25th April 2023

Tuesday is here again and we're with the Woking Gaming Club and The Sovereigns​ for a evening of gaming goodness.

Pirates; - they're known for spending their time burying treasure and going arrr! Skull King is a trick-taking game all about finding that treasure and going ahhh!

The quality of the cards is exactly the kind of quality you'd expect from a modern game - so pretty good, fairly sturdy cards that look laminated.

There's lots of nice pirate themed artwork in Skull King. Most of it is bright and colourful with good quality illustrations. Importantly, the 4 suits all look distinct from one another as do the special/character cards.

The 4 suits are easily recognised by theme and colours. The special cards are also easily recognisable.

How's it play?
Setup

• Deck setup: Add/remove the advanced game cards to or from the deck depending whether the normal or advanced game will be played.
• Dealer: Determine the dealer for the game start. The player to the left of the deal becomes the first lead player for that round.

On to play
Skull King is played over 10 rounds with players having increasingly larger hands of cards as rounds progress.
Furthermore, as the game progresses, players will play more and more tricks. Whoever wins each trick will earn the cards used in that trick - which will equate to points at the end of the round.
Skull King is a pretty traditional trick-taking game which uses a traditional turn order with the active player acting before play progresses to the player on their left.

• Round start: The dealer should shuffle the cards into a face-down deck.
• Deal cards: Now the dealer should deal cards face-down to all players.
  The number of cards dealt out should equal to the current round count. I.e., in the 1st round deal 1 card to each player, in the 4th round, deal 4, all the way to the 10th round where 10 cards are dealt to each player.
• Bidding: Each player should carefully look at their cards and try to gauge how 'strong' their hand is and secretly guess how many tricks they think they might win during the coming round. This becomes their 'bid' for the round
  Then all players simultaneously reveal their bids, which then can be recorded using the relevant tracking cards.
• Tricks: With the bidding out of the way, play can commence.
  • Lead player: The lead player will begin the trick by playing any card from their hand which will determine the suit for the trick.
    They are also free to play a special card instead which has no suit (The first suit card played will now determine the suit.)
    Follow: Now all other players must follow suit if they can, which means playing a card of the same suit. If they do not have a card of the same suit, then they can play a card of any other suit.
    Alternatively, regardless of whether a player has a card of the correct suit or not, they may choose to play a special card instead.
    Essentially, special cards have no suit and therefore do not need to follow suit.
  • Winner: Once all players have played a card, the trick is complete and a winner must be determined. There are several ways this can go.
    Suit cards: If only suit cards were played, whoever played the highest value card in the correct suit wins the trick.
    Cards of other suits can never win tricks unless it is from the black/jolly roger suit, in this case a black card will always beat the other suits regardless of value, only a black card of higher value can beat another black card.
    Special cards: As a rule, special cards will always beat suit cards, the exception being the escape card which always loses the trick!
    If multiple special cards are played, there are various rules for how they interact with each other.
    Once a winner has been determined, they collect all cards played in the trick and place them into their personal area.
    It's a good idea for a player to track how many tricks they've won for the end of round scoring.
• End of trick: If players have no more cards in their hand, the round is over and the game goes to the next round or game end as explained below.
  If players still have cards in hand, they continue playing tricks. Whoever won the previous trick will be the lead player for the next trick.
• End of round: When players have emptied their hands, the round is over!
  Players now calculate how many victory points (VPs) they have scored for the round and this is recorded.
  Bids: If a player won the exact number of tricks that they bid for at the round start, then they earn VPs. If the total tricks won is higher or lower, they lose points!
  highest value suit card: A player will earn VPs if they gained the highest value card of any suits.
  Special cards: These cards may situationally earn VPs.
• Next round: For the next round, the dealer and first player both move to the players on their left.
  The new dealer should collect all cards, shuffle them into a face-down deck and now deal cards to each player; the number of cards dealt should be 1 higher than the previous round.

Endgame
Once the 10th round has concluded and the VPs for that round calculated, the game is finally at an end and goes to end scoring.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Despite being a bit of a stretch to fit, Skull King's pirate theme is fairly amusing with evocative artwork to match. It's a good looking game.

Mechanically, the game is for the most part a straightforward, familiar trick-taking card game, albeit with a handful of special cards that change things up a little.
What makes Skull King standout are the scoring mechanics and in particular the bidding mechanic.

Players are forced to make a decision based on contextual information such as what is the current round and what cards they currently have in their hand. Then they'll need to try and gauge how many wins and losses they can get from their hand and plan accordingly.
Sometimes this will be simple, in the 1st round with only 1 trick being played, it's fairly safe to bid on winning 0 tricks, especially if a player only has a escape card in their hand!
As the game progresses though, these decisions will get harder and harder as more and more cards, special and otherwise come into play, making longer rounds a bit more unpredictable.
Additionally, the scoring system for bids rewards players who bid high (And manage to achieve it!) while it increases the price for failing big. A genuine risk and reward mechanic.
Finally, the bidding mechanic also introduces asymmetrical objective for players, some will be looking win tricks when others are trying lose them.
There's also a higher level of play here that involves paying attention to other players' bids.
E.g., if an opponent has won all the tricks they bid for and the round isn't over, making them win a trick will scupper the points they get from their bid.

However, I'm not so sure how I feel about the bidding mechanic, it definitely adds an extra layer to the gameplay but it's also kind of swingy, hitting a bid can earn a lot of VPs while missing it can lose a not insignificant number of VPs and sometimes this will be very much out a players control.
Additionally. the scoring rules feel a bit overly complex and fiddly, this compounded by how the game is played over 10 rounds and needs to be scored 10 times.

