19th October 2021

Tuesday evening has come around again and we're at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club.

The first game of the night was Unearth; a dice-rolling, worker placement game set after a distant apocalypse where players command a band of 'delvers' searching for lost wonders of the long past age. Basically archaeologists sans the bullwhips and giant rock chases!

What's in a game?

• ​Ruins cards: These oversized cards come in 2 types.
  Ruins deck: There are 25 of these cards that come in 5 colours. Each card displays 2 numbers. A claims value in the top left corner and a stones value in the bottom right; more on these below.
  End of age deck: There are 5 of these cards and only 1 is ever used at a time, they only appears at the end of the game. Each card has a special rule that only comes into play when it is revealed.
• Delver cards: Conversely, delver cards are half-size. When acquired by players, they can be spent before an action to confer some sort of bonus or benefit to that action. 
• Wonders cards: The ancient world was filled with now-destroyed wonders and these cards represent those and come in 3 kinds; minor wonders, major wonders and named wonders.
  There is only 1 wonder card each for minor and major wonders (All minor wonders are identical, as are major.) but there are 15 unique named wonder cards.
• Hexagonal tokens: These six-sided tiles come in various types.
  Stone tokens: These are used to rebuild the wonders of the world and come in 5 colours.
  Minor wonders: There are 10 identical minor wonder tokens.
  Major wonders: There are 6 of these identical tokens.
  Named wonders: There are 15 unique named wonder tokens, each one attributed to one of the named wonder cards.
• Bag: Used in conjunction with the stone tiles.
• Dice: These are the workers of the game (The delvers.), there are 4 sets and each set consists of the 5 dice; an eight-sided die, three normal six-siders and a four sided dice.
• Model: This copy of the game came with a curious little model depicting a 3d version of the delvers and appears to serve no function.

​The cards and tokens are all good quality and you'd expect them to be. The dice are plastic and round edged, they roll well enough.
For the ruins cards, Unearth uses some distinct eye-catching colour palettes and isometric cuboid artwork to depict the long destroyed structures. 
For the delver cards, an almost cartoony style is used to illustrate the workers/dice.
Overall, I like the art style.
The game doesn't make much use of iconography, what there is of it is pretty simple to comprehend.

How's it play?
Setup

• Stone tokens: Place all the stone tokens into the bag and give it a good shake.
• Ruins deck: Shuffle the ruins deck and deal one card face-down to each player, this should be kept hidden.
  Then remove 5 cards, these are not used in the game.
  End of age card: Shuffle the end of age deck, draw 1 face-down and put it at the bottom of the ruins deck, thus it will be the final card drawn from the deck.
• Draw ruin cards: Draw 5 cards from the ruins deck and place in a face-up row.
  Stone tokens: Blindly draw stone tokens from the bag and place on to the face-up ruins cards; the stone value in the bottom right corner of each card will determine how many stone tokens go on each card.
• Wonders: Put out the minor and major wonder cards face-up, put the corresponding wonder tokens in a stack on each card:
  Named wonders: Shuffle the deck of named wonders and draw cards as determined by the player count, put them out face-up and place each card's unique wonder token on top of it.
• Delver cards: Shuffle the delver deck and deal 2 to each player.
• First player: Give each player a set of dice and determine the starting player.

On to play
In Unearth, players take turns and are attempting to use delvers to acquire sets of ruin cards, that is place rolled dice on ruins card and also build wonders by accumulating and placing stone.
Broadly speaking there can be 2 phases that the active player acts in, the delving phase and the building phase.

• Delver cards: The active player may choose to play 1 or more delver cards for their respective bonuses.
• Roll a die: The active player must roll a die, if they don't have a die available for any reason, then they must take back a die they previously placed on a ruins card.
  Declare: Before rolling any dice, the active player must choose which die to roll and which ruin to put it on to.
  Roll the die: The active player must roll the die they chose and place it on the ruin card they chose! What does this do, well read on.
• Results: What happens when a die is placed on a ruins card depends on what was rolled among other factors.
  1, 2 or 3: If the die result was 1 of these 3 numbers, then the active play may immediately claim a stone token from that card the die was placed on to. If the card has no tokens left on it, then they draw blindly from the bag.
  Completing a claim: After a die has been placed on a ruins card, total the value of all the dice placed on that card, if that value meets or beats the card's claims value (The number in the top left corner.), then that card can be claimed.
  The player who has a single die showing the highest value claims the card, the number of dice a player has on a card has no direct bearing other than possibly in tie-breakers. Players who lose out on claiming a card, acquire a delver card for each die they had placed on the claimed card, so it's not all bad.
  When a card is claimed, a new card is drawn to replace it.
• Building wonders: When a player acquires a stone token, they add it to their play area by placing it next to any other stone token they've acquired and increase their 'tableau'. The objective here is to create 'rings' of 6 stones and then fill the 'space' by building a wonder in the hole. There are however, some requirements.
  Minor wonder: A minor wonder can be placed in a space surrounded by tokens of any colour
  Major wonder: A major wonder must be surrounded by stone tokens of the same colour.
  Named wonders: Each unique named wonder will have it's own requirements to be met, e.g., this may include 3 of 1 colour and 3 or any other colour.
• Next player: Once the active player has completed delving and/or building, play passes to the player to the left.

