11th November 2022

It's a Friday and I'm at the office in Woking for some end-of-week gaming fun.

You know you can't go wrong when you're playing a board game set in Renaissance Italy.
In this case it's Florence and about princes which is about as Renaissance as it gets! All you need are some Medici and Borgia to round it all off!

In The Princes of Florence players take on the role of wealthy nobles trying to out do each other by enticing artist and scholars to their estates to create 'works' which in turn gives players bragging rights - which is what is important obviously.

• Cards: There are several types of cards in The Princes of Florence.
  Bonus cards: These cards can increase the value of works when they are created. 
  Prestige cards:  Endgame bonus PPs can possibly be earned by prestige cards.
  Profession cards: There are 21 professions in the game that players will be looking to recruit.
  Recruiting cards: Used to err.. recruit professions! Specifically, profession cards played by other players.
• Tiles: There are landscape and building tiles and they're sort of tetramino shaped. Building tiles: There are 10 types and they come in small, medium and large. Each one depicts a building of some sort, ranging from a chapel to a university.
  Landscape tiles: There are parks, lakes and forests.
• Tokens: There are a number of card tokens.
  Freedoms: There are rectangular tokens for each of the 3 'freedoms', freedom of travel, opinion and religion.
  Builders: Square tokens represent builders, which aid when acquiring building tiles.
  Jesters: These are circular tokens. Jesters provide bonuses when scoring the value of a work.
  Money: Finally, there's circular tokens of various sizes to represent differing denominations of florins; the game's currency.
• Pawns: There's a pawn in each player colour used to track PPs as well as a black 'first player' pawn.
• Discs: There are also chunky scoring discs in each player colour to track work values, there is also a black disc is used to track the round count.

All the components in The Princes of Florence are well made. The tokens and cards are what you'd expect. The tetramino tiles feel nice and sturdy, as do the game and player boards.
Amusingly, the pawns are all wearing wide-brimmed hats, got to have some protection from that scorching Mediterranean sun!

Broadly speaking there there are 2 art styles utilised in The Princes of Florence.
Tiles, tokens and some of the player boards are decorated with full colour illustrations. They are quite stylised and almost simplistic illustrations but they are effective and feel appropriate for the setting.
All the game's cards (Particularly the profession cards.) are illustrated with a sepia coloured line art style. It contrasts with the art style but also compliments it and again, is appropriate for the setting.
The standout art-wise is the game board where nearly each space on the scoring track has its own unique illustration. It shows that little extra effort put into the presentation that shows care for the game which I appreciate.

There's little in the way of iconography, mostly its appears on the player boards in the form of silhouetted tetramino shapes for buildings but even so, they are also labelled.
Most information is relayed through text. Speaking of which...
The game uses a distinct and flowery font for text. It looks suitable for a renaissance themed game but can be a little harder to read than it could be and also tends to make the player board and cards a little more complex then they actually are.
It's a minor quibble and in no way a gamebreaker though.

On to play
The Princes of Florence is played over 7 rounds.
Each round is divided into an auctioning phase and an action phase.
Auctions allow players to bid for items which will aid them during action phases.
The action phase uses the usual turn structure with the active player taking their turn before play progresses to the player on their left.

