28th March 2023

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

Game of the night is Istanbul.

Ah, Istanbul, home of an ancient settlement and exotic gateway between the east and the west...
...Also a place where frenzied merchants rapidly push wheelbarrows around the bazaar, trailed by assistants while looking to acquire rubies in this worker placement game.

The component quality is good for nearly all of Istanbul.
The game makes good use of wooden components and dice which is always good. All the cardboard tokens and tiles are sturdy enough. The cards are also good.
It's all the quality you'd expect from a modern game.
The only criticism I have is that fitting the extensions into the wheelbarrow feels fiddly and when trying to put in the final extension it can be too tight and wont fit properly. It's a minor oversight that doesn't affect the game experience but it could have been a bit better.

There's unique artwork on all the location tiles. Even though it uses a pretty standard style of illustration, I think it looks good and gives the game a eye-catching presence on the table. I also feel that it's quite suitable, being evocative and colourful without obscuring important information.

Iconography in Istanbul is a bit of a mixed bag. Much of it is easily understood but the occasional icon and in particular, bonus cards will find players leafing through the rulebook for clarification.
This is fairly infrequent though and is a minor inconvenience rather than detrimental

How's it play?
Setup

• Players: Give each player the merchant, assistant, family member tokens and cubes in their colour.
  Wheelbarrow: Each player should take a wheelbarrow tile, then place their 4 cubes on the 4 'empty' spaces on their goods tracks.
  When players gain goods, they move the cube along the respective track.
  You will note at the game start, players can only have 2 of each good. By acquiring extensions, players can eventually hold up to 5 of each good.
• Tiles: The 16 location tiles will need to be put out in a 4x4 grid. This can be done either by using 1 of the 2 predetermined setups or randomly - although there are some restrictions using the random method. Additionally, many of the locations will have further setup.
  • Caravansary: Shuffle the bonus cards into a face-down deck and place them close to the caravansary.
  • Fountain: Each player should create a stack of 5 tokens with the the merchant token at the top and 4 assistants beneath and place their stack on the fountain location tile.
    The 5th assistant token should be set aside for the time being, they can be acquired during play.
    Gemstone dealer: Place rubies on the gemstone dealer location tile as per player count.
  • Markets: Sort the demand tiles into their 2 types. Shuffle each into a face-up stack and place them on to their respective market tiles.
  • Mosques: Sort the mosque tiles by type/colour, then sort each stack by goods cost, with the lowest at the top and highest cost at bottom. Then place 2 stacks on each of the 2 mosque tiles.
    Rubies: Finally add rubies to each mosque as per player count.
  • Police station: Each player should place their 'family member' cylindrical token on the police station location tile.
  • Post office: The post office has 2 rows of 4 spaces, place the 4 mail cubes along the upper row on the post office location tile.
  • Sultan's palace: Place rubies on the Sultan's palace location tile as per player count.
  • Wainwright: Place rubies and wheelbarrow extensions on the wainwright location as per player count.
  • Governor & smuggler: Roll the dice for each, then place their tokens on the location with the matching number.
• First player: Determine a starting player.
  The starting player should take 2 Lira, the next player gets 3 Lira, 3rd gets 4 Lira and so forth.
  Bonus card: Each player should draw a bonus card.

On to play
In Istanbul, players are attempting to acquire 5 or 6 rubies (Dependant on player count.) and the game provides a variety of methods to achieve this.
Istanbul follows the usual turn structure with the active player completing their turn before play progresses to their left.

During their turn, the active player will act in 2-4 phases - depending on circumstances.
The 4 phases always occur in the order shown below.

• Movement: The active player can move their stack of tokens up to 2 spaces during this phase, this cannot be diagonal and when the stack reaches its destination, one of the following must occur.
  • Drop off assistant: The active player takes one of the assistant tokens out of their stack and places it elsewhere on the same location tile.
  • Pick up assistant: If the active player already has an assistant token on the location space they stopped at, then they can add it back into their stack.
  • Pass: If the active player cannot or does not want to drop off or pick up an assistant, then their turn ends immediately unless the active player ended up at the fountain!
• Encounter merchant: This phase is conditional and if the active player ended their movement in a location tile with 1 or more merchants that belong to other players, then the active player must pay those players 2 Lira each.
  If they cannot or do no want to pay, then the active player's turn ends immediately, this does not occur if they stopped at the fountain.
• Action: This phase represents the bulk of gameplay and the active player may now choose to undertake the action for the tile they stopped at.
  There a quite a few actions a player can perform.
  • Black market: When the player's merchant is at the black market, they can gain 1 green/red/yellow good.
    Additionally, they should roll the 2 dice, the result will grant them 0-3 blue goods.
  • Caravansary: The active play draws 2 bonus cards into their hand and then discards 1 bonus card.
    When drawing cards from being at the caravansary location, the active player may choose to draw from the discard pile instead.
  • Fountain: When the active player's merchant is at the fountain, they can recall any number of their assistant tokens back into their stack.
  • Gemstone dealer: Here the active player may purchase a ruby. The more rubies that are purchased throughout the game, the more they will cost.
  • Market: When a merchant stops at one of the 2 markets, they can sell goods matching the demands on the current demand card. The more matching goods they sell, the more they earn. Each of the markets will determine how much the player earns.
    Regardless of how many goods are sold, the current demand tile is put at the bottom of the stack and a new demand tile is revealed.
  • Mosques: When a merchant stops at one of the 2 mosques, they can acquire one of the 2 mosque tiles there.
    To do so, the player's wheelbarrow must be carrying the goods that match was is shown on the top mosque tile. However, acquiring a tile costs only 1 good of the displayed tile.
    Once a mosque tile is taken, a more expensive version will be revealed beneath.
    Players can only have copy of each type of tile regardless of where they acquired it from.
  • Police station: When a player's merchant stops at the police station and if their family member is there, then the player can 'free' their family member.
    Since their family member 'knows how to get stuff', the player can immediately place the family member token on any other space and trigger its action. The family member does not have encounters and does not benefit or is restricted in that way.
  • Post Office: If the active player's merchant stops at the post office, they acquire all the items shown on the 4 uncovered spaces.
    After this, they must slide the leftmost cube on the upper row to the space directly below, thus changing the resources earned by the next merchant to stop here.
    When all 4 cubes are on the lower row, the next merchant to stop at the post office will claim their resources and put all 4 cubes back on the upper row.
  • Sultan's palace: When a merchant stops here, the player can trade goods for a ruby.
    As with the gemstone dealer, the more rubies that are acquired here, the more costly they become to trade for.
  • Tea house: Time for some friendly gambling! When a merchant stops here, the player announces a number from 3-12, then they roll both dice.
    If the rolled number is equal to or greater than the announced number, then the active player acquires Lira equal to the number they announced.
    If the number was lower, then they take 2 Lira.
  • Wainwright: Stopping here allows the merchant's player to buy an extension for their wheelbarrow. Once the 3rd and final extension has been acquired, the player can acquire 1 ruby from the wainwright tile.
  • Warehouses: There are 3 warehouses, one each respectively for green, red and yellow goods.
    If a merchant stops at a warehouse, they can fill the related good on their wheelbarrow to the maximum amount.
• Other encounters: As with the other encounter phase, this is conditional and depends on what tokens are also on the location where the active player's merchant stopped.
  • Other players' family members: If a merchant encounters the family member of another player on their location, they must snitch on them to the cops!
    This earns the active player 3 Lira or a bonus card.
  • Governor: When the governor token is on the same location as a player's merchant, the player can draw bonus card, then they must discard a bonus card or pay 2 Lira.
    After encountering the governor, roll 2 dice and move the governor's token to the location with the number that matches the dice roll.
  • Smuggler: When the smuggler is encountered, the active player may gain the good of their choice, they must then discard a good of their choice or play 2 Lira.
    As with the governor, after encountering the smuggler, roll the dice and relocate the smuggler to the new location.
• Bonus cards: These are not part of any phase in particular and the active player may play any number of bonus cards during at any time during their turn.

Endgame
The game end is triggered when any player acquires the required number of rubies.
​Play continues for the current round until all participants have had equal turns.
Finally, each player will have the option to play unused bonus cards, since Lira and goods act as a tie-breaker this can be important.

Rubies are tallied, highest amount wins.

Overall
I don't know whether it's deliberate or not but there's a slightly cynical thread of humour running through Istanbul. 
It's an amusing facet of the game that merchants are useless without assistants to boss around or how everyone has that one shady cousin who 'knows someone' or 'can get you stuff'.
Thematically, the game is presented quite well.
Your merchant and their little band go from place to place, looking to earn money or get goods in order to eventually gain rubies.

Mechanically, Istanbul is relatively straightforward. While there's quite a lot of tiles and consequently a lot going and a lot to think about and possibly remember, none of it in practice is actually overly complex.
Istanbul presents players with the conundrum of balancing the need to increase their abilities via mosque and extension tiles or trying to acquire rubies.
Broadly speaking, the game game provides some one-off way of gaining rubies but two main avenues to accumulating them - which are by spending goods or spending Lira and then providing several ways to acquire goods and Lira.
It means that Istanbul is a game of planning efficient moves and maximising actions. This is particularly the case when dropping off or picking up assistants. Well thought out play will allow a player to do this without visiting the fountain which requires an entire turn to gather assistants.

While the game is essentially a race without direct conflict between players, there's still some interaction that goes on.
There is arguably a higher level of play where players could try and anticipate the actions of their opponent allowing them to block opponents by putting their merchant on specific locations, forcing other players to pay out to go there or preventing them entering all together. However, this tends to occur by accident more than design.
Another area of interaction is at the markets, the more goods sold a player can sell an once at a market, the more money that player earns but taking longer to do this risks being trumped by another player fulfilling the demand tile earlier.
So players will need to occasionally adapt to situations as needed as well as planning their actions.

Istanbul does a good job balancing varied gameplay, strategy and meaningful decisions with ease-of-play, although I'm not sure I would describe it as entirely suitable for non-gamers but core gamers should have no problems comprehending the game
It also has a novel and clever implementation of worker placement mechanics which provide some satisfying moments when used effectively.

This is a mid-weight game with a somewhat lengthy play time - although it never felt overlong or unwelcome. I found it to be an enjoyable worker placement game. Istanbul   is a game that's definitely worth trying.

27th November 2022

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

Have you ever gone to a cat café or wanted to go to one?
According to Cat Café the game, if you're at one of these establishments you're meant to try and attract as many cats as possible! How is this done? By getting mouse toys, balls of yarn and so on to lure them over.

Of course the actual best way to attract cats is to set up a board game with lots of components, then you'll attract every one for miles around!

Caveat: We've only played this game digitally.

What's in a game?

• Dice: Cat Cafe comes with 5 normal six-siders.
• Player sheet: These sheets depict a number of important items.
  • Cat towers: There are 5 cat towers and they take up most of the space on the sheet. Each tower has 4-6 spaces numbered from 1-4/5/6 depending on the tower. Each tower also has a pair of scoring numbers at the top. Some towers also have 'scratching spots' which are unusable spots.
    Finally, there's a hex grid overlaid on the towers which makes it easier to see how different spaces are connected to each other.
  • Paw prints: Along the right side of the sheet is a vertical line of cat footprints.
  • Columns: Below the cat towers are 6 columns and each is essentially numbered 1-6.
    As well as a cat illustration, each column contains one of the game's 6 actions and associated icon. There's also a box for tracking some of the scoring for each of the symbols.
  • Scoring row: Lastly, there's a row at the bottom of the sheet to track all the game's scoring​ during the game end..

What art does appear in the game can be found on the sheets and there's a definite charm to those hand-drawn styled cartoonish cat illustrations and icons.

​Speaking of icons, nearly all the game's iconography is briefly explained on the sheet itself, there isn't too much of it and I can't imagine it proving a problem to learn.

How's it play?
Setup

• Dice: Put a number of dice into the central playing area equal to the player count plus 1.
• Sheets: Give each player a sheet.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
During the game players will be drafting dice and then using the results to draw 1 of 6 symbols on the cat towers.
Cat Café is played in 2 phases and uses a typical turn structure for the first phase while the second can be played out by all players simultaneously.

