26th April 2022

Tuesday is here and we're at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club.
​
Does Hellapagos mean hell in the Galapagos islands, I didn't see any giant tortoises in the game?

Anyway; Hellapagos is a (Somewhat!) cooperative game about surviving the ordeals of being shipwrecked on what would in other circumstances be a tropical paradise, building rafts and escaping.

What's in a game?

• Game board: Hellapagos comes with a oblong board that depicts an idyllically and cheerfully colourful tropical beach scene with survivors scavenging and hunting.
  There are spaces for completed raft cards and the weather deck.
  Raft track: There's a track to monitor the 6 stages required to build a raft.
  Resource track: Running around the perimeter of the board is the track for food and water.
• Cards: The game makes use of a couple of types of cards.
  Wreckage cards: This deck of cards contains items that players might find when scavenging the wrecked remains of their boat. This might include bottled water, food or even weapons and more!
  Weather deck: This slim deck of cards is used to manage the very changeable weather and rainfall in Hellapagos. Each card will display a number of raindrops to represent the weather.
  Hurricane card: This card goes into the weather deck, when it appears, it's bad news!
  Status cards: Double-sided cards which displayed the poisoned status for people unfortunate to be poisoned and on the flip side show the dead status for really unfortunate players.
  Raft cards: When the players manage to build a raft, they get a raft card.
• Cardholder: A fantastically unnecessary but excellent little card holder for the wreckage deck.
• Wooden balls: Used to manage both hunting for fish and scavenging for wood. There are 6 of them, each one shows 1-3 fish and one is black.
• Bag: This looks like a hemp bag and is used to blindly draw the wooden balls.
• Tokens: There are distinctly shaped tokens for the game's 3 types of resources, a water drop for water, a fish token for food and errr, a disc for wood?

Only the cards are what I would consider average in build production, which is to say, they're fine. The tokens feel suitable chunky, as do the balls and bag (Sic) which are a nice touch. The standout component is the completely superfluous cardholder which displays like the wrecked hull of a half sunken ship.

Hellagapos makes use of excellent bright and colourful artwork throughout, especially on the cards. With thick black lines and lots of colour it has an almost ligne claire quality to it. Furthermore, there's also a lot of humorous subtext to the art. Like the pendulum that makes another player take a one action of their chosen by the card-player (Hypnotises them!) and so on.

There's minimal iconography in the game and what there is, such as water or fish icons ​are easy to comprehend. Actions on the survivor cards are all detailed by text instead.

How's it play?
Setup

• Game board: Put out the game board.
  Resources: Put the food and water tokens on their starting positions on the resource track as determined by the player count.
  Raft track: Put the wood token on to the 0 spot on the raft track.
  Raft deck: Put out the raft deck adjacent to the board.
• Weather deck: Shuffle the weather deck and draw 5 cards into a face-down deck.
  Now shuffle the hurricane card into this deck.
  Place the deck (Now with 6 cards.) face-down on to the weather card space on the board.
  Put the remaining weather cards on top off the 6 cards.
  This means the hurricane card will appear somewhere in the last half of the weather deck.
• Wooden balls: Put all 6 wooden balls into the bag and give it a vigorous shake.
• Wreckage cards: Shuffle the wreckage cards into a face-down deck. Deal 3 or 4 to each player as per player count.
  Put the remaining cards into the cardholder.
• First Player: Determine a start player.

On to play
Hellapagos uses a normal turn structure with the active player taking their turn before play progresses to the player to their left.
The game has 4 basic actions a player can perform but because it's a cooperative game, there can be a lot of discussion about moves and strategies among players and later, negotiation taking place.
A round represents 'a day' and plays as follows

• Weather: Any previous weather is discarded and the active player flips over a weather card which will set the rainfall for the day which depicted as raindrops. This might be 0 or all the way up to 3 raindrops.
  In the latter half of the game, the hurricane card may appear, more on this below.
• Actions: Now, starting with the first player, each person takes 1 of the actions below.
  • Catch fish: The active player blindly pulls a wooden ball from the bag, the number of fish displayed on the ball is how many fish they collected and the food token on the resource track is increased accordingly.
  • Collect water: For their action, the active play may choose to collect water. The amount collected will be dependent on the current weather card and thus will be between 0-3. Obviously collecting water when there are 0 raindrops on the weather card is a pointless, conversely, collecting water when there are 3 raindrops would allow them to move the water token up the resource track by 3.
  • Collect wood/build raft: When collecting wood, there is some risk attached.
    First, the active player should advance the wood token 1 space along the raft track.
    After this, the active player must decide if they want to risk collecting more wood. If they decide to collect more, they must announce how much they are collecting (Between 1-5.). Then they must blindly draw that many wooden balls from the bag.
    Black balled!: If any of the wooden balls that are pulled from the bag is the black ball, then the player is immediately poisoned and they do not collect any wood. More on poisoning below. If all the balls are white, they avoided the pesky snakes that inhabit the forest, collecting the full amount amount of wood that they announced and moving the wood token along the raft track and equal amount.
    Building rafts: Once the 6th piece of wood is collected (The wood token reaches 6 on the raft track.) then the active player has finished a raft! Place a raft card on the corresponding space on the board.
  • Search wreckage: The active player can spend their action to draw a wreckage card from the deck.
    There are 2 types of wreckage card; permanent and ongoing. Wreckage cards can generally be played by their controlling player at any time or in response to another player's action or card regardless of what type they are. Although their effect will occur after an announced action. (There are no 'interrupts' here!)
    Furthermore cards can be played face-up to try and intimidate or face-down to bluff as well as kept secret.
    Permanent: Some cards have ongoing effects, to make use of them, they must be played in front of the controlling player. Even though they are permanent
    Single use: These are one-and-done, players can keep these in their hand until they decide to use them.
    Wreckage cards have a broad number of functions, from helping the group to helping (Or harming!) an individual or even influencing voting. 
• Next player: Once the active player has taken their action, play progresses to their left.
• End of round/day: When a players have taken their actions, the following occurs:
  Consume water: Move the water token down the resource track by a number of spaces equal to the number of current players. If this would take the token to lower than 0, then the players have a problem. This means that 1 or more players will need to be eliminated from the game, the exact number will be equal to how much more water would be needed. E.g., if 7 players only have 4 water on the resource track, 3 players would have to be eliminated. This is done through voting (See below.), the game also provides various methods to eliminate players via wreckage cards.
  Consume food: This is mechanically identical to consuming water but for the food resource.
  Check victory conditions: Once water and food have been dealt with, players should check to see if they meet victory conditions.
  New first player: Once a round is over and the victory conditions have not been met, the player to the left of the first player becomes new first player for the subsequent round.
• Voting: This occurs when there isn't enough food or water and a player needs to be eliminated. The first player counts to 3 and all players simultaneously point at the player they want to eliminate. Whoever has the most fingers pointing at them is out!
  If an eliminated player has been hoarding a ration card that would provide the required resource, they can discard if after the vote to save themselves, although they may attract the irritation of other players by hording it in the first place. Alternatively, another player may choose to save them with a wreckage card.
• Poison: A player may become poisoned from searching for wood or eating or drinking bad rations. Regardless of the source, the effect is the same.
  Firstly, a poisoned character cannot participate in voting while they are sick, then in the following round, their only action can be to remove the poisoned status.
• Elimination: If a player is eliminated, then that's it, they're are out of the rest of the game. After this, their remaining wreck cards must be redistributed.
  All permanent cards they had in play - except a gun are discarded from play. The gun is returned to the eliminated player's hand.
  If a player was eliminated by voting, the cards they had in hand are distributed between their neighbours.
  If they were eliminated by another player, then that player gets all the wreckage cards.
• Hurricane: When the hurricane card appears, it marks the beginning of the end. The game will finish at the end of the current round, players must leave on any rafts they've built along with their water and food rations.

Endgame
There 3 ways Hellapagos can end.

• Check for victory: At the end of every round, the players must check if they meet the victory conditions.
  Victory condition: Once water and food have been consumed for the round, if the remaining water, food and rafts are at least equal to the current number of players, then they sail to safety.
  If all players got away, congratulations are in order, it is, in my opinion very difficult to achieve this.
  It's a likely occurrence that eliminating some players freed up resources to escape, if so, then the escapees can be considered the winners.
• Hurricane: When the hurricane card has appeared, players must leave the island at the end of the round if they can. They'll need the requisite water, food and rafts for this as per the victory conditions.
  It means players must be eliminated until their numbers are low enough to allow the remaining player to get away.
  Again, any survivors who get away can be considered winners.
  If players cannot leave the island on rafts for any reason... then see below:
• Total loss: If no players can leave on a raft after the hurricane hits, then everybody loses!
  If all the players manage to starve or die of thirst, goes without saying that it's a total loss.

Overall
There's a lot to unpack with Hellapagos and I'll start with the mechanics.
The write-up is a little long and belies the fact that in play, the game is pretty straight foward to understand and play.
More importantly; it's clear that the game's mathematics have been balanced so that it's very hard to get all players off the island. Which makes sense from a game-perspective, it forces players to consider different late-game strategies.

If say, a group of 6 players had 9 days to get off the island, they'd need the following.
Water: 6 per day +6 to leave -12, which is their starting water. So 48 water.
Food: 6 per day +6 to leave - 10, which is their starting food, so 50 food.
Rafts: At 6 wood per raft, they'll need 36 wood.
In other words 5.4 water per day, 5.5 food per day, 4 wood per day.
If the player split their labour evenly per task, that would mean:
2 players getting 2.7 water per day each.
2 players getting 2.75 food per day each.
2 players getting 2 wood per day each.

Getting both water and food at that rate is pretty hard. Each player would essentially have to get 3 or their chosen resource per day, every day. Since 3 is the top end result players could hope for, it's unlikely this will occur.
Getting 2 wood per day per player seems easy but each player has a 16% chance of being poisoned, this might not seem high but when it does occur, it means that they only get 1 wood and lose their next action. Catching up in a following round mean getting 5 wood, this is a lot more tricky.
Of course players may want to search the wreckage and rightfully so, there are some very useful cards to be found in there, including for example; cards that skip the consume food action among others. On the other hand, it's equally as likely that something which helps a player personally might be found...

Players may want to divide their labour differently as well; when lots of rain appears, it might be good to get more people gathering water and 'get 'ahead' on the water track.
A game like Hellapagos thrives on player social interaction, if people don't engage with it, it won't be a particularly interesting or memorable game.

Ultimately though, players will sooner or later come to a conclusion; there won't be enough resources for all the players to get off the island.

This changes the game in 2 ways.
Firstly, players will begin looking at who to vote off as food and water become scarcer. Players will try to emphasise their own usefulness and see who can be a good target for  elimination during voting.
This is where having a valuable item can keep a player alive. Some ongoing cards are very handy and eliminating the player who controls it, also eliminates the item. Not a coincidence in the rules I think.
Additionally, players may also look to horde rations on wreckage cards, waiting until voting has occurred, allowing others to be eliminated and only using it when they have been voted out. However, other players can look at this very negatively and it can draw their ire.
players are free to form alliances or betray one another, gang up on other players, openly or otherwise and so on.
Needless to say negotiation and voting can become very tense.