• Auction phase: During this phase, players may bid on 1 of 7 different objects, there are some rules for auctions.
  • Auctions: In a round, there will be a number of auctions equal to the number players, additionally, there are some rules when resolving auctions.
  • Opening bid: Whoever starts a bid chooses 1 of the 7 objects to bid on. The objects are: Forest/Lake/Park landscape tile, builder token, jester token, prestige card or recruitment card.
    Once they've placed their opening bid, other players in clockwise order may place a higher bid or pass.
  • Passing: If a player passes on a bid for any reason, then they are out for the rest of that particular auction.
    Winning: When all players bar one pass, that player wins the auction, the winner take the object they won pays for it and cannot participate in any further auctions in that round. Thus, a player can only 1 object per round through auctions.
  • 1 auction per object type: Once a object has been won in an auction, no further objects of that type can be bid on.
  • Objects: When a player wins a bid, they take 1 of the 7 following objects as explained below:
    Landscape tiles: Forest lakes and parks. When one of these is taken, it must immediately be placed on their board's grid.
    Builders: These tokens are added to their allotted spaces on the player board going from left-to-right. They will provide bonuses when building.
    Jesters: These tokens should placed on the palazzo space, they increase the value of works... with the strength of their humour I guess!
    Prestige cards: Draw 5 and keep 1, placed the remainder at the bottom of the deck.
    Recruitment cards: Take a recruitment card, it can be used immediately or saved and used during the controlling player's turn later.
    Playing recruitment card allows a player to take a profession card that has been played by another player.
  • End of auction: Once all players have won an auction, play progresses to the action phase.
• Action phase: During their turn, the active player may perform 2 actions from the following list of 5.
  • Build: This action can be performed twice in a round.
    The active player may buy and place a building tile on their grid. The tile can be placed in any orientation on the grid but cannot be directly adjacent to another building unless the player has acquired at least 2 builder tokens. Builder tokens can also give discounts to the cost of buying buildings.
    Finally, when a building has been placed on the grid, the player immediately earns 3PPs.
  • Acquire a bonus card: This action can be performed twice in a round.
    The active player pays for a bonus card and draws 5 cards from the deck and keeps 1, returning the 4 other cards to the bottom of the deck.
  • Buy a 'Freedom': This action can only be performed once per round.
    The active player may buy one of the freedoms and immediately places it on the appropriate space on their player board.
  • Buy a profession card: This action can only be performed once per round.
    The active pays for a profession card then draws 5 and keeps 1, returning the other 4 to the bottom of the deck.
  • Complete a work: This action can be performed twice in a round.
    With this action, the active player may complete a 'work', this has several steps and involves calculating the work's 'value'.
    Play profession card: The active must play a profession card from their hand. Each profession has 3 things they 'want'; a building, landscape and freedom. Each one of these that that the active player owns will add to the work's value.
    Jesters and profession cards in hand or played also add to the value.
    Finally, if the active player has a bonus card, it can be played now to add to the value of the work.
    From this, the value of the work will be calculated.
    Minimum work value: If a work's value does not meet the minimum value of works for the round, it cannot be completed. Minimum values start at 7 in round 1 and go up to 17 in round 7.
    Rewards: Once a work has been completed and it's value has been calculated, the active play will gain rewards.
    ​Firstly; the active player moves their disc to along the scoring track to the number that matches the work's value.
    Then the active player gains 100 Florins per point. The player can choose to keep the money or immediately trade it in for PPs at a cost of 200 Florins per PP. This must be done immediately, it cannot be done later.
• Earn money: This is not one of the actions a player can take per se but any point in the game, any player may spend PPs to gain Florins at a rate of 100 Florins per PP.
• ​Next Player: Once the active player has completed their 2 actions, play progresses to the player on their left.
• Next round: Once all player have completed their turns, the round is over and the following 2 steps occur.
  Best Work: Whoever has created the single highest value work for the round gains 3PPs. All players should remove their discs in preparation of scoring works in the following round.
  First player: The first player marker should be moved to the player on the left who will start the bidding in the next round.

Endgame
Once the 7th round has been completed, the game goes to scoring.
Players now reveal any prestige cards they've acquired and score them, adding whatever they're worth to their score on the game board.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
In terms of gameplay, there's some nice mechanics going on. There's some interesting balancing that occurs with buildings. By virtue of their sizes, the larger buildings will be harder to fit in the grid and take up more room but they are wanted by more professions.

Auctioning in particular is also well balanced.
Because a player can only win 1 auction per round, it means someone who has a lot of cash cannot dominate all the proceedings. It means that every player can only ever get 1 object per round and it means that if a player has lost every auction and is the last player left in it, they can get any remaining object, unopposed and for just the cost of the opening bid.

During the action phase, synchronicity is important. Getting landscapes, buildings, freedoms and professions that 'riff' off each is very useful. E.g., both the goldsmith and bell maker want a 'workshop, or both the theologian and painter want freedom of travel.

Players will be looking to optimise their decisions especially when it comes to creating works which is a major source of income and potentially PPs.
Why is this so important? The Princes of Florence only has 7 rounds, which is only 7 auctions and 14 actions! Even the most efficient of players will probably find themselves unable to do everything they want they want to do in the rounds given. This forces them to make difficult decisions which is generally a good thing.

The Princes of Florence also has distinct early and late game states. Early on players will be looking to build up their estate, buildings, freedoms etc. In the late game they will likely be looking to create as many works as possible and convert them to PPs. If a player creates 2 works in a round, only the highest value one counts for end of round best work bonus but both will pay out Florins and consequently PPs.

I suppose that The Princes of Florence is a sort of 'mid-weight' game and by that I mean a game that isn't too complex but probably has a bit too much going on to be a good introductory or crossover game.
With having to win auctions to gain certain objects and cards, buildings to place, works to create and more, as well as having to consider how everything relates to everything else, there's a lot to think about.

But for more seasoned players, The Princes of Florence is a solid experience with well structured gameplay elements that all have a clear purpose which in turn presents players with meaningful decisions to make.
It also blends the individual aspect of a player building up their own palazzo and estate with the interaction of auctioning and drafting.
The Princes of Florence is definitely one to try.

13th October 2022

It's a Thursday and we're in Aldershot for a evening of gaming entertainment.

Do you like salads? Do you like points? If so, then maybe you'll like Point Salad, a game about well... about making salads and scoring points with a literal point salad mechanic!

What's in a game?

