11th August 2022

Thursday is here again and we're in Aldershot for more gaming goodness.

Do you like dungeons (Of the D&D kind of course...)? Do you like interior decoration?
Well now you can channel your inner ​malevolent Changing Rooms desires in this tile laying game of stylish dungeon creation for your fiendish and and most definitely picky overlord!

What's in a game?

• Dungeon tiles: These card tiles are all double-sided and come in 2 types.
  • Generic tiles: These tiles all have a 'grey' background and are also identical, one side features a room and the other, a tunnel passageway.
  • Dungeon tiles: These 120 tiles form the bulk of the game's tiles and they all have black backgrounds.
    Some dungeon tiles will contain assistant icons, more on assistants below.
    Decoration side: This side will display numerous types of icons to represent different decorations. Additionally, the decoration side may also contain a green symbol, this is symbol that can temporarily become a wild symbol when used in conjunction with a ​decorative mimic token. There may also be colour on the corner.
    Curiously, the manner in which the icons are presented on this side also provides information on what dungeon feature will be found on the other side.
    E.g., white icons at the edge mean a entrance way, so 2 white icons opposite edges of the tile would indicate a corridor, a white symbol on the edge of all 4 sides of a tile would indicate a crossroads. 
    This side also contains a unique number.
    Dungeon side: This other side displays various dungeon features such as rooms, junctions, tunnels, etc. Whilst many of the features will be grey, others will have colours.
• Starting tiles: There's one of these crossroad tiles for each player.
• Hourglass tiles: There are 3 of these and they're used to trigger the game end.
• Cards: Cards in Dungeon Decorators provide scoring opportunities to work towards and they also come in 4 types.
  Shape goal cards: This kind of card will score VPs for the player if their dungeon corridors and rooms matches the shape criteria on the card.
  Decoration goal cards: These cards can score VPs, provided the player meets it's decorative criteria.
  Blue boss goal cards: These cards are illustrated with a big bad boss who might be the dungeon's ruler. Boss cards provide a global scoring opportunity, that is, a boss card can score points for all players.
  ​Yellow boss goal cards: Functionally identical to the blue boss cards but providing a different type of global scoring opportunity and... in yellow.​
• Player boards: These come in player colours and each one features a humorous take on dungeon-themed interior decoration along with suitably cartoony artwork.
  Finally, each board contains 2 spaces to contain up to 2 dungeon tiles if a player decides to reserve them.
• Wooden cubes: Wooden cubes! There's only 4 of them though, coming in player colours, they are used to track players' scores.
• Pawns: These are the classic pawns you would find in classic games and come in player colours. They aren't used to move around a board or anything like that. Instead they're used to track turn order.
• Draft board: This board contains 2 rows of 5 spots for player pawns, one row at the top and one at the bottom.
  Between these 2 rows is another row, this time it's a row of 4 box shaped spaces to place dungeon tiles, between boxes 2 and 3 is the special 'middle' space. More on the draft board later.
• Tokens: There are 10 each of these 2 types of token.
  Arcane architect tokens: A round card token.
  Decorative mimic tokens: A colourful square token with a grinning face!
• Bags: Dungeon Decorators comes with not 1 but 2 bags (1 blue and 1 red!) to draw tiles from!

Component quality is good throughout Dungeon Decorators as you'd expect from any modern game. The tiles and tokens are all suitable sturdy as the cards, nothing bad here but nothing standout either.
The wooden cubes are a welcome addition and the traditional playing pawns are plastic - and that's fine, although to be honest they feel like a bit of left-field choice but they're also relatively big and practical, so that's good.

Most of the game's art appears on the player boards and cards, particularly the boss cards but it even carries over to some of the tokens. With bright and cartoony character art, it conveys the game's humorous theme and it's an appealing style.
Artwork for the corridors, junctions and rooms is straightforward but always practical.

There's quite a few icons to Dungeon Decorators though and players will need to learn them. This is most apparent with the decoration side of the dungeon tiles where there's the 'double-whammy' of not only having to learn what the various icons represent, but what their positioning in relation to each other means.
It's a bit fiddly and belies the games light theme and rules and will probably require referring to the rules.

How's it player?
Setup

• ​Dungeon tiles: Shuffle the ​dungeons tiles into a face-down stack. Remove 20 tiles from the game, then put 50 tiles into the blue bag, put the other 50 into the red bag, now add the 3 hourglass tiles to the red bag.
  Finally, give both bags a good shake.
• Boss cards: Sort the boss cards into their 2 types and shuffle both into face-down decks.
  Deal 1 card from both decks: These are the global scoring objectives for the game.
• Goal cards: Sort the goal card into their 2 types and shuffle them into 2 face-up decks.
• Players: Give each player the following.
  Pawn and game board in their player colours.
  A starting tile.
  Deal 3 shape goal cards and 3 decoration goal cards to each player, then everyone should discard any 2 of those cards. All discards should be done face-down.
• First player: Randomly determine the turn order for the game's 1st round. Player pawns should be placed accordingly from left-to-right along the top row on the draft board.

On to play
The objective in Dungeon Decorators is to create a dungeon in certain shapes as well as adding decorations to the dungeon in certain positions.
What these shapes and positions will be is determined by the 2 boss cards which will apply to all players and by individual goal cards players have hidden in their hands.
During each round, the active player's turn is split into 5 phases.
Dungeon Decorators does not follow the usual turn structure, once the active player has completed their actions, play does not progress to the player on their left, instead the next player is determined by whose pawn is next in line on the draft board.
The following occurs in a round:

• Draft board: First, any tiles still on the draft board from the previous round should be discarded out of the game.
  Drawing tiles: Tile will initially be drawn from the blue bag. Once all the tiles have been used form this bag, players switch to drawing from the red bag and it's the red bag that contains hourglasses which trigger the game end.
  Draw 4 tiles from the current bag and fill the 4 boxes on the draft board. For this, the decoration side is used. The order the tiles go on to the boxes is determined by the number on each tile. The lowest numbered goes on the leftmost and going rightward in increasing numerical order, so that the highest numbered tile goes on the furthest right.
• Draft tile: Whoever is first on the draft board goes first.
  They decide which tile they want to take and place their pawn on the adjacent spot on the opposite row. This will determine the player's position in the turn order for the next round.
  Middle space: If the player puts their pawn on the middle space which has no tile, the instead randomly draw a tile from the current bag.
  Then they take the tile.
• Activate assistant: Some tiles will display 1 of 4 assistant icons, these are immediately resolved when that tile is chosen.
  Goblin sapper: Allows the active player to take a generic tile which can be stored or played as per the tile placement rules (Explained below.).
  Burrow bro: The active player draws 2 tiles from the current bag, then along with the initial tile they drew, they choose which of the 3 to use, the other 2 are discarded out of play.
  Arcane architect: The active player take a arcane architect token.
  The active player may spend one of these tokens during their build phase. This allows them to reposition a tile that they've already played in a previous build phase, this includes being able to flip from one side to the other. Usual building rules apply.
  ​Decorative mimic: The active player takes one of these tokens, they can be spent during the scoring phase in their turn or during game end scoring.
  In either case, a  token can be used to make a green symbol represent any type of decoration for the purposes of a single scoring opportunity.
• Build: During this phase, the active player can chose one of the following actions.
  • Store: The tile just taken by the player can be put on to a empty box on their personal player board, each player board has room for 2 tiles.
  • Play tile: In this instance, the active player must then add the tile to their personal dungeon. There are of course some restrictions to this.
    Decoration tile: A decoration tile must be placed with at least 1 side adjacent to a wall on a dungeon card. A decoration cannot placed against a open passageway so as to block it.
    Dungeon tile: At least 1 open side of a dungeon tile must connect to another open passageway in the player's actual dungeon - it must be possible to trace a line from the newly placed tile to the starting tile. However a passageway from a dungeon tile cannot lead directly into a decoration.
    Furthermore, there should always be at least 1 unfinished passage way in a players dungeon after placing a tile.
  • Discard: If a player cannot build or store a tile, it must be discarded out of play.
• Score: The active player may reveal 1 or more goal card from their hand and score them. Points are immediately added to the score tracker and the played cards are discarded.
• Refill hand: If the active players has less than 4 goal cards, they draw from either of the decks, one at time until they have 4 in hand.
• Next player: Once the active player has finished their turn, player progresses to the next player on the draft board.
• Next round: Once all player have gone, new tiles are drawn to fill the draft board and a new round begins with a new turn order according to pawn positioning on the draft board.

Endgame
There are 2 ways the game can end.

If the 3rd and final hourglass is drawn from the red bag when refilling the spaces on the draft board, then the game immediately ends.
If the final hourglass is drawn during an action, such as placing a pawn in the middle space on the draft board our using a burrow bro action, then the current round is played out and the game ends with players having had even turns.

There are a variety of ways to score VPs.

• Goal cards: These should already be tracked on the score tracker.
• Boss goals: Boss cards reward VPs to players for having the most of some criteria related to dungeon or decoration tiles. The player with the most gains 10 VPs, 2nd place gets 4.
• Stars: Stars on dungeon tiles in a player's dungeon score VPs.
• Number of colours: Players score VPs for having different colours on dungeon tiles in their dungeon. More different colours means more VPs
• Amount of colour: Players also score VPs for the how many dungeon tiles of a single colour in their dungeon. The large the number of that colour, the more VPs.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
No doubt about it, Dungeon Decorators has a quirky theme along with quirky presentation to go with it.
At it's heart though, it's a pretty straightforward game of it's type, draft a tile and play it into a expanding network of tiles to maximise connections, albeit with a couple of nice little innovative touches in the form tile flipping and personal scoring opportunities, which I'll talk about below.
​
As is typical of this kind of game, players will need to position tiles in order to optimise the points they will score. 
Talking of scoring, Dungeon Decorators provides 2 clear routes to scoring points; how a dungeon is shaped and how decorations are placed which brings to me to the double-sided tiles.
​When placing a tile, players will need to choose which side to use and this will be heavily contextual. Players will need to take into consideration what tiles they already have in play as well as their personal goal cards and global scoring cards.

Unlike most tile-laying games, there's no connection between different scoring opportunities on the tiles, that is shape and decoration scoring is completely separate to each other with no way to place a tile to score both, it's one or the other. Yet, they also rely on each other or at least decoration tiles rely upon their presence of walls to be placed against. This means players will need to think, how can they can place a dungeon shape that allows me to play decorations.

Personal goal cards are also an interesting addition.
Firstly, they add some asymmetrical scoring opportunities which will lead to player adopting different approaches to what they prioritise and essentially some asymmetrical  tactics.
Secondly, they provide players with some flexibility when deciding how to prioritise certain elements of the game.
E.g., a when scoring goal cards, a player can choose to only draw shape goal cards and concentrate on playing dungeon tiles over decorations.

​However, even with these 2 innovative mechanics, I feel that Dungeon Decorators fails to stand out of the crowd. For me it doesn't feel different enough to other games of s similar type.
It's a perfectly acceptable game with solid core gameplay that provides an entertaining experience and I would happily play this if someone else wanted to but there are other games I would personally choose over Dungeon Decorators.

If you're a big fan of drafting, tile laying games and want to try something familiar but a fresh twist on the mechanics or the fun theme tickles your fancy, then you may want to give this a look-in.

4th August 2022

It's a Thursday and we're round Simon's for a evening of gaming entertainment.
​
Cascadia: 'A land of falling waters,' generally referring to a large wilderness area in the Pacific north-west of the USA.

