24th January 2022

It's time for some impromptu Monday gaming in lieu of Sunday and we're logged into Board Game Arena.

Can't Stop Express is the roll & write cousin to the excellent push-your-luck dice game; Cant' Stop.

Caveat: We have only ever played this game digitally.

What's in a game?

• Dice: Can't Stop Express comes with 5 six-siders, which is 1 more than Can't Stop, so something is definitely different.
• Scorecard: Each player gets their own scorecard which is a sheet full of checkboxes and looks suspiciously like a spreadsheet.
  In essence there are 11 rows numbered 2-12 (For each potential result from rolling 2 six-siders.) and each row has 10 checkboxes, 4 in 'negative', 1 in 'neutral' and 5 in 'positive.
  Each row also has a 'scoring value', this varies according to how likely that number is to come up on a roll of 2 six-siders; the rarer the number, the higher the value. The extremes 2 and 12 are worth 100 VP per positive checkmark, while the most common result 7, is only worth 30 VP per positive checkmark.
  Finally, there's another 3 rows of 8 checkboxes for tracking the 5th die.

And that's it!, Can't Stop Express is a very minimal game and that applies to all of it. I can't comment on the quality of the components, there's no art to speak of in the game and no iconography either.

How's it play?
Give each player a scorecard and you're ready to go.

​Can't Stop Express has in one regard a similar mechanic to Can't Stop, which is that after every dice roll, players are putting together 2 sets of 2 dice, the 5th die has a different role (Sic). Where Can't Stop Express differs is that once the dice are rolled, the results are used by all players simultaneously.

• Roll the dice: Once the dice have been rolled, everybody performs the following 2 actions:
• Assign pairs: All players create 2 sets of dice that will create 2 numbers from 2-12. Then, on their scorecard, all players mark off checkboxes for those numbers (Going from left-to-right.). If a player has a 4 and a 9, they would mark off the leftmost empty checkboxes on the rows for 4 and 9.
• 5th die: So what does the 5th die do? After assigning the 2 pairs, the player must​ assign the value of 5th die to one of the 3 rows in the 5th die area of the scorecard and mark off a checkbox. So if the 5th die was a 6, the player would write '6' in one of the rows and mark off the first checkbox.
• Next roll: When all players have finished assigning all their dice, the game then proceeds to the next roll and players again assign 2 sets of dice to their scorecard.
  Once again the player will need to assign the 5th die, except now it must be to one of the 2 remaining 5th die rows. This number must have a different value to the number they previously assigned, using the example above, the player must assign a value different to 6 (And mark off a checkbox.).
  After the third roll, a final unique number will be assigned to the last row. Now that 3 numbers have been to the 5th die rows, a new rule comes into play when the dice are rolled.
• 5th die restriction: From now on, whenever a player chooses which dice to assign to the 2 sets, the value of the remaining 5th die must match 1 of the 3 numbers in the 5th die rows. This means it's likely that players will not always get to choose all the dice they want for their sets because a die may be needed for it's 5th die row instead. Furthermore, every time a value is assigned to the 5th row, one of its checkboxes is marked off.
  If none of the dice match any of the 3 numbers in the rows, then they is no need to assign a 5th die.
• Scoring: There are 3 types of checkboxes in each scoring row, negative, neutral and positive, they are always marked off from left-to-right. This means starting with the 4 negative boxes which must be marked off before the neutral, which must be marked off before the positive boxes.
  Negative: Even a single marked off checkbox here reduces that row's score to -200, that's right -200! This doesn't change until after all 4 negative boxes are marked off.
  Neutral: Once all 4 negative boxes are filled, then the 5th box, i.e. the neutral checkbox can be marked off. This takes the row's score up to 0! Bargain!
  Positive: Finally, when a player gets to the positive checkboxes, each one marked off scores that row's scoring value. Each marked off positive checkbox in the 2 row would score 100 and each one in the 7 row would score 30! Bonus - literally!
  Each row has 5 positive checkboxes, so the maximum the 7 row can score is 150, any dice assigned to a maxed row add nothing to the score.

Play progresses with the dice being rolled and assigned until the endgame is reached.

Endgame
When a player fills the 8th and final checkbox in any one of their 5th die rows, then they stop scoring and the game is over for them.
Once all players can no longer score dice, the game is over and players calculate their scores for all scoring rows, rows that have no boxes checked off score 0.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
One thing I found interesting about Can't Stop Express is how it twists the paradigm of Can't Stop.

In Can't Stop, the objective is to reach the top of any 3 tracks using the results of the dice rolls, which tracks are used is unimportant; they all score a point each. Since it's much easier to get a 7 than a 2, this is balanced out by needing to get many more 7s to reach the top than you would for 2s.
The points have equal value but getting them requires varying numbers of dice results depending on the number.

In Can't Stop Express players are also trying to move along tracks but it is changed around. To reach a scoring position for both 2 and 7 requires getting the same number of pertinent results, either six 2s or 7s, but in Can't Stop Express, they score differently.
Six 7s will score 30 but six 2s will score 100 and in fact seven 2's would more than all ten 7 results.
The dice results required for each track to score are equal but they score varying amounts depending on the number.

Anyway, talk about mechanics aside, I found Can't Stop Express to be a bit of a middling game.
I like how it shares a concept with Can't Stop of setting aside 2 sets of 2 dice and it probably plays a little quicker. There's no going bust, so no 'wasted' rolls - at least in theory. Luck can mess with players in Can't Stop Express, just in a different way!
The push-your-luck element works very differently here, there are no extra dice rolls to make here. Instead players will need to judge which rows to try and fill out and it's in the planning where players push their luck, when a player decides to start marking off the checkboxes in a specific row, they're essentially gambling on that number reappearing again and again.
The 7 row is the safest bet but is not much of a scorer. The further away from 7 you move, the greater the rewards but also riskier it is to fill out 6 or more checkboxes.

​In terms of what I don't like Can't Stop Express is a game completely lacking in theme and feels a little dry (Although to be honest Can't Stop's mountain climbing theme is paper thin.).
My biggest bugbear though is the scoring; those first 4 checkboxes that penalise players 200 VPs, occasionally being forced to mark off checkboxes in rows you don't want to and watching your score drop by hundred of points can be very frustrating.
I know why it's there, it replaces drawback of going bust from Can't Stop, even so, it makes the game feel negative and I'm not fond of it.

I don't think Can't Stop Express is a bad game, mechanically speaking it's pretty solid but it lacks the extra bit of thrill that comes with deciding to re-roll the dice from Can't Stop and doesn't really bring anything new or different to the table.
I'd have no issue with playing Can't Stop Express more times but if given the choice between this and Can't Stop, I'd pick the latter every time.

4th January 2022

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

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

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

What's in a game?

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

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

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

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

How's it play?
​Setup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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

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

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

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

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

19th December 2021

We continued our Sunday gaming on Board Game Arena with Can't Stop.

Can't stop, addicted to the shindig.
Chop Top, he says I'm gonna win big.

No... wait..., this isn't a song. It's a sharp little push your luck game.

Caveat: We've only ever played this game digitally.

What's in a game?

