29th December 2021

We're at Simon's for some Wednesday evening gaming goodness during the mid Christmas break.
The game of the night was Lost Ruins of Arnak.

"That belongs in a museum!"
What does? Cliched old one liners!

​Lost Ruins of Arnak is a game about raiding temples of a long forgotten ancient civilisation on an uncharted island.

What's in a game?

• Game board: The game board for Lost Ruins of Arnak is quite large and has a full sized illustration of an unexplored, fantastical wilderness landscape. It's also quite busy, with spaces and tracks for a lot of components, cards, workers and more.
  Cards: Along the top are spaces for the 3 decks of the game's different card types; artefact, item and fear cards.
  Card track: Directly below, a card track runs runs across the board and will be populated with varying amounts of artefact and item cards during the course of the game. The card track also displays the game's 5 rounds.
  Research track: Running up the right side of the board is the 'research track'. This track has 2 'paths' that lead to the top, where VPs await the players. Going up the track costs various resources but also confers resources or other benefits, including gaining assistants.
  Sites: The bulk of the board is taken up with unexplored wilderness sites, these hidden locations which will be explored by the players' workers come in 2 tiers, the 2nd tier being harder to 'travel' to, each site has space to put a idol token or a tile on it. Below each site it will display 1 or 2 worker spaces and inside each worker space it will list the cost to travel there.
  Dig sites: Below the tier 1 sites is a another row of 5 sites, these are dig sites, they are not explorable and instead can be used by players to generate the game's 5 resources.
  Double-sided: It's worth noting that the board is double-sided and features an alternate setup on the other side with differing travel costs.
• Supply board: This small supplementary board sits along the bottom edge of the main board and contains spaces for 5 of the game's different resources and 4 sets of tiles.
• Player boards:  These boards depict a picture of a campsite and have spaces for each player's deck, 4 'used' idols slots and and 2 assistants when they're recruited. There's also space to place resources.
• Cards: Lost Ruins of Arnak uses 3 types of cards.
  Starter cards: Every player is given these and they can be used to generate coins and compass resources or scores in the game's 4 types of travel.
  Item cards: These provide some sort of bonus to the controlling player. They are always paid for with money and when acquired go to the bottom of the player's deck. Item cards can score VPs.
  Artefact cards: Unlike item cards, artefact cards go directly into the player's hand and can be immediately played for their effect when acquired. Further usage of artefact cards will cost tablet tokens. Like item cards, artefact cards can earn VPs.
  Fear cards: These serve no purpose other than to bloat the player's deck with useless trash cards. Thus getting them is actually a negative. Fear cards also cost players VPs.
• Tiles: Lost Ruins of Arnak makes use of numerous tiles.
  Temple tiles: These are placed at the top of the research track and provide VPs once acquired by players.
  Idol tiles: These are acquired by players when they first explore sites and confer bonuses and VPs, they can then also be 'spent' to get another bonus.
  Site tiles: When players explore a site location, a random site tile from it's respective tier will be placed there.
  Guardian tiles: Once a site tile has been placed, a guardian in the form of a tile will appear on top of the site tile and cause a headache for the worker there!
  Research tiles: Players will accumulate these as they move up the research track and they confer various benefits
  Assistants: These tiles contain assistants which confer a benefit of some sort on to the player who recruited them. They are also doubles-sided, meaning that assistants can be upgraded (Promoted?).
• Tokens: All of the game's resources are represented by tokens.
  Coins: These card tokens are the game's currency.
  Compasses: These are also card tokens.
  Arrowheads: These are little plastic tokens shaped a little like arrow heads.
  Jewels: It looks like translucent acrylic chunks are used to represent jewels.
  Tablets: Plastic is used for these tokens shaped like ancient tablets.
  Moon Staff: This card token is used to track the game's turns.
• Meeples: Each player is given 2 archaeologist wooden meeples for workers as well as a magnifying glass and notebook meeple in their colours. The magnifying glass and notebook are used to track a player's progress along the 2 research tracks. All the meeples are made of wood.

The quality of components in Lost Ruins of Arnak varies from average to great.
The game has really nice plastic pieces for arrowheads, tablets and jewels, along with wooden meeples, magnifying glasses and notebooks, you can never go wrong with wooden components and yet, makes use of unremarkable card tokens for coins and compasses.
Yes it's a minor quibble but it's definitely noticeable.
The game's cards and tiles are standard quality.

From an art perspective, it's all pretty good, cards and tokens all have nice, clear and colourful thematic art. The standout however, is the board, with a pair of lovely landscape images, it's almost a shame that they'll mostly be covered with components during play.

The game contains a fair amount of iconography, none of it was particularly unclear though.

How's it play?
Setup

• Board: Choose a side of the board to play with, one is hard than the other.
  Cards: Shuffle and put the artefacts and items deck face-down. Also put out the fear cards. Deal 1 artefact and 5 item cards into the card row.
  Idol tiles: Randomly assign idol tiles to all sites, tier 1 sites get 1 and tier 2 sites get 2.
  Temple tiles: These are placed at the top of the research track.
  Research tiles: Place these on their allotted spaces as required or randomly.
  ​Assistants: Shuffle these into 3 stacks so their upgraded sides are face-down.
  Site tiles: Sort the site tiles into their 2 tiers and shuffle each tier into a face-down stack.
  Guardian Tiles: Shuffle these into a face-down stack.
  Resources: Should be placed into their allotted spaces.
• Player board: Each player should get a player board; 2 meeples and 2 research tokens in their chosen colour.
  The meeples go on to the player's board and the research tokens on their designated starting spots on the research track.
• Deck: Each player should take the 4 starter cards in their colour, 2 of which will be coin/funding cards, 2 will be compass/exploration cards and then finally, add 2 fear cards to their deck.
  Now shuffle all 6 cards into a face-down deck.
• 1st player: Determine the first player and deal out resources as determined by the turn order.

Looks like we're ready to go exploring in the... Lost Ruins of Arnak.

​On to play
A round in Lost Ruins of Arnak continues until all players can no longer perform actions (Free actions don't count.) or have passed. The game features a pretty standard turn order that goes clockwise and in their turn, players will get 1 main action and any amount of free actions.
A round proceeds as follows:

• Draw cards: All players draw cards from their player deck to take their hand up to 5, thus in the first round this would be 5 of the 6 starter cards.
• Actions: Starting with the 1st player and going clockwise, each player must perform 1 main action, they can also perform free actions, generally, everything with a lightning bolt symbol is considered a free action.
  Main actions are:
  Travel: A player can move one of their meeples to a site on the board, provided an available worker spot is there and the player can generate the required travel score to pay the travel cost.
  Generally, the player uses the cards in their hand to pay travel costs, even fear cards provide walking scores
  There are 4 types of travel, these are; walking, land, sea and air.
  Walking is the most basic travel action and can only be used to pay for walking costs. Land and sea scores can pay for their relevant costs or can also be used in place of walking - but not for each other. Finally air can be used for any type of travel. Furthermore a player may spend 2 coins to what amounts to chartering a flight, that is get a point air score, which is essentially the same as any token.
  Additionally, if the player is travelling to either of the 2 wilderness tiers for the first time, they will be required also spend the relevant number of compass tokens.
  So what does travelling do? this will depend on where the archaeologist is travelling to.
  Dig site: Sending an archaeologist to a dig site will allow the player to gain some resources.
  ​Unexplored site: When a archaeologist visits a unexplored site, the player immediately gains the idol token(s) located there, along with whatever benefit it confers. as an aside, when a player initially gains an idol it is not placed in any of the 4 idols on their player board
  Then a site tile of the relevant tier is revealed, placed there and immediately resolved. Usually, it confers some benefit or resource on the controlling player
  After this, a guardian tile is revealed and placed there, as you'd imagine, guardians can be bad news. more on this below.
  Defeat guardian: if an archaeologist is on a site with a guardian, then that guardian can be defeated by spending the required resources. That guardian tile is then placed into that player's area and scores VPs at the game end, guardian tiles also have special abilities which have a one-time use.
• Buy card: The active player may purchase a card from the card row.
  Item cards go at the bottom of the purchasing player's deck and artefact cards go straight into their hand.
• Play card: The active player may play a card from their hand for whatever benefit it confers.
  All card are played into the player's play area.
• Research: The active player may move 1 of their 2 research tokens up their relevant track. Sometimes a track may have multiple routes the player can choose. There are some restrictions though.
  Firstly, a player's notebook token cannot go above their magnifying glass token, secondly, there can be a cost to pay for moving up. However there are also usually a benefit for moving along a track. This is generally the only way to acquire assistants.
  If a player reaches the top of the research track, they have reached the temple and get bonus points accordingly, the 1st player to arrive gets the most VPs, later players earn decreasing amounts. Finally players get to choose one of the temple tiles to take when reaching the temple.
• Pass: If the active player cannot perform any other main action, then they must pass. Alternatively, the active player can choose to pass if they so desire.
  Either way, the player is now out of the round and can no longer undertake any  further actions in that round. This means it's likely that players will have uneven actions in a turn and it's possible that someone could be 'last player standing' and get multiple actions in a row.
• Free actions: There are numerous free actions which players can use, they include:
  Cards: Some cards can be played as free actions.
  ​Idol token: A idol can be 'slotted' to confer a benefit to the player as listed on their player board. Since there are only 4 slots, this can only be done 4 times in a game.
  Guardian tiles: A player may flip a guardian tile over to make use of its once-only bonus.
  Assistant tiles: If a player has acquired an assistant or two, then their benefit can be used once per round.
• End of action: After a player has completed their main action and any free actions, play progresses to the player to the left.
• End of round: When the end of a round is reached, a number of actions occur.
  Return archaeologists: Each player takes back their 2 archaeologists, if they are taking back an archaeologist from a site with a guardian tile, then the poor archaeologist has fled in terror and the controlling player adds a fear card to the discarded cards in their player area for each archaeologist fleeing.
  Shuffle cards: Players take all the cards that they played in the round (Which will be in their play area.), shuffles them and puts them at the bottom of their deck. Thus there is no discard pile in Lost Ruins of Arnak. Players can also choose to discard any unplayed cards into their play area before shuffling them to move back into the bottom of their deck.
  Move Moon Staff: Cards around the Moon Staff are discarded out of the game and the staff moves to the right. This means as the 5 rounds progress, more artefact cards will appear in place of diminishing item cards.
• Next round: The starting player moves to the left and the new round starts with all players drawing cards from their deck to take their hand up to 5 cards.

There are some other rules such as for burning cards (Useful for getting rid of fear cards.) and so on, but that's the gist of it.

Endgame
When the 5th round is completed, then so it the game and we go to scoring. There are a variety of opportunities to score.
Research: Research tokens earn VPs depending where they finished on the research track.
Temple tile: Players who reached the temple can score the VPs on these tiles:
Idol tokens: each idol token acquired earns 3 VPs.
Player board idol slots: Each empty slot on a player's player board earns the VPs it displayed. This means when an idol is slotted for a benefit, the VPs it covers are not scored.
Guardian tiles: Each guardian defeated earns the player 5 VPs.
Cards: Aretfact and item cards can also earn the owning player VPs.
Fear cards: Finally; fear cards. Each fear card a player has deducts 1 VP from their total.

Points are tallied, highest score wins!

Overall
Hmmm, what to say about Lost Ruins of Arnak.
It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that this game is sort of a jack of all trades and master of none.
A little bit of deck building, a little bit of worker placement and a little bit of resource management, this game has it all!
Joking aside, this, on a basic level represents 3 different approaches to accumulating VPs. That is; buying cards and using cards, visiting sites and moving up the research track.
Card will get players useful special abilities and travel points, visiting sites will acquire players resources and going up the research track gets other benefits, including assistants.
Players will not want to neglect any of these elements and there's fairly good synergy between different parts of the game, but generally players end up focusing on 1 of them during play.
While the game isn't overly complex, there's quite a lot to consider. Personally, it felt like going up the research track was a good way to score big but it's hard to be sure. 

Another very important factor to think about is turn-economy, there's no set number of turns per round in Lost Ruins and finding ways to get extra main actions is vital. A player who gets 10 actions per round instead of 5 is going to just do better and I have to say, finding way to combo actions into more actions is pretty satisfying. For example, a player might use a card to get resources to move a worker to get different resources to spend on the research which would provide another benefit.
Having said that, taking a single main action at a time can feel frustrating, yes it's a combo system, but it's a slow one - unless you're the only player still with actions.

I found Lost Ruins of Arnak a fun game, but not a particularly compelling one; it's hard to put a finger on. The game's theme fits it's mechanics well and it has great presentation.
I think maybe that all the game's systems, the worker placement and the deck building and so on are all on an individual level, a little uninspiring and bland. The deck building mechanic would never stand on its own for example, neither would the worker placement, on the other hand, they don't need to.

So is the sum greater than the parts? The jury's out.
When I encounter a game I like, I get the urge to buy a copy and I don't get that with Lost Ruins of Arnak.
The game was entertaining but it wouldn't be first choice of mine to play but I happily play it if someone else wanted to.

16th December 2021

It's a Thursday and we're round Simon's for some gaming.

​The game of the night was Le Harve; have you ever had the urge to run a business on the French coast, construct buildings and ships, manage goods, feed your ever expanding workforce and avoid going into debt?
If the answer is yes, then maybe, just maybe, Le Havre is the game you're lookng for.

What's in a game?
Le Havre uses a lot of components, I mean it, A LOT!

• Game board: The game board is composed of 3 large tiles that are placed down together to form the board. It depicts the titular harbour with a wharf and warehouses and it's a fairly busy board too with a lot of spots and locations.
  Resource spaces: There are 6 spaces for the games 8 resources, wait, did I say 8 resources, since the resource tiles are double-sided that means the game actually has 16 resources. Finally there's a spot for the 17th resource - money.
  Supply spaces: There a row of seven of these circular spaces directly beneath the resource spaces.
  Offer spaces: And beneath the port spaces are 7 offer spaces. As the game progresses, goods will move from the resources down to the offer spaces.
  Special buildings: this is where the special buildings deck goes.
  Building proposals: These are 3 spaces which will contain regular building cards which can be built but not bought.
  Ship spaces: There are 4 spaces for the 4 different types of ship that will appear during a game.
  Round cards space: Finally, there's a space for the round cards, there not actually round but are used to track the game's round.

• Cards: Le Havre uses numerous decks of cards.
  ​Round cards/Ship cards: Not all of these are used during a game, depending on player count.
  ​They are arranged in numerical order and are used to not only track rounds, but other events such as harvesting and bringing special buildings into play. They are also double sided and on the other side are ships. When a round is over, the round card is flipped to the other side and becomes a ship available to be bought, thus more and more (And better.) ships become available as a game progresses.
  Ship cards are very useful cards, they allow players to trade resources for cash and also provide food when needed.
  Building cards: These come in 3 types, starter, standard and special and can be bought or used by players. They are functionally more or less identical though. Each card has a cost to buy in some combination of resources and money, it may also have a symbol for it's type. Then the card lists what ability it has, typically this is generate or upgrade resources, although some will construct buildings or ships. 
  Standard cards have a couple of bits of extra info, first, in the top right corner it shows a number, this is the sort order number and determines the order in which cards appear. Finally, at the bottom it repeats the buying info, which will be displayed when the cards are put out.
  Loan cards: If a player runs of cash, then they can take a load card to acquire more money, although this comes at a price...
  Buttery/Player guide: This double-sided card has a buttery on one side and a quick guide to the rules on the other.
• Tokens: As with cards, Le Havre makes use of a lot of tokens. All of them are made of card.
  Cash: These round tokens represent francs.
  Resources: All of these are double-sided, with the basic resource on one side and the upgraded resource on the other. Resources provide food and energy amongst other things and include.
  Cattle/Meat: Produces more cattle and food on the upgraded side.
  Grain/Bread: Produces more grain and also produces food
  Iron/Steel: Used for building.
  Clay/Brick: Also used for building.
  Wood/Charcoal: Produces energy.
  Fish/Smoked fish: Produces food.
  Coal/Coke: Produces energy.
  Hide/Leather​: Can be sold.
• Meeples: Each player is given 2 wooden meeples in their colour, a ship which is used in the port and a disc, which is essentially a worker and placed in buildings.
• Supply tiles: There are 7 of these circular tiles that fit on the supply spaces. Each tile displays an action that must be resolved during the game.

