3rd August 2021

Tuesday is here and I'm in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club at The Sovereigns pub for gaming night.

The game of the night was Above and Below. Published by the same company who also produce a game  called Near and Far.
Left and right, up and down, in and out: wiggle it all about, here and there, out and about, Far and Away and Home and Away! Some great suggestions for naming more games!

As the name suggest, the players will concerning themselves with the above ground settlement and exploring the caves below the village.

What's in a game?

• ​Reputation board: This central game board shows an area above ground that displays a 5-space track for 'special villages' with a cost beneath each spaces that starts at 2 and rises to ​5.
  Below ground, the board depicts a series of caves which serves as a round tracker and what appears to be a tunnel, which is used as a reputation tracker.
  Additionally, on the left is an allotted space for a barrel token and a column that depicts the game's many goods in increasing rarity.
• Player board: This board depicts a grassy landscape dotted with a few buildings.
  The top left corner displays the player's colour as well as being a trading spot.
  Along the top it shows the different actions a player may perform. These are Explore, Harvest, Build, Train & Labour.
  The grassy landscape is divided into 3 areas by 2 vertical columns of trees. These 3 areas are the ready area, exhausted area and the injured area
  Finally, along the bottom is the goods advancement tracker which runs from left to right, as each space is filled with goods, it will increase the player's income as well as generating victory points at the game end.
• Player cubes: One each for every player in a colour that matches their player board.
• Starting villager tiles: There 4 copies of the 3 identical villagers. Villagers have a hammer (For building.), quill (For training.) or lantern (For exploring.) icon in their top left corner.
  All villagers will also have an icon in their top right corner, consisting of 1 or more lanterns along with associated die numbers above the lanterns, these are used in explore rolls.
• Villager tiles: Villagers that can be trained and recruited during play. As with starting villagers, they will come with come with icons for hammers, quills and exploring.
• Special villager tiles: Not just villagers, but special ones, one that come with special actions! Special villagers can only be found by exploring the caves.
• Starting house cards: There are 4 of these identical cards that each depict 3 beds along the bottom. Beds allow injured villagers to heal and exhausted ones to rest.
• House cards: These 25 cards can be bought during the game and list a cost in the top left corner and whatever special ability they confer along the bottoms; this may be extra beds or ways to earn victory points, or produce goods, increase reputation or money, etc.
• Star house cards: These 6 cards are rarer, more expensive but more useful houses.
• Key house cards: The rarest of house cards, there are 9 of them, but only 4 are used during a game.
• Cave cards: These cards are double sided. On the front is shows a small cave and the numbers 1-6, next to each of these numbers is a further number - which is used in conjunction with the encounter book.
  On the back of the card, a open cave is shown.
  There are 25 cave cards.
• Outpost cards: These are yet another type of house card, however, these can only be built underground as players explore. There are also 25 of these cards. As with other house cards, they may provide goods, victory points or other benefits.
• Goods tokens: These small round card tokens depict the game's 8 types of good. These are:
  Common: mushroom, fruit & fish.
  Uncommon; rope, clay pot & Paper.
  Rare: Ore & amethyst. 
• Barrel tokens: There 10 card tokens each depict a barrel and can be used to remove exhaustion from a villager without using a bed. Apparently those barrels are filled with cider, it must be pretty potent stuff considering what it does.
• Potion tokens: These smaller card tokens depict some sort of drinking jar, no doubt containing some suspect liquid? Using one will remove injury from a villager.
• Dice: Standard six-siders, there are 7 of them.
• Money tokens. Unusually, these card money tokens are rectangular.
• Encounter book: This book is a sort of 'choose your own adventure' book which contains a series of numbered and interlinked paragraphs which the players will encounter when they go exploring.

The components, which mostly consist of cards, tokens, tiles and dice are good quality and what you'd expect of a modern board game. It's nothing to write home about, but still solid.
The game makes good use of its cartoony artwork, particularly with the green, grassy landscapes and cloudy blue skies that appear on many of the cards. Buildings and villagers are also well illustrated. Finally, the underground cards have evocative, mildly forbidding artwork.
There is little iconography used throughout Above and Below and what there is of it, is easy to comprehend.

How's it play?
Setup

• Give each player a player board, a starting house, the 3 starting villagers and 7 currency. The villagers should be placed on the board, where exactly on the board depends on the number of players.
• Put out the reputation board, shuffle the villager tiles into a face-down stack and deal 5 into the tracks on the board.
  Place a barrel token on to its allotted space on the board.
  Place the round marker at the start and each player's cube on the reputation track's starting spot.
  Put the special villagers to one side.
• Shuffle the house cards into a face-down deck and deal 4 face-up
• Put out all 6 star house cards face-up.
• Shuffle the key house cards and deal 4 face-up into the central area, the remaining 5 cards will not be used in this game.
• Shuffle the outpost cards into a deck and deal 4 face-up.
• Shuffle the cave cards into a face-up deck.
• Determine a starting player.

On to play.
Beginning with the starting player and going clockwise, each player performs a single action using 1 or more of their villagers, play continues clockwise until all players have used all their available villagers or have passed. After this, the next round begins.

• Actions: In order to perform actions, the active player must have at least 1 villager in their board's ready area. When undertaking an action, the relevant number of villagers must be moved to the exhausted area, with the exception of exploration - see below for further information.
  Explore: It requires at least 2 villagers to explore the caves below the village (I guess it's a scary place!).
  First a cave card is drawn by the active player, who then places the villagers they intend to use for the explore action on the top part of that card.
  The active player then rolls a die, this will determine which encounter they experience and its pertinent paragraph number.
  The player to the left of the active player takes the encounter book, finds the relevant paragraph and reads the text out to the active player, this usually includes a choice for the active player to make and a difficulty associated with those choices, sometimes there will be multiple paragraphs to play through in the style of a choose-your-own-adventure book. The active player chooses the action they want to attempt and then generates an explore roll.
  This is done by rolling a die for each villager sent exploring, if the die result equals or exceeds the value above the lantern(s), then that number of lantern(s) is added to the explore roll. Additionally, the active player may choose to have villagers exert themselves, which adds a further lantern to the explore result but sends the villager to the injured area on their player board.
  If the total of the explore roll exceeds the difficulty of the action they chose, then they earn the associated reward, this always includes the cave card which was just used for the encounter, which is flipped over to the other side and added to the player's area as an empty cave.
  If the player's explore roll is lower than the difficulty, they fail, which may result in a penalty.
  Regardless of success or failure, any remaining villagers are sent to the exhausted area on the player board.

Overall
For the most part, mechanically speaking, Above and Below is a fairly straightforward, unremarkable game. Players use their workers to increase their resources to acquire more workers and buildings create a strategy to earn victory. Pretty standard stuff, not that there's anything wrong with that, no need to reinvent the wheel.
Even so, there's some depth here and quite a bit of balancing to perform. There's little good acquiring workers without the ability to rest them which means acquiring buildings with beds instead of other benefits, particularly to ability to acquire goods and so on.

This brings us neatly to the merchant track, which is one of the game's two interesting mechanics. Firstly, it more-or-less forces players to diversify in goods in order to reach the higher scoring spots.
Secondly, it does something unusual with the game's 8 goods; which is that the rarity of a good has no bearing of it's worth for victory points, position on the track determines a good's worth and this is likely to be different for each player, meaning they may have different priorities for different goods, regardless of rarity.
Finally, it gives players a conundrum to navigate: Logically, players will want to put the most common goods on the later, higher scoring spots because, well, there's more of the common goods available to stack up for more points. This means using rarer goods earlier in the track, but rarer goods are harder to come by. So should a player start filling out the merchant track as quickly as possible with whatever they get to reach the later spots? Or should they hold off, hoping to get the scarcer goods and use them to fill the earlier spots.
It's an interesting decision to consider.

The second interesting mechanic is exploring, Above and Below really stands out from the crowd when exploring the below. The inclusion of a 'lite storytelling' choose-your-own-adventure element with flavour text and all, is both fun and meaningful, presenting players with sometimes story-based choices and risks to take which directly affect what they earn from their exploration. It's cool and a great addition beyond the usual board game fare. It makes Above and Below worth trying.

29th July 2021

Thursday is here and it's time for some gaming on Board Game Arena.

If racing isn't your thing but rolling is, then maybe you'll prefer Roll for The Galaxy to the excellent Race for The Galaxy.
​
Roll for The Galaxy is a follow up to the aforementioned game and both are thematically similar. Both games have the same 5 phases (Although not in the same order!) and both are about are about building settlements and developments to create an engine building tableau in order to win.
Mechanically, there are numerous differences though. Roll for The Galaxy uses lots of different dice and dice rolling to manage phases as well as provide workers to build with. Gone is the card-based economy of Roll for the Galaxy.

What's in a game?