• Game board: Can't stop uses a diamond shaped board featuring 11 vertical lines numbered 2-11. The number 2 line has 3 spaces, the spaces increase by 2 with every line until reaching 7 which has 13 spaces, then they decrease back to 3 when reaching line 12.
  This particular iteration of Can't Stop shows climbers scaling a mountain in the background.
• Dice: There are 4 normal six-siders in Can't Stop.
• Tokens: There are 4 sets of 11 tokens in 4 player colours.
• Movement tokens: There are 3 of these and they're used to track a player's moves.

That's it for components, there's not too much that can be said about such a minimalistic, almost abstract game.
The only art featured is the mountainous picture on the board which is a nice enough illustration which keeps the board from looking plain. Although it's obviously been used as a theme to fit the mechanic.
There's no iconography to the game unless you count the numbers on the dice!

How's it play?
​Setup

• Tokens: Give a set of 11 tokens of one colour to each player.
• Game board: Set out the remaining components in central playing area.
• First player: Determine the 1st player.

That's it, that's all there is to set up.

​On to play
The objective in Can't Stop is to get 3 of your 11 tokens to the top of the board (Or mountain.) first. 
Each player takes turns rolling the dice and using them to move their tokens up the lines, they can continue doing this until they choose to stop, reach the top or go bust.

• Roll the dice: The active player rolls all 4 dice and then splits them into 2 pairs in a combination of their choosing, thus there will be 2 sets of dice each showing a value between 2-12.
  Then the active player takes the movement tokens and places them on the associated vertical line on the board, either at the bottom if they haven't started on that line or above their personal token on that line.
  Thus a player can introduce/move 1 or 2 tokens per roll, or sometimes they can move 1 token twice.
  Now the active player must choose to continue or stop.
• Stop: Should the active player decide to stop, they then replace all the movement tokens on the board with their personal tokens.
  If a token has reached the stop of a line, then that line becomes 'locked out' and players cannot use that line again.
• Continue: If the active player chooses to continue, then they roll and resolve the 4 dice again.
  If either of the values is the same as a movement token already on the board, then that token is moved up a space.
  If the values do not match a movement token on the board, then a new movement must be introduced to the board if possible
  Remember; there are only 3 movement tokens available to players, once they're in play that's it.
• Bust: If at any time, even on their first roll, the active player cannot move or introduce a movement token to the board, then they go bust. Their turn is over and any movement tokens on the board are removed, their personal tokens do not change position.
• End of turn: Play progresses to the player on the left when the active player either chooses to stop rolling or goes bust.

Endgame
When a player's 3rd personal token reaches the top of a line and they stop, then they immediately win.

Overall
First off; if you don't like push-your-luck games or games that introduce significant amounts of randomness or chance, then you can probably stop read right here! Chances are that you'll hate Can't Stop. Only Joking, please keep reading! Maybe I can convince you that it's worth trying!

I think that Can't Stop is a good 'crossover' game that will appeal to casual-gamers, the luck element is a good balancing mechanism that levels the playing field somewhat and will probably prevent dedicated players from always winning, allowing players of differing levels of experience to play together. Simple rules make the game accessible to anyone.

For such simple rules, there's a few things I want to say about Can't Stop's elegant gameplay that has been stripped down to pure, distilled, unadulterated push-your-luck mechanics. There's no gimmicks here or clever twists, just you and the dice.

Speaking of dice; using 4 of them was a piece of inspiration. If the game was played with only 2 dice, it'd be too easy to predict outcomes. Any dice-slinger worth their salt would know that getting 2 or 12 is a 1-in-36 chance, or getting a 7 is 1-in-6.
Adding an extra 2 dice into the mix that need to be paired off changes everything but also sort of keeps it the same!
While it would take a little effort to try and figure out the probabilities with 4 dice, it doesn't change the fact that 7s will still be more common than 2s or 12s. The probability curve is now just skewed to some degree, how much, I don't know, l haven't bothered to make that effort to figure it out.

This is reflected in the game's design. You only need 3 2s or 12s to to reach the top, while you require 13 7s to do the same.

While luck undoubtedly plays a big part in Can't Stop, there's also some strategy involved. Like many chance based games, it's important to employ good judgement on when to push-your-luck and when not to.
It also pays to think about how dice are paired off. Generally, when you get movement markers in the 6-8 range, it's the best time to push it, there're no guarantees though...
And the longer a player can go without putting all 3 movement markers on the board, by managing the dice pairing, the better.

If I have a criticism, it's that the game can slow down towards the end as columns become locked off. We've played this 3-player frequently and at times, when players have captured 2 lines each it means 6 out of 11 lines are no longer in play so everybody ends up going bust a lot more often.

As a filler, I think Can't Stop is pretty good fun, it provides some entertainment which allows me to turn my brain off and chill out for a little while  (Provided bad rolls don't infuriate me!).
​I don't take it too seriously and neither should you.

30th November 2022

It's a Tuesday night and we're at The Sovereigns in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club.

The main game of the evening was Atlantis Rising.
Atlantis; the mythical civilisation swallowed by the seas and lost to time, how did this happen? Clearly it was caused by a band of bumbling table-top gamers!

What's in a game?

• Board tiles: Atlantis Rising comes with 37 double-sided tiles that when placed together form the game board. It's no ordinary looking game board though and when placed together looks like a very unique 6-pronged asterisk or a '*'.
  Each of the 6 prongs or more accurately 6 peninsulas consists of 6 tile segments featuring a different terrain type and each tile within a peninsula will show a number of worker spaces, mostly 1 or 2 and an action that is associated with placing a worker in one of those spaces, 3 peninsulas also reference a number ranging from 3-6. The other side of the tiles depicts the terrain underwater, not a good thing I'd imagine.
  The hills, mountains and forests produce gold, ore and crystal respectively, 3 of the game's 4 resources. These 3 terrains also show dice values
  The 4th peninsula is The Forge and allows players to turn resources into Atlantium, the game's 4th resource.
  The plains allows players to acquire more workers.
  Finally, the library peninsula allows players to acquire knowledge cards.
  The centre tile allows players to gain mystic energy.
• Mystic Energy: Glass beads are used to represent mystic energy.
• Resources: Little wooden cubes are used to represent the game's 4 types of resource. Little Wooden cubes, now we're talking!
• Tokens: These are standard card tokens used in this case to represent courage and mystic barriers. These Atlanteans sure like their mysticism!
• Dice: These are 3 normal six-siders.
• Attack die: Not content with 3 dice, Atlantis Rising also comes with this attack die, it is not a normal six-sider and ranges from 1-4.
• Atlantean navy board: Player may put their workers here to join the navy, why? Well come on, to protect the motherland!
  Along 1 edge of this board is the Athenian attack track, it's value starts at 0 and potentially rises to 12. The Athenian meeple galley moves along this track over turns, making the Athenians more and more dangerous. Speaking of which...
• Athenian galley: This wooden ship meeple represents the Athenian Navy who really and I mean really hate the Atlanteans. Every turn they will attack in greater numbers and must be driven off.
• Cosmic gate blueprint cards: These cards are essentially objective cards that the players must meet to win the game.
  There are 4 decks of cards labelled A-D which have increasing levels of difficulty.
• Misfortune cards: Pretty explanatory really. These cards cause problems for the players and generally cause parts of Atlantis to sink, they represent the chief threat to their chances of success.
  Typically, misfortune cards sink 1 segment in 1 peninsula but some do far worse things.
• Knowledge cards: These cards always provide some sort of benefit to the players can be at almost any time.
• Player boards: These differently coloured boards all have a different roles which confer some a benefit or special ability on the controlling player.
• Meeples: These are classic wooden meeples, they come in colours that match the player boards.
  Grey meeples: These are ordinary citizens of Atlantis that can be temporarily be recruited for a single round at a time.

