5th December 2021

Sunday evening gaming on Board Game Arena continued with Carcassonne. You too can wander this French Province, have a hand in building the legendary city, monastries and surrounding country side as well as populating the roads with... errr... highwaymen?

What's in a game?

• Land tiles: These square card tokens form the bulk of Carcassonne's components. Generally they depict a bit of green countryside along with a feature of some kind, be it a road, corner or junction, a town, monastery or part of a city. However, some tiles will have more than 1 feature.
• Meeples: Classic wooden meeples as you'd find in a classic Eurogame.  They come 5 different coloured sets of 8. 
• Scoring board: A scoreboard depicted in the game's art-style.

That's it for the game components.

What few components the game possesses, are all solidly manufactured. The tiles and scoreboard are constructed of suitably thick card and the meeples are nice wooden tokens.
The artwork found the tiles is for the most fairly small but are well detailed with  colourful illustrations, the meeples are also brightly coloured.
​As the game area is built up over play, it actually looks quite good.
In a game all about joining up tiles, the artwork is universally clear and there's never any confusion on how they connect.

How's it play?
Setup

• Starting tile: Find the starting tile and place face-up into the central starting area.
• Land tiles: Shuffle all the land tiles into a face-down stack.
• Meeples: Give each player all the meeples in their chosen colour.
• Scoreboard: Put out the scoreboard, every player should put one of their meeples on the zero space - leaving them with 7 meeples each.
• First player: Determine a first player.

That's it for the very simple setup.

On to play
Broadly speaking, Carcassonne is about about building up the central playing area and connecting the game's features, it begins with the opening player taking and playing a land tile into the central play area next to the starting tile, then continues with the player on the left and so on until the stack of face-down tiles has been depleted.

• Place land tile: The active player must take a land tile from the stack and add it to the tile(s) already in play, the tile may be rotated to any orientation but the connection must along their edges and must 'honour' the features already in play and 'continue' them, so a road must continue - unless it reaches an 'end' and so on.
• Place meeple: The active play may choose to place one meeple on the tile they just played, where this meeple is played will determine which 'role' it performs.
  Fields: If it's put on a field, it becomes a farmer.
  Monastery: On a monastery it becomes a monk.
  City: In the city it becomes a knight.
  Road: Putting a meeple on the road and it becomes a robber.
  There is 1 limitation when placing meeples though: A meeple cannot be placed on a feature that already has a meeple on it - regardless who owns that other meeple. Thus if a road already has bandit on it and the active player extends the road, they cannot add a meeple to its.
  Having said that, it's possible to place down a tile with a feature so that it does not connect to another (And a meeple is placed on it.), then connect later so that more than 1 meeple 'share' the feature, why is this significant? See below.
• Scoring: Frequently, when a land tile is placed it will complete a feature such as end a road or close off a city. When this occurs, that feature is immediately scored.
  Roads earn 1 VP per tile they go through.
  A monastery is completed when all the 8 spaces that surround it are occupied by land tiles. This earns the meeples owner 1 VP per title, thus when a monastery is completed it always earns 9 VP.
  Each tile a city sprawls through will earn 2 VP, additionally, each coat-of-arms in the city earns a further 2 VP.
  Fields however, cannot be completed and are only score during the game end and their meeples stay in play throughout the entire game.
  Shared scoring: As mentioned earlier, it's possible that more than 1 meeple will occupy a feature. In this case whoever has the most meeples scores the VP, players with less score 0! If players tie for numbers of meeples occupying a feature, then they all gain the VP.~
  Finally, when a feature is scored, all meeples that occupied it are returned to their players, ready to be made use of again.
• Next player: Once (If any.) scoring is completed, play progresses to the player to the left.

Play continues until the entire face-down stack is depleted.