This brings to my other criticism which is the game feels too long:
By my calculations, a total of 55 tricks will be played over the 10 rounds which doesn't seem too bad but actually means shuffling and dealing 10 times as well as scoring 10 times and that all adds up to make the game feel a bit overlong and also finicky.

Skull Kings is a (Completely acceptable.) average trick-taking experience that is enjoyable enough but is mired down by excess bookkeeping for a card game. It's not a bad choice for a game I feel its unique elements don't do enough to make the game differentiate itself from the crowd.
The pirate theme will appeal to some but wouldn't be my first choice for a trick-taking game.

9th October 2022

Another Sunday and another gaming session on Board Game Arena.

Do the roll and bump and put the trick taking back.
Do the roll and bump and put the trick taking back.
When the dice are good, so are you.
Next time you roll, you know what to do.
Do the roll and bump and put the trick taking back.

OK, dodgy references to 80's adverts aside, Roll'n Bump blends trick taking, set collecting with a dash of push your luck into a interesting little dice game.

• ​Dice: Roll'n Bump uses normal six-sided dice.
  Player dice: There are 5 dice in each of the game's 5 player colours.
  ​Bonus die: There is only 1 white bonus die in the game. Depending on circumstances, players may get to roll it with their dice during their turn.

Each of the 4 colours used on cards also have a unique pattern associated with them. This is a good accessibility feature. The joker card is of course the exception, having all 4 colours and all 4 pattern types on it.
Otherwise, the game has no artwork.

There's almost no iconography to the game either. There's only the 3 types of card to learn and that's trivially easy to learn.

How's it play?
Setup

• Cards: Take the joker card a place it in the middle of the central playing area. Then shuffle the remaining cards into a face-down deck.
  Deal the cards face-down into 6-12 stacks of 6-3 card each depending on player count. Arrange these stacks around the joker in the central playing area, then flip the top card on each stack face-up.
• Dice: Give each player the dice in their personal player colour.
  Bonus die: Put the white die adjacent to the cards in the central playing area.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
​Players roll dice to create tricks to place on cards and then claim those cards in which in turn scores them VPs.
​Depending on the available cards, there are 3 ways this can be done. Additionally, the active player has the possibility of 'bumping' other players' dice. I.e., the other player's dice are removed from the card and replacing by those of the active player!
Roll'n Bump uses the typical turn order of the active player taking their turn before play progresses to the player on their left.
On their turn, the active player takes the following actions.

• Claim card: Firstly, if the active player has dice on any cards in the central area at the start of their turn, they take those cards and their dice back.
  All cards taken should be sorted by colour and kept in the active player's personal area.
  When a card is claimed, the face-down card beneath is flipped face-up.
  Obviously a player can't claim cards on their first turn.
• Claim bonus die: How a bonus die can be claimed is explained below but regardless of this, if they can claim it, they do so now.
• Roll dice: The active player now rolls all of their dice and may choose to keep the result or reroll them up to twice as described below.
  Reroll: Once this is done, they may chose to set aside any number of dice - including 0 and reroll the remainder.
  2nd reroll: The active player may set aside more dice and/or take back dice they had previously set aside and roll the remainder again.
  Once the 2nd reroll is completed, there are no more rerolls
  Bonus die: The bonus die is used identically to a player's usual 5 dice, it can be rolled, set aside or rerolled as the player wishes.
  The bonus dice comes into it's own once the active player has finished rolling. The player can now change the side of any one of their normal dice to match the side shown on the bonus die. The bonus die itself is never placed on cards, players always have their 5 normal dice to place.
  
• Place dice: Now that active player has the result of their dice rolling, those dice may be placed on cards in the central playing area.
  • Singles: If a card is displaying a single number, the active player may place 1 or more dice with the matching number on to that card. E.g., if a card shows a '3', the active player may put a die showing a '3' on it.
    Bump: If a singles card already has another players die or dice on it, they can be 'bumped' off by putting more dice with the matching number on that card.
    E.g., if a card has a '4' on it, 2 4s will bump it off. Consequently, 2 4s can be bumped by 3 4s and so forth.
  • Straights: These cards display 3-5 overlapping blank boxes. This indicates the size of straight that must be placed on it to claim it. Thus 4 overlapping boxes means a straight of 4 dice must be placed on the card.
    A straight is considered a number of dice in numerical sequence without a break. 
    Bump: A straight can be bumped by another higher value straight. So a '2, 3, 4' can be bumped by a '3, 4, 5'.
    Note: If a straight ends in a '6', it cannot be bumped.
  • Sets: Blank squares are used to indicate sets cards and they come in 2, 3 or 4 spaces, except for the joker which has 5.
    These cards can be claimed with sets of any matching number. A set of 2 can be claimed with 2 5s, or a set of 3 can be claimed with a 3 1s.
    Bump: A set may be bumped by another set with a higher value. E.g., 3 1s can be bumped with 3 2s.
    Note: As with straights, high value sets cannot be bumped, i.e., any set that uses 6s cannot be bumped.
  • Unused dice: If the active player has dice that they cannot or choose not to place on cards, they can potentially be put aside next the bonus die to be claimed in the next turn.
    Bump: If another player has already placed dice adjacent to the bonus die, those dice can be bumped too! This can be done if a player has unused with a higher total value than dice already placed next to the bonus die.
    
  • Bonus die: If the active played used the bonus die on this action, once they've finished placing their dice, the bonus is returned to the side of the playing area.
• Next turn: Once the active player has finished their turn, play progresses to the player on their left.

Endgame
Play continues until one of the decks has been emptied (The joker does not count.), when this occurs, all players immediately claim cards they have dice on and the game goes to scoring.