In Cascadia players vie to create a diverse landscape of habitats and wildlife in this tile placement game.

What's in a game?

• Tiles: Cascadia uses 2 types of hex tile, however, they all share some common features.
  Each hex space will feature 1 or 2 of the game's 5 habitats and 1-3 of the 5 wildlife types. Finally some hex spaces will have a pinecone icon - usually this is a hex that only has 1 habitat and 1 animal on it.
  Starter tiles: There are 5 of these and they are a little different from the main tile in that they are actually 3 hex tiles combined into 1.
  Habitat tiles: There are about 80 of these tiles.
  The game's 5 habitats are:
  Forest
  Mountain
  Prairie
  River
  Wetland
• Tokens: There are a 100 wooden disc tokens in the game that come in 5 types. Each type represents a different animal/colour.
  Bear/brown
  Elk/earthy brown
  Fox/orange
  Hawk/blue
  Salmon/red
• Bag: A small used in conjunction with the tokens.
• Cards: There are 5 types of card in Cascadia for the 5 wildlife types and 4 cards in each type, thus 20 cards in total. One card will be used from each wildlife type during the game.
  Cards provide different scoring opportunities for each wildlife type as explained below. Additionally each of the 4 cards for all wildlife have slightly different scoring criteria and are rated A-D with A being the easiest to score and D the hardest.
  The different types of card score as follows.
  Bear: Bears score for being solitary or in small packs as determined by their card,  generally they cannot be adjacent to other bears.
  Elk: These score by being in herds, the shape the herd must take will be dictated by the elk card used.
  Fox: Foxes score by being adjacent to different wildlife types.
  Hawk: These score by being in line-of-sight of other hawks, generally they cannot be adjacent to other hawks.
  Salmon: Salmon score by being in a continuous line, the longer the better.
• Pinecone tokens: These are standard card tokens that depict pinecones. After being acquired, pinecones may be spent to trigger a couple of special actions or score VPs at the game end.

For the most part the components are all high quality. The tiles and tokens are sturdy and the wildlife tokens in particular are chunky and tactile.
The pinecone tokens are average quality by modern standard - which means perfectly acceptable.
The same is true of the cards, they feel a little flimsy but since they're only used to display information and won't really be handled much, they too are perfectly acceptable.

The art used on cards is fantastic, having said that, each set of 4 only uses 2 images which are flipped and used a 2nd time, it's a minor quibble but it feels touch cheap.
Art on the tiles is good too but is hard to appreciate since they are relatively small. Importantly, it's also uncluttered, differences between habitats is for the most part very easy to distinguish. Similarly, the wildlife icons are easy seen.

As a minor aside: Prairies are depicted as yellow, which I guess represent dry grasslands. The yellow definitely does not represent desert! And yes; some of the yellow tiles have salmon icons on them, because, believe it or not, prairies can have water features.
If you ever play the game and someone says, 'why are their fish in the desert', then let them know!!
Anyway, back to talking about components.

The iconography is easily understood in Cascadia. It's obvious what the wildlife ​icons represent and the icon for pinecones is equally as obvious.

How's it play?
Setup

• Starting tiles: Randomly give a starting tile to each player who should put it face-up in their personal playing area.
• Cards: Sort the cards by type and shuffle them into 5 face-down decks. Draw 1 from each deck and put them into a face-up row.
  These will provide players will the scoring criteria for the wildlife tokens.
• Wildlife tokens: Put all the wildlife tokens into the bag and give it a good shake.
• Tiles: Select the number of tiles to use as per player count and shuffle them into some face-down stacks, the exact number of stacks does not matter.
• Drafting area: Draw 4 tiles and place them in a row, next draw 4 wildlife tokens and put them in a row adjacent to the 4 tiles.
  ​Thus there will be 4 pairs each of 1 tile and 1 token.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
In Cascadia, players will draft tiles and wildlife tokens, using them to create a personal landscape by placing tiles adjacent to each other and putting tokens on top of them in order to create habitats and patterns of animals to score points.
Cascadia follows a usual turn order with the active player resolving their action before play progresses to their left.

• Overpopulation: The first thing the active player must do is check the wildlife tokens in the drafting area for overpopulation.
  4 identical tokens: If all 4 wildlife tokens are identical, the active player must remove all of them, put them to one side and draw 4 new wildlife tokens.
  3 identical tokens: If 3 of the 4 tokens are identical, the active player may choose to put the 3 tokens to one side and draw 3 new ones.
  It is possible to trigger overpopulation multiple times dependant on the tokens that are drawn but regardless of this, once overpopulation no longer occurs, return all set aside tokens back to the bag (And give it a good shake!).
• Pinecone tokens: If a player has acquired any pinecone tokens on previous turns (See below for info getting them.) then they can be spent for 1 of 2 actions.
  Take any tile and token: This actions allows the active player to take any tile and any wildlife token, regardless of their positions in the drafting area.
  Remove any wildlife tokens: The active player may set aside any number of wildlife tokens and then draw new tokens to replace them. Rules for overpopulation still apply here.
• Draft: The active player takes one of the 4 pairs of 1 tile and 1 wildlife token and according to the following rules, places them in their playing area.
• Place tile: The active must put the tile with one of it's faces adjacent to the face of a tile already in play. When placing tiles, the habitats on the tiles do not need to match, i.e., you can place mountains next to rivers but's a good idea to do so. Larger habitats score more VPs later on.  
• Place wildlife token: Wildlife tokens can only go on a tile that contains the matching animal icon. E.g., a fox token can only be placed on a tile which has a fox icon.
  If a wildlife token is placed on to a tile with a pinecone icon, then the active player immediately takes a pinecone token and adds it to their personal supply.
• Replacements: A new tile is drawn from a stack and a new wildlife ​token is drawn from the bag to replace those that were drafted.
• Next player: Play now progresses to the player left of the active player.

Endgame
Play continues until all the face-down stacks of tiles have been depleted and only 3 tiles remain in the drafting area, which should also be a even number of player turns.
VPs are scored from several sources.

• Meeting the scoring criteria on the 5 cards.
• Players score VPs for the biggest single grouping of tiles for each of the 5 habitats. If a player has groupings of 2 mountains and 5 mountains, they only score the group of 5 mountains. The bigger the grouping, the more VPS
  Bonus: For each of the 5 habitats, bonus VPs are awarded to the player with the biggest grouping of that habitat and the player with the 2nd biggest grouping.
• Pinecones: Each unspent pinecone contributes a VP.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
The rulebook for Cascadia talks about the real life habitats and biomes that inspired the game and it's obvious that this is one of those games where a bit of extra attention has been put into the details. 

On to the game itself: Cascadia has a nice mixture of quick to learn rules and depth of gameplay.
This depth comes from forcing players to make tricky and meaningful decisions. This occurs because Cascadia has 3 axis' of play which will influence players' choices.

The first comes from wanting tiles with specific habitats on them; players may want to expand their forests or rivers for example and will be looking for tiles that facilitate that.
The second axis comes from also wanting tiles with specific wildlife icons. If a player needs a fox token in a certain spot, then they'll need a tile with a fox icon.
The third and final axis comes from getting the actual wildlife tokens that are needed to score the wildlife cards.

​All of this means that it's unlikely that players will get all 3 that they want when picking a single pair which would be a no-brainer, they'll probably end getting 2 of they want and sometimes only 1.
​Players will need to adapt and re-strategize contextually, look to optimise their picks and finding other scoring opportunities. Players will probably have to gamble a little bit on getting what they need later in the game.

Pinecone tokens can of course change things. Used at the right time they can really open up a player's choices, getting any pair can make a difference, as can clearing all wildlife tokens in the drafting area if a player is really looking for a certain token.

Cascadia also has a fairly quick playtime, although it sort of occupies a game length that's way too long to be a filler but a little too short to fill an entire evening. I don't consider that a bad thing, you could just play twice! The randomness in setup and scoring gives it a lot of replayability.

If I had a criticism of Cascadia, it would be that sometimes the card scoring can be a little unclear and finicky. The rulebook does offer elaborations on this, but it's a definite little niggle.

Otherwise though, I think Cascadia is ab excellent tile-laying and set collectiing game.
For me it ticks a lot of boxes that good games should; straightforward rules, some depth for decision making and a brisk playtime.
It's one of those games I frequently like to carry in my board game bag when going to game events, so if I meet someone who's never met played Cascadia, they can try it.
As should you!

31st July 2022

It's a Sunday night and we're logged into Board Game Arena for a evening of gaming entertainment.

Chrome: A reference to colour (Not the browser!).
Ino: The last syllable of 'domino'.
Chromino: Colour domino!

And that's exactly what Chromino is - dominos with colours instead of numbers.

Caveat: We've only ever played Chromino digitally.

What's in the game?

• Tiles: These tiles are not the usual dominoes though. Instead of having 2 numbers, they have 3 colours. One colour on each end and one in the middle in any combination of 5 colours.
• Wild tiles: There are 5 wild tiles, these differ from the normal in that their centre spaces contain 'wild' colours which can be used as any colour.
• Bag: The physical version of the game also comes with a draw, that tiles are blindly drawn from.

There's very little to be said about the components here. No artwork is used, only 5 colours: blue, green, purple, red and yellow. These are bright plain colours too with no symbology to help colour blind players distinguish between them, which seems like a bit of a omission by today's standards.

Only 1 icon is used in Chrominos - which is the 'wild' symbol that always appears on a white background in the centre space.

How's it play?
Setup

• Starting tile: Randomly draw one of the wild tiles and place it into the central playing area.
• Players: Each player should randomly draw 8 tiles from the remaining tiles, keeping them hidden from other players.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
In Chromino, players take turns playing tiles from their hand with the intention of emptying their hand first and thus winning.
On their turn, the active player will perform 1 of the following actions.

• Play tile: If the active player can play a tile, they must do so, however, there is a specific rule when doing so.
  2 contact rule: When a tile is played, it must be placed orthogonally adjacent to another tile already in play and at least 2 of its colours must orthogonally touch matching colours. Mismatched colours cannot touch. A wild symbol counts as any colour and this applies to a tile in play or about to be played.
• Draw tile: If the active player cannot play a tile they must draw a new one.
  If the tile they drew can be played, then it must be played.
  Otherwise the new tile is added to the player's hand.
• Next player: Once the active player has played or drawn a tile, play progresses to the player on their left.

Endgame
When a player has only 1 tile remaining in their hand, they must shout "Uno!", or more sensibly just announce this is their last tile to all other players and then turn that last tile face-up for all to see. Play then continues normally. 
A new rule is introduced when a player has a only 1 tile left; which is that the last tile a player puts down cannot be a wild tile. If this would be the case, they must draw a new one instead.

Then, when a player places their final tile, the current round is concluded and any players who have placed all their tiles are declared winners.

Overall
From the brevity of the rules description, it's apparent that Chromino is a light game, which is no bad thing, it makes the game easy to learn and accessible to non gamers. It is after all, dominoes.

For me though, this level of simplicity makes the game unengaging.
I know there's a touch of strategy to be found from watching other players, possibly seeing which colours they're having trouble matching and trying to put those colours out to stymy them.
Also, when a player reveals their last tile, opponents will get an idea on how to block it but truth be told, it will also rely on luck to use these strategies.