Endgame
Play continues until the end of age card is revealed, any instructions on that card are immediately resolved, then play continues until all ruins cards have been claimed.
​
Players then score for each set of the same colour they've collected. Sets range from 1-5 cards and score 2-30 points per set. there are also points for sets of each colour collected.
Players can then score points from the individual wonders they've built, they also score for building 3 or more wonders.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
The sum of Unearth's parts make it a fairly unusual game. It provides 2 distinct paths to scoring points and neither can be entirely ignored.
Set collecting is one way to earn victory points and the card collecting mechanics are quite solid, giving players who fail to acquire a card some sort of other benefit and the range of dice available to players that give them a couple of options is key to this. Players can play for the card or try and play for the stones - the eight-sided die has a slightly better chance of roll higher than a six-sider and four sided die has a 75% chance of rolling 3 or lower, they each give advantage but don't guaranteed success.

The other path to victory points - building wonders requires players to both plan ahead and also adapt to opportunities and changes as they appear, collecting stones of a particular colour can always prove tricky, especially if another player is also on the hunt for stone tokens. There are also some restrictions on how stone tiles are placed and depending on what a stones a player is trying to get, placing them may require a small amount of planning and forethought.

I found Unearth a little unengaging and I can't quite put my finger on why, maybe it's the game's slightly abstract nature or maybe that it feels like little is ever happening.
Very little seems to occur in a player's turn, quite often a player rolls a dice and there's no immediate effect, sometimes they get a stone, sometimes they don't, occasionally they get a ruins card. Often it felt like that despite my decisions, little was in my control.

All of this makes the game sort of light on decision making. Players choose which ruins card to gamble a doe on and when to use a delver card, or where to place a stone token when they gain one and that's about it. There's just not that much to it.
I can't find much to fault Unearth but then I can't find much to praise it either. It's all a little unexciting.

12th October 2021

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

The first game of the evening was Sushi Go Party!. The big brother and follow up of the excellent Sushi Go!, if you've not read it, check out my blog about Sushi Go! here and then come back.

I'm not going to talk too much about Sushi Go Party!, other than where it's different to Sushi Go!. Mechanically, it shares almost exactly the same blend of drafting and set collecting rules as its predecessor. What Sushi Go Party! brings is a bunch of new cards with new ways to collect sets and/or score points.
In fact, Sushi Go Party! brings so many new cards to the game, that they can't be all used at the same time and introduces the concept of menus. More on menus below.

What's in a game?

• Cards: There are about 20 sets of cards in Sushi Go Party! and they are grouped by type such as appetiser, dessert and so on.
  Tiles: Each card also comes with a tile, what're the tiles for? Read on.
• Board: Sushi Go Party adds a thick, chunky board to the game which serves 2 functions:
  Firstly, it serves as scoring track around the outside
  Secondly, in the centre are a number of recessed squares that are large enough to accommodate the tiles mentioned above are named for the types dishes, e.g., appetiser, dessert and so on.

• Meeples: The game comes with 8 colourful plastic pawns.

The components in Sushi Go Party! are all pretty good, the tiles and board feel sturdy enough and the cards made well enough.
The game maintains the same excellent, cheerfully colourful illustrations of cartoonish looking food as it's predecessor. If it ain't broke...
There's not much iconography to the game, it's mostly just numbers.

How's it play?
It plays almost identically to Sushi Go!, the same take-a-card and pass-your-hand and set collecting mechanics played over 3 rounds that made the original so good are found here.
Sushi Go Party! only differs in 2 ways.

In setup, Sushi Go Party! requires the players to create a menu from the available sets of cards. This consists of the nigiri cards (Which are used in every game.), 1 rolls set, 3 appetiser sets, 2 specials sets and a dessert set. The rules provide a large, varied list of menus to use. I guess there's nothing stopping players from creating or randomly selecting their own menus.
After the menu has been finalised, the relevant tiles are placed into the relevant recessed spots on the board so that all players can see what sets will be in the game.
Finally, all the sets in the menu are shuffled together into a face down deck and dealt out to players as per the rules.
​
The second difference: In Sushi Go!; the game goes through the deck without reusing it, i.e., at the end of a round, all played cards are scored, then discarded out of the game - except for puddings of course.
But in Sushi Go Party!, the played cards are shuffled back into the deck, along with more pudding cards to balance out any that were taken players. Then the reshuffled deck is reused in the next round.

It's a subtle difference, but it technically makes Sushi Go Party! a tiny bit more predictable as the composition of cards in the deck will 'reset' from round-to-round. Whereas in the original, once they're played, they're played.

Overall
If you like Sushi Go!, you'll like Sushi Go Party!, no doubt about it and if you play Sushi Go! a lot, then this is probably also worth playing, the extra cards go a long way to increasing the game's longevity.

But there's something that makes Sushi Go Party! less appealing than its predecessor and I think it's immediacy.