• ​​Dice: Lots of six-siders in a variety of colours, each colour having a different distribution of the game's 6 different symbols.
  ​Players of Race for The Galaxy will recognise many of the elements and colours used below.
  • Home dice: (White.) These are essentially the game's default starting dice. 2 faces show the Explore icon, the remaining faces show Develop, Settle, Produce and Ship.
  • Military dice: (Red.) 1 face on a military die will show Explore, 2 show Develop and 2 show Settle, the final face shows the Wild symbol, an asterisk.
  • Consumption dice: (Purple.) 1 side shows Explore, another shows Develop, 3 faces show Ship and again, the final face shows the Wild symbol.
  • Novelty dice: (Blue.) This die type has 1 Explore, 2 Produce, 2 Ship and 1 Wild face.
  • Rare Elements dice: (Tan.) 1 Explore, 2 Develop, 1 Produce, 1 Ship and 1 Wild face.
  • Genes dice: (Green.) 1 Explore, 2 Settle, 1 Produce and 2 Wild faces.
  • Alien Technology dice: (Yellow.) Finally this die has 1 Develop, 1 Settle, 1 Produce and 3(!) Wild faces.
    Thus, utilising different dice will give players different results and consequently, different options. Some dice are more powerful than others but also rarer and harder to acquire.
• Player screen: Each player will have a screen to hide their initial dice rolls from other players, these screens also display a condensed list of rules.
• Player tile: These large tiles have a cup space (To show what goes into the player's cup.), a Citizenry space (More on this later.) and a construction zone.
  The construction zone has a square space each for a development tile and a settlement tile, finally there's also a currency track which goes from 0-10.
• Phase strip tile: This little rectangular tile has a line of 5 symbols to represent the game's 5 phases.
• Home world tiles: There are 9 of these home world tiles which are the game's starting tiles. Each home world will have it's own special ability.
• Faction tiles: These rectangular tiles are twice as wide as home world tiles. Each of these 9 tiles also confers special abilities
• Game Tiles: These square tiles are double sided and the same size as home world tiles. One side always shows a development and the other a settlement. They also list cost and any special ability or bonus they possess.
  • Developments: Usually give the controlling player some sort of bonus or special action.
  • Settlements: Apart from non-coloured settlements, there are 4 types of settlement; Novelty, Rare Elements, Genes, & Alien Tech. Usually players gain extra dice of those types of dice when constructing settlements, as well as the ability to produce and trade goods of those colours..
• Tile bag: used to blindly draw random game tiles.
• Currency meeple: A meeple token used to track currency.
• Dice cup: Each player will have their own cup for dice rolling.
• Victory points tokens: Self explanatory.
• Phase tiles: These 5 largish square titles are used to track phases, each tile is double sided and has a active and inactive face.

The most important component here are the dice, they well made and colourful with clear iconography.
All the games tiles are made of sturdy grey board and are suitably thick.
The currency meeple is a nice little wooden token that matches colour with a dice cup, speaking of which, the cups are made of pretty standard plastic but are easily tough enough to stand up to repeated use.
Finally, the victory tokens are made of standard card token chips and are probably the most average component in the game, which is to say the components are all good quality.
Anyone familiar with Race for The Galaxy will recognise the art style on the tiles. How much of it is new and how much is recycled from Race, I couldn't say. Ultimately though, it's fairly good artwork.

How's it play?
​Setup

• Put out a number of victory point tokens equal to the number of players x 12, thus 12-60 VP tokens.
• Put out the 5 phase tiles, inactive side-up.
• Put the game tiles into the bag and give it a good shake.
• Randomly deal a faction tile and a home world tile to each player. Place the home world tile on the right side of the faction tile. This forms the player's starting tableau which has a size of 3.
• Give each player:
  A dice cup.
  A phase strip tile.
  A currency meeple.
• Each player now blindly draws 2 game tiles from the back. One must be placed on the development space on their player tile and the other on the settlement space, players are free to choose which way round they do it. These 2 tiles are now in construction.
• All players take 3 white home dice and place it on the cup space on their player tile, then they take 2 more home dice and place it on the citizenry space on their player tile.
• Depending on their faction tile and home world, players will take extra dice and place them on the cup or citizenry space, or as a good on one of their starting tiles.
• Put the currency meeple on the 1 space on the player board's currency track.

​On to play.
Roll for The Galaxy is played out over 5 different steps, each player carries out each step simultaneously.

• Roll: Players take all the dice on the cup space on their player board, places them into their dice cup and rolls them secretly behind their screen.
• Assign: This sound trickier than it actually is in play.
  From behind their screen, players secretly place all dice into columns below the phase strip spots matching the symbols that were rolled on the dice. E.G., if a player has 2 dice that came up with the development symbol, they must all be placed in a column below the development symbol on the phase strip tile. An asterisk result can be placed under any phase symbol. During this step, any single die can be discarded back to the cup to move another die to any column. The number of dice in a column beneath a phase determines the number of actions the player will gain if that phase becomes active.
  Next, each player takes any single die from any column and places it on to one of the 5 phase symbols on their phase strip tile, the die can be placed on to any phase, regardless of what face the die has showing. This will activate that phase during the phases step.
• Reveal: Now players move their screens to reveal their dice.
  For each phase chosen by a player, flip the respective phase tile from inactive to active, these are the phases that will be played in this round. The remaining phases stay inactive. Any players who has dice in a column under a phase that is inactive returns those dice to their cup.
• Phases: This is where the bulk of the game occurs, if a phase is activated by any player, then all players may act in it (Provided they have dice below the pertinent phase. From 1 to 5 phases may be played and they are always played out in the order shown below.
  • Phase I - Explore: When this phase is activated, for each die a player has under the Explore symbol on their phase strip tile, they may blindly draw a tile from the bag and place it on to their tile, because game tiles are double-sided, the player may choose which side to use. However, there can only ever be one development and one settlement in construction at a time, additional developments and settlements must be stacked beneath the respective tiles.
    Alternatively, a player may increase their currency by 2 for each explore die they have.
  • Phase II - Develop: If this phase is activated, each die that a player has under their Develop symbol can be transferred on to the development tile they have in construction. If the number of dice on the tile equals the cost then that development is completed. The completed tile is put into that player's tableau and the dice are returned to the Citizenry space on their player tile.
    If there are not enough dice to complete the construction, then those dice stay there until the construction is completed or abandoned.
  • Phase III - Settle: This works identically to the Develop phase above, only with settlements
  • Phase IV - Produce: If this phase is activated, each die the player has beneath the Produce symbol may transferred to a settlement in their tableau that can produce goods and stays there as a goods die.
  • Phase V - Ship: For each die beneath the Ship symbol, the player may trade goods on settlements for a victory point each or currency. These dice are removed from their settlements and returned to their player's Citizenry space.
    When trading for victory points, players earn more points if the goods dice and/or the trading die's colour matches that of the settlement the player is trading from. Thus a blue planet with a blue goods die and a blue trading die would earn 1+1+1 victory points.
    If a goods die is traded for currency, the colour of the settlement determines how much the player earns; from 3 for Novelty goods to 6 for Alien Technology.
• Manage Empire: Once all the phases are completed, it's time to do some management. Managers - even in space to you can't avoid them.
  • Recruit: You may have noticed that for most actions, dice are returned to the Citizenry space. In order for a player to gain use of them again, they must pay 1 currency per die, which moves them into the player's cup.
  • Recall: A player may move die used a goods back to their cup for free, they may also move dice from uncompleted developments and settlements back to their cup for free.
  • Flip Phase Tiles: Turn all activated phase tiles over to their inactive side in preparation for the next round.

That's it, play progresses to a new round, now players secretly roll dice and allocate them again.

Endgame
Play progresses until either a player has completed the 12th tile in their tableau, or the supply of victory point tokens has been depleted.
Players now calculate the total cost/value of completed tiles in their tableau and victory points accumulated, furthermore; some developments will have criteria that score players additional points.
All points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Players of Race for The Galaxy (Like me!) will recognise a lot of familiar theme and ideas in Roll for The Galaxy, it's quite clever how this has been achieved, although there are some differences.

For example; in Race for The Galaxy, a player's hand is also their currency, in Roll for the Galaxy though, players have no hand. The game introduces a currency track to replicate this and at first I thought it felt a little superfluous, after all, currency is only used to recover dice from the Citizenry space, then I realised without the need for currency, the decision to choose between a game tile and currency in the Explore phase becomes unnecessary as does the decision to to choose between victory points and currency in the Ship phase.
There is no military score, instead military dice provide extra opportunities to develop and settle.
Curiously, Roll for The Galaxy swaps the Produce and Ship/Consume phases round and trading is now the 5th and final phase. I guess that this decision was taken to make it a little easier to players to produce and then trade goods in the same round?
Additionally, because Roll for the Galaxy is a 5-player game, it possible for all phases to be activated. It's never been possible to activate more than 4 phases in Race for The Galaxy.
Finally; constructing developments and settlements is quite different: In Race for The Galaxy, it's a all-or-nothing affair, either you have the cards to pay for a development/settlement or you don't. Roll for The Galaxy allows player to incrementally pay for them, however, this ties up dice in construction, as a consequence players will have less dice and therefore less choices When rolling at the start of the round.

But enough of talking about another game, let's talk about Roll for The Galaxy.

In Roll for The Galaxy, players will be to some extent at the mercy of the dice they roll at the start of a round. If you're looking to finish constructing a settlement and you get no settlement dice - tough luck!
Obviously there are rules to mitigate some of this and furthermore, correct usage of the different types of dice (Provided you get hold of them.) at the right time can be helpful and skew results in a player's favour. But on occasion, players will have to react to dice rolls that just don't go their way! Adaptation is the key here. Even so, it can prove frustrating at times when you can't do what you want to. Additionally, acquiring certain types of dice which may push players into strategies they hadn't considered before, 
Another aspect to remember when assigning dice, is to pay attention to what other players have been doing, successfully anticipating another player's choice of action can prove useful and provide extra actions to spend.