This brings me to my main issue with the game: It's just very heavily dependent on luck more than anything else.
They'll be times when someone won't be able to play anything and will just have add a tile to their hand. This becomes even more frustrating when you watch an opponent then play a tile, this now means there's now a 2-tile difference between you and them - which in Chromino can be quite a lot.
And this seemed borne out in play. Often there would be a player - who through no fault of their own would have 2 or 3 more tiles than their opponents. Usually it meant they would never be in the running to win.

So unengaging and frustrating is how I would summarise Chromino.
​I'm not sure who would like it, fans of heavier games will shy away from this and more casual players will probably gravitate to more traditional games.
However, if you want a lightweight game a bit like dominoes... well you could just play dominoes.

23rd June 2022

It's another Thursday evening and we're in Aldershot for another gaming night.

​Village Green - a local game for local people?
It turns out that competitions between local villages to have the best village green can be serious business!

What's in a game?

• Green cards: These cards each depict some garden feature such as trees, a fountain or a gazebo.
  In the top-left of most cards is a symbol which dictates the card's flower type and colour.
  At the bottom of the card may be one or more of various icons, such as types of trees, lawns etc. These are mainly used to meet scoring criteria, although some symbols have special actions associated with them.
• Award cards: These cards all contain scoring criteria, that is, ways to score points from green cards. There's a pretty diverse selection of scoring methods here. Some of the cards include ways to lose VPs which player will obviously want to avoid.
• Village cards: There are 5 of these double sided cards. The 'front' of each card depicts a individual village in full colour (Along with 1 VP.), while the flip side show's the same village but monotone and missing the VP.

​Well that's it for the components - a deck of cards.
The card quality average and what you'd expect from games nowadays.

Watercolour styled artwork is used throughout the game on the green and village cards. depicting various items that could be found on an English village green (SIC). It's a pleasant style and the artwork all looks appropriately good, fitting it's theme quite nicely.

The iconography is not so well implemented though. I felt the symbols used for the different types of flower could have been a bit more distinct or individual, especially since the icons are quite small.
I also felt the 3 different types of tree icon displayed on the bottom of the green cards and award cards could have had been more distinctive.
Otherwise, the iconography is fine.

How's it play?
Set up

• Village cards: Randomly deal a village cards to each player. Each should put it down face-up with the side showing 1 VPS.
  This will constitute the top-left of their 'tableau' in their personal playing area.
• Green cards: Take the allotted number of green cards (As determined by player count.) and shuffle them into a face-down deck.
  Next; deal 3 green cards face-down to each player.
  Finally, draw 3 cards from the deck and place in them face-up in a row next to the deck.
• Award cards: Shuffle the award cards into a face-down deck. Unlike the starting green cards, 3 award cards are dealt FACE-UP to each and placed in a row next each player's respective village card and are considered already in play.
  Then, as with the green cards, draw 3 award cards and place them face-up in a row next to the award card deck.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
The objective in Village Green is to construct a tableau of 3x3 green cards while on the 'outside' of this 3x3 grid create a row and column of award cards to score points off of the green cards. Thus creating an overall 4x4 grid - including the village card which will be in the top-left corner.
Village Green uses the usual turn structure of having the active player complete their action then having play progress to the player on their left.
The active player can take 1 of the following 2 actions.

• Bonus action: OK, this is not 1 of the usual 2 actions a player can take, before their action, the active player may perform 1 of the 2 following action once per game by flipping their village card over (And losing the VP it provides.).
  • Wipe all 3 cards from either the green card or award row and replace them.
  • Place a green card on top of another green card (This is not permitted otherwise.), however, the criteria for matching symbols/colours must still be met - see below for more on this.
• Draw and play a green card: The active player must take one of the 3 green cards (Or draw blindly from the green card deck) from the central area and add it to their hand. Then they must play or discard any card from their hand.
  Play green card: A green card may be played face up in any part of the green card 3x3 grid, however there is a restriction; the flower type and colour must match at least 1 of the those elements with all orthogonally adjacent green cards.
  E.g., if a player wants to put down a card with a blue rose symbol, all the orthogonally adjacent cards must have either a rose type and/or blue colour.
  If there are no matching types, then a card cannot be played.
  Finally, green cards cannot be played on top of other green cards - unless the card has a lawn symbol.
  Green cards also have the following rules, depending on the symbols  at the bottom of the card.
  Lawn: If a green card has a lawn, that means it may be covered by another green card later in the game, although the usual rules about type and colour still apply. Covered cards do not score at the game end.
  Pond: Every visible pond symbol scores VPs at the game end.
  Structure: When a green cards with a structure symbol is played, the active player must immediately draw and place an award card following the usual rules for award cards.
  Trees: There are 3 types of trees and they can appear in various combinations on cards. Typically, trees are used for scoring.
• Draw and play an award card: The active player must take a award card from the display of 3 (Or draw blindly from the award deck.). Then they must play it face-up into the column or row outside the 3x3 grid. An award card can be played anywhere in a row or column and unlike green cards, may be placed on top of other award cards. This means the award card beneath is no longer scored and may be something that a player wants to do if a award card will score negative or low VPs.
• End of turn: Whenever a card is taken from either the green or award card rows, it is immediately replaced. Once the active player has concluded their action, play progress to the player on their left.

Endgame
There are 3 criteria which may end the game.
If either the green card or award card deck is depleted, or a player has placed 9 green cards, then the end has been triggered. The current is completed and the game goes to scoring.

Player score from the following sources:
A face-up village card scored 1 VP
Each visible pond scores 2 VPs.
Award cards score all the (Up to 3.) cards in their respective row/column.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
On a basic level, Village Green is a fair simple game - pick a card and play a card, which makes it straightforward and quick to understand.
However, like all good games, it's easy to learn but hard to master and this is definitely the case with this game.

What makes Village Green tricky is having to literally think 2 steps ahead. Players will need to pay attention to a green card's type and colour when playing it because it will influence what is played next to it.
Not only is positioning important when playing a green card but the order in which they are played will matter too.
E.g., putting a green card into the centre of the 3x3 grid means that all 4 orthogonally adjacent cards placed subsequently must match the flower type and colour for that card. If the centre card is played last, then it would have to match all 4 cards already played and that requires planning ahead.
Matching 3 types and 3 colours might not seem difficult but remember, players will only have a hand of 3 green cards and a row of 3 cards to draft from.
Sure, a player can keep drawing and discarding green cards to hopefully get what they need, but this can catch a player out. Once the deck is gone - it's game over. Additionally, while rinsing through green cards, other players may be completing their 3x3 grids, which is also game over.
Ultimately, players will need to commit to taking some risks and play early cards with gaps between them for some wriggle room for placing later cards and also rely on a bit of luck to get what they need.

Award cards are also tricky to manage but in a different way.
Players start with three, which can be good as it gives each player a initial individual scoring target to aim for. However, as green cards get played and players may be forced to put them in certain positions thanks to type and colour, it may end up that a award card scores less, zero or even worse - negative VPs!
Luckily, award cards can be nullified by covering them with other award cards later. This though raises another quandary for players to ponder.
The later an award card is played in the game, the harder it will be to place in a way to maximise it's scoring potential.

Finally, there's some potential for higher level play by watching what cards other players are putting down, trying to anticipate their actions and denying them what they need.
Although, since some of the icons are so small, it can be physically tricky looking at other players' tableaus with leaning over them!

All of these mechanics are good because they always provide players with meaningful decisions as they try and positions cards so that they match type and colour as well as scoring criteria.

Having written all of that brings me to a drawback of the game, which is that it can be a harsh and unforgiving experience.
Players will be frustrated when unable to play cards and are instead forced to discard. It's likely that some players will end up without all their possible green or award cards - I know I did on my first play.

So despite being easy to learn, I'm not sure this is a game for more 'casual players'? If it 'groks' with them, they'll be fine. Otherwise it'll probably take a game or two to get handle on where to player cards.

There's not denying it's a elegant, fairly engaging game. It plays quick enough and will provide players the challenge of being able to place all their cards and also optimise scoring opportunities.
Definitely worth a try in my opinion.

12th June 2022

Sunday evening is here and we're logged into Board Game Arena​ for a night of gaming.
​
Does a bear lay tiles in the woods, who knows? What I can tell you is that a bear definitely does lay tiles in the park thanks to Barenpark: A tile laying game about building a park for bears and bears only!

Caveat: we've only ever played Barenpark digitally.

What's in a game?

• Game boards: All boards feature a 4x4 grid, 6 of these 16 spaces will contain 6 icons taken from a combination of 4 different type of icons and finally, one other space will contain a 'pit' space. The remaining 9 spaces are blank.
  Boards come in 2 flavours; starting and standard.
• Tiles: Barenpark uses a number of tetromino style tiles, although many tiles are much bigger or smaller than standard 4-space tertromino tiles. Barenpark has 3 types of tile.
  Green tiles: These tiles display different facilities that would be found at a park such as toilets, playgrounds etc. Green tiles score no points.
  White tiles: A white scoring icon indicates which tiles are white tiles. White tiles represent housing for game's 4 different types of bears.
  Each of the types will have 7 tiles of varying VP value from 1-7.
  Orange tiles: Like white tiles, orange scoring icons indicate which tiles are orange tiles and these represent enclosures for the 4 different types of bears.
  Unlike white tiles, there are only 3 of each type of orange tile, they also have a varying VP value, only from 6-8 instead.
• Bear statue tokens: There are 16 of these are round tokens and are numbered 1-16 which is also their VP value.

Barenpark's art is fairly minimal but effective. It's nothing to write home about but is perfectly functional.
Tiles display artwork themed to their type, so the green tiles feature a portaloo for a toilet, a playground for a play ground and so on.
The white and green tiles show buildings and habitats pertinent to the type of bear they represent. E.g., the polar tiles appear glacial.

There are only a few icons in the game and they are easily learnt. They are also colour coded, thus the wheelbarrow icon - which is green - represents green tiles, thus white cement trucks are for white tiles and orange excavators are for orange.
The work crew icon represents construction crews which is not related to tiles.

One slight criticism here is that while there are green, white and orange tiles, some tiles which are coloured green will actually be white or orange tiles, there are also some glacial blue tiles which are actually orange.
It's a minor quibble, but players will need to remember that a tile's colour is based on its scoring icon. This could have been improved by using unique colours.

How's it play?
Setup

• Game boards: Randomly give each player a starting board.
  Take all the standard gaming boards and shuffle them into 2 equal face-up stacks in the central playing area.
• Tiles: Sort the tiles by type and put them out in the central playing area face-up as per the player count.
  White and orange tiles should be arranged with the highest value tile being placed at the top and descending in value. This means as more and more tiles get taken, the remaining point scoring tiles decrease in value.
• Bear statue tokens: Put out these tokens, again, the player count will determine which tokens are used. They should put out in numerical order.
• Determine a starting player: The starting player should take a 1-space green tile from the supply (In other words take a portaloo tile!) and place it in their playing area, NOT on the board. All other player should take 2 or 3 space tiles as per the player count rules.

On to play
In Barenpark, players complete to create the best bear park ever. Players achieve this by placing tiles on to their boards which in turn allows them to draft more tiles and boards.
​
Barenpark uses a traditional turn structure with the active player taking their turn before play progress to the player on their left.
During the active player's turn, they must perform the following actions.

