24th October 2021

We've logged into Board Game Arena for some Sunday night gaming.

The first game of the night was The Crew: Mission Deep Sea.

Clearly the lost continent of Mu has fascinated gamers since times immemorial, so what better than a game about discovering the sunken land: Or at least the plot for a very good trick taking game.​

What's in a game?

• Cards: There are a total of 40 cards used in the game:
  Suits: There are 5 suits. In each of 4 of the suits there are cards numbered 1-9.
  Submarine cards: This is the 5th suit, they are numbered 1-4 and are also trump cards, obviously they depict pictures of submarines.
• Task cards: This deck of 96 half-sized cards contains objectives for players to complete. On the back of each card is its 'value', the card's value may differ for 3, 4 & 5 player games.
• Communication tokens: These are double-sided tokens used for... well communicating, they displayed used and unused on either side
• Distress signal: Another double-sided token, again showing used and unused on either side.
• Captain's token: This is a standee and represents first player.
• Logbook: The game comes with a 'logbook', this serves 2 functions, firstly it provides the game's campaign information and secondly, provides space to record the results of those missions, if you like writing in the book that is.

That's more or less it for components.
Quality-wise, they're all pretty average quality and what you'd expect.
Artwork is repeated across the game's 4 main suits which are colour themed and tend to feature monochrome illustrations decorated in the suit's colour. The trump cards all feature submarines of progressively larger size.
The task deck utilises a fair amount of iconography for objectives, mostly it's fairly clear, sometimes some smaller writing appears on a card to clarify, occasionally the rulebook had to be referred to, nothing game breaking.

How's it play?
Setup

• Cards: Shuffle the deck and deal it all out to all the players face-down, in a 3-player game, 1 player will end up with an extra card which will unused by the end of the game.
  Players must keep their hand secret.
• Captain: Whoever was dealt the 4 of submarines becomes the captain and thus first player.
• Communication tokens: Give one token to each player who should put it on the unused side.
• Distress signal: Put the distress signal on its unused side into the central playing area.
• Campaign play: The Crew: Mission Deep Sea plays over a series of over 30 progressively harder and harder missions which is displayed numerically. Each mission has it's own intro story and may have unique rules such as 1 player taking all task cards etc.
• Task deck: Shuffle the task deck and deal task cards face-down.
  The number of task cards dealt depends on the difficulty of the mission, easy missions have low numbers, getting progressively higher as the missions get harder.
  Thus if a mission has a difficulty of 5, keep dealing task cards until their exact value equals 5, any task card with a value that would take the total value over 5 is discarded. This means the number of task cards that appear in a mission will not very in their objectives but also amount of objectives.
  Now task cards must be assigned to players. There are various ways of doing this and it will vary from mission to mission, sometimes players will have option to pass, sometimes the captain assigns them.
  In order to win the mission, the objectives on these task cards must be completed before players run out of cards, some objectives can be failed, which immediately ends the mission in failure.

Once the task cards have been assigned, then the game's ready to play.

​On to play
The Crew: Mission Deep Sea is a trick-taking game where one player starts a round by playing a card and the others must follow suit. 

• Distress signal: Once all cards and task cards have been allotted out and before play begins, any player can choose to trigger the distress signal. 
  When this is done, every player must pass a card to another player, whether it's clockwise or anti-clockwise is decided by the activating player.
  Once the game has started, the distress signal cannot be used.
• Communication token: Before any round begins, any player may use their communication token.
  When a player chooses to do this, they take a card from their hand and place it face-up in front of themselves and place their token on part of the card. This can be done to communicate 1 of 3 pieces of information about that card.
  Top: If the token is placed at the top of card, it means 'this is the highest value card I have in this suit'.
  Bottom: If the token is placed at the bottom of the card, it indicates that 'this is the lowest value card I have in this suit'.
  Middle: If the token is placed in the middle of the card, it communicates 'this is the ONLY card I have in this suit'.
• Opening play: The first round begins with the captain, after that, each subsequent round begins with whoever 'won' the previous round.
  The starting player plays any card of a suit of their choice face-up into the playing area.
• Following: Now, going clockwise, each player must follow.
  This means that if they can, players that follow must play a card of the same suit. They can choose which card to play if they have more than one, but they must follow suit if they can.
  If a player has no cards of the same suit, they then have other options. They may play any other card of a different suit, this includes a submarine - which is a trump, more on trumps below.
• Taking the trick: Once each player has played their card, the winner of the trick must be determined.
  Whoever played the card with the highest value wins the trick and collects all cards played in that round. A player who had to play a card in a different suit can never win the trick.
  Trump: If a submarine was played, then it trumps a card of any value, only a higher value submarine card may trump a trump. Thus the 4 submarine cannot be beaten.
• Win/lose: Once the winner of the trick has been determined, players should check to see if any of their task cards have been completed or failed.
  If all tasks have been completed, the mission is a success. Some tasks can be completed immediately, some are only completed when the round ends.
  Any failure at all ends the mission.