Endgame
Once play reaches the game end, final scores for uncompleted features are totted up.
This means that an incomplete road (Which has a highwayman on it.) that goes over 2 tiles would score 2 points, monasteries score for partial completion as well at 1VP per. occupied surrounding tile. However, incomplete cities only score half, that is, each tile and coat-of-arms, score 1VP apiece.
Finally, farmers are scored; each completed city that connects to a field that contains a farmer scores VPs for the owning player.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Carcassonne is a game that's been around for a while now and I have to admit that in the years since I last played it, my opinion on it has softened a little.
Originally I found the randomness inherent to the game when getting a land tile irksome, it felt like it belied strategy and planning. Now however, I can see some mechanical benefit, it forces players to adapt, remain flexible and look for ways to exploit their situation and place tiles in the right places at the right time to gain points or even piggy-back off of other players.

Having said that, my opinion on farmers hasn't changed at all! I still find them fiddly to track and score as well being somewhat unbalanced.
A well placed farmer, especially early in the game can score the controlling player a lot of VPs, putting one down does lock a meeples out of the rest of the game, which can sometimes be detrimental later, but overall, the sacrifice is generally worth it. It's no surprise there's a 'no farmers' optional rule.

One of the things I like about Carcassonne is how it manages to deliver quite a lot of gameplay for such a slim package, just some tiles and meeples - that's it! It means the game has a quick set up time a despite some perhaps fiddly rules, is still fairly straightforward to learn and pick-up-and-play.
I think that this gives Carcassonne strong crossover appeal to 'non-gamers' who will quickly learn the game's basic strategies get up to speed.
This has no doubt contributed to the game's continuing success and makes it a good introductory game for 'non-gamers'.

Carcassonne is a lightweight game and isn't one I'd play too often, truth be told. But it can definitely be fun every once in a while, just don't worry about strategy too much and don't over-analyse it too much either. Play it for the lightweight enjoyment it can provide.

19th October 2021

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

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

What's in a game?

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

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

How's it play?
Setup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6th October 2021

Time for some midweek gaming! It's a Wednesday and we're round Simon's.

Valor & Villainy: Minions of Mordak is the game of the evening; an open-world styled, fantasy-themed, RPG-inspired exploration game with one player assuming the role of big-bad Mordak and the others taking on the mantle of heroes.

What's in a game?
Valor & Villainy is fairly involved game that features a lot of components.

• Map tiles: Valor & Villainy uses a variety of map tiles, most of which are randomly placed. These tiles depict the landscape, they also detail encounters that the heroes will come across.
  Starting tiles: These 5 tiles depict; as you'd expect the game's starting area and will be the map's central tiles.
  Region tiles: These tiles are ranked from tier I to tier III on their backs. When the map is created, the lower tiered cards will be closer to the centre.
  Each tile also contains icons depicting what will be found on that tile, which can be minions, ambushes etc.
• Hero boards: There is one of these thick card boards for each of the game's heroes. They are double-sided and on the back, each character's backstory is displayed.
  The front contains a portrait, as well as health and action point tracks. There are also a number of recessed tracks and spots in each board, into which various smaller components can be dropped and represent the characters increase in skills and training. Character's have tracks for melee, ranged and magic actions.
  The board also lists each character's unique ability and at the bottom has spaces for gear and equipment.
• Standees: Each hero also has their own standee.
• Mordak board: The Mordak player also has their own board which is very similar to the hero boards with a health and action tracker and recessed tracks to represent Mordak's increase in ability.
  Mordak possesses 1 extra ability; corruption.
  Procession of horrors tile: This tile slides into place next to the Mordak board and over the course of the game, allows Mordak to accrue power, it also serves as a round counter.
• Mordak standee: Not to be outdone by the heroes, Mordak has his own standee.
• Spell cards: Spell cards come in 3 types as explained below
  Arcane spell cards: These blue spells focus on attacks and tricks.
  Divine spell cards: These yellow spells provide support and healing.
  Void spell cards: These purple spells are used by Mordak and typically for the big-bad, they bring mayhem and ruin.
• Treasure cards: Can be earned by players by defeating minions.
• Loot stash cards: There are used to track minions that have defeated and treasure that's been earned by the heroes and by the Mordak player to track heroes that have been defeated!
• Minion cards: These are different types of enemy that the heroes will fight, they come in 3 classes, Chump, Elite and Boss, each getting progressively tougher.
  Minion cards contain information such as movement, attacks, damage and health levels, each one is also double-sided and can be flipped to the other side to display different stats for a minion when they get wounded instead of outright killed. Some minions will get weaker when hurt, a few will get tougher.
  Like the heroes and Mordak, minions have actions and stats.
• Covers: Each type of minion has it's own cover, used to hide what card is at the top of each minion card.
• Dice: These six-siders come in 3 different colours and are not numbered from 1-6. Instead the colours represent different levels of ability: White is novice, yellow is adept and red is mastery, each colour has a different number distribution, with white having the lowest, ranging to red with the highest.
• Ability tokens: These come in 3 colours that directly relate to skill dice. Players acquire these tokens for their abilities which in turn determine what dice are rolled by that player.
• +1 tokens: Can be acquired by players through rolling well and used for one-off bonuses.
• Initiative token: This double-sided first player token has Charge on one side and Hold on the other.