• Play tile: The active player must play one tile from their personal playing area if they can. Tiles can be placed anywhere except on a pit space and can go across multiple boards provided there are enough spaces, tiles may be rotated and flipped as desired. Obviously tiles must fully fit on the available board spaces and cannot go over other tiles.
  First tile: The first tile a player puts down can be anywhere on their player board. Subsequent tile placements must adjacent to a tile already on the board.
  Passing: If the active player does not have a tile available or cannot place a tile because it doesn't fit in any current space; they then must take a green tile (Of their choice.), this immediately ends their turn.
• Draft: After the active player has placed a tile on their board, if they covered any icons, then they draft tiles and/or board as pertinent. If multiple icons are covered by a single tile placement, then all icons are resolved.
  Green wheelbarrow: Every one of these icons covered allows the active to draft a green tile.
  White cement truck: A white tile may be drafted.
  ​Orange excavator: A orange tile may be drafted.
  Construction crew: Covering this icon allows the active to draft a new game board by taking a board from one of the two available stacks and adding to their existing player board.
  The new board must be placed adjacent to a board already in play in the same orientation. A player is limited to a total of 4 boards for their park but may create a park of any shape within that limit, they can be placed in a line or a 2x2 grid or a t-shape or whatever.
• Take bear statue: Now the active player checks to see if all of the 15 spaces on any of their game boards have been completely filled with tiles - except of course, for the pit space.
  If any board has been filled, then the active player takes the highest value bear statue token and places it on the empty pit space on that board, thus finally completing it.
• Next Player: Play now proceeds to the player on the left.

Endgame
When any player completes their 4th game board, that is; collects their 4th bear statue, then the endgame is triggered.
​All other players now have one more turn of play and then the game  goes to scoring.
Players add together the value of all tiles played and bear statues placed on their game boards.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Barenpark is a smart blend between easily understood, accessible rules, meaningful decisions and optimising gameplay. The game is something of a race to get the highest scoring tiles and bear statue tokens first and this can put players in something of quandary.

For the most part, players will want to draft white and orange tiles as often as possible because they score the points. They also cover more of the board and thus potentially draft more tiles. This is particularly true of orange tiles.
It means that players should be looking to cover icons with their tiles placements as effectively as possible to gain more tiles. Using an entire turn just to gain a green tile is not particularly efficient.
Having said that, greens are not bad tiles, sometimes getting green tiles is a useful move, those 1-space portaloos can fill in pesky gaps on a board, working towards getting bear statues.

Talking of bear statue tokens.
Sometimes it's worth taking a less efficient tile just to complete a board and gain a higher scoring token before another player. This is all of course contextual and dependant on the situation.

There's definitely a small degree of higher level of play going on here that comes from watching other players turns and trying to anticipate their next moves. With limited numbers of white and orange tiles, knowing which tile another player might go for gives you the option of employing a denial strategy against them or beating them to the punch for a token.

This brings me to the one criticism I have. When playing Barenpark in some circumstances it sometimes felt like that if one player got 'ahead' they tended to stay ahead.
By ahead I mean managing to fill spaces on the board before other players. This is most apparent when drafting bear statue tokens. At times you can see that a player will complete one of their boards before you and claiming the better scoring token, then they'll also be ahead for the next board and claiming the token ahead of you again.
Of course it's possible to re-prioritise and change which board you're trying to complete but since Barenpark has fairly linear gameplay (By which I mean you can only expand you tiles into areas where you already have tiles.), this can be tricky, although the endgame rules where players get an extra turn after whoever finished it probably goes some way to alleviating this.

I think Barenpark is a good, if unremarkable game that feels a little 'bland' or functional and is a little on the light side of this style of tile-placement game but I don't see that bad thing.

But quibbles aside, if you want a solid, tile-placing game that's not-too taxing but still engaging, Barenpark is a good choice.
Barenpark's accessibility and 'lightness' means means it's a good choice for a gateway or entry game.

9th June 2022

We're in Aldershot for an evening of board gaming fun.

So; in Isle of Cats, some evil bad guy is heading to the titular island (Which as the name might suggest, is filled with the felines.) to kill al the cats!!!
Players have a limited number of rounds to save as many as possible.

What's in a game?

• Island board: A idyllic beach scene leading a mountain is depicted on this board.
  There's a track for turn count and and a paw track (SIC) for player order.
  The island board has a '3' on the left side and a '5' on the right. These represent the game's left and right 'fields'. More on fields below.
• Player boards: Each player board is fashioned to look like a boat (The boat you'll be using to rescue cats.) which has several rooms, which are all marked out with a grid and some small icons, there are also icons for rats and treasure maps - there's got to be treasure maps - right? It is a boat after all!
  Each board is also double-sided and the other side features a more family-friendly layout.
• Tetrominos: Isle of Cats makes use of numerous different types of sort of 'not-quite' tetromino shaped tiles.
  • Cats: There are 5 breeds or types (Colours.) of cats shown on the tiles. As well as having a different colours, they also have distinctive tales.
  • Oshax: They are the 6th breed of cat found in Isle of Cats and have special rules that apply to them.
  • Common treasures: There are 4 types of 'common' treasure, the art on the tile show the treasures as having a reddish hue.
  • Rare treasures: If there's common treasures, stands to reason there's got to be rare treasures too! Artwork for these depict them with a yellowish colour.
• Cards: There are a 150 cards in 5 types of cards in Isle of Cats that have different functions and which are delineated by colour. Most cards have a cost which is displayed in the top left corner.
  Collectively they are known as 'discovery' cards.
  • Lesson cards: The blue cards are lesson cards, what do people learn from lesson cards? How to earn points obviously.
    Essentially, these are objective cards that earn players additional points.
    There normal and public lessons, the main difference being that all players can benefit from a public lesson card.
  • Rescue cards: These are green cards and they may depict a number of 'boots' and/or baskets/broken baskets. As the name suggests, these cards are used to rescue cats.
    Boots determine turn order for the round and baskets determine how many cats can be rescued.
  • Oshax cards: These brown cards are used to acquire oshax tiles.
  • Treasure cards: These are yellow and allow the player to... you guessed it, acquire treasure tiles, common or rare.
  • Anytime cards: As the name suggests, these cards can be played at anytime during the any of the phases. Anytime cards are purple and tend to give players bonuses which might be an extra permanent basket or some fish, etc.
• Tokens: Isle of Cats also makes use of several types of token.
  • Basket tokens: These tokens are used to represent 'permanent' baskets that players have acquired, they're also double sided. Both sides feature a illustration of a basket but one side is greyed out, meaning the basket has been 'used' for the round.
  • Fish tokens: These blue wooded fish shaped tokens come in a 1-fish and 5-fish denomination. Fish is the game's currency.
  • Cat tokens: There coloured wooden meeples for each of the game's 5 breed's of cat. Players don't actually gain or use cat meeples in the game but they are used when a specific colour must be displayed to players.
  • Black ship: This wooden token depicts the ominous black ship of Vesh, the evil bad guy coming to the Isle of Cats.
• Bag: Used to blindly draw tiles.
• Box lid: What, what, the box lid? Yep, the box lid is designated as a special spot for cats to sit!

​
Component quality is for the most part very good. Tiles are suitably thick and chunky and all the wooden tokens. The game boards feel fine too. The only quibble I have is that the cards feel a little flimsy.

The artwork in Isle of Cats is excellent throughout with plenty of illustrations of weird and wonderful looking cats on all the tetromino tiles and many of the cards. The boards and other cards also display nice colourful artwork.
I do have a minor criticism here too: The colours for the common and rare treasures is a little too similar to each other, they could have done with being a bit more distinct.

There are few icons used in the game and they're all clear, however, I do have a of minor grumble.
Each personal game board is divided up into 7 'rooms'. It can be hard to see how the board is split up in this manner, particularly when scoring at the end with all the clutter of tiles. The publisher's were aware of this as they put distinct little icons in the square for each room to help but even so, it's tricky thing to comprehend.

How's it play?
Setup

• Players: Give each player a player board and a basket tile.
• Starting turn order: Determine a first player.
  The first player should take a cat meeple of their chosen colour and put it at the top of the player order track. Then going left, all players should do the same with a different coloured cat meeple to determine order for the start of the first round.
• Island board: Put out the island board and put the black ship on '5' on the turn counter.
  Sort the cat meeples by colour and place them above the board.
  Next sort the common treasures by type and put out a number of each type as per player count, place them beneath the board.
  Then put out the Oshax tiles, also beneath the island board.
• Cat tiles: Put all the other cat tiles into the bag.
• Rare treasure tiles: Put the rare treasure tiles into the bag.
• Blind draw: give the bag a good shake then blindly draw out tiles.
  Draw out an amount of cat tiles equal to the number of players multiplied by four. Half should go in the left field and the other half in the right field.
  Thus; in a 3-player game, 6 cat tiles will be put in the left field and 6 in the right.
  If any rare treasures are drawn, place them adjacent to the common treasures, they do not count as 'drawn tiles' then draw more tiles until you reach the allotted amount of cat tiles.
• Discovery cards: Shuffle the discovery cards into a face-down pile.

On to play
In Isle of Cats, players are competing to cover as much of the the grid that is shown on their personal board as possible. This is done by acquiring and placing cat and treasure tiles. Players will also be looking to group cats by colour (Or family.) as much as possible as well as fulfilling whatever objectives they gain during the course of the game.
Isle of Cats is played over a number of phases, with players acting in turn order during each phase. Note that the turn order is different to player order in Isle of Cats and can and probably will change from turn-to-turn,

• Fishing phase: Each player acquires 20 fish from the supply.
• Drafting phase: Deal 7 discovery cards face-down to each player. Players then look at their cards and decide which 2 cards to keep in their playing area, they should pay special attention to the cost in the top-left corner of each card.
  The remaining cards should be passed to the player on their left. Keep repeating this until each player receives 1 card form the player on their right, this card must kept.
  • Payment: Now that each player has 7 cards, they may decide which ones to keep and must pay for them with their fish. If they do not want to pay for 1 or more card (Or cannot afford to do so.), then those cards must be discarded.
• Lesson cards phase: Blue lesson cards are played in this phase. All players must play all lesson cards in their hand. Public lesson cards are played face-up while normal lesson cards are played face-down.
• Rescue cats: Now it's time to rescue some cats. This is done by playing 1 or more green cards.
  • Turn order: Before any rescuing occurs, a new turn order must established. All players must place any and all rescue cards they want to use in this round face-down in their playing area. When this is done, all cards are simultaneously revealed.
    Whichever player has played card(s) with the highest total 'boot's score moves to 1st in the turn order. 2nd highest to 2nd in the turn order and so on.
  • Turns: Now, in the new turn order, players take turns rescuing cats or acquiring cat tiles.
    ​Players can only rescue 1 cat in a turn and must pay the cost to do so (Either 3 or 5 fish depending on the field the tile is in.). A basket must also be used to acquire a cat tile, all players start with 1 permanent basket (Which gets flipped when used.). Rescue cards may also provide temporary baskets and 2 broken baskets count as a single basket. Players can take multiple turns to gain multiple cat tiles but must have a basket available to use for each tile they acquire.
  • Tile placement: When a player gains a tile, it must be immediately placed on their personal board.
    A tile can be rotated and flipped in any way prior to placement. The first tile placed in the game can be put anywhere inside the board's grid but further tiles must be placed orthogonally adjacent to another tile already on the game board. While the board has 7 'rooms', it's OK for tiles to cross between them.​
  • Treasure map: Each player board will have 5 treasure map icons in the same 5 colours as the cat tiles. If a treasure map is covered by a cat tile which matches it's colour, then the active player may immediately take and place a common treasure tile. While common treasure tiles are quite small relatively, they can be useful for filling awkward gaps.
• Rare cards phase: This is when Oshax and treasure cards are played.  Only 1 rare card can be played per turn but again, players may have multiple turns provided they have multiple rare cards they want to play.
  • Oshax cards: Playing one of these cards allows the active player to claim a Oshax tile and add it to their player board. Oshax cats do not have a colour, instead, when placing an Oshax, the player assigns the Oshax cat a colour by putting a cat meeple of the chosen colour on the Oshax tile. - This colour is independent of the player's own player colour.
  • Treasure cards: These cards can be played to acquire rare treasures - provided they've been drawn from the bag of course.
    As with all tiles, they must be immediately placed into the active player's board. As well as filling gaps, rare treasures score VPs at the game end.
• Anytime cards: Anytime cards can be played at anytime during any of the above 5 phases.
• End of round: Once the rare card phase has ended, the end of the round has been reached, the following occurs
  • Clear fields: Any cat tiles which were not claimed during the round are discard out of play.
  • More cats: More cat tiles are drawn blindly to repopulate the fields as per the rules for setup.
  • Carry over: Players carry their hand of cards and fish tokens over to the start of the next round (There's no hand limit or fish token limit.).
  • Move Ship: Move the black ship 1 space along the turn count track.
  • Next round: The next round begins with the first phase by giving 20 fish to each player.

