21st July 2023

It's a Friday evening and we're round Simon's for some gaming fun!

​Life finds a way.... to create a tableau of cards with little green cubes and plastic plant stalks in Earth, a engine-building, action-selection game.

I wouldn't call it a barrier to playing the game considering the type of player the game is aimed at but still there are quite a lot learn.
​If I had one criticism, it would be that the 4 colours associated with the 4 actions could be a more contrasting.

How's it play?
Setup

• Fauna board: First decide which side of the fauna board to use.
  For this blog, we'll be using the standard side.
  Fauna cards: Shuffle the fauna cards into a deck and deal 4 on to the pertinent spaces on the fauna board. Either side of the fauna card can be used.
  Ecosystem cards: Shuffle the ecosystem cards into a deck and deal 2 and place them on to their spaces, again, either side can be used.
  Earth cards: Shuffle the earth cards (that is the flora, terrain & event cards) into what will be a quite large face-down cards
• Players: Give each player a player board and tokens in their player colour. The standard side of the player board should be used.
  Cards: Shuffle the island and climate cards into their respective decks. Next deal 2 island, 2 climate and 2 ecosystem cards to each player.
  Players must now decide to keep 1 of each type, they are free to use either side of the cards they were dealt, thus will have a choice of 4 for each.
  Starting resources: The island card that a player chose will dictate what the player's starting resources will be. This will involve drawings a number of earth cards into their hand, some of which will then have to be composted​. When cards are composted, they are placed face-down on to the compost space on a player's board. Players compost cards in 2 ways; from their hand or from the deck.
  Players will then also acquire an amount soil tokens.
• First player: Determine the starting player then give them the first player and active player tokens.

On to play
In Earth, players will be looking to create a tableau of earth cards (which for the most part will be flora cards) to earn VPs as well as create an engine. They will need to acquire and 'plant' cards in a 4x4 grid that will allow them to create growths and sprouts which in turn will also have uses as well as being worth VPs in this very interconnected game.

Earth uses a traditional turn order with the active player selecting 1 of the 4 available actions to perform during their turn as well as trigger additional associated actions. Other players, albeit to a lesser extent will also be able to perform that action as well as triggering their own additional actions.
Even though only 1 player is the active player, it is generally possible for all players to perform their actions simultaneously.
A turn plays out as follows.