Valor & Villainy also has various other tokens for specific circumstances and situations including woeful sheep tokens!
The components are all high quality, tiles and tokens are suitably thick and sturdy, as are the standees. The cards are all well made and the rounded plastic dice feel weighty enough but the standout components are the chunky recessed hero boards which feel solid and also fairly practical.

Artwork throughout the game is excellent. The landscapes on map tiles are well produced, clear but also colourful. Character illustrations are bold and slightly-cartoony, it's a style that gets used quite a lot in fantasy-themed games, but it looks good in Valor & Villains.

As you'd expect for a open world game like, Valor & Villainy uses a variety of icons and symbols, particularly on spell cards - which essentially are all different. For the most part, the iconography is intuitive and pretty straightforward to understand.

How's it play?
Setup

• The Map: The 5 starting tiles are put out face-up in same position for every game, then, a number of map tiles are randomly drawn from each tier, although certain tiles (The 3 shrines.) must be included, then tiles in each tier are shuffled, some are randomly drawn and placed face-down around the starting tiles, the tier I tiles go closest to the starting tiles and the tire III the furthest away.
  Once all the tiles are placed, there will be a 5x5 grid of tiles, although in games will a lower player count, they'll be slightly less tiles.
• Heroes: Give each player a hero board and associated standee, along with the requisite components to track health and action points, as well as a +1 token.
  Players' whose characters can cast spells should draw cards from the relevant deck.
• Mordak: The Mordak player should take the Mordak board and set it up in a similar manner to the hero boards.
  The procession of horrors tile should be placed next to the Mordak board and the Mordak standee put on it.
• Card decks: Shuffle the 3 magic decks into 3 face-down stacks, do the same with the treasure deck.
• Minion decks: Shuffle the 3 minion decks into 3 face-down stacks, because these cards are double-sided, the relevant cover should be placed on the top of each minion deck. This ensures the Mordak player draws minions blindly.
• Initiative: Give the initiative token to the starting player.

The game is now ready to begin

On to play
In Valor & Villainy, the hero players are trying to discover the 3 shrines hidden somewhere amongst the face-down tiles to weaken Mordak and the Mordak player will be trying to make it hard for the heroes to find them until he arrives on the map after the 6th round.
Heroes always act first with the starting player beginning, then going left. The Mordak player may then act after the hero players. The Mordak player essentially gets 2 turns to act, 1 for Mordak himself (Although Mordak doesn't have much to do in the early game.) and 1 for minions.
When players take their turns, they will have a number of actions points they can spend to move or act as they see fit, there are also some free actions that can be performed