​The art in Le Havre is a bit of a mixed bag. The game board uses fairly simplistic and colourful illustrations that I personally found clear, distinct and looked quite evocative, the same is true of illustrations on the cards. However, the tokens used monochromic artwork which is a little old school. Having said that, it was always clear what they represented.
Which brings me to iconography. Between all the different actions on all the building cards in particular, Le Havre uses a fair amount of iconography. Much of it is straightforward and apparent but some of it will require looking up in the rules. none of it game-breaking though.

How's it play?
Setup

• Round cards: Take the round cards appropriate for the number of players and place them face-up in numerical order on their allotted space. Round cards come into affect at the end of each round.
• Supply tokens: Shuffle the supply tokens into a face-down stack and then place 1 of each face-down on the row of supply spaces.
• Starter buildings: Put out the 3 starter building cards next to the board. These are owned by the town. Furthermore any buildings that are built by players are also owned by the town (Until players purchase them, that is.).
• Building cards: Shuffle the standard building cards into a face-down deck, then deal the cards into 3 smaller face-down stacks.
  Now turn each stack over and sort it buy its sort order number in the top right corner. Thus certain cards will appear earlier in the game than others. Each of the 3 stacks goes into a space on the board but they do not sit stacks. Instead, spread each stack up, so that the info on the bottom of each card is visible and players can see the cost of upcoming cards. Only the top card in each proposal space are available to be built by players.
  Special building cards: Shuffle the deck of special building card and deal 6 cards face-down into a deck on their space on the board. The rest of the deck will not be used in this game.
• Resources: Put all the resources into their specified spaces, then place 2 money, 2 fish, 2 wood and 1 clay token into their respective offer spaces.
• Player: Give each player a ship and disc meeple in their colour as well as 5 cash and 1 coal. Each player's ship should be placed just left of the first supply tile.
• First player: Determine a first player.

On to play
Acquisition of wealth is goal in Le Havre and money becomes victory points at the game end.
The game is played over a number rounds dependant on the number of players. In each round there are 7 turns, you will note that this means that players will not have an equal number of turns and this is by design.
In their turn each player must perform the supply action and has a single main action they can also perform, in addition the active player can also perform buy/sell actions.
When all 7 turns have been completed, there are some end of round actions to resolve before moving on to the next round.
Free actions: These can be performed by the active player at any time.

• Loan: If a player does not have the money to pay for something, then they can take a loan card which gives them 4 currency to spend, paying off a loan card costs 5. Every loan card that a player has during the game end will essentially cost them 7 victory points, so you don't want to keep them!
  Additionally, sometimes players with loan cards will have to pay interest to the supply.
• Buying/Selling: The active player may buy or sell any number of available buildings or ships at any time in their turn, provided they meet the requirements of course. Players cannot buy buildings in the building proposal spaces, because they're not built yet.
  When something is sold, it is at half the cash cost for the building and is sold to the town who will now own it.

Turn actions:

• Supply action: The active player must perform the supply action. This involves moving their ship meeple on to the first available supply token (Going from left to right.), turning over the tile and resolving its action. Usually this involves moving tokens from one resource supply to it's respective offer space.
  Supply tiles are only turned over once during a game and when revealed stay in the same order for the remainder of the game.
• Main action: There are 2 main actions available to the active player and they can perform 1 of them only.
  Take offer: The active player take all the resources on 1 offer space which they can use immediately.
  Enter building: The active player may take their disc and place in any available unoccupied building and use that building's ability.
  Available buildings include any buildings owned by the town or the player, furthermore, a disc may be placed in another player's building, but this will incur a entry fee that must be payed to that player.
  Next player: Once a player has completed their actions, play progresses to the player to the left.

A round ends when the player on the last supply token finishes their turn and leads directly into the end of round actions. This involves resolving the actions on the current round card and include the following.

• Harvest: If this action occurs, players with cattle or grain increase them respectively.
• Feeding: All players must feed their populations, this requires discarding food, how much is needed depends on the round card and a ship lowers this requirement. Money can be used in place of food and must be used if a player does not have enough food.
• Construction: A building from the standard or special buildings may be built by the town and now becomes available to be used or bought players.
• Ship: The round card is flipped over and becomes a ship, it is placed into its relevant spot and can bought by players.
• Next round: All player ship meeples are placed back at the start of the supply track and a new round begins. Whoever was last in the previous round is the starting player in this one, thus they get a double-turn.

Endgame
When the final round is completed, all players have 1 final main action they can perform, after this, the game goes to scoring.
Now each player calculates their wealth which are victory points. This is done by totting up the following:
Value of all building and ships a player owns.
Cash they possess.
Every loan card a player still possess at the game end deducts from the total.
Scores are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
When playing Le Havre players will need to pay attention to several areas of the game. Buildings are very important and players will probably spent a significant number of actions on them, not only do they have to think about to what they've built, what the town owns and what it available to build but what other players have built. Being able to make use of other player's building adds an interesting spin on the game.
Players will need to adapt their strategy to the buildings that become available and while there is a ordering number for buildings, it's still no guarantee of the actual order they become available.

That doesn't mean you can risk ignoring ships or acquiring resources of course, food is vital, probably the single most important thing in the game, you'll constantly need food otherwise you'll eventually be plunged into spiralling debt.
Managing all the resources is also key and the game deliberately forces players to make the hard choice between using a building or taking a resource from an offer space. Resources tend to be relatively scarce at the start of the game and player's will want to optimise their strategies.
Generally money can be used in place of some resources but it's essentially sucking up victory points and getting players closer to having to take a loan, something to avoid if you can.

Players will need to also pay attention to the supply track and their position on it and when their turns will come up, as well as when resources will be moved into the offer spaces.

Even though there were some more rules which I skipped over describing, I wouldn't call La Havre a very heavy game. I did find it a little fiddly with the occasional little rule popping up here or there and at the start I did find the game a little obtuse.
​Once you get over that hump Le Havre becomes a mostly straightforward game and proves a challenging game with meaningful decisions to make.

I do have a criticism of Le Havre though - and that's the playtime, it's just too long! This is a known issue too as the rules contain a 'shortened' variant of the game!
A 5-player game is expected to take 210 minutes over 20 rounds, that's 3 ½ hours and quite frankly, that's an underestimation.
Think about it; 210 minutes over 20 rounds is 10 minutes 30 seconds per round and each round has 7 turns, that works out at 90 seconds per turn. Do you think that the kind of players that like this type of game spend just 90 seconds per turn? If every player spends 2 minutes taking their turn instead of 90 seconds, it would add 70 minutes to the playtime. 😭

It meant that the down time between turns felt like it lasted forever and at times was just more frustrating than fun or compelling, which was what I ultimately took away from it.

If you like resource-management games that are slightly on the heavy side, then Le Havre might be worth a look, provided you can commit the time.
To be honest, it's a game that rainy, chilled Sunday afternoons are perfect for.

21st November 2021

Sunday evening gaming Board Game Arena continued.

The next game of the night was Chocolate Factory.

Have you ever wanted to own your own chocolate factory? Since pretty much everyone's a fan of chocolate, why not?
Unfortunately, there's no eating chocolate in Chocolate Factory, only a resource-management and light programming game instead.

Caveat: we've only ever played Chocolate Factory digitally.

What's in a game?

