17th November 2019

Sunday lunch time has rolled around and we're at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking. The 50 Fathoms hiatus continues.

Today we played 'Concordia'

Concordia is a resource gathering and economic expansion game set in the Roman era Mediterranean and surrounding areas.
Ah, where would 'euro style' games be without the Roman era Mediterranean? Probably set even more in Renaissance Europe!

What's in a game?
Concordia has quite a lot of components.

• Game board: The main game board is actually double-sided, one side depicts a map of the Mediterranean and surrounding regions, the other is of the Italy peninsula. Regardless of which side is used, they both contain the same features. There are about a dozen different provincial regions and each province contains 2 or 3 cities, each city is labelled A, B, C or D. The map also shows roads and sea-routes between cities. The board also features a status box for each province. There's a card track for 'personality' cards and finally a scoring track.
• City tokens: On one side of these tiles it shows one of the games 5 different resources. On the other side it is labelled A, B, C or D.
• Bonus markers: These are used in conjunction with the provincial status boxes. One side has a resource on it and the other shows some currency.
• Personality cards: There a 5 different decks of personality cards.
• Starter decks: There are identical 'starter' decks for each player.
• Personal board: Each player is given their own board that represents their storehouses. Each personal board has 12 spaces. All resources and meeples must be stored on the player's storehouse.
• Meeples: Lots of meeples, each player has 6 of them! 3 are 'person' meeples and the other 3 are 'ship' meeples.
• Houses: Each player has 15 house tokens.
• Resources: Concordia has 5 different types of resource represented by tokens. In order of lowest value to highest; brick, food, tool, wine and cloth.
• Coins: The game's currency.

Concordia has its fair share of its components and their fairly good quality too. 

It's worth mentioning the games resource tokens, normally it would be typical for the components to be coloured wooden blocks. Not so in Concordia, the tokens are shaped like the resource they represent. Thus the brick tokens look like clay bricks, wine tokens look like wine jugs and so on. It's a nice touch.

Hows it play?
Concordia has a fairly detailed setup. So, here we go.

• After deciding which side of the board to use, turn all the city tokens to the 'letter' side and shuffle them. Then put the 'A' tokens on the 'A' cities, 'B' tokens on the 'B' cities and so on. Turn over all the tokens and it will which resource all the cities will produce.
• Now put a bonus marker in each province's status box. The type of resource that should be put into a province box is the same as the highest value resource produced in any city in that particular province. All bonus markers are initially placed with the resource side-up.
• Shuffle all 5 individual personality decks. Then put them together to create 1 large deck, with the '1' deck at the top and the '5' deck at the bottom. Then draw personality cards and place them on all the spaces on the card track.
• Give each player a storehouse board, 15 houses and 6 meeples in their colour. Each player should place 1 person and 1 ship on the starter city. The remaining 4 meeples go into their storehouse, each meeple takes up 1 space in the storehouse.
• Each player is given some starting currency and resources, the resources must go on to the storehouse board.
• Finally, give a starting deck to each player. Players keep their entire deck in their hand at all times, when cards are played, they go into a discard pile.

So now we can go on to the actual game play.

The very basics of Concordia are simple: The active player plays a card from their hand carries out the action(s) listed on it.
Personality cards can be acquired which perform other actions or are better versions of the starter cards.
The starter cards are: 