Endgame
Once the 5th round has finished, the game is over and it's goes to scoring.
There are several sources for scoring points and the lesson cards in particular provide many ways to score:

• Families: A family of cats consists of at 3+ cat tiles of the same colour which are orthogonally liked in a group. Each family of cats score VPs according to its size. The bigger the more VPs.
• Public lessons: All players can score VPs from public lessons.
• Lessons: Players now reveal their lesson cards and score them appropriately.
• Rare treasures: Each rare treasure that a player has in their playing area scores VPs.

Negative VPs
That's right, it possible to lose VPs!

• Rats!: Each rat icon left visible on a player's board will lose them 1 VP.
• Unfilled rooms: Any room that has at least 1 unfilled space will cost the player 5 VPs, that means potentially if a player has just 7 empty spots (1 in each room), they could lose a lot of VPs!

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
​There's a few things to think about in Isle of Cats but it's all paced out fairly well and never feels too complex.
That's not to say there's no strategising to be done - because there is.

The chief concern for players should be the management of their fish! Fish are not only used to buy cats but also discovery cards and they're the route to not gaining more VPs but initiative or gain bonuses.
E.g., if you really want a certain tile, playing rescue cards with high 'boots' is important, but you'll need to keep them during the drafting phase - and pay for them.

Players will need to balance their spending with their priorities and recognise when and what is more important at what time.
Acquiring cat tiles is very important, building families, filling rooms, covering rats and treasure maps are all significant but so are going first or getting lesson cards and so on.

Despite players having their own player boards, there's also a higher level of play about watching the actions of other players.
For example; if another player has a big family of a certain breed of cats, it might be a good idea to deny them a beneficial card during the drafting phase and so

But since this is a drafting game, players will also have to adapt to circumstances as they occur, such as having to take a cat tile that isn't wanted and finding a way to place it to maximise it's potential - or minimise it's damage!

Isle of Cats is a mid-weight game that's pretty easy to learn and combines several mechanics in to a engaging cat-themed game.
Whether it's deciding which cards to keep and later which ones to play, as well as what tiles to take and where to place them, Isle of Cats All nearly always gives players meaningful decisions to make and that's the sign of a good game.

29th May 2022

It's a Sunday Evening and we're on Board Game Arena for some gaming entertainment.

Copenhagen; largest city in and capital of Denmark. Few know though, of the cities secret history of builders having ties with errr.... tetromino shapes? At least that's what the game Copenhagen would have you believe... sort of!

Caveat: we've only ever played Copenhagen digitally.

What's in a game?

• Player boards: Each player board is styled to look a little like the facade of a urban townhouse in what I imagine is meant to be Copenhagen.
  Mechanically speaking, each player board is a 5x9 grid which provides 45 spaces, and 4 of these spaces contain shields. Finally, outside the grid is a column of 3 more shields.
• Tetrominoes tiles: Copenhagen comes with tetrominoes tiles in 5 different colours plus white. Strictly speaking, these aren't all tetrominoes as they come in sizes of 2-5 but they are all orthogonally linked square shapes. 
  Additionally, each colour of tetrominoes has it's own 'themed shape'. E.g., all the purple tiles are straights, the red tiles tend to be blocks and so on. Having said that there's some crossover in shape types between colours. The white tiles are the exception here as they are all 1-space tiles.
  They're also somewhat limited in numbers, there are 3 of each size in each colour  except for the 5-space tiles, where there's only 1 5-space tile in each colour. Again, white is the exception in having 12 tiles.
  Finally... windows! All tiles have 1 or more windows on them. As a rule all tiles have 1 space without a window, a 2-space tile has 1 window space and 1 non-window space, the 4-space tile has 3 windows and 1 non-window. Yet again, white is the exception as every white tile has a window on it. Why are windows important? More on that later.
• Facade cards: These cards come in the same 5 colours as the tetrominoes tiles. They look quite busy but in fact, they just show the all the relevant shapes in their particular colour.
• Game end card: A unique card which can trigger 1 of the game's 2 ways of ending.
• Ability tiles: There are 5 types of these square tiles, each type confers a special ability when used. They're also double-sided with a 'used' icon on the flip side.
• Harbour tile: This large tile has spots to place the draw deck and discard pile. Along the outside of the tile are 7 spaces to line up 7 facade cards in a sort of 'U' shape.
• Scoring track: This tiles tracks player scores and slots in adjacent to the harbour tile.

The components for Copenhagen are pretty colourful and bright, although there's barely any art to speak of. 
​
There's also barely any iconography to speak of. The symbols on the ability tiles aren't immediately obvious and will probably require looking up in the rules a couple of times. Other than that though, everything else is easily understood.

How's it play?
Setup

• Harbour tile: Put out the harbour tile, then shuffle the facade cards into a face-down deck. Going clockwise, deal 7 cards face up to the allotted spaces around the harbour tile, then put the deck on to it's space on the tile.
• Tetramino tiles: Put out the tiles as per the player count and arrange them by colour and type.
• Special ability tiles: Put out 5 stacks of special ability tile according to the player count.
• Player board: Give each player a player board.
• First Player: Determine a starting player
• Starting cards: Each player draws cards from the deck as per player count and turn order.

​On to play
In Copenhagen, players take turns either gathering cards or playing them to gain tiles which they put on to their player board to score points.
During their turn, the active player may perform exactly 1 of 2 possible actions.

• Draft cards: The active player takes 2 cards from around the harbour tile. These 2 cards must be adjacent to each other and cannot 'wrap around' the horseshoe shape the line of cards are in.
  Players also have a hand limit of 7 which they must discard down to if they go over.
• Draft tiles: The active may draft one of the tetromino tiles, this is done by discarding a set of cards. if 3 red cards are discarded, then the active player can take a 3-space red tetromino tile, if 5 greens are discard, then they can take the 5 space green tetromino and so forth.
  Placing tiles: Once acquired, a tile must immediately be placed on to their playing board. They must be placed either at the bottom of the playing area, or on top another tile - although overhangs are acceptable and tiles can be rotated in any the player sees fit.

Other rules: Well that's it for the basic actions, there are a couple of extra rules.

• Shields: When a shield on a player's board is covered by a tile, then they get to perform 1 of 3 special actions.
  1-space tetromino: The active player may take and place one of the white 1-space tiles into their playing area. Which if placed on another shield space can trigger another special action.
  Ability tile: The active player may take 1 of the 5 types of ability tile. Players are limited to 1 of each type but they may be activated any anytime in the active player's turn. Once resolved, an ability tile is flipped to its used side.
  Ability tiles allow players to take 3 cards, or 2 cards not adjacent to each other and and so on.
  Reactivate abilities: This final action allows the active player to flip all ability tiles from their used side to their ready side. Obviously, this action becomes better, the more flipped tiles a player has.
• Exhausted deck: When the draw deck becomes empty, all the cards in the discard pile are shuffled back into a new draw deck.
  Additionally, the End Game card is shuffled into the bottom 10 cards of the draw deck. This may trigger the game end, see below for more information
• Scoring: There are 2 ways of scoring; horizontal which requires filling 5 spaces and vertical, which requires 9.
  Horizontal: When a player completes a horizontal line, they score 1 point, if the all the spaces in the line contain windows, they score 2 points instead.
  Vertical: A completed vertical line is worth 2 points, if all the spaces contain windows, it's worth 4.

That's it for the rules.

Endgame
Either one of two ways can trigger the game end.

If the End Game card is drawn (Can only occur after shuffling the discard pile back into a draw deck.) then the game immediately ends.
If a player scores a 12th point then the game immediately ends.

In either case, points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Mechanically, Copenhagen is a fairly light, accessible game; players are either drafting cards or drafting tiles. It's the relationship between those 2 actions that's interesting.

Firstly, there's not many tiles that go into the game, e.g., only 1 5-space tile is available in each colour and only 3 each of the other sizes in each colour, which is all quite deliberate. It takes more cards and thus more actions (And longer.) to get the bigger tiles which are the better tiles but there's the risk a player won't get the one they want.
The bigger tiles are better because of the windows (Or lack of.) on them. Getting a lot of 2-space tiles will mean 50% of filled spaces on a player's board will be windowless, while getting a lot of 5-space tiles means only 20% of spaces are windowless.
Completing a row or column with all windows essentially doubles the points that line is worth and the more windows a player can get on their board, the more likely they are to do this.

This brings me to the next point, other than the 1-space tiles, every tile has a windowless space. This means it's very hard to create lines that all score windows. Players will want to position windowless spaces to minimise their effect and provides players with meaningful decisions to make.

These two factors means that players are faced with a dilemma. Go for the quicker easier to get tiles and probably get a smaller score, or take the risk of losing our by going for bigger, better scoring tiles.
There's definitely a higher level of play that involves watching what cards other players are drafting and trying to anticipate what colours they're going for. This kind of knowledge allows players to adapt to what they think their opponent is doing.

I think Copenhagen is a fairly easy to learn game that has a streak of depth to it. Most people will pick it up fairly quickly.
Having said that I personally found the game a little dull. There's nothing here that I haven't seen elsewhere, it's just packaged differently here.

Copenhagen also played just a little too quickly for my liking (Normally something I'd never criticise a game for!); playing with just 3 people meant that frequently 6 cards were being drawn from the 70 card deck every round, this means the game would reach the end of the deck twice after 20-something cards drafts for each player. It felt like the game is mostly likely to deplete it's deck before a player gets to 12 points. 
To put that into perspective; if a player has 20-something card drafting actions, that in turn gives them the ability to draft around 50 spaces worth of tiles. The quickest way to reach 12 points is to have 6 filled rows, all with windows. That would require filling in 30 spaces at a minimum, this is provided they got the cards and tiles they wanted.

I'm sure there are players out there that would find the challenge of getting to 12 points compelling but for me. ​It meant that I found the game unsatisfying and combined with it's blandness made it average and unremarkable.
I can't really fault the game, it's just a little dull.

26th May 2022

It's a Thursday evening and I'm in Aldershot with friends for some gaming goodness that's been a long time coming!