• Drafting: The first player rolls all the dice in a central playing area. Then in turn order, each player takes 1 die.
  After all players have drafted a die, there will be still a die remaining in the central area - this is important for the next phase.
• Assigning values: This phase can be perform simultaneously by all players if they choose to do so.
  Even though each player has only drafted 1 die, they also have to make use of the die remaining in the central area. Thus they will have two dice to assign which will determine which symbol is used and the row it goes on to.
  Placing symbols: One die must assigned to one of the 6 symbol types; cat house, ball of yarn, butterfly toy, food bowl, cushion and mouse toy.
  ​The other die is assign to 'height'.
  So if a player has a '1' & '4' to use, they can put a cat house on the 4th row of a tower OR a food bowl in the 1st row of any tower.
  Once a player has decided on which combination to use, they draw the pertinent symbol (Or letter for that symbol.) on the relevant row.
  Scoring: The cat house and butterfly toy are immediately resolved when drawn, if a cat tower is completed it is scored upon completion.
  • Butterfly: When a player draws a butterfly on one of their cat towers, they can also circle 2 paws on the paw track, each butterfly toy symbol is also worth VPs at the game end. More on what paws do below.
    Cat house: When placing a cat house, the player chooses any one of the 6 symbols types and marks 2 Victory Points (VPs) for each time they've drawn on their player sheet in that symbol's box. Each symbol can only be scored once in this way.
    Cat tower: When a cat tower is completed, that is when all the spaces on a tile are filled, it is immediately scored according to the following criteria.
    • First to complete with tower: If a player is first to complete a tower and with a cat house in the tower, then they score the higher of the 2 scores at the top of the tower - all other players cross that number off, they can only score the lower number.
    • Completed any other way: If a player completes a tower first without a cat house, then they score the lower amount. If they are not first to complete a tower, they score the lower amount.
• Additional rules: There are some other rules that will come into play.
  • Passing: A player may choose or may have to pass their action. In either case, instead of adding a symbol to their sheet, they circle 3 paws on the track.
  • Paw prints: A player may cross-off any number of circled paws to alter a die's value. Each crossed off paw allows the player to increase a die's value by +1 or -1. This can be done in anyway the player sees fit, although a die cannot go from 6 to 1 or vice versa.
• Next round: Once all players have drawn a symbol or passed, the round is over. The player to the left of the current first player now becomes first and takes the dice to roll again.

Endgame
As soon as any player has completed their 3rd tower, the game ends on that round and goes to scoring.
Cat Café has several ways to score.

• Cat house: The cat houses will have actually be scored during the game, they simply need tallying up.
• Ball of yarn: All players count up the number of balls of yarn they have in each individual cat tower.
  For each cat tower, the player who has the most balls of yarn scores 8 VPs for that cat tower, any player who has 1 or more but a lesser number of balls of yarn, scores 3 VPs.
• Butterfly toy: Each butterfly toy scores 3 VPs.
• Food bowl: Each food bowl scores 1 VP per adjacent different symbol type.
• Cushion: Each cushion scores VPs equal to it's height in a cat tower. 
• Mouse toy: These score VPs for being connected in a contiguous group. It is possible for multiple groups to score.
• Cat tower: These scores will have been calculated when the cat tower was completed during play so just need tallying up.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
For me, Cat Café is a bit of a mixed bag.

I'm always a fan of games that have streamlined, elegant mechanics and there's definitely some of that to Cat Café but here it seems like sometime it comes at the price of choice.
Sometimes the choices feel meaningful, sometimes they don't.

Players will get to choose a die (And sometimes not even that!) then draft it, after that they'll get a 2 options on how to use those dice, or pass.

For example: A player may get a '1' and a '5', this means they could put a cushion on level 1 but that's a waste of a cushion (Ideally, you'd want it higher.). Alternatively they could put a cat house on level 5 which introduces a new conundrum; is this a good time to play a cat house? In the early game they won't score many VPS and are much more valuable to play in the late game - provided the number comes up again.

All of this gives players several things to think about and sounds good - which it is to an extent but it's also hard to try and plan moves ahead when luck can play such a haphazard role, sure, the appropriate use of paws can mitigate bad luck to a degree but even so, it can be frustrating not getting the numbers needed.
It means players will need to adapt and react to their results as they get them to gain optimal scoring and not rely on getting results they want later unless they have of course acquired a sizable amount of paws.

Next is scoring: Cat Café employs a fairly broad criteria for scoring with different avenues to approach in acquiring VPs.
E.g., the mouse toy scores points for gathering the same type of symbol together while the food bowl scores by gathering different symbols.
This mechanic has been utilised in other games and is understandable here, where players at times will find themselves at the mercy of the dice and have to change what they were going to do.
However, with some scoring occurring mid game and the rest after the end, it does make scoring a little bit too intricate and involved, especially for a game this light.

Having said all of that, I'm probably overthinking everything.
Cat Café is a lightweight, family friendly game with a cute cat theme.
It's not too hard to pick up and while decisions can be fairly limited they do tend to be meaningful. There's also a dollop of luck to add some unpredictability.
It would be a good choice for younger players but perhaps would need someone older to manage the scoring.

For me, I found it a little too simplistic and unengaging as well as slightly frustrating.

19th November 2022

It's a Saturday morning and we're at Bisley for Wogglecon 5 'It's a alive!' - a day of gaming goodness and a bit of charity.

Have you ever fancied travelling South American highlands with nothing but a cart of goods to keep you company, going from place to place, hunting for fish, chopping down trees, trading and so forth. If the answer is yes, then maybe Altiplano is the game for you.

How's it play?
Setup

• Game area: Set the central playing area up.
  • Location boards: Randomly arrange the 7 location tiles in a ring shape.
    • Tokens: Sort all the tokens as per player count and add them to their pertinent location tiles. Only food and money do not go on to a location tile.
    • Cards: Add the boat, house and order cards face-up to their pertinent location tiles.
  • Extension strip: Put the extension strip in the centre of the ring.
    • Extension tiles: First sort the extension tiles as per player count, then sort them by type (A, B, C and D.) and shuffle each type into face-down stacks. Finally arrange them into a single face-down stack, with the A stack at the top, going down to the D stack at the bottom.
    • Place extension tiles: Draw and place 5 tiles from the stack along the 5 spaces on the edge of the extension strip.
• Players: Give each player an action board, warehouse board and bag.
  • Meeples: Give each player the meeple, cube and container in their colour. Each player's cube should go on the '0' space on the road location.
  • Role tile: Randomly assign a role tile to each player. The tile should be placed adjacent its location on the player's action board.
    Each player should then take their starting resources as indicated on the tile, goods and food should be placed them into their bag. Money should be put to the side in a personal supply.
    Finally each player should take a brown cart cube from the village location and place it in the topmost space in the movement track on their action board.
• First player: Determine a starting player then each player places their meeple on any one of the 7 location tiles. Now we're ready to play.

On to play
In Altiplano players will be making plans to travel around the location tiles and use their goods to carry out the actions specific to those locations.
This is done over 4 phases:

• Drawing phase: This phase is carried simultaneously with all players drawing tokens from their bag and placing them on their planning spaces.
  At the start of the game, players can only use 4 planning spaces, thus only draw 4 tokens from their bag. However, by moving their cube up the road location, players will unlock more planning spaces which mean they can draw and use more goods tokens.
  Empty bag: If at any time a player needs to draw 1 or more tokens from their bag and it's empty, then they tip the contents of their container into the bag, give it a good shake and continue drawing.
  Taking tokens back: Obviously, this does not apply during the first round but before drawing tokens, a player can choose to take tokens they have previously placed on action spaces but not resolved off of those action spaces. However, these tokens must be placed on planning spaces which consequently lessen the number of tokens they can draw. Money retrieved in this manner is returned to the player's personal play.
• Planning phase: This phase is also performed simultaneously. In this phase players take goods from their planning spaces (Or money from their personal supply.) and place them on action spaces on the board. This includes the movement track and also extension tiles a player may have acquired.
  All actions require specific goods to activate them.
  Most locations have 1 or 2 spaces, except the village which has 3. Some actions require 1 good (And thus may be performed more than once.) while many actions require 2 goods.
  A player may choose not to place all the goods on their action spaces but this would mean they draw less tokens in the following round.
  When placing goods and money, players do not need to complete the action to place them. If an action requires 2 tokens, they can place just one of them even if it won't complete the action. It's a useful way to keep planning spaces free.
• Action phase: This phase represents the bulk of the game's activities and thus has many elements.
  • Turns: Unlike the previous 2 phases, starting with the current first player, actions are carried out in turn order one action at a time. The active player resolves one action, then play progresses to the next player.
    Passing: If a player cannot complete an action, they must pass. Additionally, a player may choose to pass even if they could complete an action. In either case, when a player passes, they are no longer involved in the action phase for the current round.
  • Movement: Movement does not count as an action but can be performed as part of an action.
    Timing: Movement may be performed before or after an action.
    Moving: Each player starts the game with 1 cart cube. A player can slide it to the 'used' side on their movement track to move their meeple up to 3 location either way around the circle of locations.
    Additional movement If a player has put food on to other movement track spaces, they may 'spend' it to move during another action. However they can only move 1 location unless they have acquired additional carts, in which case they can move 3 locations.
  • Actions: There are lot of actions a player can perform and several rules associated with them.
    Location: A player's meeple must be at the action's location in order to perform that action, this includes extension and role tiles.
    Paying tokens: Actions require players to pay the required tokens to resolve them. Other than money, anytime a token is 'spent' the token(s) are not actually spent instead they are put into the player's container and will ultimately end up going back into the player's bag. Only money is actually spent and returned to the central supply.
    Acquiring goods: When acquired, most goods tokens immediately go into a player's container. The exceptions are money which goes into the player's personal supply and corn, which is explained below.
  • Resolving actions: Each location has one or more actions which can be resolved by players.
    • Farm: cloth, food and wool can be acquired here.
    • Forest: cloth, food, glass and wood can be acquired here
    • Harbor: Fish and food can be acquired.
      Boat cards can also be acquired here which allow players to add tokens to their container. A player may choose any available boat card.
    • Market: The market has several actions.
      Sell goods: Some goods can be sold for 1-3 coins each, as with all actions, goods that are sold are actually put into the player's container.
      Buy extension: A player can purchase 1 extension tile per round. The total cost is the cost on the tile plus the cost from it's position on the extension strip. If a extension is bought, it is not replaced until the last phase.
      Order cards: These can be bought here too, which allows the player to choose any available order card.. A player may only have 1 unfulfilled order card at a time.
      Deliver goods: This action allows the player to move goods placed here on to an order card. When a order is completed, it will earn the controlling player VPs during the endgame, generally it will also give the player a corn token, more on these later. 
    • Mine: Silver and stone can be acquired here.
    • Road: Completing the road action may have 1 of 2 effects. Either it unlocks a planning space for a player or it provides them with a corn token, again, more on corn below.
    • Village: The village also has several types of action.
      Buy cart: Players can buy a cart and place it on an available space on their movement track.
      Buy house card: A player can buy any available house card. House cards increase the VP value of the displayed good during the endgame.
      Store goods: This action allows the player to move goods off of the action spaces and into their warehouse. There are however, several restrictions here.
      • No food: Food tokens cannot be placed into the warehouse.
        Same goods: A row can only have 1 type of good in it. Thus if the 1st good in a row is a fish token, all the subsequent tokens in that row must be fish tokens. Additionally, there can only be 1 incomplete per type of good. A row of fish must be completed before a second row can be started.
        Bottom-to-top: When a good is placed in the warehouse, it must be in the lowest available space, either in a new row or an existing one.
        Left-to-right: A good must also be placed into the leftmost open space in the row it is placed into. A row is considered complete when the rightmost space has been filled.
      • Corn: There are several rules regarding corn.
        Store immediately: Regardless of how a player gains a corn token, when they gain it, it must immediately be stored in the warehouse.
        Wildcard: Corn can be used as any type of good for a row that has already been started. E.g., if a player has started a row of fish, it can be added to that row and even complete it.
        If there is no incomplete row to add the corn token to, then it starts it's own row!
        Corn rows takes priority: When storing corn, if there is a row that was started with corn, then corn tokens must go into that row before any other until it's completed!
• End of round phase: Once all players have passed, the game goes to end of round and several events occur.
  New first player: The first player marker is passed on to the player on the left who will be the new first player.
  Reset carts: All carts are put back to their initial positions.
  Manage extension strip: If any extension tiles we bought during the action phase, remaining tiles are slid downwards to fill the gaps and new tiles are added to the gaps now at the top.
  If no extension tiles were brought during the action phase, the bottommost extension tile is discarded, the other tiles are slid down and a new tile is added to the top.
  Now a new round begins with the first phase.

​Endgame
Play continues until one of the following 2 criteria are met.
Any one location becomes fully emptied of all tokens, cards, etc.
Or, a space along the extension strip cannot be filled, i.e., the extension tiles supply has emptied.
In either instance, the current round is completed and 1 further round is played, then the game goes to scoring.

