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.

30th December 2021

Thursday afternoon gaming on Board Game Arena continued with Dice Hospital.

Doctor, doctor, please
Oh, the mess I'm in
Doctor, doctor, please
Oh, the mess I'm in

Mismanaging your hospital in Dice Hospital will definitely lead to a big mess!

What's in a game?

• Player board: Dice Hospital's player boards are curiously hexagonally shaped and each contains a number of hexes which represent different departments
  Coloured hexes: There are 3 hexes which are red, yellow and green, they represent critical care, oncology and pharmacy.
  Numbered hexes: There are 3 hexes numbered 1-2, 3-4 and 5-6, they are intensive care, imaging and clinic.
  Wards: There are 4 ward hexes and each has room for 3 patients (dice.), thus 12 patients in total. Each hex also has spaces to place 'treated' patients.
  Nurse's station: This hex is where general nurses are placed at the start of each round.
  Discharge: This is where patients go when things go well.
  Mortuary: And this where patients go when things go bad!
• Department tiles: Players can expand their hospitals by acquiring these hexagonal tiles. Departments improve a hospital's abilities to heal patients. Departments may be colour-specific (Red, yellow or green.) or 'neutral' (Blue.) which is generally number based.
• Specialist cards: Players may also recruit extra workers into their hospitals in the form of specialist and these cards list their specialities. Like departments, specialists may be colour-specific or neutral.
• Administrator cards: Each player will get one of these and they confer some unique benefit or scoring bonus to the owning player.
• Meeples: These nurse shaped meeples (Neeples?) come in 5 colours, white and blue, as well as red, yellow and green which relate to the identically coloured departments. The white and blue are essentially general staff.
• Dice: You won't be surprised to learn that Dice Hospital uses six-sided dice, a lot of them. They are used to represent patients and come in red, yellow and green which indicate the type of treatment they need; critical care, oncology or pharmacy. There are 21 in each colour and 63 in total.
• Bag: Goes with the dice.
• Ambulance tiles: There are 5 of these and they're numbered as such. Ambulances are used to deliver patients to hospitals, each ambulance has room for 3 dice.
  NOTE: The ambulance models seen in the photos here DO NOT come with the base game.
• Blood bag tokens: Provide players with some special actions when used or VPs at the game end.
• Fatality tokens: I'm sure get the idea...

There are some other tokens, but they're not significant to gameplay.

The component quality in Dice Hospital is all round good. The tiles are study and cards are of the expected quality. The game's 60 or so dice are plastic but with well rounded corners and satisfying to roll. Finally, all the meeples are stylised after medical staff, it's a nice touch and appreciated, they're made of wood too! Good stuff.

All of the art for the different departments on the hex tiles is quite small but also well detailed and depicts a variety of different medical equipment and hospital furniture, I quite like it.
The specialist cards have headshots of doctors, it's sort of average artwork but on the hand, they look like medical staff, what more could you want? Besides, how much more exciting could you make the portrait of a urologist look!

We found the game's iconography initially a little confusing but after a couple of references to the rulebook, it was always sorted out.
​None if it's a dealbreaker.

How's it play?
Setup

• Dice: Put the allotted number of dice into the dice bag and give it a good shake.
• Department tiles: Shuffle the tiles into a face-down stack and deal the allotted amount face-up, (This'll be equal to 1 less than the number of players.).
• Specialist cards: The same as the department tiles:
• Ambulance tiles: Use a number of tiles equal to 1 higher than the number of players. Start with the number 1 ambulance and put them out in sequential order.
• Player board: Give each player a board and 3 white meeples, the meeples should go into the nurse's station
• Administrator: Shuffle the administrator card and deal 2 face-down to each player. Players should which one to keep and discard the other out of the game.
• Patients: Each player should draw 3 dice blindly from the bag and set the faces to 3, 4 and 5 how they see fit, then place them into 3 spaces on one of their ward hexes.
• First player: Determine the 1st player.

That's pretty much it for set up. You'll notice that there's always never quite enough departments and specialists for players to take all of one or the other. Additionally, there's always enough ambulances to give every player a choice between at least 2.

On to play
​Dice Hospital is played over 6 phases, some of these phases are completed in turn order and some can be completed simultaneously.

• Patients: The 1st player blindly draws a number of dice equal to the number of dice spaces on all the available ambulance tiles.
  The 1st player then rolls all these dice, any 1s or 6s are rerolled until all dice are showing 2-5.
  The dice are then placed on to the ambulance tiles, placing the lowest numbered dice on to the lowest numbered ambulance and go upwards so that the highest numbered dice end up on the highest numbered ambulance tile. The player to the right of the 1st player (The last player essentially.) may then have the opportunity to rearrange some of them.
  After this and in turn order, each player takes an ambulance tile and adds the dice to their wards. The only restriction here is that the 1st player cannot take the 1 ambulance, which prevents them constantly going first.
  If there's no space for new patients on the wards, then some patients will need to be sent to the morgue!
  ​Finally, a new turn order based specifically on the ambulance numbers is established and a new 1st player is determined, this player also gains a blood bag token.
• Improvements: In this phase, players draft improvements into their hospital and this is where the new turn order becomes significant. In this new turn order, each player takes either a department hex or a specialist card (And appropriate meeple.) and adds it to their player board or play area.
  Furthermore; each player may discard exactly 1 improvement to gain a blood bag.
• Hospital phase: This where arguably, the bulk of the game takes place, this can be played in order or simultaneously.
  Here players take their meeples and puts them into departments to heal patients. how is this done?
  If a meeple is put into the green hex for example, then a green die may be healed. Healing does 2 things, it increases a die's value by 1 (E.G., from 3 to 4.) and moves it to a 'treated' space in the ward. A die may be healed multiple times from multiple sources and if it's value would be taken to 7+, it is then sent to the discharge hex. More on discharging below.
  Improved departments generally allow more than 1 patient to be healed, althohg some allow lesser number of patients to be healed by more.
  There can be restrictions however.
  For example a red department may allow 3 red dice of equal value to be healed by 1 each, but it would have to exactly 3 not less. A neutral department may allow 2 dice with values of 1-3 to be healed regardless of colour.
  Specialists also provide more healing but may be limited. A yellow specialist used to heal a yellow die may also heal a 2nd yellow die.
  The abilities of departments and specialists may be combined. If a green specialist is placed on a neutral department and one of the dice healed is green, then the green specialist's ability would be activated.
  Each department and meeple can only be used once per round.
  Blood bags: These tokens can be spent for 2 effects, firstly, any die can be healed by 1 point, secondly, the colour of a die can changed to either of the 2 other colours. This is pretty useful when used with consideration, especially if activates a a department that could not be otherwise activated.
• Neglect: Now we get to the bad part!
  Any die that were not treated, i.e. not moved to a treated space, has its value lowered by 1. If this would take a die's value down to 0, then that patient dies and the die (sic) is sent to the morgue.
  Every die sent to the morgue by a player earns them a fatality token. Then that die is returned to the bag.
• Discharge patients: During this phase all patients are discharged and score VPs for the player. The discharged dice are returned to the bag.
  Scoring in Dice Hospital is a little unusual and exponentially increases if more patients are discharged at the same time.
  What this means is if 1 patient is discharged, then 1 VP is earned. If 2 patients are discharged at the same time, 3 VPS are earned and so on. If a player manages to discharge all 12 patients at the same time, they'd earn 35 VPs.!
  ​Additionally, if a player's wards are all empty during this phase, they earn a bonus 5 VPs.
• End of round: This is the final phase of the round.
  Players' return all their meeples to their starting spots.
  All patients who were treated are moved back to their untreated spots.
  Any departments or specialists who were not drafted during the improvement phase are discarded to the bottom of their relevant stacks and new departments and specialists are drawn in preparation for the following round.

