having play progress to the player on their left.
The active player can take 1 of the following 2 actions.

• Bonus action: OK, this is not 1 of the usual 2 actions a player can take, before their action, the active player may perform 1 of the 2 following action once per game by flipping their village card over (And losing the VP it provides.).
  • Wipe all 3 cards from either the green card or award row and replace them.
  • Place a green card on top of another green card (This is not permitted otherwise.), however, the criteria for matching symbols/colours must still be met - see below for more on this.
• Draw and play a green card: The active player must take one of the 3 green cards (Or draw blindly from the green card deck) from the central area and add it to their hand. Then they must play or discard any card from their hand.
  Play green card: A green card may be played face up in any part of the green card 3x3 grid, however there is a restriction; the flower type and colour must match at least 1 of the those elements with all orthogonally adjacent green cards.
  E.g., if a player wants to put down a card with a blue rose symbol, all the orthogonally adjacent cards must have either a rose type and/or blue colour.
  If there are no matching types, then a card cannot be played.
  Finally, green cards cannot be played on top of other green cards - unless the card has a lawn symbol.
  Green cards also have the following rules, depending on the symbols  at the bottom of the card.
  Lawn: If a green card has a lawn, that means it may be covered by another green card later in the game, although the usual rules about type and colour still apply. Covered cards do not score at the game end.
  Pond: Every visible pond symbol scores VPs at the game end.
  Structure: When a green cards with a structure symbol is played, the active player must immediately draw and place an award card following the usual rules for award cards.
  Trees: There are 3 types of trees and they can appear in various combinations on cards. Typically, trees are used for scoring.
• Draw and play an award card: The active player must take a award card from the display of 3 (Or draw blindly from the award deck.). Then they must play it face-up into the column or row outside the 3x3 grid. An award card can be played anywhere in a row or column and unlike green cards, may be placed on top of other award cards. This means the award card beneath is no longer scored and may be something that a player wants to do if a award card will score negative or low VPs.
• End of turn: Whenever a card is taken from either the green or award card rows, it is immediately replaced. Once the active player has concluded their action, play progress to the player on their left.

Endgame
There are 3 criteria which may end the game.
If either the green card or award card deck is depleted, or a player has placed 9 green cards, then the end has been triggered. The current is completed and the game goes to scoring.

Player score from the following sources:
A face-up village card scored 1 VP
Each visible pond scores 2 VPs.
Award cards score all the (Up to 3.) cards in their respective row/column.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
On a basic level, Village Green is a fair simple game - pick a card and play a card, which makes it straightforward and quick to understand.
However, like all good games, it's easy to learn but hard to master and this is definitely the case with this game.

What makes Village Green tricky is having to literally think 2 steps ahead. Players will need to pay attention to a green card's type and colour when playing it because it will influence what is played next to it.
Not only is positioning important when playing a green card but the order in which they are played will matter too.
E.g., putting a green card into the centre of the 3x3 grid means that all 4 orthogonally adjacent cards placed subsequently must match the flower type and colour for that card. If the centre card is played last, then it would have to match all 4 cards already played and that requires planning ahead.
Matching 3 types and 3 colours might not seem difficult but remember, players will only have a hand of 3 green cards and a row of 3 cards to draft from.
Sure, a player can keep drawing and discarding green cards to hopefully get what they need, but this can catch a player out. Once the deck is gone - it's game over. Additionally, while rinsing through green cards, other players may be completing their 3x3 grids, which is also game over.
Ultimately, players will need to commit to taking some risks and play early cards with gaps between them for some wriggle room for placing later cards and also rely on a bit of luck to get what they need.

Award cards are also tricky to manage but in a different way.
Players start with three, which can be good as it gives each player a initial individual scoring target to aim for. However, as green cards get played and players may be forced to put them in certain positions thanks to type and colour, it may end up that a award card scores less, zero or even worse - negative VPs!
Luckily, award cards can be nullified by covering them with other award cards later. This though raises another quandary for players to ponder.
The later an award card is played in the game, the harder it will be to place in a way to maximise it's scoring potential.

Finally, there's some potential for higher level play by watching what cards other players are putting down, trying to anticipate their actions and denying them what they need.
Although, since some of the icons are so small, it can be physically tricky looking at other players' tableaus with leaning over them!

All of these mechanics are good because they always provide players with meaningful decisions as they try and positions cards so that they match type and colour as well as scoring criteria.

Having written all of that brings me to a drawback of the game, which is that it can be a harsh and unforgiving experience.
Players will be frustrated when unable to play cards and are instead forced to discard. It's likely that some players will end up without all their possible green or award cards - I know I did on my first play.

So despite being easy to learn, I'm not sure this is a game for more 'casual players'? If it 'groks' with them, they'll be fine. Otherwise it'll probably take a game or two to get handle on where to player cards.

There's not denying it's a elegant, fairly engaging game. It plays quick enough and will provide players the challenge of being able to place all their cards and also optimise scoring opportunities.
Definitely worth a try in my opinion.