​Sushi Go! is pretty much the epitome of a quick, pick-up-and-play game; shuffle the cards, deal them out to players and you're ready to go. Clean up after the game end involves collecting the cards and putting them away.

Conversely, in Sushi Go Party!; the board must be set up, a menu agreed upon and placed the relevant tiles placed on the board, then the pertinent card sets must be taken from the available sets, only then can they be shuffled and dealt to players. It doesn't end there though, when Sushi Go Party! is over, all cards must be put back into their sets before packing away.
​Not only that, Sushi Go Party! by necessity comes in a bigger tin, while the original is compact enough to fit in coat pocket.
Gone is the portability and convenience.

It sounds like I'm dissing Sushi Go Party! but I'm not, it's a great game. It's just that I don't feel the need to play it over the original, it doesn't offer a different enough experience to warrant the extra effort.
However, like I said, if you play a lot of Sushi Go!, you should give this a try and if you've never played Sushi Go! or this, then you should definitely ​try one of them.

7th September 2021

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

The first game of the night was Merv.

What's in a game?

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

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

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

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

How's it play?
Setup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

31st August 2021

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

The first game of the night was Raids.
Raids is a game about Vikings going around doing what they do, which is raiding and pillaging.
What? You say, that's a cliché and Vikings were also explorers, traders, craftsmen and so on, well this game is called Raids, so raiding and pillaging it is; and all for glory!

• Game board: This board shows a number of landmasses surrounding a central sea area.
  Following the coastline is a dotted line that represents the voyages the Viking adventurers (The Players.) will undertake.
  Also along the coastline are a number of rectangular 'encounter' spaces and 3 square 'village' spaces.
  Finally, there's the start/finish harbour space.
• Voyage tiles: These rectangular tiles represent the various events and challenges the players will encounter during their voyages. On their backs they are numbered 1-4 for the 4 voyages that occur during the game.
  There are various different types of tile.
  Improvement tiles: This type of tile includes, Axes which grant a bonus when fighting monsters and Sails and Hammers, which respectively allow you to recruit more ​Vikings and earn Glory (Victory.) points for Vikings at the game end.
  Glory tiles: These come in 2 types. Pennants allow a player to straight up score Glory points and Goods tiles score Glory points if traded.
  Rune tiles: This is a set collection tile that scores at the game end.
  Port tiles: These can be used to sell Goods tiles. They come in single or double size!
  Event tiles: These tiles allow players Visit (Collect a Viking meeple.) or Pillage (Gain money.).
  Monster tiles: These tiles are a menace to all voyaging Vikings, defeating them earns Glory.
• Harbour tiles: These square tiles each have an objective and are used in conjunction with the Harbour space, players can earn money by completing these objectives.
  Usually these objectives are about collecting the most of something.
• Coins: These metal coins come in a denomination of 1, 3 & 6.

The components for Raids are all universally good, the board and tiles are nice and sturdy, the wooden longship and Viking meeples are great components and the metal coins are an nice touch.
Artwork on the game board is nice and colourful and the longship board are also good,  the art on the voyage tiles is a little drab, a little more colour would make them pop but it's only a very minor quibble.
There isn't too much iconography in the game and mostly it's very clear what it means.
All-in-all, excellent, top notch production values for Raids.

How's it play?
​Setup

• Sort the voyage tiles into 4 stacks according to their number and shuffle them into 4 face-down decks.
  Deal the '1' tiles face-up on to the rectangular spaces on the game board.
  ​Populate the village squares with the relevant number of Viking meeples.
• Put the starting harbour tile on to the harbour space on the board, shuffle the remaining harbour tiles and one face-up next to the remaining stacks of voyage tiles, dealing 3 in total.
• Give each player a longship board.
• Determine a starting order. then distribute Viking meeples to each player according to their position in the turn order.

On to play.
​Raids is played over 4 voyages which each involve journeying around the game board. During these voyages, the players will stop at the randomly placed voyage tiles and deal with those encounters.