This that's pretty much it for components.

The quality of the components is as you'd expect from modern games universally good, the game makes extensive use of wooden tokens for meeples, resources and even the Athenian ship, which I like. The addition of glass tokens is also a nice touch and appreciated.

From the perspective of art direction, I'd call the art good but not exceptional, it is however, clear and functional when needed, the different terrains are always easily discernible.
I'd be remiss if I didn't comment on the board. It genuinely looks unique and eye-catching. It's not a gimmick either and makes sense in relation to the game's mechanics.

The game's iconography is straightforward and easy to understand.

How's it play?
Setup
The setup for Atlantis Rising is relatively simple.

• Atlantis: Create the game board.
• Cosmic gate: Sort the blueprint cards out by their 4 types and shuffle them into 4 face-down decks. 9 cards should be drawn from these decks, the mix of decks used will depend on the difficulty chosen by the players. The 10th and final card is always the power core.
  Thus players will have 10 blueprint cards to complete.
• Atlantean Navy: Set out the Atlantean Navy board and place the Athenian galley on its allotted starting spot.
• Players: Give each player a player board, the allotted amount of starting meeples and a mystic energy token.
• First player: Determine a starting player

Now we're ready to begin.

On to play
Each round in Atlantis Rising consists in a number of phases.

• Place workers: Starting with the 1st player and going to the left, each player places all their workers on to the peninsulas on the Atlantis board or the Atlantean Navy board.
  Some spots will have spaces for 2 workers who may be the same or different colours. Some spots require 2 workers of the same colour.
  When players put their workers on to the peninsulas - which they'll be doing a lot, it should be noted that the spaces which provide the most benefit will also be the ones closest to the sea and at most risk to flooding, why is this significant? read on.
  Finally, when all workers have been placed, who ever put the most on the Atlantean Navy board gains a courage token, more on courage tokens later.
• Misfortune: Once all workers have been placed, it's time for some misfortune!
  Beginning with the 1st player and going left, each player draws a misfortune card and immediately resolves it.
  Most of these cards will flood a single tile in a specific peninsula but some will cause worse problems. When a peninsula is hit by flooding, it's outermost unflooded tile becomes flooded, this is done by flipping it over to the flooded side, any workers on that tile are returned to their owners. If a peninsula is already full flooded, then the active player must flood two tiles elsewhere.
  When all players have resolved misfortune cards, the game progresses to the next phase.
• Resolution: Now, again beginning with the starting player and going left, each player resolves the workers they've placed on Atlantis. How this works will depend on where the workers have been placed. Workers that been placed on the Atlantean Navy board are resolved in the following phase.
  Resources: Acquiring gold, ore and crystal requires the active player to roll a die for each worker they have on a resource space, the result must be equal or higher than the die shown next to the respective space. The further along the peninsula the worker is placed, the lower the number they must roll and the easier it is to acquire the resource.
  It should be noted that some resources will naturally be harder to gain due to higher target numbers.
  Forge: This allows the active player to turn 1 ore into Atlantium for each worker placed. No roll is required and the further along the peninsula, the more Atlantium is acquired for that single ore.
  Library: Workers placed here allow the active player to gain knowledge cards. As with the other peninsulas, the number they can draw/keep depends how far each worker is along the peninsula.
  Recruit: Placing workers here allows the active player to increase their worker count. Unlike other peninsulas with multiple worker spaces, all the spaces here must be filled with workers from a single player.
  Basically the active player sends 2 workers into the bushes and a new worker emerges, you can draw your own conclusions.
  Except at the furthest point on the peninsula only 1 worker is needed and closer to the centre 3 are needed. So I don't know what's going on there!
  Centre space: Finally any number of workers can be placed on the centre space and each worker put here earns the owning player a mystic energy bead.
• Athenian attack: Once all players have resolved their worker actions, it's time for the Athenians to attack!
  How do those pesky Athenians attack? They generate a combat value which comes from 2 sources, firstly from the Athenian galley's position on the Atlantean Navy board which goes from 0-12  and is combined with a roll from the attack die, which gives a result from 1-4.
  Thus if the galley is on the 1+ spot, it will actually generate a value of 2-5, if the galley on the 5+ spot it will generate a value of 6-9.
  Once the combat value is generated, it must be compared to the the number of workers that all the players have collectively put on the Atlantean Navy board. If the number of workers exceeds the value, nothing happens. However, if the value exceeds the workers, then a number of tiles equal to the difference must be flooded. So if the players have put 2 workers on the navy board and the combat value is 4, 2 tiles must be flooded.
• Cosmic gate: The final phase allows each player to build one of the blueprint cards by spending the required resources, players must do this individually and cannot share resources to do it.
  Additionally, when a blueprint is completed, it immediately confers a one-off bonus or benefit.
• Round end: The Athenian galley is advanced 1 space along its track and the 1st player marker passes to the left. A new round begins with the new 1st player placing their workers.

That's it for how a round goes, there are some extra rules though.

• Knowledge cards: These can be used by the owning player at any time so long as it does not interrupt another action or event.
  Each player have a maximum of 4 knowledge cards in their hand at any time.
• Courage tokens: There are 2 ways to use a courage token and with both methods, the token is used along with a worker.
  A courage token can be played with a worker that is placed on a peninsula space. If, during the misfortune phase, that tile is flooded, the worker immediately completes the action before the flooding occurs and is returned to its owner while the courage token is discarded. If the tile is not flooded, then during the resolution phase, when the worker completes their action, the courage token is retained by the player, which is pretty sweet.
  The 2nd use for a courage token is playing it with a worker put on to the Atlantean Navy board. This worker counts as 2 workers when it comes to dealing with the Athenian galley. The courage tokens is discarded after this.
• Mystic barrier: When 1 of these tokens is placed on a peninsula, it will protect that peninsula from flooding once, after which is is discarded.
• Mystic energy: There are multiple uses for mystic energy.
  Resources: If the active player is making a roll to gain resources, each mystic energy spent adds 1 to the roll.
  Transmutation: The active player may spend 2 mystic energy to change any 1 resource for another.
  Cancel misfortune: When a tile is about to be flooded due to a misfortune card, 3 mystic energy can be spent to prevent this, it can be spent by a single player or collectively buy any number of players.
  Unflip flooded tile: 5 mystic energy can be spent to flip a tile back to its unflooded side. This can be spent collectively by any number of players.

Endgame
Play continues until 1 of 2 conditions is met.
If all the tiles on the Atlantis map are flooded - including the centre tile, then the players collectively lose.
If the players manage to build all 10 cosmic gate blueprints, they immediately win.

Overall
Just to clarify, it was the the 1st edition we played, there is a 2nd edition which has some notable changes.

Despite its nifty, unorthodox board, Atlantis Rising's central premise will be familiar to players of cooperative games. That is; players will be faced with the choice of working towards completing objectives to win the game or firefighting whatever will cause them to lose, in the case of Atlantis Rising that's 2 sources, the misfortune deck and the Athenian attacks. What Atlantis Rising brings to the table though, is a push-you-luck element.

