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.

20th February 2022

It's a Sunday and we're logged into Board Game Arena for some gaming fun.

I don't know what Loco Momo means but I kind of hope it means crazy fun with cute animals. Hmm, that didn't sound right, how about wholesome crazy fun with animals.
Loco Momo is actually about (I kid you not!) organising the disarrayed wildlife population of the forest for a group photo! 

Caveat: We've only ever played Loco Momo digitally.

What's in a game?

• ​Game board: The central game board displays 4 sets of 4 tile spaces, 16 tile spaces in total.
  A large part of the board is given over to the artwork which depicts a remote looking vaguely mysterious forest backdrop.
• Player boards: Each of these boards has a 5x5 grid of tile spaces, along with some iconography explaining scoring rules. Again the background depicts a forest environment, only this time with a peculiar set of overgrown open-air stands (Or bleachers if you will.) against the vista of a waterfall.
• Tiles: Loco Momo makes use of 105 square tiles that depict 5 wildlife species; bears, ducks, eagles, leopards and rabbits across 3 colours; blue, brown and green.
  It means there are 21 of each animal type and 7 in each colour.
• Bag: Given that we played Loco Momo digitally, there's no bag. But in the physical copy it would be used to blindly draw tiles.

There isn't too much artwork to Loco Momo, just the 2 backgrounds on the 2 types of board and 5 wildlife illustrations.
It's good quality artwork though, a bright palette and bold cartoony style suit the game's light-hearted theme well.

The game's only iconography appears on the player boards. It's not immediately apparent what they mean but quick read of the rules makes them clear.

How's it play?
Setup

• Central board: Put out the central board and randomly populate all 16 spaces on the board with wildlife tiles.
• Player board: Give each player a personal board.
• First player: Determine a first player.

That's it for setup.

On to play
The objective of Loco Momo is for players to fill their boards with tiles to score VPs and the game provides various approaches to achieve this. Although this mostly involves collecting various kinds of sets.
Loco Momo uses the traditional structure with the active player taking their 2 actions -  a drafting action and placing action with play then moving to the player on the left.

• Drafting: The active player chooses to take 1 of the 16 tiles, what happens next will depend on the type of wildlife on the tile that was picked and its colour.
  Bear: If a bear tile was chosen, then all wildlife tiles of the same colour as the bear from the same area as the bear are drafted by the active player along with the bear tile.
  Duck: Starting clockwise from the area where the duck tile was chosen, the active player looks at the other areas until they encounter another duck. Then all the wildlife tiles with the same colour as the duck are taken, along with the duck. If there are no other ducks, then tiles of matching colour are taken from the same area as the duck.
  Eagle: All wildlife tiles matching the colour of the eagle tile are taken from the diagonally opposite area to where the eagle tile was initially taken.
  Leopard: The active player should look at the next area going anticlockwise from where they took the leopard tile and take all the tiles with the matching colour.
  Rabbit: The active player should look one area clockwise form where they took the rabbit tile and take all the tiles with the matching colour.
• Place tiles: The active player will now have 1-5 tiles of the same colour which must be played on to their board.
  The active player may put these tiles into any row on their personal board, however, tiles must always be placed on the leftmost available space. Thus tokens go from left-to-right.
• Repopulate: Spaces that were created on the central board after drafting are now randomly repopulated with more wildlife tiles.
• Next player: The player to the left of the active player now becomes active.

Endgame
Play continues until the 6th round is completed, then scoring occurs.

• The bottom row: (Which I'll call row 1.) scores for each different type of animal in that horizontal row. Scoring goes from 1-14 VPs.
• Row 2: Above the bottom row is row 2, this is scored for the biggest single set of any identical animal in that horizontal row, again scoring from 1-14 VPs.
• Rows 3 & 4: Unlike rows 1 and 2, these 2 rows score vertically. Each vertical matching pair of animals in the same column score 3 VPs.
• Row 5: Tiles in the top row will score by also matching the 2 identical tiles in the same column from the 2 rows below. This scores 4 VPs.
  Thus if all 3 animals in a column match types for rows 3-5, it scores 7 VPs in total.
• Colours: Each row and column that has been filled with tiles of the same colour score an additional 5 VPs each.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
​Loco Momo is a fairly straightforward game, the gameplay strategies are more or less obvious and there's not much to say about it.

During drafting players will look for the optimal method to acquire the most tiles possible or, as will occur on occasion if there's little they want, try to avoid taking tiles.

Then, when placing tiles, players may need to make some meaningful choices.
Sure, it's easy putting down tiles when a player has got the ones they wanted but frequently, this won't be the case and dealing with those wayward tiles is very important.
Players will want to keep scoring opportunities for other tiles/sets open and minimise the damage caused by having to place unwanted tiles.