• Initiative: Who has the initiative token is the first player, they may choose to act first or last, in which case they flip the token to the Hold side.
• Hero actions: Heroes may perform actions, these include the following:
  Scout: This is a free action. When a hero chooses to scout, they flip all adjacent face-down map tiles to their face-up side, this may reveal enemies, loot or trigger ambushes.
  Looting: If a player's character is in a region without enemies, they may loot any treasure as a free action. Treasre is not immediately acquired, instead it is placed on the pertinent loot card and divvied up at the end of the round.
  Movement: For an action point a hero may move to a adjacent tile that is already face-up. Characters may only orthogonally.
  Actions: All hero actions are performed using one of their 3 stats, generally this involves combat.
• Mordak actions: In the early game, there's little Mordak can do to directly confront the heroes, although he can make life hard for them.
• Minion actions: If there are any minion cards on the board, the Mordak player can use them to attack and harass the players. Minions move and attack in much the same way as players.
• Combat: Combat plays a big part of Valor & Villainy:
  Melee: Melee occurs when enemies are on the same tile:
  Ranged: A character who decides to attack at range can only target enemies in adjacent tiles.
  Magic: Characters may spend their spell cards to cast spells.
  Defeat: Combat will generally result in one of the involved parties being defeated.
  Minions: When a minion is defeated, it is out of the game and added to the players loot stash
  Hero: When a hero is defeated, they are out of the current round and the Mordak player adds their standee to their loot stash. The standee is returned after the level-up phase has been completed
• Level-up: Once all players have had their turns, the game proceeds to the level-up phase.
  Throughout the round, any loot players acquired or minions that were defeated are added to the hero loot stash. During the level-up phase, they earn the hero players experience points, the loot can then be divvied up between them as they decide and equipped.
  Similarly, the Mordak player will earn experience points for each hero that was defeated.
  Then players may spend XP to increase their skills by adding ability tokens to their boards, they may also spend XP to increase their action points.
• Next round: The Mordak player moves their standee one space along the procession of horrors and the standee of any defeated hero is placed in the centre starting tile, ready for the next round. The initiative token is passed to the player on the left.

There's a bunch of other, mostly situational rules in Valor & Villainy, I'm not going to go into in further detail, since they don't always apply.

Endgame
Once 6 round have been completed (Or all 3 shrines have been discovered.), the game goes into The Final Battle!
During the final battle, Mordak himself will appear on the map and directly engage the hero players in combat.

Mordak has a large amount of health; 70-100. If the hero players reduce Mordak's health to 0, they win the game.
Conversely, if the Mordak player manages to defeat 3 heroes during the final battle, then the Mordak player wins the game.

Overall
There's a lot of charm to Valor & Villainy's presentation, especially the bold, chunky artwork for characters and minions.
Mechanically, the game is actually quite straightforward, unremarkable even (At least it is for the hero players.), although it does contain a fair amount of exception driven and situational rules. Using cards for minions makes it a little fiddly to move them around and handle, it also looks a little dull and flat (sic) but conversely, it makes it easy to track minion health and combat initiative.

Valor & Villlainy has several quibbles in my opinion
One of the most significant is the game's one-vs-many mechanic, these types of mechanic rarely work well in my opinion. Obviously the game will have been balanced to try and take this into account, but few games can balance the difference between 1 human brain versus 4 human brain and the hero players will always have this to their advantage. It almost feels like the game is set up to advantage hero players over the Mordak player.

The game also has a weird tonal shift thanks to this one-vs-many mechanic. For most of the game, the Mordak player will be a thorn in the players' sides,  a source of constant minor irritation. Then, during the endgame, it becomes straight up, directly confrontational PvP as Mordak appears on the map. It feels weirdly more aggressive.

For the heroes, the game is mostly about managing encounters as they appear, recognising and prioritising threats, then dealing with them using the most efficient method, allowing them the maximum opportunity to explore the tiles.
For the Mordak player, it's about exploiting any opening or weakness that the heroes present, not only defeating heroes but stymieing and thwarting them whenever possible.

Valor & Villainy is a open-world RPG-esque experience where a varied band of heroes, explore, fight monsters, acquire treasure and level up. The ingredients of an RPG are all there, but it doesn't feel quite right and I think there're a couple of reasons why.