Luck is an inherent part of cooperative games and is used to mitigate players' abilities to out-strategize a game, but these push-you-luck elements add something quite different.
When picking an action, players will also have to decide how much they want the resource, card or whatever, playing it safe might not get you what you need or enough of what you need.
The same is true when dealing with the Athenians, it requires a lot of meeples to be fully safe from them, but the true number required is never known due to the attack die roll. Sometimes it might better to put a meeple or 2 less, it might be riskier, but it gives you 2 workers that could have a vital use elsewhere.
In both instances it's a solid use of risk/reward and it gave me the feeling that it's hard to win the game by playing cautiously and at some points players just have to take risks.

Having said that, I do have an issue with the whole Athenian attack mechanic. I really don't like how the players have to collectively commit more and more workers to fighting the Athenians off. It can mean players are making effort to acquire workers simply for this purpose and feels like quite a negative mechanic. I'm not alone in this thought as this was revised for the 2nd edition.

This also brings me to another element of the game; as it progress on and more tiles flood, players will get less and less choice where to place their workers. It feels counter to how games - especially worker placement games flow, typically a player's choices and options expand as a game goes on but Atlantis Rising does the opposite, I know that it's part of the game's challenge and players need to work to prevent this but still sort of feels off.

Other than these two criticisms, Atlantis Rising is a perfectly acceptable game that cooperative gamers will be comfortable with. ​Atlantis Rising doesn't stand out from the crowd but neither does it do anything wrong.
Personally, I like how it looks, especially watching Atlantis gradually sink!

3rd October 2021

​It's time for more Sunday gaming goodness on Board Game Arena.
The first game of the night was Incan Gold.

Brave the temple, get the gold, avoid the traps, escape!
Indy never had it so easy! He should something really frustrating - like Incan Gold.

 Caveat: We've only ever played Incan Gold digitally.

What's in a game?

• Temple cards: There are 5 of these, they are used collectively to represent the temple, they also act a timer for the game's 5 rounds.
• Treasures: These are collected by intrepid explorers and come in 3 denominations, turquoise, obsidian and gold, respectively worth 1, 5 & 10 points. 
• Torch and camp cards: Used to determine a player's actions.
• Tent cards: In the physical game, these cards unfold to look like tents. There sort of a non-thing in the digital version.
• Artefact cards: Artefacts have special value in the game and there are 5 of these cards.
• Quest cards: There are 30 quest cards.
  15 are beneficial and confer treasures on to the players.
  15 are hazards, there are 5 different types of hazard, 3 cards of each type.

Incan Gold's utilises good, evocative art that suits its theme.

How's it play?
​Set up

• Temple cards: Set out the 5 temple cards to form the picture of the temple.
• Artefact cards: Shuffle the artefact cards and place 1 under each temple card.
• Turn counter: Turn over the temple card for the current round.
• Quest deck: Take the artefact card from under the current round's temple card and shuffle it into the quest deck. Place the quest deck into a face-down stack.
• Torch and camp cards: Give each player a torch card, camp card and tent card.
• 1st player: Determine a first player.

On to play
Incan Gold is played over 5 rounds of varying turn lengths, in each round players decide whether to continue exploring or run away! Cards are drawn from the quest deck by the first player until everyone has chosen to flee or the game goes bust.

• Stay or go: At the start of each turn, every player secretly decides whether they want to continue exploring the temple or retreat back to camp. This is done by playing a torch or camp card face-down, a torch to continue exploring or a camp to return to camp.
  All players then reveal their cards simultaneously. Anyone who chose a camp card is now out of the round, but can score whatever treasure they have collected in this round. Remaining players continue exploring the temple.
• Explore: If any players played a torch then the exploration continues.
  Turn quest card over: A card from the quest deck is revealed. Cards from the quest deck are played in a row starting next to the deck, thus creating a path.
  Treasure: If it's a treasure card, it will list what treasures it contains, this is then split up equally amongst whichever players are still exploring, any treasure(s) which cannot be equally divided is placed on the card that was revealed.
  Player keep the treasures they acquired to hand, they are not banked yet.
  Artefact: If an artefact card is revealed, nothing immediately happens, only 1 player may collect an artefact and this happens at the end of the round (More info below.)
  Hazard: Hazard cards can spell disaster for explorers.
  When the 1st card of any of the 5 types of hazard is revealed, nothing bad will happen. However when a 2nd card of any type of hazard is revealed, all the explorers must flee, the round has busted and is over. The following then occurs:
  Any explorer still in the temple loses all treasures they've acquired this round.
  Any treasures on the path are also discarded.
  Any artefact cards that were drawn are also discarded.
  The 2nd hazard card is removed from the deck for the remainder of play.
  Play proceeds to the next turn (See below.).
• Return to camp: Any players who played the camp card, must immediately return to their tent, they are no longer participating in exploring the temple and the following occurs:
  Treasures: Any treasures that were left on the path are now equally divided up to the retreating players, again, treasures which cannot be equally divided up remain on the path.
  Artefact: The artefact card(s) in the path is collected by the last player to retreat who is also the only player retreating. If 2 players are the last to retreat, the artefact is not collected.
  The first 3 artefacts that are found are worth 5 points each, the last are worth 10 each.
  Tent: Players who retreated many now bank any treasures they acquired, these are safe and cannot be lost.
  End of round: If the round did not bust and all the players escaped. The round is over and if for any reason a revealed artefact was not collected by a player, then it is discarded from play.
• Next round: Flip over the temple card to mark the start of the next round and shuffle the next artefact card into the quest deck. The first player moves to the left

Endgame
Play continues until 5 rounds have been completed.
Players count points from the 3 types of treasure they might've acquired and any artefact cards they collected.
​Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Incan Gold is a very focused push-you luck game, a couple of cards may be added or removed to the quest deck every round, but broadly speaking the quest deck is split 50/50 between treasures and hazards, flipping a card is like flipping a coin. It really is pushing your luck.

There are also some other interesting things going on in Incan Gold.
At the start of a round, the length of the exploration into the temple will have already been determined by shuffling the deck and there's no way for players to alter this. It means the game's 'luck' affects all players equally, if one player got further into the temple than all the others, it because they had the guts to push their luck further. Conversely, if a player went bust when others got back to camp, then they foolishly pushed their luck too hard!

Of course, there will be occasions when both approaches may prove beneficial and players will have to judge when it's a good idea to return to camp or not.
The artefact rules add a wrinkle to the game; acquiring an artefact can earn a lot of points, especially in games with higher player counts where treasures are split between more people. This of course means outlasting all the other players and surviving, adding a game of 'chicken' to Incan Gold.

Using cards to secretly choose whether to continue or retreat is the final interesting rule for various reasons.
Treasure on the path is split between all retreating players, so sometimes, retreating when it's obvious to retreat may not be the optimal strategy, as those treasures will get split amongst all retreating players. Pushing your luck here may prove beneficial, depending on how much treasure you've already got, but other players are thinking the same thing...​
When an artefact appears, it can add an extra element to this, how far is a player willing to push their luck to get the artefact? Is it worth retreating to collect treasure on the path instead? Can an opponent be bluffed into going too far. Are the other players going to fold? If a player's behaviour and motives can be predicted, it can be exploited.
While a round will have a limited number of turns before it busts, a player doesn't have to reach the end, they need to be last explorer exploring.