Players must balance the need to acquire developments and settlements with the need to produce and trade, this also means balancing the use of limited resources to construct improvements with the need to have actions.
Building an engine is vital, getting the special abilities provided is important, but so is acquiring extra dice to roll, which gives players more choices elsewhere.
Players will want to do all of this as efficiently as possible to outpace their opponents

In short; Roll for The Galaxy always provides players with meaningful decisions.

I'd happily play Roll for The Galaxy again in the future, but given the choice between this and Race for The Galaxy, I'd choose the latter every time. Roll for the Galaxy is a good and fun game but I sometimes find the randomness off putting. If dice games are your thing over card games for some reason, Roll for the Galaxy is definitely worth a look.

28th July 2021

We were at The Sovereigns in Woking on a Wednesday for an impromptu evening of gaming.

It's a Wonderful World, where you can lead a idyllic, tranquil life, except It's a Wonderful World is anything but!
​It's a dystopian, industrialised future in which competing factions vie for resources to create the most powerful empires. It's a Wonderful World indeed.

What's in a game?

• Gameboard: Unusually, the gameboard is long and thin, it's used to track the game's many resources, certain player status' and turn order.
• Empire cards: These cards are double sided and one is given to each player. Empire cards provide the controlling player with a production benefit and a scoring benefit, they also have a space to stack constructed development cards.
• Development cards: There are 150 development cards and they each display quite a lot of information, including construction cost, recycling value, value of their victory points and production ability. Production ability is a horizontal line at the bottom of the card - which will remain visible when the card is stacked (More on this below.).
• Resource cubes: It's a Wonderful World uses 6(!) different types of resource, all represented by coloured little acrylic cubes. They come in grey, black, green, yellow and blue, the final resource is Krystallium which is red
• Character tokens: These come in 2 flavours, blue which are financiers and red, which are generals.

The gameboard and cards for It's a Wonderful World are of the usual good quality we've come to expect from games today. The same is true of the colourful, translucent acrylic cubes - except for the curiously opaque grey cubes, it guess it's to ensure they remain distinct from one another.
The development cards contain quite a lot of info, but the iconography is consistently clear and they never feel cluttered.
The art used throughout the game is consistently good, colour is also well used, making the game bright and eye catching. It's a bit of a shame that when development cards become stacked, the art is no longer visible.
so a thumbs up for the presentation.

How's it play?
Setup

• Put out the game board, place all the resources and token on their allotted spaces.
• Shuffle the development cards into a face-down deck.
• Give each player an empire card, all players should use the same side (Either A or B.).

That's it for basic setup.

On to play.
It's a Wonderful World is played over 4 rounds and each round has 3 phases, drafting planning and production.
The planning and production phases occur simultaneously and have no turn order

• Drafting: Start by dealing 7 cards to each player.
  Each player chooses a single card to keep, which they put face-down in their area and passes the remaining cards along to the next player. Once all players have picked and put down a card, all players turn their chosen card face-up (For everyone to see!). Repeat this until all players have chosen 7 cards.
  For rounds 1 & 3 this is done clockwise and for rounds 2 & 4, it's done anti-clockwise. This is a slight variation on a pretty standard card drafting mechanic.
• Planning: The planning phase is probably where the bulk of the game's play takes place. In this phase, players have two options on how to use all the cards they drafted. 
  Recycle: A card may be recycled (Discarded in other words.) for whatever resources it's recycling value provides. These resources can be used immediately to contribute to or complete the construction of another can if possible.
  Build: If a player decides to build a card, it is played face-up in their area and is considered in construction until the controlling player can pay all of its construction cost.
  A development card that is constructed is placed on to the controlling player's stack on their empire card.
• Production: In this phase, all players will acquire resources according to their empire card and constructed development cards.
  There are several steps in the production phase, repeated 5 times over in total! Once each for all of the game's 5 main resource types (The 6th resource, Krystallium cannot be produced in this manner.), each resource is dealt with individually in the following order; grey (materials), black (energy), green (science), yellow (gold) and blue (exploration).
  Produce: Starting with grey, each player acquires a number of grey cubes equal to their empire's grey cube production (The sum of their empire card and constructed development cards.).
  Supremacy: If a single player produced more grey cubes than any other player, then they have supremacy in that resources colour and gains a financier token (Other resources will allow a player with supremacy in that resource to gain a general/financier depending on the resource.). What do these tokens do? More on that later.
  Construction: Players now take the grey cubes they've acquired and place them on the allotted spaces on development cards in construction (That need grey cubes.) or on their empire card, they cannot be placed anywhere else or stored. Furthermore construction does not to be completed in a single turn or phase, resources placed on a development card stay until either construction is finished or the card is discarded..
  If a card's construction is completed, it is put into the controlling player's empire card stack immediately. Completed development cards can confer a bonus to the controlling player.
  When cubes are placed on an empire card, they cannot be removed, however as soon as a player acquires 5 resources of any kind they are converted into a krystallium cube, which can be stored on a empire card and used anytime a player wants.
  Once this is all completed for the grey cubes, it's repeated for the black cubes and so on until finally, the blue cubes have been dealt with. Play then goes on to the next round.

There're are couple of other important things to note.

• Krystallium: These red cubes can be used as a wild colour, some development cards will also have red in their building costs.
• General/financier tokens: They score victory points at the game end and like krystallium, some cards include tokens in their construction costs.

​Endgame
Once the 4th round has been completed, player calculate their scores.
Some cards will provide a straight victory point score.
General/financier tokens provide a victory point each.
Finally, some cards have scoring combos dependant on other cards or the general/financier tokens.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
It's a Wonderful World is fairly straightforward to learn and play, in truth, having to collect resources 5 times over in a round actually sounds a lot more fiddly than it is in practice.
The game's engine-building, tableau-creating, simultaneous-play, card-game style has some similarities to some other games we've played such as Race for the Galaxy. While it has less depth, it's also more accessible, players will have less trouble creating engines and combos.
The game also has a slightly different take on some of these concepts.

Firstly there's drafting; what's interesting here is that players put cards they've drafted into their area face-up during the drafting phase face-up for everyone to see. In high-level play, it's possible for players to try and anticipate what their opponents might be looking to use and keep cards they might want from them.
Fairly frequently in games (Especially euro-games.) a player trying to screw over an opponent can also screw themselves over, but in It's a Wonderful World, development cards can always be discarded for resources, so sometimes in can be a legitimate move.

Secondly; how the timing of resource acquisition meshes with the game's engine building mechanic is interesting and presents an unusual approach to exploiting those engines.
For example; if a player completes construction of a development card that required grey cubes, that card goes straight into their empire's stack and if that card then produces black cubes, then the player will get those cubes when the black resource production phase comes round and they can then be used to complete development cards which require black cubes.
Knowing when to complete which development card and in which order will greatly increase the building efficiency of an empire. Many engine-builders allow players to do a the perform a wider variety of tasks but the simpler gameplay of It's a Wonderful World has a clear and concise gameplay loop, constructing development cards allows players to gain more resources to construct even more development cards to get even more resources and so on.

In round 1, players will probably end up discarding 5 of the cards they drafted for the resources to try and build 1 or 2 of those development cards. This puts players in the classic quandary of deciding what they have to discard and all the cards will be useful in some way.
By the time round 4 arrives however, it'll probably be the inverse, players will be discarding only 1 or 2 cards to try and build 5 in a round as their engine gets stronger and stronger. It's a satisfying experience to watch it at work.

All of this adds up to make It's a Wonderful World feel different enough to justify it's existence. If you like this style of game, it's definitely work a look, I do and I'd happily play it again.

13th July 2021

It's a Tuesday evening and I'm at The Sovereigns in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club. 

Where would eurogaming be without Renaissance Italy? The pageantry, the politics, the scheming and the vying for power, you know how it goes: A seemingly limitless mine of game design opportunities.
This is where Lorenzo il Magnificio comes in, a game where players control noble families in Florence competing to be the most prestigious, famous and of course.... most pious!

The boards and tiles are suitably thick, the resource cards are of a standard quality as you'd expect.
Tokens are all made of wood, which I always like, including the nicely rounded dice. The standout components however, are the family workers, instead of discs, they're these tall cylinder shapes that are easy to pick up. It makes sense as I'm sure they're going to be the components that get handled the most; practical and appealing.
Lorenzo il Magnificio features attractive artwork throughout, the boards all display pretty, somewhat stylised art work cleverly produced to incorporate all the game's worker spaces.
Art on the cards is little pared back to make room for iconography. Talking of which, all the game's symbols and text was easy to read. Lorenzo il Magnificio has good, solid components and presentation.

How's it play?
​Setup

• Development cards: Sort the development cards by colour and then by period, there should now be 12 decks of 8 cards in total, then shuffle each deck.
  Next create 4 face-down decks, one for each colour. For all decks, the period 3 cards form the bottom of the deck, period 2 the middle and period 1 the top. Place each of the 4 decks above the tower with the corresponding colour.
• Excommunication tiles: Sort the tiles by period and deal one from each on the pertinent excommunication spot on the board.
• Leader cards: Deal 4 leader cards to each player face-down. Now each player chooses a card to keep and passes the remainder to the left. Repeat this until all players have drafted 4 leader cards.
• Personal board: Give each player a personal board, bonus tile and workers in their colour, as well as starting resources.
• Determine starting order: All players then receive starting funds according to their starting position.