Scoring
All cards score in 2 ways, firstly they score their base VPs but then they also score as sets as per their colours: The more cards in a colour set, the more bonus VPs it earns. The joker can be added to any single colour set as chosen by the owning player.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Roll'n Bump is such a pared down game focused on the core of its push-your-luck driven gameplay without almost no 'schticks' that it's hard to find much to write about!
It does exactly what it says on the tin.

It has fairly straightforward, light rules which can be picked up very quickly, especially since it utilises mechanics which will be familiar in some way or other to many people.
Creating straights or sets, rerolling dice twice, it's all common stuff. Roll'n Bump would make a good crossover game.

Decision making is also pretty straightforward. Players must recognise and decide when and how to push their luck.
Roll'n Bump provides a classic risk-and-reward conundrum; settle for a low-scoring card or risk reducing that score to 0 to potentially score a different, higher value card.
Despite the overall simplicity of Roll'n Bump, there is a innovative mechanic to be found in the game; the bonus die.
I like how it can give an edge to a player without giving them extra dice to place. Being able to bump other players' used dice from the bonus dice can provide players with meaningful decisions. There will be times when a player might not put a die on a card because it could be used to acquire the bonus die for their next turn.

If I had one criticism of Roll'n Bump and considering it's a push-your-luck game, it might be a facetious criticism, it's that there's a lot of luck to the game!
Taking some big risks to put some dice on a card only to have another player flippantly bump them with a single lucky roll can be pretty frustrating.
Sometimes, someone will win simply because they lucked into a very good roll but that's the nature of the beast and something anyone playing this type of game should come to expect.

Roll'n Bump is unremarkable and doesn't really stand out from the crowd however it manages to tick all the right boxes for a push-your-luck trick taking game and offers a solid, simple and fun game without any associated fiddliness.
It also has a fairly quick playtime and would serve as a good filler or finisher game which is why we actually play it on a fairly regular basis.

If you're on the look out for a push-your-luck, trick taking game, Roll'n Bump is worth considering.

30th August 2022

Tuesday night gaming with the Woking Gaming Club continued with The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine.

The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine is actually an earlier iteration of The Crew: Mission Deep Sea which I've already blogged about and the two games are more or less identical.
Read about The Crew: Mission Deep Sea here and it'll give a good idea how The Quest of Planet Nine plays.
As such I'm not going to do a full write for ​The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, instead I'll just note one area of difference between the two.

Task cards: These are much more straightforward in The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine.
All the objectives are exclusively about acquiring certain numbers in certain colours, e.g., blue 7, yellow 2 and so on.
Consequently, The Quest for Planet Nine is a bit more straightforward, this makes it perhaps a little easier to play as it does not present players with having to deal with more left-field tasks like 'I can only win the first and last hands'.
The upside is that it has greater accessibility and will be easier to play with people who aren't so heavily into games.

30th August 2022

It's a Tuesday evening and we're with the Woking Board Gaming Club at The Sovereigns to play trick-taking card Scout.

Step right up, step right up friends. Prepared to be entertained and thrilled by the most death-defying, deck-dealing, trick-taking card game you ever set eyes on.

What's in a game?

• ​Cards: Scout uses a deck of 45 cards. The cards seem a little longer than typical playing cards.
  Unusually, each card is numbered twice, once at the 'top', then another number upside-down at the 'bottom'. These numbers are for the most part of different value and range from 1-10.
  Cards have small line-art illustrations of various circus trappings and also names of circus players who I suppose performs the acts. 
• Tokens: There are several types of card token in Scout.
  Dollar: These cute little tokens are proportioned like like bank notes, each one represents a dollar which translates to a victory point (VP.).
  Scoring tokens: These are all double-sided, one side has a positive score and the other a negative one, i.e., a +1 point token is also a -1 point token on other side since scores can go into the negative. Different valued tokens are differently shaped.
  Scout & show token: These tokens are shaped like a old style car.
  First player marker: Usually I don't both mentioning first player markers but this one is shaped like a top hat!

The quality of the cards in scout are average which is to say that they are what you'd expect of a modern game.
The tokens feel sturdy and well made.

While each card contain smudges of a pair attractive bright colours there's little artwork in Scout, what there is, is either monochrome illustration or stylised and slightly cartoony. It fits the loose circus theme well enough though.

Only numbers are utilised in Scout, no iconography related to game play appears which means the game is easily understood.

How's it play?
Setup

• Cards: The cards used will be determined by player count. Take those cards and shuffle them into a face-down deck.
• Tokens: Give each player a scout & show token.
• First player: Determine a start player and give them the first player token.

On to play
Scout is played over a number of rounds equal to the player count, i.e., if there are 4 players, there will be 4 rounds.
Each round will consist of numerous hands of card being played, players will take turns trying to empty their own hands while also accumulating cards and dollars into their own playing area.
The game uses a traditional turn structure with the active player acting and play progressing to the player on their left.
Broadly speaking, the active player can choose 1 of 2 actions and a round consists of the following:

• Deal: All the cards in the deck are dealt face-down to the players.
  Keep order: Upon picking up their cards, each player should splay them out from left-to-right and view the numbers.
  Players cannot change the order of their cards. 
  Rotate: Players can however, rotate their cards 180' and use the upside-down numbers.
  This can only be done once at the start of a round.
• Actions: The active player has a choice of 1 of the following 2actions.
  • Show: This action allows the active player to put a trick into play.
    Opening play: If it is the first turn of a round or no trick is in play for whatever reason, the active player must play a trick. This becomes the active trick.
    Trick: To play a trick, the active player must play 1 or more cards from their hand face-up into a central playing area.
    When playing more than 1 card, they must be adjacent to each other in the active player's hand.
    There are 2 types of trick.
    Run: The active player may play any number of cards that increase or decrease in sequence. E.g., a 2, 3 ,4, 5 or a 9, 8, 7.
    Set: The active player may play a set of any size, that is 2-of-a-kind, 3-of-a-kind and so on.
    Trump: If an active trick has already been put into play by another player, the active player can possibly trump it in a couple of ways.
    Basically, playing new trick which has more cards than the current trick will always trump it.
    Additionally, playing a new trick with an equal number of cards as the current trick can trump it if the new trick is the same kind of trick but has higher numbers OR is a set vs a run. I.e., a any 3-of-a-kind will beat any run of 3 numbers.
    Finally, when the active player trumps a previous player's trick, they take all of those player's cards and puts them face-down in their personal playing area, these will score VPs at the game end.
    So, what happens when the active play cannot trump the active trip? This brings me to...
  • Scout: If the active player cannot trump the active trick, they must scout instead. This involves taking a card from the active trick and adding it to their own hand. There are a couple of provisos though.
    Take card: A card can only be taken from either end of the active trick, not from the middle, obviously if there's only 1 card in a active trick, then it is taken.
    Add to hand: Upon taking a card from the active trick, it can be flipped to either orientation and placed anywhere in the active player's hand.
    This can be very helpful as it can be used to fill gaps in blocks of cards.
    Compensation: Whenever a card is scouted from the active trick, whoever played that trick will receive a dollar from the supply as compensation for their performer being poached.
  • Scout & Show: Each player has a scout & show token. Once per round, the active player may flip their token to perform a scout & show action.
    The active player can first perform the scout action as explained above and then also perform the show action also as explained above.
    This is a powerful move, not only does it allow the active player to potentially fill a gap in their cards while decreasing the size of the active trick it also allows them to immediately play a trick. Used effectively, the scout & show action can be a game changer.
• End of turn: Once the active player has completed their action, play progresses to the player on their left.
• End of round:  Play throughout a round continues until 1 of 2 conditions are met.
  Empty hand: If the active player manages to empty their hand, that is, no longer have any cards to play, then the round immediately ends.
  Unbeaten trick: If a player has put a trick into play and it is still the active trick when they become the active player again, i.e., all other players scouted: Then round immediately ends.
  • Round scoring: When a round ends, it is immediately scored as per the following criteria.
    Dollar: Each dollar token a player has acquired (As a result of having their tricks scouted.) earn that player 1VP.
    Trumped tricks: Each card a player has in their personal area from trumping other player's tricks also earns them 1VP.
    Hand: Each card that a player has in their hand will cost them 1VP! 
    Note: If someone ended a round due to playing a unbeaten trick, their hand does not count against their VPs.
    Also; the active trick does not score (or lose.) any VPs.
    Once points for the current round has have been calculated and added to the scores from previous rounds, play progresses to the next round.
• Next round: Gather up all the cards and shuffle them back into a face-down deck and deal them all out to the players again.
  First player: Pass the first player token to the player on the left who will now open the next round by performing the show action.

Endgame
When a number of rounds equal to the player count had been finished, the game ends, the final round is scored and we go to final scoring.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Scout packs quite a lot of gameplay into quite a small package.
At the heart of it, players are broadly speaking faced with 2 approaches towards a central conundrum: Should a player try and empty their hand or try and build up the size of the tricks in their hand instead?
Both have advantages and drawbacks.

A player emptying their hand is good because it minimises their losses if the round ends but playing small or single card tricks is a giving other players easy opportunities to score points by trumping them.
There's also the fact that a player ending up with for example a single card in their hand can have trouble playing it. If someone else plays any 2 card trick, there's no way a single card can trump it.

A player building up the cards and consequently the trick(s) in their hand can be hugely beneficial; playing a trick containing a large number of cards can end a round in that player's favour as not only do they not lose points for cards in card, they earn dollars for having their trick scouted.
The big risk is that a round may end before playing the big trick, which could lose them a lot of points.

There's also the possibility of working towards both, removing single cards or small tricks from a player's hand may create new tricks.

All of this is of course contextual. The cards a player chooses to have in their hand will influence their decisions as well as the actions of their opponents.
There's a higher level of play that comes from watching what others do and seeing if they are building up a trick or not - especially of they're scouting from small active tricks. Also quite often, when players also playing single card tricks, they're looking to combine cards into a bigger trick or looking to save a trick for later.

The show & scout action is also very important, if an opponent has played a big, using it well can genuinely bring about a reversal of fortune.

It means that players are always faced with meaningful decisions, playing and acquiring cards always has an impact.

I've seen some criticism that there's a notable amount of luck in Scout - and there's some truth to that but truth be told; so do many games of this type, especially card games. Which is why playing multiple hands of cards over multiple rounds acts as a 'balancer'.

There's also a quirk where the game is different according to player count.
For starters; game length can dramatically change according to player count: Not only do more players mean there's more turns per round, there's also more rounds to go as well! That being said, Scout doesn't have a particularly long play time. A 5-player game takes in the region of an hour to play out.
Hand size also varies quite with player count. In a 5-player game everyone starts with 9 cards, while in a 3-player game each player starts with 12 cards. It means that bigger tricks are more likely occur in games with a lower player count, something that players will want to take into account.

Another minor quibble is that it's a little tricky to pick up some of the rules about trumping an active trick with a new trick of the same size.

Minor grumbling aside though, I think Scout is an excellent trick taking card game that has a good amount of player interaction, gives players something to think about but can also provide some surprises.
If trick taking card games are something you like, then Scout is a game that you should definitely try.

