7th September 2021 Tuesday evening is here and we're at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club. The first game of the night was Merv. What's in a game?
Despite its busyness, the game board is well illustrated and colourful, artwork on cards is also clear and colourful. For the most part the iconography is clear and easy to understand. Unfortunately, this does not extend to the symbols used to represent the game's 6 actions, these were a constant source of confusion and error. For example; the mosque action uses a minaret symbol but actually involves moving camel meeples along a track, but the symbols with camels on it is used to represent the caravansary! Why? Because the caravansary used camels to move spices! However, in game, the caravansary action only is used to get spices and has nothing to do with camels This means that camels are used to represent spices and minarets are used to represent camels! It verges on the ridiculous. It didn't help that all 6 symbols were the same colour so that it matched the colour theme of the board. How's it play? Setup
On to play Merv is played over 3 years and in each year there are 4 rounds, players have 1 action per round, thus 12 actions in total. Taking actions in Merv are quite unusual, play takes place around the 5x5 grid and each round takes place across 1 side of the grid (Starting on the north side.), then in the subsequent round, play moves clockwise to the next side of the grid and so on, so by the 4th round, a complete circuit will have been completed.
Endgame Once the 3rd year is over and has been scored, there is there final scoring to calculate. Sets of caravan cards score points. Points are tallied, highest score wins. Overall
Merv has several approaches to acquiring victory points but resource cubes is key to nearly all of them and the resource cube economy is very important. Acquiring cubes may conflict with choosing actions if the building site a player wants to activate produces cubes of a different colour, players will have to make choices and adapt. Having said that, it pays to diversify but it also pays to pursue one one strategy such as the caravansary or mosque track. Completing contracts feels like more of a bonus for sharp-eyed players than a long-term approach. Players also need to consider palace actions, placing workers into the right spaces in halls and moving along the favour track can be a good source of points. Players will need to also look towards defending Merv from attackers, losing buildings also loses the ability to gain resource cubes in later turns and of course loses victory points for the affected player(s). Merv is definitely on the heavier side of board games, but to be honest it didn't feel deep, just fiddly. I never got the feeling that I was making clever plays, instead I got the feeling that Merv was a heavy game made for the sake of being a heavy game. When I took an action, it often felt like I was doing 2 half actions instead of 1 whole one and it took multiple different actions to achieve something. E.g., I would undertake the marketplace action and acquire a good, Was I able to sell that good? No! What about spices, what if I'd acquired spices? Can't sell them either. To sell something, that is to complete a contract, I needed influence, which earned by building walls and also scrolls, which are acquired by visiting the library. Of course I also needed resources cubes. I know that some people will love this idea but I found it unengaging and a little dull and verging on tedious. Merv feels a little dry, unexciting and detached.
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5th September 2021 Sunday night gaming on Board Game Arena continued with New Frontiers. Galaxies: The New Frontier, these are the games of the website of 3 Spellcaster and a Dwarf. Dodgy puns aside, New Frontiers is a sibling-game to Race for the Galaxy and Roll for the Galaxy and shares the same universe. Players will find many similarities between the 3. Caveat: We have only ever played the digital version of New Frontiers What's in a game? Unlike the previously mentioned games, while New Frontiers is a board game, players of the other games will recognise many elements here.
Like its siblings, New Frontiers uses an abundance of symbols and icons which can be daunting for new or inexperienced players. How's it play? Setup
In New Frontiers, turns are carried out according to the turn order as shown on the priority board. Actions are not simultaneous. On their turn, the active player chooses a single action tile and performs the action on it, all other players may follow, in other words also perform that action. However, there is a bonus that only the active player gets for triggering a tile. Each tile can only be used once per round, thus only 1 player benefits from the bonus a tile may confer. Furthermore, actions are actually performed in the order they are selected, there are no numbered phases in New Frontiers. There are 7 actions that can be chosen, most of these will be familiar to players of Race for the Galaxy or Roll for the Galaxy.