Secondly, people will start to realise that when player counts are sufficiently low, that eliminating players after collecting resources can leave the survivors with enough resources to escape the island.
The thing is though; it's likely that they'll be enough food and water to prevent any voting from going ahead. Players will have to resort to 'other methods' to removing opponents.
This is where the game gets brutal and the pistols start getting used.

Hellapagos mixes cooperative game play with a large dose of 'take that' actions. In the early-game it's all pleasant enough but once it progresses on, everything can change.

I, like many other people I imagine, am not a fan of games that have player elimination, luckily for Hellapagos, players won't generally spend too long just watching. It doesn't frequently occur early in the game and once the eliminations start, they don't stop until the game does!
I will also add; if game with lots of direct 'in-your-face' conflict and player elimination aren't your thing, it would prudent to give Hellapagos a miss.

but if this sort of thing is your jam, then with it's 12-player count! Hellapagos is a good game to try.

15th March 2022

We're with the Woking Gaming Club at The Sovereigns for some Tuesday evening entertainment.

Four Gardens is a game about you guessed it... four gardens, it's also about spinning a pagoda! I'm not sure if Spinning Pagodas would be a better name or not?
Why are players spinning a pagoda? Apparently, the pagoda contains some gods! Who... I guess... like... being spun?

What's in a game?

• Pagoda: Although it has to be constructed, the game comes with a 4-level pagoda that spins, that is each floor spins independently - spinning is very important in this game!
  Each roof on the pagoda displays 0-3 of the resource icons. There are 4 sides to each roof and 4 roofs, thus 16 sets of icons.
• Scoring board: There are 4 scoring tracks in different colours on this board, one for each of the game's 4 'gods'.
• Cards: Four Gardens comes with 70 double-sided cards. The front of each card (Called the groundwork side.) displays various symbols and information while the back of each card shows one part of a panoramic illustration.
  Groundwork side: There symbols in the top corners, top half and bottom half. They are:
  God: In the top left corner of each card is the symbol for which god it is associated with and also which track it scores on when completed.
  Dots: The top right corner displays a number of dots, which is info on how the card's position in a panorama, it shows the type of panorama it is and both the number of cards in that particular panorama and where this card goes in that panorama.
  There are 4 'types' of colour coded panorama ranging from 2-5 cards in size.
  Actions: In the top half of each card there will be displayed 2 actions. One action is always a handcart action and the other will be a 'wild' or 'rotate' action. Using  one of the available actions requires the card be discarded.
  Cost: Finally, the cost to construct this card will be shown at the bottom.
  Panorama side: The backs of these cards each display part of a garden landscape, and certain cards can be placed together to form panoramic illustrations of varying size. The top 2 corners also display the same information as the top corners on the other side.
• Tiles: The game makes use of a several types of small tiles.
  Planning tiles: These rectangular tiles each have 4 spaces to hold resources during the game.
  Bonus planning tiles: These square tiles have a single space and can hold a single resource alongside the owning player's planning tile.
  VP tiles: These tiles earn extra VPs.
  Wild resource tiles: This allows the player to acquire more resources as described below.
• Tokens: There are 2 types of tokens in Four Gardens.
  Resources: There are 4 types of resource in the game, each one is delineated by both colour and shape. There are blue water drop, grey stone, brown wood/tree and green plant tokens.
  Score markers: There are 4 scoring trackers in each player colour, these are classic eurogame little wooden cubes.

The pagoda is constructed of fairly sturdy feeling card, each floor can be individually rotated and it felt a little precarious when doing so, having said that, it never felt like it would cause a problem. The pagoda comes in several pieces, has 4 'floors' and has to be constructed. Since I played someone else's copy, I cannot comment on how hard or easy that was. It's definitely the game's standout component though.
The resource tokens felt like they were wooden and the wooden cubes were pretty standard wooden cube components, which is something I like.
The tiles were standard quality card tile and fine, I thought having tiles with little hole to hold resource tokens was a pretty smart move.
The card were also pretty standard quality from what I could tell.

From the large, eye-catching and rotating pagoda to the tactile resource tokens shaped and coloured identically to their icons in the game; Four Gardens has excellent presentation.
The backs of the cards which, when placed together form the panoramic views of the titular feature excellent, colourful and interesting art.

Four Gardens features a fair amount of iconography, from the 4 scoring tracks and types of gardens to symbols for resources and different actions available on cards. For the most part, it's instantly understandable and there should be few problems with the iconography.

How's it play?
Setup

• ​Pagoda: Randomly put together the 4 floors of the pagoda.
• Tiles: Put out the 3 sets of tiles face-up in their 3 stacks. The bonus VPs and 'take wild resource' tiles should have the highest value at the top and be in descending order.
• Cards: Shuffle the cards into a face-down deck(With the garden picture side up.).
  Draw 3 cards and place them 'face-up' in a drafting area.
• Players: The players should organise themselves at about 90' around the pagoda, so they each have a side of it facing them.
  Deal 5 cards to each player and give them a planning tile in their colour. Each player should also place their score trackers on the 4 scoring tracks.
• First player: Determine a first player.

On to play
As the name suggests, the objective is to create 4 garden panoramas using the backs of the cards.
​Four Gardens uses the traditional turn, with the active player acting with play then progressing to the player on the left.
During their turn, the active must perform exactly 3 actions. Each action also requires the player to play or discard one of the cards in their hand. There are 4 actions that can be performed, these can be performed in any order the player sees fit. The actions are:

• Groundwork: With this action, the active player takes a card from their hand and places it in front of them, it is now ready to be 'constructed'.
  There are only 2 restrictions when laying a groundwork card. Firstly, 2 identical cards cannot be both played. Only 1 of each position in any of the panoramas can be played. Players are also restricted to a maximum of 3 groundwork cards under construction at any time.
  It's worth noting that when putting a groundwork card down, it does not have to be the first in a panorama.
• Move resources: The active player must discard a card with the pertinent symbol (Which is all of them to be honest.) to move resources, this allows them to rearrange resources between groundwork cards or from their planning tile. Finally, the active player may discard resources from their planning tile and in fact, this is the only way to do to.
  Scoring: If, once resources have been moved around a card's cost is completed, it is then flipped over, becomes a panorama card and scored. Thus if the card had a blue symbol, the active player's score marker is moved 1 space along the blue track.
  Further scoring: That's not the end of scoring though. When a new card is added to a current panorama, all cards in that panorama are scored again. So if another card was added to the card with the blue symbol, then the active player would score in the blue track again. So it means that the 1st card played in a 5-card panorama would be scored 5 times!
  Completed set: If a panorama is completed, as well as scoring, the active player immediately acquires one of the bonus tiles and if necessary, resolves it.
  Knock back!: Each scoring track only reaches the '10' spot, if scoring would take the active player's marker above 10 on a track, they cannot go any higher. Instead, the scoring markers of all other players are pushed back 1 space instead!
  If a player's marker is then knocked back off the first spot on a track, then they cannot put the marker back on the track and will score 0 for that track!
• Rotate pagoda/collect resources: This is the most complicated action in the game. It allows the player to rotate the pagoda and collect resources if they discard a card with the relevant icon. That icon will also determine which 'floor' of the pagoda is rotated and how resources.
  When a floor is rotated, all the floors above it are also rotated in a similar fashion and it is rotated 90'.
  After this, the active player collects all the resources for the side of the pagoda that are facing them. The icon will determine the order in which the resources are collected. Either from the top going downwards, or bottom going up. This is very important because when resources are collected, they are placed in the active player's planning tile spaces in the order they are collected. If there no spaces available in the player's planning tile, then unplaced resources are discarded. As you can see, the order in which resources are collected is very important.
• Take a wild resource: If the active player discards a card with the wild resource icon, they can take a resource of their choice and place it either on a groundwork card or planning tile space.
  The wild resource tokens functions identically but allows the player to acquire multiple resources.
• End turn: Once the active player has completed their 3 actions they draw cards from either the displayed cards or blindly from the deck until they have 5 in their hand, play then progresses to the player on the left.

​Endgame
Depending on the player count, once 8-10 panorama cards have been constructed by any player, play goes into the endgame and the current round is completed.
Players calculated VPs earned from the 4 scoring tracks and points they may have gotten from a bonus VP track.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
I'll start by discussing the pagoda - the game's most obvious feature.
Is it a gimmick mechanic? Maybe. Does it work well? Definitely.
It's also quite a unique mechanic and not something I've seen anywhere else.

When used in conjunction with the rule limiting how many resources can be collected on the planning tile, it forces players to really think about how they have to manipulate the pagoda to get the resources they need:
It takes an action to empty a planning tile that's been filled unnecessarily and that's an action that could be used elsewhere.
I think it's a set of mechanics that works very well.

Talking about the pagoda does lead me to one gripe: Which is the rule where all players should sit around the pagoda at 90' angles. Players don't always have the right gaming space to accommodate this and while strictly speaking, it's not necessary as players can remember what side of the pagoda is meant to be facing them, it's inconvenient and finicky. 

The card-synergy, or more accurately score-synergy is a pretty clever rule, providing players a reason to work towards completing panoramas.
The 4 scoring tracks seem a little unnecessary but in practice they work fine.

This brings me to the knock-back mechanic. It feels a little harsh that, if a player gets their scoring marker knocked off the board, it can't come back into scoring. On the other hand if a player has reached maximum on a track and other players are lingering at the bottom, it's probably not a priority for those other players, so not that much of a loss. 
So yes, it feels a bit harsh but it's not game breaking.
All of this means players will look to optimise the order in which they play cards to optimise how they increase their scores. Concentrating on increasing scores in 1 or 2 tracks can potentially knock-back other players. Conversely, working towards completing panoramas can earn bonuses which may prove useful elsewhere; sometimes you'll be able to do both but sometimes not and looking for opportunities to exploit these times is vital.

The also makes use of a variation of the hand-as-currency mechanic, except here it's used to trigger actions and not to actually pay for something. Despite this difference, it places that same conundrum on players; which is how to choose which card to discard? Obviously, they'll be times when it has to be a card with the action they need but otherwise, it's another meaningful decision to make.

In conclusion; Four Gardens is a fairly easy to learn set-collecting game that provides players with enough decisions to be engaging, fun and provides unusual resource gathering and scoring mechanics which makes it feel unique.
I enjoyed it and think it's worth a try.

9th February 2022

It's Wednesday night and we're round Simon's for some gaming fun. The evening's game was In the hall of the Mountain King.

Ask yourself: What is it that trolls like to do? Live under bridges perhaps; no. Chase goats maybe; no. What about make trouble on the internet; no. What trolls really like to do is dig tunnels (The fancier the better.) and move statues!

What's in a game?