12th June 2022

Sunday evening is here and we're logged into Board Game Arena​ for a night of gaming.
​
Does a bear lay tiles in the woods, who knows? What I can tell you is that a bear definitely does lay tiles in the park thanks to Barenpark: A tile laying game about building a park for bears and bears only!

Caveat: we've only ever played Barenpark digitally.

What's in a game?

• Game boards: All boards feature a 4x4 grid, 6 of these 16 spaces will contain 6 icons taken from a combination of 4 different type of icons and finally, one other space will contain a 'pit' space. The remaining 9 spaces are blank.
  Boards come in 2 flavours; starting and standard.
• Tiles: Barenpark uses a number of tetromino style tiles, although many tiles are much bigger or smaller than standard 4-space tertromino tiles. Barenpark has 3 types of tile.
  Green tiles: These tiles display different facilities that would be found at a park such as toilets, playgrounds etc. Green tiles score no points.
  White tiles: A white scoring icon indicates which tiles are white tiles. White tiles represent housing for game's 4 different types of bears.
  Each of the types will have 7 tiles of varying VP value from 1-7.
  Orange tiles: Like white tiles, orange scoring icons indicate which tiles are orange tiles and these represent enclosures for the 4 different types of bears.
  Unlike white tiles, there are only 3 of each type of orange tile, they also have a varying VP value, only from 6-8 instead.
• Bear statue tokens: There are 16 of these are round tokens and are numbered 1-16 which is also their VP value.

Barenpark's art is fairly minimal but effective. It's nothing to write home about but is perfectly functional.
Tiles display artwork themed to their type, so the green tiles feature a portaloo for a toilet, a playground for a play ground and so on.
The white and green tiles show buildings and habitats pertinent to the type of bear they represent. E.g., the polar tiles appear glacial.

There are only a few icons in the game and they are easily learnt. They are also colour coded, thus the wheelbarrow icon - which is green - represents green tiles, thus white cement trucks are for white tiles and orange excavators are for orange.
The work crew icon represents construction crews which is not related to tiles.

One slight criticism here is that while there are green, white and orange tiles, some tiles which are coloured green will actually be white or orange tiles, there are also some glacial blue tiles which are actually orange.
It's a minor quibble, but players will need to remember that a tile's colour is based on its scoring icon. This could have been improved by using unique colours.

How's it play?
Setup

• Game boards: Randomly give each player a starting board.
  Take all the standard gaming boards and shuffle them into 2 equal face-up stacks in the central playing area.
• Tiles: Sort the tiles by type and put them out in the central playing area face-up as per the player count.
  White and orange tiles should be arranged with the highest value tile being placed at the top and descending in value. This means as more and more tiles get taken, the remaining point scoring tiles decrease in value.
• Bear statue tokens: Put out these tokens, again, the player count will determine which tokens are used. They should put out in numerical order.
• Determine a starting player: The starting player should take a 1-space green tile from the supply (In other words take a portaloo tile!) and place it in their playing area, NOT on the board. All other player should take 2 or 3 space tiles as per the player count rules.

On to play
In Barenpark, players complete to create the best bear park ever. Players achieve this by placing tiles on to their boards which in turn allows them to draft more tiles and boards.
​
Barenpark uses a traditional turn structure with the active player taking their turn before play progress to the player on their left.
During the active player's turn, they must perform the following actions.

• Play tile: The active player must play one tile from their personal playing area if they can. Tiles can be placed anywhere except on a pit space and can go across multiple boards provided there are enough spaces, tiles may be rotated and flipped as desired. Obviously tiles must fully fit on the available board spaces and cannot go over other tiles.
  First tile: The first tile a player puts down can be anywhere on their player board. Subsequent tile placements must adjacent to a tile already on the board.
  Passing: If the active player does not have a tile available or cannot place a tile because it doesn't fit in any current space; they then must take a green tile (Of their choice.), this immediately ends their turn.
• Draft: After the active player has placed a tile on their board, if they covered any icons, then they draft tiles and/or board as pertinent. If multiple icons are covered by a single tile placement, then all icons are resolved.
  Green wheelbarrow: Every one of these icons covered allows the active to draft a green tile.
  White cement truck: A white tile may be drafted.
  ​Orange excavator: A orange tile may be drafted.
  Construction crew: Covering this icon allows the active to draft a new game board by taking a board from one of the two available stacks and adding to their existing player board.
  The new board must be placed adjacent to a board already in play in the same orientation. A player is limited to a total of 4 boards for their park but may create a park of any shape within that limit, they can be placed in a line or a 2x2 grid or a t-shape or whatever.
• Take bear statue: Now the active player checks to see if all of the 15 spaces on any of their game boards have been completely filled with tiles - except of course, for the pit space.
  If any board has been filled, then the active player takes the highest value bear statue token and places it on the empty pit space on that board, thus finally completing it.
• Next Player: Play now proceeds to the player on the left.

Endgame
When any player completes their 4th game board, that is; collects their 4th bear statue, then the endgame is triggered.
​All other players now have one more turn of play and then the game  goes to scoring.
Players add together the value of all tiles played and bear statues placed on their game boards.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Barenpark is a smart blend between easily understood, accessible rules, meaningful decisions and optimising gameplay. The game is something of a race to get the highest scoring tiles and bear statue tokens first and this can put players in something of quandary.