Endgame
Players collectively win or lose at The Crew: Mission Deep Sea.
Ultimately they win when all the missions have been completed.

Overall
A friend described The Crew: Mission Deep Sea as whist with a twist and that's sort of accurate but barely describes how much of a good game this is.

The task cards are what makes so good, there are 96 of them, providing a vast combination of objectives that can appear. Even if you complete the 30-odd missions in the logbook (Which could take a while!), there's nothing to stop players from just choosing a difficulty and playing!

Players must always pay attention during missions, simple mistakes can very quickly end them and each one will provide a distinct randomly generated challenge to face - and pitfalls to avoid! Players will have to silently co-ordinate their efforts, task cards will force them to learn to exploit all the game's rules to be successful, they'll have to learn that winning a trick is not always the way they should go and at times not having the right suit is the right choice!
I could spend ages going on about how we've played the game but instead i'll say: 

The Crew: Mission Deep Sea packs a lot of gameplay into a little package of what is essentially a couple of decks of cards and a handful of tokens. It's a game everyone should definitely try.

15th August 2021

Sunday evening is here again and I'm my living room logged into Board Game Arena on my PC for some gaming goodness.

First up was 6 nimmit!. 6 nimmit! is 6 takes in German, it's quite an abstract game and the name will make sense when you seen the rules.

What's in a game?
6 nimmit is a card game and comes with a deck of 104 cards number from 1 to... you guessed it... 104 and that's it for game components. Each card also displays one or more symbols which are endearingly known as ​bullheads. Bullheads are bad.

The cards are normal quality as you'd expect.
There's pretty much no artwork to speak off, other than the symbol for bullheads and colours used to mark out cards which have more than 1 bullhead symbol.
The game has no iconography other than numbers and bullheads and being an abstract game, doesn't need anything else.

How's it play?
Setup

• Shuffle all the cards into a face-down deck.
• Draw 4 cards and place them face-up into a column in the central play area. These form the beginnings of the 4 rows into which players will place their cards
• Deal 10 face-down cards to each player.

On to play
6 nimmit! is played over several rounds and the goal is for players to empty their hand of cards and avoid collecting other cards as much as possible each round, which is not as easy as you might think...
How is this done, well read on.

• Pick a card: Each player chooses a card and plays it face-down in front of them. Once everybody done this, all cards are simultaneously ​turned face-up.
• Lowest first: Whoever played the lowest valued card, plays their card first, play then progresses to the player of the highest card, who goes last.
• Play a card: The active player must play their card on to one of the 4 rows, going from left to right and using the following rules.
  Go higher: When playing a card, it's value must be higher than the card it is placed next to.
  Go closer: Also when playing card, it must be placed next card that is closest in value to it. E.G., if 40 is played, it must be placed next to a 30 instead of a 25.
  Go low: If the card played is not higher than any row, then the active player must take all the cards in a row of their choice and place the played card as the first card in a new row.
  6 takes: If a player would place a 6th card into a row, they instead collect all the cards in that row and place what would've been the 6th card and place it as the first card in a new row.
  Who played the 6th card takes the row; 6 takes - geddit!
• Round end: Play continues until all players have played the 10 cards in their hand.
  Players tally the bullheads they've acquired this round, then all cards are shuffled back into a new deck and a new round is set up.

