11th February 2020 Tuesday night with the gaming club at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking continues. The final game of the night was 'Glory to Rome'. Glory to Rome is a game about the glory of Rome, well sort of. It's a game about rebuilding Rome after the 'great fire of 64 A.D.'. Become a leader of Rome by building fountains, villas and statues, even the Basilica! Of course, players also get to build a latrine... glory to Rome indeed. Well... I guess someone has to! Glory to Rome is an engine building card game which has an interesting central premise; which is that the function of cards change in the context of how they're used. This isn't something new or unique to Glory to Rome, however I've not seen it used as extensively as in this game. What's in a game Glory to Rome has a lot of cards and some of these cards serve multiple functions. Order cards By far the biggest stack of cards in the game, order cards have multiple uses:
When constructing a building, it needs a site to lay the 'foundation' on. There are site cards for each of the 6 different types of material. Site cards are covered in stripes Jacks These cards are 'jack-of-all-trades'. They are wildcards. Rome demands card This oversized card goes in the centre of the playing area and is a discard pile/pool for order cards. Bonus cards There are 6 bonus cards, one for each type of material. When scoring at the end, the player who has the highest amount of a material in their Vault acquires it's bonus card. Each bonus card is worth 3 victory points. Leader card Used to represent the first player in a round. That's it for cards. Player board Player boards (Or camp board.) serve 2 functions. They are a player aid and they also track certain cards and actions the players have played. The boards track influence, clientele, stockpile & vault. The quality of the components is pretty standard, nothing standout, but by no means nothing bad either. The art on the cards is minimal, almost simplistic and feels a little bit amateurish. It does however, give the cards a distinct look, is uncluttered and clean looking. I guess it's down to taste. How's it play? Setup is pretty simple.
Whoever is the first player decides to either 'lead'... or think!
When all players have completed their actions, all cards that were played as role cards are placed in the pool. Any Jacks played are returned to their stack. Play proceeds to the next turn and the Leader card moves to the player to the left. That's the basics out of the way, now on to what the role cards actually do.
The player board has 4 sides and each side has a function.
I think that is more or less it for most rules. Endgame There are several criteria that trigger the end of the game. Play continues until all site cards for all materials have been used, out-of-town site cards do not count towards this. The deck of order cards is depleted. The catacomb building is completed. The Forum Romanum is built and the player who built it has at least one of each type client in Clientele and one of each material type in their Stockpile. If this occurs, then that player wins an outright victory! Victory points are not tallied! When any of these conditions are met the game immediately ends and points are tallied (Except in the case of a Forum Romanum victory.). Players score 1 point for each Influence point. Players score the cards hidden in their Vault. Players score bonus cards for the materials in their Vault. All victory points are tallied, highest score wins. Overall
Glory to Rome is pretty straightforward to learn once you get your head around the central premise that your hand represents, people, buildings, materials and more. Like other games that use similar mechanics, it forces players to make difficult decisions on what cards to use for what. Glory to Rome is an engine building game on 2 tiers. How cards are placed on the player board on the Clientele side is essentially building an engine. Giving players extra or bonus actions. Placing buildings is the other way of building an engine. Together they give players quite a few options to explore. The game's owner stated that certain cards can break the game, but that wasn't my experience when we played it. Upon looking at some cards after the game ended, I could see what he meant though. Glory to Rome also asks players to watch each other and see what they do and in particular, what they put in to the pool. The pool is the best source of cards - provided it has what you need and you have the cards to get them. Glory to Rome is perhaps a little too long to play for what it is, but otherwise it's a fun game.
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9th February 2020 It's a Sunday and we're at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking. There's no 50 Fathoms this week as 3 players are absent. Instead we are playing 'Puerto Rico'. William Shakespeare wrote: All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages. Well if you happen to play a plantation owner in Puerto Rico, you will play 7 roles, I dunno about 7 acts though. What's in a game?
The quality of the components is mostly quite good. What artwork there is in the game is OK, but it's not particularly memorable or interesting. How's it play? As always, we begin with setup. It looks quite long, but it's actually straightforward.