• Active player: The active player is whoever is in last place on the current journey and they carry out the following actions.
  Collect: The active player collects the voyage tile for the location they are currently stopped at. Obviously this doesn't count for the first movement since all Longships start in the harbour. More on collecting tiles below.
  Discard: The active player must discard all voyage tiles between themselves and the next player. However, tiles displaying an orange arrow are never removed this way.
  This is clearly to stop a player in last place hopping from encounter to encounter when in last place.
  Movement: The active player must travel onwards, they can travel forward as far as they like and stop at any tile with only one stipulation; they cannot stop at a tile or space with an orange arrow, they can only move past orange arrows, although this may trigger an action. More on this below.
• Combat: If the active player's Longship stops at the same location as another player's, then battle ensues.
  Combat in Raids is essentially an auctioning mechanic.
  Whoever initiated combat must discard 1 Viking meeple.
  The other player may retaliate by discarding 2 Viking meeples.
  Now the initial player may retaliate by discarding 3 Viking meeples.
  This continues until one player chooses to or must flee, in which case they don not discard any Viking meeples and move forward to another encounter of their choice.
  If a player has no Viking meeples, they cannot initiate combat and cannot stop at the same encounter as another player's Longship.
• Collecting tiles: This is never done at the end of a player's movement, but before it on their following turn. It's an important distinction because it allows other players a chance to oust a player before they encounter the tile.
  After collecting a tile, it may go on to the player's Longship board or by the side of it.
  Improvement tiles: These are placed on to one of the spaces on the Longship board.
  Glory tiles: Are also placed on the game board.
  Rune tiles: When Rune tiles are collected, they are put to the side of the Longship board.
  Port tiles: These are also put to the side of the Longship board, furthermore, when collecting a Port tile, the active player may remove 1 or 2 Goods tile from their board and place it next to the Port tile. This means the Goods tile(s) will score at the game end. Additionally, collecting a Port tile gains the active player a Viking meeple.
• Passing tiles: Some voyage tiles and certain spaces on the game board are marked with an orange arrow, players cannot stop at these spaces. Instead they must stop before or after them. Unlike the tiles mentioned above, these tiles are resolved as the active player crosses it.
  Monster tiles: When encountering a monster tile, the active may sacrifice a poor hapless Viking meeple to sail past it or fight the monster. Fighting a monster requires sacrificing the requisite number of poor hapless Vikings to defeat it! However, this means the player can take the Monster tile, place it next to their Longship board and score it at the game end.
  If a player has no Vikings when they pass a Monster tile, then they simply move past it.
  Visit tile: The 1st player to pass a Visit tile acquires 2 Viking meeples, the 2nd player to pass it collects 1. Visit tiles are never collected.
  Pillage tile: The 1st player to pass a Pillage tile acquires 3 money, the 2nd player to pass it collects 1. Pillage tiles are never collected.
• Village spaces: When passing a Village space on the board, each player collects a single Viking meeple.​
• End of voyage: When a player completes a tour of the board and returns to the harbour space, they place their Longship token into the space for their finishing position and the starting order for the next voyage.
  ​Once all players have returned, cash is given out to the player who best meets the objective, then lesser amounts to the 2nd and 3rd best to meet the objective.
• New voyage: Any remaining tiles are removed.
  ​Tiles from the next voyage are placed on the gameboard, Populate the village spaces with more Viking meeples and begin the next voyage.

Endgame
Play continues until all players have completed the 4th voyage, then scores are calculated. Players can earn Glory points from a number of sources.
Pennant tiles on a player's Longship earns straight up Glory points.
Hammer tiles on a Longship earn points per Viking also on the Longship.
Goods tiles that have been traded earn Glory Points.
Sets of Rune tiles collected earn points accordingly.
Monsters defeated earn points.
Finally, cash accumulated during the game earn Glory points on a 1-to-1 basis.
All points are tallied, Highest score wins.

Overall
Travelling around the map, players will faced with a central choice on deciding how far to move their Longship? Should a player move slowly to encounter more tiles or rush ahead to a tile they really want? This is of course contextual and players will have to identify what they need and prioritise accordingly.
They'll also have to keep an eye out for the behaviour of other players and want to gauge their motivations. The rule where players can only collect tiles at the start of their turn slots into this nicely, possibly allowing other players to fight for the tile and keeping the situation tense. A worker placement game that allows workers to drive off other workers!

I also like how the Longship board works, merging aesthetics and mechanics. It's a great visual representation of what players are carrying and crew limitations.

The game is in essence a mid-to-light worker placement game with a touch of auctioning and resource management mechanics.
Raids fits its Viking theme reasonably well as players sail around, trading and plundering while battling mythic beasts and each other.

Having said that, I found the game a little unengaging, maybe a little too abstract. I could sail pretty much anywhere I wanted with generally minimal risk, it never felt like epic adventuring. Combat was fairly rare, mostly players didn't complete too much for the same resources but it felt bland, a quick glance at other player's Viking meeples will tell you if you can be beat them or not and at what cost. 

I'm also a little uncertain of how much replayability Raids has. Even though it has random placement for the encounter tiles, because they're not really interdependent on each other, it felt like it didn't matter the order in which you might encounter them, especially since I could sail as far as I wanted.

I don't think Raids is a bad game, if someone wanted to play it, I'd have no problem joining in (But not too often!), but it's not a game I'd pick.

10th August 2021

We're with the Woking Gaming Club for board gaming night at The Sovereigns in Woking for the second and final game of the evening.

So apparently, if you're a kid, the most important things to you, other than building a fort, is pizza and toys. Welcome to Fort, a game about very fickle personal relationships!

What's in a game?