There's a lack of storytelling to the game and variety to the encounters, there's randomness when setting up a map and not all tiles will appear in any single game, but they're just encounters, they feel a little bland and there's no sense of travelling, journeying or adventuring.

The normal map (For 4+ players) will have 20 face-down map tiles to scout, to explore all of them will require turning over 3-4 map tiles per round. Scouting tiles is actually a bit of a balancing act and one of the challenges the hero players face. if the heroes scout too slowly, they risk not finding all the shrines, if they do it too quickly, they risk revealing more minions than they can handle at once.
This will require players to head off in different directions and in an RPG you should never split the party!

In relation to combat, it seems the most efficient way for the Mordak player to accumulate experience points is to relentlessly pick on one player until they are defeated, then choose another player to pick on. It feels particularly un-RPG-like where combat tends to distributed amongst all heroes.
Even then, when a hero is defeated, on the next turn, the hero will reappear in the centre tile like it's a videogame spawn point.

All of this adds up to make Valor & Villainy feel disconnected from RPGs.

But for me, by far the biggest problem the game has, is its run time. We played with 5 players in total and a game took somewhere between 2-3 hours to play out. If felt like each player took about 4-5 mins to complete their turn and don't forget that the Mordak player essentially gets 2 turns in a row, 1 for themselves and 1 for their minions which makes a round 25-30 minutes long and that's before adding in The Final Battle. It also meant players had about 20 minutes of downtime between turns.
It's too much, if Valor & Villainy was an exceptional or engaging game, it wouldn't be such an issue, but it's not. It's not a bad game either, it's just slightly bland and slightly average. 

There's nothing wrong with an average game, so long as it doesn't outstay it's welcome.
The effort Valor & Villainy requires to play doesn't quite justify the experience it provides.

26th September 2021

Sunday evening gaming on Board Game Arena continued with Cloud City.

Travel around Cloud City and defeat Darth Vader and his stormtroopers... oh wait... what? This is an entirely different Cloud City!

Be an architect and build up tower blocks in your model city to create walkways between them in this 3D tile laying game.

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

What's in a game?

• Tiles: There are 48 tiles in Cloud City, including 4 starter tiles.
  Every tile displays 2 building symbols, either adjacent to each other or diagonally opposite each other. Each building symbols is either blue, green or brown.
  The starting tiles are numbered 1-4.
• Buildings: Cloud City makes uses of building meeples (Beeples?), these also come in 3 heights that correspond to the 3 colours. The blue are the shortest, green are at the middle height and the browns are the tallest.
• Walkways: As with the other components, the walkways come in the same 3 colours and are used with the building meeples of the matching colour.
  There are 31 walkways in each colour and their lengths vary from 1 to 8 (1, 2, 3, 5 & 8.) and they are marked as such, this is also their victory point value.

There's virtually no art in Cloud City, it's plain but functional and to be honest, I can't where you'd put it.
The games iconography is similarly minimal but easily understood.
I will add that since we've only played Cloud City digitally, it's hard to gauge how it would look with physical components, which could be quite good, judging from the photos I've seen.

How's it play?
Setup

• Cloud tiles: Shuffle the cloud tiles (Not including the starting tiles.) into a face-down stack and deal 3 face-up next to the stack.
• Walkways: Put out the walkways according to colour and length.
• Starting tiles: Determine the starting player and give them starting tile 1, give player 2 tile 2 and so on.
  Each player should put their starting tile down in their own play area, then take and place the matching building meeples on their spaces on their tile.
• Hand: Deal 3 tiles to each player.

On to play
In Cloud City each player will create a 3x3 grid of tiles, buildings and walkways. Points are scored from walkways which are worth points according to their length, thus walkways score 1-8 points each.