On to play
Lorenzo il Magnificio is played over 3 periods, with 2 rounds per period, which equates to 6 rounds in total.
Each round has its own setup phase before the players act in turn order, additionally at the end of every period (2nd, 4th and 6th rounds.) there's an additional step; the Vatican report step.
A round progresses as follows:

• Development cards: Deal cards from the 4 different development decks on to their respective tower, starting at the bottom and working upwards.
• Roll the dice: Whoever is the starting player for the current round rolls the 3 dice and places them on to their allotted spot on the board. The dice will remain on those results until the following round.
• Actions: Beginning with the starting player, all players carry out their actions, i.e., places their workers on the board, how's that done? This is where the game starts to show its complexity.
  Value: Each worker has a value equal to the value of the die with the corresponding colour. If the white dice is showing 5, then white workers are worth 5 and so on. The neutral workers always has a value of 0. Players may temporarily raise the value of a worker for the round by spending servant meeples. Why are values so important? It may determine where a worker can be placed, speaking of which.
  Placing workers: Every space on the game board will have a minimum value which must be met by a worker in order to place it there.
  Development cards: Each tower has 4 development cards with rising costs of 1, 3, 5 & 7 the further up the tower they are positioned, thus the highest spot requires at least 1 servant acquire, the higher will also give players some resources.
  Most cards also have an additional cost in cash or resources, even more so if another player has put a worker somewhere in a tower first. Depending on the card, these costs might come from any of the resources.
  Additionally, only 1 worker of a colour can be used on a tower at a time, however, a neutral family worker does not have a colour and doesn't count towards this limit.
  Development cards provide a once-only benefit when acquired, this may resources or points, most also provide some sort of ongoing benefit. They're 4 types of development cards.
  Buildings: Generally buildings allow players to convert one kind of resource into another, like wood into cash, i.e. selling wood. Buildings have worker values that can be used to trigger their abilities (More on this below.).
  ​Territories: These cards produce goods such as wood or stone, like building cards, they come with worker values that can be triggered. Territory cards initially have no specific cost, however, after acquiring more than a couple, it will cost military points, as bonus though, they will confer victory points in the endgame.
  Characters: Character cards always cost cash generally provide a once-off benefit and then an ongoing benefit.
  Ventures: As well as once-only benefits, ventures also grant bonus points the game end. Ventures tend to cost military points or resources
  When building and territory cards are acquired, they are placed on their respective tracks on a player's personal board from left to right. Character and venture cards are placed to the right of a player's personal board.
  Wood/stone production: Players may use workers to gain these 2 types of resource. For the 1st worker used this way, the minimum value is 1, for workers placed after this, the value must be higher.
  When a worker triggers wood/stone production, it can also trigger the personal board and building/territory cards placed on it.
  Personal board bonus tile: When wood/stone production is triggered, the active player's bonus tile is also triggered and they gain those benefits. Additionally, buildings or territories may be activated.
  Wood production actives the active player's row of territories, however, only cards with a worker value equal or lower than the worker that was played on the wood production spot are triggered. Furthermore, they are activated in the order in which they were placed on the personal board.
  The same is true of stone production and building cards.
  Thus territories and buildings are key to building an engine to generate or change the game's many resources.
  Market: There are 4 market spaces, these confer, money, servants, military points or council favours, which in turn may provide some of the game's resources. Each of these spaces has a minimum value of 1, only one worker may be placed in a market space.
  Council Palace: A worker must have a minimum value of 1 to be placed here, doing so will change the turn order for the following round and also confer them a council favour.
  Leader cards: Each player will have a hand of leader cards, each one has a requirement to bring into play, once this is met, the card can be put into play, players don't need to spend the requirements. Leader cards have either permanent or once per turn benefits without needing a worker.
• Vatican Report: A Vatican report occurs at the end of a period, i.e. rounds 2, 4 & 6.
  At the end of these rounds, players must have faith points equal to a certain amount as specified by the round.
  A player who does not have enough faith points during a Vatican report is excommunicated and suffers the penalties listed on the current excommunication tile for the rest of the game, this is marked on the relevant tile with a cube in their colour.
  A player who has reached the current threshold for faith points may spend those points to avoid excommunication and earn some victory points along the way. However, they may choose to retain the faith points and instead suffer whatever excommunication penalty there is.
• Round end: At the end of every round, the following actions occur.
  Development cards: All unacquired development cards are discarded from the game. An entirely new set of cards are drawn and placed for all 4 towers.
  New turn order: A new turn order is established as per the workers positioned in the Council Workers.

Once all 3 periods are completed, it goes to the endgame.

Endgame
Calculate points from the following:
Current score plus points for acquired territory cards and character cards, end-of-game victory points for venture cards.
The player with the highest military score gains an additional 5 victory points, 2nd highest acquires 2 extra victory points.
Finally, every set of 5 combines resources scores an additional point.
All points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
​Lorenzo il Magnificio sits towards the heavier end of games in my opinion, mechanically speaking, at it's core it's not a particularly complex game, but there's a lot of exceptions and variations to consider when trying to buy those all-important development cards and managing faith and military scores and the resources required to do all this. Don't forget those 2 engines you'll need to build either in order to gain and change those resources, or the abilities that character cards confer or the endgame points that venture cards grant.
Like I said, a lot to think about.

The game uses 4 types of resource and 3 types of score (Two of which can also be spent at times.) and mixes a few types of game mechanics; there's a bit of worker placement, a bit of engine building and a bit of resource management. Where it throws a spanner in the works though, is the use of dice to randomise the value of workers. A couple of low rolls can force players to change their strategies, particularly when competing for development cards, however, the use of servants can potentially mitigate low rolls, even so, players will have to adapt to circumstances.
Furthermore, players have relatively limited moves to play with, each player has 4 workers they can use over 6 turns, giving 24 placements in total, which is why building the engines that essentially get triggered for free is so vital. Synergy and move optimisation are also key to this game.

There are several approaches to scoring points in Lorenzo il Magnifcio, although these strategies are down to which development cards are acquired, development cards are the game's most vital element to winning and most actions are in service of getting those cards. However, the game seems a fairly well balanced, nothing felt overpowered or unimportant, decisions always felt meaningful and because of limited moves, these decisions generally felt tricky.
​If I had one criticism of the game; it's the excommunication tiles, they feel negative, but I guess that's the point of them.

If someone wanted to play this, I'd have no qualms joining in. It's not one of my favourites, but it's still enjoyable.

If you have a hankering for a heavy-ish worker placement game set in Renaissance Italy, you'll probably like this.

27th June 2021

​Sunday is here and I'm logged into Board Game Arena.

Playing board games is a great way to escape your troubles and ignore what's been happening outside your window and across the globe for the past 2 years and to do that, we chose to play a game about not 1 pandemic, but 4 of them!
The first game of the evening was Pandemic.

What's in a game?

• Board: The board depicts a map of the Earth with a network of 48 interconnected cities spread across it and split into 4 differently coloured regions, red, blue, black and yellow.
  Outbreak track: As outbreaks occur, a marker moves along this track, when it reaches the final space.... well you get the idea.
  Infection track: As the game progresses, the rate at which new infections appear will increase as tracked on this board. In game terms, it determines how many infection cards are drawn during the infection stage, ranging from 2-4 cards.
  There are also spaces for the infection deck and player decks.
  Finally there's space for the cure markers.
• Role cards: There are 7 differently coloured role cards, as you might expect, each one has it's own role and unique special ability.
• Pawns: There are 7 of these and they correspond to the 7 role cards.
• City cards: There are 48 city cards, one for each city, city cards come in the same 4 colours of their relevant cities
• Event cards: There are 5 event cards, when used, they provide players with a one-off benefit.
• Epidemic cards: These cards increase the game's infection rate and also trigger some other nasty effects.
• Infection cards: There are 48 infection cards, one for each city and in the same 4 matching colours as city cards.
• Disease cubes: These translucent cubes come in the 4 colours to represent the 4 different diseases, there are 24 in each colour and thus 96 in total.
• Research stations: There are 6 of these little 3D models.
• Cure markers: These jar-shaped, double sided chunky plastic markers are used to indicate when one of the diseases has been cured or eradicated.
• Tokens: Used to track outbreak and infection rate.

The components in Pandemic are all of a reasonable quality as you would expect, nothing feels particularly cheap. The pawns are made of plastic and not wood, but that's a trivial quibble. The other markers are constructed of satisfyingly thick plastic.
The plastic 3D research stations are a nice touch as are the colourful, translucent, acrylic disease cubes, it also makes them easier to pick up and move - which for the cubes will occur frequently.
Artwork on the board is functional more than pretty, which is fine and everything's easy to understand, the same is true of city and infection cards which show locations on the board as opposed to containing illustrations.
​The small amount of artwork in the game mostly appears on role cards, which each have a good quality unique illustration that depicts their role, event cards also contain some unique artwork.