• ​Player board: Each player gets one of these groovy recessed game boards used to manage various elements of the game.
  Fort track: In a game called Fort, there better be something about forts and I'm not disappointed here. Every player's fort has a level from 0 to 5 and that's what this tracks, it also shows the cost to level up and associated benefits. Increasing their fort levels allows players to gain special cards, including the fabled Macaroni Sculpture Card and confers victory points.
  Stuff tracks: There are 2 stuff tracks in Fort, with 4 spaces each, they allow players to store tokens. One track is for pizza and the other for toys.
  Pack space: As in backpack I guess. Players can store extra stuff here, the bigger their fort, the more they can store.
  Lookout: On the left side of the board is a semi-circular indentation, to which you can send friends to! The bigger the fort, the friend cards can go to the lookout. Cards placed here can provide a permanent action improvement bonus to cards with a matching suit. More on this below.
  Yard: Finally, along the top edge of the board is space marked out as the Yard.
• Friend cards: In Fort there are 2 types of friend, normal friends and best friends! Apart from one specific rule, they're more or less identical and each card will have the following elements.
  Suit: In the top left of every card, its suit is displayed, Fort features 6 suits and a wildcard. Some cards will have 2 suits. These suits are Skateboard, Shovel, Glue, Squirtgun, Crown & Book. The wildcard is a Coin, money counts in any amount I guess!
  Public action: When a card is played, all players can perform the public action.
  Private action: Conversely, only the active player can undertake the private action.
  Public/Private actions are the card's special abilities, they allow to recruit or trash cards, gain resources, etc.
  Best friend cards: Where would you childhood be without best friends, those friends you'll probably never see again when you see again! However, in fort, they'll never leave you, unless of course, you shun them first!
  Friend cards: your general neighbourhood kids, the ones from a few doors down that you occasionally play with.
• Made up rule cards: These cards score players additional victory points during the endgame, provided they meet the required conditions of course. Any made up rule acquired is kept face-down until the endgame.
• Perk cards: Acquiring a perk card confers some sort of bonus or benefit during the game.
• Victory track: This board tracks players' victory points. There also a space along the bottom edge of the board marked as the park.
• Tokens: There are 3 types of token, for the game's 2 currencies - pizza and toys and for tracking tokens for victory point scores and fort levels
• Macaroni Sculpture card: Scores points for the player who acquires it and also triggers the endgame.

The cards and boards are pretty standard, normal quality components, what you'd expect from a modern game.
​The tokens are anything but average, big, chunky and colourful, they're a great addition to the game.
Stylised child-like art is used throughout Fort to decorate its cards and components, normally against a plain but colourful background, fairly effective art in my opinion.

Fort uses a lot of iconography; between the 7 suits on the cards and a plethora of symbols for card actions, there quite a lot to remember and the stylised art used for icons isn't always instantly clear. It's not a gamebreaker by any means but it does add to the learning curve. 

How's it play?
Setup

• Perk cards: Shuffle the perk cards into a face-down deck. Deal a number of them equal to1 higher than the number of players face-up in a row above the victory park. The remaining cards will not be used.
• Made up Rules cards: Shuffle these into a face-down deck
• Player Board: Give each player a player board, the player should also receive the 2 best friends cards displayed on the flipside of the board.
• Park deck: Shuffle the friend cards into a face-down deck, deal 8 to each player. Then deal 3 friend cards face-up in the area below the victory track (The park area.).
• Player decks: All players should shuffle their 8 friend card and 2 best friend cards into a single 10-card face-down deck and draw 5 cards.
• Leader: Determine a 1st player.

On to play
​A round is pretty standard in Fort, the active player plays a card and the other players react. Then the player to the left becomes the active player.

• Clean up: At the start of the active player's turn, any cards placed into the yard at the end of their previous turn that are still there, are then placed into the active player's discard pile. This'll make more sense further down.
  Obviously this doesn't occur in a player's first turn.
• Play a card: It's playtime! The active player can choose to play a single card in front of them.
  Actions: Each card has 2 actions, a public action and a private one. The active player may choose to do either action or both in any order they see fit.
  There is one restriction only, the active player must fully perform 1 of the 2 actions, if they can't, then that card cannot be played.
  Improve action: Certain card actions have a variable effect, in this instance, the active player may also play 1 or more cards of a matching suit to increase the effectiveness of that variable action. Cards that a player has placed in their look out provide a permanent bonus that can possibly be used.
  However, the player must still be able to fully complete an action, if an improvement would make it impossible for the active player to do this, then the improvement cannot be used.
  An example of an action might be 'add 2 pizza tokens to the pizza track', if the active player only has 1 space left, then they cannot fully complete the action and cannot choose to do that action. The excess token could not be discarded.
  Follow: Once the active player has completed their action(s), other players may perform the public action the card played, again they must be able to fully complete the action in order to carry it out.

• Recruit: Once action have been completed, the active player must recruit a new friend card.
  This can come from the park or blindly from the park deck, or from another player's yard. The card goes directly into the active player's discard pile.
• Discard: Cards are either discarded into the active player's discard pile or the yard at the top of their player board.
  Discard pile: The played card and any cards played to improve actions are placed directly into the player's discard pile. Best friend cards are always put into the discard pile, regardless of whether they were played or not.
  Yard: Any card left in the active player's hand - that is cards they did not play, must be placed in the active player's yard.
  This means they are vulnerable to being recruited by other players. That's what you get for ignoring your friends.
  ​Any friend cards left in a player's yard at the start of their turn are send to their discard pile as part of clean up.
  
• Draw: This also means the active player's hand is now also empty. As their final action, the active player now draws 5 more cards.
• Play on: Play now moves on to the player to the left, when a round is completed, first player moves one player to the left.