For the most part, players will want to draft white and orange tiles as often as possible because they score the points. They also cover more of the board and thus potentially draft more tiles. This is particularly true of orange tiles.
It means that players should be looking to cover icons with their tiles placements as effectively as possible to gain more tiles. Using an entire turn just to gain a green tile is not particularly efficient.
Having said that, greens are not bad tiles, sometimes getting green tiles is a useful move, those 1-space portaloos can fill in pesky gaps on a board, working towards getting bear statues.

Talking of bear statue tokens.
Sometimes it's worth taking a less efficient tile just to complete a board and gain a higher scoring token before another player. This is all of course contextual and dependant on the situation.

There's definitely a small degree of higher level of play going on here that comes from watching other players turns and trying to anticipate their next moves. With limited numbers of white and orange tiles, knowing which tile another player might go for gives you the option of employing a denial strategy against them or beating them to the punch for a token.

This brings me to the one criticism I have. When playing Barenpark in some circumstances it sometimes felt like that if one player got 'ahead' they tended to stay ahead.
By ahead I mean managing to fill spaces on the board before other players. This is most apparent when drafting bear statue tokens. At times you can see that a player will complete one of their boards before you and claiming the better scoring token, then they'll also be ahead for the next board and claiming the token ahead of you again.
Of course it's possible to re-prioritise and change which board you're trying to complete but since Barenpark has fairly linear gameplay (By which I mean you can only expand you tiles into areas where you already have tiles.), this can be tricky, although the endgame rules where players get an extra turn after whoever finished it probably goes some way to alleviating this.

I think Barenpark is a good, if unremarkable game that feels a little 'bland' or functional and is a little on the light side of this style of tile-placement game but I don't see that bad thing.

But quibbles aside, if you want a solid, tile-placing game that's not-too taxing but still engaging, Barenpark is a good choice.
Barenpark's accessibility and 'lightness' means means it's a good choice for a gateway or entry game.

9th June 2022

We're in Aldershot for an evening of board gaming fun.

So; in Isle of Cats, some evil bad guy is heading to the titular island (Which as the name might suggest, is filled with the felines.) to kill al the cats!!!
Players have a limited number of rounds to save as many as possible.

What's in a game?

• Island board: A idyllic beach scene leading a mountain is depicted on this board.
  There's a track for turn count and and a paw track (SIC) for player order.
  The island board has a '3' on the left side and a '5' on the right. These represent the game's left and right 'fields'. More on fields below.
• Player boards: Each player board is fashioned to look like a boat (The boat you'll be using to rescue cats.) which has several rooms, which are all marked out with a grid and some small icons, there are also icons for rats and treasure maps - there's got to be treasure maps - right? It is a boat after all!
  Each board is also double-sided and the other side features a more family-friendly layout.
• Tetrominos: Isle of Cats makes use of numerous different types of sort of 'not-quite' tetromino shaped tiles.
  • Cats: There are 5 breeds or types (Colours.) of cats shown on the tiles. As well as having a different colours, they also have distinctive tales.
  • Oshax: They are the 6th breed of cat found in Isle of Cats and have special rules that apply to them.
  • Common treasures: There are 4 types of 'common' treasure, the art on the tile show the treasures as having a reddish hue.
  • Rare treasures: If there's common treasures, stands to reason there's got to be rare treasures too! Artwork for these depict them with a yellowish colour.
• Cards: There are a 150 cards in 5 types of cards in Isle of Cats that have different functions and which are delineated by colour. Most cards have a cost which is displayed in the top left corner.
  Collectively they are known as 'discovery' cards.
  • Lesson cards: The blue cards are lesson cards, what do people learn from lesson cards? How to earn points obviously.
    Essentially, these are objective cards that earn players additional points.
    There normal and public lessons, the main difference being that all players can benefit from a public lesson card.
  • Rescue cards: These are green cards and they may depict a number of 'boots' and/or baskets/broken baskets. As the name suggests, these cards are used to rescue cats.
    Boots determine turn order for the round and baskets determine how many cats can be rescued.
  • Oshax cards: These brown cards are used to acquire oshax tiles.
  • Treasure cards: These are yellow and allow the player to... you guessed it, acquire treasure tiles, common or rare.
  • Anytime cards: As the name suggests, these cards can be played at anytime during the any of the phases. Anytime cards are purple and tend to give players bonuses which might be an extra permanent basket or some fish, etc.
• Tokens: Isle of Cats also makes use of several types of token.
  • Basket tokens: These tokens are used to represent 'permanent' baskets that players have acquired, they're also double sided. Both sides feature a illustration of a basket but one side is greyed out, meaning the basket has been 'used' for the round.
  • Fish tokens: These blue wooded fish shaped tokens come in a 1-fish and 5-fish denomination. Fish is the game's currency.
  • Cat tokens: There coloured wooden meeples for each of the game's 5 breed's of cat. Players don't actually gain or use cat meeples in the game but they are used when a specific colour must be displayed to players.
  • Black ship: This wooden token depicts the ominous black ship of Vesh, the evil bad guy coming to the Isle of Cats.
• Bag: Used to blindly draw tiles.
• Box lid: What, what, the box lid? Yep, the box lid is designated as a special spot for cats to sit!