• Board: The game's central board has a couple of functions, it tracks rounds, coal values and scores, it also has spaces for the game's sets of cards. Speaking of which...
• Cards: Chocolate Factory uses quite a few different types of cards.
  Factory parts: It makes sense for a game called Chocolate Factory to have factory part cards! These smaller-than-usual cards will be used to manufacture chocolate and are part of the engine building mechanic. There are 2 types of card, A & B.
  Corner shop orders: These represent the wide variety of orders that players can fulfil. Corner shops come in 3 sizes, small, medium and large and respectively have 1-3 tiers of order to complete each. Once fulfilled, they can be replaced with new orders.
  Department store orders: There are 5 department stores in Chocolate Factory that always want the same type of chocolate. These double-sided cards are used to fulfil those orders and each had 9 spaces to track how much every player has provided. Unlike the corner shop orders, these are only scored at the end of the game and the points earned are relative to where players have reached on each card, there are scores for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place.
  Employees: There are 5 different types of employee card that directly correspond to the 5 different department stores that are demanding chocolate. Even though all the department stores want chocolate, players cannot sell it to a department unless they've acquired an employee of that respective store. Employee cards also confer a 1 round benefit to the player that acquired it.
• Player board: The player boards depict each player's factory; which consists of a conveyor belt that runs from left-to-right, the conveyor belt has an entrance and exit as well as 4 spaces; both above and below each conveyor belt space is a factory part space - thus 8 factory part spaces in all. The player boards come come with 3 factory parts already installed.
• Tiles: Chocolate Factory also comes with a fair amount of tiles for each player.
  Conveyor belt tiles: Each player will have 7 of these square tiles which will form their conveyor belt.
  Coal bunker tile: Each player has one of these tiles to store their coal.
  Storeroom tile: This is where each player their chocolate once it's exited their factory. They're not very good storerooms; because while players can store as much chocolate in their storerooms during a round, they can only store 2 pieces between rounds!
• Tokens: There's a lot of chocolate in Chocolate Factory and thus a lot of tokens! For the most part, players will be looking to use their factory to upgrade from one type of chocolate token to another to then fulfil orders. Essentially these are all resources that need to be managed in some way or other.
  Below is the 'order of value' for tokens.
  Bean tokens/Cocoa tokens:
  Chocolate finger tokens/Chocolate chunk tokens:
  Wrapped caramel chocolate/Wrapped nut chocolate tokens:
  Premium boxed chocolate tokens:
• Coal tokens: No, not chocolate but used to power factories.
• Markers: These come in player colours and are used to track various bits of information.

That's pretty much it for components.
​
Since we've only played Chocolate Factory digitally, I can really comment on the qualty of the components.
However, I can say what are there is, is quite nice and colourful, it has an early 20th century vibe to both the art style and subject of the art.
The game uses a fair amount of iconography, luckily for the most part, it was pretty straightforward to comprehend.

How's it play?
Setup

• ​Factory parts: Separate the cards into face-down decks by their A and B types. Shuffle each deck then place the A deck on top of the B deck. Thus the B cards will not appear until the late game.
• Corner shop orders: Sort these cards by their 3 types and shuffle them into 3 face-down decks.
• Employees: Sort these cards by their 5 types and then also shuffle them into 5 face-down decks.
• Department store orders: Put out these 5 cards next to the game board.
• Player boards: Give each player their factory board along with their conveyor belt, storage and coal bunker tiles.
• Starting player: Determine a starting player.

Now we're good to go!

On to play
​Chocolate Factory is played over 6 rounds - Monday to Saturday and each round has 2 phases, a drafting phase which goes twice in turn order and a factory phase which can be played out simultaneously.
Drafting phase

• Coal: First give each player coal tokens which will range from 5 to 10 according to the day.
• Factory parts: Draw factory part cards and arrange according to the number of players.
• Employees: Draw 1 employee from each of the 5 employee decks and arrange as per the number of players.
• 1st draft: Beginning with the first player, everyone will end up taking either a factory part card from the available selection or an employee card.
• 2nd draft: Once the 1st draft is over, there's a second! However, this draft is in reverse turn order, each player drafts another card, except this time it must be from the opposite selection. So each player will end up with a factory part and an employee.

That's it for the first phase.

Factory phase
Each player will now have a factory part and a employee card.
Factory parts are added to the player's board in one of the spaces above or below the conveyor belt spaces, a factory part can be used to replace an already existing factory part.
Employee cards serve 2 purposes, firstly they grant the player some sort of bonus and secondly, they allow the controlling player to sell chocolate to the department store they work for. Unlike factory parts, employees only stay in play for 1 round.

So how does the factory phase work?
The factory phase has 3 shifts and in each shift players first take a bean and place it on the conveyor belt tile that's about to enter into the factory.
Then each player must push their conveyor belt tiles along 1 space from the left to right so that the tile they placed a bean on goes into the factory, it's also possible that a tile will be slid out of the exit on the other side. Anything on that tile is placed into the respective player's storeroom.

Once this is done, the factory parts can be used, each part costs mostly 1 but sometimes 2 coal to activate. A factory part can only be used on resources adjacent to it. For example the basic roaster factory party will turn a bean into coca, a upgrader factory part will change any resource into the next level of resource (E.g., coca into chocolate fingers.). Converters will turn chocolate into wrapped chocolate or boxed chocolate and so on.
There are some limitation here, each factory part can only be activated once per shift.

Once the 1st shift is finished, the 2nd begins, another tile is placed at the entrance to the factory with  a bean on it and then the conveyor belt is pushed along another space and factory parts can be activated (Or reactivated.). Thus the conveyor belt will move 3 times a day.

Selling
When all 3 shifts have been run, players must sell chocolate, they can only keep 2 pieces in their storeroom between rounds, any excess is lost and players think ahead to avoid losses!
Chocolate can be sold to corner shops and each one has their own demands. Like the factory phase, selling can be completed simultaneously.
When selling to corner shops, they have 1-3 tiers of demand that must be met depending on their size and lower tiers must be completed before the higher ones. When a tier is completed it is immediately scored, when all tiers are scored the card is discarded and the player must draw a new corner shop card or any size they want.
Selling to department stores is a little different.
Firstly a player can only sell to a department store that matches the employee they drafted.
Secondly, when fulfilling the demands of a department store, points are not immediately scored, instead a marker in the player's colour is moved along the 9 spaces.

Once selling is concluded, a new round is set up, coal is distributed to players and new factory part and employee cards drawn, then the new round commences.

Endgame
Play continues until the 6th and round is completed, then the 5 department store scores are calculated.
Whoever has completed the most corner shop cards earns a bonus
Whoever has their marker the furthest along scores for 1st place, if the next player is at least half as far along as 1st place they score for 2nd place and if a 3rd player is half as far along as 2nd place, they score for 3rd place.
Furthermore, players can earn a bonus for selling chocolate to 3, 4 or all 5 department stores.
Finally, remaining chocolate and coal can earn points.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Chocolate Factory gives players several important factors to think about.
Firstly, during the drafting phase, players must prioritise what they think is important to them, do they want a factory part more than an employee, they'll get both, but not necessarily in the ones they want if they wait to the 2nd drafting phase.

Cards that players draft can dramatically change the situation for players. Most obviously are employee cards which determine which department store a player can sell chocolate to. If a player is geared to sell the kind of chocolate a particular department is demanding, then getting the employee that gives you access can be paramount. This is even before considering which benefit the employee card also confers on the controlling player.

Factory parts will form the core of the player's ability to produce and sell chocolate, getting a part that wasn't wanted or needed will force player to reconsider their strategies for at least one round. Unlike employee cards, factory parts can stick around for the entire game, although they can be replaced and since players will acquire 6 factory parts and only have 5 spaces in their factory, it means something will have to go. Where these parts are placed can have a significant impact.
Place them too far to the right and it'll take a while for resources on the conveyor belt to reach them. Put them too far to the left and players risk screwing up their engine.
Putting factory parts in factory is an exercise in optimisation.

Speaking of optimisation, the game has a fairly unforgiving action economy. It's obviously a deliberate design decision, but there's never enough coal. Players start with 5 coal in round 1, they'll have 3 factory parts to activate - and that's over 3 shifts! Even in round 6, when each player can have a full factory, they only get 10 coal each, they'll on average only be able to activate 3 or 4 of their parts per shift.
If forces player to make meaningful decisions which is always good and also makes them think across 3 shifts instead of 1, but it also feels a little frustrating and uneventful when half of the engine you've been building isn't used in a shift and maybe isn't used in the entire round.

Scoring also presents players with choices.