Endgame
There are 3 ways the endgame can be triggered.
If the park deck is depleted.
If any player reaches 25 or higher on the victory track.
If any player reaches fort level 5, they acquire the Macaroni Sculpture Card.
Once one of these criteria have been met, the current round is completed. Points can come the victory track, fort level, made up rule cards and the Macaroni Sculpture Card.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
The central theme and premise behind Fort is quite clever and charming. That is that friend cards are literally friends: Don't play a friend card, then that friend may go hang out with another player, although best friends are always loyal and more potential friends may be found at the park.
Building a fort is of paramount importance as are pizzas and toys. Halcyon days!

Fort blends together a bit of deck-building and a bit of drafting. Broadly speaking it provides players with the choice of performing actions to increase their victory points, or build up their fort. One provides points towards winning and the other confers benefits which hopefully helps later on.
Another very important strategy here is to watch what other players put into their yards, some vulture-like scavenging may net the sharp-eyed player's a useful card, simultaneously denying another player of it.
Thus players will also want to play as many of their 5 cards as possible, minimising the risk of losing friends. The better combos a player can generate, the more cards they can play.

But despite this, I found Fort a finicky game to play, there's lots of suits to remember, somewhat indecipherable iconography to navigate and occasionally overly-complex actions to comprehend.
The rule about having to fully complete an action in order to perform it all was a sticking point for me. I'm sure it's there's for balancing or a legitimate reason, but it felt so unnecessary and counter-intuitive.
It's frustrating being unable to use a card because it's too powerful and having to discard it into the yard, only to watch another player snatch it up. It turns Fort from what could have been light, breezy and quick, into slow, pedestrian grind instead.
Fort is a mechanically sound game with a strong theme and great presentation but somehow becomes a forgettable experience.

1st August 2021

Sunday night gaming on Board Game Arena has come to a conclusion.

The last game of the evening was Via Magica.
Via Magica - the magic way, what is the magic way? Turns out it's a game of errr.... bingo? Not just bingo, but bingo very loosely inspired by Harry Potter.

Players take the role of a student of magic looking to earn their Certificate of Sorcery, this is done by collecting macguffins to open magical portals; the titular Via Magica.

Caveat: We have only ever played Via Magica online.

What's in a game?

• Portal cards: A deck of 80 cards that represent magic portals.
  Each card has a row of 3-6 open spots which each displays an animus symbol and represents the cost to activate it in animus tokens/crystals Each card also displays a reward that the player will earn once activated, this can be straight-up points, situational points calculated at the end or a bonus such as extra crystals and so on.
• Crystals: These are used in conjunction with portal cards.
• Animus tokens: There are 23 of them that make up the 7 different types of token. The astute among you will be thinking that these numbers do not breakdown evenly - and you'd be correct, all the differently coloured animus' have a different rarity as shown below.​
  Air: X6, grey/white.
  Water: X5, blue
  Earth: X4, brown.
  Life: X3, green.
  Fire: X2, red.
  Shadow: X1, black.
  Wildcard: X2, any colour.​​
• Bag: Used with Animus tokens.
• Bonus tiles: Each of these tiles has a condition, that if met, can give a player bonus points if they claim the tile. Bonus tiles can only be claimed directly after a portal has been activated. They come in 2 types
  Colour of portals: These conditions revolve around activating a particular number of portals of a particular colour(s).
  Number of portals: Players can earn bonus points for the total number of cards they activate.
  However, only one tile can ever be claimed from this category and only at the time the criteria is met! This means that players are racing to claim these tokens, the bonus for activating 4 portals cannot be claimed when opening a 5th!

Since this game has only been played digitally, it's not possible to comment on the quality of the game components.
The artwork on cards in Via Magica is universally good; cheerfully brash and colourfully cartoonish characters dominate the cards. The animus tokens are also bright and colourful.
The game's iconography is easy to read.

How's it play?
Setup

• Shuffle the deck of portal cards and deal 5 cards face-up in to a central row.
• Then deal 6 to each player, face-down. The remain cards become the portal deck.
  Each player keeps 3 and discards the others. The only restriction is that a player can never have any duplicate cards, doubles must be discarded and new cards dealt in their place.
  Each players places their 3 cards face-up in a row in front of them.
• Give each player 7 crystals.
• Put all 23 animus tokens into the bag and give it a good shake.

That's that, now we're ready to play.
On to play
In Via Magica, all players act simultaneously after the active player who assumes the role of Catcher, which is a fancy name for a bingo caller, draws a token.