On to play
The turn structure for Pandemic is as follows: The active player has their turn, which consists of 4 actions, then they draw 2 cards from the player deck, finally the 'board' has its go. Once all of this has been completed, the player to the left becomes the active player.

• Actions: The active player has 4 actions and can spend actions to perform the actions below.
  Move: Spend an action to move to a linked adjacent city.
  Play card: The active player may discard a city card to move to that city or if the card matches the city their pawn is currently on, then it can be discarded to move to any city. This always costs an action and the card must be discarded.
  Research station: For an action point, the active player can move between 2 research station, regardless of their positions on the board.
  Pass card: If the active player and any other player have their pawns on the same city, a player card may be passed between them for an action, provided it matches the location they are on.
  ​Build research station: To build the research station, the active player must discard the city card that matches the city they are on and also spend an action, place a research station token on that location.
  Treat disease: For an action, the active player may remove a disease cube from their current location.
  Cure disease: If the active player has 5 city cards of the same colour and they are currently on a location also has a research station, they can discard those cards and use a action to cure the disease of the matching colour.
  A cured disease can still spread, but is now much easier to cure - an action can be spent to remove all disease cubes of that colour from a city instead of a single cube. Once all the disease cubes for a cured disease have been removed from a board, then that disease has been eradicated and won't return this game.
  Special ability: Some special abilities require the spending of an action to use.
  Event cards: Playing an event card doesn't cost an action, furthermore any player can play one in any player's turn unless a card has been drawn but not resolved.
  Hand limit: It's worth mentioning that all players have a hand limit of 7, any cards above this number must be discarded or possibly played in the case of an event card.
  ​You will have no doubt noticed that needing 5 cards of a single colour out of a hand of 7 means that players will forced to discard other cards frequently in pursuit of their objective. This is par for the course for a Pandemic game.
• Draw cards: Once the active player has finished their 4 actions, they must draw 2 cards from the player deck, if these are city or event cards, then it's all good. If however, it includes an epidemic card, things just went south.
  Epidemic Card: When an epidemic card is drawn, 3 events will be triggered.
  Increase rate: Move the marker 1 space along the infection rate track, this may increase the number of cards drawn during the infection stage.
  Epidemic infection: Draw a card from the bottom of the infection deck and increase the number of cubes of the corresponding colour on the revealed location to 3, if the location already contains cubes, an outbreak will occur (See below for more on outbreaks.).
  Resupply infection deck: Take all the cards in the infection deck's discard pile (Including the one just drawn from the bottom of the deck.) and shuffle them, then place them face-down on top of the infection deck, do not shuffle the unrevealed cards in the infection deck.
  In game terms, this means that cities that have already experienced infection will experience it again before other cities. The pressure is on!
• Infect: Draw a number of cards from the infection deck equal to the infection rate, add a disease cube in the card's colour to each revealed city. Cities cannot hold more than 3 cubes of each colour, if a disease cube would be added to a city that already has 3 cubes in that colour, don't add the cube, instead an outbreak occurs.
  All revealed cards should then be discarded.
  Outbreak: When an outbreak occurs, 2 events will be triggered
  Marker: Move the marker on the outbreak track along by 1 space when an outbreak occurs.
  Expansion: Next, add a disease cube of the outbreak's colour to every adjacent connected city, if an adjacent city already 3 cubes in that colour, then another outbreak occurs, thus multiple outbreaks may and probably will happen, however, a city can only experience 1 outbreak per infection card drawn.

Play then progresses to the player on the left.

Overall
Well, Pandemic.... what's there to say about this game?
​Pandemic is a pillar of modern cooperative games that has been followed up not only by a slew of expansions and spinoffs, but also a number of differently themed games such as Horrified that employ similar mechanics.
Some of Pandemic's elements and mechanics may seem a bit trite nowadays, but that's simply because they're part of a game that popularised those mechanics in the first place and is a testament to Pandemic's longevity and influence.

Pandemic utilises the tried-and-tested game flow of alternating between player turns and card-driven board actions in a game that is a globe-trotting race against time. In a turn, players are faced with the difficult choice of trying to stem the spread of the 4 diseases or instead trying to interact with the other players and swap the cards necessary to cure those diseases. Ultimately, players will need to find a balance between the two approaches.
As with other cooperative games, bad luck may play a major role in Pandemic and mitigating that bad luck is vital to winning.
Decisive actions, recognising priorities and acting on them are also vital to success, as are knowing when to use role special abilities.
Pandemic is also hard, I think this comes down to Pandemic's rules for swapping city cards between players which requires them to be in that card's city in order to do so. It's unlikely players will be able to collect 5 cards of single colour on their own so coordination between players is vital.
We've played a few of the iterations that followed Pandemic and it always felt like this rule has been softened a little. Is that as bad thing, I suspect YMMV?


Pandemic does a good job at evoking the feel of a spreading global crisis and the desperate worldwide fight to contain it.

I have to admit, considering the events of the past 2 years, we haven't had much compulsion to play Pandemic. Even so and despite the difficulty, I feel that if you like cooperative games, it's still worth playing, it challenges players with making difficult decisions at nearly every avenue and is satisfying to win.

24th June 2021

It's a Thursday evening and we're round Simon's for a couple of games.

The first game of the night was Paper Tales.
As the name implies, create the tale of building a kingdom and warring with your neighbours over 4 generations or in Paper Tales' terms - 4 rounds!

What's in a game?

• Gameboard: Used to track player victory points and turns.
• Building cards: There are 5 sets of 5 identical cards, a set is given to each player and they represent structures that can be built in a player's kingdom. Each building card is also double-sided, with the other side being an upgraded version of the building.
  Buildings can provide resources or other benefits and are also worth victory points.
• Unit cards: These represent characters that a player may recruit into their kingdom and each one has a deployment cost in gold, they may also have a combat value. Unit cards also ​frequently provide resources or possess a special ability.
• Currency tokens: These card tokens are themed to look like gold pieces.
• Age tokens: Used to track age. More on these card tokens below.

The game also has various score and turn tracking counters.
The quality of the game's components is to the usual standard as you would expect, which is fine.
The building and unit cards feature some bright, colourful and stylised artwork which I found quite charming.

How's it play?
Setup

• Give each player a set of 5 building cards and 3 gold.
• Shuffle the unit cards into a face-down deck.

​That's it for setup, pretty straightforward.

On to play
Paper Tales is played over 4 rounds and there are 6 stages to each round. Other than the drafting in the Recruitment stage, each stage is played simultaneously by players

• Recruitment: 5 unit cards are dealt to all players.
  Then, each player chooses 1 card to keep and passes the remainder to the next player clockwise or anti-clockwise (As determined by the turn.). Each player now chooses a card to keep from 4 cards they just received and passes on the 3 remaining cards.
  This continues until all players have chosen their 5 cards.
• Deployment: Each player now places up to 4 of their 5 cards face-down in a 2x2 grid in front of them. Where they're placed will be very important in the next stage.
  Once this is completed, all players simultaneously reveal their cards and pay their respective deployment costs. Any cards that cannot be bought must be discarded, furthermore any cards above the allowed number must also be discarded.
  Players are additionally allowed to keep 1 card 'in hand', any excess cards must be discarded.
• Wars: Now all the unit cards have been revealed, it's time to war on your neighbours! That's right, in Paper Tales there is.... only war, well sort of.
  Only the 2 cards in the top row of the 2x2 grid can participate in wars, although some cards have the ability fight from the second row. Each player adds up the combat values of all the cards that are participating in wars into a single kingdom value and compares that value to their 2 neighbouring players' kingdom values.
  Players earn 3 victory points for equalling or exceeding the kingdom value of each neighbour; thus a player can earn 0-6 victory points in the wars stage.
  There are no detrimental effects to losing a war.

Overall
​So, Paper Tales is something of a curious beast.
It feels like a deliberately small scale game that merges a little bit of card drafting, a little engine building and card combo mechanics with a little bit of resource management.

The game broadly presents 2 routes to scoring victory points.
Using unit cards with high combat values in war can theoretically score a player 24 victory points and in a game if this scale, that can be a sizable score.
The other way to generate victory points is from the abilities that unit cards may possess, maximising the usage of those abilities can require careful consideration.
​
It's also a somewhat challenging game, not that this is a bad thing. That's because when playing Paper Tales, it never feels like there's enough gold to deploy all the cards you want or enough turns/resources to construct buildings you want. There's 5 buildings to construct and only 4 turns, and that's not including upgrades!
It's worth noting that decisions made in the 1st round may have a significant impact on options and decisions in the final round.
Players are forced to make tricky, meaningful decisions, which is always good.

The aging mechanic is unusual and represents the transitory passage of time and is something players need to watch out for, those unit cards are only around for 2 rounds! However, there are also ways for a player to exploit this mechanic to their benefit with card abilities.
For a game that only gives players 4 or possibly 5 cards to work with, there's quite often a combo that can be created.

Paper Tales has in terms of rounds a quite short playtime, yet somehow feels a little fiddly for a game of this scope and the handful of times we played it, the short playtime made the game feel a little unsatisfactory.
It's all about maximising resources and exploiting card combos, but as I said above, because it's a challenging game, it can be hard to optimise your strategies in early plays, i.e., it has a steep learning curve despite it's apparent simplicity.