Each round, every player will have the opportunity to score their 3 corner shops and work towards scoring 1 of the 5 department stores.
Corner shops are pretty straightforward to manage, the only wrinkle being that their demands must be met in tier order. It means that players will sometimes need to adapt to changing demands that a corner shop might present.
Department stores are a proposition that's a little more interesting though.
Because scores are based on relative positions between players, it can lead to some interesting outcomes.
E.g., if a player sells just 1 item to a department store and no one else does then they'll get the full reward for 1st place but conversely, if they sell 5 items to a department score and another player sells more, then they'll get less.
This adds an extra option or strategy to the game and unlike some tableau-engine building games, it becomes beneficial to watch what other players are doing and what they're producing and who they're selling it to.
And while I feel that the majority of player's victory points will come from corner shops, department stores can't be neglected. They exist in a sweet (sic) spot where they can tip the balance in a player's favour.

I'm kind of conflicted about Chocolate Factory, it has some solid mechanics that present players with choices, I particularly like how players can chose where to sell their chocolate to maximise their profit.
But parts of it are also a little unexciting, where the effort creating an engine feels greater than the rewards it provides.

I would have no problem playing Chocolate Factory again, but not too often. I think occasionally, it would be a good change of pace

12th November 2021

It's a Friday night and we're round Simon's for some impromptu evening gaming.

“I beg your pardon,” said the Mole, pulling himself together with an effort. “You must think me very rude; but all this is so new to me."

Well, Everdell is new to me, mixing various game mechanics and lush anthropomorphic artwork.

What's in a game?
Everdell is a game that has a big footprint and a lot components.

• Game board: Everdell's board is a curious circular shape and the central area is called the 'meadow'. Around the meadow with numerous spots to place the game's resources. There also various worker locations dotted across the maps, including some blank worker spaces that will be populated with randomly determined worker locations during the game setup. There also some location for 'events'. More on events later.
  Most of the worker locations earn players some combination of the game's resources and/or cards. E.G., 2 twigs and a card or 1 resin and a card.
• Tree: The game comes with a tree made of gameboard that can be constructed, placed on the board and used to hold various components.
• Basic event tiles: These score point when acquired.
• Resources: Everdell uses 4 main types of resources, berries, twigs, resin and pebbles. These are represented by shaped 3d plastic tokens.
• Meeples: Each player has up to 6 workers they can use, these wooden tokens are shaped in the style of different type of anthropomorphic animals.
• Cards: Broadly speaking, the game uses several different types of cards.
  Critter & construction cards: These are the core of the game and as the name suggests, come in 2 types. In the top left corner is the requirement or cost to play them, just below is the card type and at the bottom of each card it displays what benefit it confers such as victory points and more. There is a wide variety of different benefits available, this may even include extra places to put workers and sometimes these are modified by other cards.
  Special event cards: These cards are a variation on the event tiles above and as such will score when player's meet their requirements.
  Forest cards: These are used on the board to provide randomly generated worker spots in each game.
• Victory point tokens: Standard card tokens.

No doubt about, Everdell has fantastic production values.
The components are well made and the attention to detail for the most part is excellent. In particular, the resources look great as do the individualised meeples. We didn't use the tree but it's a nice touch
Even if the anthropomorphised artwork is not to your taste, it's hard to fault the quality of the artwork and rich, warm colour palettes used throughout on the board and all the cards.
​Iconography is where the game could be improved though. Sometimes, the text used on the critter and construction cards is perhaps a little too small as are the symbols and sometimes, to maintain the game's aesthetic, you'll encounter a small around of tiny writing surrounded by a lot of unused space. Having said that, it's a quibble, not a gamebreaker and doesn't really detract from the game's quality

How's it play?
Setup

• Meadow: Shuffle the critter & construction cards into a face-down deck, then draw and place 8 of them face-up into the meadow on the board.
• Forest cards: Shuffle the forest cards and deal out the allotted amount as per player count face-up on to the blank spots on the board. This means that some of the worker spots are randomly generated each game.
• Events:
  Event tiles: Put out the basic event tiles on to their allotted spaces on the board.
  Special event cards: Shuffle these cards and deal 4 face-up on to their allotted spaces.
• Cards: Determine the starting player; then each player should draw cards from the deck, starting with the 1st player who gets 5, then 2nd gets 6 and thus forth.
• Meeples: Each player takes only 2 meeples in their colour, the remaining 4 will be acquired before the game's 3 later turns. 

Now we're pretty much ready to go.

On to play
The objective in Everdell is to construct the best city, that is the city that scores the most victory points. Players achieve this by playing critters and constructions into their tableau.
​When somebody becomes the active player, they can perform 1 action from a choice of 3 and then player progresses to the player to the left. Players continue performing actions until they have to or choose to stop; in which case the season has ended for them. Everdell is played over 4 seasons.

• Place worker: The active player may place a worker on a available spot. This will allow them to gain a mix of resources, cards or victory points depending on which spot it is.
  Some spots only allow for the placement of a single worker but some allow multiple players to make use of them. Furthermore, some cards that may get played have spots to place workers and acquire whatever benefits the card confers. This means a player may end up placing a worker in another player's tableau!
• Play card: The active player can play a card as their action, cards provide lots of actions or abilities which can be performed, too many to list here.
  Broadly speaking, cards come in two categories; critters and constructions which can also be common or unique. Cards also have a type such as Tan Traveller or Green Production which affect what function the card performs.
  For example Tan Traveller cards have a once-only benefit, but Green Production cards produce something whenever a production phase is triggered.
  Playing a card requires spending the relevant resources, having said that, the game has some synergy between cards and some critters can be played for free if the linked construction is already in the player's tableau.
  Players can play card types in sets to acquire event tiles/cards; e.g. the Grand Tour event can be earned if the player puts 3 destination cards into their tableau.  
• Prepare for Season: Players can continue taking actions until they run out of workers and cards that can be played, when this happens, the player must prepare for the next season.
  This involves taking back their workers plus an additional worker or two from the supply, players may be able to re-activate production cards in their tableau or take cards from the meadow, all depending on the season.

When all players have prepared for season, then the current season is over and play moves to the next one.

Endgame
When the 4th season is completed, then the game is over.
Victory points can be scored from a variety or sources, including cards, tokens and events.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
It's obvious that a lot of thought and care has gone into the game's presentation and charm. It's one of the best looking games I've seen in a while and I always appreciate the extra effort committed to a game.

Hmmm, what else to say about Everdell; for the most part, it's initially a pretty solid, straightforward game, although it feels a like a bit of a slow burner.
While the game's cards provide players with a variety of approaches choices and plays to make. Having said that, the game's action-economy is actually quite tight, almost too harsh. E.g, in the 1st season, players will only have 2 workers to gain resources in order to play cards, it means players will have to pay close attention to optimising their plays and actions. card synergy can make a big difference.
It gave me the feeling that players will need to know what they're doing from their first action in order to play Everdell competitively.

Additionally, in comparison to other tableau building games, it feels like the tableau in Everdell provides much more limited benefits that lacks the satisfaction putting together a good tableau.
​At best, production cards are reactivated once every other season - or round - but because players have multiple actions in a single season, it means a lengthy gap before those reactivations. This is something players will need to consider when playing cards.
All of this makes the choices in Everdell important - which is the sign of a good game.

Ultimately though, I just found it a little unexciting and unengaging and while it wouldn't be my first choice, I'd have no qualms about playing Everdell again.

21st September 2021

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

In honour of Talk Like A Pirate Day, the first game of the evening was Jamaica, a game of pirate racing.

However, before we move on:
"My wife's gone to the West Indies."
"Jamaica?"
"No, she went of her own accord!"

With that out of the way, let's continue.

How's it play?
Setup

• Game board: Put all the treasure tokens on to their allotted spaces on the board, then shuffle the treasure cards and remove 3, place the 9 remaining cards in a face-down deck on to their space on the board.
  Put out the dice on their spaces.
• Player decks: Give each player a player deck and put the corresponding ship on to the start/finish space.
  Each player should shuffler their decks into a face-down deck and draw 3 cards.
  Give each player a player board.
• Start player: Determine the start player, who becomes the Captain.

Now we're ready to to begin.