• Board: In the Hall of the Mountain King comes with a double-sided board and the player count determines which side is used. Regardless of this; both sides depicts a mountain surrounded by wilderness and features a square grid that contains a large number of icons and is divided into 5 zones.
  Heart of the Mountain: This fiery spot sits at the centre of the board and is surrounded by 5 bands of colour which form the game's 5 zones. The furthest zone away is dark grey, the next is light grey, then red, orange and finally yellow which is the closest band.
  Buried resources: Across the board are a number of these icons on spaces.
  Rubble spaces: These spaces will hinder players as they expand through the mountain.
  Start spots: There are player starting spots throughout the dark grey band.
  Statue spots: There are also starting spots for statues littered throughout the dark grey band.
  Workshop spaces: These are empty spaces upon which players can build workshop if they get the opportunity.
  Pedestal track: Outside of the grid is this track which keeps tally of which type of pedestal have been built in each zone. There 3 types of pedestal and thus 15 spaces.
  Score tracker: Finally a score tracker runs the perimeter of the board.
• Player board: There are one of these long rectangular for each player in their colour and every board contains information on the pricing structure/scoring for tunnel tiles as well as listing turn actions and the scoring for statues/pedestals.
  Along the top row are 4 indicators for card positioning and finally, the central area has a storage space to place resources.
• Tiles: The game makes uses of numerous types of tiles.
  Gate Tiles: These are small tiles that fit on a single space on the board, there are 4 of them in player colours and they represent the starting spaces for players.
  Great Hall tiles: These square and rectangular tiles of varying size display artwork for different types of rooms, they go from 2x2 up to 4x4.
  Each tile has an altar space which is a blue/orange/white circle. Each tile also displays two different VP scores - more on this later.
  Tunnel tiles: These are sort of like tetramino shaped tiles except they come with a varied number of blocks ranging from 2-5, some of which have holes in them called anchors. They allow players to see the colour of the square and thus the zone beneath the anchor.
  Workshop tiles: These single space tiles will be placed by players on the workshop spaces during the course of play. Workshop tiles have special abilities which can be utilised by players.
• Cards: There are various types of cards that In the Hall of the Mountain King makes use of.
  Spell cards: Each of these cards contains a spell that will benefit the player who uses it in some way.
  Troll cards: These cards are subdivided into even more types! The top half of each card features a picture of a troll and the bottom half will display resources.
  Starter troll cards: There are 4 sets of the 6 starter cards in each player colour. The starter cards feature 2 rows of resources delineated by a dotted line
  Troll card: The subdividing continues! The standard troll cards are further divided into type 1, 2 and 3. The higher the type, the more resource symbols the card will contain and therefore produce.
• Tokens: In the Hall of the Mountain King also makes use of various tokens.
  Coronation tokens: There are 2 of these round card tokens, valued at 5 and 3 VPs respectively. As well as scoring for players, they trigger the game end.
  Pedestal point tokens: These small square tokens are used in conjunction with the pedestal track on the board, consequently there are 15 of them, valued from 1-4 VPs each.
  Pedestal reminder tokens: That's right, the game has tokens to remind players to do something and that something is to do with pedestals! These tokens are each coloured blue/orange/white.
  Resource tokens : Yep, In the Hall if the Mountain King also makes use of lots of different types of resources, 7 to be exact.
  Stone: Little grey wooden cubes are used to represent this resource.
  Iron: These are little black wooden cubes.
  Heartstone: These little wooden cubes are red.
  Carts: These brown wooden tokens are actually shaped a little like carts.
  Hammers: Green wooden tokens shaped like... hammers!
  Runes: These are actually translucent acrylic purple gem shaped tokens.
  Coins: Standard round card currency tokens.
• Draw bag: A bag used to blindly draw pedestal tokens.
• Meeples: There are 2 types of meeple the game makes use of.
  Statues: There are 3 types of statue in the game, they are coloured blue/orange/white. Blue statues represent ice and at the top, are shaped a little like an ice crystal I guess. Orange represents fire and has a flame shaped top, while the white statues are shaped like a crescent moon.
  Pedestals: Pedestals are identically shaped and come in the same three colours as statues.

That's it for components and In the Hall of the Mountain King uses a lot of them!

There's certainly a good amount of wooden tokens and meeples here, the acrylic crystals are also a nice addition.
None of the other components struck me as being poor quality and they're typical of what is expected in a modern game.
There are a couple of minor quibbles though.
The pedestal points tokens are a bit small and fiddly to handle
The second is a bit of personal grumble - which is that all the carts are brown but depending on where the carts are acquired from will represent different colours. Carts in a player's central area can be used for any colour of statue. But carts from icons on troll cards can only be used to move statutes of a certain colour - which is indicated by the colour of the icon used to acquire the cart! Makes sense... right? Maybe not? Surely it would have been useful to include some carts of the relevant colours?

There isn't a great deal of art in the game, mostly on on the spell and troll cards but it's all well illustrated with bold colours and and is fairly varied. There are 4 types (Or clans.) of troll cards and 3 types correspond to the blue/orange/white colour motif that runs through the game and I quite like how those trolls cards have a colour pallet to match it their types.
Having said that; the starter cards all feature the same piece of artwork that has been coloured matched to each player colour which is a little disappointing.

For the most, the game's iconography is actually straightforward and easily understood. Only the aforementioned issue with carts being a small problem. If the cart icon has a coloured background then a cart that is sourced from that icon can only be used for that colour of statue.
Luckily it's not a gamebreaker although it's finicky rule to remember.

How's it play?
Setup

• Board: Which side of the game board that is used will be dictated by player count.
  Statues: The board must be populated with statues. Randomly choose the colour of the first statue and put a statue meeple of that colour it in any statue space, then randomly select a statue from the remaining 2 colours and place it in the next statue space going clockwise. Finally place the final colour of statue clockwise after the second statue.
  Now that there's a pattern of 3 colours, repeat the pattern going clockwise until all statue spaces are occupied
  Pedestal point tokens: Randomize the tokens face-down and place them in the 15 spaces on the pedestal track. Then flip them face-up
• Workshop tiles: Shuffle the workshop tiles into a face-down and stack and draw 2 per player plus 1 more and place them out face-up. The remaining tiles have no use in the game.
• Tunnel tiles: Sort the tunnel tiles by type.
• Spell cards: Shuffle the spell cards into a face-down deck and deal 3 face-up. These 3 cards are called the spell book.
• Bag: Put all the pedestal meeples into the draw bag and give it a vigorous shake.
• Troll cards: Sort the troll cards by type and shuffle them into respective 3 face-down decks, then deal cards from the deck according to their type. When they are all placed, they should form a sort of ziggurat shape so they don't line up in columns, they are known charmingly as the Horde.
  Type 1: Deal 5 type 1 cards and place them in a row at the 'bottom' of the ziggurat.
  Type 2: Deal 4 of these cards and place them in a row directly above the type 1 cards but vertically positioned between the cards from the row below.
  Type 3: Deal 3 type 3 cards and also place them in a row above the type 2 cards, again vertically positioned between the cards from the row below.
  Pedestal meeples: Randomly draw 4 pedestal meeples from the bag and place them on the row of type 2 cards.
  Pedestal reminder tokens: Place 1 of these on each card in the type 3 row.
• Coronation tokens: Depending on the player count put out 1 or both of these tokens.
• 1st player: determine a start player.
• Player boards: Give each player the player board, gate tile and starter troll cards in their player colour
  Gate tile: In turn order, each player should put their gate tile on to one of the starting spots on the board.
  Starting trolls: Each player should shuffle their 6 starter cards into a face-down deck, draw 2 and then should put 1 of the 2 cards into any of the 4 allotted spaces above their player board.
  Now draw another card and again put 1 of them into the 3 remaining spaces. Repeat this until all 4 spaces are filled in a row. This is the beginning of each players Trollmoot and as further cards are added will eventually resemble a pyramid.
  Each player should now have 1 card in their hand and 1 card left face-down.
  Resources: Each player gains the resources listed on the bottom row of the 4 cards they put into their playing area. Once the resources have been gathered, partially slide the cards under the player board so that the bottom row of resources are hidden.
  Bonus resources: The first player does not gain any bonus resources! However, all other player do. They will gain resources from the bottom row of 1 or 2 of the cards they didn't put into their play area depending on their position in the turn order.
  Regardless of whether players gain bonus resources or not, the 2 un-played starter troll cards are discarded out of play.

Phew! We're ready to go now.

On to play
Play during In the Hall of the Mountain King will have active player performing 4 actions before play moves clockwise to the next player.

• Spells and workshop: The active player may perform one or both of these actions.
  Spells: The active player may spend a rune token to use the ability of any one of the 3 revealed spell cards by placing it on the pertinent spell card.
  Once a spell has accumulated 3 runes, it's discarded and new spell is drawn from the deck.
  Workshop: The active player may make use of one workshop's abilities which is connected to their tunnel network. It can be used as many times as it is connected to any tunnel network - even that of another player.
  Typically workshops allow players to swap around resources, any gained this way are placed into the storage on the active player's board.
• Dig or recruit: The active player must perform only 1 of the 2 following actions.
  Dig: This involves spending resources to acquire a tunnel tile and place it on the board, there are obviously some restrictions and quite a few rules here.
  ​The cost of purchasing a tunnel tile is equal to the spaces it occupies, i.e., a 4 space tile costs 4 resources. This can be paid in only stone or only iron or only heartstone and not any mix if the 3. Players can trade any 4 resources for 1 of their choice at any time. When a tunnel tile is bought, it immediately scores VPs depending on it's size (Except the 2 space tunnel which scores nothing.) and the type of material used to construct the tunnel. Stone scores the least and heartstone scores the most as indicated in the bottom right corner of the player board.
  Next, the active player must put the tunnel tile on to the board; all positioning of and measuring of these tiles is done orthogonally. A tunnel tile can be rotated or flipped anyway the player chooses but must go adjacent to the active player's gate tile or a tunnel tile connected to the active player's tunnel network. Furthermore, there must always be at least 1 space between the networks of all players - no 2 networks can connect.
  If the tile covers any rubble spaces, the active player must spend hammer tokens equal to the rubble spaces being covered.
  If the tile covers any buried resources icon(s) or a statue meeple, the player gains them. Resources are placed into the storage space on their player board and statues are placed back on the same space on the game board but now on the tunnel tile.
  If the tile has been placed adjacent to an empty workshop space, the active player may place one of the available workshop there.
  If the tile that has been place has an anchor point on it and the active player has a pedestal in their storage then they may put the pedestal on the anchor spot, this can only ever be done just after the tile has been placed. There's a further restriction, each zone can only ever contain 1 pedestal of any colour. Since there are 5 zones, there can only be 5 pedestals of one colour in the game at any time and only 3 (One of each colour.) in each zone. There can be a maximum of 15 pedestals in the game which matches the 15 spaces on the pedestal track. Speaking of which, when a player puts a pedestal on the board, they immediately gain the pedestal point token from the space that matches the zone where the statue was placed and the statue's colour. This should be kept face-down in the players storage and revealed during scoring.
  Recruit: The active player may recruit one of the trolls from the Horde and depending on which level the troll is recruited from, it may cost 2 or 5 coins.
  If a type 1 troll is recruited, it costs nothing, if a type 2 troll from the middle row is recruited, the 2 troll cards beneath it must be bribed​ with 1 coin each, thus 2 coins. If a type 3 troll is recruited, then the 2 trolls beneath them must be bribed and then the 3 trolls beneath the the 2 must also be bribed for a total cost of 5 coins. all bribes are placed on the troll card itself. If a troll card acquires 4 coins, it's removed from play and replaced.
  When the active player takes a troll card, they also get anything on the card, including coins. So for a type 2 troll that would be the pedestal on it and on a type 3 the pedestal reminder token means they can take the pedestal of their choice from the bag.
  After a troll card has been taken, it is immediately replaced from it's relevant deck. For type 2 trolls, new pedestals are randomly drawn from the bag and for type 3, the reminder tokens are placed on them.
  Now the player must put the troll card into their Trollmoot. When doing this, it must go position above 2 other troll cards and overlap their top corners. Thus the 2nd row of a Trollmoot will contain 3 cards, the 3rd 2 troll cards and the top row will contain a single troll card, who become the chieftain of the Trollmoot. When the active player gains their chieftain, they can take one of the coronation tokens if there is one available.
  Additionally, when a card is added to the Trollmoot, it is activated, this means that the player acquires the resources listed on the card. Not only that, the 2 cards beneath the card are also activated and then the 3 cards beneath the 2 are activated and so forth in a cascading effect. This means that when the chieftain card is placed, it will activate all cards in the Trollmoot.
  When resources are acquired this way, they are placed on the troll card that generated them and not on the storage space on the player board. This is important to remember because if a troll card is already contains a resource it produces, then the player does not acquire it.
  This means it's a good idea to use resources on troll cards before those on the storage or to use workshops to cycle resources off of troll cards.
• Great Hall: The active player may place 1 great hall tile per turn into their network by placing it on top of their tunnel tiles. However, the player's tunnel network must contain an area at least as large the great hall tile to accommodate it. E.g., a tunnel network must contain an area at least 3x3 in to to accommodate the 3x3 great hall tile.
  Every great hall tile has an altar space and 2 differing VP values. The 2nd value is what the tile is worth if a statue of any colour is placed on the altar space
• Move Statues: The active player spend cart tokens to move statues.
  Cart tokens that come from the players storage on their player board can be used to move statues of any colour.
  Cart tokens that come from troll cards can only move statues that match the colour of the cart icon on that troll card. I.e., the cart token on a troll card with a white cart icon can only be used to move a white statue - even though the cart token itself is brown!
  Each cart token spent allows the active player to move a statue to anywhere on another tunnel tile (Or another space on the same tile - only 1 statue can ever occupy a single space.).
  This can involve putting the statue on a pedestal of matching colour which doubles the statue's VP value.
• Next player: when the active player has completed all 4 phases, play progresses clockwise to the next player.