​
Component quality is for the most part very good. Tiles are suitably thick and chunky and all the wooden tokens. The game boards feel fine too. The only quibble I have is that the cards feel a little flimsy.

The artwork in Isle of Cats is excellent throughout with plenty of illustrations of weird and wonderful looking cats on all the tetromino tiles and many of the cards. The boards and other cards also display nice colourful artwork.
I do have a minor criticism here too: The colours for the common and rare treasures is a little too similar to each other, they could have done with being a bit more distinct.

There are few icons used in the game and they're all clear, however, I do have a of minor grumble.
Each personal game board is divided up into 7 'rooms'. It can be hard to see how the board is split up in this manner, particularly when scoring at the end with all the clutter of tiles. The publisher's were aware of this as they put distinct little icons in the square for each room to help but even so, it's tricky thing to comprehend.

How's it play?
Setup

• Players: Give each player a player board and a basket tile.
• Starting turn order: Determine a first player.
  The first player should take a cat meeple of their chosen colour and put it at the top of the player order track. Then going left, all players should do the same with a different coloured cat meeple to determine order for the start of the first round.
• Island board: Put out the island board and put the black ship on '5' on the turn counter.
  Sort the cat meeples by colour and place them above the board.
  Next sort the common treasures by type and put out a number of each type as per player count, place them beneath the board.
  Then put out the Oshax tiles, also beneath the island board.
• Cat tiles: Put all the other cat tiles into the bag.
• Rare treasure tiles: Put the rare treasure tiles into the bag.
• Blind draw: give the bag a good shake then blindly draw out tiles.
  Draw out an amount of cat tiles equal to the number of players multiplied by four. Half should go in the left field and the other half in the right field.
  Thus; in a 3-player game, 6 cat tiles will be put in the left field and 6 in the right.
  If any rare treasures are drawn, place them adjacent to the common treasures, they do not count as 'drawn tiles' then draw more tiles until you reach the allotted amount of cat tiles.
• Discovery cards: Shuffle the discovery cards into a face-down pile.

On to play
In Isle of Cats, players are competing to cover as much of the the grid that is shown on their personal board as possible. This is done by acquiring and placing cat and treasure tiles. Players will also be looking to group cats by colour (Or family.) as much as possible as well as fulfilling whatever objectives they gain during the course of the game.
Isle of Cats is played over a number of phases, with players acting in turn order during each phase. Note that the turn order is different to player order in Isle of Cats and can and probably will change from turn-to-turn,

• Fishing phase: Each player acquires 20 fish from the supply.
• Drafting phase: Deal 7 discovery cards face-down to each player. Players then look at their cards and decide which 2 cards to keep in their playing area, they should pay special attention to the cost in the top-left corner of each card.
  The remaining cards should be passed to the player on their left. Keep repeating this until each player receives 1 card form the player on their right, this card must kept.
  • Payment: Now that each player has 7 cards, they may decide which ones to keep and must pay for them with their fish. If they do not want to pay for 1 or more card (Or cannot afford to do so.), then those cards must be discarded.
• Lesson cards phase: Blue lesson cards are played in this phase. All players must play all lesson cards in their hand. Public lesson cards are played face-up while normal lesson cards are played face-down.
• Rescue cats: Now it's time to rescue some cats. This is done by playing 1 or more green cards.
  • Turn order: Before any rescuing occurs, a new turn order must established. All players must place any and all rescue cards they want to use in this round face-down in their playing area. When this is done, all cards are simultaneously revealed.
    Whichever player has played card(s) with the highest total 'boot's score moves to 1st in the turn order. 2nd highest to 2nd in the turn order and so on.
  • Turns: Now, in the new turn order, players take turns rescuing cats or acquiring cat tiles.
    ​Players can only rescue 1 cat in a turn and must pay the cost to do so (Either 3 or 5 fish depending on the field the tile is in.). A basket must also be used to acquire a cat tile, all players start with 1 permanent basket (Which gets flipped when used.). Rescue cards may also provide temporary baskets and 2 broken baskets count as a single basket. Players can take multiple turns to gain multiple cat tiles but must have a basket available to use for each tile they acquire.
  • Tile placement: When a player gains a tile, it must be immediately placed on their personal board.
    A tile can be rotated and flipped in any way prior to placement. The first tile placed in the game can be put anywhere inside the board's grid but further tiles must be placed orthogonally adjacent to another tile already on the game board. While the board has 7 'rooms', it's OK for tiles to cross between them.​
  • Treasure map: Each player board will have 5 treasure map icons in the same 5 colours as the cat tiles. If a treasure map is covered by a cat tile which matches it's colour, then the active player may immediately take and place a common treasure tile. While common treasure tiles are quite small relatively, they can be useful for filling awkward gaps.
• Rare cards phase: This is when Oshax and treasure cards are played.  Only 1 rare card can be played per turn but again, players may have multiple turns provided they have multiple rare cards they want to play.
  • Oshax cards: Playing one of these cards allows the active player to claim a Oshax tile and add it to their player board. Oshax cats do not have a colour, instead, when placing an Oshax, the player assigns the Oshax cat a colour by putting a cat meeple of the chosen colour on the Oshax tile. - This colour is independent of the player's own player colour.
  • Treasure cards: These cards can be played to acquire rare treasures - provided they've been drawn from the bag of course.
    As with all tiles, they must be immediately placed into the active player's board. As well as filling gaps, rare treasures score VPs at the game end.
• Anytime cards: Anytime cards can be played at anytime during any of the above 5 phases.
• End of round: Once the rare card phase has ended, the end of the round has been reached, the following occurs
  • Clear fields: Any cat tiles which were not claimed during the round are discard out of play.
  • More cats: More cat tiles are drawn blindly to repopulate the fields as per the rules for setup.
  • Carry over: Players carry their hand of cards and fish tokens over to the start of the next round (There's no hand limit or fish token limit.).
  • Move Ship: Move the black ship 1 space along the turn count track.
  • Next round: The next round begins with the first phase by giving 20 fish to each player.