• ​Play tile: The active player must play one of the tiles from their hand and it must be played adjacent to a tile that has already been played - which in the 1st round would the starting tile.
  When playing a tile, the player's city cannot exceed the 3x3 limitation, in the early rounds there will be a lot of freedom on where to place tiles but towards the end, locations become limited.
• Place walkways: The player may choose to take walkways from the supply and connect 2 buildings of the same height, they are free to connect them as they are built or later. Furthermore, they can take as many walkways in a turn as they can use.
  There are however, some restrictions; a walkway cannot cross over an empty space without a tile and a building cannot be connected by more than 2 walkways, so no T-junctions or crossroads.
  If the supply has run out out of the walkways a player needs, then it's too bad.
• Draw: The active player must fill their hand back up to 3, they may take one of the 3 face-up tiles available or draw blindly from the stack
• Next: Play progresses to the player to the left.

Endgame
Play continues until all players have completed their 3x3 grid, which always takes 8 rounds. Each player's victory points is equal to the value of the totalled numbers on all the walkway tokens they played.
Points are tallied. Highest score wins

Overall
In some ways, Cloud City is a standard tile-laying game: Put down tiles to create links and score points from them.
However, because Cloud City adds a extra dimension (Sic.) to gameplay, the game has that sweet spot of simplicity of rules but depth of choice. Players can choose to try and create single long paths that score big on walkways or zigzagging small paths that score little but often. Players will also want to utilise all the empty space that their tiles inevitably generate. Managing to have walkways pass over or under others is an efficient way to rack up points. It lends Cloud City a almost puzzle-like quality.
The rule limiting walkways to 2 per building is excellent, a good example of less is more, it prevents players from relatively easily creating a web of walkways and forces them to try and anticipate the direction they will need to take when putting down buildings, getting it wrong can cost points. Ideally, players will want to have a single snaking walkway that goes from building to building.

That brings me to the game's other central mechanic; drafting.
Cloud City employs 2 instances of drafting.
Most obviously, is the tile drafting. Players can choose which tile from 3 to take to replace one they've played or draw blindly. This is a common implementation of drafting in tile placement games.
It's the other type of drafting that's more interesting. Cloud City's rules mean that player's do not need to immediately connect buildings with walkways and this can present players with a conundrum:

If a player does not immediately place walkways on their buildings, they can be taken later and placed in way to optimise scoring. There's a risk though, since there's a limited number of each walkway, particularly the 8 pointers, of which there are only 3 in each colour. Once they're gone, they're gone and to get one later can make a player lose out.
Conversely, players can take and place walkways immediately, this is safer in one regard, but the risk here is that the tiles placed later may provide alternate better ways to score.
This is something that players will always need to bear in mind.

Cloud City mostly presents players with meaningful decisions to make and I found the urge to try and create the perfect network of walkways fairly compelling. It was a enjoyable experience that was easy to learn and played fairly quickly.

11th September 2021

All day Saturday continues, the next game I played at Wogglecon was Betrayal at the House on the Hill.

​What's more fun than exploring the local haunted house with your disparate band of friends. I mean, what's the worst that could happen? It's not like one of them is going to betray you, right? It's not like it's in the game's title!

• Room tiles: There is a starting tile along with another 44 other room tiles. Each tile depicts a room in the titular house, the back shows which of the house's 3 floors it belongs to.
• Dice: Each one of these six-siders is numbered 0-2 twice.
• Event cards: These are the encounters the characters will experience.
• Item cards: Equipment and gear that characters will acquire during the game.
• Omen cards: These don't sound like good news.
• Tokens: The game has a lot of tokens, hundreds in fact and mostly for monsters!
• Traitor's tome: This book is used during the 'haunt' stage.
• Secrets of survival: Also used during the 'haunt' stage.

All of the game's tiles and tokens are constructed of thick and study card, the dice are also good quality. The cards are the expected standard quality.
The character tiles are decorated in monochrome illustrations with one colour - the player's colour. Artwork used on the room tiles is a little plain but unobtrusive. The paintjobs on the models is nice addition. Thematically, it all fits though.
The game's iconography was straight forward.

How's it play?
Setup

• Each player should take a character tile, choose a side and set up their starting stats.
• Shuffle the event, item and omen cards face-down into their respective decks
• Put out the starting room tile - the entrance hall, then shuffle the remaining room tiles into a face-down stack.
• Determine the starting player.