21st August 2022

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

So there's this Noah guy who has to put groups of animals on to his ark but it turns out there's way more species than anyone would have thought!
He's quite busy now and has instructed his staff (The players!) to load the more mundane animals on to the ark.
​How should the players do this? Through the crucible of competitive play of course!

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

​What's in a game?

• Game board: Noah features a circular decagon shaped board, that is a 10-sided shape.
  Around the perimeter of the board is a scoring track and along 5 of its 10 sides, the board also displays 5 docks.
  Despite the scoring track going over the artwork for the dock, there's no links between them.
• Cards: The game makes use of 2 types of card.
  • ​Animal cards: Each animal card has a cute, cartoonish illustration of its particular animal species, be it cat, dog, horse, bear etc. Each card also displays the following information.
    Weight: This is basically a numerical value from 1 to 9.
    Type: Animal cards are male or female as depicted by the text colour, being blue for male and pink for female unsurprisingly.
    Movement indicator: This is linked to animal type and affects the Noah token. More on this below.
    Penalty points: These are depicted as tear icons that run in a column down the left side and may have 0, 1 or more. The more a player has the game, the more points they lose.
    Ability: Some cards may have a special ability which will be indicated by an icon near the top right corner.
  • ​Ferry cards: There are 8 of these, they are all identical and in a landscape orientation, shown in the top left corner of every card is '21' which is the ferry's 'weight limit'.
• Token: Noah has a singular large token that depicts er.... Noah!

Colourful high quality artwork is used throughout Noah and the animal cards in particular look good and depict their subject matter well and clearly. There's not much else to say about it other than it's a style clearly aimed at younger players.

There's about half a dozen icons used in the game, the movement icons are pretty self-explanatory, as are the tears. The remaining 5 or so icons for card ability are a little small and will probably have to be looked up in the rules until learned.
​I can't imagine it being a problem.

How's it play?
Setup

• Board: Put out the board and add 1 ferry card to each dock, place the remaining ferry cards as a reserve in the centre of the board.
  Noah: Place the Noah token on one of the ferries, any ferry will do.
• Cards: Sort the cards as per player count and shuffle the cards being used into a face-down deck.
  Deal 1 card each face-up on to each of the 5 ferries.
  Then deal 8 cards face-down to each player.
  Any remaining card will not be used during this round.
  
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
Noah is played over 3 rounds, the objective in all 3 rounds is for players to empty their hands as quickly as possible and thus, score as few points as possible. This is done by playing animal cards on to the ferry cards.
Noah follows a typical turn order with the active player acting, before play progresses to the player on their left.

• Play card: During their turn the active player must play a card on to one of the 5 ferries, there some rules and restrictions though.
  • Noah token: The player must play their card on to the ferry where the Noah token is located. Cards should be played on top of previous cards but splayed so that the information from previous cards is still displayed. This is actually quite important.
  • Setting type: Now it gets a little fiddly. Every ferry starts can start with a single animal card of any type. After a 2nd animal card is played on to a ferry, it will determine what following cards can be played on to that ferry in later turns by any player.
    Same type: If a male animal card is played on to another male card, then all cards that go on to that ferry from now on must also be male. The same applies with female cards; a female card played on another female means all cards played on that ferry must be female.
    Alternating: If the 2nd card played is of the opposite type (A female card played on a male card or vice-versa.), then all following cards on that ferry must alternative between male and female as indicated.
  • Move Noah: The Noah token is moved and the active player will be given a choice of 1 of 2 docks to send it to. The animal card they just played will indicate which 2 docks they can send it to.
    Female cards send Noah to one of the 2 adjacent docks and male cards to one of the 2 opposite docks.
  • Weight limit: Each animal card has a weight value and each ferry cannot hold a hold a combined weight of all cards that is greater than 21.
    If a player cannot play a card that would keep the weight to 21 or less, they must instead pick up and add all the animal cards on that ferry to their hand. This is a bad thing as the objective is to discard cards!
    Then they play any card from their hand on to the now empty ferry to make it the new 1st card on that ferry.
  • Hitting 21: Conversely, if the card just played by the active player takes the weight to exactly 21 (Which is what players will want.), then the following 4 actions occur:
    Move Noah: Move the Noah token as explained above.
    Remove cards: All the animal cards on the ferry that got to weight 21 are discarded out of play as is the ferry card itself.
    New ferry: A new ferry card is drawn from the reserve to replace the one ust discarded.
    Give cards: The active player gives 1-4 cards from their to another player, the exact number will be dependant on how many ferries have already been discarded out of play (1-4 ferries.).
    Out of cards: If either there's no ferry card to replace one just discarded, or a player empties their hand, then the round is over. More on this below.
• Activate ability: Some cards will come with a special ability is played, it's ability should be resolved as per the text for that ability.
  Abilities include actions such as looking at an opponent's hand or swapping cards with an opponents.
• Pairs: If the species of the card just played by the active player matches the species it was played on, e.g., a cat is played on another cat, then the active player gets another turn after the current one is completed. This can be chained multiple times.
• End of turn: Once the active player has completed their turn(s), player progresses to the player on their left.
• End of round: The current round will end if either of the 2 following criteria are met.
  Empty hand: If the active player has emptied their hand.
  No ferries: Once the 4th ferry card has been discarded, they will be no ferry card remaining in the reserve.
  • Tally points: All players tally the penalty points of all cards they still have in their hand at the end of the round and increase their score on the tracker correspondingly.
• Next round: A new round is prepared as per setup above.

Endgame
Noah is played over 3 rounds. After the 3rd round has concluded, players count their finishing scores.

Points are tallied, lowest score wins!