Play now progresses to the next round, with the 1st player drawing and rolling dice and the dice drafting phase and so on.

Endgame
Play continues until 8 rounds have been completed. Upon reaching the end, players calculate their final scores, this includes:
VPs for discharging patients over the 8 rounds.
+1 per unspent blood bag.
-2 per fatality token acquired. 
Scores are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
As well as randomly determining which improvements appear, I like how the game makes use of dice as both a randomiser and a resource to be managed. Using dice value to gauge health levels and colours to represent different types of malady is innovative and great.

There's a lot of good gameplay in Dice Hospital and a lot to like. Figuring out how to strike balance the hospital's different needs, requirements and aspects is a satisfying challenge.

In this regard, the game's 2-tier drafting mechanics work well, drafting patients that are easier to heal means going later when drafting hospital improvements, that's a good balancing mechanic with meaningful decisions. There's also a higher level of play at work here, if you can anticipate which patients/improvements other players are looking to acquire, you can either try and either deny them what they want or make it easier to get what you want. For example, if no one else wants a red doctor, then going last in the improvement drafting phase is not a problem.

Knowing what and when to draft is probably the single most important aspect of the game, using those combinations of special abilities to heal multiple patients at a time is vital. It's also contextual, depending on the colour of patients and improvements appear and what a player already has in their hospital. Players may find themselves having to reappraise their strategy from turn to turn. Willingness to trash an improvement for a blood bag can also be a powerful play, used right, blood bags can provide much more than a single VP.
Luckily, the game provides fairly good opportunities to combo departments and specialists off each other, especially toward the latter half.
However, getting that balance wrong leads to sub-optimal play, having to many departments leaves them unused and too many specialists means they just do nothing.

Even though it's an abstract dice game, it genuinely feels a bit like you're running a hospital, having to try and find ways to treat and discharge patients before the next influx of unending patient.
This is not a coincidence. Players start the game with 3 patients and acquire 3 more every round, this means by the end of the 3rd round, they'll have filled all their wards (Provided they haven't already discharged any patients.), as a consequence, players will need to discharge 3 patients a round just to avoid sending some to the morgue.
Thanks to the scoring though, there's a wrinkle here. Discharging patients in drips and drabs doesn't score many VPs. Players will actually want their patient numbers to build up a bit and discharge as many of them at once as possible to optimise scoring.
It's a another balancing act and it all combines to make Dice Hospital a good game.

If you like worker placement mechanics, blended with a bit mid-complexity, light randomness, meaningful choices and almost engine building elements; then Dice Hospital is worth a try. One I found an enjoyable experience.

29th December 2021

We're at Simon's for some Wednesday evening gaming goodness during the mid Christmas break.
The game of the night was Lost Ruins of Arnak.

"That belongs in a museum!"
What does? Cliched old one liners!

​Lost Ruins of Arnak is a game about raiding temples of a long forgotten ancient civilisation on an uncharted island.

What's in a game?