Is it tiny? Yeah pretty much. Is it in a dungeon? Definitely. Is it epic?... Well, you'll just have to see!
Tiny Epic dungeons is a cooperative tile laying (Or card laying really.) dungeon crawler with players taking on the roles of various heroes who will spend much of their time managing a goblin epidemic before being chased around by the big bad before hopefully defeating it.

What's in a game?

• ​Cards: Tiny Epic Dungeons uses a whole bunch of cards, most of them square shaped.
  In the corner of each card is a tin (sic) icon that indicates type of card it is.
  • ​Room cards: These square cards depict the game's titular dungeon. Each one is a room or a chamber and will have have various ways in and out.
    Typically these rooms contain a challenge or a trap to bother our heroes that they may choose to (Or be forced to!) attempt to overcome. Generally, success at these grants a benefit and a failure confers a penalty. Some will also introduce goblins into the mix.
    Entrance: This is the beginning card.
    Lair: This is where the heroes will find the boss.
  • Encounter cards: These are dungeon rooms that also contain minions. Minions are tougher than goblins.
  • Minion cards: These cards depict minions that characters will encounter. There are 8 of them and they include your standard fantasy monsters such as a troll, minotaur or giant spider, etc.
    Each card has a portrait of the pertinent monster and stats for armour, movement and 3 types of combat. There's also a damage track that runs along the edge of the card.
    Additionally, along the bottom it lists extra actions that can be triggered.
  • Goblin cards: There are 6 of these. Functionally they're almost identical to minions, except much weaker, having only 1 health each. Goblins are easy to kill but also spawn at a quicker rate, if too many are spawned at once... it spells bad news for the players.
  • Loot cards: Players can acquire treasure as they progress through their adventure and loot cards are magic items that confer bonuses on characters. Additionally, some items exist in sets which confer further bonuses if part or all of a set is collected by a single character.
  • Magic spells: Characters can potentially cast spells and these cards are spells that they can acquire.
• Oversized cards: Tiny Epic Dungeons also uses oversized cards or mats as the rules call them.
  • Torch mat: This card depicts a series of steps going downwards and acts a timer track. At the end of every turn the marker moves down a step, if it lands on a step with an icon, then that action is triggered. Generally these spawn goblins or trigger the extra actions of goblins and minions. If the marker reaches the bottom before they players find the boss lair, it's game over.
    This is a double sided card and it's flipped to the other side once the boss has been encountered. It is also downward heading set of stairs with icons on a timing track and again, if the marker reaches the bottom, the players lose.
    Finally along the top and bottom of both sides are spaces to position 4 goblin cards alongside the torch mat. Each goblin space is marked 1-4 and has a associated meeple.
  • Boss mat: These cards depict both the boss's stats and the boss' lair.
    The lair will contain a number of locations that characters may stand to fight the boss, some of which will benefit the characters and some of which will punish them.
    Bosses also have health track marked with one or more octogram symbols that relate to the altar tokens below and combat stats.
    Each boss card is also double sided and the flip side shows 3 rows of spaces for 2-4 heart tokens. More on these later.
  • Hero mats: Now we're talking. Each character in Tiny Epic Dungeons has their own mat which is essentially a character sheet. It shows their name, race and class such as dwarf fighter or wood elf rogue along with a illustration of the character.
    It also lists their health and focus, special moves (And some standard move too.) and numerical ratings for Speed and Armour.
    The final 3 stats; Strength, Agility and Intellect are rated by cubes. More this below.
    Finally along the edge of each hero mat, it has allotted spaces to place weapons, armour, spells and magic items.
• Miniature figures: There's an actual proper 3d plastic figure for each of the characters and they look like they're in the 25mm scale.
• Tokens: There are several types of tokens in the game, they all look they're made of wood.
  Heart & focus tokens: The focus tokens look like tiny lighting bolts that make their icon in game. Red hearts are for heroes and black hearts are for minions!
  Disarmed tokens: These cog shaped tokens also display keyholes and are used to represent neutralised traps. Curiously, they're the largest tokens in the game, noticeable so bigger than most other components.
  Altar tokens: These little black and white tokens have an octagram styled shape and relate to the bosses.
• Meeples: There are a whole bunch of little wooden meeples in Tiny Epic Dungeons.
  Goblin meeples: Should they be called geeples, gobples? Anyway, there are 4 of these and they are numbered, there's 1 for each that matches the icons on the goblin spaces on the torch mat.
  Minion meeples: Each of the game's minions has its own unique meeple.
  Boss meeple: A beeple? Even though there are 6 different bosses in the game, there's only 1 boss meeple which is a tiny (Sic.) omission, having said that and considering all the other components, it would be a bit mean spirited to be critical.
  It also looks styled after the eye of Sauron; which if you're going to only have 1 boss meeple is a pretty good choice.
• Dice: There are 4 dice in Tiny Epic Dungeons, 3 are black hero dice and 1 is a red enemy die.
  They are normal six-siders... well sort of anyway.
  Hero dice: The hero dice are numbered +1, +2 and 3-6. The +1, +2, 3 and 4 all also have focus icons, while the 6 also has a heart symbol.
  Enemy die: The enemy die is numbered 2-5, the 1 and 6 have been replaced with icons for a torch icon and a broken shield.

Tiny Epic Dungeons packs a lot into a small box.
The cards feel a little flimsy and the dice are plastic and feel a bit average but other than that, the components are all good quality.
The character figures are sizable and a pretty cool touch for a game of this proportion, while for the most part the tokens are small (Other than the disarm tokens.), they're still solid and well made.
But for me, the standout components are the meeples, not only are they nicely shaped wooden tokens, they also illustrated. It shows some thought and care has gone into the production.

The use of art is also good throughout the game, portraits of heroes, minions and bosses are all chunky and colourful, utilising a cartoony style that's used in a lot of modern fantasy games, it's a style I like 
Artwork used on the dungeons cards is also pretty good, there's a nice contrast between somewhat grey looking rooms and the colourful dressing and scenery that inhabit them and even the box lid features some evocative art.

This brings me to iconography. It's rare that I'm critical of a game's iconography and this is one of those occasions.
It's just that there's so much of it. A good proportion of it is instantly comprehensible, but a smaller proportion of it is not and a smaller proportion of a lot is still quite a lot!

I know that this is the result of game that is trying to emulate a D&D RPG style dungeon-crawl experience without a dungeon but even so: we played the game several times and I still did not recognised some icons. Between the fairly extensive rules and the extensive iconography, it gives the game a bit of steep learning curve.
Additionally; not only are so many icons, some of them are quite small, icons in the corner of the dungeons cards and the first time we tried to play I didn't notice them!

How's it play?
Setup

• Dungeon deck: Depending player count a mix of room and encounter cards are shuffled into 3 separate decks, Then they are placed into a single stack called the dungeon deck which will result in the early cards being room cards, the middle being a mix of room and encounter cards, while the lair will be close to the bottom of the deck.
• Other decks: Shuffle the goblin, minion, loot and magic cards into 4 face-down decks.
• Boss mat: Shuffle the boss mats and deal 1 face-down. This will be the dungeon's boss encounter.
  On the back are 3 rows of heart symbols that correspond to a 2-4 player count and have hearts equal to the number of players. E.g., the 3-player row will have 3 spaces.
• Torch mat: Put out the torch mat and out the torch token on the first place. Then put the 4 goblin meeples on their respective spots.
• Dungeon entrance: Put the dungeon entrance cards into the central playing area and put an altar token on the entrance, the others will come into play later. Then draw 4 cards from the dungeon deck and place them face-down, alongside the entrance card. This all forms the game's starting area.
• Hero mats: Either choose or randomly allocate a boss mat to each player. Each player should then take a heart and focus token and put them on to their relevant starting spots. Finally, the miniature for each hero should be placed on the entrance card.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

That's pretty much it for the setup.

On to play
In Tiny Epic Dungeons, the players must explore and reveal the dungeon, fighting goblins and acquiring loot and magic until they defeat enough minions in order get into the boss' lair and defeat them.
The dungeon in Tiny Epic Dungeons is always a 7x7 grid in size, with the entrance always being the exact centre of the dungeon.
When it comes to the active player's turn, they can broadly speaking: move, perform exactly 1 'heroic' action and any number of free actions.

• Move: During the active player's turn, they can move their character through a number of cards equal to their speed stat.
  Exploring: If a character's movement would take them on to a face-down card, then the active player flips the card, places it (Honouring all previous room connections.) and must move on to it, they then resolve the revealed the card.
  Encounter: After moving on to a card, it's encounter must be resolved. This might be a ambush by a goblin or minion, a trap or actually nothing! Additionally the card may provide a challenge for the character to overcome.
  If a goblin is encountered, flip a goblin card face-up and place it next to an available space adjacent to the torch mat. Then place that space's meeple on to the revealed card.
  If it's a minion, flip over and reveal a minion card. Put it's meeple on the revealed card and a black heart token on the minion card's health track.
  Expansion: Finally, the active player draws cards from the dungeon deck face-down and places them face-down next to exits from the revealed room. They must adhere to the 7x7 grid limit.
• Heroic actions: Characters may perform exactly 1 heroic action. This occurs after movement and movement cannot occurs after a heroic action. There are numerous different actions available.
  Skill check: A character may need or want to make a skill check. This may be because they want to overcome a challenge, cast a spell perform a search, need to avoid or disarm a trap or something else.
  Regardless of what has invoked the check, broadly speaking, they all function identically.
  All checks use 1 of a character's 3 stats; Strength, Agility and Intellect. Sometimes the nature of the check will determine which is used, other times, the player can choose. Checks also have an numerical value which is its difficulty.
  All stats are rated 1-3, this is how many hero dice the player will roll for the check. Thus a character with Strength 3 will roll 3 hero dice.
  Once the dice are rolled, the player keeps 1 die as their result which is compared to the difficulty of the challenge, if it meets or beats the number, the check is successful. However, there's a bit more to it than that.
  If any of the unused dice show a +1 or +2, then those results can be added to the die that was used, increasing its score.
  Furthermore, any used dice that show any resources are acquired by the player are the check is resolved.
  Combat: Combat is a little different to skill checks and is broken down into melee, ranged and magic, each type relates to 1 character stat.
  When the player rolls their hero dice, they also roll the enemy die at the same time.
  After making their combat roll, the player compares their result with their enemies armour value, every point that exceeds the armour value inflicts a point of damage on the enemy.
  Once the player's attack has been resolved, if the enemy is still standing, then they counterattack using the result of the red enemy die. This is a value that is added to the enemy's combat value and compared to the characters armour value and inflicts damage in the same way as a character attack. Additionally, there are 2 other results on the enemy die:
  The torch symbol deals no damage to the character and instead moves the torch token down 1 step on the torch mat.
  The broken shield result means that the character's armour value is ignored​ and the enemy deals their base damage to the character.
  Rest: As their heroic action, a character may rest. htlyIt may not seem heroic but it is useful as it replenishes some of their health and focus.
• Free actions: Characters may perform any number of free actions, additionally, free actions can be performed at any time, before or after both movement and heroic actions.
  Free actions tend to be support actions that don't have direct effects, some of which are listed below:
  Modify results: A character may expend focus points to alter the results of a skill check/combat roll.
  Research: The active character may spend focus points to acquire spell cards.
  Trigger/modify abilities: The active character may have abilities or loot items which confer benefits, typically these can be triggered by paying it's activation cost.
  Explore: This free action allows the player to reveal face-down cards adjacent to their character's current position. This is fairly costly though and to activate this action, the torch token must be moved 1 space down the torch mat track. More on the torch mat below.
• Turn end: Once a character has finished all their actions, it triggers the final action of the turn, which is to move the torch token down a space on the torch track. This can have no effect or may trigger one of the following 2 actions:
  Enemy actions: If this is triggered, all goblins and minions may move and/or attack the heroes.
  Spawn goblin: When this action is triggered, turn over a goblin card and place it on a relevant space adjacent to the torch track. For goblins spawned in this manner, their meeple is always placed on the entrance card.
• Next player: Play now progresses to the player on the left.