Overall
Noah is in essence a light trick-taking game and most of the mechanics are pretty straightforward; play a card and try to get that set to 21 but there's a couple of wrinkles in there.

Firstly, the rules for all male, all female or alternating animal cards will present players with some interesting conundrums. Players will need to try and think ahead, a card they play early in a round will have a significant effect later.
For example if a player only has 1 female card and plays it on another female card, then they won't be able to play any of their male cards on that ferry.
Players will also need to pay attention to the tears on their cards, playing cards with high penalty-points is vital to keep a score low.
As expressed above, I feel this rule is a bit fiddly but without it, the game would be too simple. Having to think about numbers and colours is what marks the game out as a bit different and forces players to make meaningful decisions

Secondly, the mechanic for moving the Noah token can throw a real element of unpredictability and even some 'take that' into the game. A player can move Noah to a ferry that has a weight of '20' for example, making it hard for the following player to play a card on it.
It goes both ways though and sometimes, Noah will just by chance be moved to a ferry where the following player cannot play a card.
I'm not sure how I feel about this, it adds some much needed unpredictability to the game which prevents players from over planning. However, it veers very close to the frustrating side, fans of heavier games may find this off putting.

For me, it was a little frustrating, simplistic and unengaging.
Noah is also a quite 'negative' game about not gaining points and having the lowest possible score. Generally, this type of scoring doesn't sit well with me.

Having said that, It's fair to say that I'm probably not the target audience here
​.
From its colourful, cheerful presentation, light trick-taking mechanic and easy to setup and learn rules, it's clear that Noah is a family friendly game.
It also has a reasonably quick play time that does not outstay its welcome.

If you're looking for a light card game with some distinctive gameplay to play with more casual or younger players, then Noah might be what you're looking for.

15th May 2022

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

Diced Tomatoes, a game about tomatoes that uses dice - what it says on the tin er... box!

Caveat: we've only played this game digitally.

​What's in a game?

• Dice: You'll be unsurprised to learn that Diced Tomatoes comes with quite a few dice, these are all normal six-siders and come in 3 colours.
  Red dice: By far the most common type, red dice are main avenue for point scoring.
  Black dice: When your tomatoes go rotten, that's when black dice come into play. Typically, one player will 'inflict' them on another.
  Gold dice: The rarest of dice, can be used to earn bonus points.
• Vine tokens: These tokens are double sided, one side shows a blank area and the flip side shows a space to place a 'seed' die. Vine tokens are the beginnings of creating (Or seeding.) a tomato vine. More on this below.
• Star fruit tokens: Used to track bonus points.
• Player board: Used to track karma and to track scoring with 6 locations numbered 1 to 6 to place seeding dice once they're vines are completed.

There's not much art to speak of in Diced Tomatoes, understandably, the minimalist art is red-themed.

How's it play?
Setup

• Dice: ​Give each player 11 red dice, 2 black dice and 1 gold die to put into their own personal supply.
• Board: Give each player a board and a put the karma marker on 3.
• Vine tokens: give each player 3 vine tokens which should be placed face-up.
• First player: Players roll their golden die to determine the starting player.
• Dice pool: Now all players pool their dice into a central supply that all players can use.

On to play
Points are scored in Diced Tomatoes by creating vertical lines of 4 dice (Vines if you will.) in either straights or sets of-a-kind.
In a turn, the active player takes their actions which will involve rolling and placing dice, which may result in them or other players scoring points.

• Vine tokens: If the active player has any face-down vine tokens, then they are flipped face-up. Obviously, this will not apply in a player's first turn.
• Roll the dice: The active player must take 3 dice from central supply and roll them. They can choose any combination of the 3 available colours, however only red dice can be used as seeding dice (More on this below.), so at the start it's a good idea to choose 3 reds. Later, players may choose to put black or gold dice into the mix.
  Additionally, in later turns, players will probably have dice 'passed' to them, which means they get more to roll.
• Place dice: Once the dice are rolled, the active player places them according to the following rules. Furthermore, the active player must place dice if they can, even if this means benefitting another player, although they will most likely do this to try and hinder other players instead.
  • Seeding dice: A red die of any value may be placed on to a empty face-up vine token. This is the start of that particular vine and that die becomes the seeding die, which is also it's 'value' and will be the VP's that are earned when the vine is completed.
    Thus; if a '4' is placed on to a vine token, that die will be worth 4 VPs when the vine is completed.
  • Add to a vine: If a vine token already has a seeding die on it, then dice can be added to that vine with the following provisos.
    • Matching: If the die being placed is the same value as the seeding die, then it can be placed above or below the seeding die. This means that this vine has become a 'matching set' trick.
    • Straight: If a die is exactly 1 higher or lower than a seeding die, then a higher value die can be placed above the seeding below and a lower value die will go below.
      When a die is added to a seeding die is this fashion, this vine becomes a 'straight' set.
    • Continue set: If a vine has 2 or more dice on it, then only dice which continue the trick can be added to it.
      So, if a vine has 2 '5' dice on it, then only 5's can be added to it to continue the matching set.
      If a vine has a straight, then that straight must be continued by adding lower value dice to the bottom or higher value dice to the top.
    • Black and gold dice: Every black die is placed on a vine lowers the value of the seeding die by 1.
      Conversely, every gold die on a vine increases the seeding die's value by 1.
      If the value of a seeding die ever drops below 1 or rises above 6, then that vine is wiped clean and becomes empty!
    • Other players: It will be likely at some point or other that the active player will not be able add dice to their vines. In this case, they must add dice to the vine token/dice of another player, even if it scores that other player points.
      There is a benefit to finishing another player's vine though, which is karma, more on this below.
    • End turn and pass dice: At the end of their turn, any dice the active player cannot place on either their own vines or those of another player must be passed on to the player on their left who will roll them in addition to the 3 dice they pick and roll in their turn.