On to play
​In Jamaica, the Captain rolls the dice and assigns them to the game's 2 different phases per turn. Each player then chooses 1 of their 3 available cards to play and then performs the day and night actions on those cards. how effective those actions will be are determined by dice rolled and allocated to day and night.

• Captain rolls: The player who is The captain rolls the 2 normal six-siders, then they assign 1 die to the 'day' phase and the other to the 'night' phase, they are free to consult their hand of cards before doing so.
• Play cards: Once the dice have been allocated to the 2 phases, each player must play one of their 3 available cards face-down in front of them. Once this is done, all cards are revealed.
  Actions: Starting with the captain, who becomes the active player, all players perform their 2 actions. The day action is fully completed first, then the night action is completed.
  There are 2 types of action - movement and loading with a total of 5 different actions.
• Loading: There are 3 loading actions for the 3 types of resource - food, gold and gunpowder, they all function identically.
  The active player loads a number of resources into their hold equal to the dice for that phase. If they are loading food as the night action and the die for the night phase is a 3, then they load 3 food tokens.
  Holds: There are however, some restrictions on loading. Resources must be loaded into empty holds, if the active player has no empty holds then they must discard all the resources from a hold to make room, furthermore, the resource being discarded cannot match the resource being loaded.
• ​Movement: There are 2 types of movement.
  Forward arrow: The green arrow pointing right represents forward movement, this allow the player's ship to move forward a number of spaces equal to the dice on the pertinent space. E.g., if the die on the morning space is a 4 and the played card has a green arrow for the morning action, then they can move forward 4 spaces.
  Back Arrow: The red arrow that points left represents backwards movement. The player must mover their ship backwards a number of spaces equal to the relevant die!
  Stopping: Once a ship has ended its movement, the player must deal with the space they have stopped at, this can be detrimental if player's aren't careful. There are 3 types of space.
  Port: If a player's ship ends movement on a port space, they must pay the cost shown in gold.
  At sea: If the player's ship ends movement on a space where they are at sea, indicated by the squares, they must pay the cost in food.
  Can't pay: In either instance above, if they active player cannot pay the cost of the space they have ended movement on, they must move their ship backwards until they land on a space where they can pay the cost, or on to a pirate lair where there is no cost, see below for more info.
  If a ship does not move this turn because they played a card with 2 load actions, then they do not have to pay any cost.
  Pirate lair: If player stops at a pirate lair and there's a treasure token there. They can discard the token to draw a treasure card. If the token here has already been taken then nothing happens. In both situations there's nothing to pay.
  Combat: What happens if a ship moves on to the same space as another ship, glad you asked; see below.
• Combat: When a ship moves on the same space as another ship, then combat ensues!
  The player who moved on to an already occupied space is considered the attacker, the player who was already there is the defender.
  The attacker decides how many gunpowder tokens they want to commit, rolls the combat die and adds the 2 values together, this is their combat strength.
  The defender then decides how many gunpowder tokens to commit and rolls the combat die, adding the 2 values together to generate their own combat strength.
  Whoever has the highest combat strength; wins (See below)! In the case of a draw, nothing happens.
  Star: If the star result is rolled, it can dramatically change the outcome of combat.
  If the attacker rolls the star, they immediately win the combat, the defender doesn't even get to roll!
  If the defender rolls the star, then they win the combat regardless of the attackers combat strength.
  The winner: The winner of combat may chose 1 of the following 3 actions.
  Take resources: They winner may take all the contents from one of the loser's holds.
  Plunder treasure: the winner may take one of the loser's face-down treasure cards.
  Curses: The winner may give one of their cursed face-down treasure cards to the loser, curses indeed!
• Next player: Once the active player has completed their 2 actions, play progresses to the player to their left until all players have completed their actions. All players draw another player card and the compass token moves 1 player to the left and a new round begins.

​
Endgame
Play continues until a ship reaches the start/finish, upon which the current turn is completed and the game goes to scoring. There are 4 sources of scoring.
Players score points according to where their ship finished, the start/finish scores 15 and points go downwards from there. If a ship failed to pass the -5 space, then they lose 5 points.
Every gold token a player has on their player board scores a points.
Treasure cards score their points and cursed treasure cards deducts from the player's score.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
In Jamaica, players must balance the need to load resources with the need to move along the game track, doing too much of one or the other will probably be detrimental. They'll need to judge when it's the right time to move with the right amount of resources. The rules limiting how players fill their holds forces players to make decisions about what they carry on their ships.
Players will also need to mitigate bad rolls and unfavourable cards, e.g., playing a red arrow backwards move when the die shows a 1.

At the same time it's also a good idea to keep an eye out for other players. If another player is 3 spaces away and one of the dice rolled a 3, there's always the risk that opponent will end moving on to your space, provoking a fight, which could prove costly. Perhaps it might be a good time to load some gunpowder...

Obviously, all of this is to some extent is influenced by the dice rolls, having all the gold in the world wont help if a player can't reach a port! It means players will need to adapt to this randomiser and change strategies when the dice - and sometimes the captain don't give player the results they need.

Jamaica is a cheerfully colourful game with fairly light programming game where players 'only' have to think 2 moves ahead, with a theme that fits well with the mechanics. Jamaica also has elements of resource management and a touch of player interaction and conflict. It's an easy to learn programming game that is fun to play, particularly if you like a little bit of jostling between players and generally presents them with meaningful choices to make.

7th September 2021

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

The first game of the night was Merv.

What's in a game?

• Game board: Merv is a busy game and consequently has a busy board loaded with information, spaces and tracks!
  City: The central part of the board is dominated by a 5x5 grid, this is the city of Merv. The grid is considered to have a north, east, south and west side. It's also surrounded by 'wall spaces'.
  Caravansary: This is a 'caravan of camels' where players can go to buy spice.
  Influence track: As players complete certain actions, they move along this track which allows them to acquire different types of spice.
  Library: This is where players can acquire scrolls and as they do so, they will also acquire benefits or bonuses called breakthroughs.
  Marketplace: Players can travel to other settlements to buy various goods. The marketplace contains 4 inner cities and 4 outer cities.
  Mosque: Players can move along this track to acquire benefits and bonuses.
  Palace: Players can send courtiers to the palace to earn victory points - at a cost.
  Favour track: Used in conjunction with the Palace.
• City tiles: These are used in the city.
  Camel market: This double-sided tile sits in the centre of the 5x5 grid.
  Building sites: There are 24 of these other tiles that populate the rest of the city. Players will be able to construct buildings on these sites.
  When activated, building sites provide resource cubes in their colours as well as 1 of 6 actions.
• Caravan cards: This deck of cards is used to represent the 4 different types of spice available to purchase, however the distribution of spices is not equal on the cards, some are rarer. From most common to rare, they are; cinnamon, ginger, juniper & pepper. Caravan cards confer 2 bonuses'
  Doubles: Whenever a player completes a pair, they get a bonus depending on what type of spice it is.
  Set collecting: During the endgame, sets of cards score victory points.
• Contract cards: These represent business or trade contracts which players can complete for victory points and other rewards.
  Completing a contract usually requires a mixture of resources, goods and scrolls. Players will also require a minimum level of influence in order to complete contracts.
  Unusually, goods and contracts are not spent when completing a contract, they are simply placed on the card, which prevents them being used for other contracts.
  There are 6 types of contract card.
• Goods tiles: There 24 common and 24 rare goods tiles.
• Scroll tiles: These represent the world of academia in Merv
• Breakthrough tiles: Earn enough scroll tiles and a player will acquire a breakthrough tile, these tiles confer a bonus or benefit of some kind.
• Upgrade tiles: Used to upgrade buildings that are constructed.
• Scoring tiles: These score points at the end of every year and are acquired from the mosque track.
• Camel meeples: Wooden meeples.
• Resources: Little wooden cubes, now you're talking. They come in 5 colours and represent the game's 4 different types of errr resources? The white cubes are considered wild.
• Wall tokens: These wooden tokens are shaped in the style of city walls.
• Buildings: There are 9 each of these wooden tokens in each of the 4 player colours.
• Wooden disks: Merv has a lot of tracks that need tracking and wooden disks are used to track those tracks! There are 10 in each colour.
• Meeples: Each player gets a Master Meeple and 8 worker meeples in their colour.