That's not to say it's a bad game, because it's not, but it sits towards the heavier end of a what might be considered 'light' or 'filler' game in my opinion, which is considering what I'd consider it to be.
I'd have no reservations about playing it again.
It's worth a look, but I think it needs playing at least a couple times before passing judgement on it.

30th May 2021

It's a Sunday and I'm logged on to Board Game Arena on my PC, time for the first game of the night.

Monk Tybor Kwelein had spent his life cataloguing the 4 kingdoms of plants, fungi, insects and animals in the pages of the titular Codex Naturalis. Now he is no longer with us, will one-to-four other people take up the mantle and carry on his work in the form of a neat little card game.

What's in a game?
Codex Naturalis is a card game and unsurprisingly, has a lot of cards. All the cards are about half the size of normal playing cards which is sensible, as otherwise the game would have a massive footprint, most of the cards share some similar features.

• Starter cards: These cards are double-sided, each side will have 1-4 'visible corners', which is to say these are corners which are 'colourless', 'hidden corners' are corners where the card's art fills the corner.
  Each side will also contain symbols which represent 1-4 of the 4 kingdoms, which may be on the visible corners or in the 'middle' of the card.
• Resource cards: Also double sided; on the 'front' side there will be 2-3 visible corners which may or may not contain kingdom symbols, they may or may not also contain 'objective' symbols. These are a quill, inkpot & manuscript, more on them later. Occasionally, resource cards will score a point.
  The 'back' side of resource cards always have 4 visible corners and a kingdom symbol in the middle of the card.
• Gold cards: As the name suggests, these cards are actually decorated with gold foil and again, they are double sided. On the front they will also have 2-3 visible corners, generally there are no kingdom symbols in the corners, although there may well be objective symbols.
  All gold cards have a requirement in kingdom symbols before they can be played, thus if a gold card displays 3 plant symbols, then the active player must have 3 symbols visible in their playing area before the card can be put down.
  Additionally, all gold cards score points and there are a variety of ways to score.
  Finally, identical to resource cards, the backs of gold cards have 4 visible corners and a kingdom symbol in the middle.
• Objective cards: These are the only cards which are not double sided, the front will show objectives that score extra points at the end of the game if the conditions are met.
  ​There's 2 varieties of objective, some require players having certain resource or objective symbols displayed in their area at the end of the game. The other type requires cards to be placed in specific order and colour, these can be quite tricky to achieve.
• Scoring board: A standard board for tracking player scores.
• Tokens: Standard wooden discs used with the board.

The scoring board and tokens are pretty standard quality game components and perfectly acceptable.
The cards feel very thick and sturdy (Maybe because of the smaller size?) and seem to be made to a high standard, all the gold cards and numerous resource cards are embossed in actual gold foil, which is a really nice touch and despite their small size, most of the cards all have charming, highly detailed monochrome illustrations themed by their colour. Finally, all the cards are coated in a glossy finish.
The only criticism I have is of the small symbols at the bottom of the gold cards, they are quite small and some players have complaint that it can be hard to discern between the symbols, particularly the blue and the green.
Otherwise, these are some of the highest quality card components I've seen and it all comes wrapped up in a compact tin.

How's it play?
Setup

• Shuffle the resource cards and deal 2 into the centre of the play area, the remaining resource cards should be placed adjacent in a face-down deck.
• Shuffle the gold cards and deal 2 into the centre of the play area, the remaining resource cards should be placed adjacent in a face-down deck.
• Deal a starter card to all players, each player can choose which side to use as their starting card.
• Each player now draws 2 resource cards and 1 gold cards from the respective decks.
• Shuffle the objective cards into a face-down deck.
  2 objective cards should be drawn and placed into the playing area face-up, these are common objectives, all players can earn points by completing their requirements.
  2 objective cards should then be dealt to all players, these are secret objectives, each player should select one to keep and discard the other to the bottom objective deck. These cards should be hidden from other players, the owning player can earn points by meeting their requirements.
• Determine a starting player.

On to play
The objective in Codex Naturalis is to create an expanding spread of overlapping cards in their playing area. The basic process of actions to achieve this in Codex Naturalis is simple, a player plays a card, then draws a card, of course there's more to it than that. 

points, this card probably scores the most if you can manage to fill the doughnut hole!​

• Draw card: Once a card has been played, the active player must draw a card, this can be any of the 4 face-up cards or drawn blindly from either the resource of gold face-down decks. A player can never have more than 3 cards in their hand.
  If a face-up card is taken, it's immediately replaced by a card from its respective deck.

The player to the left then becomes the active player.
Play continues one player's score reaches 20 or more, then the endgame is triggered.

Endgame
After the endgame is triggered, the current round is completed, then one final round is played.
After this, players count the score from the cards they've played and then calculates the score they get from completing both common objectives and their secret objective.
Score are tallied and highest score wins!

Overall
Codex Naturalis has simple rules, but also a fairly deep level of gameplay. Despite only having a hand of 3 cards, players are given a wide variety of choices and strategies to pursue when placing cards.

A lot of this comes from the objectives, you'll obviously need to play gold cards to score but it's important not to ignore objectives, scoring from the gold cards will generally put your score into the low-to-mid 20s, but objectives which are scored after the end and can push your score higher, especially since they can be scored multiple times. That everyone has a secret objectives means that the final outcome is not known until the final scoring and keeps the stakes high.
Players must also learn to manage their hands and objectives, there are 4 colours of card, but only 2 of each type of card is ever displayed face-up, it's likely that player's won't always see the cards they need.
Codex Naturalis can also give players agonizing choices because they'll frequently be given the option to cover up a resource or objective symbol with the corner of another card. When that symbol is covered up, it's gone for the rest of the game, forcing players to choose which to prioritise. Only symbols that appear in the middle in of a card cannot be covered.
Finally, because face-up cards never have more than 3 visible corners, players will need to think how to place cards with future placement in mind, the visible corner of a card can be 'locked' by placing another card with a hidden corner adjacent to it. This essentially ends that line of expansion, which can limit options later on.

Codex Naturalis is a little too long for a filler and perhaps a little too short for a main game, which is only a minor quibble really. Otherwise, I found it to be a solid, easy-to-learn, mid-to-light game with good replay value and high production values.
Definitely worth a try.

23rd May 2021

It's a Sunday and I'm logged into Skype and Board Game Arena, ready for an evening of gaming.

The first game of the night was Happy City, a cheerful looking, light engine-building card game about building up a city, a happy city no less. 

Caveat: We've only played this game digitally on Board Game Arena.

What's in a game?

• Happy market cards: These 5 starter cards are double-sided, on one side they are white and on the other each one has one of the different colour/symbols. All happy market cards generate 1 income per turn.
• Building cards: These cards have a cost and a symbol/colour for building type, they may also have a income rating and population or happiness rating that ranges from -1 to +3.
  There are 3 'levels' of building cards, the higher the level the better the card, but the higher the cost.
  Level 1: Cost 1-3 coins to buy.
  Level 2: Cost 4-5 coins.
  Level 3: Cost 6-9 coins.
• Dwelling cards: These cards are similar to standard building cards, except they are only dwellings, thus they only have a cost, population rating and the green symbol.
  There are 3 types/levels of identical dwellings.
  Level 1: Cost 1, population 1.
  Level 2: Cost 3, population 2.
  Level 3: Cost 6, population 3.
• Special building cards: These cards have no cost, instead they have a requirement which must be met with colours/symbols.
• Coins: Standard currency.

I can't comment on the physical quality of the components but all the cards are decorated with colourful and interesting illustrations. The art is excellent.
Symbols are clear and easy to read.

How's it play?
At it's core, Happy City is a tableau-building game, adding cards increases income or score. 
Setup

• ​Give each player a happy market card, this should be put with the white side up in the player's area and represents the beginning of their tableau.
  The building cards should be sorted by level, then each deck should be shuffled. All 3 decks should be placed face-down in the central area to form a column.
• The dwelling cards should be sorted by type and placed in 3 face-up stacks, the number of cards in each stack should be equal to the number of players minus one.
• Shuffle the special building cards and place a line of them face-up in the central area, the number of cards used should be equal to the number of players plus two.
• Give each player 2 coins.
• Determine starting player.

On to play
In Happy City, the starting player's first turn is slightly different to subsequent turns, as explained below.

• Income: At the start of their turn, the active player receives coins equal to their income.
• Draw building card(s): ​In this next stage, there must always be a choice of 3 building cards available for the active player to purchase. Thus, since there are no building cards available at the start of the game, the starting player must draw 3 building cards and place them face-up next to the building decks. The player can select cards from any deck.
  In subsequent turns, the active player may discard a face-up building card before drawing more. Thus the active player will always have the option to draw 1 and maybe 2 cards.
• Take action: The active player can choose from 1 of 3 actions.
  Buy a building card: Pay for a building and place it in their tableau.
  Buy a dwelling: Pay for a dwelling and place it in their tableau.
  Pass and gain a coin: Self explanatory.
• Acquire special card: If the active player has cards in their tableau with colours/symbols that meet the the requirements of a special card, then the active player may take that special card as a free action, players can only ever have 1 special card in their tableau.

Once the active player has completed their action, the player to their left becomes the active player.