Now a new round begins, possibly with a new player order and all the action tiles are now selectable again. Rounds continue until the endgame conditions are met. Endgame Once the endgame is triggered, the current round ends and points are scored. There are 4 ways to trigger the game end. Settlements: A player adds a 7th settled worlds to the game board. Developments: When the 11th or 12th development space on a player's board has been filled with a development. Victory points: When the supply of victory points is depleted. Colonists: When the supply of colonist meeples drops lower than 5. Points come from settled planets and developments bought, some developments offer additional routes to earn point and finally, victory points are counted. Points are tallied, highest score wins! Overall
Players of the previous 2 games will find a lot here instantly familiar. New Frontiers contains the same mix of intricate and mechanical interdependencies between planets and developments that feature in the other two games which allow players to create varied combinations of engine building and combinations. There are a couple of mechanics New Frontiers does differently, particularly the action mechanic, firstly there's no set action order for actions to occur and more importantly, only 1 player can benefit from an action's bonus per round. If a player really needs a bonus action, it can make turn order very important. The existence of a turn order is new as well. When playing New Frontiers, there are a couple of approaches always available to players, building their tableau or acquiring victory point tokens, or maybe getting one of the 9-point developments and working towards exploiting for points in the endgame. However, players will need to adapt to which planets become available to the, as unlike developments which use a drafting mechanic, planet acquisition will be to some degree, random. But here's the thing; the additions New Frontiers brings to the table don't add anything to the game other than extra complexity, there's no extra depth or strategy, just extra resources to manage in place of the hand-as-money mechanic that makes Race for the Galaxy such a good game. Yet somehow, it even seems to have a shorter, less engaging play time? You see, in Race for the Galaxy and Roll for the Galaxy, there are 2 ways to end a game; a player can complete their tableau or deplete the supply of victory tokens, both of which require players to play well or at least fast/better than other players. But in New Frontiers, it's possible to end the game by simply triggering the Settle action multiple times. It felt hugely unsatisfying way for the game to end. Ultimately, New Frontiers is a good game, it has the pedigree of its predecessors, but it's also too familiar and too similar to Race for the Galaxy, which is in my opinion, hands down the better game. I would choose it over New Frontiers every time. 3rd August 2021 Tuesday is here and I'm in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club at The Sovereigns pub for gaming night. The game of the night was Above and Below. Published by the same company who also produce a game called Near and Far. Left and right, up and down, in and out: wiggle it all about, here and there, out and about, Far and Away and Home and Away! Some great suggestions for naming more games! As the name suggest, the players will concerning themselves with the above ground settlement and exploring the caves below the village. What's in a game?
The game makes good use of its cartoony artwork, particularly with the green, grassy landscapes and cloudy blue skies that appear on many of the cards. Buildings and villagers are also well illustrated. Finally, the underground cards have evocative, mildly forbidding artwork. There is little iconography used throughout Above and Below and what there is of it, is easy to comprehend. How's it play? Setup
Beginning with the starting player and going clockwise, each player performs a single action using 1 or more of their villagers, play continues clockwise until all players have used all their available villagers or have passed. After this, the next round begins.
Endgame Once seven rounds are completed, the game goes to scoring, victory points can come from a variety of places. Reputation: Whoever has the highest reputation gets 5 victory points and 2nd place gets 3. Each house and outpost: Regardless of what it is, earns a victory point. House/outpost bonuses: Some houses and outposts will confer additional bonus points, these may be straight up points or situational points, e.g., 1 point per barrel. Advancement tracker: Players earn points for each good on their advancement tracker, depending on where the good is positioned. 2 goods on the 1st space would earn 2 victory points in total, 2 goods on the 8th and final space would earn 12 victory points! The type of good makes no difference here. The advancement tracker can earn a lot of points. Points are tallied, highest score wins. Overall
For the most part, mechanically speaking, Above and Below is a fairly straightforward, unremarkable game. Players use their workers to increase their resources to acquire more workers and buildings create a strategy to earn victory. Pretty standard stuff, not that there's anything wrong with that, no need to reinvent the wheel. Even so, there's some depth here and quite a bit of balancing to perform. There's little good acquiring workers without the ability to rest them which means acquiring buildings with beds instead of other benefits, particularly to ability to acquire goods and so on. This brings us neatly to the merchant track, which is one of the game's two interesting mechanics. Firstly, it more-or-less forces players to diversify in goods in order to reach the higher scoring spots. Secondly, it does something unusual with the game's 8 goods; which is that the rarity of a good has no bearing of it's worth for victory points, position on the track determines a good's worth and this is likely to be different for each player, meaning they may have different priorities for different goods, regardless of rarity. Finally, it gives players a conundrum to navigate: Logically, players will want to put the most common goods on the later, higher scoring spots because, well, there's more of the common goods available to stack up for more points. This means using rarer goods earlier in the track, but rarer goods are harder to come by. So should a player start filling out the merchant track as quickly as possible with whatever they get to reach the later spots? Or should they hold off, hoping to get the scarcer goods and use them to fill the earlier spots. It's an interesting decision to consider. The second interesting mechanic is exploring, Above and Below really stands out from the crowd when exploring the below. The inclusion of a 'lite storytelling' choose-your-own-adventure element with flavour text and all, is both fun and meaningful, presenting players with sometimes story-based choices and risks to take which directly affect what they earn from their exploration. It's cool and a great addition beyond the usual board game fare. It makes Above and Below worth trying. 1st August 2021 Sunday night gaming on Board Game Arena has come to a conclusion. The last game of the evening was Via Magica. Via Magica - the magic way, what is the magic way? Turns out it's a game of errr.... bingo? Not just bingo, but bingo very loosely inspired by Harry Potter. Players take the role of a student of magic looking to earn their Certificate of Sorcery, this is done by collecting macguffins to open magical portals; the titular Via Magica. Caveat: We have only ever played Via Magica online. What's in a game?