• Action Selection: The active player now chooses 1 of the 4 available actions and places the active player token above that action on their player board. This easily allows other players to see which action has been chosen.
  • Plant: This is the green action.
    Play card: This actions allows active player to put 1 or 2 cards from their hand into their tableau by paying their cost in soil.
    Tableau creation: Each player will create a card tableau over the course of the game. A tableau cannot exceed a 4x4 grid. When starting a tableau, the first card can be placed 'anywhere' in the tableau. Subsequent cards must be adjacent to another card, either diagonally or orthogonally.
    Draw cards: The active player then draws 4 cards from the earth deck and keeps 1.
    Other players: All other players plant 1 card as per the rules and draw 1 card.
  • Compost: This is the red action.
    Gain soil: The active player gains 5 soil.
    Compost cards: The active play can compost 2 cards from from the earth deck on to their compost deck face-down.
    Other players: All other players may either gain 2 soil or compost 2 cards from the deck but not both!
  • Watering: This is the blue action.
    Gain sprouts: The active player gains 6 sprout cubes. These must immediately be placed on to available sprout spaces on flora cards. Any sprouts that cannot be placed are lost. Sprout cubes cannot be stored in a reserve or on a player board.
    Gain soil: The active player now gains 2 soil.
    Other players: All other players can either gain 2 sprouts or gain 2 soil.
  • Growing: This is the yellow action.
    Gain cards: The active player takes 4 cards from the earth deck into their hand.
    Gain growth: The active player now gains 2 growth which they can put on to growth spaces on flora cards.
    How growth works: For each growth a player has, they may place a stalk on to the growth space on a flora, if they are completing the last segment of growth, they ass a canopy as sign the growth has been completed.
    Each growth space has 2 numbers associated with it. On the left is shown how many growth segments can be stored there and on the right, how many VPs a fully created growth will score. As with sprouts, any growth that cannot be immediately stored will be lost.
  • Other players: All other players may either gain 2 cards or gain 2 growth.
• Additional actions: What are these additional actions mentioned above? Well, the 4 main actions each have a colour associated with it and when that action is chosen by the active player, all actions on all cards with the matching colour may also be activated by all players.
  Activation order: When actions on cards are activated, particularly when more than one is activated, they are always activated in a specific order, which is left-to-right and top-to-bottom.
  Player board or tableau: If actions on both a player board and tableau are activated at the same time, the player may choose whether to activate the board or tableau first. However, whichever one is activated first must be fully resolved before moving on to the other. The activation order mentioned above applies to both board and tableau.
  Multicoloured actions: Some actions are multicoloured. This means they are activated whenever a red, blue or yellow action is chosen, never the green.
  ​Black actions: A black action is a once-only action that occurs only when the card is first played.
  ​Brown actions: These actions will either have an ongoing effect during the game or provide a end of game scoring opportunity.
• Bonus action: Technically unrelated to colours, each player has the option to spend 3 sprouts to gain 2 soil. This can be done at anytime except during the watering action and prevents players from simply turning sprouts into soil to make room for more sprouts.
• Event cards: These can be played pretty much at any time during the game except in the middle of another action and have a variety of functions. Event cards have no cost but may earn VPs, it's also fairly common for them to lose VPs as well.
  Once played, event cards are discard face-up in the event card pile on a player's board. They are not composted and thus score the VPs found on the front.
• Next player: Once all players have resolved all their actions. The turn is over, the active player passes the active player token to the player on their left who now become the active player.

Endgame
The endgame is triggered as soon as any player plants the 16th card in their tableau. That player should place one of their leaf tokens on to the 7VP spot on the fauna board.
Play then continues until all players have had equal turn and then goes to scoring.

Earth provides players with a wide variety of avenues to score points.

• Base VPs: Score the VP values shown on all cards in play, this also includes cards on the player board.
• Event cards: Score VPs from all event cards in the event card discard pile.
• Compost: Score 1VP per card in the compost pile.
• Sprouts: Score 1VP per sprout on flora cards.
• Growths: Completed growths score their full VP value while incomplete growths score 1VP per section.
• Terrain cards: Calculate VPs earned from terrain cards.
• Ecosystem cards: Each player scores their personal ecosystem card as well as the 2 shared cards.
• Fauna board: Players now add in the VPs acquired from leaf tokens they placed on the fauna board - this includes 7VPs for the player that triggered the game end.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
In Earth, the tableaus that players are creating are literal islands that will expand and grow from their origin point, where different terrains and flora will spread, endure events and attract fauna. Each island will develop its own set of interconnected ecology in the form of its game mechanics and engine.
In this regard, Earth fits its natural world theme pretty well.

​Mechanically, Earth blends tableau building with resource management and action selection.
Whilst not particularly complicated, there are a lot of 'moving parts' to Earth and a lot for players to think about and many ways to score. Soil, sprouts, growth and even cards are all resources that must be managed and all of those bar soil also generate VPs. The game's engine building frequently demands that one resource be spent to gain more of another and so on. Classic engine building stuff.

It means that players need to really think about which cards they will use to create their tableau, this will involve considering not only the abilities on the cards but also their position within the tableau as this will affect how well they 'combo' off of each other.
​Furthermore, players will probably need to think about the plant and habitat types of the cards they want to play and how that effects their scoring opportunities. Terrain cards throw even more into the mix with some often almost random objectives requiring the placement of cards in certain ways or scoring off of hand size or compost size.
With so many ways to score that can arise in diverse combinations, it's kind of hard to describe how to play Earth but players will need to recognise opportunities to exploit when they appear and possibly rethink their approach. There's some flexibility to how an island expands and players may find themselves changing strategies partway through the game to accommodate new goals they have acquired

While Earth has a fairly lengthy playtime, especially with a higher player count, it never feels like it due to how most of the game can played out simultaneously.
It's also definitely not one for beginners and leans towards the heavier end of the difficulty scale. Fortunately, it's not too hard to learn and cards will contain a lot of the information that players need.