Expert game
Happy City has 2 levels of play; family & expert. This blog describes the family version.
The expert game differs in 2 ways.
All the happy market cards are flipped to their differently coloured sides and laid out, then the players draft one to become the starting card in their tableau and giving them some choice in how they start the game.
Special buildings also differ; the family Special cards give players a boost to their income, happiness or population. The expert special cards however, are different, they confer different benefits, sometimes variable and situational.

Endgame
The game continues until a player has 10 cards in their tableau, upon which the current round continues until all players have had an equal number of turns.
Each player's score is calculated by multiplying the total value of happiness symbols in their tableau by all the population symbols.
​Highest score wins.

Overall
Gameplay in Happy City gives players the choice between increasing income or accumulating happiness/population. Income will give the player more buying power but happiness/population contributes towards the end score.
Having 3 decks of building cards at different cost ranges is an interesting mechanic when it comes to drawing cards. The player will always have the option to draw 1 or 2 cards, higher level cards will be better, but may prove more risky to draw. E.g., If a player has 4 coins, drawing a level 1 card will be safe as level 1 cards only cost 1-3 coins each, level 2 cards cost 4-5 coins, so there's a risk that a level 2 card will be unaffordable and will have been drawn pointlessly. It can give players a quandary when drawing building cards.
The game's scoring mechanic also adds an extra layer to decisions, failing to pay attention to how the points are spread between happiness/population can lead to lost scoring opportunities.

While Happy City is simple to learn, enjoyable and fast to play, making it a good filler game, it's perhaps also a little too basic for dedicated gamers. After a few games it was fairly easy to spot an optimal strategy to pursue and it became a race to develop that strategy. So I feel that the game doesn't offer a lot of longevity.
Ultimately, because it's such a light game, it's probably a good game for families or more casual players which is probably who the game is aimed at.

We also played the expert level a few times but felt like it added little to the game.
The varied happy markets are nice and offered a little extra strategy but the expert level special cards weren't so good. The problem was that they seemed harder to acquire than the family special cards, which meant they were acquired later in the game and therefore their benefits were limited, we found it wasn't worth specifically trying to get one, getting one by happenstance was fine, but then that sort of makes having a choice of starting happy market card pointless.
We enjoyed the family version more.
​
The family version is a game I'd play, but not too often.

2nd April 2021

It was a Friday and I was logged into Board Game Arena on my PC.

As the name suggests, Stone Age is a game about the trials and tribulation faced by the inhabitants of prehistoric communities.

Caveat: The digital version of this game was played at this time, but we had played the physical version on previous occasions.

What's in a game?
Stone Age is a worker placement game and at its core takes place on a central game board which is divided into various different locations, into which workers can be placed to activate the associated action. Some locations may contain any amount of workers, others are limited by numbers.

• Board: A stone age settlement in a wilderness vista is shown on the board, settlement locations are concerned with the advances and inventions and wilderness locations are used for gathering resources. As well as the obligatory scoring track, the board contains the following elements:
  Tool maker: There is only 1 space here for a single worker, using this location allows a player to gain or improve their tools.
  Field: There is also only 1 space herer, this allows a player to increase their tribes agriculture score on the agriculture track.
  Hut: There are 2 spaces here, to utilise the hut a player must place 2 workers on to the 2 spaces at the same time. This allows the player to acquire an additional worker.
  That's right, this is the nookie shed!
  Plains: This is where workers are placed to acquire food, presumably by gathering food or hunting animals. Any amount of workers can be placed here.
  Forest: Workers are placed here to acquire wood. Up to 7 workers can be placed here.
  Clay pit: Players can acquire clay here, also has a maximum of 7 worker spaces.
  Quarry: Used to gain stone, also has a maximum of 7 workers spaces.
  River: Players can place workers here to pan for gold, again, a maximum of 7 workers can be placed here.
  Agriculture track: Used to track the agriculture level of each time. This also represents the advancing knowledge of a tribe and ability to stave off hunger through farming.
• Building tiles: There are 4 spaces on the board for building tiles. Tiles each have a space for a single worker which is used to buy the tile. The cost varies according to the tile, but is always in resources. Tiles score victory points.
• Civilisation cards: As with building tiles, there are 4 spaces on the board for civilisation cards, the cost of civilisation cards is also paid in resources but unlike building tiles, the player can choose which resources to spend. Cost ranges from 1-4 resources and is dictated by which space the card is filling on the board, the leftmost space costs 4 and each space to the right decreases the cost by 1 down to a cost of 1 on the 4th and rightmost space.
  Like building tiles, each card has a single space for a worker, allowing the controlling player to purchase the card.
  Civilisation cards have a variety of benefits, most cards give a one-off bonus, typically resources and most cards can also contribute towards collecting a set for victory points.
• Player board: Each player has their own board, used to store resources and workers. They are also used to display which building tiles and tools they have accumulated, face-down civilisation cards are also placed on the board.
• Meeples: Each player has 10 workers in their colour and starts the game with 5, the remaining workers can be earned during the game.
• Food tokens: Standard round card tokens that are used to represent food.
• Resource tokens: All of the game's 4 resources (Wood, clay, stone & Gold.) are represented by wooden tokens.
• Tool tokens: These double-sided square card tokens show either 1 & 2 or 3 & 4 on their sides.
• Dice: There are 7 dice, used when gathering food or resources.

Components in Stone Age are what you'd expect, the cards, tiles and boards are solid if unremarkable, they do the job and look as if they'll last well, which is all you can ask for. The meeples and the 4 sets of resource tokens in are constructed of wood and are the nicest components.
The game board has a bright and colourful depiction of a stone age community on the edge of the wilderness that's quite eye-catching. The player boards have similar, if plainer artwork, again this is fine since most of the time they'll be covered in components.
The civilisation cards essentially all use the same piece of artwork with elaborate game iconography providing some variation and the same is true of the building tiles. It's nothing to write home about (Or blog about I suppose?) but is perfectly acceptable.
For the most part, the art is good. ​

How's it play?
Setup

• Give each player 5 meeples and a player board, also give each player 12 food.
• Put all the food and resources on to the game board in their allotted places, food goes on the plains, wood on to the forest and so on.
• Shuffle the civilisation cards and place 4 of them on to their 4 allotted spaces face-up. The remainder of the cards should be placed as a face-down deck next to the board.
• All 28 building tiles should be shuffled into 4 stacks of 7. The number of stacks available in a game should equal to the number of players participating. Each stack used should be placed face-up in one of the 4 allotted spaces for them.
• Determine starting player.

That's more or less it, now the game's ready to go.
Gameplay is broken up into 3 phases, place workers, resolve workers and end of round.

• Place workers: Starting with the 1st player and going clockwise, each player may put meeple(s) into a single location, there are some stipulations though:
  Worker limits: Most spaces limit to the number of workers that can be placed there, obviously this cannot be exceeded.
  No reinforcements: Once a player has placed any number of workers into a location, on a later turn they cannot add any more workers to that same location, regardless of how many open spaces might be available.
  No passing: Players cannot pass and must place all of their workers.

Once all players have placed their workers, it's time to resolve those actions.
Again starting with the first player, they must remove all of their workers from one location at a time from every location they've placed workers and immediately resolve the associated actions as they do so, returning the meeple to the player's board. Players are free to remove their meeples in whatever order they see fit (This can have significant impact on game play.). The following actions are available:

• Tool maker: Allows the player to take a tool token or increase a tool token's level. A player may have up to 3 level 4 tools.
  Tools are beneficial when a player's tribe goes gathering food or resources (See below for more information.).
• Hut: Allows the player to take one of their unused meeples and add it to their player board, ready to be deployed in the next round. Players can have a maximum of 10 workers at their disposal.
• Field: Allows the player to increase their agriculture level, (This can be very important, see below.).
• Gather food: The active player may gather food, they take a number of dice equal to the workers they placed on the plains location and roll them. Then divide the result by 2 and round-down, that's how much food they get. Thus with 2 dice, the average result is 7 which would net the player 3 food.
  Tool tokens may be used once per round to increase the value rolled by the value of the tool, which can be very useful.
• Gather resources: Functionally, this is identical to gathering food except it gets harder because the number used to divide the dice roll gets higher.
  Gathering wood requires the player to divide the result of the dice roll by 3 instead, so 2 dice with an average result of 7 would net the player 2 wood. This incrementally increases for all the resources, culminating with gold which requires the dice roll to be divided by 6! 2 dice getting an average of 7 would net the player 1 gold and if they rolled 5 or less (Not that improbable.) then they'd get 0!
  Tools can also be used to increase the value of these rolls.
• Buy building tile: The active player can buy the building tile they placed a worker on by paying its cost as indicated on the tile. This immediately increases the player's score as displayed.
• Buy civilisation card: The active player can buy the civilisation tile they placed a worker on to, paying the 1 - 4 resources as required and placing the card face-down on their player board.

Once the first player has removed all their workers, play proceeds clockwise until all players have retrieved all their workers, then the game goes to the end of round.

• Feeding: Firstly, each player acquires extra food equal to their level on the agriculture track and adds it to their player board.
  Then they must feed their tribe. Feeding a tribe requires spending an amount of food equal to the amount workers a player has available, since all players begin the game with 5 workers, this cost will always be at least 5.
  If a player have used all their food and still doesn't have enough, then they can substitute in resources on a 1-to-1 basis (Which can be pricey!), if a player is unwilling or unable to do this, then they immediately suffer a -10 point penalty! That is undoubtedly harsh.
• Restock civilisation cards: If any civilisation cards were bought during the round, slide cards to right to fill the empty spaces, then deal cards from the deck into the spaces now on the left. This is a typical 'conveyor belt' mechanic.