Okay, that's it for the main rules.

Endgame
The endgame is triggered when there no coronation tokens left to acquire.
The current round is completed and 2 more rounds are played.
Players then calculate VPs, a player's VPs may come from the following sources.

Score tracker.
Statues - depending on their position in the 5 zones and doubled if the player managed to place them on a pedestal.
Great hall tokens in a player's network - with or without statues.
​Pedestal points for placing pedestals.
Coronation tokens.
Unspent resources; these can earn points. Every 3-of-a-kind scores an extra VP.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Despite having quite a few rule to remember and sounding quite complicated, In the Hall of the Mountain King is actually pretty straightforward in practice and many of the rules are obvious when in action.

​There's definitely a couple of finicky rules though, and again - it's to do with the carts and pedestals. It feels like an unnecessary complication to have these differently coloured carts to move statues.
The rule that restrict pedestals to 1 per colour in each zone also feels a but cumbersome. I know why the rule is there: It encourages competition in a game that otherwise has little interaction between players.
​Players will want to be the first to get a pedestal as close to the Heart of the Mountain as possible. It locks out completing players and offers a big scoring opportunity.

It means that players are put into a balancing act of needing build their tunnel network but also acquire resources to make this expansion happen. Clever placement of tiles will earn players some resources but recruiting trolls is the best way to get them and you'll note that digging and recruiting are pretty much the only 2 mutually exclusive actions in a turn.

There's more to tunnel tile placement too, pedestals and thus statues have to go on anchor spots and it's these need to be as close to the centre of the board as possible, sometimes it'll be tricky to get it right, or it'll require not getting something else. Being able to avoid rubble spaces helps as well.
Resource management also has more to it. Spending resources from troll cards first is prudent, as is using workshops to change them into other resources - because they go back on to the storage space and not the troll card. It does involve trying to think ahead about what resources can be acquired and what will be needed.

This brings me neatly to the Trollmoot/Horde elements of the game, with their overlapping and cascading mechanics for both buying cards and acquiring resources they almost feel like a different game to the tile placement taking place on the game board.
I have to say that I like the cascading mechanic, it's simple but provides some interesting decisions for players to make. Building up a Trollmoot, like much of In the Hall of the Mountain King requires a little forethought.
If my calculations are correct, the cards in the centre columns will be activated the most. Players will want to identify and prioritise what resources they'll need in their Trollmoot setup. Additionally, deciding where to place a troll card will determine what resources the player immediately.

I do also have some concerns about the game, I found using the tunnel tiles, creating pedestals and moving statues more of a chore than satisfying and the game it didn't quite gel with me.
I'm also not sure how much value there is in replaying the game. The player and statue starting positions and workshops may vary but mostly the board's resources stay unchanged. And while the card mechanics are good, the cards themselves only vary in which resources they provide.

In the Hall of the Mountain King is another one of these games that does nothing really wrong and I've got nothing against the game. If someone else wanted to play it I would happily join in but somehow it's missing that special something that makes me want to play it again.

8th February 2022

Tuesday night games with the Woking Gaming Club at The Sovereigns continued with Fantastic Factories.

I don't know if factories are fantastic but I guess we're going to find out.

What's in a game?

• Player board: These rectangular boards contain recessed spaces to assign 3 rows of up to 3 dice each and considered each player's headquarters.
  Research: This is the first row, dice of any value can be assigned here.
  Generate: Dice showing values 1-3 can be assigned here.
  Mine: Finally, dice displaying 4-6 can be assigned here.
• ​Dice: Fantastic Factories comes with quite a few dice. They're normal six-siders constructed of translucent acrylic with rounded corners and dots.
  There are 5 sets of 4 dice in player colours and a generic set of 8 grey-white dice which players can acquire temporarily.
• Tokens: The game makes use of various types of card tokens.
  Energy tokens: These round tokens are unsurprisingly marked with lightning bolts.
  Metal tokens: Metal bars are used to indicate these are metal tokens
  Goods tokens: There are 2 types of these token that show 1 or 2 crates and correspondingly represent 1 or 2 goods.
  Tool type tokens: There is 1 each of these 4 tokens and they show a cog, wrench, hammer and shovel. They are used to determine the type of tool required to hire contractors (See below for more on contractors.). Tool type symbols also appear on blueprint cards.
• Cards: There are 2 types of cards in Fantastic Factories.
  Blueprints: These are the factories that players will build.
  In the top left it lists the cost to build the factory, this will include some combination of energy and metal as well as a tool. Additionally, when a blueprint is discarded, it will generate that tool type.
  In the top right corner it shows the VPs the card is worth when built. 
  Finally, in the bottom half, the card shows what kind of ability that blueprint will have when built, e.g, spending energy to get goods or something along those lines.
  ​Contractors: These cards have once-only abilities that are triggered when the card is bought (Contractor is hired.). Hiring contractors will cost a tool, the exact type of tool is determined by the tool type tokens.
• First player marker: The game features a wooden first player token shaped like a factory, it even has a pair of polluting smokestacks!

The components in Fantastic Factories are average in quality, which means they're perfectly acceptable, there's nothing poor here. Having said that, the translucent dice look good despite not being wooden, speaking of which, the wooden first player marker is a nice touch.

From an art perspective, the game makes good use of cheerfully bright colours. The art itself uses heavily stylised illustrations of both factories and contractors which is fine and suits the game's slightly light-hearted theme.

When built, factories provide a varied amount of special actions, consequently the game makes use of quite a varied amount of iconography. For the most part it's straightforward, however, on occasion 2 cards may seem similar but they'll be a small difference between denominated by a single small icon or sometimes they'll just be something 
​I wouldn't say it's any kind of a gamebreaker or that there's too much iconography but for a few turns players will probably end up referring to the rules.

How's it play?
Setup

• Tool tokens: Put out the 4 tool tokens in a line, the order does not matter.
• Contractors: Shuffle the contractor cards into a face-down deck, then deal 4 face-up with each one in line beneath each tool token.
• Blueprints: Also shuffle these into a face-down deck and again, deal 4 face-up, this time below the contractor cards.
  Marketplace: Thus this row of 4 tokens with 2 rows of 4 cards beneath also forms 4 columns and is what is called the marketplace.
• Players: Give each player a player board, 4 dice in their player colour, 2 energy and 1 metal token.
  Finally, deal 4 blueprint cards to each player.

On to play
Broadly speaking, a round is broken into 2 phases; a market phase which occurs in turn order and a work phase, which can be performed simultaneously by all players.

• Market phase: Starting with the first player and going in turn order, everyone may perform the optional action, then must choose one of the following 2 actions.
  • Optional action: By spending an energy or metal token, the active player may wipe one of the two rows of cards in the marketplace and have 4 new cards revealed.
  • Hire contractor: The active player may hire 1 contractor card by paying it's cost which will a combination of whatever energy/metal tokens it may require plus the tool symbol for the column it's in, the active player does this by discarding a card from their hand with a matching tool symbol.
    When a contractor is acquired, it's ability is used immediately and the card is discarded.
    That's not very realistic, if it was, the contractor would do nothing for 3 rounds and then charge the player again before doing anything!
    OR
  • Gain blueprint: The active player may buy a blueprint much as they would do with a contractor card except they do not need to pay the tool cost. When the active player acquires a blueprint card, it goes into their hand.
• Work phase: This phase can be carried out by all players simultaneously if they wish.
  Roll dice: The first action that occurs in the work is rolling dice.
  After this, there are several types of action that can be performed during the work phase and players carry them out in any order they choose.
  • Headquarters/basic actions: All 3 basic actions involve assigning the rolled dice to spaces on the headquarters board. The numbers rolled will affect where those can be assigned and what they do.
    • Research: Dice with any value can be assigned to this action. For each dice assigned this way, the player can draw a card from the blueprint deck (Not the face-up cards.)
    • Generate: Only dice numbering 1-3 can be assigned to this action, then the player would acquire energy tokens equal to the value of the dice assigned. E.g., if a 1 and a 3 are placed in generate, the player would gain 4 energy.
    • Mine: Only dice numbering 4-6 can be placed here and each die assigned earn the player a metal token.
      Matched numbers: If a pair of matching numbers are assigned any single basic action, it increases the amount the player gain by 1. If 3 matching numbers are assigned, it would earn the player an extra 2.
      Putting 5 and 5 into research or mine would earn the player 3 blueprints/metal tokens.
      If a player somehow would manage to put 3, 3 and 3 into generate, it would earn them 11 energy!​
  • Build blueprints: Players may build any number of blueprint cards from their hand provided they can meet all the costs, this will of course involve discarding blueprint cards with the identical tool symbol.
  • Activate buildings: Players may activate buildings that have been built in any order they see fit. Each building can only be activated once per turn however.
    Buildings have an activation cost, this might be a resource or even a die and will produce some other resource for the player.
• Extra dice: Some abilities allow players to acquire extra dice to use, these always come from the supply of grey/white dice, are temporary and will return back to their supply at the end of the round.
• Next round: Once all players have finished their actions, the first player marker moves to the player on the right and a new round begins with the next market phase.