• Game board: The game board for Lost Ruins of Arnak is quite large and has a full sized illustration of an unexplored, fantastical wilderness landscape. It's also quite busy, with spaces and tracks for a lot of components, cards, workers and more.
  Cards: Along the top are spaces for the 3 decks of the game's different card types; artefact, item and fear cards.
  Card track: Directly below, a card track runs runs across the board and will be populated with varying amounts of artefact and item cards during the course of the game. The card track also displays the game's 5 rounds.
  Research track: Running up the right side of the board is the 'research track'. This track has 2 'paths' that lead to the top, where VPs await the players. Going up the track costs various resources but also confers resources or other benefits, including gaining assistants.
  Sites: The bulk of the board is taken up with unexplored wilderness sites, these hidden locations which will be explored by the players' workers come in 2 tiers, the 2nd tier being harder to 'travel' to, each site has space to put a idol token or a tile on it. Below each site it will display 1 or 2 worker spaces and inside each worker space it will list the cost to travel there.
  Dig sites: Below the tier 1 sites is a another row of 5 sites, these are dig sites, they are not explorable and instead can be used by players to generate the game's 5 resources.
  Double-sided: It's worth noting that the board is double-sided and features an alternate setup on the other side with differing travel costs.
• Supply board: This small supplementary board sits along the bottom edge of the main board and contains spaces for 5 of the game's different resources and 4 sets of tiles.
• Player boards:  These boards depict a picture of a campsite and have spaces for each player's deck, 4 'used' idols slots and and 2 assistants when they're recruited. There's also space to place resources.
• Cards: Lost Ruins of Arnak uses 3 types of cards.
  Starter cards: Every player is given these and they can be used to generate coins and compass resources or scores in the game's 4 types of travel.
  Item cards: These provide some sort of bonus to the controlling player. They are always paid for with money and when acquired go to the bottom of the player's deck. Item cards can score VPs.
  Artefact cards: Unlike item cards, artefact cards go directly into the player's hand and can be immediately played for their effect when acquired. Further usage of artefact cards will cost tablet tokens. Like item cards, artefact cards can earn VPs.
  Fear cards: These serve no purpose other than to bloat the player's deck with useless trash cards. Thus getting them is actually a negative. Fear cards also cost players VPs.
• Tiles: Lost Ruins of Arnak makes use of numerous tiles.
  Temple tiles: These are placed at the top of the research track and provide VPs once acquired by players.
  Idol tiles: These are acquired by players when they first explore sites and confer bonuses and VPs, they can then also be 'spent' to get another bonus.
  Site tiles: When players explore a site location, a random site tile from it's respective tier will be placed there.
  Guardian tiles: Once a site tile has been placed, a guardian in the form of a tile will appear on top of the site tile and cause a headache for the worker there!
  Research tiles: Players will accumulate these as they move up the research track and they confer various benefits
  Assistants: These tiles contain assistants which confer a benefit of some sort on to the player who recruited them. They are also doubles-sided, meaning that assistants can be upgraded (Promoted?).
• Tokens: All of the game's resources are represented by tokens.
  Coins: These card tokens are the game's currency.
  Compasses: These are also card tokens.
  Arrowheads: These are little plastic tokens shaped a little like arrow heads.
  Jewels: It looks like translucent acrylic chunks are used to represent jewels.
  Tablets: Plastic is used for these tokens shaped like ancient tablets.
  Moon Staff: This card token is used to track the game's turns.
• Meeples: Each player is given 2 archaeologist wooden meeples for workers as well as a magnifying glass and notebook meeple in their colours. The magnifying glass and notebook are used to track a player's progress along the 2 research tracks. All the meeples are made of wood.

The quality of components in Lost Ruins of Arnak varies from average to great.
The game has really nice plastic pieces for arrowheads, tablets and jewels, along with wooden meeples, magnifying glasses and notebooks, you can never go wrong with wooden components and yet, makes use of unremarkable card tokens for coins and compasses.
Yes it's a minor quibble but it's definitely noticeable.
The game's cards and tiles are standard quality.

From an art perspective, it's all pretty good, cards and tokens all have nice, clear and colourful thematic art. The standout however, is the board, with a pair of lovely landscape images, it's almost a shame that they'll mostly be covered with components during play.

The game contains a fair amount of iconography, none of it was particularly unclear though.

How's it play?
Setup

• Board: Choose a side of the board to play with, one is hard than the other.
  Cards: Shuffle and put the artefacts and items deck face-down. Also put out the fear cards. Deal 1 artefact and 5 item cards into the card row.
  Idol tiles: Randomly assign idol tiles to all sites, tier 1 sites get 1 and tier 2 sites get 2.
  Temple tiles: These are placed at the top of the research track.
  Research tiles: Place these on their allotted spaces as required or randomly.
  ​Assistants: Shuffle these into 3 stacks so their upgraded sides are face-down.
  Site tiles: Sort the site tiles into their 2 tiers and shuffle each tier into a face-down stack.
  Guardian Tiles: Shuffle these into a face-down stack.
  Resources: Should be placed into their allotted spaces.
• Player board: Each player should get a player board; 2 meeples and 2 research tokens in their chosen colour.
  The meeples go on to the player's board and the research tokens on their designated starting spots on the research track.
• Deck: Each player should take the 4 starter cards in their colour, 2 of which will be coin/funding cards, 2 will be compass/exploration cards and then finally, add 2 fear cards to their deck.
  Now shuffle all 6 cards into a face-down deck.
• 1st player: Determine the first player and deal out resources as determined by the turn order.

Looks like we're ready to go exploring in the... Lost Ruins of Arnak.

​On to play
A round in Lost Ruins of Arnak continues until all players can no longer perform actions (Free actions don't count.) or have passed. The game features a pretty standard turn order that goes clockwise and in their turn, players will get 1 main action and any amount of free actions.
A round proceeds as follows:

• Draw cards: All players draw cards from their player deck to take their hand up to 5, thus in the first round this would be 5 of the 6 starter cards.
• Actions: Starting with the 1st player and going clockwise, each player must perform 1 main action, they can also perform free actions, generally, everything with a lightning bolt symbol is considered a free action.
  Main actions are:
  Travel: A player can move one of their meeples to a site on the board, provided an available worker spot is there and the player can generate the required travel score to pay the travel cost.
  Generally, the player uses the cards in their hand to pay travel costs, even fear cards provide walking scores
  There are 4 types of travel, these are; walking, land, sea and air.
  Walking is the most basic travel action and can only be used to pay for walking costs. Land and sea scores can pay for their relevant costs or can also be used in place of walking - but not for each other. Finally air can be used for any type of travel. Furthermore a player may spend 2 coins to what amounts to chartering a flight, that is get a point air score, which is essentially the same as any token.
  Additionally, if the player is travelling to either of the 2 wilderness tiers for the first time, they will be required also spend the relevant number of compass tokens.
  So what does travelling do? this will depend on where the archaeologist is travelling to.
  Dig site: Sending an archaeologist to a dig site will allow the player to gain some resources.
  ​Unexplored site: When a archaeologist visits a unexplored site, the player immediately gains the idol token(s) located there, along with whatever benefit it confers. as an aside, when a player initially gains an idol it is not placed in any of the 4 idols on their player board
  Then a site tile of the relevant tier is revealed, placed there and immediately resolved. Usually, it confers some benefit or resource on the controlling player
  After this, a guardian tile is revealed and placed there, as you'd imagine, guardians can be bad news. more on this below.
  Defeat guardian: if an archaeologist is on a site with a guardian, then that guardian can be defeated by spending the required resources. That guardian tile is then placed into that player's area and scores VPs at the game end, guardian tiles also have special abilities which have a one-time use.
• Buy card: The active player may purchase a card from the card row.
  Item cards go at the bottom of the purchasing player's deck and artefact cards go straight into their hand.
• Play card: The active player may play a card from their hand for whatever benefit it confers.
  All card are played into the player's play area.
• Research: The active player may move 1 of their 2 research tokens up their relevant track. Sometimes a track may have multiple routes the player can choose. There are some restrictions though.
  Firstly, a player's notebook token cannot go above their magnifying glass token, secondly, there can be a cost to pay for moving up. However there are also usually a benefit for moving along a track. This is generally the only way to acquire assistants.
  If a player reaches the top of the research track, they have reached the temple and get bonus points accordingly, the 1st player to arrive gets the most VPs, later players earn decreasing amounts. Finally players get to choose one of the temple tiles to take when reaching the temple.
• Pass: If the active player cannot perform any other main action, then they must pass. Alternatively, the active player can choose to pass if they so desire.
  Either way, the player is now out of the round and can no longer undertake any  further actions in that round. This means it's likely that players will have uneven actions in a turn and it's possible that someone could be 'last player standing' and get multiple actions in a row.
• Free actions: There are numerous free actions which players can use, they include:
  Cards: Some cards can be played as free actions.
  ​Idol token: A idol can be 'slotted' to confer a benefit to the player as listed on their player board. Since there are only 4 slots, this can only be done 4 times in a game.
  Guardian tiles: A player may flip a guardian tile over to make use of its once-only bonus.
  Assistant tiles: If a player has acquired an assistant or two, then their benefit can be used once per round.
• End of action: After a player has completed their main action and any free actions, play progresses to the player to the left.
• End of round: When the end of a round is reached, a number of actions occur.
  Return archaeologists: Each player takes back their 2 archaeologists, if they are taking back an archaeologist from a site with a guardian tile, then the poor archaeologist has fled in terror and the controlling player adds a fear card to the discarded cards in their player area for each archaeologist fleeing.
  Shuffle cards: Players take all the cards that they played in the round (Which will be in their play area.), shuffles them and puts them at the bottom of their deck. Thus there is no discard pile in Lost Ruins of Arnak. Players can also choose to discard any unplayed cards into their play area before shuffling them to move back into the bottom of their deck.
  Move Moon Staff: Cards around the Moon Staff are discarded out of the game and the staff moves to the right. This means as the 5 rounds progress, more artefact cards will appear in place of diminishing item cards.
• Next round: The starting player moves to the left and the new round starts with all players drawing cards from their deck to take their hand up to 5 cards.

There are some other rules such as for burning cards (Useful for getting rid of fear cards.) and so on, but that's the gist of it.

Endgame
When the 5th round is completed, then so it the game and we go to scoring. There are a variety of opportunities to score.
Research: Research tokens earn VPs depending where they finished on the research track.
Temple tile: Players who reached the temple can score the VPs on these tiles:
Idol tokens: each idol token acquired earns 3 VPs.
Player board idol slots: Each empty slot on a player's player board earns the VPs it displayed. This means when an idol is slotted for a benefit, the VPs it covers are not scored.
Guardian tiles: Each guardian defeated earns the player 5 VPs.
Cards: Aretfact and item cards can also earn the owning player VPs.
Fear cards: Finally; fear cards. Each fear card a player has deducts 1 VP from their total.

Points are tallied, highest score wins!

Overall
Hmmm, what to say about Lost Ruins of Arnak.
It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that this game is sort of a jack of all trades and master of none.
A little bit of deck building, a little bit of worker placement and a little bit of resource management, this game has it all!
Joking aside, this, on a basic level represents 3 different approaches to accumulating VPs. That is; buying cards and using cards, visiting sites and moving up the research track.
Card will get players useful special abilities and travel points, visiting sites will acquire players resources and going up the research track gets other benefits, including assistants.
Players will not want to neglect any of these elements and there's fairly good synergy between different parts of the game, but generally players end up focusing on 1 of them during play.
While the game isn't overly complex, there's quite a lot to consider. Personally, it felt like going up the research track was a good way to score big but it's hard to be sure. 

Another very important factor to think about is turn-economy, there's no set number of turns per round in Lost Ruins and finding ways to get extra main actions is vital. A player who gets 10 actions per round instead of 5 is going to just do better and I have to say, finding way to combo actions into more actions is pretty satisfying. For example, a player might use a card to get resources to move a worker to get different resources to spend on the research which would provide another benefit.
Having said that, taking a single main action at a time can feel frustrating, yes it's a combo system, but it's a slow one - unless you're the only player still with actions.

I found Lost Ruins of Arnak a fun game, but not a particularly compelling one; it's hard to put a finger on. The game's theme fits it's mechanics well and it has great presentation.
I think maybe that all the game's systems, the worker placement and the deck building and so on are all on an individual level, a little uninspiring and bland. The deck building mechanic would never stand on its own for example, neither would the worker placement, on the other hand, they don't need to.

So is the sum greater than the parts? The jury's out.
When I encounter a game I like, I get the urge to buy a copy and I don't get that with Lost Ruins of Arnak.
The game was entertaining but it wouldn't be first choice of mine to play but I happily play it if someone else wanted to.

16th December 2021

It's a Thursday and we're round Simon's for some gaming.

​The game of the night was Le Harve; have you ever had the urge to run a business on the French coast, construct buildings and ships, manage goods, feed your ever expanding workforce and avoid going into debt?
If the answer is yes, then maybe, just maybe, Le Havre is the game you're lookng for.

What's in a game?
Le Havre uses a lot of components, I mean it, A LOT!