For me, Earth strikes all the right notes and is a game I enjoy playing:  It provides a balance between accessibility and depth along meaningful decisions and has a engaging theme. It doesn't hurt that it's filled with fantastic imagery and components that looks great on the table.
Definitely one to try.

11th December 2022

It's a Sunday evening and where logged into video chat and Board Game Arena for some gaming fun.

More space, more empires and more final frontiers. 
Cosmos: Empires is a galactically-themed tableau building where plays rush to build their cosmic empire - or least increase their empire's production - all very capitalist!

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

What's in a game?

• Cards: Cosmos: Empires uses a single deck of card.
  Each card is illustrated with some sort of space-themed vehicle or construct.
  In the top left corner of each card is the 'purchasing' cost
  Along the bottom it lists the card's 'type', 'activation number' and 'production value'.
  Some cards will also have one of various types of ability, this may well also include some text to better explain how the card works.
• Dice: The game uses 2 4-sided (d4), pyramid looking dice numbered from 1-4.
  There are also a few 8-sided (d8) dice which have no direct gameplay use but are instead used to track certain cards.
• Currency: The game uses 'credits' as its currency.

I have to say I found the illustrations to be pretty good sci-fi themed artwork and could easily see them on classic 70's sci-fi book covers. Having said that, I did also find some of the artwork was a little too busy for a card game, there were bright spots that drew the eye from important information for example and perhaps the text could have been a bit clearer.

While there are a few icons, it's not overwhelming, some information on card abilities are displayed on the cards themselves, sometimes player's will want to refer to the rules for clarification. I would not consider it a problem as Cosmos: Empires is pretty straightforward.

How's it play?
Setup

• Cards: Shuffle the cards into a face-down deck, then deal 10 face-up into a central drafting area.
• Players: Give 8 credits to each player.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
In Cosmos: Empires, players will be generating credits which will be used to buy cards from the drafting area.
These cards will have various actions that can be used to the player's benefit with the ultimate aim of increasing currency production.
When a player reaches a certain threshold of currency production, it will trigger the game end.
Cosmos: Empires mostly follows the typical turn structure with the active player performing their actions before play progresses to the player on their left. However, it is likely that 'inactive' players will have their cards activated outside of their turn.
The following occurs during the active player's turn.

• Roll dice: First the active player rolls the 2 4-sided dice and add their values together generating a number from 2-8.
  Note: It should be noted that it's possible for the active player to change the result of the dice roll during their turn. More on this below.
  • Activations: Now all players who have cards with matching activation numbers can activate those cards and produce the listed amount of credits for each activated card's production value.
• Actions: During their turn, the active play can perform any 2 actions from the following. A player may also pick an action to perform twice.
  • Shift result: The active player may use an action increase or decrease the result of the dice roll by 1. This will have the result of changing which cards are activated.
  • Build card: This is another way of saying the active player may buy a card  from the drafting area and add it to their tableau.
  • Cycle a card: The active player may spend an action to discard a card from the drafting area to the bottom of the deck and gain 2 credits.
• Card abilities: If a card has an ability, it can be activated by the active player during their turn without using an action, it's essentially 'free' to use a card ability.
  Furthermore, if the active player 'builds' a card, its ability can be immediately used.
• Next player: Once the active player has completed their 2 actions, play progress to the player on their left.

Endgame
Play continues until any one player has combined production value (Not credits.) on all the cards in their tableau of 30 or more.
At this point the endgame is triggered, the round continues until all players have had even turns.
All player then calculate their finishing combined production value.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Cosmos: Empires is a tableau building game that seems to me to have been designed to be a more streamlined, quicker playing, simpler, more accessible game that's a little different to other games of this type.

The strategy in Cosmos: Empires is relatively straightforward; acquire as many cards as quickly as you can, while some cards do combo off each other and getting those cards is good. It's also a goof idea to just get many cards as you can and hope dice rolls go your way.