Endgame
Play continues until either a player has built their 10th card or acquired their 12th good.
In either case, the current round ends and 1 more round is played.
Players then total the VPs from their buildings and the goods they gained.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
On a basic level, Fantastic Factories is mechanically pretty straightforward; acquire blueprints, acquire resources to build factories, use factories to acquire resources.

It's a mid-weight engine building game that provides players with strong card synergy and offers a good selection of choices and avenues to follow for building that engine.
I feel for the most part that players will want to focus on blueprints and building them, which is natural as this is what gets resources and VPs.
Players shouldn't neglect the contractors who provide instant if transitory benefits for a relatively low cost. Applied at the right time, they can be game changers - provided they're available at the right time! Once again, it's a case of reacting to opportunities as they are revealed.

There are a couple of there elements that make Fantastic Factories interesting.

Firstly; dice rolling. Players will never be guaranteed getting the results and thus the resources they want. It means that players may not be able to build the card they originally wanted to and will need to adapt and react to the situation as it arises for optimal play. Of course it's always possible to play it safe and have all the required resources before getting a card, it's safer but it's also slower.
Secondly; Fantastic Factories makes use of a hand-as currency mechanic. This forces players to think ahead, players may need to get blueprint cards just to discard for another building, or may be forced to discard a blueprint they still want in order to build another, it can be a tough decision.

There's also some high level play, where it pays to watch what other players are working towards then wipe the marketplace to deny another a player a card they want.

Fantastic Factories is a well balanced game, it's rules aren't particularly complicated and are easy to learn but also have depth that comes from recognising how to exploit the available cards that appear during the game to build their engine optimally and to maximum efficiency.
​The gameplay is solid and will appeal to fans of engine building games, which I am. so I guess factories can be fantastic!

8th February 2022

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

The 1st game of the night was Llamaland.
A whole land full of llamas, they get everywhere, all over the fields, hills and mountains!

What's in a game?

• Player tiles: One of these starter tiles is given to each player and represents the beginnings of the player's estate. They're double sided and feature a grassy landscape overlaid with 4x4 grid which in part contains various icons for coins, villages, cacao, corn and potato.
• Land tiles: There are 12 each of these 5 types of tetramino shaped tiles. Similarly to the player tiles, they are double sided and feature a grid with icons and grassy land.
• Foundation tiles: These are small square tiles and depict brickwork, their use is explained below.
• Cards: Llamaland makes use of various types of card.
  Llama cards: You can't have a game called Llamaland without llama cards!
  These come in three types; cacao, corn and potato which are displayed at the top in a row 4 of the relevant icon. There are 16 of each and they are numbered from 5-12 VPs and feature illustrations of moody llamas!
  Objective cards: There are blue and purple objective cards which feature objectives for players to achieve. Each objective card also has 3 numbered rows with spaces for players to place their markers.
  Character cards: These cards represent villagers and when acquired by players,  can be used to acquire bonuses of some sort. Each card has a stylised, cartoony picture of a fairly generic looking South American native.
• Tokens: Llamaland also makes use of various types of tokens.
  Player markers: There are 4 of these small, square-like card tokens in each player colour.
  Coins: Grey coloured round card tokens are used for money.
  Crops: There are 3 types of crop token, potato, corn and cacao which correspond to their llama cards and are essentially other forms of currency. Not only does each have it's illustration, they are also differently shaped.
  Shepard's crook: This staff shaped token is the first player marker.
• Meeples: Perhaps unsurprisingly, the game's wooden meeples are llama shaped, I guess they're lleemples?

Most of Llamaland's components are good quality, the cards feel a little flimsy but unless they're abused, they should be fine. Otherwise it's all good, the tiles all feel suitability solid and chunky. The tokens are fine, I like how they're the different shaped.
​The most noteworthy component though, are the cute little llama meeples.

The art in Llamaland is nice and colourful, all the tiles are bright and eye catching, the art for the character cards is heavily stylised but I like it.
The illustrations used for the llama cards depict them as llama meeples. If you look carefully at several cards, you can see that some of them have slightly different expressions! It's a nice touch and I wonder how often these kinds of detail get noticed?

Much of the game's iconography is easily comprehended, however, some of the icons on the character cards can be unclear, this generally applies to cards that confer bonuses for covering other icons because they show the relevant icons being covered and those icons are a little obscure.
The blue objective cards will probably require referring to the rulebook to understand.
None of this is a gamebreaker though. It's unlikely that players will need to look up anything more than once or twice.

How's it play?
Setup

• Land tiles: Sort the land tiles into their 5 types and shuffle them into individual stacks.
• Llama cards: Sort the llama cards into their 3 types, give each deck a shuffle and then according to the player count draw cards from each deck. Turn these cards face-up and then sort them by value, with the highest at the top and lowest at the bottom
  The remaining llama cards are not used the game.
• Character cards: Shuffle the character cards into a face-down deck, then deal a row of 5 cards face-up next to the deck.
• Objective cards:
  Blue objectives: Shuffle the blue objective cards and deal 4 face-up into the central playing area.
  Purple objectives: Shuffle the purple objective cards and deal 3 face-up into the central playing area.
  Remaining objective cards are not used in the game.
• Players: Give all players a starter board, each can choose which side to start the game with.
  Then give each player the 4 markers in their player colour and 3 foundation tiles.
• First player: determine a first player and give them the Shepard's crook. All other players gain 1 or more coins depending on their position in the turn order.

On to play
LLamaland is played using a traditional turn structure, with the active player taking a turn adding tiles to their estate. Once that's concluded, play moves to the player on the left.

• Take tile: The active player takes a land tile and places next or on to their estate, there are 2 ways to do this and each has a different 'bonus' action. When a land tile is placed, it can be freely rotated or flipped as desired.
  • Extending: When a tile is placed orthogonally adjacent to the estate on the 'ground level' it is considered to be extending. 
    Free action: The active player may place a marker when extending, more on markers below.
  • Building: Land tiles can also be placed on top of the estate but there are some requirements.
    A land tile cannot be placed exactly on a identical tile and cannot cover a space containing a llama meeples. Additionally, there can be no 'gaps' underneath the tile being played. The active player can use any number of their 3 foundation tiles to fill in gaps.
    Free action: The active player may 'collect benefits' for covering icons.
• Place marker: When the active player has this action available, they can take 1 of their markers and put it on a empty row on an objective card - or if their markers are all already on cards, they can move a marker. A row can only contain 1 marker at a time.
  There is no immediate effect for doing this and it only comes into play at the game end. Whereupon the marker will score VPs for whoever placed it provided they met the objective.
  Blue objectives: These tend to be objectives about the placing of llama meeples (See below about placing llamas.) such placing 4 llama meeples in a row.
  Purple objectives: These objectives are concerned with acquiring llama cards.
• Collect benefits: When building upwards, land tiles will be placed on top of the estate. If this land tile covers any icons, then the active player gains those resources. Thus covering coin, cacao, corn or potato icons will gain those tokens, covering a village icon allows the player to take a character card of their choice from the row, or draw one blindly from the deck.
• Feed a llama: Once the active player has extended or built upwards and completed the associated action, they can choose to feed exactly 1 llama in their turn by spending 4 of the required crop, players may choose to spend coins in place of crops by spending 2 coins per crop, then the active player performs the following 2 actions.
  Take llama card: The active player takes the topmost llama card form the stack associated with the crops they spent and puts it into their play area.
  Take llama meeple: The active player must also take a llama meeple and put it on to their estate. The meeple must go on to a empty green space. Furthermore, going forwards, land tiles can now no longer be placed on top of a meeple.
  10 crops: if the active player has 10 or more resources during this stage, they must feed a llama in this turn.
• Character cards: These cards can be used once per turn each. Some cards which allow one resource to be swapped for another have double ended arrows, these means the swap can go either way.
• Next player: Once the active player has finished, play move to the person on the left.

Endgame
Play continues until one of the following criteria is met.
There are 4 or less land tiles less, regardless of type.
There is only 1 type of llama card left.
In either instance the game goes into the endgame and play continues until all players have had an equal number of turns, then it goes to scoring.

Every llama card acquired earns its listed VPs.
A player marker on a objective card that the player has successfully completed earns that player its listed VPs.
Unused crop tokens earn 1 VP each.
Every 2 unused coins earns 1 VP.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Broadly speaking, Llamaland's gameplay is divided into 3 areas.

I'd say that primarily the game is concerned with tile placing mechanics. Much of the gameplay here will be familiar ground. Players cannot predict exactly what tiles will be available when drafting tiles will be available in their turn and will need to adapt to circumstances and look for opportunities. Pretty standard stuff.
The unusual element here is building upwards, it adds an extra axis (sic) to the gameplay. It's vital to build upwards efficiently, there's no other way to get resources and players will want cluster desired resources in such a way that it makes covering them quick and easy.

The second element is acquiring and placing llama meeples. When placing them, players will not only have to think about completing blue objectives but also trying to not hinder the placement of later tiles.
Chances are that players will have more than one objective for placing llama meeples and they'll want to maximise the placing and there's definitely some synergy going on between objectives. Many purple objectives require 4 of a kind llamas and some blue ones require placing 4 llama meeples on the estate in a certain, thus it's possible to work to both objectives together.

The third mechanic and one I find interesting is placing markers on objectives.
Placing markers later in the game is safer as players will have better idea on what they can achieve, or might already have achieved however, they end up having to put their markers lower value rows. Placing markers earlier though, means players can go for the bigger VP rewards - provided they can complete the objective. When a player puts one of their marker on an objective, they're essentially making a bet that they'll complete the objective.
It's a classic risk and reward mechanic.
It also makes individual objectives pretty apparent to all players, if someone's just put their marker on the collect 4 potato llamas objective card, it's safe to assume what they'll be going for and others can respond as they see appropriate.

Llamaland is a cheerfully colourful game that manages to always provides players with meaningful choices to make and strategies to utilise which I found it an engaging and fun.

3rd February 2022

It's a Thursday and we're round Simon's for a night of gaming. The first game of the evening was My Little Scythe.

​What does does My Little Scythe have to do My Little Pony? Well... err... nothing... obviously...

My Little Scythe is a reskinned iteration of Scythe that has been simplified and pared down to make it more accessible to younger players.
I have played Scythe but it was some time ago, long before I started this blog in fact.

What's in a game?