Endgame
Once the 5th round has finished, the game is over and it's goes to scoring.
There are several sources for scoring points and the lesson cards in particular provide many ways to score:

• Families: A family of cats consists of at 3+ cat tiles of the same colour which are orthogonally liked in a group. Each family of cats score VPs according to its size. The bigger the more VPs.
• Public lessons: All players can score VPs from public lessons.
• Lessons: Players now reveal their lesson cards and score them appropriately.
• Rare treasures: Each rare treasure that a player has in their playing area scores VPs.

Negative VPs
That's right, it possible to lose VPs!

• Rats!: Each rat icon left visible on a player's board will lose them 1 VP.
• Unfilled rooms: Any room that has at least 1 unfilled space will cost the player 5 VPs, that means potentially if a player has just 7 empty spots (1 in each room), they could lose a lot of VPs!

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
​There's a few things to think about in Isle of Cats but it's all paced out fairly well and never feels too complex.
That's not to say there's no strategising to be done - because there is.

The chief concern for players should be the management of their fish! Fish are not only used to buy cats but also discovery cards and they're the route to not gaining more VPs but initiative or gain bonuses.
E.g., if you really want a certain tile, playing rescue cards with high 'boots' is important, but you'll need to keep them during the drafting phase - and pay for them.

Players will need to balance their spending with their priorities and recognise when and what is more important at what time.
Acquiring cat tiles is very important, building families, filling rooms, covering rats and treasure maps are all significant but so are going first or getting lesson cards and so on.

Despite players having their own player boards, there's also a higher level of play about watching the actions of other players.
For example; if another player has a big family of a certain breed of cats, it might be a good idea to deny them a beneficial card during the drafting phase and so

But since this is a drafting game, players will also have to adapt to circumstances as they occur, such as having to take a cat tile that isn't wanted and finding a way to place it to maximise it's potential - or minimise it's damage!

Isle of Cats is a mid-weight game that's pretty easy to learn and combines several mechanics in to a engaging cat-themed game.
Whether it's deciding which cards to keep and later which ones to play, as well as what tiles to take and where to place them, Isle of Cats All nearly always gives players meaningful decisions to make and that's the sign of a good game.

29th May 2022

It's a Sunday Evening and we're on Board Game Arena for some gaming entertainment.

Copenhagen; largest city in and capital of Denmark. Few know though, of the cities secret history of builders having ties with errr.... tetromino shapes? At least that's what the game Copenhagen would have you believe... sort of!

Caveat: we've only ever played Copenhagen digitally.

What's in a game?

• Player boards: Each player board is styled to look a little like the facade of a urban townhouse in what I imagine is meant to be Copenhagen.
  Mechanically speaking, each player board is a 5x9 grid which provides 45 spaces, and 4 of these spaces contain shields. Finally, outside the grid is a column of 3 more shields.
• Tetrominoes tiles: Copenhagen comes with tetrominoes tiles in 5 different colours plus white. Strictly speaking, these aren't all tetrominoes as they come in sizes of 2-5 but they are all orthogonally linked square shapes. 
  Additionally, each colour of tetrominoes has it's own 'themed shape'. E.g., all the purple tiles are straights, the red tiles tend to be blocks and so on. Having said that there's some crossover in shape types between colours. The white tiles are the exception here as they are all 1-space tiles.
  They're also somewhat limited in numbers, there are 3 of each size in each colour  except for the 5-space tiles, where there's only 1 5-space tile in each colour. Again, white is the exception in having 12 tiles.
  Finally... windows! All tiles have 1 or more windows on them. As a rule all tiles have 1 space without a window, a 2-space tile has 1 window space and 1 non-window space, the 4-space tile has 3 windows and 1 non-window. Yet again, white is the exception as every white tile has a window on it. Why are windows important? More on that later.
• Facade cards: These cards come in the same 5 colours as the tetrominoes tiles. They look quite busy but in fact, they just show the all the relevant shapes in their particular colour.
• Game end card: A unique card which can trigger 1 of the game's 2 ways of ending.
• Ability tiles: There are 5 types of these square tiles, each type confers a special ability when used. They're also double-sided with a 'used' icon on the flip side.
• Harbour tile: This large tile has spots to place the draw deck and discard pile. Along the outside of the tile are 7 spaces to line up 7 facade cards in a sort of 'U' shape.
• Scoring track: This tiles tracks player scores and slots in adjacent to the harbour tile.