In Puerto Rico there are 2 ways to earn victory points; by shipping goods out and buying buildings. Each round, in turn order, each player will assume 1 of the 7 roles and carry out the action associated with that role. When a player chooses a role, all players can the also carry out that action, but the player who chose the role can do it's bonus action instead. When players chose a role, they take the relevant role card from the display. The roles are:
Players return their role cards and the next player in turn becomes the new first player and a new round begins. There remains one last thing to discuss - what function do buildings serve. Firstly, they earn player points. Some buildings are necessary to process goods. Other buildings confer bonuses when trading and shipping or allow players to 'break the rules' in some way or other. Finally, the 5 large buildings give extra victory points according to the conditions on each individual large building tile. Endgame There are 3 manners in which the endgame can be triggered.
Players then tally their scores, highest value wins. Overall
Puerto Rico is not a complicated game, but it is a fairly involved one and the rules are fairly detailed. The game has minimal 'downtime' as it allows players to act in other player's turns. This keeps players on their toes, being able to take advantage of another player's role is key to optimising strategy. It's also a game of very little luck. The only random element is drawing the plantation tiles, everything else is down to player actions and choices. Talking of choices, the game mostly provides players with useful and meaningful decisions to make. There's always the balancing act caused by there being one too many actions that players will want to do, pushing them into making tricky choices. The trading and shipping rules give Puerto Rico a little bit of a competitive edge. Players need to watch what each other are doing, because as mentioned above, a decision that the active player makes can aid another player. Since the trading tile and ship tiles are not emptied until full and even then only at the end of their respective actions. Players can screw each other (And themselves to be fair.) by initiating trading or shipping at particular times, this can and probably will deny certain players the benefits of trading or shipping. After all there are 5 types of good, but only 4 spaces on the trading tile and 3 ships. Since the game has 2 ways of scoring points. There are broadly speaking, 2 strategies for winning. These are; accumulate victory points by shopping goods out, or buy buildings and accumulate victory points that way. In the few times, we've played it recently, it seems to be that acquiring buildings might be a better way of accumulating victory points. Perhaps the trading approach has a harder learning curve? This is about the only negative I can think about the game. But other than this, Puerto Rico is a game that rewards thoughtful play and that's always a good thing. 28th January 2020 Tuesday is here and we're at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking to play board games. Popular opinion states that most restaurant fail in the first year, so running one is hard work (And believe me I know!). What could be harder? Running a whole chain of restaurants! That's where 'Food Chain Magnate' comes in. Now you too can know what it's like to run restaurants without all the 'fun' of inconsistent staff, irritating customers, infuriating regulations and interfering local authorities. What's in a game? There's quite a lot to Food Chain Magnate and quite a lot of components too.
How's it play? First; setup.
A round of Food Chain Magnate is played over 7 rounds.