• Architect: Playing the Architect card allows the active player to move their colonists (Meeples). The amount of spaces that meeples can be moved is equal to the number of meeples the active player has on the board (At the start a player will have 2 moves.), This can be split amongst the players meeples as they see fit. Movement is a little unusual in Concordia. Obviously 'person' meeples travel by road and 'ship' meeples by sea. But when meeples move they don't move from city to city, they stop on the route between 2 cities instead. A meeple cannot occupy the same space as another meeple. Once the active player has finished moving their meeples, they can build a house on any city that is adjacent to any road/sea route that the active player has a meeple positioned on. Building a house costs currency and resources (The resources required depend upon what the city produces.). Building a house on a city that already has another player's house on it is possible, but costs more currency (But not more resources.).
• Diplomat: Playing the Diplomat allows the active player to copy the topmost card in any other player's discard pile and thus use it's abilities.
• Mercator: Playing the Mercator allows the active player to take 3 currency from the bank. The active player can also perform exactly 2 trades. Each trade allows the active player to buy/sell any amount of a single resource provided they have enough currency/storehouse space to manage it.
• Prefect: Every player starts with 2 of these cards. This card gives the active player the choice to perform one of two different but related actions. The first action is to collect resources. The active player chooses a province and receives the resource displayed on the bonus marker in the province's status box, additionally every player who has a house on a city in the chosen region will receive a resource of the type that the city produces. Then the bonus marker is turned over to the side that shows currency. The second action is to collect currency equal to what is shown on all the 'flipped' bonus markers. When this action is chosen, all bonus markers are put on to their 'resource side.
• Senator: The Senator card allows the active player to buy up to 2 cards from the personality card track. Obviously there is a cost, this is determined from 2 sources, first the cost on the card and secondly the cost on the card track, cards on the left are cheaper than those on the right. When cards are bought, the remaining cards to the right are slid left to fill the gap and new cards are added to spaces on the right. This is a 'conveyor belt' mechanic seen in several other games.
• Tribune: When played, the Tribune card does 3 actions. It allows the active player to take their discard pile and return it to their hand. Secondly, if the active player is retrieving more than 3 cards from the discard pile, they acquire currency. Thirdly, the player can choose to add a new person or ship meeple to the board, after paying the resource cost.

Additional cards
There are more types of cards available in the personality deck. There are specialist cards for each type of resource that allows the player possibly gain extra resources. There are also improved versions of starter cards and cards that make certain actions easier to perform.

There are some more rules, but this is the gist of it

Endgame
There are 2 ways to trigger the endgame. If all the personality cards are bought or if a player builds or their houses. Then the final round is completed.

Scoring is quite detailed and involved, in fact almost convoluted.
All cards are attributed to 1 of 6 Roman gods such as Saturn, Jupiter, Mars etc.
Each 'god' is scored differently: Mars for example, will score a player 2 victory points per meeple they have on the board per Mars card​.

All victory points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Here's the thing, I quite like Concordia, but I can't put my finger on exactly why?

Maybe it's because it's a game about expansion and empire building, but a mercantile empire and not a military one. There is no direct conflict and the worse you can do to another player is to buy a personality card they want, or maybe block a route they want to use. It's all feels very 'eurogame'.

Or maybe it's the deck building element. I feel there's something engrossing about having limited actions and needing to optimise strategies accordingly.
Thinking about it, if there was too much direct competition between players, the deck building and planning wouldn't work so well within the game.

Finally, I thought I would mention the scoring. Because there's 6 different ways to score, it's almost as if you don't need to think about the scoring and can just concentrate on building up your trade empire and let the points take care of themselves.

But anyway, all in all, Concordia is a game I enjoy playing.

26th October 2019

Saturday evening has rolled round again and we're at Matakishi's for some gaming goodness.

​Tonight we played '1830', or to give it its full name; '1830: The Game of Railroads and Robber Barons'. As you will have surmised, this is a game about railroad building. Actually, it's probably fair to say it's the game about railroad building.

What's in a game?
1830's components are very 'old-school' and clearly favour function over form.

• Game board: The 1830 game board is split into 2 halves. The top half contains a grid filled with numbers, this is used to manage the stock market in the game. The bottom half of the board depicts a hex map of north-eastern United States from Chicago to New York.
• Hex tokens: These tokens show the railway lines that will connect towns and cities. The tokens come in several different colours to represent improvements in technology. As the game progresses, players will gain access to more and more complicated rail layouts and junctions that can be used to 'upgrade' previously played hex tiles.
• Share certificates: There are several 'public' companies in the game and there are shares for each of them. Each certificate is for 10%, except for the first certificate which is the 'President's certificate' and is worth 20%. That's 9 certificates for each company that equal 100%.
• Private company certificates: As well as public companies, there are a number of smaller privately held companies in the 1830.
• Company boards: Each company has its own board. The board has room for the company trains and funds, each board also comes with come some 'station' tokens.
• Train cards: These double sided cards represent train technology and are numbered from 2-6. The higher the number the better the trains that can travel further and make more stops.
• Money: 1830's currency is obviously U.S. dollars, this depicted with paper money. That's right, actual paper money! Haven't seen that in a board game for a long time, as I said 'old-school'.