Incan Gold is a game with just 2 decisions, but there's always risk and reward behind those decisions, it can give players tricky and meaningful decisions to make.

We've only played Incan Gold digitally and it's a game that employs a significant amount of randomness, something which computers are not very good at handling. It can lead to weird or erroneous results appearing in games, so it's hard to discern if our experience of the game was influenced by this not.

We found Incan Gold to be a frustrating experience. The push-your-luck element of the game felt too harsh, too punishing to be fun. The 2nd hazard card seemed to pop up far too often and players frequently busted very early. Eventually we ended up barely turning over any cards before returning to camp, it seemed the most efficient move to make.
It felt like the risk far outweighed the reward and it made for an unexciting experience, one we didn't feel like repeating.

12th September 2021


Up from the depths.
Thirty stories high.
Breathing fire!
HIS HEAD IN THE SKY!
GODZILLA!
GODZILLA!
GODZILLA!
….and Godzoo- OK, that's going too far.

Take on the role of a kaiju as they rampage against each other for the right to flatten  Tokyo!

• Power cards: These cards grant monsters powers. Some powers are once-only and discarded when used, some are always active and others can be triggered by certain criteria. Additionally, some power cards will target other players' monsters, normally to detrimental effect.
• Dice: These are not the usual six-siders, the numbers 4, 5 & 6 are replaced with a monster footprint, lighting and heart symbols.
  There are 6 black dice and 2 green ones. Mostly, players will use the black dice, some power cards allow them to use the extra 2 green dice though.
• Energy cubes: Translucent, green acrylic cubes.
• Tokens: Standard cardboard disc shaped tokens, used to track some of the power cards' abilities.

That's it for components, they're all solidly made; the monster standees and boards are thick and sturdy, it doesn't feel like the dials will fall off any time soon. The tokens, cards and acrylic are exactly what you'd expect them to be.
​The dice are very well constructed and feel satisfying weighty to heft, which is good because they be getting a of of use.
The boards, cards and standees are lavished with brash, colourful and cartoonish art, it's comical style perfectly fits both the game's style and over the top theme.
The game has little iconography which is easy to understand.

How's it play?
Setup

• ​Give each player a standee and matching monster board, each player should set the health to 10 and victory points to 0.
• Set out the main board, dice, cubes and tokens.
• Shuffle the power cards into a face-down deck and deal 3 face-up.
• Determine a starting player.

On to play
​In King of Tokyo, players take turns rolling and re-rolling dice, then using those results to try and gain some benefit to work towards their objectives. During play there will always be a monster inside Tokyo, while the others are outside, in a 5+ player game, there can be 2 monsters inside Tokyo.
A turn goes like this.

• Dice: The active player rolls the 6 black dice.
  Rerolls: After the 1st roll, the active player may choose to set aside any number of dice and reroll the remaining. They may choose to set aside 0 dice or all of them (Although this would end their rolling.).
  They may then reroll those remaining dice that were not put aside; after this roll, they may put aside any number of those dice, they may even add back in dice they put aside in the previous roll.
  Finally, the active player may have a final 2nd reroll (3rd roll in total.) of the dice not set aside. Now the results on all the dice must be resolved.
• Results:
  3-of-a-kind: If the active player got 3-of-a-kind for the numerical results, then they score victory points for that base number. If they rolled 1, 1 & 1, then they score 1 point, if they roll 3, 3 & 3, they would score 3 points.
  Getting more matching numbers, increase the score per matching die. Thus getting a result of 2, 2, 2, 2, & 2 would earn the active player 4 victory points.
  Footprint: The footprint stomps enemies! Each footprint does a point of damage.
  If the active player is outside Tokyo, the damage dealt to the monster inside Tokyo, if the active player is inside Tokyo, the damage is dealt to every monster outside Tokyo!
  If a monster has it's health reduced to 0, it is eliminated from the game.
  Heart: For every heart result the active player has rolled, they are healed 1 damage, however, monsters inside Tokyo cannot heal.
  Energy: Each energy result gains the active player 1 energy cube.
• Buy power card: Once the dice have been resolved, the active player can spend their energy cubes to buy 1 or more power cards.
  Alternatively, the active player may spend 2 energy to clear away the 3 available power cards and replace them with 3 new ones.
• Next player: Play proceeds with the player to the left.

Rules for Tokyo

• If a Tokyo space is empty, the active player's monster must enter it.
• A player earns a victory point for entering Tokyo.
• A player beginning their turn in Tokyo earns 2 victory points.
• A player's monster cannot leave Tokyo, they can only yield it to a player who has just damaged them.

Endgame
Play continues until one of two conditions are met.
A player has reached 20 victory points - in which they immediately win or all monster bar one have had their health reduced to 0, in which case the last monster standing wins.

Overall
King of Tokyo is a push-your-luck game with a difference, most other games of this type task players with essentially beating the odds and doing so more efficiently than other players, getting to whatever the victory criteria is first. But King of Tokyo has an extra wrinkle, in King of Tokyo, players can target and eliminate other players, I'm not a fan of player elimination but it gives the game an extra approach and dimension to gameplay. Not only that, players will look to prioritise different results at different times, if they're low on health; they'll want hearts. If there's a power card they like the look of; they'll want energy.

The rules for getting into Tokyo compliment this well.

Getting into Tokyo works for scoring points or attacking enemies.
There's an inherent risk to do so, because it makes that player the central target. Managing to stick it out in Tokyo however, earns the player 2 victory points per turn, which on the surface might not seem like much but is actually 10% of the required victory score. Additionally, being in Tokyo is the best way to dish out damage to all other players, hit them hard enough and they'll probably want to heal instead of attack, giving the player in Tokyo more time, because sometimes, attacking the player in Tokyo is a risk. A canny player might yield Tokyo to another player who is low on health because it then puts them on the spot!

Throw the usage of power cards into the mix and King of Tokyo becomes an enjoyable blend of strategy, risk and reward and push-your-luck mechanics. Furthermore, players will need to adapt to the unpredictability the game sends their way.

King of Tokyo is a easy to learn, light and fun game not to be taken too seriously, it's perhaps a little too long for a filler game but is definitely worth trying, especially if you're a fan of push-your-luck games.

29th July 2021

It's a Thursday and we're logged into Board Game Arena for some gaming entertainment.

The first game was Martian Dice, it turns out that in Martian society abducting humans is a highly popular and competitive past time, players take the role of opportunistic Martians, flying around looking for hapless humans to kidnap as well as those old favourites - cows and errrrr.... chickens? Meanwhile, they'll also have to dodge all those pesky Sherman tanks sent by the US Government to harass them.

Caveat: We've only ever played Martian Dice digitially.

What's in a game?
You'll be unsurprised to learn that Martian Dice is a dice game that comes with 13 standard 6 sided dice. All dice are identical and come with the following symbols on their faces.

• Cow: 1 face on the dice is a cow, a favourite target for Martians. Scores points.
• Chicken: 1 face on the dice shows a chicken. Scores points.
• Human: 1 face depicts a human and a shocked looking one too, presumably in the process of being sucked up by a tractor beam. Also scores points.
• Tank: 1 dice face shows a pesky Sherman tank, the natural enemy of UFOs throughout the universe.
• Death-ray: Finally, the last 2 faces on the dice show death-ray, useful for dealing with tanks.