• Cards: Point Salad uses a deck of 108 cards and that's it. OK, there's a bit more to it.
  Each card is double sided with a veggie side and a scoring side. The veggie side features 1 of 6 vegetables/colours and the other,  the scoring side has scoring criteria related to the veggies.
  Veggie side: The vegetables (Or veggies) types are:
  Cabbage/purple.
  Carrot/orange.
  Lettuce/green.
  Onion/dark red.
  Pepper/yellow.
  Tomato/red (Yes, technically, tomatoes are a fruit but I digress.).
  Scoring side: The flip side of the cards each feature a scoring criteria or manner of point scoring, of which Point Salad has a wide variety.
  The scoring criteria tend to be based on combinations of veggies. For example,  8 victory points (VPs) per 3 onions or 10 VPs for the most tomatoes or 5 VPs for each pair of carrot and lettuce and so on. Some cards will give points for certain veggies and deduct VPs for others, some may score for not having any of a certain type of veggie!
  Finally, in the corner on a scoring card it will display which veggie is on the other side.

Point Salad's cards are pretty basic, they don't seem laminated and feel a little flimsy. Although unless you treat them badly, it shouldn't be a problem.

There isn't much art to Point Salad, only the illustrations for the 6 types of veggie. These are colourful, chunky illustrations with thick line art. I like it and think it suits the game's light, breezy theme.

The game's only iconography is the 6 vegetable types. For the most part, they are clear  and distinct. EXCEPT for the onion and tomato images which not only look a little similar but both use shades of red for their associated colour. It's not a gamebreaker by any means but it definitely can be a little confusing and could have been clearer
The scoring criteria are pretty easy to understand, it uses a mixture of the icons and text to explain their individual rules.

• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
In Point Salad players will be drafting cards from the central selection.
They will be drafting veggies to create sets and drafting scoring cards to score those sets.
Point Salad uses the typical turn structure with the active player acting before play progresses to the player on their left.

During their turn, the active player must perform 1 of the following 2 draft actions, additionally, they may then also perform a free action.

• Draft: The active player must perform 1 of the following 2 draft actions.
  Take 1 scoring card: The active player may take 1 card from the 3 scoring decks and place it in their personal area, keeping it with the scoring side-up.
  Take 2 veggie cards: The active player may take any 2 of the 6 veggie cards and add them to their personal playing area, keeping them veggie side-up and collating them into sets
  The cards that were taken are replaced by flipping and placing cards from their corresponding decks.
• Optional free action: Once per turn, the active player may flip 1 card from the scoring side to its veggie side. Players cannot flip cards from the veggie side to point side!​
• Next player: Once the active player has drafted and possibly performed their free action, player passes to the player on their left.
• Empty deck: At any time, if 1 of the scoring decks becomes empty, simply take the largest of the remaining decks and split it into 2 decks.

Endgame
Play continues until all cards have been drafted and then goes to scoring.

All cards are scored all ways! That means that if for example, a set of carrots can gain VPs from 2 scoring cards, then they are scored twice and so on.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Point Salad is a easy to learn game, there are only 2 actions (And 1 free action.) to choose from and 1 core tenement to remember; scoring cards score off of veggie cards.
The depth comes from what is done with those 2 decisions.

Getting scoring cards early on will give a player an objective to aim for but also can limit their drafting options.
Conversely, concentrating on veggie cards early will give a player some flexibility when it comes to acquiring scoring cards, the risk here though is that optional scoring cards may never become available because other players may get them first or they may get flipped to the veggie side or in game with a lower player count, may not even be in the game.

All of this means that planning ahead can be a two-edged sword. It's definitely worth trying to plan ahead, synergy between scoring cards, i.e., multiple scoring cards that score off 1 type of veggie can led to big scores.
However, the drafting area's landscape is likely significantly change from turn-to-turn and players will also need to adapt to circumstances as they arise. Players will also need to mange having to take cards they don't need or want and look to create or exploit new scoring opportunities as they appear.
The optional free card flip rule offers players a little flexibility. They'll be times that a points card with a negative may prove a liability might be worth flipping which negates the negative and also provides a veggie for another points cards. Again, this is all contextual.

There's also a higher level of play at work here. Players can try and anticipate their opponents are hoping to do and possibly stymy them. Taking specific veggie cards or scoring cards they might want or even taking veggie will cause points cards from the related column to be flipped to replace them

It means that Point Salad generally provides players will meaningful decisions and choices to make.

I find Point Salad an enjoyable game, it makes a great filler, plays up to 6 and also a good crossover or family game.
It's a game that you shouldn't take too seriously, it's a light, fun quick game. In fact it's so quick to play that it seems like the set up time longer than the play time! Which is my only, minor criticism of an otherwise good game.
It this sounds like your kind of thing, you should definitely give Point Salad a try.

9th October 2022

Another Sunday, another session of gaming goodness on Board Game Arena.

Travel around North America, fulfil tickets, draft cards, create routes in Ticket to Ride. 

• Cards: Ticket to Ride uses 2 types of cards:
  Train car cards: These cards come in 8 different colours that correspond to the connection colours on the board and each colour also displays a different type of train car such a freight or passenger car.
  There also 14 'locomotion' cards, which are 'wild' cards.
  Destination cards: Each one of the destination cards shows the same map of North America as shown on the game board, 2 of the destinations on the card will be highlighted. Finally, each destination card has a associated victory point (VP) value.
• Train meeples: Should these be called 'treeples'? Hmm maybe not, could be confused with trees!
  ​There are 45 trains in each of the game's 5 player colours. The trains are sized so that 1 train meeple fits on 1 segment in a route.