​That's it for the basic flow of a turn, there are some other rules.

• Karma: All players start with 3 karma and can accumulate up to 12 during their turn, however, only 6 karma can be carried over from turn to turn.
  Karma is acquired by completing other player's vines and can be used to change the value of dice in some way or other and may even be used by a player to wipe one of their vines clear of all dice. Why would a player want to do this? Well more on that later.
• Scoring: Once a vine has accumulated 4 dice, it is immediately scored. This applies to all players, thus it is possible for players other than the active player to score points.
  VPs: When a vine is scored, the player takes the seeding die and places it on the first available scoring space on their player board, so the 1st seeding die to score goes on the '1' space, the 2nd seeding die would go on the 2nd space and so forth.
  If there were any black and/or gold dice on the vine, the seeding die's face is changed accordingly. E.g., a gold die on the vine would turn a '1' into a '2'.
  A seeding dice on the scoring board is worth it's face-value in VPs, a die showing a '4' would be worth.
  The other 3 dice are returned to the central pool.
  Bonus points: If the value on a seeding die matches the value of the scoring space it is put on to, then the player earns bonus points. So if seeding die with a value of '3' is places on the 3rd scoring spot, it will earn bonus points; how many bonus points?
  ​Basically, it increases the spot's VP score to 7 for each matching die/spot. This is tracked with the star fruit tokens.
• Flip vine token: Once a vine is scored, the now empty vine token is flipped 'face-down' and no seeding die (For better or for worse.) can be played on it until it is flipped over in the owning player's turn.

Endgame
There are 2 criteria that can trigger the game end.
If there are no dice left in the central pool at the end of the active player's turn, then the game immediately ends.
Alternatively, once any player has filled all 6 spots on their scoring board, they score 2 bonus VPs, current round is played out and the game ends. 

Players now calculate their finishing scores from the following sources.

• Points come from seeding dice on the scoring track plus a possible 2 bonus points.
• Star fruit tokens.
• Remaining karma score
• Remaining red dice on vines.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Despite Diced Tomatoes being a fairly light game with an unusual implementation of trick-taking mechanics (In that you don't really take other players' tricks - well you can ruin them instead!), it does give players lots to think about.

Firstly players will want to create their own vines. The order in which seeding dice are scored can be very important because getting it right will earn bonus points. This is particularly true for the early scoring spaces. A value 1 seeding die earns 6 VPs when placed on the 1 slot but a value 6 seeding die placed on the 6 slot only earns 1 bonus VP.

Secondly, because players can put dice on to the vine tokens and vines of other players, it means that they can try to complete them to gain karma.

Alternatively, they can try and mess with other player vines to disrupt their scoring.
E.g., if another player has a vine with 3 '1s' which they are intending to put into scoring slot 1, adding a 1 value black dice would complete the vine, but the black die would lower the seeding die's value to 0 - wiping that vine out.

​Or ​adding a gold die would add 1 point making the seeding die worth 2 when completed, this means the other player would not gain the star fruit bonus when putting it on scoring slot 1. So while they've gained a VP from the gold die, they've lost the bonus from not matching the scoring slot, collectively losing 5 VPs!
So it seems sometimes, players will want to wipe out their own vines to keep a scoring opportunity open!

As you can see, Dice Tomatoes provides quite a lot of interaction between players and a quite lot of opportunities for 'take that' moves and depending on how you feel about this style of play, may or may not be your kind of thing.
Personally I'm a bit ambivalent about it - especially in a game that's a quick and light filler.
One thing I'm not a fan of is having your vines wiped when your score goes above 6. I know why the rules are that way but it feels a bit mean spirited and counter-intuitive to lose points by gaining points.

Diced Tomatoes is a not difficult to learn, fairly quick to play filler game. Mechanically it's fairly solid and has a unique spin on trick-taking. I'm struggling to find any genuine criticism but then, I'm also struggling to find any reason to play it again.
I feel that the ease in which players can interfere in each other's plans is a bit of a frustration and it left me unengaged. It also feel like it prolongs what could be a short and sweet game.
It's not a bad game but there's just other game's I'd rather play.
Of course YMMV and maybe you'd get more out of it but Diced Tomatoes isn't one for me.

10th April 2022

Sunday evening is here and we're logged into Board Game Arena for a night of gaming.

'Viva Las Vegan!'
Or
'Millions of cabbages, cabbages for me.'
'Millions of cabbages, cabbages for free.'

Err... wait...? No... that's enough of that!
Las Vegan is a umm.. vegetable-themed trick taking card game?

Caveat: We've only ever played Las Vegan digitally and not sure if a English language version is even available in hard copy?

What's in a game?

• Cards: Las Vegan comes with 40 cards numbered 0-9 in 4 different vegetables/colours/suits.
• Cabbage machine cards: There are 12 of these double-sized cards which are used for scoring. Each one displays either a numeric value or a set of vegetables. Cabbage cards essentially represent scoring criteria. Thus if a cabbage machine displays the number 3, it means that cards with 3 on them will score. What they score is determined by casino chips, see below for more on casino chips.
  Golden cabbage machine card: Another scoring card displaying scoring options for Min and Max.
• Casino chips: The game features 4 double-sided casino chip tokens that sport a number on each side ranging from -3 to +1, obviously these numbers are skewed towards the negative.
  Golden chip: This chip is golden and is also double-sided, displaying -3/-4 respectively.
  Casino chips are used to determine the scoring on the cabbage cards, i.e., casino chips determine what meeting the scoring criteria will actually end up scoring.
• Cabbages: What is it with cabbages? Not satisfied with cabbage machines, Las Vegan also has cabbage tokens, which are the game's victory point tokens.