• The active player blindly draws a token from the bag, announces to all the other players which of the 7 animus types was drawn and places it in the central (not back in the bag.).
• All players now look at their 3 cards.
  • If a player has an open animus spot on any of their cards that matches the animus token that was just drawn, then that player puts 1 of their 7 crystals on to one of those matching spaces. If a player has no spare crystals, then they may take a crystal they have previously placed and move it over.
  • If a player has no open spaces that match the drawn animus, then they do not place a crystal this time.
• If a player has covered all the spots on their card with crystals, then they have activated the portal and should shout WINGARDI-, er no, they shout BING-, er no they shout INCANTATUM!
  They then return all the crystals from the completed card to their supply and put the card in their completed area.
  If the card has a relevant effect, it is triggered now.
  Next they take a card from the 5 available and add it to their row of 3 and a new card is drawn from the deck to bring the central row back up to 5 cards.
  If multiple players completed cards at the same time, then the player who shouted Incantatum first goes first, followed by other completing players to their left and onwards.
  After a portal is activated, a player will automatically earn a Colour of Portal bonus token they are eligible for and may choose to take a Number of Portals token is they want it.
• If a wildcard token was drawn by the active player, they return all tokens back to the bag, gives it a shake and passes it on to the player to their left. That player is now the active player and the Catcher.
  If no wildcard token was drawn, the active player blindly draws another token and play proceeds on.

Endgame
Play proceeds until a player has activated a 7th portal card.
Players now calculate at all the victory points their portal cards confer, end of game bonuses they earn and points acquired from bonus tiles.
All scores are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
There's no denying it, Via Magica is bingo, the manual says as much. The portal cards are bingo cards and the animus tokens are bingo balls, the twist though, is that whilst there are only 7 'numbers', the odds of them coming up are heavily skewed and is what adds a scintilla of much needed depth to the game. Portal cards with more than 1 or 2 rare openings will generally be much harder to complete, it also means that players should complete the 'rarer' spaces first if they get wildcards.

Additionally, there is a little bit of strategy when using some of the lower cost cards; once a player starts a card, they'll generally want to finish it, as a consequence, quite often there's no decision to be made and players will concentrate on the card they started if they can. However, since players initially have 7 crystals, they'll always have at least 1 surplus crystal (Provided they are only 'going' for 1 card a a time that is.), 'loading' a lower cost card with surplus crystals can prove when a draw goes against the player, allowing them to switch a crystal round to a secondary card which may prove beneficial.
Initial and later card drafts will prove important, the basic dichotomy is choosing between point scoring cards and special ability cards, as well as quick-to-complete lower cost cards and higher value more costly ones.
​During play, we found that picking the highest cost cards seemed to be the most successful approach.
Ultimately though, this is a game of luck and luck will be the biggest factor.

Obviously Via Magica has little to engage players of heavier games and personally I found it an unabsorbing experience.
It's unlikely that I'm the target audience though, the simplicity and bingo theme of Via Magica clearly makes it a crossover game that is accessible enough to appeal to non-gamers and which they will find easy to learn.

25th July 2021

Sunday gaming on Board Game Arena continued with our next game.

If Esther Rantzen ever made board games, it probably wouldn't be this one, for starters, there's no dog that says 'sausages'!

Caveat: We have only ever played That's Life! digitally online.

What's in a game?
That's Life! is all about travelling along a route consisting of a series of randomly placed hexagonal tiles, where the bad ones outweigh the good ones, generally trying to manage those bad situations with a bit of luck and occasionally encountering generosity or greed. Maybe that really is what life is all about?

• Start and end tiles: This pair of tiles mark the start and finish of the route.
• Plus tiles: Plus tiles score points for players when acquired, there are 8 of them, ranging in value from 1 to 8.
• Minus tiles: When minus tiles are acquired, they lose points for the capturing player. There are 18 minus tiles valued from -1 to -10.
• Lucky tiles: These will turn minus values into plus ones, as they may be used to swing a large number of points they can be very powerful. There are 6 of them.
• Action tiles: The 4 tiles are double-sided and are marked gift/steal.
• Meeples: Up to 3 meeples per player.
• Die: Every roll and move game needs dice and this is a standard six-sider.

There's a more complex version of the game we didn't play that involves 'guard' meeples.

How's it play?
Setup

• Take all the plus, minus and lucky tiles, then shuffle them into a face-down stack of 32 tiles.
• Put down the start tile.
• Draw 8 tiles from the stack and place them in line starting at the start tile to form a path, the exact route of the path isn't important.
  Next, place an action tile (Gift side up.) at the end of the path and after the 8th tile.
  Repeat this with the 24 remaining tiles on the stack and 3 action cards to continue the path.
• Place the end tile after the final action tile to complete the route.
• Give each player 2 or 3 (Depending on player count.) meeples in their colour and place them all on the starting tile.
• Determine the starting player.

On to play
The goal in That's Life! is to journey to the game's end, acquiring those scoring tiles as you go while trying to avoiding those minus tiles. How's this done?

• Roll the dice: The active player rolls the die and moves one of their meeples by that rolled amount.

That's it, well OK, not exactly, there's a bit more.

• Picking up tiles: When one of the active player's meeples leaves a tile and there are no other meeples on it, then they MUST pick up the tile (Unless it's an action tile - see below.).
  Tiles picked up by a player are placed into a single stack in the order they were acquired, thus the most recently collected tile will always go on top of the stack.
• Action tiles: If the active player moves one of their meeples off an action tile and there are no other meeples on it, then the action card's gift/steal ability is activated, depending on which face is up.
  Gift side up: The active must give the tile on top of their stack to another player, who places it on top of theirs.
  Steal side up: The active player takes the topmost tile from someone else's stack and places it on top of theirs.
  Flip sides: Action tiles are not collected by players and always stay in the route, instead they are flipped over to their other side.