• Game board: The game board is composed of 3 large tiles that are placed down together to form the board. It depicts the titular harbour with a wharf and warehouses and it's a fairly busy board too with a lot of spots and locations.
  Resource spaces: There are 6 spaces for the games 8 resources, wait, did I say 8 resources, since the resource tiles are double-sided that means the game actually has 16 resources. Finally there's a spot for the 17th resource - money.
  Supply spaces: There a row of seven of these circular spaces directly beneath the resource spaces.
  Offer spaces: And beneath the port spaces are 7 offer spaces. As the game progresses, goods will move from the resources down to the offer spaces.
  Special buildings: this is where the special buildings deck goes.
  Building proposals: These are 3 spaces which will contain regular building cards which can be built but not bought.
  Ship spaces: There are 4 spaces for the 4 different types of ship that will appear during a game.
  Round cards space: Finally, there's a space for the round cards, there not actually round but are used to track the game's round.

• Cards: Le Havre uses numerous decks of cards.
  ​Round cards/Ship cards: Not all of these are used during a game, depending on player count.
  ​They are arranged in numerical order and are used to not only track rounds, but other events such as harvesting and bringing special buildings into play. They are also double sided and on the other side are ships. When a round is over, the round card is flipped to the other side and becomes a ship available to be bought, thus more and more (And better.) ships become available as a game progresses.
  Ship cards are very useful cards, they allow players to trade resources for cash and also provide food when needed.
  Building cards: These come in 3 types, starter, standard and special and can be bought or used by players. They are functionally more or less identical though. Each card has a cost to buy in some combination of resources and money, it may also have a symbol for it's type. Then the card lists what ability it has, typically this is generate or upgrade resources, although some will construct buildings or ships. 
  Standard cards have a couple of bits of extra info, first, in the top right corner it shows a number, this is the sort order number and determines the order in which cards appear. Finally, at the bottom it repeats the buying info, which will be displayed when the cards are put out.
  Loan cards: If a player runs of cash, then they can take a load card to acquire more money, although this comes at a price...
  Buttery/Player guide: This double-sided card has a buttery on one side and a quick guide to the rules on the other.
• Tokens: As with cards, Le Havre makes use of a lot of tokens. All of them are made of card.
  Cash: These round tokens represent francs.
  Resources: All of these are double-sided, with the basic resource on one side and the upgraded resource on the other. Resources provide food and energy amongst other things and include.
  Cattle/Meat: Produces more cattle and food on the upgraded side.
  Grain/Bread: Produces more grain and also produces food
  Iron/Steel: Used for building.
  Clay/Brick: Also used for building.
  Wood/Charcoal: Produces energy.
  Fish/Smoked fish: Produces food.
  Coal/Coke: Produces energy.
  Hide/Leather​: Can be sold.
• Meeples: Each player is given 2 wooden meeples in their colour, a ship which is used in the port and a disc, which is essentially a worker and placed in buildings.
• Supply tiles: There are 7 of these circular tiles that fit on the supply spaces. Each tile displays an action that must be resolved during the game.

​The art in Le Havre is a bit of a mixed bag. The game board uses fairly simplistic and colourful illustrations that I personally found clear, distinct and looked quite evocative, the same is true of illustrations on the cards. However, the tokens used monochromic artwork which is a little old school. Having said that, it was always clear what they represented.
Which brings me to iconography. Between all the different actions on all the building cards in particular, Le Havre uses a fair amount of iconography. Much of it is straightforward and apparent but some of it will require looking up in the rules. none of it game-breaking though.

How's it play?
Setup

• Round cards: Take the round cards appropriate for the number of players and place them face-up in numerical order on their allotted space. Round cards come into affect at the end of each round.
• Supply tokens: Shuffle the supply tokens into a face-down stack and then place 1 of each face-down on the row of supply spaces.
• Starter buildings: Put out the 3 starter building cards next to the board. These are owned by the town. Furthermore any buildings that are built by players are also owned by the town (Until players purchase them, that is.).
• Building cards: Shuffle the standard building cards into a face-down deck, then deal the cards into 3 smaller face-down stacks.
  Now turn each stack over and sort it buy its sort order number in the top right corner. Thus certain cards will appear earlier in the game than others. Each of the 3 stacks goes into a space on the board but they do not sit stacks. Instead, spread each stack up, so that the info on the bottom of each card is visible and players can see the cost of upcoming cards. Only the top card in each proposal space are available to be built by players.
  Special building cards: Shuffle the deck of special building card and deal 6 cards face-down into a deck on their space on the board. The rest of the deck will not be used in this game.
• Resources: Put all the resources into their specified spaces, then place 2 money, 2 fish, 2 wood and 1 clay token into their respective offer spaces.
• Player: Give each player a ship and disc meeple in their colour as well as 5 cash and 1 coal. Each player's ship should be placed just left of the first supply tile.
• First player: Determine a first player.

On to play
Acquisition of wealth is goal in Le Havre and money becomes victory points at the game end.
The game is played over a number rounds dependant on the number of players. In each round there are 7 turns, you will note that this means that players will not have an equal number of turns and this is by design.
In their turn each player must perform the supply action and has a single main action they can also perform, in addition the active player can also perform buy/sell actions.
When all 7 turns have been completed, there are some end of round actions to resolve before moving on to the next round.
Free actions: These can be performed by the active player at any time.

• Loan: If a player does not have the money to pay for something, then they can take a loan card which gives them 4 currency to spend, paying off a loan card costs 5. Every loan card that a player has during the game end will essentially cost them 7 victory points, so you don't want to keep them!
  Additionally, sometimes players with loan cards will have to pay interest to the supply.
• Buying/Selling: The active player may buy or sell any number of available buildings or ships at any time in their turn, provided they meet the requirements of course. Players cannot buy buildings in the building proposal spaces, because they're not built yet.
  When something is sold, it is at half the cash cost for the building and is sold to the town who will now own it.