Merv has top-notch components; the cards and tiles are all good quality. cubes, tokens and meeples all look good, made of wood and feel solid, the walls are the standout components here and really look nice when set on the on the board and surrounding the city.
​
Despite its busyness, the game board is well illustrated and colourful, artwork on cards is also clear and colourful.

For the most part the iconography is clear and easy to understand.
Unfortunately, this does not extend to the symbols used to represent the game's 6 actions, these were a constant source of confusion and error.

​For example; the mosque action uses a minaret symbol but actually involves moving camel meeples along a track, but the symbols with camels on it is used to represent the caravansary! Why? Because the caravansary used camels to move spices! However, in game, the caravansary action only is used to get spices and has nothing to do with camels
This means that camels are used to represent spices and minarets are used to represent camels! It verges on the ridiculous.
It didn't help that all 6 symbols were the same colour so that it matched the colour theme of the board.

How's it play?
Setup

• City: Randomly choose one side of the camel market tile and place it at the centre of the 5x5 grid.
  Shuffle all of the build site tiles and randomly place them in the city, filling out all 24 spaces.
• Caravansary: shuffle the caravan cards into a face-down deck.
  Draw 8 cards and place them face-up in a row along the edge of the board close to the caravansary space. Then place camels on cards according to the number of players.
• Contract cards: Put the contract cards face-up into their 6 respective decks with the highest value card at the top and in descending order, making the earlier contracts more valuable.
• Library: Place the scroll and breakthrough tokens on their Library spaces.
• Mosque: The upgrade tokens go on to the mosque track, as do 4 camel meeples.
• Marketplace: Place a camel meeple on each of the 4 inner cities in the marketplace.
• Tokens: Give each player their meeples, disks and building tokens.
• Player order: Determine starting player.

I'm sure I've missed some steps, but it's pretty much covered.

On to play
Merv is played over 3 years and in each year there are 4 rounds, players have 1 action per round, thus 12 actions in total.
Taking actions in Merv are quite unusual, play takes place around the 5x5 grid and each round takes place across 1 side of the grid (Starting on the north side.), then in the subsequent round, play moves clockwise to the next side of the grid and so on, so by the 4th round, a complete circuit will have been completed.

• Place meeple: When a player takes their turn, they place their Master Meeple on one of the 5 spaces on the currently active side of the grid and activates one of the 5 building sites in that column/row. When this happens, the following occurs.
  Build: If there is no building on the activated site, then the active player must put one of their buildings there.
  Resources: The active player gains a resource in the colour indicated on the site they activated, furthermore they also gain resources from any sites of the same colour in the same column/row, provided those sites also have buildings. Thus it pays to position buildings in certain ways over turns to be able to generate multiple resources at a time as the game progresses.
  If those buildings belong to other players, then those players additionally acquire resources.
  Then one of the following is chosen.
  Deploy soldier: The active player may place one of their soldiers on to a tile with a building that is not already protected, this protects the building and earns them influence. What is protection for? More on this later.
  Gain favour: Move a space along the favour track at the palace.
  Action: The player use the action on the activated site, actions are the main staple of Merv and players will be using them most of the time.
  Camel market: If the active player has chosen the middle space of the 5, then they can access the camel market tile. The active player may use one of the tiles 4 special abilities by placing a camel meeple on the abilities' space, alternatively, they may collect all the camel meeples previously placed on the camel market tile.
• Actions: There are 6 types of action in Merv.
  Caravansary: This action allows the active player to purchase caravan cards by spending resource cubes, they will also acquire camel meeples if they're on the purchased caravan card.
  Caravan cards come in 4 types, the number of different types a player can hold at any time depends on how far they've travelled along the influence track.
  Every pair of caravan cards earns the player a bonus and sets earn victory points at the end of the game.
  Library: When a player takes the library action, they can spend resources to purchase scrolls. For every 2 scrolls a player acquires, they also acquire a breakthrough.
  Scrolls also have uses elsewhere.
  Marketplace: This grants the active player access to the marketplace which consists of 8 cities, this requires establishing a camp in one of the 4 inner cities. The first player to do this acquires the camel on the city.
  Once a camp has been built, the player can spend resources to buy goods from that city, they may also buy goods from adjacent cities by spending the required goods and a camel meeple. In later actions the player can expand their network of camps and thus do away with the need to spend camels to reach those cities.
  Camels spent this way are placed on caravan cards in the caravansary.
  Mosque: There are 4 camel meeples on the mosque track and taking this action allows the active player to move them. They may move as far as they want, provided they can pay the cost in resource cubes for each move. Every time a player advances along the track, it earns them a bonus; this might be a building upgrade, scoring upgrade and so on.
  Palace: The palace consists of 2 elements; the 4 halls and the favour track.
  Moving up the favour track scores victory points for the active player.
  Each of the 4 halls has 3 spaces and a cost, paying the associated cost allows the player to place meeples in these halls, which will score the player victory points at the end of every year for either scrolls, spices, good or buildings on mosque building sites. Points are earned by spending the advancements made on the favour track.
  Wall: This action allows the active player to build walls around the 5x5 grid, they can build as many segments in action as they can afford in resource points.
  Walls provide protection to the buildings they shield and also earn the player influence.
• Complete contract: If a player has the required mix of influence, resources cubes, goods, spices and scrolls, they may complete a contract in their turn and immediately score the contract's victory points.
  Completing a contract generally requires multiple actions, fortunately completing a contract itself is a free action.
• End of round: At the end of the round a new turn order may be established for the following round.
• End of year: Once the 4th round has been completed, the year has reached its end, but it's not quite over. There are still a couple matters to conclude.
  Invasion: In years 2 & 3, the Mongol horde invades and every unprotected building is destroyed! Although players may bribe the Mongols to leave a building alone with a resource cube matching the site's colour.
  End of year scoring: At the end of each year players score points, these come from several sources.
  Buildings: Each building scores the player a point.
  Scoring tiles: Scoring tiles acquired from the mosque track score points.

Endgame
Once the 3rd year is over and has been scored, there is there final scoring to calculate.
Sets of caravan cards score points.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Merv has several approaches to acquiring victory points but resource cubes is key to nearly all of them and the resource cube economy is very important. Acquiring cubes may conflict with choosing actions if the building site a player wants to activate produces cubes of a different colour, players will have to make choices and adapt.
Having said that, it pays to diversify but it also pays to pursue one one strategy such as the caravansary or mosque track.
Completing contracts feels like more of a bonus for sharp-eyed players than a long-term approach.
Players also need to consider palace actions, placing workers into the right spaces in halls and moving along the favour track can be a good source of points.

Players will need to also look towards defending Merv from attackers, losing buildings also loses the ability to gain resource cubes in later turns and of course loses victory points for the affected player(s).

Merv is definitely on the heavier side of board games, but to be honest it didn't feel deep, just fiddly.
I never got the feeling that I was making clever plays, instead I got the feeling that Merv was a heavy game made for the sake of being a heavy game.
When I took an action, it often felt like I was doing 2 half actions instead of 1 whole one and it took multiple different actions to achieve something.

E.g., I would undertake the marketplace action and acquire a good, Was I able to sell that good? No!
What about spices, what if I'd acquired spices? Can't sell them either.
To sell something, that is to complete a contract, I needed influence, which earned by building walls and also scrolls, which are acquired by visiting the library. Of course I also needed resources cubes.
​I know that some people will love this idea but I found it unengaging and a little dull and verging on tedious. Merv feels a little dry, unexciting and detached.

5th September 2021

Sunday night gaming on Board Game Arena continued with New Frontiers.

Galaxies: The New Frontier, these are the games of the website of 3 Spellcaster and a Dwarf.
Dodgy puns aside, New Frontiers is a sibling-game to Race for the Galaxy and Roll for the Galaxy and shares the same universe. Players will find many similarities between the 3.

Caveat: We have only ever played the digital version of New Frontiers

What's in a game?
Unlike the previously mentioned games, while New Frontiers is a board game, players of the other games will recognise many elements here.