The artwork on cards in Via Magica is universally good; cheerfully brash and colourfully cartoonish characters dominate the cards. The animus tokens are also bright and colourful. The game's iconography is easy to read. How's it play? Setup
On to play In Via Magica, all players act simultaneously after the active player who assumes the role of Catcher, which is a fancy name for a bingo caller, draws a token.
Play proceeds until a player has activated a 7th portal card. Players now calculate at all the victory points their portal cards confer, end of game bonuses they earn and points acquired from bonus tiles. All scores are tallied, highest score wins. Overall
There's no denying it, Via Magica is bingo, the manual says as much. The portal cards are bingo cards and the animus tokens are bingo balls, the twist though, is that whilst there are only 7 'numbers', the odds of them coming up are heavily skewed and is what adds a scintilla of much needed depth to the game. Portal cards with more than 1 or 2 rare openings will generally be much harder to complete, it also means that players should complete the 'rarer' spaces first if they get wildcards. Additionally, there is a little bit of strategy when using some of the lower cost cards; once a player starts a card, they'll generally want to finish it, as a consequence, quite often there's no decision to be made and players will concentrate on the card they started if they can. However, since players initially have 7 crystals, they'll always have at least 1 surplus crystal (Provided they are only 'going' for 1 card a a time that is.), 'loading' a lower cost card with surplus crystals can prove when a draw goes against the player, allowing them to switch a crystal round to a secondary card which may prove beneficial. Initial and later card drafts will prove important, the basic dichotomy is choosing between point scoring cards and special ability cards, as well as quick-to-complete lower cost cards and higher value more costly ones. During play, we found that picking the highest cost cards seemed to be the most successful approach. Ultimately though, this is a game of luck and luck will be the biggest factor. Obviously Via Magica has little to engage players of heavier games and personally I found it an unabsorbing experience. It's unlikely that I'm the target audience though, the simplicity and bingo theme of Via Magica clearly makes it a crossover game that is accessible enough to appeal to non-gamers and which they will find easy to learn. 28th July 2021 We were at The Sovereigns in Woking on a Wednesday for an impromptu evening of gaming. It's a Wonderful World, where you can lead a idyllic, tranquil life, except It's a Wonderful World is anything but! It's a dystopian, industrialised future in which competing factions vie for resources to create the most powerful empires. It's a Wonderful World indeed. What's in a game?