Endgame
Play continues through rounds until at the end of a round, in which at least one player has accumulated 66 or more bullheads..
Points are tallied, the player who has collected the lowest number of bullheads wins.

Overall
As per the brevity of this blog post, 6 nimmit! is a very simple game to learn, it's also a curious mix of strategy and unpredictability.

The objective is obviously to try and not collect cards, they'll be times that a player will want to play lower value cards to 'get into' a row before it gets to 5 cards, conversely, they'll times they want to play higher cards to go later and hope someone plays the 6th card in a row to clear it out.
Sometimes players will want to play very low and choose which row to take because it's the best of a bad set of choices, the bullheads a row may contain can vary greatly. Also choosing which row to take presents a player with the opportunity to mess with other players.
Watching a row you planned to play a card into vanish and leave a much worse alternative is quite the surprise.

And that's the thing, while some card plays can be much safer than others, it's almost always never 100% safe and it's other players bring that element of aforementioned of unpredictability to the game.

Quick to pick-up-and-play, 6 nimmit! can be a lot of fun with its surprises and reversals -of-fortune, provided you don't find playing fairly randomised games frustrating and you're not too much of a serious gamer.

16th July 2019

It's a Tuesday and the 3rd and final game of game evening at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking is 'Honshu'.

Wikipedia describes Honshu as 'the largest and most populous main island of Japan'.

Honshu the game describes itself as a 'trick-taking, map building card game set in feudal Japan'.

So, there you go!

What's in a game?

• 60 map cards, each card has 6 'squares' and each square represents a type of terrain. The cards are numbered 1-60.
• 6 starting province cards, these are double sided. So you can have identical starting provinces or asymmetrical ones. Like the  map cards, they have 6 terrain spaces.
• 40 resources equally distributed in 4 different colours. These are depicted by tiny coloured wooden cubes. You know it's a proper 'Euro' when you get wooden cubes!
• 8 end of game scoring objectives.
• 5 turn order cards.

How's it play?
The objective of Honshu is to lay down map cards to create your province. When laying a card, generally the objective is to lay cards in such a way that matching terrain types are next to each other.
First thing though, is set up.

• Randomly deal a starting province to each player. This is put into the player's are and is the first part of their province.
• Randomly deal a turn order card to each player.
• Randomly deal 6 map cards to each player.
• Randomly select an 'end of game' scoring card (This is an optional rule, but it's worth mentioning.).

A turn is divided into 2 phases, 'trick-taking' and 'map-laying'.

Trick-taking

• Each player plays one of their map cards into the central area, this is done in the turn order that was randomly determined during set up.
• Once all players have played a card, a new turn order is determined. As explained above, all cards are numbered, the player who put down the card with the highest number is now first, the 2nd highest is not 2nd and so on.
• Once the new turn order has been determined, beginning with whoever is first can now take any of the cards that were played by any of the players.
• This means that the order the cards were put down will not be the same when they are picked up.
• In later turns, players can spend resources (That they have accumulated.) to increase the value of the card they have just played by 60!

Once everyone has collected a card, we go on to the map-laying phase. When players put down their map cards, there are certain rules that must be followed.

• When laying down a map card, at least one of its 6 squares must overlap another of the player's map cards (Or starting province in the first turn.).
• A card may be placed underneath another card instead of overlapping on top of it.
• Squares that contain water cannot be laid underneath other cards.
• At least 1 square of the new card must remain visible.

That's it for map-laying.

Play continues for 3 turns. Then before the 4th turn, players pass their 3 remaining cards to the player to their left.
Once the 6th turn is completed, the players will have run out of cards. 6 new cards are randomly dealt to each player and play continues.
After the 9th turn has been completed, players pass their 3 remaining cards to the player on their right.
After the 12th turn, the game is over and we go to scoring.

Endgame
So once the 12th turn is over, it's time to score. There are several different terrain types and each type scores differently.