I suppose that you could call the art on the board muted but I would say it's functional and unobtrusive. The board is quite busy as it is with all the routes crossing back and forth, overly elaborate art would just obfuscate important information, so it feels like a good decision to me.
Each colour of train card has it's own unique illustration which helps with accessibility issues. The illustrations are perfectly good if a little plain.
The destination cards essentially replicate the art on the board.

There's no notable iconography in Ticket to Ride and the game is straightforward to comprehend. There's just the 9 types of train car to remember and that's easy and intuitive. I imagine the biggest hurdle to overcome in the game's presentation is finding destinations on the map and the iconography does a lot to make that as easy as it can.

How's it play?
Setup

• ​Game board: Put out the game board.
• Train car cards: Shuffle the cards into a face-down deck, deal 5 cards face-up adjacent to the board.
• Destination cards: Also shuffle these into a face-down deck.
• Players: First give each player all the train meeples in their player colour.
  Train car cards: Deal 4 to each player, this is their starting hand.
  Destination cards: Deal 3 destination cards to each player. Everyone decides how many to keep. A player must keep 1-3 destination cards.
  Destination cards should be kept secret players until the end game scoring, only then should they be revealed.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
In Ticket to Ride, players broadly speaking have 3 objectives, these are; build as many routes as possible, create a connection between the locations on their destination cards and finally, create the longest contiguous set of connections.
All of these will contribute VPs towards their final score.
This is done by drafting cards which in turn allows players to create routes.
Ticket to Ride uses the typical turn structure of the active player taking their action before play progresses to the player on their left.
In their turn, the active player can perform exactly 1 of the 3 following actions.

• Draft train car cards: This action allows the player to draw 2 of the standard 8 types of train car cards. This can be done by taking it from the 5 available face-up cards or drawing blindly from the deck.
  Locomotion cards: A player can only claim 1 locomotion card as their enntire drafting action.
  Shuffling: If at anytime there's 3 or more locomotion cards in the face-up line of cards, then all 5 are discarded and 5 new cards are drawn. Additionally, if the train car card deck becomes empty, the discard pile is shuffled into a new deck.
• Claim route: A route is a line of oblong spaces between 2 destinations. A route may a have a colour or may be 'grey'.
  To claim a route, the active player must discard train car cards of the matching colour and equal number of spaces to the route. A grey route can be claimed with cards of any colour provided they are all of the same colour.
  Locomotion cards: These can be used as train car cards of any colour.
  Place train meeples: Once a route has been claimed, the active player places a train meeple on every space on the route.
  ​This also means that no other player may claim this route.
  Some adjacent destinations will have 2 routes running in parallel, in games with 4+ players, the 2nd route can be also claimed. In 2 or 3 player games, 2nd routes are not in play.
  Scoring: When a route is claimed, it is immediately scored on the tracker. Routes run 1-6 spaces in length and correspondingly score 1-15 VPs.
• Draw destination cards: As their action, the active player may draw 3 cards and keep 1-3 of them, providing them with additional scoring opportunities (Or not as explained below!).
  Discarded cards are returned to the bottom of the destination deck.
• Next player: Once the active player has completed their action, play progresses to the player on their left.

Endgame
When the active player has 2 or less train meeples remaining, the end game is triggered. Every player including the active player has 1 more turn then the game goes to scoring.

Players will add points from destination cards to their running total from the game and the player with the longest set of connections gains bonus VPs.

Destination cards are now revealed:

• Completed destination cards: Players earn the listed VPs for every destination card that they have completed (That is; any destination card where the owning player may trace a connection of their routes between the 2 destinations.).
• Incomplete destination cards: Every incomplete destination a play has will deduct VPs from that player's total.

Finally, whichever players has the longest contiguous set of routes earns a bonus 10 VPs!

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Ticket to Ride is a very popular, well regarded game and it's easy to see why. Lightweight rules that are genuinely elegant, almost minimalist that're easy to learn, a game that's intuitive to play with a theme anybody can understand. Ticket to Ride is definitely a game with crossover appeal, is a good game for casual play and introduction to board games.
It also has a fairly random distribution of destination cards throughout a game which provides a good level of variety to games.

This pared down set of rules means that Ticket to Ride also provides players with clear meaningful decisions to make.
Basic tactics are pretty straightforward: Players are in a race to connect their personal destinations before they risk getting blocked by other players. They'll need to balance getting cards they need to draft and claiming routes.
Since a player's routes do not need to connect, any player essentially can claim any route, anytime if they have the appropriate cards.

Completing destination cards can be quite satisfying and they add an extra wrinkle to the gameplay. Being able to acquire more of them during play can be a game changer, earning more VPs but conversely, is also risky, getting a card that is not completed obviously costs VPs.
What makes this even more interesting is during the late game this risk/reward mechanic becomes even more pronounced.
Acquiring a destination card late in the game can be very risky because the player may not have the required time to complete the connection. However, late in the game is when a player's train network is at it's biggest, consequently it's possible to gain destination cards which have already​ been connected.