VPs will come from a variety of sources.

• Goods tokens: Tokens can score 0-4 VPs each depending on the type. Tokens on a player's action board, warehouse, in their bag and container all count.
  Tokens on order cards are not counted.
• Warehouse: Each completed row in a player's warehouse will score it's associated VPs.
• Cards: Boat and house cards earn their respective VPs. Completed order cards also earn their VPs.
• Bonus VPs: If a player has house cards, they will earn bonus VPs for the corresponding goods.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
As you can see from the write up so far, there's quite a lot going on in Altiplano and a lot for players to think about.

There's a recognisable quandary going on with the bag building mechanic.
Players will naturally be looking to acquire tokens to carry out actions but invariably there will be times they end up getting pulled from the bag when they're not needed and unneeded tokens can 'water down' a player's strategies.
Unwanted tokens can of course be left on planning spaces but most players will find that irritatingly suboptimal. Alternatively, they can placed on spaces for action that a player does not immediately want to perform but they will eventually end up coming back  to again though. Another option albeit fairly situational, is to put them on to order cards, although removes the goods from the remainder of the game.
Finally, they can be put into the warehouse, this means those tokens have greater scoring opportunities but again, permanently removes them from a player's container/bag which may or may not be a good thing. layers will have judge the merits of storing tokens contextually - except when dealing with glass tokens. The thing with glass tokens is that they don't produce any other type of token, all they do is produce the most VPs per token, storing them in the warehouse where they contribute to more VPs and declutter a player's bag is a no-brainer and usually I consider no-brainers a bad thing for a board game but I feel this is a deliberate decision on the part of the game - more on that below.

If you've been paying attention (And I'm sure you have!) you will also have noticed that several goods such as a cacao, alpacas and even something that seems that it should be common such as fish cannot be produced from the action board.
So how are these acquired?
There's a couple of opportunities to get them, namely boat cards, extension tiles and possibly role tiles.
However, this brings me to a bit of a bugbear I have with this scarcity mechanic. It means there can be a race by experienced players to get those hard-to-produce goods, particularly cacao which produces glass which can be worth so many VPs. In fact I feel the whole of the forest location is especially strong location since cacao alone is used there for 3 separate actions in the same location. A player who can produce cacao and concentrates on doing so can soon be producing lots of goods at the forest.
Having said that, the game is a bit of a point salad with various avenues to scoring VPs, it's just that I feel going for glass is the strongest way and experienced players will end competing in that tactic.

While the bulk of the game's activity takes place during the action phase, the planning phase is where players will do most of their well... planning. They'll look to optimise there actions to get the most out of their available tokens.
Because players will generally need to move around to perform multiple actions, efficient use of the movement track is important, especially so in the early game when food tokens will be scarcer. A player can move their meeple before or after an action may make it seem unimportant but sometimes players will need to think ahead about where they need to be at the start of the next round.
As well as having to think about movement and balancing their goods with their bags, players will also have to think about gaining extensions, house and order cards, as well as boat cards if they are needed. 
Add to this increasing their planning spaces and acquiring corn to fill out their warehouse and players have lot of ways to approach the game
​
In this regard Altiplano does that thing which presents players with lots of options but frequently not enough opportunity to do everything they want, forcing them to make tricky decisions, which I consider a good thing in games.

Altiplano is a mid-to-heavy game with a longish playtime, it's probably not for beginners and perhaps could be criticised for being a bit over-elaborate although personally I didn't find it that much of a problem
In conclusion; the mechanics blend together to give players choices and essentially problems to solve in optimising their actions. If bag-building style games and resource management are your thing, Altiplano is worth a try.

17th August 2022

It's a Wednesday afternoon and we're round Simon's for some gaming goodness.

Become a raider in the world of antiquity and attack a bunch of ancient empires by placing meeples on a board!

What's in a game?

• Game board: Raiders of Scythia features a big board that, for lack of a better term is divided into 5 different levels or 'slices'. Each one showing a different scene of a different area of the world with it's own colour palette.
  In the top level players can gain resources, while the 4 lower levels can be - as the name suggests - raided.
  Scythian Village: The top slice depicts the home settlement of the titular raiders.
  There are 8  'spaces' that allow players to perform certain actions.
  Each spot has a place to put 1 worker - some of these are coded to specific colours of workers, there are also places to put starter workers, more on this below.
  Civilisations: The 4 lower slices represent 4 different civilisations that can be raided by players. Each civilisation will have a number of locations that can be raided along with information pertinent to raiding, there are also spaces to place workers meeples and quest tiles.
• Player boards: Each player board is a long piece of card depicting a campsite in a wilderness setting. Each also contains some game information and places to put 6 cards - 1 hero card and 5 crew cards.
• Hero cards: There are 8 of these and as well as a illustration, each one provides some sort of special ability or bonus. I guess they are the leaders of your raiding parties.
• Crew cards: These can be recruited by players for a cost and are a bit similar to hero cards in that they provide a bonus for of the game's 2 actions.
  However, crew cards have hit points and strength and unlike hero card, crew cards can be killed.
• Animal cards: These cards all depict 2 animals, a eagle at the top and a horse at the bottom. Does that mean these are actually 'eagorse' cards or 'horgle' cards?
  Anyway, they can be assigned to crew cards to confer extra bonuses, these will differ if they are used as a eagle or a horse.
• Quest tiles: These square card tiles are double-sided. One side depicts some artwork and the other will show a quest that can be completed for VPs.
• Dice: The game uses six-siders, however as well as featuring numbers, they also contain icons that represent drops of blood. There are a total of 6 dice, 2 each in red, white and yellow.
• Tokens: Raiders of Scythia uses a large variety of tokens and I do mean large which are divided up into 3 types.
  • Workers: These are worker meeples and come in 3 colours, blue, grey and red.
  • Resources: There are 3 types of resource.
    Silver: Depicted by hexagonal card coins.
    Provisions: These brown tokens look a bit like chocolate muffins which I suppose is fairly appropriate.
    Kumis: These beige tokens are cups of kumis, which is apparently a type of alcohol derived from horse milk. However when I was told what the token represented, I misheard it as houmous! So forever from then on I will think of them as cups of houmous.
  • Plunder: There are 4 types of plunder, they are all represented by chunky hexagonal tokens in four colours.
    Black: Livestock.
    Brown: Wagons.
    Grey: Equipment, which is about vague as it gets, but what the hey!
    Yellow: Gold!
  • Wound tokens: Wait, there's a 5th type of token! Red blood droplet tokens used to represent and track wounds.
• Bag: Used to blind draw plunder tokens during setup.

Component quality is good throughout Raiders of Scythia, cards and tiles are exactly as you'd expect them to be.
The tokens are excellent, attention has gone into the creation of the provisions and houmous err... kumis and while the plunder tokens are more generic, they are also very chunky and tactile.

So, I think it looks like whoever owned the copy of Raiders of Scythia we played bought stickers that upgraded the tokens with artwork (As you can see from the photos.). I think that otherwise by default the tokens are plain.
This also means someone had to sit down and attach stickers to a lot of token, that would push me into the deep end!

Regardless of this, the game's art-style is excellent. I'm not an art expert but it uses a sort of line illustration with flat shading that shows a lot of detail and is used to great effect on the board as it shows various situations in the different situations without overly cluttering the board.

While there is a fair amount of iconography, it's mostly do with the tokens and is fairly apparent, I don't think that it will prove to be a problem.

How's it play?
Setup

• Game board: Put out the game board and shuffle the quest tiles into a face-down stack. Place 2 tiles face-up in their allotted spots in the village part of the board.
  Also place quest tile face-down on to their allotted spaces on the other levels of the game board.
• Plunder: Put all the plunder tokens into the bag and give it a good shake. Then draw and place tokens on all the face-down quest tiles and board spaces as determined by the information for each spot.
• Workers: Raiders of Scythia begins with workers already on the board. Place worker meeples by their colours on to their allotted spaces on the game board.
• Player board: Give each player a board in their colour, along with 3 silver, 1 provision and 1 blue worker.
• Cards: Sort the cards by type and shuffle them into face down decks.
  Animal deck: Draw 3 cards and place them in a row adjacent to their deck.
  Hero deck: Draw a number of hero cards equal to the player count +1 and place them in a face-up row.
  Crew Deck: Also draw crew cards equal to the hero cards drawn and place them in a face-up row alongside the hero cards. Thus, creating pairs of hero and crew cards.
• Starting player: Determine the first player:
  Now in reverse order with who would be last, each player should choose a pair of 1 hero and 1 crew card and place them on their spaces on each player's board.
  The remaining hero cards should be discarded out of play and the remaining crew card should be put into the discard pile.
• Crew cards: Now deal 5 more crew cards to every player who should keep 3 of them and discard the other 2.
  Players should now have 1 hero and 4 crew cards on their player board.

On to play
In Raiders of Scythia, players will vying to gain resources which will allow them in turn to raid and pillage which earn VPs, consequently also acquiring plunder which can be used to complete quest tiles which also earn VPs.
Play follows the usual paradigm of the active player taking an action before play progresses to the player on the left.
Broadly speaking, the active player has a choice of 1 of 2 actions each turn.

• Work: The active player may put their worker on to a spot in the Scythian Village, there's a bit more to it than that though.
  • ​Place worker: The active player may put their meeple on a available spot in the home settlement part of the board provided the meeple's colour matches the colour requirement of that spot. Most spots require a blue meeple but some require a grey one. Then the player can resolve that spot's action.
  • Take worker: The active player now takes a worker of their choice from a home settlement space and resolves that space's action. The worker that the player takes can be of a different colour and this is a way to get one.
  • Actions: The are a number of actions that can be performed, sometimes these also have costs. Actions include:
    Gaining any of the resources types.
    Gaining a crew or animal card into your hand.
    Playing a card to the player board from your hand.
    Using a hero card's special ability.
    Completing a quest.
• Raid: This is the second action the active player can perform and takes place in the 4 lower parts of the board. Like the Work action, the active player will place a worker, resolve it, then take another worker. However, there are some notable differences.
  • Requirements: The active player must meet the requirements to initiate the raid, this includes:
    Worker: The active must have an appropriately coloured meeple.
    Crew: The active player must have a big enough crew.
    Resources: The active player must have the required resources to initiate the raid.
  • Place worker: The active player may put their on a space they would like to raid. Unlike the home settlement, meeples placed in a raid can never be taken again.
  • Resources: The active player must discard wagon and provision resources equal to the cost as part of the raid.
  • Strength: The active player must calculate their strength; this is done by totting the strength scores of their crew cards, rolling a number of dice as determined by the civilisation they are raiding and how much gold their target has and adding the results to their crew's strength.
    Additionally, the active player may spend Kumis to increase the strength of their raid.
    The final combined strength is then compared to values displayed for that  location which will determine what VPs the active player gains. Generally, the higher the strength, the more VPs are earned.
  • Wounds: According the result of the dice roll and the location attacked, the active player must distribute any wounds they received by adding wound tokens to their crew cards.
    This can be done as the player sees fit. A crew card is only 'killed' if it reaches -1 wounds. Additionally, each wound lowers a crew card's strength by 1.
  • Plunder: The player can take all the plunder tokens from the location they raided.
  • Take meeple: While the meeple placed by the active player cannot be taken, one that was put there during set up can be taken.
    Quest tile: If the location had a quest tile, it should be flipped to it's other side revealing what cost is required to complete the quest and the reward for doing so.
    ​This quest is now available for any player to complete by carrying out the appropriate action in the Scythian Village area of the board.
• Next player: Once the active player has completed their action, play moves on to the player on the left.

​Endgame
Play continues until only to raid spaces or quest tiles remain on the board. After this, all player get 1 more turn and it goes to scoring.
VPs can come from several sources.

• Crew and animal cards may provide VPs.
• Quest tiles will provide VPs.
• Plunder tokens a player has accumulated will also provide VPs.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
​I'm going to start by saying the idea 'of a worker placement game with each player only having only 1 worker' sounds crazy but it works perfectly well in Raiders of Scythia.

There's a clever mechanic at play with the colours of the meeples. E.g., when using the blue meeples to raid, they can't be taken again and players will be taking grey and red meeples instead by by the time player's are doing that, they won't need the blue meeples anymore. Players are never put in a position where they can't use a meeple because of its colour.

Anyway, on to the game.
Players will need to use the village in order to gain resources to raid the civilisation to gain plunder and reveal quest tiles which can then be bought with whatever resources and plunder the player has acquired. Phew!
It's something of a race to do this since once a spot has been raided, that's it, no one can raid that spot again. Action optimisation is important.
Something similar can apply when placing meeples in the village. There can only ever 1 worker on a space and there's some high level play that can be utilised by blocking another player and putting a meeple of your own in spot they want to use first. The same applies when taking a meeple, players can choose not to take a certain meeple just to leave the space blocked.  