Other rules
There are also some other rules that need covering.

• Defeating enemies: When a goblin is defeated, it's card is put into a discard pile (And thus may be spawned again) and the meeple is returned to it's starting spot on the torch mat.
  It's slightly different for minions: Firstly, minions have a health track that must be depleted before it is defeated. When this occurs, it's black heart token is placed on the heart row on the face-down boss card. Unlike a goblin, when a minion is defeated, it is out of the game.
  Defeating enemies usually gives the players a reward in the form of a loot or magic card.
• Being defeated: If a character's health is dropped to 0, they are knocked unconscious. This means in the player's following turn, the hero must take the rest action and no other actions.
• Boss lair: Even if the lair is found, it cannot be entered until all the black hearts are placed on the back of the boss mat. I.e., all the minions are defeated. Once this is done, characters can get into the boss lair...

That's not quite it, once the lair is opened, the game goes into Act 2 and there's more for the boss.

• Reveal Boss: Flip over the boss mat, revealing the boss.
  Put the boss meeple on it's starting spot.
  Put the black heart tokens that were put on the back of the card on to the health track - it means that the boss will have multiple health tracks!
  Finally, put altar tokens on the cards that spawned minions.
• Torch mat: Flip the torch mat to it's other side and put the torch token at the top of the torch track, essentially resetting the track for the boss fight.
• Lair actions: Characters can move into spaces in the lair and fight the boss, this can inflict penalties or grant bonuses.
  However, at some point, they'll need to get the boss out into the dungeon.
• Damaging the boss: Attacks deal damage to the boss' health tracks like normal. However, the black heart tokens cannot move past the altar symbol(s) until all the alter tokens had been put on top of them. How's that done? Read on.
• NEW ACTION - taunt boss: Characters now have a new free action that allows them to spend focus to get the boss to chase them. When the boss moves on to a card containing an altar token, that token is put on to the relevant space on the boss mat, once all the tokens are there, the boss can take more damage.

Phew, there are some additional rules, such as about acquiring gear and magic etc - but that's more or less the gist of it.

Endgame
In the first act, if a 5th goblin comes into play before any of the 4 adjacent to the torch mat are defeated, then the players collectively lose.
If at any time the torch token reaches the end of the track on either side of the torch mat, then the players lose.
If the players get to act 2 and reduce all the boss's health tracks to 0, they collectively win!

Overall
So, Tiny Epic Dungeons has quite a lot rules, I feel it's not particularly complicated but there's certainly a lot going on and that means that there's a lot to remember in this fairly ambitious attempt to recreate the D&D style dungeon-crawling experience. The question is, does it succeed? Well... sort of.

The thing is, Tiny Epic Dungeons can't hide it's cooperative board game DNA. it utilises a commonplace cooperative mechanic of making the players choose between working towards their objectives (In this case exploring the dungeon, finding and defeating minions and finding the boss lair.) with managing an ongoing, constantly expanding threat (In this case preventing 5 goblins spawning in the game.). Players will be faced with choosing between the two. Furthermore, the constant ticking countdown of the torch track will encourage players not to dawdle and cooperate as much as possible.
Another challenge facing players is placement of dungeon tiles all current passageways must be honoured and the game has a strict 7x7 size. If player don't think a step ahead, there's a risk that a pathway may lead to a dead-end too early, leaving a portion of the 7x7 grid inaccessible.
Mechanically, these are all good, they put players in the position of having to make meaningful decisions. However, they do feel a little un-RPG-ish.

During this early stage of the game we did encounter a noteworthy quirk; one character could not leave the entrance for about a quarter of the game! At the start of their turn, there was always a goblin on the entrance card thanks to spawning from the torch track. Once they defeated the goblin, they could no longer move and by the time of their next turn, there was another goblin on the entrance!

One thing I like is how the game clearly differentiates between the early and late game. When the boss is revealed, everything changes and priorities shift somewhat. Exploration and goblin management become less important and dealing with the boss more so which thanks to the altar tokens requires more than just dealing damage to the big bad.

All of this should serve to make Tiny Epic Dungeons a good game but truth be told - it's all a little unremarkable.
​
Combat feels unexciting, particularly when dealing with goblins again and again, it felt repetitive and frustrating. They're not a threat because they're tough (They're not tough!), they're a threat because the rules say that you lose if you don't defeat them quick enough.
The dice mechanic used is pretty cool though. I like that the unused dice can give a benefit, e.g., not using a 6 as the result of a skill check because as it provides a point of health gives players a meaningful decision to make when choosing which die to use for a skill check.

The dungeon exploration experience it provides is pretty standard and OK but the lengthy rules and having to interpret fiddly icons mires the game in slowness and interfere with the pacing. Even after several play throughs, I look at the icons and think, 'Wait, what does that do?'.
After more play throughs I'm sure that the rules will provide no obstacle but I feel little compulsion to play it again, which is a bit of shame as it looks really nice.

While there's nothing wrong with Tiny Epic Dungeons and I can't find any fault with it, I also can't find a reason to like it.

1st May 2022

It's a Sunday and we're logged into Board Game Arena for an evening of gaming.

Azul; not a game about a villainous god-entity from Ghostbusters but actually a game about creating mosaic, decorative wall patterns with multi coloured tiles.
My friend's a plasterer, wonder if he'd be good at this!

Caveat: We've only ever played Azul digitally.

What's in a game?

• Player board: The player boards are double-sided with different shapes on both sides. Most of each player board is taken up by two sets of grids.
  Pattern lines: The left hand grid is a sort of triangular shape composed of rows of squares. The top row has 1 square and each row below increases the count of squares by 1. Thus the 5th and final row consists of 5 squares. These lines are known as the pattern lines
  Wall: The right hand grid is a 5x5 size with coloured/patterned squares. There are 5 types of square and each row has one of each type. Additionally, going downwards, each row has those types of square in a slightly offset position so they appear to 'descend' diagonally. The relationship between the 2 types of grid is key to the game. The wall is where players score VPs.
  Floor line: Along the bottom of the player board is a row of spaces labelled with minus values, e.g., -1, -2 and up to -3.
  Score tracker: Finally, along top of each board is an individual scoring tracker for each player.
• Token mats: There are 9 of these mats and they are each decorated in elaborate swirling patterns.
• Token/tiles: There are 100 tokens which represent the game's wall tiles, 20 each in 5 types with patterns that match the patterns on the square grid on player boards.
  First player token: There is also a first player token, it has no intrinsic value and will actually cost players VPs!
• Bag: The physical game comes with a bag which is used to blindly draw tokens.

The game's only artwork are the patterns which appear on the tokens. It does it's job though, between bright colours and unique images, the 5 sets of tokens look distinctive from one another.

Azul doesn't make use of icons and the relationship between tokens and a player board is clear.

How's it play?
Setup

• Board: Give each player a board.
• Mats: Put out 5-9 mats in a circular shape according to player count. Then place the first player token in the central area between the mats. All of this constitutes the game's drafting area.
• Tokens: Put all of the tokens into the bag and give it a good shake.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
In Azul, the player's objective is to place tokens on to their respective spots on the wall grid of their player board, which scores them VPs.
This is done by filling in the horizontal lines in the pattern lines grid; players must collect tokens of the type they need and place them in the spaces on the respective horizontal line. Depending on the line, it will require 1-5 tokens to fill a line. When a line is filled, one of those tokens can be placed in the matching space on that line at the end of the round.
All tokens will score 1 or more VPs when placed, tokens can also score again at the game end.

Azul makes use of a traditional turn order, with the active player performing their action (Which will involve taking 1 or more tokens of the same type.) before play progresses to the player on the left.

• Round start: The first player should blindly draw tokens from the bag and place them on the mats until each mat has 4 tokens on it. With 5-9 mats there will be 20-36 tokens used.
• Collect tokens: The active player must draft tokens from one of the mats or the central area (At the game start there won't be anything in the central area to draft.).
  The player chooses which type of token to draft and must take all the tokens of that type from the chosen mat or central area.
  From mat: If the tokens are drafted from a matt, the any tokens remaining on that matt are moved into the central area.
  From centre: If tokens are drafted from the central area and the first player token is also there, then that is taken as well.
  The first player token cannot be played into the lines and instead goes into the floor line. It means that the player will go first in the next round but will lose a point as a consequence.
• Place tokens: Now the active player must place their tokens into the pattern lines grid on their player board. There are several restrictions here.
  • Tokens can only be placed into a single line.
  • Tokens may be placed into any empty line or a line which already contains matching tokens.
    Any excess tokens remaining after filling a line are sent to the floor line.
  • Tokens cannot be placed in a line already containing different tokens.
  • Tokens cannot be placed in a line where the matching token has already been added to the wall grid. I.e., if a line had been previously filled and emptied of a particular type of token, in essence a line can only be used once for each type of tokens and it cannot be repeated.
  • Finally, the active player may choose to put the tokens into the floor line.
• Next player: Once the active player has placed their tokens, play progresses to the player on the left.
• Round end: Play continues until all the tiles from the drafting area have been placed on to player boards, then the  round is over and the following end of round actions occur for each player:
  • Resolve tokens: A line in the pattern lines which has been filled is considered resolved. This means that one of the tokens from that line is placed on it's corresponding spot on the same row in the wall grid, any remaining tokens are returned to the bag.
  • Scoring tokens: When a token is moved to the wall grid, it is immediately scored. How much it scores will depend on it's position relative to other tokens on the wall grid.
    If the token is not adjacent to any other tokens (The very first token placed on the wall grid for example.), then it scores 1 VP.
    If the token has been placed adjacent to 1 or more other tokens, it forms a link with them and scores more. For each horizontal token it is adjacent to in a link, an additional VP is scored. The same is true for a vertical link.
    If multiple rows were completed in the same round, then multiple tokens can be scored.
  • Floor line: Each token that has been placed in a box in the floor ​line costs the VPs listed, this is cumulative. E.g., the first 4 boxes are 1-, -1, -2, -2, if they are filled, this would total -6 VP. Once penalty points have been calculated, return the first player token to the centre and the other tokens to the bag.
• Next round: Whoever had the first player token is now the first player for the next round which they begin by blindly drawing tokens to populate the mats in preparation for the next round.
  Any uncompleted pattern lines carry over into the following round.
  

​
Endgame
When any horizontal line in the wall grid on any player's board has been filled, the endgame is triggered. The current end of round actions and scoring are completed and the game goes to final, bonus scoring.