You see; typically in tableau building games there's ​an early game element about building up the tableau then a late game element about using that tableau to work towards whatever the winning criteria.
Cosmos: Empires eschews this paradigm because it's winning criteria is about accumulating production value and all cards provide production value. It means that acquiring any cards works towards winning.
​The impact of this is that can create a sort of situation where a player will get some cards that quickly earn them a lot of production/credits which can be used to get even more cards (Especially the case when a player can build 2 cards per turn.) to get more even more production/credits in a self perpetuating cycle.
Now this might sound like a good thing and the kind of you'd want in a tableau builder?

The issue is that it can put one player into a unassailable lead where they not only constantly outproduce other players' production but consequently, they also constantly outpace the production increases of other players. A uncatchable double whammy!
This can be exacerbated by the fact that all cards activate in all players' turns. Quite often activations will end up benefitting whoever is in the lead simply by virtue of them having more cards.
Sure, players can shift the activation numbers but I found in order to not to give the leader benefits, I also had to deny them to myself. It felt very negative.

I genuinely admire any game's attempt to pare back rules, provide more elegant gameplay and quicker playtime and this is the case for Cosmos: Empires but it results in a game that feels somewhat unbalanced.
Additionally, I found Cosmos: Empires a little bland, it didn't feel like there's much variety in the mix of cards and it didn't feel particularly engaging. I'm not sure it would stand up to repeated playing

Although, having said all of that, I might not be the best target audience.
Cosmos: Empires might serve as a good entry the tableau building game type and if you want a straightforward, uncluttered, quick playing iteration of it, Cosmos: Empires might tick those boxes.

20th September 2022

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

Recruit and assemble your citizens (Or heroes really.), build domains and vanquish foul enemies in this fantasy adventure themed dice rolling and tableau building game.

What's in a game?

• Player boards: These oblong boards are used by each player to track the game's 3 resources; Gold, Strength, Magic and also Victory Points (VPs.).
• Tokens:
  • Resource tokens: There are wooden tokens that match the shape and colour of each of the player board's 4 tracks and are used to track them on player boards.
    Card resource tokens: These cards tokens replicate the wooden resource tokens... only in cardboard.
  • Extensions: These card tokens are used to track resources which increase above 10.
• Dice: Valeria: Card kingdoms comes with 2 normal six-siders. These are plastic dice with indented numbers.
• Cards: Lots of cards and I do mean a lots that come in several different types.
  • Citizens: These cards represent the heroes that players will recruit to their cause and they share a number of features.
    These include knights, peasants, butchers and so on. Some of these folk don't seem much like the adventuring type but I guess it takes all sorts!
    Activation number: In the top left corner of each citizen card is its activation number. Activation numbers range from 1-8 or can be 9/10 or 11/12.
    There are 2 different citizen cards for each activation number which can be mixed and matched during setup.
    Role: Each citizen has 1 of 4 roles and this is shown in the top right corner. Types include Worker, Soldier, Shadow and Holy.
    ​Cost: On the left side, alongside the citizen's name is the cost in gold to recruit the citizen. Recruiting duplicate citizens usually gets more expensive.
    Abilities: Finally, along the bottom edge of the card are its 2 abilities. One of which is activated in the player's turn and the other which is activated in other players' turns.
    Typically, abilities include gaining some of the game's several resources or changing one resource into another.
  • Starter citizens: These are 3 starter cards which all player begin the game with, this includes 2 citizen cards and a Herald which gives players a consolation resource if they get nothing from activation. More on activation below.
  • Duke cards: Duke and duchess cards are all unique and provide provide players with asymmetrical scoring opportunities.
  • Monster cards: A fantasy adventure game without evil monster to battle wouldn't be very good and Valeria: card Kingdoms features some famous fantasy opponents. Each monster card shares several statistics.
    Location and type: In the top right corner of every monster card is its location, which can be mountains, swamp etc. There are 8 types of location.
    Type indicates how tough a monster is  and goes from minion to boss.
    Strength: To the left of the monster's name is listed it's strength. This how many of which resource(s) must be spend to vanquish it, this is usually just strength but may also include magic.
    Victory points: Top the right of the name it will list the monster's VP reward which will be earned at the game end for defeating it.
    Reward: Along the bottom of the card it will display the immediate reward a player earns for defeating that monster. Rewards can take a variety of forms.
  • Domain cards: As well as slaying monsters, a player's citizen's can also go out and build (Well purchase actually!) domains. All domain cards share certain information.
    Role requirements: Shown in the top right corner are the role requirements to acquire that domain card. E.g., a domain may require a worker and holy role citizen cards or 2 soldier role cards.
    Cost: To the left of the card's name is the cost in gold to purchase the domain card - provided the player also has citizen cards that match its requirements.
    Victory points: To the right of a domain's name is the VPs it earns at the game end.
    Reward: Listed along the bottom of the card is the reward it provides to the player that purchases it. This can be a one-off bonus or a ongoing benefit.
  • Exhaustion cards: These cards simple say exhaustion and are used to track when the game end may occur.