Players will also need to take into consideration their crew, not only is it vital in undertaking raids, it also provides players some engine building capacity to their actions.

Finally, the game also provides some opportunities for risk/reward actions during raids as dice rolls are unpredictable.
While it's not possible to fail a raid (Players just gain less or 0 VPs for a bad roll), it's possible to squander resources and kumis for a poor roll. Players will be faced with the choice of raiding earlier with a weaker crew or risk losing a raid to another player by taking the time to increase the strength of their crew.
Furthermore, wounds are also unpredictable, a player's crew cards may take 0 wounds or may take 6 depending on the dice roll, adding the element of risk.

For me, Raiders of Scythia is a good worker placement game. Because players essentially only ever 2 actions per, they need to think about the best way to make use of them, they need to make every decision count. In other words, their decisions are meaningful, which is always a good thing.
I found the game to be a fun experience with a unique mechanic for a worker placement game.

5th August 2022

It's a Friday and we're in Aldershot for some gaming!

​When you go into a national park, you may find yourself hiking along trails.
Which is a slightly tortured segue into how Trails is actually a follow up to the excellent Parks game and shares some similar concepts.

So let's hit the errr... trail and see how it stacks up?

What's in a game?

• Tiles: Trails uses 7 rectangular tiles, which broadly speaking come in 2 types.
  Trailhead & Trail End: These 2 tiles are used to mark the start and end of the hike. Along the top of both of these tiles are several of icons.
  Finally, both of these tiles are double-sided, which sides are used is determined by player count.
  Trail sites: There are 5 of these and they are also double-sided, with one side showing day and the flip side showing night.
  Each trail site features a icon at the bottom that indicates the action associated with it. The night side always has improved versions of those actions.
• Wildlife die: This is not a normal six-sider, instead each side has an icon that relates to one of the 5 trail sites, the 6th and final side is a wild action symbol.
• Canteen tokens: There is 1 canteen in each player colour, one side shows a full canteen and the other, an empty one.
• Sun token: This cheery token depicts a stylised sun, it has an arrow and is used to track the setting sun.
• Resources: Little wooden cubes are used for the game's 3 types of resource.
  Acorn: Red cubes are the acorn resources.
  Leaf: Uses green cubes for resources. 
  Rock: Has grey resources.
• Meeples: Trails uses a handful of wooden meeples.
  Hikers: There's 1 hiker meeple in each player colour, They are sort of hiker shaped and so should be called heeples?
  Bear: A black bear meeple, should it be a beeple? This is also known as the wildlife token. Encountering a bear on a hike usually spells trouble for the hikers but the bear in Trails is a lot more friendly.
• Badge cards: There are about 40 badge cards in the game. Each one has a cost, shown in the middle and a benefit shown at the bottom. This might be VPs in some form or other at the game end or one-off bonuses such as resources.
  ​Most badge cards also have a 'type' which is shown in the top left.
• Photo cards: As well as containing pleasant artwork, photo cards display 2 pieces of information; how many VPs the card is worth and how many 'bird' icons it has.
  More on what 'birds' mean below.
• Bird trophy token: Features a picture of a bird! It's used in conjunction with the 'birds' scoring.

​
For the most part, component quality in Trails is good.
The wooden meeples look and feel good as does the die.
I also like the wooden resource cubes, although I'm not a big fan of the colours which I feel are a little too muted and sometimes in poor light, the grey and the green colours can feel hard to distinguish.
I also found the player colours a little muted too.
All the tiles and tokens are constructed of thick card and feel weighty.
However, I would describe all the cards as average in quality and perhaps a little flimsy. It's not really an issue though, Trails is not a card game and they won't be handled much so should stand up to repeated handling.

Without a doubt, all the art in Trails is excellent.
Much of it is sourced from the Fifty-Nine Parks art project which also provided the same art for Parks and will be familiar to players of that. So even though Trails is reusing artwork, it doesn't matter because it's such good quality.
Having said that, a lot of images are heavily cropped and the fact they're all on relatively small components means they just don't look as impressive.
Original art appears on the badge cards in the form of a series of quite stylised images. It's a different style to art that appears on the tile and photo cards but I have to say I think it looks good.

All the main icons which appear on the tiles and die are easily understood.
It's not quite so obvious with some of the rewards on badge cards and players will need to refer to the rules and clarifications on occasion. It's nothing game breaking though.

How's it play?
Setup

• Game board:
  Trail sites: Take the 5 trail site tiles, shuffle them and place them randomly into a  line with the day side face-up.
  Trail head & end: Put the trail head tile on the left end of the row of trail site tiles 'at the start' and put the trail end tile on the right, 'at the end'.
  Sun token: Position the sun token with its arrow pointing at the rightmost icon on the trail end tile.
  Wildlife token: Place the bear token on the middle tile of the 5 trail sites.
• Badge cards: Shuffle the badge cards into a face-down deck. Draw 2 cards and place them face-up adjacent to the trail head, also draw 2 cards and place them adjacent to the trail end.
• Photo cards: Shuffle the photo cards into a face-down deck.
• Players: Give each player the hiker meeple and canteen token in their colour, the canteen token should be on the full side.
  Also give each player 1 resource cube of each type.
  Deal a badge card to each player face-down, players should keep this hidden from their opponents.
• First player: Determine a starting player.
  Players should put their meeples on their starting tile, which will be dependant on player count. All meeples should start facing the other side of the row of tiles, facing is important in Trails, i.e., the direction they will be hiking.

On to play
In Trails, players will travel back and forth along the path, taking photos and accumulating resources which they will use to buy badge cards.
The game follows a typical turn structure with the active player resolving their turn before play progresses to the left. As their action, the active player can move their meeple and resolve the tile it lands on.

• Move hiker: The active player may move their hiker 1 or 2 spaces forward in the direction it is facing.
  Canteen: The active player may use their canteen (Flip it from the full side to empty.) to move their hiker as many spaces forward in the direction they are facing as they want.
• Actions: The active player must now resolve the action of the tile to which they moved their hiker.
  All 5 of the trail sites have an action and also a improved version of that action on the night side. The trail head and end tiles also have actions.
  The actions are as follows.
  • Acorn: When a hiker lands on the tile with the acorn symbol, the controlling player takes an acorn resource cube from the supply.
    Improved action: The active player takes 2 acorn cubes.
  • Leaf: The player takes a leaf token.
    Improved action: The player takes 2 leaf tokens.
  • Rock: The player takes a rock token.
    Improved action: The player takes... you guessed it... 2 rock tokens.
  • Exchange: The active player returns a resource cube of their choice to the supply and take 2 cubes of a different type.
    Improved action: When taking 2 resource cubes, they take 1 each of both other types.
  • Take photo: The active player may spend a resource cube to take a photo.
    When doing this the active player may either:
    Draw 2 cards from the deck, keep 1 and discard the other face up, or.
    take the top card on the photo discard pile.
    All photo cards acquired should be kept face-down until scoring at the game end.
    Improved action: Taking a photo no longer costs a resource.
    Empty deck: If the photo deck ever becomes empty, flip the discard pile over to become a new draw deck, the cards are not shuffled.
  • Trail head: Upon reaching the trail head, several actions may occur.
    Turn around: The active player should turn their hiker 180' to face back to the other side of the trail.
    Fill canteen: If the active player's canteen was empty, they should flip to the 'full' side.
    Acquire badge cards: The active player may acquire either or both badge cards adjacent to the trail head by spending the required resources, they may also purchase their secret badge card. It is therefore possible to buy up to 3 badge cards upon stopping on the trail head.
    Additionally, bonus resources acquired from gaining a badge can be used to purchase one of the remaining badge cards. 
  • Trail end: There are also several actions that will occur when a hiker end on the trail end.
    Turn around: The active player should turn their hiker 180' to face back to the other side of the trail.
    Sun action: The active player can resolve the action that the sun token is pointing at.
    If the sun token is above either the trail head or end, then the action will be one of the icons at the top of the tile. If the token is above one of the trail tiles, then that tile's action will be performed. E.g., if sun token is above the leaf tile, the active player gets a leaf resource.
    Move sun token: Once the sun action has been resolved, the sun token is moved 1 space to the left. In the case of the trail head or end icons, it moves to the next icon (Or off the tile.).
    If the token is above a trail site, then it is moved to the tile on the left. That trail site is then flipped from day to night.
    Eventually, the sun token will move over the trail head and then off the final icon, which will trigger the game end.
    Acquire badge card: This identical to acquiring a badge card at the trail head except the cards adjacent to the trail end can be gained.
• Wildlife: If the active player's hiker lands on a trail site which also contains the bear meeple, they should roll the wildlife die, then move the bear to the tile indicated by the result and resolve that tile's action. Thus if the photo icon comes up on the die, move the bear on to the photo tile and immediately resolve the photo action - this could either the day or night version.
  If the bear result comes up on the die, then the active player may choose to move the bear to any of the 5 trail sites and resolve that tile's action.
• End of turn: Once the active player has completed their action(s), they should perform the following:
  Check resources: A player can only have 8 resources in total in hand, if they have too many, they must discard down to 8.
  Replace badge cards: Any cards acquired from either of the end tile must be replaced from the deck,
  Furthermore, if the active player bought their secret badge card, they should draw a new secret badge card from the deck. Players should always have a personal hidden badge card.
  Next Player: The player to the left now becomes the active player and begin their turn by moving their meeple.

Endgame
When a player take as sun action that moves off the last leftmost icon on the trail end, they resolve that action as usual and take the sun token.
Play progresses normally, until the player to the right of sun token holder has completed their action, upon which the game ends. I.e., once sun has taken the sun token, all other players get 1 more turn.

Players now calculate their VPs.

• Cards: VPs will come from badge ​card and photo cards
• Bird token bonus: Now all players count up how many bird icons they have across their badge and photo cards. Whoever has the most birds, gains the bird token which is worth 4 VPs.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
I'm not over fond of comparing one game to another, a game should be taken on it own merits but in this case, there might be some value in doing so.
Parks and Trails come from the same family of games and as such share some thematic elements. Both are about hiking along tiles, collecting resources to acquire photos and cards, as well as using canteens for a bonus.
However, Trails differs in several ways as explained below.

Unlike it's predecessor, hikers from multiple players can happily coexist on the same space so the stress and need to try and anticipate where other players' hikers will go is gone, as the tactic of trying to block other players.
It makes the game a little lighter (By no means a bad thing.) and focuses players on getting badge cards (Which are the game's biggest source of VPs.) and players will encounter something of a conundrum here.
They may have the urge to collect as many resources as possible which can be prudent but at the same time, they'll want to reach the trail head & end tiles quickly to get a certain badge card before other players. Trails is a game about optimisation especially since there are only 3 types to manage - although that 8 cube limit can be punishing.

I also like the addition of the day turning into night mechanic, not only is it visually pleasing to watch the sun set, it adds some momentum to the game, upping the ante by giving players more resources and making it easier to get more badge cards. Players that have done well in the early game are not guaranteed victory.

So is Trails a sufficiently different game to Parks to warrant having both? I would say yes. I bought copies of both and I'm glad I did.
Trails felt like an easy game to learn and despite the fairly lengthy rules writeup above, is a reasonably light game that requires a little less brain power and also a little less directly competitive. Although for a lighter game is has a reasonably long play time - far too long to be considered a filler game.
That's a minor criticism though and ultimately, Trails is a fun experience and is worth trying.

30th June 2022

It's a Thursday and we're at Aldershot for some gaming goodness.

Burger Boss! What's better than being a king? Being a boss of course!
​Be a boss of those burgers in this game of resource management and worker placement or if you want to be specific; dice-placement.

What's in game?