The components for Copenhagen are pretty colourful and bright, although there's barely any art to speak of. 
​
There's also barely any iconography to speak of. The symbols on the ability tiles aren't immediately obvious and will probably require looking up in the rules a couple of times. Other than that though, everything else is easily understood.

How's it play?
Setup

• Harbour tile: Put out the harbour tile, then shuffle the facade cards into a face-down deck. Going clockwise, deal 7 cards face up to the allotted spaces around the harbour tile, then put the deck on to it's space on the tile.
• Tetramino tiles: Put out the tiles as per the player count and arrange them by colour and type.
• Special ability tiles: Put out 5 stacks of special ability tile according to the player count.
• Player board: Give each player a player board.
• First Player: Determine a starting player
• Starting cards: Each player draws cards from the deck as per player count and turn order.

​On to play
In Copenhagen, players take turns either gathering cards or playing them to gain tiles which they put on to their player board to score points.
During their turn, the active player may perform exactly 1 of 2 possible actions.

• Draft cards: The active player takes 2 cards from around the harbour tile. These 2 cards must be adjacent to each other and cannot 'wrap around' the horseshoe shape the line of cards are in.
  Players also have a hand limit of 7 which they must discard down to if they go over.
• Draft tiles: The active may draft one of the tetromino tiles, this is done by discarding a set of cards. if 3 red cards are discarded, then the active player can take a 3-space red tetromino tile, if 5 greens are discard, then they can take the 5 space green tetromino and so forth.
  Placing tiles: Once acquired, a tile must immediately be placed on to their playing board. They must be placed either at the bottom of the playing area, or on top another tile - although overhangs are acceptable and tiles can be rotated in any the player sees fit.

Other rules: Well that's it for the basic actions, there are a couple of extra rules.

• Shields: When a shield on a player's board is covered by a tile, then they get to perform 1 of 3 special actions.
  1-space tetromino: The active player may take and place one of the white 1-space tiles into their playing area. Which if placed on another shield space can trigger another special action.
  Ability tile: The active player may take 1 of the 5 types of ability tile. Players are limited to 1 of each type but they may be activated any anytime in the active player's turn. Once resolved, an ability tile is flipped to its used side.
  Ability tiles allow players to take 3 cards, or 2 cards not adjacent to each other and and so on.
  Reactivate abilities: This final action allows the active player to flip all ability tiles from their used side to their ready side. Obviously, this action becomes better, the more flipped tiles a player has.
• Exhausted deck: When the draw deck becomes empty, all the cards in the discard pile are shuffled back into a new draw deck.
  Additionally, the End Game card is shuffled into the bottom 10 cards of the draw deck. This may trigger the game end, see below for more information
• Scoring: There are 2 ways of scoring; horizontal which requires filling 5 spaces and vertical, which requires 9.
  Horizontal: When a player completes a horizontal line, they score 1 point, if the all the spaces in the line contain windows, they score 2 points instead.
  Vertical: A completed vertical line is worth 2 points, if all the spaces contain windows, it's worth 4.

That's it for the rules.

Endgame
Either one of two ways can trigger the game end.

If the End Game card is drawn (Can only occur after shuffling the discard pile back into a draw deck.) then the game immediately ends.
If a player scores a 12th point then the game immediately ends.

In either case, points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Mechanically, Copenhagen is a fairly light, accessible game; players are either drafting cards or drafting tiles. It's the relationship between those 2 actions that's interesting.

Firstly, there's not many tiles that go into the game, e.g., only 1 5-space tile is available in each colour and only 3 each of the other sizes in each colour, which is all quite deliberate. It takes more cards and thus more actions (And longer.) to get the bigger tiles which are the better tiles but there's the risk a player won't get the one they want.
The bigger tiles are better because of the windows (Or lack of.) on them. Getting a lot of 2-space tiles will mean 50% of filled spaces on a player's board will be windowless, while getting a lot of 5-space tiles means only 20% of spaces are windowless.
Completing a row or column with all windows essentially doubles the points that line is worth and the more windows a player can get on their board, the more likely they are to do this.

This brings me to the next point, other than the 1-space tiles, every tile has a windowless space. This means it's very hard to create lines that all score windows. Players will want to position windowless spaces to minimise their effect and provides players with meaningful decisions to make.