How's it play?
​Martian Dice is a pretty straightforward push your luck game and players can continue rolling dice until they choose to or are forced to stop.

• Roll the dice: The active player initially rolls all 13 dice. Once dice are rolled, the results can be dealt with as follows.
• Tanks: Firstly, whenever any dice are rolled, all that come up as tanks must be set aside.
• Decisions: Next, the active player must now choose one set of dice to put aside, when deciding on this they can only set aside dice with matching faces and it must be all of them; thus if the active player rolled 3 death-rays and they want to put aside death-rays, they must put all 3 aside and no other dice.
  Additionally, cows, chickens and humans can only be put aside once each per turn, this means the active player only ever has a maximum of 3 scoring opportunities per turn.
  Conversely, death-rays can always be put aside. Players will need death-rays to see off those aforementioned pesky tanks.
  If for any reason the active player can't set aside dice, (E.g., they rolled all chickens and they've already put aside chickens) then their turn immediately ends and they go to scoring, more on scoring below.
• Stop or go: If the active player has put aside all 13 dice, their turn ends and they go to scoring.
  Otherwise they can voluntarily end their turn and go to scoring.
  Or they can roll the remaining dice not set aside again, repeating the steps above.
• Scoring: The first thing the scoring player must do is compare tanks and death-rays that have been set aside, if tanks outnumber death-rays, the heroic US army has repelled the player who scores 0 for that turn. If death-rays equal or outnumber tanks, then superior Martian technology wins the day and the active player is free to abduct their cows, chickens and human.
  The active player score 1 point for each cow, chicken or human dice that they set aside.
  If the active player managed to set aside at least one dice of all 3 types, then they score a bonus 3 points.
• Turn end: Play then continues with the player to the left.

Endgame
The game continues until a player scores 25 or more points, then the current round is concluded.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
This is usually where I blog about what I think of a game, but with Martian Dice, it's a little trickier. This is because at the time of writing, we've only ever played the game digitally and the version of Martian Dice we played on Board Game Arena appears to be quite broken!
Why?

In a word (Or acronym.); R.N.G. - random number generation. Computers can't actually, truly, generate numbers randomly, they can only do an approximation of it and any game that contains any random element will be affected by this to some lesser or greater degree - and that's probably most tabletop games on Board Game Arena!
So why am I singling out Martian Dice?

In game that's only about throwing lots of dice, when the randomness does go skew-whiff, it can become readily apparent. Look at the examples below.

I don't know the odds of the rolls that occurred above, but they must've have been very long. These kinds of results weren't particularly uncommon either, every few rounds something would pop up that just looked too improbable.
This skewed randomness did however, generally appear to affect all players equally which mitigated it somewhat, but it did alter the way we played the game.

Anyway back to my conclusion.

Martian Dice really only ever gives players 2 decisions to make.
What dice shall I keep?
Should I continue my turn or not?
Luckily, at least 1 of these decisions is generally always a meaningful decision.

Players will only get 3 scoring opportunities per turn, they'll sometimes be faced with the decision of scoring fewer points now and locking out that scoring type or hoping to get a better result later at the risk of getting 0 points. It can put players in a painful predicament - in a good way!

The other key hard decision players will have to make is choosing to put aside scoring dice or death-rays to battle tanks, especially as invariably a couple of tanks will have turned up.
Go for the points now and hope to be able to deal with the tanks later?
Or deal with the tanks now and hope points will turn up on another roll, albeit one with fewer dice?
Perhaps a player will get lots of death-rays early on; they could put them aside to deal with tanks that will appear in later rolls, on the other hand, putting aside this many death-rays lessens the chances of getting scoring results.

Finally players will frequently have to decide whether to push their luck or not. Because of how the scoring mechanism works, it obvious when there's no point pushing on and when it's got a chance to score more points. The question is; is it worth the risk? Sometimes players will have to roll because they've got too many tanks in play, other times - well getting just one of that type a player hasn't got would score 4 extra points! However, if the tanks and death-rays set aside are close in numbers, an unfortunate roll will bust they player.
All of these decisions will of course be contextual, but the game gives players a fairly clear risk/reward choice to make.

Martian Dice is a light, quick to learn and play, luck-based (sic) game, it definitely has some nuance and strategy but it will also appeal to fans of push your luck mechanics.
If you want a game not too taxing on the grey matter and works as a filler, Martian Dice could work well for you. We found it a good finisher at the end of an evening of play.

30th May 2021

Sunday night gaming on Board Game Arena continues with Dragonwood.

Those woods there, there be dragons in those woods, that must be why it's named Dragonwood! There are many monsters to capture, so to assemble brave adventurers, take your cards and take your dice and head off into the forests, there're adversaries to be struck, stomped or screamed at!

Caveat: We've only ever played Dragonwood digitally online.

What's in a game?

• Dragonwood cards: These cards consist of creatures to capture, enhancements to earn and events to encounter.
  Creatures: Acquiring creatures earn victory points. Each card has a picture of the creature it represents and also shows how many victory points it's worth.
  Creatures also have a column of 3 numbers, one number each for the strike, stomp, or scream actions.
  For example:
  Grumpy Troll
  Victory points: 4
  Strike: 9
  Stomp: 11
  Scream: 9
  These values are the target numbers that must be met with dice rolls in order to acquire the card, the higher the victory points, the higher the target numbers.
  Which of the 3 values is used for the dice roll is explained below.
  Enhancements: Unlike creatures, enhancements do not score victory points, instead they give the controlling player a bonus that works towards capturing creatures in some way or other, this may be once-only or ongoing.
  Finally, enhancements cannot be used in capturing other enhancements.
  Events: Events can be beneficial or detrimental and are immediately played when revealed during play.
• Adventurer cards: There are 64 adventurer cards in all.
  60 adventurer cards: Numbered 1-12 in 5 different colours.
  4 Lucky Ladybug cards: Drawing one of these cards is lucky! See below for further info.
• Dice: These six siders are NOT numbered 1-6, instead the distribution of numbers goes; 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4. The mathematically astute among you will note that the mean average when rolling 2 of these dice would be 5, the mean average for 2 normal six siders is 7.

That's it for components.
Well, there's not much that can be said since we've only played it digitally. The art on the carts is bright, cartoonish and pleasant, text is clearly written and easy to read.

How's it play?
Setup

• Dragonwood deck: The size of this deck is dependant on the number of players.
  First remove the 2 dragon cards from the deck and shuffle it, discard the required number of cards and then shuffle the dragons back into the bottom half of the deck.
  Deal a row of 5 cards to form what's called 'The landscape'. If any events are dealt during setup, shuffle them back into the deck.
• Adventurer deck: Shuffle the adventurer cards into a face-down deck, deal 5 to each player, these should be kept hidden.
• Starting player: Determine a starting player

On to play
The objective in Dragonwood is to capture creatures cards which are worth 1-7 points each.
Each turn, the active player will have a choice of 2 actions.