• Cards: Burger Boss is not a card game per se but uses cards as a sort of proxy board and uses them for a variety of functions.
  • Restaurant cards: These come in every player colour and each has a differing humourous restaurant theme.
  • Kitchen cards: Can't have a burger joint without kitchen. Kitchen cards come in each player colour and have spaces for a worker, cold storage (A fridge basically.) and a grill track. Each colour also has a couple of expansion kitchen cards that when unlocked add more fridge spaces and additional grill tracks.
  • Game cards: Each of the game's main 8 actions are managed by a card. Each will have an amount of numbered worker spaces that can be used. Many of these spaces also require dice of specific value.
    More on game cards below.
  • Secret mission cards: Each of these provides players with a secret bonus scoring opportunity only revealed during the game end.
  • Manager's Special Cards: These can be acquired during play and provide players with bonus or special actions including some 'take that!' actions.
  • Meal Size Cards: The longer customers have to wait, the hungrier they get and the more food they'll buy! I'm sure that's how it works in real life?
    These 3 cards give a bonus of $1-$3 per customer respectively and speaking of customers...
  • Customer Cards: There are 30 customers, they're all very fussy and have specific food requirements for their burgers as displayed on their cards. Each card also lists how much they pay for their burger.
  • Turn Order Card: Burger Boss does not use a traditional turn order and it is tracked on this card.
• Dice: There are 4 dice in each player colour. These are typical six-siders.
• Cubes: Burger Boss has little wooden cubes, although there's only 1 in each player colour and they're used in conjunction with the turn order card.
• Ingredients: Ah yes - the meat of the game! (SIC). Ingredients are represented by these sort of tiny - but chunky wooden discs. They come in 5 colours which correspond to the types of 5 ingredients; buns, burger patties, cheese slices, lettuce and tomato.
• Money: Cash is represented by the standard round card tokens.

All the game's cards are finished in vinyl/plastic and as such feel quite sturdy.
The dice plastic, although they have nicely rounded corners.
Wooden components are always a plus in my book. The discs used to represent burgers and ingredients are obviously wrongly proportioned but if they were correctly sized, they'd have to be much bigger, otherwise they'd make the handling ingredients even more fiddly than it already is - which is quite fiddly and is my one criticism of the components.

Presentation wise, Burger Boss uses a cheerfully brash palette along with cartoonish illustrations. It's a bright, colourful art style that suits the game's light-hearted approach perfectly.

There's little iconography used in the game and it's easily understood, mostly consisting of symbol ingredients and and dice values.
The manager's special cards use text to provide information, which is a little sparse and will probably have players referring to the rules. It's not something that will occur too often though.

Packaging
I don't usually talk about a game's packaging - because usually it's just a box.
Burger Boss however, comes in a giant burger! Inside are several layers to hold all of the game's components.
Yes I know that it won't stack with other games and the manual doesn't fit in the burger and it'll just have to be put all back into it's normal, typical box anyway which technically defeats the  purpose of the burger packing - but it gives the game a unique, eye-catching presentation and I like that.
Yes, I also know it's just a gimmick but I like gimmicks!

How's it play?
Setup

• Starting cards: Give each player the restaurant card, kitchen card and 2 dice in their player colour.
• Cash: Give each player their starting $3.
• Secret mission cards: Shuffle the cards and deal 1 face-down to each player. These should be kept hidden until the game end.
• Game cards: Put out the 8 game cards.
• Manager's special cards: Shuffle these cards into a face-down deck.
• Meal size cards: Arrange the 3 cards in a row sequentially with the lowest on the left and highest on the right. Thus going $1, $2 and $3.
  During the game, customer cards will be added in columns beneath the meal size cards and slide rightwards throughout the game.
• Customer cards: Shuffle the customer cards into a face-down deck. 

On to play
The objective in Burger Boss is to fulfil customer orders to earn money, this is done by gaining and cooking the required ingredients. All of these actions are achieved by putting dice on cards, many of these cards will require dice of specific values.
The game does not have a traditional turn order and instead uses a mechanic that mixes randomness and player choice to determine player order. Once player order is established, whenever someone becomes the active player, they can take an action by using a die.
Each round consists of the following phases.

• New customers: Deal 2 customer cards in a column beneath the $1 bonus card.
  There will be no customer cards at the game start but in subsequent rounds any unfulfilled customer cards will be slid 1 space to the right and more customers will be introduced using a sort of conveyor belt mechanic. Thus there can be up to 6 customer cards available at any one time.
  If a customer card has reached the 3rd space and must be slid across, it is instead discarded out of the game. Now that's an unsatisfied customer!
• ​Turn order: Every round, dice are rolled to determine turn order.
  For the first round, the turn order is dictated by players openly rolling their 2 dice, whoever gets the lowest roll goes 1st, 2nd lowest goes 2nd and so on.
  However, in all subsequent rounds, every player rolls their dice in secret and can choose how many and which of their dice they want to use and declares them to the other players.
  This decision will apply to both turn order and to having dice to use as workers and their values during the round.
  It means for example; a player can use 1 die to go earlier in the turn order but will only get 1 worker.
  This becomes more important when players get 3 or 4 dice to use. Generally, having more workers is beneficial, but they'll be times a player will want to go first.
• Actions: Once turn order has been determined, the game goes to actions and players get to each place 1 die at a time in that order.
  Spaces on game cards are limited, furthermore, the actions on many game cards will require a die of a specific number, additionally a couple of actions will require 2 dice.
  Once a the active player has placed a die (Provided it meets the required conditions.) it is immediately resolved. There a numerous actions potentially available to players.
  • Bakery: There are 5 spaces here numbered from 1-5 and they allow the active player to gain 1 or 2 burger buns depending on the value of the die used.
  • Butcher: There also 5 spaces on this card but numbered 2-6, again they allow the player to acquire 1 or 2 burger patties.
  • Cheese shop: There are 4 unnumbered spaces in a row here and they work a little differently. Dice are placed left to right and the 1st die placed here can be of any value but all subsequent dice must have a value equal to or higher than the preceding die.
    This means if the 1st die placed is a 6, then all subsequent dice must be 6's.
  • Fruit & veg: There are 6 spaces here, numbered 1-6. Spaces numbered 1-3 allow the active player to gain lettuce while spaces numbered 4-6 gives them a tomato ingredient.
  • Kitchen expansion: This card can be used exactly twice by all players to gain their kitchen expansion cards.
    The first expansion requires a pair of doubles or a single die of any value and cost of $5.
    The final expansion requires a pair of doubles and $5 or a single die and $10.
  • Manager's specials: There are 8 unnumbered spaces here. The active player may place a die of any value here to draw a manager's special card.
    These will provide players with some sort of bonus of some kind. Manager's special cards can be played at anytime in the active players turn.
  • Supermarket: This card allows players to gain any ingredients of their choice by paying for them.
    There are 3 unnumbered spaces here that allow a player to buy 1, 2 or 3 ingredients of their choice for a respective cost of $2, $4, or $6.
  • Workers: As with the kitchen expansion, this card can be used only twice by each player and allows them to gain more dice for use in later rounds.
    The first worker dice requires a pair of doubles or a single die of any value and cost of $5.
    The final worker requires a pair of doubles and $5 or a single die and $10.
  • Kitchen: The kitchen is where customers' burgers are created. Players must create stacks of ingredients that exactly match the requirements on customer cards. There are a number of rules regarding the kitchen and cooking.
    Gaining ingredients: Whenever a player gains ingredients from the above actions, they go into the storage space on their kitchen card(s), any excess ingredients are discarded. Also: ingredients acquired cannot be used for cooking in the round they were acquired.
    Cooking: To cook food, a die of any value must be placed on to the kitchen card, only 1 die ever required to cook, regardless of the number of kitchen cards a player has. This allows the player to move ingredients from the storage onto the grill, these ingredients cannot be removed, however, in later rounds more ingredients can be added. It's also possible to have multiple food orders cooking at the same time on the grill's 3 spaces.
• Next player: Once the active player has resolved their action, play progresses to the next player in the turn order. If the new active player does not have any dice left to place, they simply pass. Once all workers have used, the game goes to the next phase.
• Sales: This phase only occurs once all players have placed all workers. Then, in turn order players can fulfil customers orders, allowing them to remove the required ingredient stake from their grill, take the customer card and earn the money listed on the card plus the size bonus of the column it was in.
• End of round: Several events occur at the end of a round.
  Ingredients on grills: All ingredients on all grills move 1 space to the right on the grill track. If a stack of ingredients comes off the 3rd and final grill space, they are discarded and the player receives a kingly​ $1 for their troubles!
  ​Dice: All players retrieve their dice from all cards and play returns to the new customers phase.

Endgame
The endgame is triggered when the customer card deck is depleted - although there will be customer cards in play. There is then 1 final round of playing then the game goes to scoring.

Players total money from the following:
Money earned from selling food to customers.
Money earned from their secret objective card.
Anything still on the grill earns $1 apiece; food in storage earns nothing.

Cash is tallied, highest amount wins.

Overall
Burger Boss is a light-to-midweight game, as written above, the rules seem a bit complex but in practice they're fairly straightforward. That's not say it's a good game for beginners - because it's not!

There are several mechanics and concepts in Burger Boss that that require thinking ahead and someone nuanced decisionmaking.
Quite often, it'll be impossible to complete a customer's order in a single round and generally there isn't enough cold storage to hold the required ingredients. This means that players will probably have to put ingredients on to their grill and hope to complete them in a later round. Mistake's can be costly and $1 is scant compensation for losing food.
Which brings me to customers. There's a balance to be found between completing a customer order as quickly as possible and waiting for a later turn to earn more money but risking another player getting that customer first!

While there is no direct interaction between players in Burger Boss, the game has a lot of open information and it definitely pays to watch what other players are doing; what they've got on their grills, where they're putting their workers and responding to this.

This ties in with the turn order mechanic, sometimes players will want to use less workers to go earlier.
​Worker spaces to gain ingredients are limited and turn order can play a vital role when fulfilling customer orders, in both cases, going later and being stymied by other players' actions (Whether accidentally or deliberately.) can be infuriating.

Burger Boss also has a a bit of the unexpected, manager's special card can also throw spanners into the works with unexpected special actions, especially when used judiciously.

Despite this, the game provides options to gaining other benefits - or benefits other ways, if the baker or butcher is inaccessible for any reason, there's always the supermarket. There's a pretty generous number of worker spaces on the card for the aforementioned manager's cards.
All of these means that rarely is a player presented with meaningless decisions which is always a good thing in games.

I found Burger Boss to be a colourful, visually appealing game of making burger (OK, they stacks of ingredients, but still it looks good.) and fun worker placement and resource management game with a reasonable play time and gameplay that's tricky enough to tax the brain enough to be engaging, along with a side order (SIC) of competitiveness.

2nd May 2022

It's a bank holiday Monday and we're round Simon's for some gaming fun.

Waterdeep, famed city in The Forgotten Realms and home to many a adventurer, ready to brave the wilderness in the search for treasure and glory... oh wait... This Dungeons & Dragons setting licensed game is nothing to do with Dungeon & Dragons... It's actually a political-intrigue themed worker placement game!

What's in the game?

• Game board: The board shows a map of the titular city; Waterdeep in some detail.
  Buildings: There 9 basic worker-spaces dedicated the various 'buildings' and establishments throughout the city, such as the Blackstaff Tower and The Grinning Lion Tavern.
  Some spaces such as the Cliffwatch Inn and Builder's Hall have additional spaces associated with them (To place certain types of cards basically.).
  Building sites: There are also 9 blank spots which can have buildings constructed upon them during the course of the game.
  Card spaces: There are spaces for the quest deck & discard pile, intrigue deck and discard pile as well as the the deck of building tiles.
  Round tracker: Lord of Waterdeep is played over 8 rounds, this is tracked with VP tokens - which are then introduced into the game over each round. More on this below.
  Agent tracker: Players gain an additional worker halfway through the game, their workers are kept here until acquired.
  Scoring track: Finally, there's a scoring track which runs the perimeter of the board.
• Player mat: There is a player mat in each of the 5 player colours. Each mat represents a different faction active within Waterdeep, the City Watch or the Harpers for example.
  Mats contain spaces to put acquired resources such as cubes, money or agents. There are also allotted spots to place active and completed quest card and to place a player's Lord card.
• Agent meeples: These come in each player and are the game's workers. Additionally, there is a ambassador and lieutenant meeple which may come into play.
• Adventurers: Represented by little wooden cubes, these are recruits that players will be... err... recruiting to their cause to complete quests.
  There are 4 colours of cube representing clerics, fighters, rogues and magic-users. What, no demi-humans!
• Cards: Lord of Waterdeep makes uses of several types of cards.
  Lord cards: These are the Lords of Waterdeep, the secret rules or the city. There are 11 lord cards and each player will secretly be playing one of them. Lord cards feature some flavour text and a method for earning additional VPs.
  Quest cards: Questing is an important part of Lord of Waterdeep. Quest cards contain illustrations and some flavour text. Each quest card also has a cost to complete, typically it will be a number of adventurers such as 3 fighters and 2 rogues and so on, the cost may include money too
  Each quest also associated with 1 of 5 types such as Warfare or Skulduggery. This also determines which type of adventure it primarily needs.
  Intrigue cards: When played, intrigue provide the controlling player with a once-only benefit of some sort.
• Building tiles: These extra buildings which can be constructed and placed on the boards blank building sites for the listed cost in coins. The provide players with extra locations to place workers and new benefits which can be earned. Any player put a worker there but be warned, the builder gets a benefit whenever another player makes use of their building.
  These tiles are sort of square shaped but with an indentation in 1 corner - which is where players' building control marker goes. (More on markers below.)
• Tokens: The game also makes use of various card tokens.
  Victory points: These hexagonal tokens display what appears to be a ruby.
  Building control marker: These come in the 5 different player colours, when a player constructs a building, they put their marker on the corner of the tile.
  Gold: The game uses curiously shaped square and crescent tokens to represent gold. I guess that's what coins look like in Waterdeep.
  First player marker: This token looks a bit like the rook from a chess set and represents Castle Waterdeep.