The first player marker move clockwise and a new round begins.

Endgame
There are 2 conditions that can trigger the endgame.
If any of the building tile stacks have all 7 of their tiles purchased, it triggers the endgame, the current round is concluded and the game goes to the end game and then scoring.
At the end of a round, if there aren't enough civilisation cards to fill a 4 spots on the board, then the game immediately ends and goes to scoring.
In both instances, tribes must be fed for a final time.
Final scores are tallied by adding the score from the victory point track, points that come from sets of civilisation cards and 1 point for each (Non food) resource the player possesses.
Highest score wins.

Overall
If I have one criticism of Stone Age, it's that the first 3 opening moves in any given round are generally always no-brainers, that's because the tool maker, hut & field locations are such a high priority because they confer very good rewards that would usually be stupid for players to pass up. If you're the 4th player, you won't get a look in unless another player is really desperate for something else or doesn't know what they're doing.
I'm not sold on the resource gathering mechanic either, yes it's quite nice but it can leave you at the mercy of the dice rolls that makes low rolls feel frustrating but somehow high rolls not feel satisfying.

Otherwise Stone Age is a mid-to-light worker placement game that is fairly easy to learn but feels perhaps a little generic, however, it does provide a fair level of depth.
The game manages to generally provide a choice or two too many for players to cover with workers, forcing them to prioritise their actions and making meaningful decisions. An extra worker is good, so is the agriculture required to feed them, the tools can help with gathering resources which are useful to buy cards and tiles and so on.

So if you want to play a worker placement game that isn't too taxing on the grey matter, you could do a lot worse than Stone Age.

24th March 2021

It's a Wednesday evening and I'm logged into Zoom and Board Game Arena on my PC.

It was time for a game that spanned the ages and the creation of massive monuments and the civilisations they represented. Luckily, it doesn't take that long to play 7 Wonders!

Caveat: We played the game online but have previously played the physical copy. Photos were taken for this blog post.

What's in a game?
​The purpose of the game is for each player to create their own civilisation through the construction of various types of buildings and ultimately create one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World.
7 Wonders is card game played over 3 sets of rounds (or ages). Each age has its own set of cards which are used. There are numerous types of cards, some of these types can be more or less common in different ages.

• Cards: All the different cards share some common elements, such as cost which can be in resources, money or even free. Each card also has its name along its left hand edge (This can be very important in later ages.). Cards also show in small writing what cards they chain with.
  Resource cards: These brown cards represent raw resources such as wood, stone and so on that are foundations of your civilisation. They only appear in ages 1 & 2.
  Goods cards: These are manufactured goods such as cloth or glass, they are important in the construction of advanced buildings for your civilisation. These cards are grey coloured. Like resource cards, these do not appear in age 3.
  Civic buildings: Blue cards are civic buildings such as baths, aqueducts, temples and palaces. Civic buildings score victory points as displayed on each card.
  Science buildings: This is where the games set collecting element comes into play. There are 3 different scientific symbols and collecting a set of all 3 scores victory points but victory points can also be scored by collecting sets of the same kind, 2-of-a-kind, 3-of-a-kind and so on for all 3 symbols. Green is used to represent scientific cards.
  Commercial buildings: These yellow cards represent businesses that allow the player to gain additional resources, goods or money in various manners, sometimes they also allow the player to accumulate victory points.
  Military buildings: Guard towers, archery ranges and training grounds and the like are all red military cards. Unsurprisingly, they increase a civilisation's military strength by 1-3 points. There is no direct combat between different players in 7 Wonders, but there is automatic conflict between neighbouring civilisations at the end of each age.
  Guild cards: These purple cards only appear in age 3, they sort of combine the mechanics of commercial buildings with the scoring of civic buildings.
• Wonder cards: These are not used during play but can be used to randomly determine which wonder board (See below.) each player gets and whether the A or B side is used.
• Wonder boards: As you would expect, there a 7 wonder boards, one for each ancient wonder. Each board is slightly different and also have an A and B side for more variation and complexity but all contain a resource or good they manufacture for the controlling player.
  Nearly all the wonder boards have 3 spaces (One board has 4 and another 2!) at the bottom. When these spaces are filled, they give the controlling player victory points or a special once only or ongoing bonus.
• Conflict tokens: These tokens are valued at +1, +3, +5 or -1 and they modify victory points.
• Coins: Standard currency, comes in 1s or 3s.

The cards, tokens and coins are of the usual quality you'd expect, the wonder boards are made of fairly thick grey board and feel sturdy.
The text and icons are all mostly clear (I tended to confuse stone and ore icons, because the ore icon looks like a pile of stone to me.), the symbology used for special rules on cards is also generally clear, the rulebook does a good job on clarifying these in cases of confusion.
I also like how the layout allows cards to be more or less stacked while still displaying pertinent information.
In terms of art quality, the wonder boards are quite large and very nicely decorated in eye-catching illustrations of the 7 titular wonders. Art on the cards are of a similar quality but obviously on a smaller scale.

How's it play?
Setup
7 Wonders is a 3-7 player game but also contains some special rules to allow 2 player games. This blog post talks about the normal 3-7 player game.

• Shuffle the wonder cards and deal 1 face down to each player, after this each player flips their card, revealing which wonder board they take and the card's orientation will display whether to use the A or B side.
• 3 decks must be constructed for each of the 3 ages. Deck size is dependant on the number of players and each will consist of 21-49 cards. Cards display which game size they are suitable for. Finally 5-9 of the 10 available guild cards are added to the age 3 deck.
  These 3 decks are shuffled.
• Deal all of the age 1 cards face-down to all players, each player should now have 7 cards.
• Give all players 3 currency.

And we're ready to play.

On to play
Each player in 7 Wonders is neighboured by a player to their left and right; why this is important will be explained below.
​Each player takes a card from their hand and plays face down in front of them, then they pass the remaining cards clockwise to the next player, the direction of play alternates between rounds.
Once every player has chosen a card, all player then simultaneously reveal their card, plays it and executes one of the 3 actions below.

• Construct building: The most common action, put the chosen card into play, it may be a resource/good or a building, but the rules are identical. Each card has a cost of some sort shown in top left corner. This may be a combination of the following factors below.
  Free: Some cards have to cost and are free to play.
  Chain: If a building name is displayed next to a card's cost and that player has that named building already built in their game area, then the building cost of the currently played card is reduced to zero.
  Money: Players will have to spend money to construct this building.
  Resources/goods: Some cards will require a single or mixture of resources and goods to build. The player must have cards already in their play area that display the relevant resources or goods they need. Thus if building requires 2 wood to construct, the player must have 2 cards in their playing area showing a wood each, or a card with 2 wood symbols, the symbols on wonder boards contribute to this.
  This also where your neighbours matter. A player can also use the resources and goods of one or both of their neighbours, they have to pay for it though; 2 coins for each used. This is unaffected by how a neighbour is using their own resources and goods, also the neighbour cannot refuse to sell resources - after all, money is money!
• Build their wonder: Wonders are built in stages, typically 3 stages. All wonders are built in a linear fashion from left to right.
  Cost: Each stage of a wonder will have a cost similar to constructing a building.
  Place card: Finally, when a stage has been paid for, it is built. The player takes they card they chose earlier and places it face-down underneath the space on the wonder board they just built, never revealing what card was used. Thus, building part of a wonder replaces the normal build card action.
• Gain money: A player may discard the card they chose for 3 currency, this card is always discarded face-down and is permanently out of the game. I guess players do this if they're really desperate for funds.

Overall
​I'm going to nit-pick a couple of things about 7 Wonders.
Set up feels a little long for a game that's quite short, having to sift through all 3 decks at the game start feels irritating, probably because there's 3 decks to construct instead of 1 and if the player count changes between games, then all 3 decks will need to be rebalanced.
The game is quite involved and perhaps a little too complicated for its expected playtime. I found myself frequently forgetting the rule about chaining buildings
Scoring is convoluted, specifically scoring the scientific cards where each symbol will scored twice. I wouldn't be surprised that more time was spent making sure this was correct than the rest of the scoring.

Like other drafting games of this style, early in the game players will struggle to decide what's going to be important to them or not, but by looking at their wonder board, players will see what they need to build their wonder and what benefits it gives them as some guidance.
One interesting feature about 7 Wonders is how players can pay to utilise their neighbours resources and goods and of course, players will want to keep and eye on their neighbours' military forces. It's a nice little spin that adds to the game.
​Since there are 7 ways to score points, players will have a lot of options on which strategy to pursue.
For example, civic buildings give a lot of victory points, but nothing else.
Military strength can score a lot of points (and cost your neighbours a few), but only if you dominate, getting caught in a war of escalation can be distracting and costly.

Quibbles aside, 7 Wonders is a straightforward game to learn that has a quick turnaround and is a fun game to play, players will want to strategize, but the luck of the draw means they will need to adapt to circumstances.
The game always provides players with meaningful choices, which is what you want.