The development cards contain quite a lot of info, but the iconography is consistently clear and they never feel cluttered. The art used throughout the game is consistently good, colour is also well used, making the game bright and eye catching. It's a bit of a shame that when development cards become stacked, the art is no longer visible. so a thumbs up for the presentation. How's it play? Setup
On to play. It's a Wonderful World is played over 4 rounds and each round has 3 phases, drafting planning and production. The planning and production phases occur simultaneously and have no turn order
Endgame Once the 4th round has been completed, player calculate their scores. Some cards will provide a straight victory point score. General/financier tokens provide a victory point each. Finally, some cards have scoring combos dependant on other cards or the general/financier tokens. Points are tallied, highest score wins. Overall
It's a Wonderful World is fairly straightforward to learn and play, in truth, having to collect resources 5 times over in a round actually sounds a lot more fiddly than it is in practice. The game's engine-building, tableau-creating, simultaneous-play, card-game style has some similarities to some other games we've played such as Race for the Galaxy. While it has less depth, it's also more accessible, players will have less trouble creating engines and combos. The game also has a slightly different take on some of these concepts. Firstly there's drafting; what's interesting here is that players put cards they've drafted into their area face-up during the drafting phase face-up for everyone to see. In high-level play, it's possible for players to try and anticipate what their opponents might be looking to use and keep cards they might want from them. Fairly frequently in games (Especially euro-games.) a player trying to screw over an opponent can also screw themselves over, but in It's a Wonderful World, development cards can always be discarded for resources, so sometimes in can be a legitimate move. Secondly; how the timing of resource acquisition meshes with the game's engine building mechanic is interesting and presents an unusual approach to exploiting those engines. For example; if a player completes construction of a development card that required grey cubes, that card goes straight into their empire's stack and if that card then produces black cubes, then the player will get those cubes when the black resource production phase comes round and they can then be used to complete development cards which require black cubes. Knowing when to complete which development card and in which order will greatly increase the building efficiency of an empire. Many engine-builders allow players to do a the perform a wider variety of tasks but the simpler gameplay of It's a Wonderful World has a clear and concise gameplay loop, constructing development cards allows players to gain more resources to construct even more development cards to get even more resources and so on. In round 1, players will probably end up discarding 5 of the cards they drafted for the resources to try and build 1 or 2 of those development cards. This puts players in the classic quandary of deciding what they have to discard and all the cards will be useful in some way. By the time round 4 arrives however, it'll probably be the inverse, players will be discarding only 1 or 2 cards to try and build 5 in a round as their engine gets stronger and stronger. It's a satisfying experience to watch it at work. All of this adds up to make It's a Wonderful World feel different enough to justify it's existence. If you like this style of game, it's definitely work a look, I do and I'd happily play it again. 13th July 2021 It's a Tuesday evening and I'm at The Sovereigns in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club. Where would eurogaming be without Renaissance Italy? The pageantry, the politics, the scheming and the vying for power, you know how it goes: A seemingly limitless mine of game design opportunities. This is where Lorenzo il Magnificio comes in, a game where players control noble families in Florence competing to be the most prestigious, famous and of course.... most pious! What's in a game?
The boards and tiles are suitably thick, the resource cards are of a standard quality as you'd expect. Tokens are all made of wood, which I always like, including the nicely rounded dice. The standout components however, are the family workers, instead of discs, they're these tall cylinder shapes that are easy to pick up. It makes sense as I'm sure they're going to be the components that get handled the most; practical and appealing. Lorenzo il Magnificio features attractive artwork throughout, the boards all display pretty, somewhat stylised art work cleverly produced to incorporate all the game's worker spaces. Art on the cards is little pared back to make room for iconography. Talking of which, all the game's symbols and text was easy to read. Lorenzo il Magnificio has good, solid components and presentation. How's it play? Setup
Lorenzo il Magnificio is played over 3 periods, with 2 rounds per period, which equates to 6 rounds in total. Each round has its own setup phase before the players act in turn order, additionally at the end of every period (2nd, 4th and 6th rounds.) there's an additional step; the Vatican report step. A round progresses as follows:
Endgame Calculate points from the following: Current score plus points for acquired territory cards and character cards, end-of-game victory points for venture cards. The player with the highest military score gains an additional 5 victory points, 2nd highest acquires 2 extra victory points. Finally, every set of 5 combines resources scores an additional point. All points are tallied, highest score wins. Overall