Endgame Play continues until all the allotted money from the 'bank' supply is depleted, in which case any remaining money is paid out from the reserve supply. The player who has accumulated the most money, wins. Overall
Food Chain Magnate markets itself as a 'heavy' game and it's not kidding. The aim of the game is to build housing and create marketing campaigns, this generates a demand for whatever particular food & drink the player decides advertise. Then the player produces the relevant food & drink to fill that demand, this equals profit. Except it's not so simple. There is a lot to think here and all of it is important. How a player structures their company is crucial. All of the other actions options will become avaialable based on the staff cards that you recruit and play. A lot to think about. You need food? Pizza chefs will produce pizza and burger chefs will produce burgers. You want drinks? You need an errand boy to go and collect them. Want to be more competitively priced? Get a pricing manager. Need an advertising campaign. You'll have to get marketing staff. Want to place more housing? A business developer is what you need. Your staff need training to be more effective? Trainers are what you need. You got too many staff? Get more managers! Need to recruit people even quicker? Recruiters are what's needed. And so on. Marketing needs to be targeted. There are different types of marketing that target a player's audience at different 'ranges' and they tend to be of varying length. Players will need to optimise creating their demand. Advertising can have a real sting in the tail. Because other players can benefit from it too. If one player creates a demand for burgers and another player then opens a burger joint closer to the housing that's been targeted, then the customers will go there instead (Customers have absolutely no loyalty!). Or if another player slashes the price of their burgers, then other restaurants will be ignored. Sly players will definitely try and exploit other player's marketing. This brings me to 'pricing'. This is a great game mechanic. Instinctively, players will want to increase prices to generate more revenue. But a player really needs to undercut their opponents, because less profit is better than no profit. Pricing is a real race to the bottom and forces players to make horrible choices - always a good thing! Players will also need to think about food & drink production, as more and more demand appears, players will need to get better and better at production to meet that demand. Also, as demands get more complex, fulfilling those demands gets equally as complex (A house's demands cannot be only partially fulfilled and must be fully met.). And don't forget milestones, the benefits they can confer can be very important. When we played this game, the owner explained to us that he thinks at the start there's a couple of different routes to follow for 'opening moves' that there are 'no brainer' moves (These are to do with milestones.). It seems some of the milestones can be completed in the first couple of turns and only the first player(s) that complete them get the benefit, not following the 'no brainer' moves means a player can lose out on those benefits. This implies that early moves (Or mistakes really!) can affect the entire game. I'm not sure how I feel about this? I don't like 'no brainers', because what they do is remove choice from a game. On the other hand, maybe it was overstated. I guess the game would need to be played multiple times to see if this is the case All of this contributes to make Food Chain Magnate a deep game that requires a lot of forethought and strategy. There is no luck or chance in this game. If you like genuinely heavy games, this may interest you. For me though, I found it to be a little bit difficult to play the game on all the levels it required and mostly ignored the marketing side. It felt a strangely unengaging game, perhaps it was the theme? 7th January 2020 It's the first Tuesday of the year and we're NOT at 'The Sovereigns' (Which is closed for refitting.), instead we're at 'The Wheatsheaf' in Woking for board gaming. Tonight, we're playing Taverns of Tief....err? Taverns of Tiefe... err? It's a game where you run a pub! So this game tries it's best squeeze in as many game mechanics as it can. Deck building - yep. Card drafting - yep. Dice drafting - yep. Dice placement - yep. Resource management - yep. Hidden Role - y... wait no, that's about the only thing missing! What's in a game? So Taverns of Tiefenthal comes with some optional extras or expansions, apparently we used all of them in the game we played. So there's a lot of components.
Many of the game's components are made of nice and thick card stock, including the beer mats. The artwork is quite nice and colour and there's some nice detail on the tavern board and tiles. How's it play? We begin with setup.
That covers most of the setup. Now to explain what does what. Let's start with the tavern board. Many of the abilities on the board are activated by placing dice of a specific value on them.
Guest cards are acquired by spending beer.
So at last, finally, we get to how the game plays. Each round is player over several phases.
Endgame Play continues for 8 rounds. Victory points are scored from the cards that players bought Points are tallied, highest score wins. Overall
Taverns of Tiefenthal requires a lot of explanation (As you can see above), but in play is actually quite straightforward. It's more of a game about optimizing strategies than complex rules. The game gives you a lot of choices and options. Occasionally these will be meaningless decisions because of how the dice fall, but most of the time you'll have to choose between different actions. A player will nearly always have more options available than actions to perform them. This is makes a good game in my opinion. There's nothing particularly unique about the game, other than how it blends certain game mechanics together to emulate it's subject quite well. The game's presentation is also very good with well made components and colourful and well produced art. The game's only drawback is its setup time, there's quite a lot to do. But I think the payoff is worth it as I enjoyed it. 21st September 2019. It's Saturday evening round at Matakishi's and that can only mean games night! So here we have 'Machi Koro Legacy'. As the title suggests, this is a legacy version of the very good Machi Koro game. Spoilers!!! Don't read any further ahead if you want to play Machi Koro Legacy! What's a legacy game? Glad you asked. A legacy game's unique feature is that it is actually a series of play-throughs of the same game. After each game concludes, something changes, is added or removed from the game and that change carries over to the next play-through of the game. Thus you have (In theory.) a game that constantly changes and evolves according to player input. Machi Koro Legacy is played over 10 games. We played games 1-5 in one night and in total all 10 games were played over 3 evenings. I'm going to blog about all of the games in this post. Since at the time of writing, these blog posts are about a month behind the actual plays. If you don't know anything about Machi Koro, you can read my blog about it here. Have you read it? Good! Now you know all about Machi Koro. The Basics The original Machi Koro has 2 expansions, 'The Harbour' and 'Millionaire's Row'. Generally we play Machi Koro with The Harbour. As you would expect, the core mechanics of Machi Koro remain unchanged for the 'legacy' version. If you didn't actually bother reading my blog about the main game: Here's a quick recap.