• Forests: All visible forest square scores 2 points each.
• Towns: Only the single biggest town district in a province scores points. Each square in the biggest town district is worth 1 point. A town district can be created (And increased in size.) by connecting town squares orthogonically. 
• Lakes: Larger lakes score points, whilst the smallest lakes score none. Each connected square in a lake other than the first is worth 3 points. Thus a lake consisting of 1 square is worth 0 points. A lake consisting of 3 squares will score 6 points.
• Fallow: Fallow squares score 0 points.
• Productions: There are some squares that are called production squares. These squares will produce 1 good in one of the 4 colours as shown on the production square is the map card. A cube in the relevant colour will be placed on the production square
• Factories: Some tiles will have factory squares on them and and like resources, factories come in 4 colours. During the endgame, if players can move resources from production squares to factory squares (Of the same colour.), then they can score points for it, the value of the score is dependent upon the individual factory.
• End game scoring cards: Finally the end game scoring card is scored. There are 8 different end game scoring cards that each provide varied ways to score additional points.

Overall
Honshu is a small game that packs a lot in.
It has a trick-taking mechanic that can be exploited to good use if you're canny, as well a a drafting mechanic​. Which is quite interesting.
The map-laying phase gives the player quite a lot of flexibility when putting map cards down, so you get a lot of choices and decisions to make.

Honshu reminds me a little bit of 'Isle of Skye', both games are broadly divided into a acquisition phase and a map laying phase.
Both games give players options for strategies (And both games allow you take another player's map tile/card!).

Honshu is a little simpler, but quicker to play.
And like Isle of Skye, I think Honshu is a good game and definitely worth trying.

5th March 2019

The final game of the night at 'The Sovereigns). Game 3 was 'The Great Dalmuti'.

The Great Dalmuti is a card game designed by Richard Garfield - he who invented 'Magic: The Gathering'. In fact, The Great Dalmuti was the first game Richard Garfield designed after Magic - and it was another card game!

There was a lot of speculation about what this game could be?
It turned out that it was a 'normal' card game.
It also turned out that it is a good card game.

The Great Dalmuti is a trick-laying card game with a little twist: It's all about social inequality.

At the start of every game a social hierarchy is established (either by cutting the deck or the finishing order in the previous game).

The social order goes like:
Greater Dalmuti: Sitting at the top of the heap is The Greater Dalmuti.
Lesser Dalmuti: Next is the Lesser Dalmuti, lower than Greater Dalmuti, but higher than the Merchant classes. He know his place - much like the Two Ronnies sketch.
Merchants: There can be up to 4 Merchants in a game, they are also arranged according to the social hierarchy.
Lesser Peon: The Lesser Peon is not quite bottom of the heap, that is reserved for...
Greater Peon: The Greater Peon, who truly is at the bottom. Even worse; the Greater Peon must shuffle and deal cards out at the start of the game.

Once the social order has been established, players must change seats according to their position in the hierarchy.

The Greater Dalmuti doesn't have to move (and why should he, he's the most important player in the game). So The Lesser Dalmuti sits to the left of The Greater Dalmuti. To the left of The Lesser Dalmuti sit the Merchants, starting with the most important merchant and going downwards in order to the left. To the left of the lowest merchant sits The Lesser Peon and finally to the left of The Lesser Peon sits The Greater Peon.

Interestingly, this means that The Greater Dalmuti is to the left of the Greater Peon and that they sit next to each other.

Next, the rules need to be explained before talking about how the game's twist affects the gameplay.

The deck of cards consists of 80 cards.

• There are 78 cards numbered from 1 to 12: The lower the value, the more important the card. The number of the card also shows how many of that card appear in the deck. Thus there is only one 1 card, 6 6's and 12 12s and so on. This all adds up to 78. All the cards are illustrated with pictures indicating their value. The 12 card show peasants, lower numbered cards then show knights, bishops, etc until the 1 card - which depicts The Great Dalmuti.
• The deck also contains 2 jokers, these are wild cards. On their own they have a value of 13. But when a Joker is played with other cards, it assumes the value of those cards (see below for further explanation).

The goal is to empty your hand of cards. This is done by playing 'tricks'.
Whoever is The Greater Dalmuti begins the first round of the game. In subsequent rounds, whoever last played a trick begins the round.