Lorenzo il Magnificio sits towards the heavier end of games in my opinion, mechanically speaking, at it's core it's not a particularly complex game, but there's a lot of exceptions and variations to consider when trying to buy those all-important development cards and managing faith and military scores and the resources required to do all this. Don't forget those 2 engines you'll need to build either in order to gain and change those resources, or the abilities that character cards confer or the endgame points that venture cards grant. Like I said, a lot to think about. The game uses 4 types of resource and 3 types of score (Two of which can also be spent at times.) and mixes a few types of game mechanics; there's a bit of worker placement, a bit of engine building and a bit of resource management. Where it throws a spanner in the works though, is the use of dice to randomise the value of workers. A couple of low rolls can force players to change their strategies, particularly when competing for development cards, however, the use of servants can potentially mitigate low rolls, even so, players will have to adapt to circumstances. Furthermore, players have relatively limited moves to play with, each player has 4 workers they can use over 6 turns, giving 24 placements in total, which is why building the engines that essentially get triggered for free is so vital. Synergy and move optimisation are also key to this game. There are several approaches to scoring points in Lorenzo il Magnifcio, although these strategies are down to which development cards are acquired, development cards are the game's most vital element to winning and most actions are in service of getting those cards. However, the game seems a fairly well balanced, nothing felt overpowered or unimportant, decisions always felt meaningful and because of limited moves, these decisions generally felt tricky. If I had one criticism of the game; it's the excommunication tiles, they feel negative, but I guess that's the point of them. If someone wanted to play this, I'd have no qualms joining in. It's not one of my favourites, but it's still enjoyable. If you have a hankering for a heavy-ish worker placement game set in Renaissance Italy, you'll probably like this. 30th June 2021 It's a Wednesday and we're round Simon's for some gaming. Star Trekkin' across the universe, On the Starship Enterprise under Captain Kirk. Star Trekkin' across the universe, Only going forward 'cause we can't find reverse. This sort of sums up Space Base in a roundabout kind of way, a game about launching spacecraft into space, only for them to disappear into the void and never return, well except for the victory points and money they sent your way! What's in a game?
As you'd expect, all the components in Space Base are of a good quality; the player boards are sturdy and the plastic dice, while not as nice as wooden ones, are nicely rounded and roll well. The cards are also good quality, it's understandable that they were made half-width, otherwise the game would have a massive footprint! A lot of the ship cards have special or unique rules and their iconography is mostly easy to comprehend. The little acrylic cubes are colourful and distinct, while the dice have a 'cosmic' sparkly finish and the '1' result has been replaced with a rocket. The ship cards all contain a varied amount of detailed and neat, colourful illustrations of spaceships, along with their names, designations and classes, some are just palette swaps, but that's OK. It's unfortunate that these illustrations are so small though, as they tend to be overlooked. A nice touch is how the background art on the cards matches the background art for their sectors on the player board. Ship cards are also marked out in bright blue and red, while the colony cards are bright yellow and it all combines to give the game a distinct and overall, eye catching look, it's a great use of primary colours. How's it play? Setup
On to play Thematically, as the name suggests, this is a game about managing the spaceships docked at the titular space base, which I guess makes the players glorified intergalactic space traffic wardens! Collect those parking fines! In Space Base, a player's turn is broadly divided into 2 stages, rolling dice and activating cards, then buying a card.
Endgame Play progresses until a player reaches 40+ victory points, then the current round is completed so all players have had an equal number of turn. Victory point scores are tallied, highest score wins. Overall
Space Base is a bright and cheerful, well made game that at least initially, is a lot of fun to play and gives players lots of options. The idea of beginning a game with an already built up tableau is a good one, it means that the active player will always gain something on their turn and it's never wasted. It's also a fairly accessible game and the basic rules are easy to learn; roll and choose dice, activate the relevant cards and buy more cards. However, the game does become a lot more complex when more cards come into play, many cards allow the players to shift which cards are activated or purchase more cards, or have charge cube based abilities and so on, some of which can prove confusing. Being able to split or combine the dice roll when activating cards is an intriguing rule and superficially give players a couple of choices on how to play their actions and build up their tableau. Splitting the dice gives the player the option of activating cards in the 1-to-6 range twice instead of once in the 7-12 range, however, balancing means that the cards in the 7-12 are more powerful, giving greater gains. Should a player choose lower gains more often, or greater gains less often? That's the theory anyway. Let's look at how this might work in practice. The chance of rolling a 12 or double 6 is 1/36. the odds of rolling a 6 on 2 dice is 1/3, which means activating a 6 is 12 times more likely than activating a 12. However thinking about further, a 6 would activated twice when a 12 is activated, taking the ratio up to 13. Thinking