• Player boards: Each player gets one of these double-sided, strangely shaped player boards. Roughly in the centre of each side of the board is a starting planet.
  Beneath the starting planet is a 3x4 grid with 12 spaces, but not a normal square spaces, instead each space on the grid is a sort of sideways chevron space.
  Finally, 3 of the 4 sides are lined with semi-circular indents, 8 in total. This is what gives the player boards their strange shape.
• Planet tiles: Planet tiles are double-sided and round - like planets and obviously slot into the indentations on the player boards. One side is grey and represents an explored planet, the other is coloured and represents a settled planet.
  Planets have a victory point value as well as a cost in money or military strength and colonists. Some planets are 'grey but most come in 1 of 4 colours which represents the type of goods they produce, most planets have some sort of special ability or bonus of some kind.
  Planets come in 3 types.
  Production worlds: These planets have a solid colour around their cost.
  Windfall worlds: These planets have a coloured nimbus around their cost. Windfall worlds start with 1 good in their respective colour when they enter the game.
  Military worlds: Military worlds can also be production and windfall worlds, however a military world are marked out by red lettering for the cost. Unlike the other types of planet which are paid for with money. Military worlds are settled by having military strength equal or greater than the planet's cost.
• Development tiles: These chevron shaped tiles are designed to fit on the player board's grid, all development tiles have a cost and confer some sort of benefit. Like planets, they are double-sided with different abilities on each side.
  Developments come in 2 types.
  Normal sized: Take up 1 space on the grid.
  Double width: These tiles take up 2 spaces on the grid and are more expensive but confer stronger abilities than the usual tiles.
• Goods: There are 4 types of good in New Frontiers, each type is pertinent to it's similarly coloured planets. Players of the earlier games will recognise them.
  Blue: Novelty goods.
  Tan: Rare elements.
  Green: Genes.
  Yellow: Alien artefacts.
• Action tiles: There are 7 action tiles, these determine player actions, more on them below.
• Priority tile: Used to determine player order.
• Player disks: Used in conjunction with the priority tile.
• Victory point tokens: These cards are made of card and are common to all Galaxies games
• Colonists meeples: These are one of the game's types of currency
• Credit tokens: The game's other type of currency.
• Bag: Used with planet tiles.

The art in New Frontiers is all of a good quality, I'm sure some of it has been reused from the previous games, as have the names of developments and planets. But that's no bad thing, since it gives all 3 games a unified look.
Like its siblings, New Frontiers uses an abundance of symbols and icons which can be daunting for new or inexperienced players.

How's it play?
Setup

• Action tiles: Set out the action tiles.
• Development tiles: Set out the 2 sets of development tiles.
• Victory points: Put out 12 VP per player.
• Colonists: Put out 12 colonist meeples per player.
• Planet tiles: Put the planet tiles into the bag and give it a good shake.
• ​Player order: Determine the player order and then set up the disks with the priority board accordingly.
• Player board: Randomly deal a player board to each player.
  Then, in turn order, each player choose a side and thus their starting planet.
  Give each player their starting credits.
  Finally give each player a colonist meeple.

On to play
In New Frontiers, turns are carried out according to the turn order as shown on the priority board. Actions are not simultaneous.
On their turn, the active player chooses a single action tile and performs the action on it, all other players may follow, in other words also perform that action. However, there is a bonus that only the active player gets for triggering a tile.
Each tile can only be used once per round, thus only 1 player benefits from the bonus a tile may confer. Furthermore, actions are actually performed in the order they are selected, there are no numbered phases in New Frontiers.
There are 7 actions that can be chosen, most of these will be familiar to players of Race for the Galaxy or Roll for the Galaxy.

• Explore: The active player draws 7 planet tiles and keeps 1, then in turn order, each other player also colonist takes a planet tile.
  Bonus: Once all other players have chosen their planets, the active player takes a 2nd planet. Remaining planets are returned to the bag.
  When acquired, planet tiles are placed grey-side-up in a circular indentation on the player's board. This planet has been explored but not colonised.
• Develop: The active player may purchase one of the available developments, then in turn order, so may the remaining players. Purchasing developments requires spending credits.
  Bonus: The active player pays 1 less credit when purchasing a development.
  Bonus tiles are placed on the grid on the player's board.
  
• Settle: The active player must either add 2 colonists to their reserve or settle on one of their explored planets. Other plays also must either take 2 colonists or settle a planet.
  Bonus: The active player gains a colonist before performing their action.
  Settling a planet requires a player to spend both relevant credits and also colonist meeples.
  Once a planet has been settled, it is flipped to the colour-side-up. The credits spent are returned to the supply, but colonist are placed on the planet they colonised and never returned to the supply. If it's a windfall world, it immediately acquires a goods token in its colour.
• Trade, Consume: Each player does the following 2 actions.
  Trade: Players may sell a single good on one of their planets for credits, the amount of credits gained depends on which one of the 4 types of good it is.
  Consume: If a player has goods in their tableau, they must use any and all consume powers they have at their disposal.
  Bonus: The player who triggered this action acquires 1 victory point.
• Produce: Players produce goods on all their production worlds.
  Bonus: There are 2 bonuses a play may get for triggering the Produce action. Firstly, the active player may produce a good on a windfall world. Secondly; in every round that Produce is not triggered, it acquire a credit, the active play may take all those credits when choosing Produce.
• Retreat Into Isolation: When this action is selected, nothing happens, no one gets anything!
  Bonus: This is the first of 2 actions 'unique' to New Frontiers.
  The player who activates this action gets 2 credits! Score!
  I guess a player may want to select this action to ensure other players don't benefit from their action... Or they really need 2 credits?
• Send Diplomatic Envoys: This is the other action unique to New Frontiers.
  Again, nobody gets anything when this action is selected.
  Bonus: Again this action has 2 bonuses, the active player acquires a victory point and then moves to the front of the priority board, this means they go first in the next round.

Round end: Once all players have had their turn, the round is over. If the Produce action wasn't selected this round, then add a credit to it.
Now a new round begins, possibly with a new player order and all the action tiles are now selectable again.
Rounds continue until the endgame conditions are met.

Endgame
Once the endgame is triggered, the current round ends and points are scored.
There are 4 ways to trigger the game end.
Settlements: A player adds a 7th settled worlds to the game board.
Developments: When the 11th or 12th development space on a player's board has been filled with a development.
Victory points: When the supply of victory points is depleted.
Colonists: When the supply of colonist meeples drops lower than 5.

Points come from settled planets and developments bought, some developments offer additional routes to earn point and finally, victory points are counted.
Points are tallied, highest score wins!

Overall
Players of the previous 2 games will find a lot here instantly familiar.
New Frontiers contains the same mix of intricate and mechanical interdependencies between planets and developments that feature in the other two games which allow players to create varied combinations of engine building and combinations.

There are a couple of mechanics New Frontiers does differently, particularly the action mechanic, firstly there's no set action order for actions to occur and more importantly, only 1 player can benefit from an action's bonus per round. If a player really needs a bonus action, it can make turn order very important. The existence of a turn order is new as well.

When playing New Frontiers, there are a couple of approaches always available to players, building their tableau or acquiring victory point tokens, or maybe getting one of the 9-point developments and working towards exploiting for points in the endgame. However, players will need to adapt to which planets become available to the, as unlike developments which use a drafting mechanic, planet acquisition will be to some degree, random.

But here's the thing; the additions New Frontiers brings to the table don't add anything to the game other than extra complexity, there's no extra depth or strategy, just extra resources to manage in place of the hand-as-money mechanic that makes Race for the Galaxy such a good game. ​Yet somehow, it even seems to have a shorter, less engaging play time?
You see, in Race for the Galaxy and Roll for the Galaxy, there are 2 ways to end a game; a player can complete their tableau or deplete the supply of victory tokens, both of which require players to play well or at least fast/better than other players. But in New Frontiers, it's possible to end the game by simply triggering the Settle action multiple times. It felt hugely unsatisfying way for the game to end.

Ultimately, New Frontiers is a good game, it has the pedigree of its predecessors, but it's also too familiar and too similar to Race for the Galaxy, which is in my opinion, hands down the better game. I would choose it over New Frontiers every time.

3rd August 2021

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

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

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

What's in a game?

• ​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.