There's also a higher level of play in Ticket to Ride. Watching what opponents are doing and successfully anticipating what connections they're trying to make can allow a player to block or slow their progress down by claim routes they might want. If you look at the map, you will see that that there are numerous routes which are only 1 or 2 space grey routes that are very easy for a player to claim, e.g., a 1 space grey route can be claimed with any train rail card. It's obvious this is by design.

This brings me to my main contention with Ticket to Ride: It's a game that promotes negative gameplay. What do I mean by that?
Claiming a route another player needs will force them to spend additional turns acquiring train car cards and then taking longer to claim routes around the block.
In terms of action economy, a player wasting 1 action to make an opponent waste 5 or 6 can be pretty advantageous.
Preventing an opponent completing a destination card may earn that player no VPs but for their opponents, it will cost them points.

Many Eurogames have mechanics which have sort of a balance to them where if a player screws over an opponent, they will also frequently screw themselves over and only occasionally can they screw an opponent over while advance themselves.
Ticket to Ride is not like that!

Although, in part this will be down to the type of people playing.
Dedicated players will learn and exploit blocking at every opportunity and why not? Games are for winning and getting a score of 1 while opponents get 0 is still winning.

More casual players may not care about higher level tactics. Early games will be light and fun but even so, after a while they'll end up realising (Probably by accident!) how powerful blocking can be.

Remember, earlier I said how connecting destinations can feel satisfying, well getting blocked can feel equally unsatisfying.

There's a lot that's good about Ticket to Ride and I wanted to like it but the negative aspect can just be too frustrating. I understand why the game has a lot of fans, I'm not one of them.

20th September 2022

Tuesday is here again and we're with the Woking Gaming Club at The Sovereigns in Woking.

Recruit and assemble your citizens (Or heroes really.), build domains and vanquish foul enemies in this fantasy adventure themed dice rolling and tableau building game.

What's in a game?

• Player boards: These oblong boards are used by each player to track the game's 3 resources; Gold, Strength, Magic and also Victory Points (VPs.).
• Tokens:
  • Resource tokens: There are wooden tokens that match the shape and colour of each of the player board's 4 tracks and are used to track them on player boards.
    Card resource tokens: These cards tokens replicate the wooden resource tokens... only in cardboard.
  • Extensions: These card tokens are used to track resources which increase above 10.
• Dice: Valeria: Card kingdoms comes with 2 normal six-siders. These are plastic dice with indented numbers.
• Cards: Lots of cards and I do mean a lots that come in several different types.
  • Citizens: These cards represent the heroes that players will recruit to their cause and they share a number of features.
    These include knights, peasants, butchers and so on. Some of these folk don't seem much like the adventuring type but I guess it takes all sorts!
    Activation number: In the top left corner of each citizen card is its activation number. Activation numbers range from 1-8 or can be 9/10 or 11/12.
    There are 2 different citizen cards for each activation number which can be mixed and matched during setup.
    Role: Each citizen has 1 of 4 roles and this is shown in the top right corner. Types include Worker, Soldier, Shadow and Holy.
    ​Cost: On the left side, alongside the citizen's name is the cost in gold to recruit the citizen. Recruiting duplicate citizens usually gets more expensive.
    Abilities: Finally, along the bottom edge of the card are its 2 abilities. One of which is activated in the player's turn and the other which is activated in other players' turns.
    Typically, abilities include gaining some of the game's several resources or changing one resource into another.
  • Starter citizens: These are 3 starter cards which all player begin the game with, this includes 2 citizen cards and a Herald which gives players a consolation resource if they get nothing from activation. More on activation below.
  • Duke cards: Duke and duchess cards are all unique and provide provide players with asymmetrical scoring opportunities.
  • Monster cards: A fantasy adventure game without evil monster to battle wouldn't be very good and Valeria: card Kingdoms features some famous fantasy opponents. Each monster card shares several statistics.
    Location and type: In the top right corner of every monster card is its location, which can be mountains, swamp etc. There are 8 types of location.
    Type indicates how tough a monster is  and goes from minion to boss.
    Strength: To the left of the monster's name is listed it's strength. This how many of which resource(s) must be spend to vanquish it, this is usually just strength but may also include magic.
    Victory points: Top the right of the name it will list the monster's VP reward which will be earned at the game end for defeating it.
    Reward: Along the bottom of the card it will display the immediate reward a player earns for defeating that monster. Rewards can take a variety of forms.
  • Domain cards: As well as slaying monsters, a player's citizen's can also go out and build (Well purchase actually!) domains. All domain cards share certain information.
    Role requirements: Shown in the top right corner are the role requirements to acquire that domain card. E.g., a domain may require a worker and holy role citizen cards or 2 soldier role cards.
    Cost: To the left of the card's name is the cost in gold to purchase the domain card - provided the player also has citizen cards that match its requirements.
    Victory points: To the right of a domain's name is the VPs it earns at the game end.
    Reward: Listed along the bottom of the card is the reward it provides to the player that purchases it. This can be a one-off bonus or a ongoing benefit.
  • Exhaustion cards: These cards simple say exhaustion and are used to track when the game end may occur.