Component quality is the usual good quality you'd expect from a modern game like Valeria: Card Kingdoms.
Card quality is fine as are the card tokens and the player boards.
Wooden tokens for resources are always a welcome addition.
The dice are plastic and feel a little 'square' but they have indented numbers which is good.

Valeria: Card kingdoms features good art throughout. Cards are well illustrated with colourful chunky pictures of heroic citizens and intriguing domains, my favourite though, is the artwork for monsters that brashly depict menacing enemies.

There's quite a lot of iconography throughout the game, from types of heroes and monsters, to terrain types and ability icons.
For the most part, they are fairly intuitive - matching the roles on citizen cards to the requirements on domain cards is obvious but some of the abilities, particularly on  domain cards are a bit esoteric and will require some looking up in the rulebook.

I don't think it's especially beginner or casual friend but ​by no means is it a gamebreaker either.

How's it play?
Setup

• Players: Give each player the following:
  Player board: Give each player a player board and the 4 resource tokens to go with it. Strength and VPs start at 0, Magic at 1 and Gold at 2
  Starter cards: Give each player their 3 starter cards.
  ​Duke cards: Shuffle the duke cards into a face-down deck and deal 2 face-down to each player. Then each player should select 1 to keep hidden and discard the other out of play.
• Central playing area: The monster, citizen and domain cards will be set out in 4 rows of 5 stacks per row as follows.
  Monster cards: Sort the monster cards by location and choose 5 locations. Take the cards for those 5 locations and create a row of 5 face-up stacks of monster cards. Each stack should also be sorted by monster type, with the weakest at the top and strongest at the bottom.
  Citizen cards: Decide which citizen cards will be used and sort them by activation number. There should be 10 stacks with 5 cards in each stack.
  Place them into 2 face-up rows of 5 stacks, with activation numbers 1-5 on the top row, while 6-8, 9/10 and 11/12 go on the second row.
  Domain cards: Shuffle the domain cards into a face-down deck. Deal 2 cards face-down into a row of 5 stacks, finally deal 1 domain card face-up on the top of each stack.
• Exhaustion cards: Take a number of exhaustion cards equal to twice the player count and put them in to the central playing area.
• First Player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
In Valeria: Card Kingdoms, players will be rolling dice to activate cards to accumulate resources which in turn can be spent to acquire more citizen cards, domains and monsters.
The game follows the usual turn structure of the active player taking their actions before player progresses to the player on their left.
During a turn, the following phases occur.