There's also a higher level of play that involves looking at what's available on the central board and what other players are working towards, then trying to anticipate what tiles they'll be looking to gain from themselves. It might be prudent to try and deny other players certain tiles.
Or if they're not interested in tile of a particular colour, it might be safe take that tile in a later turn.

This brings me to the one niggle I have about Loco Momo, which are the colour scoring rules.
We've only played Loco Momo 3 player and because there are 3 colours of tile, we tend to gravitate towards one colour each with little 'stealing' of other players' colours. Which is understandable as completing columns/rows with the same colours confers nice bonuses and during the late-game completing sets scoring the colour instead of the animal gets more VPs. Consequently it also makes decisions 'easier'.
I imagine with 4 players, this status quo would be shaken up and the game would become more interesting.
Despite the criticism, the game ultimately generally does provide players with meaningful decisions to make.

Games about about drafting sets of tiles and placing them on to a player board are pretty commonplace today.
So does Loco Momo do anything to stand out from the crowd?

I think the answer is... sort of.
Loco Momo is a bit unremarkable but at the same time it's an enjoyably light, easily learnt and accessible example of this kind of game with a reasonable playing time. A good introduction or crossover game
If this ticks your boxes, Loco Momo might be worth a look.

13th February 2022

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

Shifting Stones is a light sort of puzzle-themed sliding tile game.

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

​What's in a game?

• Tiles: Shifting Stones features 9 double-sided tiles. On all the tiles, each side is a different colour to the other. Each colour also has it's own illustration. The tiles brea down as follows.
  Black/yellow: 1 tile.
  Orange/red: 2 tiles.
  Blue/purple: 3 tiles.
  Green/grey: 3 tiles.
• Cards: There are 72 cards in Shifting Stones. Each card displays a 3x3 grid in some manner or other and will contain pictures of 1-4 of the tiles in various positions in the grid. Each card also has a VP value, the more tiles on the card, the more VPs.
• Player aids: Normally I don't bother mentioning player aids but in Shifting Stones, they're particularly useful as they show both sides of all 4 types of tile.

There's not much to say about the components. The illustrations on the tiles are nicely detailed and distinctive. However, I found the colours somewhat muted in lower lighting and a little indistinguishable, particularly the orange/red combination. The same is true of the cards.

The game has no iconography other than the tile illustrations.

How's it play?
Setup

• Tiles: Randomise the 9 tiles and put them into a 3x3 grid with the illustrations orientated the same way.
• Cards: Shuffle the cards into a face-down deck, deal 4 to each player.
• First player: Determine a first player.

On to play
Shifting Stones uses a traditional turn order, the active player has their turn and when it finishes, play progress clockwise to the next.
During their turn, the active player perform any number of the score/swap/flips actions in any order so long as they have the cards to perform them. Alternatively, they may skip their turn.

• Score: If the positioning of the tiles matches a card in the active player's hand, they may score it buy placing it down in their playing area.
• Swap tiles: This action requires the active player to discard a card of their choice, then they can swap around 2 orthogonally adjacent tiles.
• Flip tile: This action also requires the player to discard a card and allow them to flip a tile to it's other side.
• End turn: When the turn ends, the active player draws cards until they have a hand of 4 again.
• Skip turn: Instead of acting, the player may skip their turn entirely. This allows then to draw cards and temporarily increase their hand size to 6, giving them more option in the following turn. However, this action cannot be chosen during the subsequent turns. I.e., a player cannot skip turn twice in a row.

Endgame
Play continues until any player has scored (Dependant on player count.) 7-10 cards, after which the current round is completed.

Players add up the VPs of all the cards they've scored during the game.
Additionally, whoever played the most 1 value cards earns a bonus 3 VPs.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
As you can see from the brief write-up, Shifting Stones is a fairly straightforward and accessible game, it could make a good introduction to new players or crossover game.

Despite the straightforward rules, there is actually a bit of depth to be found in Shifting Stones. The game makes use of a hand-as-currency mechanic to pay for actions and getting rid of cards that might prove useful is always a meaningful decision. Players will want to minimise this and find the most efficient way to swap/flip tiles to where they need them to be and hope to score at least 1 card per turn.
At the same time, hanging on to cards too long can earn nothing and trying to plan ahead is likely to be futile, it's too risky leaving things for another round as it players will invariably change the tile positionings, players will need to be decisive and exploit the opportunities that present themselves during their turn.

There's not much more else to say really, there's no noteworthy interaction between players and it's hard to gauge what others are doing, especially since whenever they refill their hand  - which is every turn, they'll be presented with newer options.

Other than I found the game a little bit of a frustrating experience.
Watching other players inadvertently wrecking the positioning I was try to set up between turns wasn't what I'd call much fun. I also found having to remember what was on the flip side of the tiles something of a chore, having to refer to the reference card wasn't much better. If perhaps. there was more engaging core gameplay, maybe I'd would make the effort to remember what's on the other side of the tiles. But there wasn't, so I didn't.