Component quality is the usual good quality you'd expect from a modern game like Valeria: Card Kingdoms.
Card quality is fine as are the card tokens and the player boards.
Wooden tokens for resources are always a welcome addition.
The dice are plastic and feel a little 'square' but they have indented numbers which is good.

Valeria: Card kingdoms features good art throughout. Cards are well illustrated with colourful chunky pictures of heroic citizens and intriguing domains, my favourite though, is the artwork for monsters that brashly depict menacing enemies.

There's quite a lot of iconography throughout the game, from types of heroes and monsters, to terrain types and ability icons.
For the most part, they are fairly intuitive - matching the roles on citizen cards to the requirements on domain cards is obvious but some of the abilities, particularly on  domain cards are a bit esoteric and will require some looking up in the rulebook.

I don't think it's especially beginner or casual friend but ​by no means is it a gamebreaker either.

How's it play?
Setup

• Players: Give each player the following:
  Player board: Give each player a player board and the 4 resource tokens to go with it. Strength and VPs start at 0, Magic at 1 and Gold at 2
  Starter cards: Give each player their 3 starter cards.
  ​Duke cards: Shuffle the duke cards into a face-down deck and deal 2 face-down to each player. Then each player should select 1 to keep hidden and discard the other out of play.
• Central playing area: The monster, citizen and domain cards will be set out in 4 rows of 5 stacks per row as follows.
  Monster cards: Sort the monster cards by location and choose 5 locations. Take the cards for those 5 locations and create a row of 5 face-up stacks of monster cards. Each stack should also be sorted by monster type, with the weakest at the top and strongest at the bottom.
  Citizen cards: Decide which citizen cards will be used and sort them by activation number. There should be 10 stacks with 5 cards in each stack.
  Place them into 2 face-up rows of 5 stacks, with activation numbers 1-5 on the top row, while 6-8, 9/10 and 11/12 go on the second row.
  Domain cards: Shuffle the domain cards into a face-down deck. Deal 2 cards face-down into a row of 5 stacks, finally deal 1 domain card face-up on the top of each stack.
• Exhaustion cards: Take a number of exhaustion cards equal to twice the player count and put them in to the central playing area.
• First Player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
In Valeria: Card Kingdoms, players will be rolling dice to activate cards to accumulate resources which in turn can be spent to acquire more citizen cards, domains and monsters.
The game follows the usual turn structure of the active player taking their actions before player progresses to the player on their left.
During a turn, the following phases occur.

• Dice roll phase: The active player rolls both dice. The result of this roll will determine which citizen cards will activate.
  Reading the dice: The dice are red 2 ways, individually and as a pair.
  E.g., rolling a 2 and 5 means that cards with activation numbers 2, 5 & 7 will activate.
  Rolling doubles like double 4 means that 8 activates and 4 activates twice.
• Activation phase: Players now resolve citizen cards with activation numbers that match the result the result of the dice roll.
  This means the active player resolves the left hand ability on all their activated cards.
  All other players resolve the right hand ability on all their activated cards.
  No activations: If none of a player's citizen cards activates, the Herald activates instead and this gives the unfortunate player 1 of the 3 resource of their choosing.
• Action phase: The active player must now perform 2 actions, this can be 2 different actions or the same action twice.
  Spending resources: 3 of the 4 available actions requires the active player to spend resources. In most cases, the magic resource can substitute for other resources provided at least 1 from the original resource is also spent.
  E.g., if a card costs 4 gold, the player must spend at least 1 gold but can substitute magic for any other part of the gold cost.
  The 4 actions are:
  • ​Gain resources: Each action spent allows the active player to gain 1 of the 3 resources.
  • Recruit citizen: The active player can recruit a citizen from the central area by playing their gold cost. This card is immediately placed into their tableau and will be ready to activate in the next roll.
  • Defeat monster: For an action, the active player may defeat the monster on top of any monster stack. They must spend the relevant strength and/or magic to do so. The player immediately gains the reward and the monster card is put into their victory stack.
    VPs from monster cards are not earned at this time.
    Additionally; as monsters are defeated, stronger and stronger monsters are revealed.
    
  • Build domain: The active player may spend an action to build the top domain card on any stack provided they meet the role requirement and spend the relevant gold.
    The domain card is then placed into their tableau. If the domain provides an immediate benefit, then the player resolves that benefit now. Ongoing benefits will as determined by their description.
    Finally, a face-down domain card is flipped to replace the one just taken.
    As with monster cards, domain cards not earn their VP until the game.
• Empty stack: Any time that any of the 20 stacks in the central playing area becomes empty, an exhaustion card is put in the empty spot.
• Next player: Once the active player has taken their 2 actions, play progresses to the player on their left who begins their turn by rolling the dice.

Endgame
Play in Valeria: Card Kingdoms continues until any 1 of 3 game ending criteria is met, which are:

• All monster cards have been vanquished.
• All domain cards have been built.
• All allotted exhaustion cards have been placed into the central playing area.