For the most part, all the components felt sturdy and well made. The player mats felt a little thin and flimsy but that's probably down to the fact they're quite large and will be perfectly find unless mistreated.

​There's a lot of excellent art throughout the game. I'm not sure if it's been created specifically for Lords of Waterdeep or sourced from the large amount of Forgotten Realms/D&D artwork that's been produced over the decades but either way, it's good quality and generously used on all the game's cards.
The other piece of significant artwork is the map on the board, it's very well detailed, although it does make the board look a little 'busy'. Regardless of this I still quite like it.

The game does use a fair amount of iconography, for the vast majority of icons, it's pretty clear what they mean and there was minimal need to refer to the rules.

How's it play?
Setup

• Player mats: Randomly deal a player mat to each player. This will be that player's faction/colour for the game.
  Also give each player a number of meeples/agents as per player count and building control markers, all  in their player colour.
  Finally put 1 meeple of each player colour on the agent track.
• Lords of Waterdeep: Shuffle the Lord cards into a face-down deck, deal 1 face-down to each player and discard the rest out of the game. Player's should keep the identity of their lord secret, there's a space to put it under their player mat.
• Board: Put out the game board and do the following.
  Quest deck: Shuffle the quest cards into a face-down deck then deal 4 face-up on to their allotted spaces above the Cliffwatch Inn.
  Building tiles: Shuffle the building tiles into a face-down stack, deal 3 face-up on to the allotted spaces adjacent to the Builder's Hall.
  Intrigue cards: Shuffle the intrigue cards into a face-down deck and place them on their allotted space. Then deal 2 intrigue cards to each player face-down.
  Victory point tokens: Put 3 VP tokens on to each of the 8 round tracking spaces.
• First player: Determine a starting player, that player gets 4 gold, each subsequent player then gets 1 more gold than the previous player. Thus for a 5 player game, the starting gold will go from 4-8 gold.

On to play
Lords of Waterdeep uses the traditional turn structure with the active player taking an action and play progressing to their left.
When someone is the active player, they can act in 2 phases.
Firstly they must take their action, a player can only pass when they have no more agents to play.
finally, the active player may complete a quest if possible.

• Round start: At the start of the first and every following round, take the 3 VP tokens and place 1 each on the three building tiles available to buy.
• Place worker: A player action will involve placing one of their agents on to a space on the board and resolving that space. Several spaces will devoted to acquiring resources, others however, will have more specific actions.
  • Acquire resource: A number of the spaces will simply acquire 1 or more of the games 5 main resources (4 adventurer types and gold.) for the player when they place their worker there. I.e., going to the arena will recruit fighters, going to the tavern will recruit rogues and so forth.
    When resources are acquired, they are placed on to the player's mat.
  • Builder's Hall: If a worker is placed here, then the active player chooses one of the 3 available advanced buildings and pays its cost. The building is then placed into the blank building sites. Finally, the active player puts one of their building control markers in the appropriate slot.
    When a advanced building is drafted from the builder's hall, it is immediately replaced with a new building tile.
    Advanced buildings: there are numerous different types of advanced building that can come into play. Each one provides an extra space to place a worker and will provide the player who built it with a benefit whenever another player uses the building.
  • Castle Waterdeep: When a player puts a worker here, they gain the first player marker for the following round. Additionally, they also draw an intrigue card.
  • Cliffwatch Inn: There are actually 3 spaces here.
    First space: This allows the active player to take a face-up quest card then put it on the active quest area adjacent to their player mat and take 2 gold
    Second space: This allows the active player to take a face-up quest card then put it on the active quest area adjacent to their player mat and draw an intrigue card.
    Third space: With this action, all the currently face-up quest cards are discard and are replaced with 4 more, then the active player takes 1 of them.
    Whenever a quest card is taken, it is immediately replaced.
    Quest cards: When a player gains a quest card, it placed along the left-hand edge of their player mat; until it is completed, it has no function.
  • Waterdeep Harbour: This spot also has 3 spaces.
    Each time a player places a worker here, they may immediately play one of their intrigue cards.
    A player may put multiple agents here but is still limited to playing 1 agent per turn.
    Intrigue card: When an intrigue card is played, it is immediately resolved and discarded.
    There are several types of intrigue card which may benefit whoever plays it or hinder another.
• Complete quest: ​After the active player has placed and resolved one of their workers, they may spend resources on their mat to complete one active quest per turn.
  Once a quest is completed, it grants a reward, this may be a once-only or ongoing benefit. Quests with on-going benefits are known as plot-quests and may provide extra places to put workers.
  When a quest is completed, it's VPs are immediately scored.
  Mandatory quests: These quests are not acquired the usual way, they come from intrigue cards and are actually played on other players. If a player receives a mandatory quest, it must be completed before they complete any other quest.
• Next player: Once a player has put a worker into play and chosen to complete a quest or not, play progresses to the player on their left.
• Next round: When all players have placed all their workers, the current round ends and play progresses to the next round. The VP tokens on the new round's spot on the round tracker are placed on the 3 available building tiles.
  It is possible for a building to have more than 1 VP token if it wasn't built in the previous round.
  5th Round: At the start of the 5th round, each player acquires an additional agent/worker they can use for the rest of the game.

Endgame
The game ends at the end of the 8th round and goes to final scoring. VPs come from the follwing sources.

• Score on the score tracker.
• Every agent/worker a player has on their mat earns them an additional VP.
• Every 2 gold a player has on their mat earns them a VP.
• Lord cards will score VPs according to their individual quest objectives.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Now, I'm by no means whatsoever particularly knowledgeable about the Forgotten Realms setting but it's quite impressive how Lords of Waterdeep manages to marry a worker placement game with the flavour of the setting, or at least a part of it that takes place in Waterdeep. It's not vital to the rules or gameplay but conversely, neither is it jarring or hindering.

The game is all about optimising actions to gain required resources as efficiently as possible to complete quests which must also be acquired while at the same time trying to predict and out manoeuvre other players: Most of the locations that confer resources will only have space for a single worker, making it unlikely that players will get all the resources they want in a single round, prioritising is very important because completing quests is very important, not only do quests provide VPs, they can confer useful benefits as well.

This ties in with the Lord cards which are essentially secret objectives.
Not only may players be competing for certain quest types and their respective resources, there's also a higher level of play where resources and quests can be denied to other players, provided their objectives can be guessed of course.

The advanced buildings is an interesting proposition, it adds an element of emergent strategy to the game, changing the status quo, giving players new options and making them re-asses their plans. Constructing a useful building also has the benefit of earning the builder its bonus and inevitably, it'll be used by other players.

There's not much else to say really, the gameplay is solid if somewhat unremarkable; players of worker placements games will find themselves on familiar ground here which may or may not be good thing - depending on your mileage.
Perhaps the playing time is a touch too long for what it is but none of this stops Lords of Waterdeep from ultimately being an enjoyable game.

If the Forgotten Realms setting doesn't put you off for some reason and you want to try a worker placement game, then Lords of Waterdeep is probably worth a look.

8th February 2022

Tuesday night games with the Woking Gaming Club at The Sovereigns continued with Fantastic Factories.

I don't know if factories are fantastic but I guess we're going to find out.

What's in a game?

• Player board: These rectangular boards contain recessed spaces to assign 3 rows of up to 3 dice each and considered each player's headquarters.
  Research: This is the first row, dice of any value can be assigned here.
  Generate: Dice showing values 1-3 can be assigned here.
  Mine: Finally, dice displaying 4-6 can be assigned here.
• ​Dice: Fantastic Factories comes with quite a few dice. They're normal six-siders constructed of translucent acrylic with rounded corners and dots.
  There are 5 sets of 4 dice in player colours and a generic set of 8 grey-white dice which players can acquire temporarily.
• Tokens: The game makes use of various types of card tokens.
  Energy tokens: These round tokens are unsurprisingly marked with lightning bolts.
  Metal tokens: Metal bars are used to indicate these are metal tokens
  Goods tokens: There are 2 types of these token that show 1 or 2 crates and correspondingly represent 1 or 2 goods.
  Tool type tokens: There is 1 each of these 4 tokens and they show a cog, wrench, hammer and shovel. They are used to determine the type of tool required to hire contractors (See below for more on contractors.). Tool type symbols also appear on blueprint cards.
• Cards: There are 2 types of cards in Fantastic Factories.
  Blueprints: These are the factories that players will build.
  In the top left it lists the cost to build the factory, this will include some combination of energy and metal as well as a tool. Additionally, when a blueprint is discarded, it will generate that tool type.
  In the top right corner it shows the VPs the card is worth when built. 
  Finally, in the bottom half, the card shows what kind of ability that blueprint will have when built, e.g, spending energy to get goods or something along those lines.
  ​Contractors: These cards have once-only abilities that are triggered when the card is bought (Contractor is hired.). Hiring contractors will cost a tool, the exact type of tool is determined by the tool type tokens.
• First player marker: The game features a wooden first player token shaped like a factory, it even has a pair of polluting smokestacks!

The components in Fantastic Factories are average in quality, which means they're perfectly acceptable, there's nothing poor here. Having said that, the translucent dice look good despite not being wooden, speaking of which, the wooden first player marker is a nice touch.

From an art perspective, the game makes good use of cheerfully bright colours. The art itself uses heavily stylised illustrations of both factories and contractors which is fine and suits the game's slightly light-hearted theme.

When built, factories provide a varied amount of special actions, consequently the game makes use of quite a varied amount of iconography. For the most part it's straightforward, however, on occasion 2 cards may seem similar but they'll be a small difference between denominated by a single small icon or sometimes they'll just be something 
​I wouldn't say it's any kind of a gamebreaker or that there's too much iconography but for a few turns players will probably end up referring to the rules.

How's it play?
Setup

• Tool tokens: Put out the 4 tool tokens in a line, the order does not matter.
• Contractors: Shuffle the contractor cards into a face-down deck, then deal 4 face-up with each one in line beneath each tool token.
• Blueprints: Also shuffle these into a face-down deck and again, deal 4 face-up, this time below the contractor cards.
  Marketplace: Thus this row of 4 tokens with 2 rows of 4 cards beneath also forms 4 columns and is what is called the marketplace.
• Players: Give each player a player board, 4 dice in their player colour, 2 energy and 1 metal token.
  Finally, deal 4 blueprint cards to each player.

On to play
Broadly speaking, a round is broken into 2 phases; a market phase which occurs in turn order and a work phase, which can be performed simultaneously by all players.

• Market phase: Starting with the first player and going in turn order, everyone may perform the optional action, then must choose one of the following 2 actions.
  • Optional action: By spending an energy or metal token, the active player may wipe one of the two rows of cards in the marketplace and have 4 new cards revealed.
  • Hire contractor: The active player may hire 1 contractor card by paying it's cost which will a combination of whatever energy/metal tokens it may require plus the tool symbol for the column it's in, the active player does this by discarding a card from their hand with a matching tool symbol.
    When a contractor is acquired, it's ability is used immediately and the card is discarded.
    That's not very realistic, if it was, the contractor would do nothing for 3 rounds and then charge the player again before doing anything!
    OR
  • Gain blueprint: The active player may buy a blueprint much as they would do with a contractor card except they do not need to pay the tool cost. When the active player acquires a blueprint card, it goes into their hand.
• Work phase: This phase can be carried out by all players simultaneously if they wish.
  Roll dice: The first action that occurs in the work is rolling dice.
  After this, there are several types of action that can be performed during the work phase and players carry them out in any order they choose.
  • Headquarters/basic actions: All 3 basic actions involve assigning the rolled dice to spaces on the headquarters board. The numbers rolled will affect where those can be assigned and what they do.
    • Research: Dice with any value can be assigned to this action. For each dice assigned this way, the player can draw a card from the blueprint deck (Not the face-up cards.)
    • Generate: Only dice numbering 1-3 can be assigned to this action, then the player would acquire energy tokens equal to the value of the dice assigned. E.g., if a 1 and a 3 are placed in generate, the player would gain 4 energy.
    • Mine: Only dice numbering 4-6 can be placed here and each die assigned earn the player a metal token.
      Matched numbers: If a pair of matching numbers are assigned any single basic action, it increases the amount the player gain by 1. If 3 matching numbers are assigned, it would earn the player an extra 2.
      Putting 5 and 5 into research or mine would earn the player 3 blueprints/metal tokens.
      If a player somehow would manage to put 3, 3 and 3 into generate, it would earn them 11 energy!​
  • Build blueprints: Players may build any number of blueprint cards from their hand provided they can meet all the costs, this will of course involve discarding blueprint cards with the identical tool symbol.
  • Activate buildings: Players may activate buildings that have been built in any order they see fit. Each building can only be activated once per turn however.
    Buildings have an activation cost, this might be a resource or even a die and will produce some other resource for the player.
• Extra dice: Some abilities allow players to acquire extra dice to use, these always come from the supply of grey/white dice, are temporary and will return back to their supply at the end of the round.
• Next round: Once all players have finished their actions, the first player marker moves to the player on the right and a new round begins with the next market phase.