• Reload: This is a fancy word for draw a card from the Adventurer deck. If the Lucky Ladybug card is drawn, discard it to the discard pile and draw 2 more cards. Players have a maximum hand size of 9.
  ​If the adventurer deck is depleted, shuffle the discard pile into a new deck. This is done only once per game.
• Capture a card: Players may try to capture a creature or enhancement, mechanically it's identical and there are 3 ways to do this, all methods are done by playing cards, the more card that are played, the more dice can be rolled. Thus the active player plays their cards and chooses one of the 3 capture methods to use.
  Strike: In order to use strike, the active player must play cards that are all in a straight, e.g., a 4, 5, 6, 7 of any colour, because there are 4 cards being played, that would give the active player 4 dice to roll.
  Stomp: To stomp, all card played must have the same value, so two 9s would give the active player 2 dice to roll.
  ​Scream: This requires the active player to play cards all of the same colour, regardless of their numbers; a 2, 3, 8, 10 & 12 all in green would give the active player 5 dice to roll.
  Once the method has been chosen, the active player rolls the relevant dice:
  Fail: if the result is less than the target number for the chosen method, then the capture attempt has failed! The active player takes the cards they played back into their hand and must discard 1 card.
  Success: If the result is equal to or higher than the chosen target number, then the creature is captured and the cards are discarded into the adventurer discard pile.
  A new card is immediately drawn to replace the captured card, if that card is an event, it is immediately played and discarded, another card is drawn, there must always be 5 cards in the landscape if possible.

Play continues until either both dragons have been captured which case the game ends immediately or the adventurer deck has been depleted twice, which triggers a final set of turns.
Then it goes to the endgame.

Endgame
Players score the victory points for each creature they captured.
The player who has captured the most creatures earns an additional 3 points.
Once points are tallied, highest score wins!

Overall
Decisions are based around how much you want or need to push your luck and when to or when not to try and capture cards, managing this is key to Dragonwood.

If a creature has a value of 10 for one of it's target numbers, then it's not hard to figure out that 4 dice will give the active player a 50% chance of capturing it and they'll need to play 4 cards to do this. 9 or lower and the odds swing in the player's favour, 11+ and well, it's not a push your luck game for nothing!
Sure, someone can play it safe and draw cards to get better odds, but this consumes turns while instead, competitors could be capturing those creatures. A handful of adventurer cards scores nothing at the game's end.
Conversely, rashly trying to capture cards and failing will cost players their adventurer cards, it's a clever little balancing mechanic.
Even though the decision to capture a card or not is a simple, almost no brainer decision, the need to outdo other players generally means it never quite a meaningless one.

We found that acquiring enhancements early on (If they appear early on that is.) could be a big advantage. There are enhancements that add 1 or 2 to capture rolls, it might not seem like much, but in a game about averaged dice rolls, it can swing the odds quite a lot.

It's obvious that Dragonwood is a light game that skews towards younger players and with that in mind, I don't think it's appropriate to be overly harsh on it.
With it's fairly simplistic choices and reliance on randomness, fans of 'heavy' games probably won't find much to engage with here, unless they're looking looking for a undemanding filler for around 30 minutes to allow their brains to cool down between other, heavier games.
However, ​I do think that younger players will find the game enjoyable and dice rolling exciting, casual gamers may also find it entertaining.

10th March 2020

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

The first game of the evening was 'Quacks of Quedlinburg'.
Quacks of QuedlinBurg is not a game about ducks as I thought when I first heard the name.
It's actually a push your luck game about disreputable, dangerous, deplorable and downright dishonest doctors. Actually YOU play the quacks in question trying to create the most amazing and wondrous potions. Amazing and wondrous that is, until they blow up in your face.

What's in a game?
Quacks of Quedlinburg has quite a few components, there is a game board and personal game boards. There are also tokens - and lots of them too, as they are the most important component of the game.

• Game board: The main game board tracks player scores and also tracks the current number of rounds in the game.
• Personal game board: The personal game board is designed to look like a pot filled with a swirling liquid that's just been vigorously stirred, there's a scoring track the follows the lines of the swirling that tracks how many victory points and coins they earn in a round. There're also spots for other components. This board is double-sided for an alternate play style.
• Flasks: There is a flask tile for each player, they are shaped like bottles and are double sided. One side shows the flask as filled, the other as empty.

• Bags: There is a bag for each player.
• Player tokens: Each player receives a rat token and a droplet in their colour. These tokens are made of plastic and are quite chunky.
• Rubies: These are made of translucent acrylic and are 'crystal shaped'  .
• Ingredient tiles. These are used to represent different ingredients that players may gain access to. There are 22 different types of ingredient, depicted in 7 different colours. There are 4 ingredients for yellow, green, red, blue and purple (Arranged in 4 sets of 5 with 1 of each colour). There is 1 black and 1 orange ingredient.
• Ingredient tokens: There tokens for each colour of ingredient (Not type of ingredient.), there are numbered; 1, 2, or 4.  There are also white ingredient tokens numbered 1, 2 or 3.
• Bonus die: A six sided die, but with the numbers replaced by symbols.
• Fortune Teller Cards: A deck of 24 cards that give a one-off bonus when drawn at the start of the round.

The components are all of a good quality. The artwork is colourful and well drawn.
​That the player boards look like pots, flask tiles look like potion bottles and ingredient tiles look like ingredient books shows that some thought, effort and care has been put into the their design. ​

How's it play?
​Setup.

• Set up the ingredients for the game. The black and orange ingredients are used in every game. 1 of the 4 sets (Of 5 ingredients.) is chosen and used as well. Some sets are more 'difficult' to use than others.
• Put out the black and orange ingredient tiles, along with their respective tokens. Then put out the green, red and blue ingredient tiles along with their respective tokens. Put the yellow and purple tiles and tokens to one side for now.
• Shuffle the fortune teller cards and place them down in a face-down stack.
• Give each player a player board (Pot.), a flask tile, a rat token and droplet token. The flask and the rat token go on to their respective spots on the player board. The droplet token goes on to the '0' spot on the scoring track.
• Next give each player a bag, 1 orange token, 1 green token and 7 white tokens (The white tokens consist of 4x1 point tokens, 2x2 point tokens and 1x3 point token.). All of the tokens are placed into the player's bag, which is thoroughly shaken.

Now we're ready to begin.

Quacks of Quedlinburg is played over 9 rounds and something new or different is introduced over several of the rounds.

• At the start of round 2, the yellow ingredients come into play.
• At the start of round 3, the purple ingredients come into play.
• At the start of round 6, each player must add another 1 point white token into their bag.

Now, this is how the first 8 rounds are played.

• ​First a card is drawn from the fortune teller deck and it's action is carried out.
• From round 2 onwards: Determine if players get 'rat-tails' to put into their pot! There are a number of 'rat symbols' on the scoring track on the main board. Every symbol between the player and every other player, means that the other player may place their rat token a space further along the track on their own board, giving them a head start for the round. Essentially a balancing mechanic.
• Then simultaneously, each player begins blindly drawing ingredient tokens, one at a time from their bag and placing them on the scoring track on their board (Starting at the droplet token, 0 at the game start.). The number on the token determines where it goes: If it's a 1, it goes on to the 1st available spot, a 2 goes on the 2nd available spot and so on. Some ingredient tokens have special actions triggered when placed, these actions are carried out immediately.
• Players may continue drawing and placing tokens until either; they choose to stop or they go 'bust'. A player goes bust when the white tokens they drew have a combined value that exceeds 7 (Potion goes boom!).