Regardless of the method that triggers the endgame, play continues until the end of the round and all players have had equal turns.

A player can earn VPs from a variety of sources.

• VPs from the player's personal board.
• Total VPs from all monsters defeated by the player.
• Total VPs from all domains build by the player.
• VPs earned by meeting the scoring criteria on the player's Duke card.

Points are tallied, highest score wins!

Overall
I'll start by saying I quite like the implementation of the fantasy theme both in presentation and execution. It is slightly abstract but gathering a band of heroes to go off and fight monsters and build domains feels good.

Like many engine and tableau building games, there's a distinct early game in Valeria: Card Kingdoms about players building up their tableau, in this case with citizen cards and a late game about gaining increased resources to acquire monster and domain cards as well as VPs.
However, because players get 2 actions during their turn, there's some opportunity for optimised actions, card synchronicity and thus meaningful decisions. Getting the right citizen card can lead to getting a domain card for example. Getting a good domain card early can be a big boon dependant on its ability.
This means there will be a fairly constant flow of cards being drafted from the central area. Players will find themselves competing to get the cards they want as quickly as possible and is the game's primary form of interaction between players.

In fact: Thanks to every card having an ability that can be activated in other players' turns and also being able to read the dice both individually and as a pair making card activations more common, means the game generally flows quite rapidly. Players will often have something happening outside of their turn.
Like many drafting games, there's a higher level of play here that comes from watching what other players are doing and potentially trying to stymie them. The addition of duke cards messes with this though, providing players with unique and unpredictable objectives.

​​Valeria: Card Kingdoms is a solid iteration of the dice rolling, card activating, tableau building game style and players of those games will be on familiar ground here. To compliment this, there's also a couple of innovative touches to do with reading the dice and card activating that make the game fresh.

Despite its brisk playtime, the game does has a fairly involved setup process and also an abundance of iconography which makes for a slightly steep learning curve.
​Don't that put you off though. Valeria: Card Kingdoms is well worth a try.

8th September 2022

It's a Thursday evening, it's Aldershot, it's time for some gaming goodness.

​Channel your inner Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and Kevin McCloud as you attempt to build your... Dream Home in this drafting, set collecting game.

What's in the game?

• Game board: This is not really a game board but more of a drafting board.
  There are 2 rows of 6 card spaces each, the first space of each row is dedicated to placing the game's 2 deck of cards.
  Thus the top row is the resource card row and the bottom row is the room card row.
• Home board: These are actually player boards. Each one depicts a 3 level idyllic suburban home.
  The bottom floor depicts a porch or entrance (Which essentially uses up 3 spaces) along with a 'garage' (Which is actually the basement) and consists of 2 card spaces. 
  The middle floor has 5 card spaces.
  Finally, the top floor also have 5 card spaces - giving a total of 12
• Cards: Dream Home uses 2 decks of cards.
  Room cards: These cards all show various rooms you would find in a typical house, bathrooms, kitchens and so on. Room cards are used by players create their home and are colour-coded according to type. There are normal rooms, basement rooms and unique rooms.
  Many types of room cards can be placed adjacent to cards of the identical type. 
  At the bottom of each room card it will display 1 or more numbers, which indicate both the maximum 'size' that room can reach and also victory point (VP) value of that card for reaching the that size if other cards of the same type are placed adjacent to it.
  Resource cards: This type of card provides players with benefits or bonuses, which may be once-only, ongoing or game end VPs.
  There are roof cards, décor cards, tool and helper cards.
• Tokens: These are décor tokens, each one is uniquely shaped according to the resource card it corresponds to and will also display a VP value.
• First player token: I don't usually write about the first player token but this is a fairly chunky wooden styled in the shape of a house.

​Component quality is the usual good standard found in most modern board games. The cards are fine, the board and tokens are constructed from sturdy cardboard. The first player token is chunky and made from wood, it's obviously a bit of a gimmick but it's the kind of gimmick I'm a sucker for!

Dream Home has fantastic artwork throughout. The Illustration used on the home board is good, however, the standouts are the cards and tokens which feature excellent colourful and distinct depictions of home spaces. Interestingly, many cards will feature children hidden among the furniture. This is more than just a aesthetic choice which will be explained below.

Most information is conveyed via text and there's no iconography that needs learning.

How's it play?
​Setup
This is the setup for 4-player games, in game with lower player counts, some cards will be discarded after being placed on the game board.

• Game board: Sort the cards by type and shuffle them into 2 face-down decks.
  Resource row: Place the resource deck on to the leftmost space on the top row.
  Next, leave the 1st space to the right of the deck empty, it's used to indicate the first player token, a resource card never goes here.
  Finally deal 4 face-up cards on to the 4 remaining spaces in the row.
  Rooms row: Put the room deck on the leftmost space on the bottom row, deal 5 face-up cards on to the 5 spaces in this row.
• Player board: Give each player a player board.
• First player: Determine a starting player and give them the first player token.