How's it play?
Setup
1830 was originally published in 1986. The version we played was published in 2011 by Mayfair Games. There was some head-scratching during set up as it turns out in this edition there are several variants of the game. We had been trying to set up the 'basic' version of the game, which apparently is different to the 'classic' version (Which is what we wanted to play.).

The basic version of the game should be the classic version, do you hear Mayfair Games!

​Anyway, on with setup.

• The game board is set out, as are the train cards,  private companies and company boards.
• The share certificates are put out into stacks for each public company. The president's certificate goes on top.
• $2400 is divided amongst the players.

That's pretty straightforward.

Bidding
Bidding only occurs once in the game (Right at the start.).

Players have to bid for the right to buy one of the private companies.
Auctioning is actually very straightforward. One player makes a starting bid (Whoever is nominated as 'The Banker' should start.), then proceeding clockwise, each player has to make a higher bid or pass. If a player passes, then they are out of the auction permanently.
When everybody has passed, then the player who was the highest bidder, gets the 'privilege' of choosing which private company to buy first (Yes, even though you may have bid loads of money, you still have to pay to buy a private company!), also the highest bidder gets to take the 'Priority' card for the first stock market round. Second highest bidder gets second choice of buying a private company and so on until all the players have a private company.

Stock market and operating rounds
This is where the majority of the game takes place.

At the beginning of the game there will be a stock market round followed by an operating round.
Later on, there will be a stock market round followed by two operating rounds.
Even further into the game, the stock market round will be followed by three​ operating rounds.

Stock market round

• The stock market rounds begins with the player who has the priority card and proceeds clockwise.
• Players can choose to buy and sell shares or pass. Obviously, this early in the game, there will be little if any selling of shares. The stock market round continues until all players has consecutively passed. Finally, the priority card is given to the player to the left​ of the last player to buy or sell a share.
• At the start of the game there are no public companies operating, so the starting player can only buy shares.
• When buying a share in a company for the first time, two things happen. Firstly the player who is buying the share sets the price of the stock, this is called the 'Par' and ranges from $67 to $100 for each 10% certificate. Secondly, the president's certificate must be bought before any other certificate (At twice the par cost too! Since it represents 20% of the company). After this, certificates in that company are bought at the normal 10% per certificate.
• Any shares that are sold by a player are put into 'the bank' and are not returned to the stack it was bought from. Selling shares will lower the value of the shares on the stock market, but it does not affect the 'par' price. Player may choose to buy shares from the bank (At the stock market price.) or from the stack (At the par price.). No player may own more than 5 stock certificates in any one company. This includes the president's certificate, so a single player can earn up to 60% of a company.
• When 60% of the shares in a company have been bought (From the stack at the par price) by players, the company has been 'floated', see more below about this.
• At the end of a stock market round, if all the shares in any company have been bought by players, then the stock value of that company increases.

Company flotation
When a company is floated, the following occurs:

• Whoever has the most shares becomes president of the company. If this is not the player with the president's share, then it is swapped for two shares with the player who has the most shares. 
• The president receives the company board, this will include station tokens and 'operating capital' equal to ten times the par value.

Operating rounds
So now we're on to the operating round(s). The following occurs:

• The private companies pay out to the players that own them. They're a useful source of income early in the game, but eventually they disappear from the game as the publicly held companies come to dominate.
• Next the publicly held companies operate. They do this in order of the stock value, the most valuable company goes first. They can carry out the following actions.
• Lay track: The president can put down a hex token on a part of their rail network to expand it. If the he goes over 'rough terrain', it incurs a cost that must be paid out of the companies operating capital, sometimes going into another city also costs. If this is the first operating round for a newly floated company, then it will have it's own unique starting hex, players must start their expansion from this hex. As the game progresses, more and more advanced hex tokens become available that allow more complicated junctions to appear on a hex token, these can be used to upgrade previously placed hexes.
• Run a service: Starting from the company's home hex (Or a station token that has been paid for and placed by the company.), the president must run a rail service. The number of stations that the service can stop at is dependant on the train cards that the company owns. If a company owns a 3 point train card, then the service will stop at a maximum of 3 stations. A company may run multiple services if they own multiple train cards, but they cannot use the same rail lines again in the same round.
• Income: Once the service has been run, the president calculates how much income the service makes. Then the president decides whether to add the money to the company's operating capital or pay it out as a dividend. If it's paid out as a dividend, then all players who own shares in the company will receive a percentage of the profit according to the stocks they own. If a company pays out a dividend, the stock market value of the company rises, if the income is given to the company, the stock market value drops.
• Purchase trains: You will have noticed that trains are bought after running a service; this means during a company's first operating round, it cannot run a service! There's a nasty twist in the rules here, because as improved trains come into player, older trains become obsolete. So when the first 4 point trains is bought by a player, all 2 point trains are removed from play. If a player isn't careful, the train(s) of a company that they control will removed in someone else's turn. Then the player cannot buy a train until after running a service! Nasty!
• After the operating rounds have completed. Play returns to the stock market round, beginning with the player who currently holds the priority card.