Endgame
Play continues until either a player has built their 10th card or acquired their 12th good.
In either case, the current round ends and 1 more round is played.
Players then total the VPs from their buildings and the goods they gained.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
On a basic level, Fantastic Factories is mechanically pretty straightforward; acquire blueprints, acquire resources to build factories, use factories to acquire resources.

It's a mid-weight engine building game that provides players with strong card synergy and offers a good selection of choices and avenues to follow for building that engine.
I feel for the most part that players will want to focus on blueprints and building them, which is natural as this is what gets resources and VPs.
Players shouldn't neglect the contractors who provide instant if transitory benefits for a relatively low cost. Applied at the right time, they can be game changers - provided they're available at the right time! Once again, it's a case of reacting to opportunities as they are revealed.

There are a couple of there elements that make Fantastic Factories interesting.

Firstly; dice rolling. Players will never be guaranteed getting the results and thus the resources they want. It means that players may not be able to build the card they originally wanted to and will need to adapt and react to the situation as it arises for optimal play. Of course it's always possible to play it safe and have all the required resources before getting a card, it's safer but it's also slower.
Secondly; Fantastic Factories makes use of a hand-as currency mechanic. This forces players to think ahead, players may need to get blueprint cards just to discard for another building, or may be forced to discard a blueprint they still want in order to build another, it can be a tough decision.

There's also some high level play, where it pays to watch what other players are working towards then wipe the marketplace to deny another a player a card they want.

Fantastic Factories is a well balanced game, it's rules aren't particularly complicated and are easy to learn but also have depth that comes from recognising how to exploit the available cards that appear during the game to build their engine optimally and to maximum efficiency.
​The gameplay is solid and will appeal to fans of engine building games, which I am. so I guess factories can be fantastic!

28th January 2022

It's Friday evening and we're round Simon's for a night of gaming.

The game of the night was Apollo.

Houston.... we've had a game here.
One small step for gaming and errr, umm... one cooperative game for gamers?

Anyway, enough of the bad jokes.

What's in a game?
​Apollo is an symmetrical cooperative game where 1 player take on the role of mission control and the other players take on the role of astronauts on the titular mission.

• Game boards: Apollo uses 2 game boards of differing difficulty. One each for the Gemini and Apollo missions. The Gemini board depicts a flight path orbiting the Earth while the Apollo board shows a flight plan to the Moon and back to Earth.
• Mission packs: There are mission packs for both the Gemini and Apollo missions which each come in a silvery pouch reminiscent of the pouches used to store astronaut food.
  Each mission pack contains a set of double-sided flight stage cards and some experiment cards. These determine some of the challenges that each mission will face.
• Player screen: This is used by the mission control player to hide stuff that the other player should not know about. Inside, is artwork that various mission control systems and displays.
  The screen comes with widgets that can be clipped to it and then flipped up by mission control to alert the other players that comms are down or something else is wrong.
• Mission control board: This board is used by mission control to track how much damage the flight has taken. This is done with 5 sliders that track the module's 5 different systems; flight control, power distribution, life support, communications and experiments.
  Each go from 8 to 0. When the slider is at 8, everything is hunky dory, when it's at the lower numbers, those systems start encountering problems and when it's a 0, it's quite literally a crisis!
  The mission control board also has a space to place the current experiment card.
• Crisis cards: There are 5 sets of five crisis cards, obviously each set relates to one of the 5 systems.
  When a system crisis occurs occurs, a pertinent card is drawn and resolved, either by mission control or the astronauts.
• Crisis puzzle boards: There are 4 of these square boards, each with a slightly different layout. Certain crisis cards may force the mission control player to complete one.
• Tetrominoes: Used in conjunction with the puzzle boards.
• Astronaut board: This board is designed to look like the controls panels on the flight module and is obviously used by the astronaut players, it essentially has 5 spaces to place dice that correspond to the 5 areas on the mission control board.
• Flight damage board: This square board is used to track damage that occurs to the module.
  It consists of 5 'gridded' rows which again correspond to the 5 systems. Each row has 3 spaces which each contain a 'X' symbol and 3 bonus spaces. Finally there's a 6th 'blank' row at the bottom.
• Dice: There are 12 normal six-siders that come with the game, 6 come in yellow and 6 in black.
• Tokens: Apollo makes use of 2 types of tokens.
  Comm tokens: These tokens display COMM on one side and some will display an icon/action on the other side.
  +/- tokens: These double sided tokens are green on one side and red on the other, they also display a '+' symbol and a '-' symbol. These can be spent to modify the results of dice rolls during the game.
• Pawn: There are 2 types of astronaut shaped pawn/meeple (Astreeple?) in Apollo.
  Black pawn: This the experiment meeple and is used by mission control to track the astronauts' experiments
  Red pawns: these 5 meeples can be used by the astronauts to track information.
• Standees: There are Gemini and Apollo standees used to track mission progress on their associated boards.
• First player token: This coaster sized token displays a picture of an astronaut walking on the moon.

Apollo's components are pretty good throughout and it's clear effort and thought has gone into creating some of them.

The boards, tokens and player screen are all constructed of suitability thick card. While the dice are not wooden, they use a old school LCD numeric font for the numbers which is pretty cool, as are the pouches to store the mission cards.

The astronaut board and particularly the player screen feature very well themed artwork that calls back to sixties computer tech. The art on the astronaut board displays various dials and buttons is perhaps a little sparse but is also clean and doesn't interfere with the game element. Most of the player screen is decorated with evocative artwork of of what I imagine is module controls, the inside has some game information but the rest is an illustration of what mission control might look like. Dig the cup of coffee!
The art that depicts the Earth and the Moon is perfectly fine, they look like what they're meant to.
Finally, the flight stage cards are double-sided and as each one is completed, it's flipped over to show an illustration of that actual stage, which is a nice touch.

The game features little in the way of dedicated iconography, all the information is presented clear terms and is easy to comprehend.

How's it play?
Setup
Since Apollo is a asymmetrical game, it has a asymmetrical setup.

• Player Screen: The mission control player must put up the screen in their playing area and clip on the alert widgets on to it.
  Mission control board: Behind the screen they should place the mission control board and set all the sliders to '8'.
  Crisis cards: The mission control player should then sort all the crisis cards into their respective stacks, then shuffle them into 5 face-down decks and place them close to their related systems.
  Dice: the mission control player should take 1 yellow and 1 black dice and place it behind the screen.
  Comms tokens: The mission control player place 2 'blank' comms tokens behind the screen, then shuffles the remaining tokens into face-down stacks.
• Mission pack: Select the mission pack which has been chosen and set out the flight stage cards sequentially in a row.
  Then shuffle the experiment cards into a face-up deck and place the 1st one on it's space on the mission control board.
• Astronaut players: The astronaut players should put the astronaut board, flight damage board and remaining dice in their playing area.
• First player: A first player should be determined among the astronaut players.

On to play
Apollo is played over a number of rounds, each round has its setup and then is played over a number of turns.​ To make matters worse, Apollo is played in real time and each round only lasts 4 minutes.

• Setup: The mission control player tells the astronaut players how many dice they can roll - this is dependant on the life support rating - the higher the better and only the mission control player knows what the actual rating is.
• Roll the dice: One of the astronauts rolls the dice allotted number of dice.
  Assign dice: Dice results 1-5 are placed into their pertinent rows, covering up the 'X' symbols. 6's are put into the bottom row. After this, the 6's can be reallocated to any of the other 5 rows.
  Resolve dice: Any 'X' symbols not covered inflict that much damage to their system. If the flight control row is displaying 2 'X' symbols, the flight control system slider on the mission control board would have to be moved down 2 points.
  Additionally, each die in any bonus spaces, earns the astronauts +/- tokens (These cannot be used to change the results on the damage board.).

That's it for the setup, then the game goes into the round.

• Mission control player: The mission control player has a number of actions they can perform.
  Track flight: The mission control player moves the standee along its flightpath at the end of every player turn and also tracks when it will encounter a flight stage.
  Additionally, when a flight stage is completed, mission control should flip the relevant card over, revealing the picture on the back.
  Track damage: Mission controls tracks all the damage the flight takes, furthermore they can flip up an alert to tell the players something is wrong somewhere. Mission control may also spend comms tokens to verbally provide the astronauts with more information about damaged systems.
  Comms: Some comms tokens will also have icons or action on the flipside which mission control can spend to aid the astronauts.
  Track experiments: Mission control also tracks the astronauts progress on whatever experiment they're on.
  Deal with a crisis: When a system rating drops to 0, mission control must complete a puzzle board to get it up and running again.

The round goes differently for the astronaut players. Starting with the first player, each astronaut player takes a turn going clockwise and a turn consists of exactly 1 action. An action involves moving one or more dice from the flight damage board on to the astronaut board and resolving them
What are these actions and how do they work?

• Allocating dice: Actions usually require several dice and differing actions will have different dice requirements, they might require only yellow or black dice, or even alternating colours, some might require identical or ascending numbers and so on. Some actions (Generally flight stages and experiments.) require a set number of dice to complete, most of these actions can be completed over a number of turns, in this case, they stay on the relevant space until the 
  Other actions scale, i.e. the action gets better the more dice are allocated to it.
• Flight control: This action allows the astronaut players to contribute dice to completing the flight stage goal.
• Power distribution: This action allows mission control to adjust the sliders on their mission control board, this is also a scaling action, so the more dice allocated to the action, the more adjustments mission control can make.
• Life support: Using this action allows the astronauts to gain +/- tokens.
• Experiments: This action allows the astronauts to contribute dice towards completing the current experiment.
• Communications: Performing this action allows mission control to acquire more comms tokens.
• Repair systems: Allocating dice to this action allows mission control to increase the rating of one of the systems.
• End of turn: Once the active player has had their action, mission control moves the standee 1 space along the flight path and the next astronaut player become the active player.
• End of round: The current round ends when 1 of 3 criteria is met.
  All dice have been allocated.
  4 minutes are up.
  The astronauts decide to end the round.
  Regardless of how the round ends, the following round begins with mission control announcing how many dice the astronauts may roll.

Play progresses with the players (Hopefully!) successfully completing the required number of flight stages and experiments

Endgame
During play, if the module passes a flight stage space on the board without completing its requisite task or the flight control rating is lower then 4, then the mission immediately fails.
If the module reaches splashdown without completing the required number of experiments, then the mission fails.

However, if all the flight stages and experiments are completed, then mission is a success and the players win the game.

Overall
The rules for Apollo sound quite clunky in writing but in actual play, they felt straightforward and once players begin performing actions, it becomes quite understandable.  I wouldn't call it a crossover game but I imagine that it would be easy to pick up.

Apollo is quite unusual, being an asymmetrical cooperative game and I think it fits its theme quite well too.
Having that slight disconnect between mission control and the astronauts somehow lends the game a greater sense of teamwork.
Astronauts having to rely on mission control to get information and mission control having to rely on the astronauts to get comms tokens and to be able to make changes to systems means players have to work together.
It's definitely a bit different to the typical cooperative game where players are cooperating but generally sort of off doing their own thing. Another noticeable and welcome difference is how there's no characters running round a global board trying to stop the spread of something here.