• Board: My Little Scythe comes with a big board and the game has a fairly big footprint.
  Map: The board mostly depicts a landscape divided into 6 different terrains types (Regions.) which are marked out by large hexes. At the centre is a castle, there are also several portals dotted across the map. Finally, there are 6 starting points throughout the map.
  Tracks: There 2 tracks shown on the board, one for pies and one for friendship.
  Spaces: There are spaces for the game's magic spell, quest cards and upgrade tiles as well as for the 8 spaces for the 8 victory conditions.
• Setup tile: This hexagonal tile is used to determine the initial placement of the game's 2 types of resources; apples, gems as well as quests.
• Player boards: These boards depict the 3 types of actions that will available to each player as well as their related sub actions. There are also spaces for players to place victory tokens.
• Tokens: There are quite a few types of tokens in this game.
  Friendship tokens: A little heart adorns these triangular shaped card tokens which are used on the friendship track. There is 1 in each player colour.
  Pie Tokens: Ditto for these circular tokens decorated with pies which are used on the pie stack. Again there is 1 in each player colour.
  Trophy tokens: There are 4 square, card trophy tokens in each colour and they all display pictures of trophies. Trophy tokens are used to track victory conditions.
  Quest tokens: These card tokens will appear the board and when picked up by players, provide them with a quest card.
  Base camp tiles: These come in player colours and are used to indicate each player's starting position and respawn point.
  Apple tokens: Bright red, chunky and apple shaped tokens.
  Magic gem tokens: Translucent acrylic stylised like diamonds are used for magic gems.
  Pawns: Standard plastic pawns that come in the different player colours. Used to track which actions are available to each player.
• Power up tiles: Players can acquire these tiles and use them to upgrade 2 of their 3 abilities.
  Base camp tiles: These come in player colours and are used to indicate each player's starting position and spawn point.
• Cards: My Little Scythe uses 3 types of cards:
  Personality cards: Each personality card makes it easier to achieve one of the game's 8 victory conditions and one is dealt to each player.
  Magics spell cards: These cards can be used to increase a player's combat score during a pie fight and each one has a numeric value.
  Quest cards: When a player picks up a quest card, it will give them 3 options to choose from (More on this below.).
• Pie fight dials: These dials are mounted on card and during pie fights (Combat really.) they're used to make blind bids to win a pie fight, there's also a place to slide in a magic spell card.
• Dice: My Little Scythe comes with 5 plastic six sided dice, 2 red, 2 blue and 1 yellow. These are not normal six-siders and are instead covered with differently coloured symbols, one on each face corresponding to one of the 6 regions.
• Meeples: There are 2 oversized meeples (Called Seekers.) in each player colour for My Little Scythe. Each set depicts a different anthropomorphic animal type.

All of My Little Scythe's components are high quality, there's been no skimping on the game. Tiles, tokens and pie fight dials are cut from thick card and feel sturdy. Having opaque plastic for apples and translucent for gems is a nice touch and looks good on the board. Wooden dice would have been nice but that's not to say that the plastic ones are bad. Finally, the meeples are chunky and well designed, they're a little bland in beige though - I'm sure they'd look good painted up.

It's obviously that the game's art direction is meant to emulate the style of a Saturday morning kid's cartoon. It makes use of bright colours and features well illustrated cartoon styled art throughout.

The game's iconography is clear, all of the symbols are easily understood.

What's in a game?
Setup

• Board: Put out the game board and determine which starting locations should be used as per the player count.
• Magic spell cards: Shuffle the magic spell cards into a face-down deck and place it on it's space on the board.
• Quest cards: Also shuffle the quest cards into a face-down deck and place it on it's space on the board.
• Power up tiles: Sort them by type and shuffle them into a face-down decks on their relevant spaces on the board.
• Players: Each player should take a player board and choose their colour, then take all the components in that colour.
  Base Camp: Each player should then put their base camp tile on one of the allotted starting locations. Their 2 meeples should go into the base camp.
  Friendship & pie tokens: Each player should place their friendship and pie tokens on the '3' space along the pertinent track.
  Trophy tokens: All 4 trophy tokens should be put into the allotted spaces on each player's personal board. ​
• Personality cards: shuffle the personality cards and randomly deal 1 face-down to each player.
• Determine start resources: Put the setup tile on the castle space face-down, spin it around and flip it face-up. then align it with the castle's hex. This will determine the resources that start on the board.
• Determine start player: Choose a starting player.

On to play
My Little Scythe is all about victory conditions and the first player to achieve 4 of them will win.
The turn structure in My Little Scythe is very traditional, with the active player having their turn and active play moving to the person on the left.

• Actions: My Little Scythe has 3 types of action the player can make use of; Move, Seek and Make, each action type will also have 1 or more sub actions which are what the active player must perform.
  When a player chooses an action they want to activate, they place or move their pawn on the spot next to the sub action they want to complete. There's 1 restriction here, a player cannot place a pawn back on the action type they just took the pawn from. Thus players cannot perform the same action type 2 turns in a row. The actions types are:
  • Move: The active player may move their Seekers up to 2 hexes or 1 only if they are carrying resources. When Seekers leave a hex, they can 'carry' any resources that are on the hex along with them, any resources on a hex with a seeker are under that Seekers 'control'.
    Portals: They allow Seekers to teleport across the map or enter the castle.
  • Seek: This action allows the active player to put resources and quest tokens on to different regions on the board by rolling 4 dice and has 2 sub actions which determines which dice are used. As a base, 1 of each die type is used, but the sub actions determines whether the 4th die will be red or blue.
    After the dice are rolled, the results determine the region into which the resources are placed but active player chooses the exact hex in those regions to place the items. Although no hex may contain more than 1 of anything.
    Friendship: If the active player puts a resource into a hex occupied by a Seeker of another player, then the active player moves up the friendship track.
  • Create: The create action contains 3 sub actions that allows the active player to spend various combinations of resources to move up the pie track, draw a magic spell card or draw an upgrade tile.
• Base camp: If a Seeker is returned to their base camp either by delivering to the castle or losing a pie fight, 2 event occur.
  Gain resource: The affected player either draws a magic spell card into their hand or moves their token 2 spaces up the pie track.
  Remove pawn: The affected removes their pawn from their board, as a result, they will a choice of all actions when they become active player.
• Castle delivery: If the active player's Seekers deliver resources to the castle, they will be return to their base camp.
• Pie fight: When 1 or more of the active player's Seekers ends their turn in the same spaces as one or more seekers of another player, it will result in a pie fight.
  The active player - who moved into the space is considered the attacker and immediately drops 1 on the friendship track.
  A pie fight in essence involves a blind auction between the players using their score on the pie track as currency. Thus a player may use up to 7 pies if they have them on the track. This is done by each player taking a pie fight dial and in secret, setting it between 0-7 (The amount they want to bid.). Each player may also secretly add a magic spell card to their dial for each of their Seekers participating in the pie fight.
  Both players Then simultaneously reveal their dials, the value of any magic cards played is added to the bid. Whoever has the highest value wins the pie-fight, ties go to the attacker.
  The losing Seeker(s) are returned to their base camp, leaving any resources they had as spoils for the victor.
  Regardless of a pie fight's outcome, each player's score on the pie track is lowered by the amount they bid and any magic spell cards used are discarded.
• Quests: If a Seeker ends their turn on to a hex space containing a quest token, they remove it, immediately draw a card from the quest deck and attempt to resolve it. Each quest has 2 options to choose from with different requirements and rewards, if the player cannot or chooses not to complete the quest, there's also a 3rd option to return the card to the bottom of the deck for a small reward.
  When a quest is completed, it is retained by the player who did it on their playing area.
• Upgrade tiles: When a player acquires an upgrade tile, they can choose to upgrade either the move or make action type and draw 3 tiles from the chosen stack. From those 3 they pick one and cover the basic action type with it. This means the upgraded action type will provide new action the player can activate.
  The remaining 2 tile are returned to the bottom of their relevant deck.
• End of turn: When the active player has completed their turn, play progress to the player on their left.

That's it for the main rules, however, the trophies need to be described.

• Trophies: Firstly; quests can only be completed if a player has a friendship score of 3 or more.
  Players can each earn exactly 1 trophy per turn, provided they achieve the requirements. If a player meets the requirements of 2 in a turn, they can still only earn 1 per turn. When a player earns a trophy, they take a trophy token from their player board and place it on the space for the achievement they completed. Achievements are as follows:
  Apple delivery: Delivering 4 apples to the castle.
  Friendship: Reaching 8 on the friendship track.
  Magic gem delivery: Delivering 4 magic gems to the castle.
  ​Magic spell cards: Have 3 magic spell cards in hand at one time.
  Pies: Reaching 8 on the pie track.
  Pie fight: Winning a pie fight.
  Quests: Successfully complete 2 quests.
  Upgrade tiles: Acquire 2 upgrade tiles.

Endgame
Play continues until a player has earned all 4 of their trophies which triggers the endgame.
Each player who has not earned their 4 trophies now has a further single turn to do so. Additionally, the 1 trophy per turn restriction does not apply during the endgame.

In the case of a tie (Which can be likely considering the small scoring range.), whoever has the highest friendship score wins, if the tie still isn't broken, whoever controls the most resources wins and if that's equal, victory is shared.

Overall
My Little Scythe has done a good job of paring down the rules of Scythe without really diluting its game experience. Players of Scythe will find a lot here that is familiar.

Like Scythe, My Little Scythe is a blend of doing your own thing and competing with other players.

This is due to how the trophy mechanics work; players are attempting to complete any 4 objectives out of 8 which generates a lot of routes towards victory. Different players will naturally approach how they can go about winning individualistically.

It means that player behaviour can generally be quite varied, players may simply ignore each other, compete for resources or even engage in outright conflict, or any amount of combination of those.
However, I feel that acquiring apples and gems is perhaps the most important goal in the game maybe overimportant, they provide the most ways to earning most trophies, competition for them can be stiff, especially with higher player counts.

Players in My Little Scythe will want to optimise there strategy dependant on a number of factors, including personality card and resource locations, they can also to pay attention to what other players, trying to predict what they're doing, react accordingly and may have to change their strategy.

With it's colourful, cartoony presentation and relatively stripped down rules, it's obvious that My Little Scythe is at least in part aimed at younger players - that's not to say that it can't be enjoyed by adults or doesn't have some crossover appeal.
Having said that, I don't think the rules are that simplified, I'd say they're still fairly intricate and could prove an obstacle to younger players, particularly if there isn't an older player present who's familiar with the rules. I'd say My Little Scythe is family-friendly more than kid-friendly.
I think it's a fairly good family-friendly game as well and a good introduction for kids or 'non-gamers'.
​
For me though; I'm not sure how I feel about My Little Scythe. It doesn't feel like my kin of game.
There's nothing wrong with the game mechanically, nor do I think it's overly simplistic and I'm fine with the theme. I can see how other people enjoy it but I was just unenthused by it and found it unchallenging. To me,  It felt like there was synergy  lacking between actions
I'd have no problem playing it again if others wanted to, but it's not one I'd choose to play.

15th January 2022

It's Wogglecon and the final game of the day was Ginkgopolis.
What's a Ginkgopolis? Good question, I guess it means Ginkgo city but what does Ginkgo mean? It's a type of tree, so Ginkgopolis must mean tree-city.