There are more situational rules in the game, but there's no need to go into too much detail here.

Endgame​
Play continues until all the money from the bank has been paid out to the players.

Winning is determined by who has acquired the most personal wealth.
Players add up all the personal money they have accumulated and the combined stock market value of all the shares they own. The operating capital of any companies that the player may control is not added to the final tally.

Highest score wins.​

Overall
It's a testament to 1830's design that 30 years on, it's mechanics and rules are still totally solid and watertight.
The stock market round is well balanced so it has enough depth to be engaging and interesting, but is not head scratching in complexity.
I really like it that player's money is entirely separated from the money needed to run a company. I also like how in order to maximise your personal profitability, you'll also need to invest in companies run by other players. Because no player can own more than 60% in a company, this will happen.
The operating rounds give players plenty of choice and options when expanding their companies. Eventually there will be sets of intricate and convoluted rail networks interacting and criss-crossing with each other.
​Players also need to pay close attention to the money that their companies maintain as having a company go bankrupt will have serious consequences for the stock value.

On the box of 1830, it says that it takes 3-6 hours to play and that's no exaggeration. It is the only drawback to 1830 is that I can think of.

1830 is a classic and there's no doubt about it. There are plenty of other rail building games and many of them are good. But if you've got the hours to spare, none are as good as 1830.

It only remains for me to say that it seems that the game was last in print a few years ago. It's criminal that it's still out of print now, considering just how good a game 1830 is.

2nd July 2019.

​The second game of gaming night at 'The Sovereigns' was 'Isle of Skye'.

In my imagination, one day someone was playing 'Carcassonne' and they thought. 'Y'know what this needs is more depth. Oh and it needs to be set in a remote part of Scotland!'.

And the result of that thought was 'Isle of Skye'.

In reality the link to Carcassonne is fairly superficial, both are landscape-based tile laying games and that's about it for similarities
Isle of Skye also contains an intriguing trading mechanic.

What's in a game?

• A large bag comes with the game.
• A stack of square tiles. These depict various types of landscape such as mountain, field and water, as well as other features. These tiles are placed in the bag and randomly drawn during the game.
• A main game board. This board tracks player scores and the turn counter. There are also 4 spaces for 'scoring tiles'.
  
• Scoring tiles. There are a number of these. They are shuffled and 4 are placed on the main game board.
  
• A screen for each player.
  
• And err... axe for each player?

How's it play?
First, there's the set up.
The scoring tiles are shuffled and 4 of them are placed on the main game board. Each tile has a different method or way of scoring points.
Each player is also given some currency (Which they keep hidden behind their screen at all times.).

The game is played over 5 turns and the game is scored at the end of these 5 turns: In each turn different scoring tiles will used for scoring. In the 1st turn, one tile is used, in turns 2 & 3, two tiles are used and in turns 4 & 5 three tiles are used.

Once set up is completed, the game begins. There are 3 phases to every turn.

Income
Each player draws currency from the gold supply.

Trading
The trading mechanics in Isle of Skye are like no other game I've played. Each turn, all the players will acquire some tiles and must sell them, but they use their own money to do so!

• First, every player blindly draws 3 tiles from the bag and hides them behind their screen in a line.
• Then the players decide which 2 tiles to sell and which one to discard.
• When selling tiles, the player can decide how much they want for each tile for. To do this, they must use their own money. This is done by putting coins on the tile equal to the cost you want the tile to be. Thus if you want to price a tile at 3 gold, you must put 3 of your own gold on the tile. Tiles have a minimum cost of 1 and obviously cannot be more expensive than the gold you have.
• The third tile must be discarded. You indicate this by putting the axe counter on it (It gets axed - geddit!).
• Once everybody has done this, we go on to the next stage.