The legacy game I can't really blog about the game in my normal format because the components and rules change throughout the game. So I'll just go through it as best as I can. I'm not going to extensively talk about the original, I'll try to just talk about any differences between 'original' and 'legacy' versions. Personal game board This is immediately different. In legacy, each player is given a game board that has the following:
Diamonds are a new currency introduced in Legacy. Players can start a game with diamonds or acquire them during play. Some landmarks and cards can use diamonds for a benefit. But the main use of diamonds is to spend them to re-roll dice rolls. Double sided establishment cards These are an entirely new type of game introduced in Legacy. When a game is concluded, a new type of card is added to the market from the next game onward. These cards are 'double sided'. One side tends to be blue/green and the other red or occasionally purple. The player who just won the concluding game gets to choose which side is used, these cards have tick boxes which can ticked to indicate which side was initially chosen. During later games, it is possible that a stack of double sided cards can be flipped over to their other side. If this occurs, then it also affects all copies of that card in players' areas! (See below for how 'flipping' can occur.) Traveller die Another new introduction to legacy is the 'traveller die', a blank six sided die. What's the point of a blank die you may ask? Well, it doesn't stay blank for long. As games are completed, stickers are added to die. The traveller die is now rolled along with the normal dice. The following stickers are added to the traveller die: Turtle, yokai and moon princess There 3 travellers each have their own little figure that moves along cards as dictated by the rules for the traveller die.
The sea Another new addition to legacy that appears later in the game is 'the sea'. This is depicted by placing 3 cards in a column in the market area along side the establishment cards. Then, each player receives a boat figurine in their colour and a 12 sided die is introduced into the game. What does this all do? Well, read on:
Islands When the sea has been introduced, islands are next. Islands work in the following way.
During one of the latter games, the players will acquire rockets for their ships and in the 10th and final game, they will travel to the moon in an endeavour to return the moon princess home.
Right that's about it for what's in the game and rules. I've missed out some bits about some cards being removed from play and so on, but that I think is most of it. The 11th game Once the 10th game has concluded. The remaining cards can be used to make up a new game of Machi Koro. Having a functioning game afterwards is a nice touch. Overall I think this blog post I've written about Machi Koro Legacy is going to be the longest blog I've written about a card game so far. I guess a legacy game can complicate things quite a lot and there's quite a lot to process here. Additionally, I will state that this is the only legacy game I've ever played and I have nothing to compare it to or measure it against. I guess I'll just go through the things listed above and blog my thoughts about them. Town square cards I actually quite like this idea, it gives players a meaningful decision to make immediately and can lead to an asymmetrical game start (See below for more on this.). Landmarks As your small fishing settlement advances through civilisation to fulfil its destiny of becoming a 'space power', it's only natural that its landmarks will change over time. So thematically I understand it, but from a game play perspective, I'm ambivalent towards it. This is partially I think, because I didn't find them particularly interesting or useful. Especially since there's so many of them (10 communal and 12 player landmarks.) and they only hang around for a maximum of 3 games. Diamonds Diamonds have several uses in legacy. Some landmarks allow players to use diamonds for extra turns or for extra cash. They can also be used in conjunction with island cards to acquire establishment cards. But probably the biggest use of diamonds is for re-rolls. The original Machi Koro gave players a re-roll once per turn in the form of a landmark that they could purchase. Legacy take this a step further by giving players the ability to spend multiple diamonds to gain multiple re-rolls. This has a low impact in the early games, but a high impact in the later games. When a players has 8 diamonds, they spend a long time pondering their many potential re-rolls. I don't actually mind the game slowing down that much (I'm used to it.). I dislike how easy it is to just mitigate so many bad rolls. Having to deal with bad rolls is part of what makes Machi Koro what it is. Double sided establishments The idea of having dual-function establishments seems like a reasonable idea. It can change up the dynamic of the game a little and doesn't seem to have a negative impact. If only there was a better way to implement them other than the yokai (See Below.). Travellers Legacy adds 3 travellers to the game, as well as an extra die and extra rule to deal with it all. The problem I have with this is that all it does is introduce an extra random element and no game play element. When travellers do move, most of the time it has minimal or no impact on me or the decisions I made.