about it even further, I realise that a 1+5, 2+4, 3+3, 4+2 and 5+1 give 5 more ways to activate 6, taking the ratio up to 18-1! Does the 12 sector generally gain a player 18 times the benefits of sector 6, It doesn't feel like it? I've scrutinised the manual and the developers are aware of all these odds (Although they discount a double-result as an extra activation), so it must be as designed. Why is this important? It's all to do with which cards a player deploys and how the rolled dice are used. Even taking balancing into account, it seems that deploying cards in sectors 1-6 seems much more beneficial than 7-12. Once a player has covered all first 6 sectors, it means they're guaranteed 2 actions per other player's turn, whereas there's no such guarantee of even 1 activation for sectors 7-12. Even partial coverage seems much more beneficial. It becomes more apparent when you play with more players, in a 5 player game, it'll get you 8 activations between turns! At the time of writing, we've played Space Base over half a dozen times or so and for the last few games, I've concentrated only buying cards for sectors 1-6, not worrying too much about what benefit it gives me, only looking to increase my deployed cards; and it's been more successful than not - so far! It's possible I was lucky to get the cards I wanted, but realistically half of the cards must be for sectors 1-6, so they'll generally always be available. Or it might just have be some lucky dice rolls going my way, or they didn't go well for the other players? Ultimately, it seems to be that buying and deploying cards to stack up in sectors 1-6 seems like a bit of a no-brainer decision to me, which can be bad for a board game, because if that's the case, it removes meaningful choices. Having said that, it's not something I'm 100% sure about and I'm still enjoying Space Base, I found a lot to like about it, rolling the dice and seeing what it gives you is always fun. It's a game I'm happy play again when it comes up. 24th June 2021 It's a Thursday evening and we're round Simon's for a couple of games. The first game of the night was Paper Tales. As the name implies, create the tale of building a kingdom and warring with your neighbours over 4 generations or in Paper Tales' terms - 4 rounds! What's in a game?
The quality of the game's components is to the usual standard as you would expect, which is fine. The building and unit cards feature some bright, colourful and stylised artwork which I found quite charming. How's it play? Setup
On to play Paper Tales is played over 4 rounds and there are 6 stages to each round. Other than the drafting in the Recruitment stage, each stage is played simultaneously by players
Endgame Play continues until 4 rounds have been completed. Then players then tally their victory points on the score board with the victory points on their constructed buildings. Highest score wins. Overall
So, Paper Tales is something of a curious beast. It feels like a deliberately small scale game that merges a little bit of card drafting, a little engine building and card combo mechanics with a little bit of resource management. The game broadly presents 2 routes to scoring victory points. Using unit cards with high combat values in war can theoretically score a player 24 victory points and in a game if this scale, that can be a sizable score. The other way to generate victory points is from the abilities that unit cards may possess, maximising the usage of those abilities can require careful consideration. It's also a somewhat challenging game, not that this is a bad thing. That's because when playing Paper Tales, it never feels like there's enough gold to deploy all the cards you want or enough turns/resources to construct buildings you want. There's 5 buildings to construct and only 4 turns, and that's not including upgrades! It's worth noting that decisions made in the 1st round may have a significant impact on options and decisions in the final round. Players are forced to make tricky, meaningful decisions, which is always good. The aging mechanic is unusual and represents the transitory passage of time and is something players need to watch out for, those unit cards are only around for 2 rounds! However, there are also ways for a player to exploit this mechanic to their benefit with card abilities. For a game that only gives players 4 or possibly 5 cards to work with, there's quite often a combo that can be created. Paper Tales has in terms of rounds a quite short playtime, yet somehow feels a little fiddly for a game of this scope and the handful of times we played it, the short playtime made the game feel a little unsatisfactory. It's all about maximising resources and exploiting card combos, but as I said above, because it's a challenging game, it can be hard to optimise your strategies in early plays, i.e., it has a steep learning curve despite it's apparent simplicity. That's not to say it's a bad game, because it's not, but it sits towards the heavier end of a what might be considered 'light' or 'filler' game in my opinion, which is considering what I'd consider it to be. I'd have no reservations about playing it again. It's worth a look, but I think it needs playing at least a couple times before passing judgement on it. 30th May 2021 It's a Sunday and I'm logged on to Board Game Arena on my PC, time for the first game of the night. Monk Tybor Kwelein had spent his life cataloguing the 4 kingdoms of plants, fungi, insects and animals in the pages of the titular Codex Naturalis. Now he is no longer with us, will one-to-four other people take up the mantle and carry on his work in the form of a neat little card game. What's in a game? Codex Naturalis is a card game and unsurprisingly, has a lot of cards. All the cards are about half the size of normal playing cards which is sensible, as otherwise the game would have a massive footprint, most of the cards share some similar features.