Turn actions:

• Supply action: The active player must perform the supply action. This involves moving their ship meeple on to the first available supply token (Going from left to right.), turning over the tile and resolving its action. Usually this involves moving tokens from one resource supply to it's respective offer space.
  Supply tiles are only turned over once during a game and when revealed stay in the same order for the remainder of the game.
• Main action: There are 2 main actions available to the active player and they can perform 1 of them only.
  Take offer: The active player take all the resources on 1 offer space which they can use immediately.
  Enter building: The active player may take their disc and place in any available unoccupied building and use that building's ability.
  Available buildings include any buildings owned by the town or the player, furthermore, a disc may be placed in another player's building, but this will incur a entry fee that must be payed to that player.
  Next player: Once a player has completed their actions, play progresses to the player to the left.

A round ends when the player on the last supply token finishes their turn and leads directly into the end of round actions. This involves resolving the actions on the current round card and include the following.

• Harvest: If this action occurs, players with cattle or grain increase them respectively.
• Feeding: All players must feed their populations, this requires discarding food, how much is needed depends on the round card and a ship lowers this requirement. Money can be used in place of food and must be used if a player does not have enough food.
• Construction: A building from the standard or special buildings may be built by the town and now becomes available to be used or bought players.
• Ship: The round card is flipped over and becomes a ship, it is placed into its relevant spot and can bought by players.
• Next round: All player ship meeples are placed back at the start of the supply track and a new round begins. Whoever was last in the previous round is the starting player in this one, thus they get a double-turn.

Endgame
When the final round is completed, all players have 1 final main action they can perform, after this, the game goes to scoring.
Now each player calculates their wealth which are victory points. This is done by totting up the following:
Value of all building and ships a player owns.
Cash they possess.
Every loan card a player still possess at the game end deducts from the total.
Scores are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
When playing Le Havre players will need to pay attention to several areas of the game. Buildings are very important and players will probably spent a significant number of actions on them, not only do they have to think about to what they've built, what the town owns and what it available to build but what other players have built. Being able to make use of other player's building adds an interesting spin on the game.
Players will need to adapt their strategy to the buildings that become available and while there is a ordering number for buildings, it's still no guarantee of the actual order they become available.

That doesn't mean you can risk ignoring ships or acquiring resources of course, food is vital, probably the single most important thing in the game, you'll constantly need food otherwise you'll eventually be plunged into spiralling debt.
Managing all the resources is also key and the game deliberately forces players to make the hard choice between using a building or taking a resource from an offer space. Resources tend to be relatively scarce at the start of the game and player's will want to optimise their strategies.
Generally money can be used in place of some resources but it's essentially sucking up victory points and getting players closer to having to take a loan, something to avoid if you can.

Players will need to also pay attention to the supply track and their position on it and when their turns will come up, as well as when resources will be moved into the offer spaces.

Even though there were some more rules which I skipped over describing, I wouldn't call La Havre a very heavy game. I did find it a little fiddly with the occasional little rule popping up here or there and at the start I did find the game a little obtuse.
​Once you get over that hump Le Havre becomes a mostly straightforward game and proves a challenging game with meaningful decisions to make.

I do have a criticism of Le Havre though - and that's the playtime, it's just too long! This is a known issue too as the rules contain a 'shortened' variant of the game!
A 5-player game is expected to take 210 minutes over 20 rounds, that's 3 ½ hours and quite frankly, that's an underestimation.
Think about it; 210 minutes over 20 rounds is 10 minutes 30 seconds per round and each round has 7 turns, that works out at 90 seconds per turn. Do you think that the kind of players that like this type of game spend just 90 seconds per turn? If every player spends 2 minutes taking their turn instead of 90 seconds, it would add 70 minutes to the playtime. 😭

It meant that the down time between turns felt like it lasted forever and at times was just more frustrating than fun or compelling, which was what I ultimately took away from it.

If you like resource-management games that are slightly on the heavy side, then Le Havre might be worth a look, provided you can commit the time.
To be honest, it's a game that rainy, chilled Sunday afternoons are perfect for.

30th November 2022

It's a Tuesday night and we're at The Sovereigns in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club.

The main game of the evening was Atlantis Rising.
Atlantis; the mythical civilisation swallowed by the seas and lost to time, how did this happen? Clearly it was caused by a band of bumbling table-top gamers!

What's in a game?

• Board tiles: Atlantis Rising comes with 37 double-sided tiles that when placed together form the game board. It's no ordinary looking game board though and when placed together looks like a very unique 6-pronged asterisk or a '*'.
  Each of the 6 prongs or more accurately 6 peninsulas consists of 6 tile segments featuring a different terrain type and each tile within a peninsula will show a number of worker spaces, mostly 1 or 2 and an action that is associated with placing a worker in one of those spaces, 3 peninsulas also reference a number ranging from 3-6. The other side of the tiles depicts the terrain underwater, not a good thing I'd imagine.
  The hills, mountains and forests produce gold, ore and crystal respectively, 3 of the game's 4 resources. These 3 terrains also show dice values
  The 4th peninsula is The Forge and allows players to turn resources into Atlantium, the game's 4th resource.
  The plains allows players to acquire more workers.
  Finally, the library peninsula allows players to acquire knowledge cards.
  The centre tile allows players to gain mystic energy.
• Mystic Energy: Glass beads are used to represent mystic energy.
• Resources: Little wooden cubes are used to represent the game's 4 types of resource. Little Wooden cubes, now we're talking!
• Tokens: These are standard card tokens used in this case to represent courage and mystic barriers. These Atlanteans sure like their mysticism!
• Dice: These are 3 normal six-siders.
• Attack die: Not content with 3 dice, Atlantis Rising also comes with this attack die, it is not a normal six-sider and ranges from 1-4.
• Atlantean navy board: Player may put their workers here to join the navy, why? Well come on, to protect the motherland!
  Along 1 edge of this board is the Athenian attack track, it's value starts at 0 and potentially rises to 12. The Athenian meeple galley moves along this track over turns, making the Athenians more and more dangerous. Speaking of which...
• Athenian galley: This wooden ship meeple represents the Athenian Navy who really and I mean really hate the Atlanteans. Every turn they will attack in greater numbers and must be driven off.
• Cosmic gate blueprint cards: These cards are essentially objective cards that the players must meet to win the game.
  There are 4 decks of cards labelled A-D which have increasing levels of difficulty.
• Misfortune cards: Pretty explanatory really. These cards cause problems for the players and generally cause parts of Atlantis to sink, they represent the chief threat to their chances of success.
  Typically, misfortune cards sink 1 segment in 1 peninsula but some do far worse things.
• Knowledge cards: These cards always provide some sort of benefit to the players can be at almost any time.
• Player boards: These differently coloured boards all have a different roles which confer some a benefit or special ability on the controlling player.
• Meeples: These are classic wooden meeples, they come in colours that match the player boards.
  Grey meeples: These are ordinary citizens of Atlantis that can be temporarily be recruited for a single round at a time.