The sea When the sea was added into legacy, it introduced a fiddly and slightly confusing set of mechanics to the game. Not only that, they're completely alien to Machi Koro's 'style' and lack any elegance. You might as well have added a copy of 'Monopoly' to legacy, they're so different. Furthermore, when the sea was added to legacy was when the game started to really slow down. All those extra little rules and extras just dragged it down. It seems that the combination of the sea and diamonds is not a good one. Island cards The island cards are quite an interesting proposition.
The moon track is essentially an extension of the the sea track. Everything I've said about the sea, applies equally here. So that's it. As I explained earlier, this is the only legacy style game I've played. And to be honest, in regards to Machi Koro, I don't think it adds much to the experience of playing it.
Sure, it adds some interesting ideas to the mix and it was nice seeing new cards. But it also adds a whole lot of unnecessary stuff too. Additionally, the changes that occur throughout the games feel very small, the choice that the winner makes after every game feels inconsequential. I don't regret playing Machi Koro Legacy at all; it provided us with 10 games and 3 evenings of entertainment. But during those games I never felt that I was playing something superior to the original. 20th July 2019
Saturday night is here. This means gaming at Matakishi's. And on this night we played 'Villagers' Have you ever wanted to live in a idyllic little place? Where a single cobble stoned road runs through a village populated with quaint thatched roofed, half timbered homes to carpenters, jewellers, blacksmiths and many more craftsmen? 'A village where the population is trying to rinse everyone else out their cash two gold coins at a time?' If this sounds appealing; then welcome to Villagers; a pretty little set collecting card game. What's in a game? What's in this game? Cards, lots of cards.
There's not too much else to say, well the illustrations on the cars are nice. How's it play? Broadly speaking, the objective of Villagers is to collect sets of cards in the same 'profession'. When accumulating these cards, they are stacked on top of each other, so only the names of the cards underneath are displayed. As quite often, we begin with the set up.
Endgame Scoring for Villagers is a bit convoluted and requires some explanation.