Shifting Stones is straightforward and clearly skews towards the lighter end of the complexity scale, it would possibly make a good filler game. I'm not sure there's enough here to appeal to me though and coupled with the frustrating experience means that this is not one for me.

9th February 2022

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

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

What's in a game?

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

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

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

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

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

How's it play?
Setup

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

Phew! We're ready to go now.

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

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

Okay, that's it for the main rules.

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

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

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8th February 2022

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

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

What's in a game?

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

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

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

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

How's it play?
Setup

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

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

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

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

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

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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

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

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

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

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

15th January 2022

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

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

What's in a game?

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

That's it for most components.

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

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

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

How's it play?
Setup

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

On to play

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

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

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

VPs come from various sources in Ginkgopolis.

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

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

27th December 2021

Mid-Christmas gaming on Board Game Arena continued with Lucky Numbers.

A good Friend Is Like A Four Leaf Clover, hard to find and lucky to have.
Well, in Lucky Numbers; clovers make a game easy to learn and fun to play.

How's it play?
Setup

• Clover tiles: Take 1 set of clovers per player and shuffle them face-down into a central playing area. Thus there will be 40-80 tiles used per game.
• Player board: Give each a player board.
• Starting tiles: Each player randomly draws 4 tiles and places them on their board diagonally, going from top-left to bottom-right in ascending numbers.
• First player: determine a first player.

And that's it for setup!

​On to play
The objective in Lucky Numbers is to be the first player to fill in all empty spaces on their board with clover tiles in ascending order.
Players take turns acquiring tiles and hopefully placing them on their player boards. 

• Acquire tile: The active player must blindly pick a face-down tile or pick up face-up tile (Provided there are face-up tiles available.) from the central playing area.
• Place tile: Once the active player has a tile, they have to place it on their player board. However, there are some rules for placement, when placing a tile:
  A) Its value must be higher than the first tile to its left and the first tile above.
  B) Its value must also be lower than first tile to it's right and the first tile below.
• Return tile: If the active player cannot put a tile on to their player board, they must return it face-up to the central playing area.
• Swap tile: Alternatively; if the active player cannot place their tile, they can swap it for one on their board - provided the new tile meets the placement requirements above. The tile that was swapped out is put into the central playing area face-up.
• End turn: Once the active player has placed, swapped or returned a tile, play progresses to the player to the left.

Finally, that's it for the rules!

Endgame
The first player to place clover tiles on all spaces on their player board, wins!​

Overall
There's no doubt about it, luck plays an important role in Lucky Numbers, which considering its name is... err... lucky?
And that's not a bad thing either.
Luck keeps the game fresh, acts as a fairly good balancing mechanic between players of differing experience levels and puts them on their toes.

Despite the part that luck plays, there's also strategy to found in Lucky numbers.
On a basic level, knowing where to place tiles is critical. After a couple of games players will learn the broad areas that are good placings for a tile but this is also contextual and players will need to pay close attention to the value of the tile in their hand in relation to the tiles already in play on their board. A physical gap between tiles also requires a numerical gap between them, how much of a numerical gap? That depends on those 2 numbers, numbers on nearby tiles, numbers in the central area and even numbers played by other players.
​
Which brings me neatly to other players: There's a slightly deeper level of strategy and gameplay at work here.
Players will invariably draw tiles they cannot use and will need to put them in the central area, sometimes though, it will just gift the tile to another player who can find a use for it on their turn. Sometimes it may be prudent to swap if for another tile on the your board to deny it to the other player.
Or; if you notice another player swapping out a tile, it probably means they're making a play for something, they may be looking to use the tile they replaced or another tile from the central area in a different space and there may be a way of blocking that play.
Even though players are working towards completing their own boards, it really pays to keep an eye on what others are doing and what empty spaces they have on their boards and they're looking for to win.

If I had a couple of criticisms, it would be that despite the simple rules, there can be fiddly moments: We've only played the game digitally, but occasionally the game prevents me placing a tile incorrectly (Because I'm not paying attention!). If we were playing a physical, these kinds of mistakes might be missed. 
Secondly, quite often, if someone is lucky enough to get a good, even spread of 4 starting tiles, it can be too much of an edge, not always but definitely sometimes.
None of this is a gamebreaker though.

Lucky Numbers nails a sweet spot between replayability, rules-accessibility, randomness and a dollop of strategy. It's a great crossover game that will appeal to non-gamers as strategies utilised in the game are based on cunning and observation, not remembering rules.
​
I wouldn't want to play it too much, but Lucky Numbers is a fun game in short bursts. If you don't mind games where luck can hold a lot of sway, then it's definitely work a look.

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.