This that's pretty much it for components.

The quality of the components is as you'd expect from modern games universally good, the game makes extensive use of wooden tokens for meeples, resources and even the Athenian ship, which I like. The addition of glass tokens is also a nice touch and appreciated.

From the perspective of art direction, I'd call the art good but not exceptional, it is however, clear and functional when needed, the different terrains are always easily discernible.
I'd be remiss if I didn't comment on the board. It genuinely looks unique and eye-catching. It's not a gimmick either and makes sense in relation to the game's mechanics.

The game's iconography is straightforward and easy to understand.

How's it play?
Setup
The setup for Atlantis Rising is relatively simple.

• Atlantis: Create the game board.
• Cosmic gate: Sort the blueprint cards out by their 4 types and shuffle them into 4 face-down decks. 9 cards should be drawn from these decks, the mix of decks used will depend on the difficulty chosen by the players. The 10th and final card is always the power core.
  Thus players will have 10 blueprint cards to complete.
• Atlantean Navy: Set out the Atlantean Navy board and place the Athenian galley on its allotted starting spot.
• Players: Give each player a player board, the allotted amount of starting meeples and a mystic energy token.
• First player: Determine a starting player

Now we're ready to begin.

On to play
Each round in Atlantis Rising consists in a number of phases.

• Place workers: Starting with the 1st player and going to the left, each player places all their workers on to the peninsulas on the Atlantis board or the Atlantean Navy board.
  Some spots will have spaces for 2 workers who may be the same or different colours. Some spots require 2 workers of the same colour.
  When players put their workers on to the peninsulas - which they'll be doing a lot, it should be noted that the spaces which provide the most benefit will also be the ones closest to the sea and at most risk to flooding, why is this significant? read on.
  Finally, when all workers have been placed, who ever put the most on the Atlantean Navy board gains a courage token, more on courage tokens later.
• Misfortune: Once all workers have been placed, it's time for some misfortune!
  Beginning with the 1st player and going left, each player draws a misfortune card and immediately resolves it.
  Most of these cards will flood a single tile in a specific peninsula but some will cause worse problems. When a peninsula is hit by flooding, it's outermost unflooded tile becomes flooded, this is done by flipping it over to the flooded side, any workers on that tile are returned to their owners. If a peninsula is already full flooded, then the active player must flood two tiles elsewhere.
  When all players have resolved misfortune cards, the game progresses to the next phase.
• Resolution: Now, again beginning with the starting player and going left, each player resolves the workers they've placed on Atlantis. How this works will depend on where the workers have been placed. Workers that been placed on the Atlantean Navy board are resolved in the following phase.
  Resources: Acquiring gold, ore and crystal requires the active player to roll a die for each worker they have on a resource space, the result must be equal or higher than the die shown next to the respective space. The further along the peninsula the worker is placed, the lower the number they must roll and the easier it is to acquire the resource.
  It should be noted that some resources will naturally be harder to gain due to higher target numbers.
  Forge: This allows the active player to turn 1 ore into Atlantium for each worker placed. No roll is required and the further along the peninsula, the more Atlantium is acquired for that single ore.
  Library: Workers placed here allow the active player to gain knowledge cards. As with the other peninsulas, the number they can draw/keep depends how far each worker is along the peninsula.
  Recruit: Placing workers here allows the active player to increase their worker count. Unlike other peninsulas with multiple worker spaces, all the spaces here must be filled with workers from a single player.
  Basically the active player sends 2 workers into the bushes and a new worker emerges, you can draw your own conclusions.
  Except at the furthest point on the peninsula only 1 worker is needed and closer to the centre 3 are needed. So I don't know what's going on there!
  Centre space: Finally any number of workers can be placed on the centre space and each worker put here earns the owning player a mystic energy bead.
• Athenian attack: Once all players have resolved their worker actions, it's time for the Athenians to attack!
  How do those pesky Athenians attack? They generate a combat value which comes from 2 sources, firstly from the Athenian galley's position on the Atlantean Navy board which goes from 0-12  and is combined with a roll from the attack die, which gives a result from 1-4.
  Thus if the galley is on the 1+ spot, it will actually generate a value of 2-5, if the galley on the 5+ spot it will generate a value of 6-9.
  Once the combat value is generated, it must be compared to the the number of workers that all the players have collectively put on the Atlantean Navy board. If the number of workers exceeds the value, nothing happens. However, if the value exceeds the workers, then a number of tiles equal to the difference must be flooded. So if the players have put 2 workers on the navy board and the combat value is 4, 2 tiles must be flooded.
• Cosmic gate: The final phase allows each player to build one of the blueprint cards by spending the required resources, players must do this individually and cannot share resources to do it.
  Additionally, when a blueprint is completed, it immediately confers a one-off bonus or benefit.
• Round end: The Athenian galley is advanced 1 space along its track and the 1st player marker passes to the left. A new round begins with the new 1st player placing their workers.

That's it for how a round goes, there are some extra rules though.