There's fairly minimal art throughout Las Vegan. The cards feature illustrations of vegetables on a slot machine reel and the cabbage machine cards show either vegetables or numbers across 3 reels.
Nothing bad but also nothing to write home about.

There's no iconography to speak off, just plain and simple numbers as well as the icons for the 4 types of card.

How's it play?
Setup

• Cabbage tokens: Give 15 cabbage tokens to each player.
• Cabbage machine cards: Shuffle the cabbage machine cards into a face-down deck and deal 3 face-up into the central playing area, then put out the golden cabbage machine card.
  These are the cards that will be scored in this round.
• Casino chips: Take all 5 casino chip tokens and flip them. The sides that come face-up will be used for scoring in that round.
• Cards: shuffle the cards into a face-down deck and deal all of them face-down to the players.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
Las Vegan is played over 1-4 rounds, each round follows the typical turn structure for a trick taking game, with the first or active player playing a card and the player to the left the 'following' that play.

• Opening card: Whoever is the first player can play any card from their hand. As you'd expect for a trick taking game, this set the suit for the trick.
• Follow: The next player must 'follow suit' and play a card from the same suit as the starting player if they can, otherwise they can play any card from any other suit.
  This continues until all players have played a card.
• Take trick: Whoever played the highest value card in that turn's suit takes the trick!
  Trump: However, if someone plays a '0' card of a different suit during a trick that will trump the highest value card and win instead.
  Take cards: Whoever won the trick should take all the cards and place them into their own face-down pile as a reminder of how many tricks they've taken. Players cannot look at any of these cards during the remainder of the round.
• Number 7: When a player collects 1 or more '7' value cards after winning a trick, they must place one of the casino chips (For each '7' they took.) on to a cabbage machine card, there are some restrictions here though.
  A casino chip cannot be flipped over to it's reverse side.
  Only 1 casino chip can go on a cabbage machine card and cannot be moved for the remainder of the round.
  The golden casino chip can only go on the golden cabbage machine card and it must be placed on the Min or Max space. None of the other casino chips can go on the golden cabbage machine card.
• Next Trick: The player who won the trick becomes the first player for the next trick.
• End of round: When all players have played their cards, the round is over and several events occur.
  ​Scoring: Each of the 4 cabbage machine cards is scored for all players, depending on the value of the casino chip that was placed on it.
  E.g., If the cabbage machine card with a '5' has a -2 chip on it, that means players lose 2 VPs for each '5' card they've taken during the round. If the card with 3 green vegetables has a +1 on it, it means that every 3 greens scores a VP.
  The golden cabbage card: This works a little differently, the scoring only affects the player who took the least/most tricks - depending on where the golden casino chip was placed and since that coin has a score modifier of -3 or -4, they'll always lose that amount of VPs.
  Got to say; there's nothing golden about that!
  New setup: The three cabbage machine cards are removed from play and 3 new ones are dealt from the cabbage machine card deck, the golden cabbage machine card is used in all rounds.
  All the casino chips are collected and flipped again in preparation for the next round.
  The cards are all collected and shuffled into a face-down deck and dealt out to the players again.
  Whoever took the last trick becomes the start player for the new round.

Endgame
Las Vegan can end in 1 of 2 ways.
If during scoring at the end of any round, any player's cabbage tokens (VPs.) reaches 0 or lower, it ends the game.
The game will also end at the end of the 4th round regardless.
Once the game has ended, players tot up their remaining cabbage tokens.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
The first thing to talk about is the scoring and particularly the casino chips. The values on the chips go from -3 to +1 and obviously skew heavily towards the negative, it's even worse than that though. There are 4 double-sided chips and +1s only appear on 2 of the 8 sides (Although in some regard this is quite logical as most numbers only appear twice across the chips.), thus it's skewed both in value and probability.
The golden casino chip is negative on both sides.

All of this means thhat this is a game about how little you lose, minimising your losses and not really how much you accumulate.
Las Vegan appears to be themed ont slot machines and one-arm bandits and maybe this is part of that theme; 'The house always wins?'
Even so, it all seems negative and doesn't feel like fun.

Despite my reservations about the scoring, the casino chip mechanic itself is pretty interesting.
When a player gets the opportunity to deploy a chip, they'll want to try and remember what cards they and the other players have taken. E.g., if the '3' cabbage machine card is in play and a player knows an opponent has taken several 3's, they may want to put a big negative on that card to hit them. Conversely, a player may try and use a +1 if they've collected 3s this round.
This is also affected by when 7s appear. The earlier that 7s appear, the more of a gamble it is using the casino chips, if they appear later, it's a lot easier to predict scoring. It's also that chips might appear right at the start or end of a round, or several may appear in single trick.
Players will need to calculate and adapt when using the casino chip, remembering plays opponents make made will be helpful too.

There's not too much to say about the mechanics for the actual game, which are very straightforward and about as basic as a trick taking game can get - and that's not a bad thing, it makes the game accessible and easy to learn, as well as playing fairly quickly . Las Vegan could be a good filler or finisher for the day.
Having said that, the scoring mechanics feel a little clunky, counterintuitive and unnecessarily fiddly.
The game's depth comes from strategies that will emerge once casino chips are starting to get played on cabbage machine cards and then players will look to how they can manipulate or win or lose tricks to optimise their scores.

For me; I found the game's simplicity a little unengaging, a little too run-of-the-mill while the depth the scoring brought to the table (sic) did not add enough to make me want to play more. The negative scoring also left me feeling frustrating.
Not a game for me.

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.