In Ginkgopolis, players take on the role city planners in tree-city and attempt to manage it's expansion, both outwards and upwards.

What's in a game?

• ​Cards: Gingkopolis makes use of several different types of cards.
  Urbanisation cards: These 12 cards are labelled A-L and are used when expanding the city outwards.
  ​Character cards: These 27 cards provide players starting resources and they depict a personality, they may also confer bonuses when performing certain actions.
  Building cards: These cards come in 3 colours, red, yellow and blue and each relates to 1 of the game's key currencies, resources, building tiles and VPs respectively, (VPs can be spent as a currency in Ginkgopolis.).
  ​​Each set is also is numbered 1-20, thus there are 60 in total.
  At the bottom of each kind is a bonus it can confer on the owning player.
• Building tiles: There are also 60 building tile, also in the same 3 colours and each numbered 1-20. Buildings tiles are tied directly to their card counterparts.
• Tokens: The game uses several different types of token.
  Urbanisation tokens: These round tokens tie directly with the the urbanisation cards and thus are also labelled A-L.
  New hand tokens: The small round tokens show a hand of tokens and can be traded in by players to gain a new hand of cards during the game.
  Success tokens: VPs by any other name. These green tokens are stylistically shaped like the crown of a Ginkgo Biloba tree, a theme continued across the game.
• Screens: Each player will have a screen to hide their resources from other players. These are pretty standard three-fold card screens and on the outside, a futuristic undeveloped landscape is depicted, inside an iconographic guide displays the basic game rules.
• Resources: There are 25 wooden resources in each player colour and they are shaped like octagonal tubes, while they're not little cubes, octagonal tubes will do in a pinch.
• Meeples: The game makes use of pretty unique wooden crane or construction (The industrial sort, not the bird!) shaped meeples (Creeples?). These meeples are used to track construction over a round.

That's it for most components.

Ginkgopolis has solid components, the tiles and tokens are constructed from suitability thick, chunky card as are the screens, while the meeples and resources are wooden which is always appreciated.

The game makes good use of colour, effectively mixing primary colours with green and emphasising the ginkgo tree motif employed throughout.
Ginkgopolis' artwork is high quality, character cards are well illustrated with slightly cartoonish, colourful individuals that follow the game's red-yellow-blue and green theme, the same is true of the building cards/tiles which depict various different types of structures.

The iconography in Ginkgopolis is a bit strange, there's not too much of it and it's fairly simple to understand. However, due to Ginkgopolis' almost counter-intuitive rules, getting to grips with it took a little time. Nothing too bad though.

How's it play?
Setup

• Starting tiles: Take the 9 building tiles numbered 1-3 in each colour and randomly put them into a face-up 3x3 grid.
  This is essentially represents what buildings there are at the beginning of the city.
• Building tiles: Shuffle the remaining build tiles into  any number of face-down stacks.
• Urbanisation tokens: Take the 12 urbanisation tokens and place them around the perimeter of the 3x3 board in alphabetical order.
• Starting deck: Take the 9 building cards numbered 1-3 in each colour (Identical to the building tiles setup in the 1st step.), then take the 12 urbanisation cards and shuffle them all into a face-down deck.
• Building cards: Take the remaining building cards, sort them by colour and put them into ascending order by their numbers.
• Players: Give each player the screen in their player colour and 2 new hand tokens, which should go behind the screen. Players do not initially get any resources, instead these are put into the central playing area.
• Character cards: Shuffle the character cards and deal 4 face-down to each player. All players choose 1 character card to keep face-down and pass the remaining cards leftwards.
  Continue until all players have 3 character cards, unselected cards are discarded out of the game.
  Players now reveal their 3 character cards which should be placed in front of their screen. Once these cards have been revealed, players gain starting items as indicated on the card. These could be resources, VP tokens or building tiles are all kept behind each player's screen.
• First player: Determine a first player. After this deal 4 cards from the building deck to each player face-down.
• New Hand: When a player is dealt cards, they may discard a new hand token to draw a new hand.

On to play

In the basic flow of actions in Ginkgopolis, players simultaneously put down cards and then resolve them in turn order.

• Play card: Each player puts a face-down card in front of their screen, they may also choose to play a face-down tile on top of that card. When all players have done that, play progresses to resolution.
  It's not quite as simple as that however.
• Resolution: ​Players now all reveal their cards which are then resolved in turn order.
  The action a card performs changes depending on whether a tile has been played with it or not.
• Playing a card without a tile: This action basically allows the player to gain one of the game's currencies.
  Urbanisation card: When this card is played without a tile, the player can gain a single resource token or building tile from the supply and place it behind their screen.
  The urbanisation card is then put into the discard pile.
  Building tile: If one of these is played without a tile, then the building on the card (Which will be on the grid of tiles.) is 'activated' and the player gains the related resource, be it resources, building tiles or resources. Furthermore, the 'taller' the building, the more resources the player acquires. More on building upwards below.
  The building card is then put into the discard pile
• Playing a card with a tile: This allows players to build outwards or upwards, depending on the card played.
  Urbanisation card: Playing a building tile along with a urbanisation card allows the player to build outwards. The tile is placed on the space with the urbanisation token that matches the letter on the urbanisation card that was played. Thus, if the D urbanisation card is played, the tile is played on the D token.
  The token is then moved further outwards, the city must always be ringed by the urbanisation tokens.
  Finally, any tiles orthogonally connected to the tile just played are immediately activated and the player acquires the related resources.
  The urbanisation card is then put into the discard pile.
  Building card: If a tile is played with a building card, then this allows the player to build upwards on a already existing building tile. There are some rules that govern this.
  The tile that was chosen must be played on top the building tile that corresponds to the building card that was played. If there are any resources on the tile about to be covered, the are returned to the owner's personal supply.
  The player must put resources of their own on the tile they are playing equal to the new level. If a building is going up to level 3, then the player must put 3 of their resources on top of it. If the tile being played is a different colour​ from the current tile, then the player must discard 1 resource to the central supply.
  Additionally; If the value of the tile being played is lower than the current tile, then the player must spent VPs equal to the difference. If a level 8 tile is played on a level 10 builds, the player would need to spend 2 VPs.
  Finally, it's very important that a construction meeple is placed on the newly built building tile and the building card is played in front of the player's screen and not put into the discard pile.
  Districts: When 2 or more buildings of the same colour are orthogonally connected, they form a district. Districts are very important for the end game scoring.
  
• Bonuses: Once a card's action has been resolved, the player should apply any bonuses they gain from the cards in front of their screen.
• Continue: Once all players have completed the actions on their cards, play progresses on.
  All players pass the 3 cards they did not play to their left, the first player card should be passed on.
  1 card is dealt from the building deck to all players, so everybody now has 4 cards again.
• Next round: Turns continue being played out until the building deck is depleted, in this case the following immediately occurs.
  ​All construction meeples are removed from the tiles they' were placed on and the card that corresponds to the tile is added to the building card. If a meeple was removed from the red 8 building tile, the red 8 building card is added to the building deck discard pile.
  All the building cards are then shuffled into a new building card deck, cards are dealt out as required and play progresses.
• Depleted building tiles: When the supply of building tiles becomes depleted for the first time, the following action occurs once only.
  ​Each player can donate building tiles to a new supply and receive a VP for each tile they donate.
  

Endgame
There are 2 ways in which Ginkgopolis can end.
If the building tile supply is depleted a second time or if a player has put all resource tokens on to the city.
In either case, the current round is resolved and the game goes to scoring.

VPs come from various sources in Ginkgopolis.

• VP tokens straight-up score their value.
• Cards with end game bonuses on cards may also score VPS.
• Each unused new hand token is worth 2 VPs.
• Finally, each districts is scored, that is areas where 2 or more buildings of the same colour are connected. This can be slightly complicated.
  All players with resources in a single districts count them up. The player with the most resources scores VPs equal to all the resources in that district. 2nd place gains VPs equal to the resources in that district of their colour only.
  If a district only has resources of 1 colour (I.e., from 1 player only.), then that player scores VPs for both 1st and second place, which means scoring 2 VPs per resource!
  

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
​Firstly, one small fascinating thing about Ginkgopolis is how the game almost operates like a machine! Cards played to build something must not be put into the discard pile, otherwise they'll end up going back into circulation and later, players will end with cards in their hands that can't be used to either get currencies or build upwards.
Further to this, new buildings must be given a meeple so that players can track which new cards must be added to the building deck as again, it would leave players without cards to gain currencies or build.
Get this wrong and like a machine losing cogs, the game will begin grinding to a halt!
I don't know what kind of fevered imagination dreamt up this mechanic but it's both convoluted and brilliant!

​Ginkgopolis' rules are definitely a little counter-intuitive.
For example; when you play a card, that's not what you're building but what you're building on top of. Or after building something, getting to keep the card you used to build something.
Additionally; it took a little bit for me to wrap my head around the game. Remember:
Playing a card without a tile earns currencies.
Playing a card with a tile allows a player to build a tile.
I would also say Ginkgopolis is little fiddly for beginning player but none of this a dealbreaker, it's more an indicator of how Ginkgopolis feels a little unusual compared to other games I've played and I don't consider this a bad thing.

While there are various avenues to follow for scoring, I feel that the biggest source of VPs would come from controlling districts because it's possible to not only score your own resources but those of other players' too!
It can be quite hard to plan ahead though due to the card drafting and they'll be times when you'll want to play more than 1 card from your hand. It pushes you to make hard decisions (And hope the other cards come back around.), it means you have to adapt and spot situations you can exploit. It also means watching your neighbours and trying to gauge their objectives. There's quite a lot of player interaction that goes on and putting the right tile into play at the right time can dramatically alter the landscape. 

There's also an interesting strategy when deciding which tiles to put in the city. Putting a 20-value tile down makes it harder for other players to build over it, they'd have to pay VPs to build a lowered valued tile, or an extra resource to play a 20-value tile in a different colour.
On the other hand, keeping a 20-value tile back can give a player the opportunity to build over other higher value tiles later in the game.

The building outwards or upwards mechanics provide plenty of scope here. Expanding outwards can be easier (Provided a player gets the right urbanisation cards.) because a player need less resources and will also earn currencies when doing so. The downside is that it's easier for other players to build over your tiles.
The opposite is also sort of true, building upwards tends to be costly, but it's also more costly for other players to build over them.
Building tiles also puts the related card (And it's bonus action.) in to play in the player's personal area, creating the opportunity to combo actions into bonuses.

Players will need to balance the need to acquire currencies with the need to build tiles. However, as the city landscape and a player hand changes, so can the options to do either of these. Adaptation is vital and every decision can be critical

This made my choices feel meaningful when playing Ginkgopolis, which is always good. I'd say that Ginkgopolis is a mid-weight tile laying game with some fairly interactive area-control gameplay that gives players interesting and changing options.
It took a little time to warm to Ginkgopolis but I enjoyed the game and think it's worth giving a try.