• Dice roll phase: The active player rolls both dice. The result of this roll will determine which citizen cards will activate.
  Reading the dice: The dice are red 2 ways, individually and as a pair.
  E.g., rolling a 2 and 5 means that cards with activation numbers 2, 5 & 7 will activate.
  Rolling doubles like double 4 means that 8 activates and 4 activates twice.
• Activation phase: Players now resolve citizen cards with activation numbers that match the result the result of the dice roll.
  This means the active player resolves the left hand ability on all their activated cards.
  All other players resolve the right hand ability on all their activated cards.
  No activations: If none of a player's citizen cards activates, the Herald activates instead and this gives the unfortunate player 1 of the 3 resource of their choosing.
• Action phase: The active player must now perform 2 actions, this can be 2 different actions or the same action twice.
  Spending resources: 3 of the 4 available actions requires the active player to spend resources. In most cases, the magic resource can substitute for other resources provided at least 1 from the original resource is also spent.
  E.g., if a card costs 4 gold, the player must spend at least 1 gold but can substitute magic for any other part of the gold cost.
  The 4 actions are:
  • ​Gain resources: Each action spent allows the active player to gain 1 of the 3 resources.
  • Recruit citizen: The active player can recruit a citizen from the central area by playing their gold cost. This card is immediately placed into their tableau and will be ready to activate in the next roll.
  • Defeat monster: For an action, the active player may defeat the monster on top of any monster stack. They must spend the relevant strength and/or magic to do so. The player immediately gains the reward and the monster card is put into their victory stack.
    VPs from monster cards are not earned at this time.
    Additionally; as monsters are defeated, stronger and stronger monsters are revealed.
    
  • Build domain: The active player may spend an action to build the top domain card on any stack provided they meet the role requirement and spend the relevant gold.
    The domain card is then placed into their tableau. If the domain provides an immediate benefit, then the player resolves that benefit now. Ongoing benefits will as determined by their description.
    Finally, a face-down domain card is flipped to replace the one just taken.
    As with monster cards, domain cards not earn their VP until the game.
• Empty stack: Any time that any of the 20 stacks in the central playing area becomes empty, an exhaustion card is put in the empty spot.
• Next player: Once the active player has taken their 2 actions, play progresses to the player on their left who begins their turn by rolling the dice.

Endgame
Play in Valeria: Card Kingdoms continues until any 1 of 3 game ending criteria is met, which are:

• All monster cards have been vanquished.
• All domain cards have been built.
• All allotted exhaustion cards have been placed into the central playing area.

Regardless of the method that triggers the endgame, play continues until the end of the round and all players have had equal turns.

A player can earn VPs from a variety of sources.

• VPs from the player's personal board.
• Total VPs from all monsters defeated by the player.
• Total VPs from all domains build by the player.
• VPs earned by meeting the scoring criteria on the player's Duke card.

Points are tallied, highest score wins!

Overall
I'll start by saying I quite like the implementation of the fantasy theme both in presentation and execution. It is slightly abstract but gathering a band of heroes to go off and fight monsters and build domains feels good.

Like many engine and tableau building games, there's a distinct early game in Valeria: Card Kingdoms about players building up their tableau, in this case with citizen cards and a late game about gaining increased resources to acquire monster and domain cards as well as VPs.
However, because players get 2 actions during their turn, there's some opportunity for optimised actions, card synchronicity and thus meaningful decisions. Getting the right citizen card can lead to getting a domain card for example. Getting a good domain card early can be a big boon dependant on its ability.
This means there will be a fairly constant flow of cards being drafted from the central area. Players will find themselves competing to get the cards they want as quickly as possible and is the game's primary form of interaction between players.

In fact: Thanks to every card having an ability that can be activated in other players' turns and also being able to read the dice both individually and as a pair making card activations more common, means the game generally flows quite rapidly. Players will often have something happening outside of their turn.
Like many drafting games, there's a higher level of play here that comes from watching what other players are doing and potentially trying to stymie them. The addition of duke cards messes with this though, providing players with unique and unpredictable objectives.

​​Valeria: Card Kingdoms is a solid iteration of the dice rolling, card activating, tableau building game style and players of those games will be on familiar ground here. To compliment this, there's also a couple of innovative touches to do with reading the dice and card activating that make the game fresh.

Despite its brisk playtime, the game does has a fairly involved setup process and also an abundance of iconography which makes for a slightly steep learning curve.
​Don't that put you off though. Valeria: Card Kingdoms is well worth a try.