Bonus VPs can be scored scored by the following:

• Every filled out vertical line is worth 7 VPs.
• Every filled out horizontal line is worth 2 VPs.
• Every completed set of 5 matching tokens (In other words; each filled out diagonal line.) is worth 10 VPs.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
On a rudimentary level, Azul's mechanics involve drafting handfuls of tokens and then placing them on to a board where their relative positioning scores varying amounts of VPs. It's a mechanic (Or a variation of that mechanic.) that have been employed in several other games and I'd say that Azul is a mid-weight iteration of it. As written the rules feel a little opaque and counter-intuitive but in application, they're pretty straightforward.
Where Azul get its weightiness comes from two areas of the rules; how the drafting - particularly drafting from mats works and then where and when tiles should go on the grids.

​As a basic concept, collecting as many tokens as possible to fill out the pattern lines and consequently get tokens on the wall grid is the way to go. However, there's more to it than.
For example, simply collecting too many tokens can sent the excess to the floor ​line and cost VPs, this is more important than it sounds, because as tokens are taken from the mats, it's inevitable that other tokens will build up in the centre and trying to predict this can be very important. Depending on circumstances, a lot of tokens of a particular type may well build up in the centre.
A player may want 4 red tokens for example, should they try and take them in drips and drabs from several mats over several turns or wait for them to accumulate in the centre? Provided of that they do accumulate in the centre, what if too many go to the centre?
There's definitely a higher level of play where watching what other players are doing is important. Quite often it's clear what they're prioritising, what they want or don't want in the next few turns.
​If they have a single token in the 5-space line on the left, it's likely they'll be looking to fill that out. Conversely, if they've already got 1 or more scoring tokens on the right side, they'll be unlikely or unable to use more of those tokens.
Being able to predict other player's objectives will help when making decisions. It can also allow a player to try and deny tokens to other players and curiously, on some occasions force other players to take tokens they don't want.

Players will also want to think about how and when to place their scoring tokens. Putting them down willy-nilly is a sure way to minimise points.
Obviously in order to optimise points, tokens should ideally be put on to the wall adjacent to other tokens. Placing them vertically is a good way to go, since completed vertical lines earn an additional 7 VPs each, unless a player is looking to end the game, in which case they can go for the horizontal line!

This brings me to an interesting facet in the mechanics, scoring the diagonal, i.e., putting all the tokens of 1 type on to the wall grid scores the biggest bonus; 10 VPs but as they are diagonal, they can't score off of each other! Additionally, once a diagonal of a type has been completed, the player can no longer score tokens of that type at all, collecting those tokens will now just incur penalty points in the floor line. Should a player hold off getting the diagonal until later which lowers the risk of sending tokens to the floor line or wait? Waiting will mean risking not completing it at all.

I have to say I'm not fond of mechanics which lose players points especially if it can occur out of their control, it irritates like a unreachable itch and can be a little stress inducing. I find that's the case with Azul as well. 
However, having said that, the truth is; this is what makes Azul a good game and gives it depth. It means that collecting tokens either earns VPs (Or contributes towards acquiring VPs.) or loses VPs. It's always a meaningful decision.

​Other iterations of these mechanics are a little less stressful, brain-boiling and perhaps more accessible. But if depth is what you're looking along with a dollop indirect interaction between players, then Azul is worth a try.

19th April 2022

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

Mesopotamia; source of much history, a birthplace of the world's early civilisations. Also the source of many board games, one of them being Babylonia.
Take on the role of a merchant dynasty and attempt to create the most lucrative trade routes.

What's in a game?

• Game board: Babylonia's board has an illustrated a map that depicts this part of Mesopotamia, along with the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. It has a hex overlay used to delineate, cities, farms, rivers and ziggurats. A scoring track circles the perimeter of the board.
  Additionally, the board is divided into 3 regions, north, south and central which are marked out and separated by the 2 rivers. This dictates what parts of the board are used in the game as per player count.
  Unusually, the orientation of the map feels unconventional, when viewed from the landscape orientation, north is to the left and south to the right. Only when viewed in portrait orientation are north and south where you expect them to be, it's been rotated '90!
  Obviously this is a non-issue, since I'm used to looking at both board and maps in the landscape orientation, it's a bit counterintuitive for me.
• Ziggurats: There are 5 of these little 3D wooden models.
• Cards: There are 9 of these ziggurat cards, when acquired they provide the owning player with benefit of some sort, this may be a once-only or ongoing benefit. They are numbered 1-9.
  A one-off benefit may be immediately gain 10 VPs and ongoing benefits may include allowing a player to have more tokens on their stand or being able to play 3 noble tokens instead of 2 and so on.
• Tiles: Babylonia uses 2 types of hexagonal card tile, they represent cities and farms. The front of each type shows their scoring criteria, which for farms are straight-up numbers or a city symbol, city tiles will have icons related to the game's 3 types of nobles.
• Tokens: There are 30 of these round wooden tokens in each player colour and they come in 4 types; farmers and nobles. Nobles are further subdivided in to civil servants, merchants and priests. Dang! Even in the ancient world civil servants were a thing, I'm surprised there aren't lawyers!
• Stands: There's a oblong stand with 2 grooves for each player and are used to hold tokens.

Babylonia's components are all good. the cards are actually as chunky as the tokens. The remaining components. the tokens and ziggurats are all constructed of wood and feel high quality. The stands are a nice touch.

The artwork used on the board is good and portrays what I imagine to be a suitably middle-eastern landscape for Mesopotamia. It is perhaps a little too busy and distracts the eye, however, the hexes help to make the layout clear.
The cards all use the same illustration which is a little bland.

For the most part, iconography is easily understood. Only some of the ziggurat cards are not immediately clear and will require looking up in the rule book but that only applies when and if the card comes into play. Nothing that would be a problem or approaching a dealbreaker.

How's it play?
Setup

• Board: Put out the board and place the following.
  Ziggurats: Place the ziggurat models on their allotted spaces.
  Cities and farms: Shuffle the city and farm tiles into a face-down stack and randomly place them face-up on their allotted spaces on the board.
  In games with a lower play count, not all the board is used, consequently not all the ziggurats, cities and farms are used either.
• Cards: Put out the cards numbered 1-7.
  There's a variant where all 9 are shuffled and 7 are randomly dealt to use.
• Tokens: Give each player all the tokens and stand in their colour, they should be shuffled into face-down stacks. Then each player should deal themselves 5 and place them into their stand.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
Babylonia uses a standard turn structure with the active player taking their turn before play moves to the left.
In their turn, there are 3 phases active player must complete.

• Play Tokens: The active player must play tokens, depending on where tokens are placed, there may be immediate scoring. When playing tokens, the active player can choose from 2 options:
  Play any 2 tokens: The active player may put any 2 of their tokens (Any mix of nobles and/or farmers.) on to the board. These may be used on river spaces but must be turned face-down to do so.
  Play 3+ farmers: The active player may put 3 or more farmer tokens and only farmer tokens on to the board. They cannot be used to cover river spaces.
  Placement rules: Some rules and restrictions apply when placing tokens.
  ​In the 1st two turns only 1 or 2 tokens can be played respectively, after this the usual limits apply.
  Tokens may be placed on to any empty hex space. That's is one not occupied by a city/farm/ziggurat or opponent's token. Tokens do not need to be placed next to each other or the board edge or anything like that.
  Farms: Having said that, a farmer token can be placed on a hex with a farm tile if the active player already has at least 1 other token adjacent to that farm. When this occurs, the player token replaces the farm tile which is removed and score - more on this below.
  Scoring: Farms and ziggurats can be immediately scored during this phase depending on where the player put their tokens.
  Farm tile: When a player acquires a farm tile, it is immediately scored. If the tile contains a number, that's the VPs scored.
  ​If it has the city symbol, then the active player gains VPs equal to all the city tiles all players have in their personal areas! (More on acquiring city tiles below.)
  Ziggurats: When a player puts one of their tokens adjacent to a ziggurat, they immediately score VPs equal to the number of ziggurats they have tokens adjacent to. Thus for the 1st time a token is placed adjacent to a ziggurat, the active player gains 1 VP, if they place a token adjacent to a second ziggurat, the would score 2 VPs.
  Multiple tokens adjacent to the same ziggurat do not increase scoring, it ziggurats, not tokens that score.
• Score surrounded cities/ziggurats: When all the land hex spaces surrounding a city or ziggurat are occupied (By any mix of player tokens.), it is considered completed and is scored. Tokens placed face-down in river spaces adjacent to a ziggurat do not count towards completion but do count for the purposes of majority.
  Whoever has the most of their tokens surrounding a city/ziggurat has majority (Which confers extra benefits.), in the case of a tie, no one will have majority.
  Cities: When a city is completed, all players who have adjacent noble tokens that match the icon(s) on the city tile score 2 VP per matching token. Furthermore any matching tokens connected via the players own network of other tokens (Including face-down tokens.) also score 2 VPs each. This can be a good source of VPs.
  Finally, whoever has majority, takes the city tile and places it in their playing area and scores VPs equal to the number of city tiles they've acquired and placed in their playing area. Thus the first city tile acquired earns 1 VP the second gains 2 VPs and so forth.
  If there is no majority, then the city tile is discarded and no one scores it.
  Ziggurats: When a ziggurat is completed, whoever has majority immediately takes an available ziggurat card of their choice and gains whatever benefit it confers. Again, in the case no majority, no one can acquire a ziggurat card via that ziggurat.
• Refill tokens on stand: Once the active player has completed the first 2 phases, they draw tokens from their personal stack to increase the tokens on the stand back to 5.
• Next player: Play progresses to the player on the left.

Endgame
Play continues until 1 of the following 2 criteria are met:
A player has no tokens on their stand.
Or
There are only 1 or 0 city tiles left on the board.
In either case, the game ends immediately!

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
If you were to look at a game of Babylonia in progress, you'd be forgiven for thinking that with all these tokens in play at the same time that it's a complicated game but it's not.
From the rules write up above there's not too much to learn but like all good games, there's a lot to think about.
Right from the start Babylonia provides players with meaningful decisions to make and several paths to scoring VPs which can be prioritised. Often these will vary in value contextually and in relation to other decisions. There will be short term and long term goals.

Take ziggurats for example, a player may put tokens next a number of different ziggurats to score points as efficiently as possible but may also choose to concentrate on a single one in order to secure a card. However, taking too long to gain majority on a Ziggurat may lose you some actions.

Cards themselves will change in importance, those with continuous ability will be most exploitable in the early game and those with once-only bonuses will be important in the late game - provided of course, that someone else hasn't beaten you to the punch. 

Farms and cities have an interesting relationship, getting cities quicker than other players can earn a lot of VPs when some farms are scored or more city tiles are acquired. But city tiles need to be surrounded to score - unlike farms which can score immediately. Sometimes It may also take more actions to surround a city; if it looks like a player is going to get majority in a city (Or ziggurat actually.) other players wont be incentivised to complete it early for another player's benefit.

Finally, there's the network of tokens that players will create, their trade routes. Finding ways to connect nobles to matching city tiles on other parts of the board can be a good source of points. Especially if a noble can be connect to multiple cities, a city can only be scored once so getting another use out of already played token is useful.
It's here small token plays can have big outcomes.
Sometimes players will want to put specific nobles into player or sometimes use farmers for rapid expansion. All of this is dependant on what tokens get drawn though. It's likely that something will not go to plan thanks to other players. Adapting to circumstances can also be important.

Paying attention to what other players are doing is also vital since - apart from what's on a player's stand - everything is open. It means that it's likely that getting majority will eventually become a race as players' objectives clash and anticipating those objectives can make a difference.

With straightforward rules and a brisk playing time, Babylonia is fairly accessible but also provides players with meaningful decisions.
I enjoyed it and would recommend it.