Endgame
Play continues until all players' meeples have crossed the finish line.
Each lucky tile acquired by a player can now used to convert the score from a minus tile into a plus, then all points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
There's no getting away from that fact that this is a roll and move game, it may give you 2 or 3 choices from that roll, but it still is what it is. 
That's not to say it's all bad, usually at least 1 of the 2 or 3 choices a player is given is meaningful.
Finding a way to linger on a plus tile until other players have to leave (Or getting off the tile before other players even arrive!) will earn victory points and players will obviously also want to avoid the minus tiles. However, minus tiles sort of reverses this, players will look to linger on a bad tile in the hope that another player will land it, allowing them to potentially escape. Furthermore, minus tiles outnumber plus ones 18-to-8; that's more than double, landing on them is inevitable, so is picking them up.
This is what makes the lucky tiles such gamechangers with their ability to mitigate negative penalties, if a player has a lucky tile in their stack, suddenly that big minus tile becomes an asset, provided of course someone doesn't steal the lucky tile in the meantime.
All of this is also largely dependant on what other players do, because they'll also be trying to linger on good tiles and escaping bad ones.

That's Life! is a very easy game to learn and comprehend. I feel that it will have crossover appeal to non-gamers but for us, it felt a little too light and a little too luck-based; because players invariably end up collecting more negative tiles than positive, it ends up lending the game a negative feel - even though generally it will affect all player equally (Maybe life is like that?). It meant we didn't find That's Life a satisfying experience or a compelling game.

11th July 2021

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

"The only constant is change." - Heraclitus' review of Fluxx from about 500 BC!
He knew what he was talking about when it comes to the first game of the evening.

What's in a game?
​Fluxx comes with a deck of just over 80 cards. which is about 50% bigger than a pack of regular playing cards, there 4 types of card in Fluxx along with the basic rules card:

• Basic rules card: Fluxx begins with this card face-up in the playing area, it displays the game's basic starting rules which are; draw 1, play 1.
• New rule: as the name suggests, when a new rule card is played it will change a rule in some way, this may increase or decrease the draw, play or hand limits, it may even change the win conditions etc.
• Goal: These types of card set a game's victory condition when played. Generally there's only 1 Goal card in play at a time, typically goals involve collecting a set of keepers (More on Keepers below.), e.g., the Death by Chocolate goal with requires the Chocolate and Death keepers to win. There are some goals that require certain keepers not be in be in play!
• Keepers: Keepers are cards that you err.... keep in front of you when played, they're basically nouns.
• Actions: When an action card is played it will trigger an event, this may include making players pick up, discard or swap cards or keepers, it may effect turns etc.

In terms of quality, the cards in Fluxx are comparable to that of a standard set of playing cards, which is acceptable.
Large easy-to-read text is used throughout Fluxx, which is a boon considering the kind of game it is.
Cards in Fluxx, other than the action cards it seems, contain some sort of mostly monochrome line illustrations. The artwork is a bit plain, but doesn't detract from the cards or interfere with the clarity of the text. All cards also have a splash of colour which indicates which of the 4 kinds of card they are.
​Its functional more than pretty, but I don't have a problem with that.

How's it play?
Setup

• Set out the basic rules card face-up in the central playing area. For the start of the game, draw is 1 and play is also 1.
• Shuffle the deck and deal 3 cards out to each player, put the remaining cards into a face-down deck.
• Determine the starting player.

On to play

• Draw: The active player draws cards equal to the draw rule, which at the game start is 1.
• Play: The active player must play cards equal to the current play rule.
  New Rule: When a new rule is played, it takes effect immediately, even affecting the active player! A draw/play change is played on the relevant corner of the basic rules card, replacing any card that's already there, which is discarded. Other rules are played next to the basic rules card, sometimes this will cause other new rule cards to be discarded.
  Goal: When played, goal cards are placed into the central game area, generally there's only ever one goal card in play, a previous goal card is discarded when a new one is played.
  Keeper: When the active player plays a keeper cards, it's placed into their personal area.
  Action: Action cards are one-and-done, when played by the active player, their affect is completed they are put into the discard pile.

That's the basics for Fluxx, bear in mind that all of those rules can and will be varied or changed!

Overall
There's not much I can say about Fluxx, it's clearly a light, fun and unpredictable experience which favours opportunistic play. Players will want to keep a sharp eye out for the changes that occur when the situation inevitably shifts from one rule to another, this is especially true since any player can win at any time.
An easy game to pick up that plays quickly (Probably!), This makes it an excellent filler, the version 5.0 rules state that players can just drop in and out, making it a good opener for a longer session of gaming or a finisher.
If you want a quick diversion, it's hard to go wrong with Fluxx

27th June 2021

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

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

What's in a game?

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

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

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

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

Play then progresses to the player on the left.

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

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


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

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

30th May 2021

Sunday night gaming on Board Game Arena continues with Dragonwood.

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

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

What's in a game?

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

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

How's it play?
Setup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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