On to play
The objective in Betrayal at House on the Hill is to explore the house until the 'haunt' is discovered and then maybe defeat it!
Broadly speaking, the game is divided into 2 stages, the second stage begins once the 'haunt' has manifested.
On their turn, the active player can do the following:

• Move: The active player may move through a number of room tiles equal to their speed stat.
• Explore: When the active player would 'move off' the edge of the playing area, they draw a room tile, place it and move on to it. Their movement immediately ends, regardless of how far they've moved, then they must deal with the room's encounter.
  This involves drawing a card from either the event, item or omen decks.
  The 'house' in the game actually has 3 different floors which will lead to the creation of 3 different tile-maps.
  Event cards: Event cards may be beneficial or detrimental, at times this will involve making a roll using one of the character's 4 stats which may also result in beneficial or negative outcomes.
  Once an event has been encountered, the event card is discarded.
  Item card: This will a item the character may use and typically confers some sort of benefit on the character.
  Items are kept by the character and their benefit can be used once per the player's turn.
  Item cards are kept by the player.
  Omen cards: These are a bit like event and items cards. An omen card might require a player to make a roll or perform an action, but they are also kept by the player and can be used once per turn.
  Anytime an omen card is drawn, the active player must roll 6 dice, if the result is lower than the total number of omen cards that have been drawn, then the 'haunt' is triggered. More on this below.
• The haunt: After the haunt is triggered, it can fundamentally alter the game. The active player looks at a chart in one of the books, it will determine who is revealed as the traitor and which of the game's 50 haunt scenarios will be played out.
  Traitor: The traitor player takes the Traitor's Tome and must move away from the other players, then they read the haunt scenario that was activated. It will tell the traitor what their objective is and why powers they may have acquired and what monsters they may control.
  Heroes: The remaining explorers now become the heroes, with the traitor out of earshot, they can read about the haunt in Secrets of Survival, learn their objectives and discuss their strategy.
  Turn order: Once all players have finished reading their pertinent information, a new turn order is established. Basically the traitor player goes last in the new order, any monsters the traitor controls go after them.
  Play pretty much continues pretty much as it did previously, heroes and the traitor can still move around, explore and draw cards. Crucially, though, heroes' stats may now be reduced to 0, resulting in their untimely demise.

Endgame
The heroes and the traitor continue taking their turns until one or the other complete their objective, in which case they win. 

Overall
Mechanically speaking, Betrayal at the House on the Hill is straightforward, especially in the first stage of the game. Players add tiles to the map and deal with whatever randomly comes with it, it's fun, but players are just reacting to encounters, all a bit unchallenging mentally.
When the traitor is revealed, this all changes though.

The heroes will find themselves having to complete their objectives while invariably having to keep out of the clutches of the traitor and their monstrous allies. They'll probably have to collaborate to have a chance of success.
Meanwhile, the traitor will have their own objectives, this may or may not involve capturing or defeating the heroes. The traitor can be sure that the heroes' objective will be bad news for them and will want to thwart them.
Betrayal at the House on the Hill has now become a very tense game of cat-and-mouse.

However, there are number of things about the game that irk me.
I'm not fond of traitor mechanics, nor am I fond of one-vs-many mechanics and Betrayal at the House on the Hill uses both! It's a bit of a put-off for me, obviously, YMMV.

Additionally, when the haunt is revealed, all the players must split up to secretly read their objective and in the case of the heroes; discuss their actions while the traitor sits around waiting. This creates a strange, pace-breaking awkward pause to the game.

Finally, having the playing area actually split into 3 playing areas, one for each of the house's floors feels somewhat clumsy to me, it's not a dealbreaker, but it does take up table-space.

There's nothing wrong with the game, it's just not really for me and isn't a game I'd pick to play.
If the haunted house theme appeals and you're happy to play with traitor mechanics, Betrayal at the house on the hill will probably be an enjoyable experience.