Overall Villagers is deceptively fast to play. Apart from the basic cards, there's only 2 of each card. This means that you don't have the luxury of hoarding cards for 'later'. You need to start working towards collecting sets as quickly as you can and even then, it's likely that you will only manage to accumulate one major set in a game. If you can do this before the first market, the stack will score twice. So don't get too distracted by other potential sets when they appear. Luckily, there is normally an abundance of solitary villagers that you can take to give you something when the card you need invariably don't appear. So it seems that decisive errr decisions are the order of the day in Villagers. Villagers is an interesting game to play, particularly its unusual scoring system. I'm not sure on it's long term depth. But as an occasional game it's perfectly acceptable. 29th June 2019
It's still the 29th of June, but day has given way to the onset of evening. This can only mean gaming night at Matakishi's. We fell back on a tried and tested classic - Machi Koro. You can read my thoughts about it here. 25th June 2019. Gaming night at 'The Sovereigns' continues. The final game of the night is Evolution: Climate. Have you ever yearned to evolve over millions of years and wander the plains of the Mesozoic era? Do you like dinosaurs (And who doesn't?)? Then maybe Evolution: Climate is for. Evolution: Climate is one in a series of 'Evolution' games about evolving dinosaurs. I've only played this one and they appear to share similar mechanics and concepts, but have differing themes. As the name implies, this game is about climate and adds extra rules for temperature. What's in a game? Evolution: Climate has both a main game board and smaller personal 'species' game boards for all players. The main game board is used to track the climate and food supplies. The personal board is used to track the evolutionary development of your dinosaur species. You can have more than one species during a game and therefore can have more boards. There is a deck of 'trait' cards. Some food markers. Finally, there are some little bags given out to all players. Each bag has a unique dinosaur picture on it, which is a nice touch. How's it play?
Each player is given a species board and a bag. Deal cards. In the first phase, trait cards are dealt to each player, the more species they control, the more cards they get. Determine plant food & climate. In the next phase; play begins with everybody playing trait card face-down on to the main game board. Once this is done, all the cards are turned over. This determines 2 things.
Play trait cards. Players place face-down trait cards next to their species boards. When all players have done, these are turned over. Trait cards represent the different evolutions that your species' will go through. Thus your species' may gain a 'hard shell' or gain the ability to climb. All of these traits give a species special abilities or possibly bonuses to their 'stats'. species can only have 4 different trait cards at any time, but trait cards can be replaced by other trait cards. Players may also discard trait cards to improve their species' 'stats' on their species' boards. Talking of which... The species board has 3 pertinent stats.
Finally, a trait card can be discarded to gain a new species board (And thus begin a new species.). Feeding. This is the final phase of a turn. At the start of this phase all species are hungry and must feed, one at a time. All animals are either herbivore or carnivore.
After feeding has been completed, all players take the food tokens that they have acquired during the round from their species' boards and places the tokens into their spiffy little individual bags. Then the next turn begins with dealing out cards again. Endgame When there are no more trait cards to deal out, the endgame is triggered. Play continues for the current turn and then scores are tallied. A player's score is equal to the food tokens collected in their bag plus the combined value of the population and body size scores of all their species. Highest score wins. Overall One of the things i like about Evolution: Climate is how through some simple rules it depicts the rudimentary theories behind evolution. It's almost educational. At the start of a round, players get the chance to try and influence the available plant food and the climate. These are important decisions as larger dinosaurs fare better in the cold and vice versa in the heat. Also; If your species is herbivorous, you will want to increase the plant food supply and so on. At its core, this an engine-building game, with the trait cards for your species' being the engine. Trait cards make a big difference to a species' ability to fend off predators or to be a better hunter or to more efficiently collect food and so on. There's lots to think about and decisions to make here. Trait cards also count as currency if you want to 'buy' improvements to your species' stats, you use trait cards to do it. This provides with even more decisions to make. Both stats are important. Population is important, increasing it is a good way to stave off the risk of extinction, but it can be hard to maintain if food is sparse. This applies to carnivores too. A carnivore species may not be at the mercy of the limited food on the main game board. But if it wipes out it's food source, it can starve itself into extinction just as quick as any herbivore. Body size is important too. Larger species' will be protected from smaller carnivores and for carnivores size is vital. If a carnivore is not bigger than any herbivores, then that carnivore is in trouble. Feeding can also be quite interesting, as the appearance of a carnivore can really change things up can add a bit of direct conflict to the 'survival of the fittest'. Players must balance all of these concerns during the game, it's not complicated, but it does give players choices and consequences to overcome. This is always a sign of a good game IMHO. I enjoyed Evolution: Climate and would happily play it again. 22nd June 2019
Saturday night beckons and gaming at Matakishi's also beckons. On this evening we return to a tried and trusted favourite - Machi Koro. You can read my blog about it here. |
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