On to play
Dream Home is played over exactly 12 rounds and players will be putting room cards on to their personal game board to build their home and gaining resource cards.
This is done by drafting pairs of cards from the same column, that is, 1 resource and 1 room card - except for the leftmost space, in which case they acquire a room card and the first player token.

Turn order is slightly different to the usual here: The player with the first player token goes first and play progresses to the left until all players have taken their turn. However, it's possible that the first player token will change hands during a round, consequently, in the following round a new turn order would be established.

During their turn, the active player takes the following actions.

• Take cards: The active player must choose a column and take the resource and room card from that column.
  First player token: If the active player chooses the first column, they only get a room card, however, they also gain the first player marker and will go first in the next round.
• Place room: The active player must place the room card they just drafted with the following restrictions:
  Basement: Basement cards must go on to 1 of the 2 basement spaces.
  Build up: All other room cards must be placed on top of the porch or on top of another room card, this can a basement card or be another room card in the case of placing room cards on the top floor.
  ​Size limit: Players will want to put cards of the same type adjacent to each other to maximise VP scoring but a room cannot exceed it's size limit. E.g., a bedroom can consist of 2 adjacent bedroom cards, a 3rd bedroom card cannot be placed adjacent to that room.
  ​Can't play: If for any reason, the active player cannot play a card, they can place it face-down as an empty room which will score 0 VPs. Empty rooms follow the same placement rules as explained above.
• Resource cards: There are 4 types of resource card.
  Décor cards: When one of these cards is taken, the active player also takes the corresponding décor token. The token must immediately be placed on a room that matches the token and can provide bonus VPs at the game end. When this is done, the room is considered finished, that is, no more room cards can be added to that room.
  If a décor token cannot be placed on a matching room, it is discarded.
  Helper cards: These cards generally provide some sort of bonus scoring criteria during the game end.
  Roof cards: These come in several different colours and when a player acquires a roof, they turn it face-down and place it on their home board's roof.
  These cards cannot be looked at again until final scoring at game end!
  4 Roof cards can score bonus VPs at the game end and more if they are of a matching colour. This means players will need to memorise those colours.
  Tool cards: These usually provide some sort of benefit during the game.
• Next player: Once the active player has resolved the cards they took, play progresses to the player on their left.
• Next round: Once all player's have taken their turn, play progresses to the next round and the following occur.
  Clear board: All face-up cards remaining on the game board are discarded out of play. 4 new resource and 5 new room cards are drawn and placed as per the setup rules.
  Turn order: Whoever has the first player token will be the starting player in the new round. If the first player token did not change hands because nobody chose the left most column, then whoever retained the token will be the starting player again in the new round.

Endgame
Dream Home is played over 12 rounds and after the last round, the game goes to scoring. There are various avenues to earning VPs.

• ​Room cards: These score points according to their type and size. E.g., a living room consisting of 3 cards will score 9 VPs.
• Décor: These tokens will score points as listed on them.
• Functionality: Players earn points for having certain type of rooms in their home. A home with a bathroom, bedroom and kitchen will earn VPs for example.
• Roof: Players can now look at their roof cards. If a player has at least 4 roof cards on their roof, they score 3 points. If a player can have set of at least 4 roof cards of the same colour then they earn 8 VPs.
  Windows: Every roof card that has a window scores and additional VP.
• Additionally; certain cards can also provide VPs.

Points are tallied, highest score wins. In the case of a tie, the player with home board showing the most children on the cards wins!

Overall
Dream Home strikes a balance between ease of play and depth. Players will be faced with the conundrum of having to build outwards before building upwards.
It might not seem like much but it's unlikely that players will get all the cards they need at the time they need them.
The larger room sets will score more points per card but unless a player gets the right cards at the right time, it's likely that they will have to leave gaps when collecting bigger sets, which can make it tricky to build upwards.

The drafting mechanic also provides players with a meaningful choice. Again, it's unlikely that players will always get the 2 cards they want, often they will need to compromise on which resource and room card to take as well as adapt to circumstances as they are occur.

Finally, the first player mechanic is also interesting. Gaining the first player token feels costly because the player only gets a room card but it can play dividends in the following turn. There will times when going first can be extremely useful.
Conversely going last can be painful as the last player will only ever have a choice of 2 columns to pick from.

None of this is ever too complicated, the sets are never too big and intricacies that can arise from syncing resource cards such as décor cards with room cards is never too complex.

Dream Home also doesn't outstay its welcome. Being played over 12 rounds keeps it moving along briskly and provides a fairly concise experience, unless you're playing with a sufferer of analysis paralysis!

It's fair to say that Dream Home is a lightweight and accessible iteration of the 'draft-and-place' multiple components, set collecting mechanic seen in quite a few games.
This accessibility along with it's top-notch presentation means that it's probably a good game to play with younger participants or more casual gamers.

For me though: While I feel that Dream Home does provide a good experience for younger and more casual gamers, I'm not sure it has long term appeal to more dedicated gamers. I enjoyed the game but it's fairly simplistic nature means I'm not sure how often I'd like to play it.

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.