Once all players have either stopped adding ingredients or have gone bust, play goes on to the next 6 phases.

• In turn order, players who did not go bust can roll the bonus die and acquires whatever bonus the die rolls. Players that went bust skip this phase.
• Some tokens have actions that are triggered in this phase, carry these actions out now, in turn order.
• Players may earn a ruby, depending on where they finished on their scoring track.
• Players who did not go bust score victory points depending on where they finished on their scoring track. Players who went bust, must choose whether to earn victory points or earn coins (See below.).
• Players who did not go bust earn points according to their finishing spot. Players who went bust choose either to earn coins or victory points. Coins can now be spent to buy more ingredients which are added to their bag. Coins cannot be carried over from round to round, use 'em or lose 'em!
• Finally, players may spend rubies to either move their droplet forward on their board (Thus moving their starting spot forward.) or to refill their flask it they used it. 

What the flask does?
When players are drawing ingredients from their bag. They can use their flask to return the token to the bag - provided they had not gone bust because of the token.

Endgame
Play continues normally until the start of the 9th round.
The final round is a little different.

When drawing a token from their bags, each player keeps the token in a closed hand and every player opens their hand at the same time. When a player wants to stop drawing tokens they simply keep their empty hand closed until it's time to reveal it. After that they drop out of further rounds of drawing ingredients.

The phases for spending coins on ingredients and rubies on the droplet/flask are ignored because they are pointless at the end of the game.
Instead; every 5 coins and/or 2 rubies will earn the player a victory point.

After this, victory points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Quacks of Quedlinburg is a fairly easy game to learn and easy to play. It moves along briskly too as there's very little downtime and it doesn't outstay its welcome as it's finished after 9 rounds. When I played it, it felt like a lot was occurring in a short game time.

Pulling ingredients out a bag to put into a pot is a brilliant use of the 'push your luck' mechanic. It fits the game perfectly and surprisingly makes it a lot of fun.

Additionally; unlike most 'push your luck' games, going bust does not totally kill a player's turn, they still reap some of rewards of their potion making and they can still carry out most of the other actions.

The engine building mechanic works well too, as players introduce tokens into their bags, it makes going bust a little harder, giving players longer more productive turns.

Combined, the 2 game mechanics always gives the player meaningful and interesting decisions to make, when to and when not to push your luck? What ingredients to buy? And so on.

I liked it and will definitely play it again.

29th October 2019

Tuesday night at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking and it's game night at the Woking board game club.

We started the evening with 'Heckmeck' AKA 'Pickomino'.

Have you ever wondered what is a chicken's favourite food? It turns out that a chicken's favourite food is worms. But not just any worms, but roast worms! And not just any roast worms either, but BBQ roast worms! How many BBQ roast worms does a chicken like eating? As many as it can get. How does it get as many BBQ roast worms as it can? By pushing it's luck of course!

That's what Heckmeck is about. Pushing your luck to accumulate as many BBQ roast worms as possible.

What's in a game?
There are 2 versions of Heckmeck, standard and deluxe.
We played the standard version of the game. They use the following components:

• 8 six sided dice, each numbered from 1 to 5, the 6th side depicts a worm. A worm has a value of 5. 
• 16 dominoes, the top half of the dominoes are numbered from 21 to 36, the bottom half show 1-4 worms. The higher the value of the domino, the more worms on it.

The deluxe version includes some extra components and rules.

• 2 extra dominoes.
• 7 'bratworm' tokens.
• 6 different meeples, each meeple grants a special ability to whoever 'owns' it.

All of the components are of a good quality. The dominoes are solid and heavy. The dice are all wooden with rounded corners. The deluxe components are of a similar quality.

How's it play?
First there's setup.

• Place the dominoes in a line in ascending order to form a supply.

Yep, that's it for setup. Now on with the game.

The goal in Heckmeck is to roll and accumulate dice to get a score high enough to claim a domino. But here's a twist, at least one of those dice must have a worm result.
How's this done? Keep reading.

• At the start of their turn, the active player rolls all 8 dice.
• The player must then keep a 'set' of dice. A 'set' consists of 1 or more dice showing the same face. For example, after rolling the dice the player gets; 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4 & 5. They could choose to keep the 1, the two 2s (Combined value of 4.), the two 3s (Worth 6.), the two 4s (Worth 8.) or the 5. Let's say the player took the two 4s.
• Once the player has chosen a 'set', they put those dice to one side. Then they must choose to stop rolling or continue rolling.
• If the player chooses to continue rolling, they must re-roll the remaining dice and keep another 'set', but this set cannot be the same as a set the player already took. So now the player rolls the remaining 6 dice and gets; 4, 4, 5, W, W, W (W=worm.). The player cannot take the 4s because they have already taken 4s. So they must take 5 or the 3 worms. The player takes the 3 worms.
• The player now has a score of 23, 8 from the first roll and 15 from the second roll  (Remember worms are worth 5.). The player also has at least 1 worm result. So this is enough to get a domino, the player chooses to stop rolling. There are dominoes with the scores of 21, 22 & 23. The player must take the highest domino they can, which in this case is the 23.

Going bust or failing

• If after rolling the dice, the player cannot collect a set because all of the dice are showing numbers they have already collected. Then they have gone bust!
• Additionally, if a player chooses to stop rolling or cannot roll anymore dice and they have no accumulated a high enough score to get a domino, then they have failed!
• Going bust or failing have the same result; the player must return a domino to the supply row and turn the highest valued domino in the supply row face-down. If the player has no domino to return, there is no further action.

Stacking
Stacking is one of the things that makes Heckmeck stand out.

• When a player takes a second domino (And any subsequent dominoes.) they place it on top of the previous domino to form a stack. Thus all dominoes are kept in a stack (Even if it's a stack of 1.) and each player will have a single stack.
• When a player goes bust or fails and must return a domino to the supply, they must return the domino from the top of the stack.

Stealing
Like stacking, stealing is something I've not seen in a push your luck game before.

• If the active player accumulates a score that is exactly the same value as the domino on the top of another player's stack, then the active player can steal that domino and add to their own stack!
  
• That's bang out of order!

Endgame
Play continues until there are no more face-up dominoes in the supply to collect.
Players tally the worms they've collected, highest number of worms wins.

Overall

​Heckmeck is easy to learn and fairly quick to play. It has several excellent mechanics that give players tricky decisions to make.
Choosing which sets to keep is crucial because of it 'locks out' numbers. Do you really want to take that single 5, because that means you can no longer get any more 5s. Decisions, decisions.
The worm mechanic is also cool. Needing to have a worm result is an extra thing that can go wrong. Making a worm worth a 5 is genius, it puts players in the same quandary as rolling a 5. If a worm was only worth 1, taking it when it's only 1 worm would be a no-brainer.
Finally, the stacking and stealing together is another great idea. If players just laid their tiles out in a line, then stealing them would be a bit too easy as the choice would be wider. However, since the dominoes are stacked, stealing is uncommon. When it does occur, it's something that should be taken advantage of!

All of this adds up to make a good push your luck game.
Heckmeck has very quickly become a favourite with nearly everybody I play it with. And deservedly so.