• So the starting player can play as many cards from their hand as they want, provided all the cards played have the same value.​ Thus they could play 3 5s or 4 10s etc.
• Play proceeds to the left and the next player along must play a trick that 'beats' the previous trick or pass. In order to beat the trick, the player must meet the following criteria: They must play the same number of cards, the value on the cards must all be identical and finally the value of the cards must be lower than the previous trick. So if the previous player played 3 5s, you must play 3 4s or 3 3s. If the previous player played 4 10s, you must play 4 9s or 4 8s etc.
• Jokers; a joker played on its own is worth 13, worse than a peasant! But when played with other cards it assumes the value of those cards. Thus if you have 2 6s and play a joker with those cards, it becomes a trick of 3 6s. This means you can use jokers to play unbeatable tricks if you have the right cards. If you play a joker with 2 2s, it becomes 3 2s. A trick that cannot be trumped.
• If you cannot play a trick, you must pass. Additionally, you can voluntarily pass. If you do choose to pass and then if play comes back round to you, you can choose to play a trick or pass again. That is; passing does not omit you from subsequent trick laying in the same round if the opportunity arises.
• Once everybody has passed in a round and cannot (or chooses not to) play another trick, the round ends. All the played cards are discarded.
• The last player to have played a trick, starts the round.
• The finishing order determines the social order for the following round. The first player to empty their hand becomes The Greater Dalmuti in the next round, the second player to empty their hand becomes The Lesser Dalmuti and so on, through the merchant classes and finally on to the peons.
• The game has no scoring mechanic, it's all about the bragging rights!

So that's the rules, what about the twist? What about the social inequality?

That's where taxation comes in. What's taxation?
​

• Once the social hierarchy for a game has been determined, the cards dealt and Before play begins is when we have taxation.
• In taxation, The Greater Peon must give their best 2 cards to The Greater Dalmuti, that is the 2 cards with the lowest value, (luckily Jokers count as 13 because they are single cards). In return The Greater Dalmuti will give The Greater Peon any 2 card they choose to, (these will probably be 11s & 12s).
• The Lesser Peon must give their best card to The Lesser Dalmuti, who in return will give a single card of their choice to The Lesser Peon.
• This means that if either of The Peons had the Great Dalmuti card, it will now be in the hands of The Dalmutis. This generally means that The Dalmutis have a 50% chance of starting with The Great Dalmuti card (which is a 1).

However, during taxation, there is a small chance of something called revolution. This is how revolution works.

• There are 2 types of revolution.
• If a player (other than The Greater Peon) has both jokers: During the taxation phase, they can show the jokers to everyone and trigger revolution.
• If there is revolution, the no tax is collected (The Peons do not have to give away their best cards).
• If The Greater Peon has both Jokers, then they can show everyone The Jokers and trigger greater revolution.
• If there is a greater revolution, then all the players switch places! This means the Greater and Lesser Dalmutis become the Greater and Lesser Peons and the Peons become the Dalmutis. The Merchants also switch around.

​And that's the rules, with a small twist of inequality thrown in for good measure.

This inequality makes for some interesting asymmetrical game play. When playing, what tends to happen is that the players at the higher end of the hierarchy tend to dominate the first few rounds, (quite often, by the time play reaches the lower positioned players, they have to pass) this allows the higher ranked players to dominate.

But usually, at some point the Peons will get to start a round; then they tend to steamroller everyone else for a while. When a Peon player decides to lay (as their first trick) something like 7 12s, it's likely that The Greater Dalmuti player won't even have 7 cards in their hand, nevermind 7 cards that match!

Whilst the lower value cards are better, sometimes they cannot match the number of higher numbered cards that are played.

Like all good games, your decisions here are very important. Sometimes you have to resist the urge to always just get rid of your worst cards (very often a sound strategy) to retain a set or keep a good card for later.
EG; do you break a set of 3 cards to play a trick now or retain them, so that later they can be used make a trick harder to trump.
Being able to 'control' when a trick ends, so that you get to determine the cards that start the next trick is very useful.

The Great Dalmuti is a quick and easy game that is fun to play and I only have 2 minor gripes about the game.

• The game requires at least 4 players, on the flip side, it does support up to 8 players.
• The seating needs to be rearranged after every game.

Other than that, it's nice little game.