So next everybody removes their screen and reveals their choices to each other. The following occurs.

• All tiles marked with an axe are discarded back into the bag (And the bag is shaken to 'shuffle' the tiles.).
• Each player can then buy one tile from another player (Players cannot bu their own tiles.). Player can pass it they have to.
• Play progresses until all players have had the opportunity to buy a tile.
• If one of your tiles is bought, then the player buying it pays you the cost you indicated, you also get back the gold you put on the tile.
• If one or both of your tiles are not bought, the you must buy them yourself! Paying the cost with the gold that you placed on the tile earlier.

Playing tiles
Once all of the tiles have been bought, players have to lay their tiles.

The rules for laying tiles is pretty straightforward. Tiles can be placed down in any orientation, but must honour all the other tiles that it is adjacent to.
Each player creates their own 'map' independent of all other players.

Overall?
I Liked Isle of Skye.

I particularly like the mechanics for selling tiles. You given some intriguing and risky strategies to use.

If you draw tiles you don't want, you can try to sell them at a low price to get rid of them. But underselling the tiles may help someone else with very little benefit to yourself.
Conversely, putting a high price on tiles may them price them out of other peoples' ranges. Ending up with you paying a high cost for tiles you don't want.
Additionally, because you use your own funds to put a price on tiles. If you price your tiles too highly, you will be left with little gold to buy other player's tiles.

There's lots of potential decisions here and that's good.

When laying tiles, there's lots of decisions to be made too.

As well as the 3 land types, field, mountain and water, there are also features such roads, lighthouses, farms etc.
All of these can be used in scoring, but they will do so differently over the rounds. So you need to prioritise how you lay tiles to maximise scoring.

So like I said I like Isle of Skye and it's been added to 'the list'.

12th February

Gaming night at The Sovereigns in Woking

​Bohanza is a card game about growing beans and trading beans. Mostly it's about trading beans. Bohanza is a 'set-collecting' game with a great little wrinkle.
Unusually, it supports up to 7 players and on this occasion we got up to 7! I've never played it with that many people - excellent!

Gameplay is reasonably simple.

First, there is one important rule everyone must remember.

At the start of the game, each player is dealt a hand of cards.

• The cards must stay in the player's hand in the order in which they are dealt.
• Additionally; all cards a player draws must go into a player's hand in the order drawn.
• Players can NEVER re-order the cards in their hand.

This rule is the crux of the game, it's what drives the entire game. Here's why.

• Bohanza is won by earning the most gold. Gold is earned by planting sets of identical bean crops and then selling them.
• There are various different types of beans, coffee beans, blue beans, coca beans etc.
• Players start the game with 2 fields (1 more field can be bought during the game), which means they can only work on collecting 2 (or 3) different sets of beans at any one time.
• Here's the wrinkle; at the start of a player's turn, they MUST play the first card in their hand. This is unavoidable. If the card they have to play does not match any sets of cards they have already 'planted'. Too bad, a planted set of beans must be sold to make space for the card that needs to be played.

By now you will have realised that the cards in your hand will probably seriously screw with your plans and your crops.
So you need to get rid of the wrong cards in your card before you have to play them. How do you do that? You trade them away of course.

​Once the active player has played their mandatory card, they can choose to play another card from their hand.
After this, they draw 2 cards from the deck and places in them in front them in the play area. Now trading begins.

At this point, the active player can trade any card from their hand, or any of the 2 face up cards with any other player. The active player can also 'donate' cards to other players (although the other player can reject the offer). Curiously other players can try to donate card to the active player. Trades can only occur with the active player.

Once trading has concluded, all traded cards must be immediately planted. If the active player still as any of the 2 face up cards they just drew.

And that's how trading is done.

The only other thing to explain is selling crops.
Players can sell a crop at pretty much any time. This will earn them up to 4 gold, depending on how many cards they have collected for that set.
Different beans require different amounts of cards to earn gold.

The player then keeps a number of cards from the set as their gold. The remaining cards are placed into the discard pile. This is worthy of noting, because not all the cards from a set is put back into the set.