​During the game, players will be, broadly speaking, faced with 3 types of obstacle; successfully completing flight stages, successfully completing experiments and firefighting damage that occurs during the flight.
There's a real need to strike a balance between these 3 priorities and players will also have to approach this as efficiently as possible, the flight module moves along the board after every turn and is in essence another countdown timer. It means planning for the known variables of the flight stages, somewhat knowable experiments and also reacting and adapting to unpredictable damage inflicted on the command module and there will be damage!  There are 15 damage spaces on the flight damage board and only 10 dice to cover them, that means at least 5 damage to the systems every round.
Being a cooperative game, Apollo uses the luck or specifically the bad luck that arises from rolling those dice to challenge players.

The game also features a time limit in the form of a 4 minute timer: On paper this might not seem like much time but in play it's perhaps a little overgenerous.
4 minutes to assign 10 dice works out to be 240 seconds for 10 dice or 24 seconds per die, which we did not find much of an issue.

We played the Gemini mission board a couple of times and it didn't present too much challenge for us, there were a definite couple hiccups and dicey (sic) moments but otherwise it was pretty much plain sailing or more accurately, plain err.... orbiting? Mission control never had to reach for the puzzle boards.
However, we are a fairly experienced band of players and maybe for once, the luck went our way this time.
We didn't get round to playing the Apollo mission board which is probably where the meat of the game lies and certainly looks more challenging, so I'm reserving judgement on the game's difficulty.

I'm not certain about the game's replay-ability either, it wasn't boring but at the same time felt a little samey, players are ultimately just assigning dice to tasks, some of which may become quite familiar over multiple plays.

Easy to learn with a reasonable play time and providing some interesting decisions to make, I'd say that Apollo is a good game to play every once in awhile and if cooperative games are your cup of tea, then it's definitely worth checking out this fresh take on cooperative gameplay.

15th January 2022

It's a Saturday and we're at the Bisley Scout Hall with the Woking Gaming Club for Wogglecon,  for a day of gaming and hanging with with friends.

There are a lot of national parks in the USA and you're about to hike a bunch of them in the first game of the day; Parks.   

What's in a game?

• Board: This small board is not a game board in the traditional sense and is instead used to manage the game's numerous decks of cards.
• Tiles: Parks uses some unusually shaped tiles to construct it's main playing area.
  Trailhead & trail end: These are the start and end tiles for each hike and have a sort of chevron shape to one edge each. The trail end card has 3 options for players; visit a park (Which is another way of saying buy the card.), buy gear or reserve a park card.
  Trail sites: These are the trails that hikers will travel along during the game and provide players with the resources they need. They are unusually chevron shaped tiles and come in 2 types; basic and advanced. Basic tiles are used right from the start of the game, while the advanced ones are introduced one at a time at the start of every season.
  Camera tile: This large token is obviously shaped like a camera and makes it 'cheaper' for the owning player to take photographs, it's likely that the camera token will change hands frequently.
  Campfire tiles: There is one of these in every player colour and they're double-sided. One side shows a crackling and roaring fire, while the flip side shows an extinguished and smoking campfire site.
• Tokens: Parks makes use of numerous tokens to track the game's resources.
  Resource tokens: The game uses 4 types of resources; water, sunshine, mountain and forest, the wooden tokens are suitability shaped and coloured to represent this.
  Wildlife tokens: These brown wooden tokens are 'wild' (SIC) resources and can be used as any of the 4 resources mentioned above. Interestingly, each wildlife token is a depicted as different animal, no two are the same.
  Photograph tokens: When players take photographs, they acquire one of these uniquely illustrated square card tokens. Photograph tokens score VPs at the game end.
• First hiker token: Unlike all all the other components, this first player triangular token is made of metal! It depicts a stylised image of the wind gusting past a snowy-topped mountain.
• Cards: Parks also makes use of several sets of cards.
  Park cards: These oversized cards each depict a different national park in the USA and can be bought by players. Along the bottom it shows the cost in resources and VP value. Additionally, each card also contains a small amount of text that provides titbit of information that park. It even names the artist who created the picture.
  Gear cards: Players will have opportunity to buy gear cards using sunshine tokens, these provide bonuses or benefits such as making something cheaper or being able to acquire more of a certain resource, etc. Gear cards feature heavily stylised illustrations.
  Canteen cards: After canteen cans are acquired by players, they are activated by placing a water token on them and confer some bonus, typically acquiring other resources.
  Season cards: Parks is played over 4 seasons and a card is revealed at the start of each one which will alter or add a rule for that season as well as determine the weather for the season - how sunny or wet it will be which in turn determines if bonus sunshine and/or water tokens appear along the.
  Year cards: If a game is played over 4 seasons, you've got to have a year card! These are basically secret objective cards. Quite often this involves visiting specific parks in some way or other.
• Meeples: There are 2 hiker meeples (Heeples?) in each player colour.

​
​The quality of Park's components is universally high and it's obvious that a lot of care and attention has been put into the game, this extends even to the packaging and token trays.
The cards are fine and the tiles are appropriately thick. The tokens are all wooden, well made and colourful, the individually shaped wildlife tokens are the standout here. Finally, the inclusion of a metal first player marker is pretty unusual but it has a satisfyingly weighty feel to it and is a cool addition.

For nearly all of it's artwork, the game sources The Fifty Nine Parks Print Series which as the name suggests, is a project which consists of a picture of each American national park created by a different artist. Perhaps it could be argued that doing this saves on the art budget but honestly, it feels like a great collaboration.
As a result the game features excellent and varied artwork throughout, all the park cards and photography tokens are uniquely illustrated, the art also features on all the card backs and even the inside of the box lid! Fantastic!

Parks makes use of a fairly wide variety of iconography but for the most part it was easy to comprehend and presented no obstacle to the game.

How's it play?
​Setup

• Board: Put out the board.
• Park cards: Shuffle the park cards into a face-down deck and place it on it's spot on the board. Deal 3 cards face-up on to their allotted spaces.
• Gear cards: As with the park cards, shuffle the gear cards into a face-down deal and deal 3 face-up.
• Canteen cards: Shuffle the canteen cards into a face down deck on its spot on the board and deal 1 face-up to each player.
• Year cards: Shuffle the year cards into a face-down deck and deal 2 to each player.
  Each player should keep 1 and discard the other out of the game. This card will become the players' secret objective for the game.
• Trail: Separate the basic and advanced trail site tiles, then take the player-dependant number basic trail sites and randomly add 1 advanced tile.
  Next, shuffle all these tiles and lay them out from left to right, add the trailhead to the 'start' on the left and trail end to the right. They should all 'slot' together and you have the trail for the first season.
• Season cards: Shuffle the season cards into a face-down deck, place it on it's spot on the board, then draw and reveal the card for the first season.
  This will determine the special rule for the season and will also dictate the weather conditions and where bonus sunshine and water tokens appear on the trail.
• Hikers: Give each player the 2 meeples and campfire tile in their colour. Players should place their meeples on the trailhead tile and put the campfire tile to the 'fire' side in their personal playing area.
• First player: Determine the first player.

On to play
Parks is played over 4 seasons during in which each the players' hikers travels along that season's trail from left to right.

• Hike: The active player must move one of their hikers, a hiker can be moved as far as the owning player wishes but only moves towards the right and can never go 'backwards'. Furthermore, when a hiker stops on a tile, the player must perform that tile's action, if they are unable to do so, then the hiker cannot stop on that tile. Additionally, if a hiker stops on a tile that already contains 1 or more hikers, then they must flip their campfire token over to the 'used' side. If the campfire has already been used, then again, the hiker cannot stop on that tile.
  Actions: On the basic tiles, the actions mostly involve collecting various resources from the supply, one tile allows the active player to take a photograph or acquire a canteen card.
  The 4 advanced tiles allow players to swap out their personal resources, an extra opportunity to use the 'buy' actions or to potentially copy another tile's action.
• Resource limit: Each player is limited to having 12 resources of any kind in their personal supply, including wildlife tokens.
• Canteens: Each player starts with a canteen and can acquire more. When a player collects a water token, instead of putting in their own supply, they can put it on an available canteen card to activate its ability. Frequently it allows the active player to collect a different resource. This might not seem like much, but water is one of the more abundant tokens in the game and using it to acquire rarer resources can prove beneficial.
• Photographs: If a player chooses to take a photograph, it costs them any 2 resources to do so and they put a photograph into their personal supply, after this they take the camera token into their ownership.
  If a player already has the camera token when they take a photograph, it only costs them 1 resource.
• Trail end: When a hiker reaches the trail end, the active player has a choice of 3 actions.
  Visit park: This actually means buy a park card with their resources. A park card can be bought by the active player from the 3 available from the board or park card they have previously reserved (See below for information on reserving.). If a card is taken from the board, it is immediately replaced from the deck
  Buy gear: The active must buy one of the 3 available gear cards. As with park cards on the board, if a gear card is bought, it is immediately replaced.
  Reserve park card: When selecting this action, the active player must reserve a park card. They can pick one of the 3 available cards or draw blindly from the deck, in either case, they're put into the player's area but they have not been bought yet and do not score VPs until they are.
  The first player to reserve a park also takes the first player marker for the next season.
  Flip campfire: This is not an action per se; if a hiker reaches the trail end and the player's campfire token has been flipped to the used side, it is flipped back to the fire side. Thus a campfire can be used twice in a season.
• Last hiker: When there is only 1 hiker left on the trail, on their turn, they must go directly to the trail end.
• Season's end: When all hikers from all players have reached the trail end, the season is over and several actions occur.
  Photograph: Whoever have the camera token and take an additional photograph for the discounted cost.
  Canteen: All water tokens on all canteen cards are removed and they become available to be used in the next season.
  Trailhead: Move all the hikers on to the trailhead in preparation for a next hike.
  New trail: Pick up all the tiles in the trail and randomly add another advanced tile to the stack and shuffle them. Then deal out the tiles to create a new, slightly longer trail for the next season.
  Season change: A new season card is drawn with a new special rule and a new weather pattern to apply to the trail tiles.
  First player: Play now begins for the new season, starting with the current first player.

​Endgame
Once the 4th season has been completed, the game ends.
Players score points from the parks they've visited (Bought.), they also score a point for each photo they took and whoever has the first player token at the game end scores 1 point for it.
Finally; players reveal their year cards, completing the objective on these usually scores 2-3 points.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Parks is essentially a light worker placement game added where your 2 workers only ever head right combined with resource management.
It's a game all about planning trips that means that it's about acquiring resources to buy park cards which generally provide the majority of VPs required to win the game. However, it is impossible to fully plan things out. Going from season to season, players will have a good idea what resources and tiles will be available but not where they will appear. It requires adaption and some creative thinking when faced with a different tile layout.

Limiting the resources a player can own to 12 is an solid rule, it prevents players hording too much and splurging out big at once. It also makes players think about optimising their strategies.
The initial urge in Parks is to travel as slowly as possible to collect as many resources as possible and in the early-game that's not a bad idea but sooner or later, players will need to use them up and that means visiting parks.
Remember, players have only 2 hikers and that means they can only use the visit park action on the trail end twice per season (Provided they don't use any other actions on the tile.), this means that players have 8 opportunities to visit parks, yes; there's an advanced trail tile that allows extra buy actions but there's no guarantee where and when it'll appear.

This brings me to the worker placement element of Parks. Each player can use their campfire a maximum of 2 times in a season, it means thinking carefully before moving on to a occupied tile, it also means trying to anticipate how other players will move and if necessary, getting there first! Or perhaps moving the other hiker so that whoever is occupying the tile you need may have moved by the following turn.

Ultimately it means that players should look to optimise their moves, balance resource acquisition with card acquisition, players might well be competing for the same park card and watching a card you want being taken by another player because you tarried to collect an extra resource can be galling.
Players will have the double-obstacle of reacting to both seasonal changes and the choices made by the other players.

The game's rules are not over-complex but also provide a fair amount of depth. There's enough interaction between players to force you to pay attention to their choices . Decisions that players face are always meaningful and getting wrong could lose you out.
Add to this the game's top notch thematically appropriate production values and you have a small package that delivers a big game.

Having said that, it's not without a couple of drawbacks.
Most significantly; the game experience can change notably with player count. A 3-player game will feel quite different to 5-player. The hiker count goes from 6 to 10, the tiles become a lot more crowded and it becomes more challenging to do what you want. While in games with 4 or more players an extra basic tile is added into the mix, it doesn't quite alleviate the increased clutter on the trail.
Secondly, a 5-player game seems to last around 2 hours and that perhaps feels a little overlong. Parks doesn't outstay its welcome and it's not a game-breaker but it can feel a little long for what it is.

Other than that, Parks is well presented, accessible and satisfying to play (At least when you get the park card you want!).
It's definitely one that's worth trying.