These two factors means that players are faced with a dilemma. Go for the quicker easier to get tiles and probably get a smaller score, or take the risk of losing our by going for bigger, better scoring tiles.
There's definitely a higher level of play that involves watching what cards other players are drafting and trying to anticipate what colours they're going for. This kind of knowledge allows players to adapt to what they think their opponent is doing.

I think Copenhagen is a fairly easy to learn game that has a streak of depth to it. Most people will pick it up fairly quickly.
Having said that I personally found the game a little dull. There's nothing here that I haven't seen elsewhere, it's just packaged differently here.

Copenhagen also played just a little too quickly for my liking (Normally something I'd never criticise a game for!); playing with just 3 people meant that frequently 6 cards were being drawn from the 70 card deck every round, this means the game would reach the end of the deck twice after 20-something cards drafts for each player. It felt like the game is mostly likely to deplete it's deck before a player gets to 12 points. 
To put that into perspective; if a player has 20-something card drafting actions, that in turn gives them the ability to draft around 50 spaces worth of tiles. The quickest way to reach 12 points is to have 6 filled rows, all with windows. That would require filling in 30 spaces at a minimum, this is provided they got the cards and tiles they wanted.

I'm sure there are players out there that would find the challenge of getting to 12 points compelling but for me. ​It meant that I found the game unsatisfying and combined with it's blandness made it average and unremarkable.
I can't really fault the game, it's just a little dull.

1st May 2022

It's a Sunday and we're logged into Board Game Arena for an evening of gaming.

Azul; not a game about a villainous god-entity from Ghostbusters but actually a game about creating mosaic, decorative wall patterns with multi coloured tiles.
My friend's a plasterer, wonder if he'd be good at this!

Caveat: We've only ever played Azul digitally.

What's in a game?

• Player board: The player boards are double-sided with different shapes on both sides. Most of each player board is taken up by two sets of grids.
  Pattern lines: The left hand grid is a sort of triangular shape composed of rows of squares. The top row has 1 square and each row below increases the count of squares by 1. Thus the 5th and final row consists of 5 squares. These lines are known as the pattern lines
  Wall: The right hand grid is a 5x5 size with coloured/patterned squares. There are 5 types of square and each row has one of each type. Additionally, going downwards, each row has those types of square in a slightly offset position so they appear to 'descend' diagonally. The relationship between the 2 types of grid is key to the game. The wall is where players score VPs.
  Floor line: Along the bottom of the player board is a row of spaces labelled with minus values, e.g., -1, -2 and up to -3.
  Score tracker: Finally, along top of each board is an individual scoring tracker for each player.
• Token mats: There are 9 of these mats and they are each decorated in elaborate swirling patterns.
• Token/tiles: There are 100 tokens which represent the game's wall tiles, 20 each in 5 types with patterns that match the patterns on the square grid on player boards.
  First player token: There is also a first player token, it has no intrinsic value and will actually cost players VPs!
• Bag: The physical game comes with a bag which is used to blindly draw tokens.

The game's only artwork are the patterns which appear on the tokens. It does it's job though, between bright colours and unique images, the 5 sets of tokens look distinctive from one another.

Azul doesn't make use of icons and the relationship between tokens and a player board is clear.

How's it play?
Setup

• Board: Give each player a board.
• Mats: Put out 5-9 mats in a circular shape according to player count. Then place the first player token in the central area between the mats. All of this constitutes the game's drafting area.
• Tokens: Put all of the tokens into the bag and give it a good shake.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
In Azul, the player's objective is to place tokens on to their respective spots on the wall grid of their player board, which scores them VPs.
This is done by filling in the horizontal lines in the pattern lines grid; players must collect tokens of the type they need and place them in the spaces on the respective horizontal line. Depending on the line, it will require 1-5 tokens to fill a line. When a line is filled, one of those tokens can be placed in the matching space on that line at the end of the round.
All tokens will score 1 or more VPs when placed, tokens can also score again at the game end.

Azul makes use of a traditional turn order, with the active player performing their action (Which will involve taking 1 or more tokens of the same type.) before play progresses to the player on the left.