When the draw deck is depleted, the discard pile is shuffled and becomes the draw deck. This is done twice (thus the deck played through a total of 3 times). Once the deck is depleted a 3rd time, the game ends.

The player with the most gold, wins.

There you have it. Bohanza is good because it forces players to negotiate and trade. Most games that include trading have it as a option or a choice. But in Bohanza, choosing to not trade will probably have dire consequences.

In Deep Sea Adventure each player is a treasure-hunting diver who is looking to score big. The game is played over 3 rounds and the player with the most valuable treasures after the end of the 3rd round is the winner.

Deep Sea Adventure packs a whole lot of push-your-luck fun into a little box.

Whilst this is a competitive game, it sneaks a co-operative little mechanic into the rules which in turn players can try to twist to their own advantage.

The game begins with all the players' meeples in a submarine. Beneath the sub is a winding trail of face down markers. Each marker represents a treasure that can be collected by a diver. The value of the treasures also vary, but the deeper you dive, more valuable the treasure. The more sides a marker has, the more potential value it has.

Play goes like this:

• During a player's turn, they dive into the deeps. This is done by rolling 2 dice (both numbered 1-3, giving a range of 2-6 and an average of 4) and moving that many spaces down the treasure markers.
• When a diver moves, they 'hop' over other divers (don't count the space the other diver is on), this means that sometimes movement is very unpredictable.
• When a player stops on a treasure marker they can choose to pick it up (and place it still face down in front of themselves). If they do pick it up, it is replaced by a 'blank' marker.
• At the start of their next turn, the player can choose to continue diving for more treasure or turn around and head back to the sub. Rolling both dice to move up or down. Once a diver begins their ascent, they can't turn back down again.

And that's it, that's it for the rules.

Ok, there's a bit more.

• At the start of a player's turn, if they are carrying one or more treasures, then they must lower the sub's oxygen level by the number of treasures they are holding.
• Oxygen level? WTF is that? Did I forget to mention the sub's oxygen level? Well, the submarine has an oxygen level that is communally shared by all the divers. When the oxygen level reaches zero, all the divers not back in the sub will.... well you get the idea.
• After rolling the dice to move, the number of treasures carried is also deducted from the dice result. Carrying treasures will slow divers down, possibly down to zero movement.
• Thus carrying treasures consumes oxygen and slows movement. A potentially lethal combination.
• A player does not score points for the treasures they collect until they safely return to the submarine. If they don't make it back to the sub, then the treasure's are dropped and to the bottom of the track and pile up in piles of three. When a treasure plie is picked up, it only counts as one treasure for purposes of movement and oxygen, even though it actually be three treasures. Very tasty if you can get to it!
• After every diver has returned to the sub, or as is more likely the oxygen runs out. Then the round ends. All the blank markers are removed (thus the trail is shortened and the deeper treasures become more accessible). The oxygen level is set back to max and the next round begins. There are 3 rounds to a game.

And that really is it for the rules. Deep Sea Adventure is all about pushing you luck.

Pushing your luck in picking up treasures (so tempting to pick up one extra treasure, just one little treasure - it won't make much of a difference, right).

Pushing your luck in movement. The hop mechanic can prove helpful or can push you way too deep into the depths.

Finally, pushing your luck with the communal oxygen supply. This is the game's best mechanic. This is what turns it from a 'OK' game into a 'good' game. The communal oxygen means that you have watch what the other players are picking up. It forces you to try and think a whole round ahead.

When playing Deep Sea Adventure, there comes a point when oxygen starts to matter. For a couple of turns, no one picks up treasure. Everyone wants something a little better and is willing to dive a little deeper to get it. But then, it all changes, as treasures are picked up, oxygen is used up. The change may seem quite subtle, but can actually be quite dramatic. No oxygen being used, to suddenly 4-5 every round.  Being able to spot and react to this change is key to winning in my opinion.

In a six player game, at some point every player will have picked up at least one treasure, that means six points of oxygen will be used up before your next turn. That's about a quarter of all the available oxygen.

Some players will try and load themselves with treasures to burn up oxygen as they return to the sub, (this is in itself a risky strategy as it also slows movement - several times I've seen loaded down players one or 2 spaces away from the sub and not move at all until the oxygen runs out).

All of this means that you can never be complacent about the oxygen supply and this Deep Sea Adventure is good fun and a good game.