The scoring board and tokens are pretty standard quality game components and perfectly acceptable. The cards feel very thick and sturdy (Maybe because of the smaller size?) and seem to be made to a high standard, all the gold cards and numerous resource cards are embossed in actual gold foil, which is a really nice touch and despite their small size, most of the cards all have charming, highly detailed monochrome illustrations themed by their colour. Finally, all the cards are coated in a glossy finish. The only criticism I have is of the small symbols at the bottom of the gold cards, they are quite small and some players have complaint that it can be hard to discern between the symbols, particularly the blue and the green. Otherwise, these are some of the highest quality card components I've seen and it all comes wrapped up in a compact tin. How's it play? Setup
The objective in Codex Naturalis is to create an expanding spread of overlapping cards in their playing area. The basic process of actions to achieve this in Codex Naturalis is simple, a player plays a card, then draws a card, of course there's more to it than that.
points, this card probably scores the most if you can manage to fill the doughnut hole!
Play continues one player's score reaches 20 or more, then the endgame is triggered. Endgame After the endgame is triggered, the current round is completed, then one final round is played. After this, players count the score from the cards they've played and then calculates the score they get from completing both common objectives and their secret objective. Score are tallied and highest score wins! Overall
Codex Naturalis has simple rules, but also a fairly deep level of gameplay. Despite only having a hand of 3 cards, players are given a wide variety of choices and strategies to pursue when placing cards. A lot of this comes from the objectives, you'll obviously need to play gold cards to score but it's important not to ignore objectives, scoring from the gold cards will generally put your score into the low-to-mid 20s, but objectives which are scored after the end and can push your score higher, especially since they can be scored multiple times. That everyone has a secret objectives means that the final outcome is not known until the final scoring and keeps the stakes high. Players must also learn to manage their hands and objectives, there are 4 colours of card, but only 2 of each type of card is ever displayed face-up, it's likely that player's won't always see the cards they need. Codex Naturalis can also give players agonizing choices because they'll frequently be given the option to cover up a resource or objective symbol with the corner of another card. When that symbol is covered up, it's gone for the rest of the game, forcing players to choose which to prioritise. Only symbols that appear in the middle in of a card cannot be covered. Finally, because face-up cards never have more than 3 visible corners, players will need to think how to place cards with future placement in mind, the visible corner of a card can be 'locked' by placing another card with a hidden corner adjacent to it. This essentially ends that line of expansion, which can limit options later on. Codex Naturalis is a little too long for a filler and perhaps a little too short for a main game, which is only a minor quibble really. Otherwise, I found it to be a solid, easy-to-learn, mid-to-light game with good replay value and high production values. Definitely worth a try. 23rd May 2021 It's Sunday evening and I'm logged into Skype and Board Game Arena on my PC and it's time for the final game of the day. Drafting. Rawr! Dinosaurs. Rawr! T-rexes. Rawr! Draftosaurus has it all, drafting and well... you get the idea. This is a game where scientists have discovered how to clone dinosaurs and now parks of them are opening everywhere, all in a completely non-copyright infringing manner of course! Caveat: We've only played Draftosaurus digitally online. What's in a game?
There's not much more I can say, I can't talk about the physical components which also include a draw bag. How's it play? Draftosaurus is about placing dinosaur meeples into the pens, different pens have different requirements, which is explained below. Setup
Endgame Once the 12th and final dinosaur meeple has been placed by all players, the endgame is triggered. Players score all of the sets they've created on their board, plus any bonuses or penalties. Highest score wins. Overall
When playing Draftosaurus, more often than not, players will find themselves having to place meeples into unexpected pens thanks to the placement die. Without this element, the game would be too predictable. How players deal with, manage and anticipate these these situations is key to victory. Often there will be a conflict between which set to increase or start on and keeping a pen open for another type of dinosaur. It also pays to try and remember which dinosaur meeples will be coming round. The winter side of the board makes it harder to collect different sets and provides more challenge but somehow a little less fun? It's hard to find a lot more to say about Draftosaurus, it's quick, fairly light game to learn and play that's also quite luck based. If you don't like this sort of game, Draftosaurus will probably infuriate you. I think that maybe it's a bit too luck based for me to play extensively. Not taken too seriously and played as a filler game and Draftosaurus is a reasonable diversion. |
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