15th January 2022

It's a Saturday and we're at the Bisley Scout Hall with the Woking Gaming Club for Wogglecon,  for a day of gaming and hanging with with friends.

There are a lot of national parks in the USA and you're about to hike a bunch of them in the first game of the day; Parks.   

What's in a game?

• Board: This small board is not a game board in the traditional sense and is instead used to manage the game's numerous decks of cards.
• Tiles: Parks uses some unusually shaped tiles to construct it's main playing area.
  Trailhead & trail end: These are the start and end tiles for each hike and have a sort of chevron shape to one edge each. The trail end card has 3 options for players; visit a park (Which is another way of saying buy the card.), buy gear or reserve a park card.
  Trail sites: These are the trails that hikers will travel along during the game and provide players with the resources they need. They are unusually chevron shaped tiles and come in 2 types; basic and advanced. Basic tiles are used right from the start of the game, while the advanced ones are introduced one at a time at the start of every season.
  Camera tile: This large token is obviously shaped like a camera and makes it 'cheaper' for the owning player to take photographs, it's likely that the camera token will change hands frequently.
  Campfire tiles: There is one of these in every player colour and they're double-sided. One side shows a crackling and roaring fire, while the flip side shows an extinguished and smoking campfire site.
• Tokens: Parks makes use of numerous tokens to track the game's resources.
  Resource tokens: The game uses 4 types of resources; water, sunshine, mountain and forest, the wooden tokens are suitability shaped and coloured to represent this.
  Wildlife tokens: These brown wooden tokens are 'wild' (SIC) resources and can be used as any of the 4 resources mentioned above. Interestingly, each wildlife token is a depicted as different animal, no two are the same.
  Photograph tokens: When players take photographs, they acquire one of these uniquely illustrated square card tokens. Photograph tokens score VPs at the game end.
• First hiker token: Unlike all all the other components, this first player triangular token is made of metal! It depicts a stylised image of the wind gusting past a snowy-topped mountain.
• Cards: Parks also makes use of several sets of cards.
  Park cards: These oversized cards each depict a different national park in the USA and can be bought by players. Along the bottom it shows the cost in resources and VP value. Additionally, each card also contains a small amount of text that provides titbit of information that park. It even names the artist who created the picture.
  Gear cards: Players will have opportunity to buy gear cards using sunshine tokens, these provide bonuses or benefits such as making something cheaper or being able to acquire more of a certain resource, etc. Gear cards feature heavily stylised illustrations.
  Canteen cards: After canteen cans are acquired by players, they are activated by placing a water token on them and confer some bonus, typically acquiring other resources.
  Season cards: Parks is played over 4 seasons and a card is revealed at the start of each one which will alter or add a rule for that season as well as determine the weather for the season - how sunny or wet it will be which in turn determines if bonus sunshine and/or water tokens appear along the.
  Year cards: If a game is played over 4 seasons, you've got to have a year card! These are basically secret objective cards. Quite often this involves visiting specific parks in some way or other.
• Meeples: There are 2 hiker meeples (Heeples?) in each player colour.

​
​The quality of Park's components is universally high and it's obvious that a lot of care and attention has been put into the game, this extends even to the packaging and token trays.
The cards are fine and the tiles are appropriately thick. The tokens are all wooden, well made and colourful, the individually shaped wildlife tokens are the standout here. Finally, the inclusion of a metal first player marker is pretty unusual but it has a satisfyingly weighty feel to it and is a cool addition.

For nearly all of it's artwork, the game sources The Fifty Nine Parks Print Series which as the name suggests, is a project which consists of a picture of each American national park created by a different artist. Perhaps it could be argued that doing this saves on the art budget but honestly, it feels like a great collaboration.
As a result the game features excellent and varied artwork throughout, all the park cards and photography tokens are uniquely illustrated, the art also features on all the card backs and even the inside of the box lid! Fantastic!

Parks makes use of a fairly wide variety of iconography but for the most part it was easy to comprehend and presented no obstacle to the game.

How's it play?
​Setup

• Board: Put out the board.
• Park cards: Shuffle the park cards into a face-down deck and place it on it's spot on the board. Deal 3 cards face-up on to their allotted spaces.
• Gear cards: As with the park cards, shuffle the gear cards into a face-down deal and deal 3 face-up.
• Canteen cards: Shuffle the canteen cards into a face down deck on its spot on the board and deal 1 face-up to each player.
• Year cards: Shuffle the year cards into a face-down deck and deal 2 to each player.
  Each player should keep 1 and discard the other out of the game. This card will become the players' secret objective for the game.
• Trail: Separate the basic and advanced trail site tiles, then take the player-dependant number basic trail sites and randomly add 1 advanced tile.
  Next, shuffle all these tiles and lay them out from left to right, add the trailhead to the 'start' on the left and trail end to the right. They should all 'slot' together and you have the trail for the first season.
• Season cards: Shuffle the season cards into a face-down deck, place it on it's spot on the board, then draw and reveal the card for the first season.
  This will determine the special rule for the season and will also dictate the weather conditions and where bonus sunshine and water tokens appear on the trail.
• Hikers: Give each player the 2 meeples and campfire tile in their colour. Players should place their meeples on the trailhead tile and put the campfire tile to the 'fire' side in their personal playing area.
• First player: Determine the first player.

On to play
Parks is played over 4 seasons during in which each the players' hikers travels along that season's trail from left to right.

• Hike: The active player must move one of their hikers, a hiker can be moved as far as the owning player wishes but only moves towards the right and can never go 'backwards'. Furthermore, when a hiker stops on a tile, the player must perform that tile's action, if they are unable to do so, then the hiker cannot stop on that tile. Additionally, if a hiker stops on a tile that already contains 1 or more hikers, then they must flip their campfire token over to the 'used' side. If the campfire has already been used, then again, the hiker cannot stop on that tile.
  Actions: On the basic tiles, the actions mostly involve collecting various resources from the supply, one tile allows the active player to take a photograph or acquire a canteen card.
  The 4 advanced tiles allow players to swap out their personal resources, an extra opportunity to use the 'buy' actions or to potentially copy another tile's action.
• Resource limit: Each player is limited to having 12 resources of any kind in their personal supply, including wildlife tokens.
• Canteens: Each player starts with a canteen and can acquire more. When a player collects a water token, instead of putting in their own supply, they can put it on an available canteen card to activate its ability. Frequently it allows the active player to collect a different resource. This might not seem like much, but water is one of the more abundant tokens in the game and using it to acquire rarer resources can prove beneficial.
• Photographs: If a player chooses to take a photograph, it costs them any 2 resources to do so and they put a photograph into their personal supply, after this they take the camera token into their ownership.
  If a player already has the camera token when they take a photograph, it only costs them 1 resource.
• Trail end: When a hiker reaches the trail end, the active player has a choice of 3 actions.
  Visit park: This actually means buy a park card with their resources. A park card can be bought by the active player from the 3 available from the board or park card they have previously reserved (See below for information on reserving.). If a card is taken from the board, it is immediately replaced from the deck
  Buy gear: The active must buy one of the 3 available gear cards. As with park cards on the board, if a gear card is bought, it is immediately replaced.
  Reserve park card: When selecting this action, the active player must reserve a park card. They can pick one of the 3 available cards or draw blindly from the deck, in either case, they're put into the player's area but they have not been bought yet and do not score VPs until they are.
  The first player to reserve a park also takes the first player marker for the next season.
  Flip campfire: This is not an action per se; if a hiker reaches the trail end and the player's campfire token has been flipped to the used side, it is flipped back to the fire side. Thus a campfire can be used twice in a season.
• Last hiker: When there is only 1 hiker left on the trail, on their turn, they must go directly to the trail end.
• Season's end: When all hikers from all players have reached the trail end, the season is over and several actions occur.
  Photograph: Whoever have the camera token and take an additional photograph for the discounted cost.
  Canteen: All water tokens on all canteen cards are removed and they become available to be used in the next season.
  Trailhead: Move all the hikers on to the trailhead in preparation for a next hike.
  New trail: Pick up all the tiles in the trail and randomly add another advanced tile to the stack and shuffle them. Then deal out the tiles to create a new, slightly longer trail for the next season.
  Season change: A new season card is drawn with a new special rule and a new weather pattern to apply to the trail tiles.
  First player: Play now begins for the new season, starting with the current first player.

​Endgame
Once the 4th season has been completed, the game ends.
Players score points from the parks they've visited (Bought.), they also score a point for each photo they took and whoever has the first player token at the game end scores 1 point for it.
Finally; players reveal their year cards, completing the objective on these usually scores 2-3 points.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Parks is essentially a light worker placement game added where your 2 workers only ever head right combined with resource management.
It's a game all about planning trips that means that it's about acquiring resources to buy park cards which generally provide the majority of VPs required to win the game. However, it is impossible to fully plan things out. Going from season to season, players will have a good idea what resources and tiles will be available but not where they will appear. It requires adaption and some creative thinking when faced with a different tile layout.

Limiting the resources a player can own to 12 is an solid rule, it prevents players hording too much and splurging out big at once. It also makes players think about optimising their strategies.
The initial urge in Parks is to travel as slowly as possible to collect as many resources as possible and in the early-game that's not a bad idea but sooner or later, players will need to use them up and that means visiting parks.
Remember, players have only 2 hikers and that means they can only use the visit park action on the trail end twice per season (Provided they don't use any other actions on the tile.), this means that players have 8 opportunities to visit parks, yes; there's an advanced trail tile that allows extra buy actions but there's no guarantee where and when it'll appear.

This brings me to the worker placement element of Parks. Each player can use their campfire a maximum of 2 times in a season, it means thinking carefully before moving on to a occupied tile, it also means trying to anticipate how other players will move and if necessary, getting there first! Or perhaps moving the other hiker so that whoever is occupying the tile you need may have moved by the following turn.

Ultimately it means that players should look to optimise their moves, balance resource acquisition with card acquisition, players might well be competing for the same park card and watching a card you want being taken by another player because you tarried to collect an extra resource can be galling.
Players will have the double-obstacle of reacting to both seasonal changes and the choices made by the other players.

The game's rules are not over-complex but also provide a fair amount of depth. There's enough interaction between players to force you to pay attention to their choices . Decisions that players face are always meaningful and getting wrong could lose you out.
Add to this the game's top notch thematically appropriate production values and you have a small package that delivers a big game.

Having said that, it's not without a couple of drawbacks.
Most significantly; the game experience can change notably with player count. A 3-player game will feel quite different to 5-player. The hiker count goes from 6 to 10, the tiles become a lot more crowded and it becomes more challenging to do what you want. While in games with 4 or more players an extra basic tile is added into the mix, it doesn't quite alleviate the increased clutter on the trail.
Secondly, a 5-player game seems to last around 2 hours and that perhaps feels a little overlong. Parks doesn't outstay its welcome and it's not a game-breaker but it can feel a little long for what it is.

Other than that, Parks is well presented, accessible and satisfying to play (At least when you get the park card you want!).
It's definitely one that's worth trying.

4th January 2022

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

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

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

What's in a game?

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

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

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

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

How's it play?
​Setup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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

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

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

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

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

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.