• Round start: The first player should blindly draw tokens from the bag and place them on the mats until each mat has 4 tokens on it. With 5-9 mats there will be 20-36 tokens used.
• Collect tokens: The active player must draft tokens from one of the mats or the central area (At the game start there won't be anything in the central area to draft.).
  The player chooses which type of token to draft and must take all the tokens of that type from the chosen mat or central area.
  From mat: If the tokens are drafted from a matt, the any tokens remaining on that matt are moved into the central area.
  From centre: If tokens are drafted from the central area and the first player token is also there, then that is taken as well.
  The first player token cannot be played into the lines and instead goes into the floor line. It means that the player will go first in the next round but will lose a point as a consequence.
• Place tokens: Now the active player must place their tokens into the pattern lines grid on their player board. There are several restrictions here.
  • Tokens can only be placed into a single line.
  • Tokens may be placed into any empty line or a line which already contains matching tokens.
    Any excess tokens remaining after filling a line are sent to the floor line.
  • Tokens cannot be placed in a line already containing different tokens.
  • Tokens cannot be placed in a line where the matching token has already been added to the wall grid. I.e., if a line had been previously filled and emptied of a particular type of token, in essence a line can only be used once for each type of tokens and it cannot be repeated.
  • Finally, the active player may choose to put the tokens into the floor line.
• Next player: Once the active player has placed their tokens, play progresses to the player on the left.
• Round end: Play continues until all the tiles from the drafting area have been placed on to player boards, then the  round is over and the following end of round actions occur for each player:
  • Resolve tokens: A line in the pattern lines which has been filled is considered resolved. This means that one of the tokens from that line is placed on it's corresponding spot on the same row in the wall grid, any remaining tokens are returned to the bag.
  • Scoring tokens: When a token is moved to the wall grid, it is immediately scored. How much it scores will depend on it's position relative to other tokens on the wall grid.
    If the token is not adjacent to any other tokens (The very first token placed on the wall grid for example.), then it scores 1 VP.
    If the token has been placed adjacent to 1 or more other tokens, it forms a link with them and scores more. For each horizontal token it is adjacent to in a link, an additional VP is scored. The same is true for a vertical link.
    If multiple rows were completed in the same round, then multiple tokens can be scored.
  • Floor line: Each token that has been placed in a box in the floor ​line costs the VPs listed, this is cumulative. E.g., the first 4 boxes are 1-, -1, -2, -2, if they are filled, this would total -6 VP. Once penalty points have been calculated, return the first player token to the centre and the other tokens to the bag.
• Next round: Whoever had the first player token is now the first player for the next round which they begin by blindly drawing tokens to populate the mats in preparation for the next round.
  Any uncompleted pattern lines carry over into the following round.
  

​
Endgame
When any horizontal line in the wall grid on any player's board has been filled, the endgame is triggered. The current end of round actions and scoring are completed and the game goes to final, bonus scoring.

Bonus VPs can be scored scored by the following:

• Every filled out vertical line is worth 7 VPs.
• Every filled out horizontal line is worth 2 VPs.
• Every completed set of 5 matching tokens (In other words; each filled out diagonal line.) is worth 10 VPs.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
On a rudimentary level, Azul's mechanics involve drafting handfuls of tokens and then placing them on to a board where their relative positioning scores varying amounts of VPs. It's a mechanic (Or a variation of that mechanic.) that have been employed in several other games and I'd say that Azul is a mid-weight iteration of it. As written the rules feel a little opaque and counter-intuitive but in application, they're pretty straightforward.
Where Azul get its weightiness comes from two areas of the rules; how the drafting - particularly drafting from mats works and then where and when tiles should go on the grids.

​As a basic concept, collecting as many tokens as possible to fill out the pattern lines and consequently get tokens on the wall grid is the way to go. However, there's more to it than.
For example, simply collecting too many tokens can sent the excess to the floor ​line and cost VPs, this is more important than it sounds, because as tokens are taken from the mats, it's inevitable that other tokens will build up in the centre and trying to predict this can be very important. Depending on circumstances, a lot of tokens of a particular type may well build up in the centre.
A player may want 4 red tokens for example, should they try and take them in drips and drabs from several mats over several turns or wait for them to accumulate in the centre? Provided of that they do accumulate in the centre, what if too many go to the centre?
There's definitely a higher level of play where watching what other players are doing is important. Quite often it's clear what they're prioritising, what they want or don't want in the next few turns.
​If they have a single token in the 5-space line on the left, it's likely they'll be looking to fill that out. Conversely, if they've already got 1 or more scoring tokens on the right side, they'll be unlikely or unable to use more of those tokens.
Being able to predict other player's objectives will help when making decisions. It can also allow a player to try and deny tokens to other players and curiously, on some occasions force other players to take tokens they don't want.

Players will also want to think about how and when to place their scoring tokens. Putting them down willy-nilly is a sure way to minimise points.
Obviously in order to optimise points, tokens should ideally be put on to the wall adjacent to other tokens. Placing them vertically is a good way to go, since completed vertical lines earn an additional 7 VPs each, unless a player is looking to end the game, in which case they can go for the horizontal line!

This brings me to an interesting facet in the mechanics, scoring the diagonal, i.e., putting all the tokens of 1 type on to the wall grid scores the biggest bonus; 10 VPs but as they are diagonal, they can't score off of each other! Additionally, once a diagonal of a type has been completed, the player can no longer score tokens of that type at all, collecting those tokens will now just incur penalty points in the floor line. Should a player hold off getting the diagonal until later which lowers the risk of sending tokens to the floor line or wait? Waiting will mean risking not completing it at all.

I have to say I'm not fond of mechanics which lose players points especially if it can occur out of their control, it irritates like a unreachable itch and can be a little stress inducing. I find that's the case with Azul as well. 
However, having said that, the truth is; this is what makes Azul a good game and gives it depth. It means that collecting tokens either earns VPs (Or contributes towards acquiring VPs.) or loses VPs. It's always a meaningful decision.

​Other iterations of these mechanics are a little less stressful, brain-boiling and perhaps more accessible. But if depth is what you're looking along with a dollop indirect interaction between players, then Azul is worth a try.