• Knowledge cards: These can be used by the owning player at any time so long as it does not interrupt another action or event.
  Each player have a maximum of 4 knowledge cards in their hand at any time.
• Courage tokens: There are 2 ways to use a courage token and with both methods, the token is used along with a worker.
  A courage token can be played with a worker that is placed on a peninsula space. If, during the misfortune phase, that tile is flooded, the worker immediately completes the action before the flooding occurs and is returned to its owner while the courage token is discarded. If the tile is not flooded, then during the resolution phase, when the worker completes their action, the courage token is retained by the player, which is pretty sweet.
  The 2nd use for a courage token is playing it with a worker put on to the Atlantean Navy board. This worker counts as 2 workers when it comes to dealing with the Athenian galley. The courage tokens is discarded after this.
• Mystic barrier: When 1 of these tokens is placed on a peninsula, it will protect that peninsula from flooding once, after which is is discarded.
• Mystic energy: There are multiple uses for mystic energy.
  Resources: If the active player is making a roll to gain resources, each mystic energy spent adds 1 to the roll.
  Transmutation: The active player may spend 2 mystic energy to change any 1 resource for another.
  Cancel misfortune: When a tile is about to be flooded due to a misfortune card, 3 mystic energy can be spent to prevent this, it can be spent by a single player or collectively buy any number of players.
  Unflip flooded tile: 5 mystic energy can be spent to flip a tile back to its unflooded side. This can be spent collectively by any number of players.

Endgame
Play continues until 1 of 2 conditions is met.
If all the tiles on the Atlantis map are flooded - including the centre tile, then the players collectively lose.
If the players manage to build all 10 cosmic gate blueprints, they immediately win.

Overall
Just to clarify, it was the the 1st edition we played, there is a 2nd edition which has some notable changes.

Despite its nifty, unorthodox board, Atlantis Rising's central premise will be familiar to players of cooperative games. That is; players will be faced with the choice of working towards completing objectives to win the game or firefighting whatever will cause them to lose, in the case of Atlantis Rising that's 2 sources, the misfortune deck and the Athenian attacks. What Atlantis Rising brings to the table though, is a push-you-luck element.

Luck is an inherent part of cooperative games and is used to mitigate players' abilities to out-strategize a game, but these push-you-luck elements add something quite different.
When picking an action, players will also have to decide how much they want the resource, card or whatever, playing it safe might not get you what you need or enough of what you need.
The same is true when dealing with the Athenians, it requires a lot of meeples to be fully safe from them, but the true number required is never known due to the attack die roll. Sometimes it might better to put a meeple or 2 less, it might be riskier, but it gives you 2 workers that could have a vital use elsewhere.
In both instances it's a solid use of risk/reward and it gave me the feeling that it's hard to win the game by playing cautiously and at some points players just have to take risks.

Having said that, I do have an issue with the whole Athenian attack mechanic. I really don't like how the players have to collectively commit more and more workers to fighting the Athenians off. It can mean players are making effort to acquire workers simply for this purpose and feels like quite a negative mechanic. I'm not alone in this thought as this was revised for the 2nd edition.

This also brings me to another element of the game; as it progress on and more tiles flood, players will get less and less choice where to place their workers. It feels counter to how games - especially worker placement games flow, typically a player's choices and options expand as a game goes on but Atlantis Rising does the opposite, I know that it's part of the game's challenge and players need to work to prevent this but still sort of feels off.

Other than these two criticisms, Atlantis Rising is a perfectly acceptable game that cooperative gamers will be comfortable with. ​Atlantis Rising doesn't stand out from the crowd but neither does it do anything wrong.
Personally, I like how it looks, especially watching Atlantis gradually sink!

12th November 2021

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

“I beg your pardon,” said the Mole, pulling himself together with an effort. “You must think me very rude; but all this is so new to me."

Well, Everdell is new to me, mixing various game mechanics and lush anthropomorphic artwork.

What's in a game?
Everdell is a game that has a big footprint and a lot components.

• Game board: Everdell's board is a curious circular shape and the central area is called the 'meadow'. Around the meadow with numerous spots to place the game's resources. There also various worker locations dotted across the maps, including some blank worker spaces that will be populated with randomly determined worker locations during the game setup. There also some location for 'events'. More on events later.
  Most of the worker locations earn players some combination of the game's resources and/or cards. E.G., 2 twigs and a card or 1 resin and a card.
• Tree: The game comes with a tree made of gameboard that can be constructed, placed on the board and used to hold various components.
• Basic event tiles: These score point when acquired.
• Resources: Everdell uses 4 main types of resources, berries, twigs, resin and pebbles. These are represented by shaped 3d plastic tokens.
• Meeples: Each player has up to 6 workers they can use, these wooden tokens are shaped in the style of different type of anthropomorphic animals.
• Cards: Broadly speaking, the game uses several different types of cards.
  Critter & construction cards: These are the core of the game and as the name suggests, come in 2 types. In the top left corner is the requirement or cost to play them, just below is the card type and at the bottom of each card it displays what benefit it confers such as victory points and more. There is a wide variety of different benefits available, this may even include extra places to put workers and sometimes these are modified by other cards.
  Special event cards: These cards are a variation on the event tiles above and as such will score when player's meet their requirements.
  Forest cards: These are used on the board to provide randomly generated worker spots in each game.
• Victory point tokens: Standard card tokens.

No doubt about, Everdell has fantastic production values.
The components are well made and the attention to detail for the most part is excellent. In particular, the resources look great as do the individualised meeples. We didn't use the tree but it's a nice touch
Even if the anthropomorphised artwork is not to your taste, it's hard to fault the quality of the artwork and rich, warm colour palettes used throughout on the board and all the cards.
​Iconography is where the game could be improved though. Sometimes, the text used on the critter and construction cards is perhaps a little too small as are the symbols and sometimes, to maintain the game's aesthetic, you'll encounter a small around of tiny writing surrounded by a lot of unused space. Having said that, it's a quibble, not a gamebreaker and doesn't really detract from the game's quality

How's it play?
Setup

• Meadow: Shuffle the critter & construction cards into a face-down deck, then draw and place 8 of them face-up into the meadow on the board.
• Forest cards: Shuffle the forest cards and deal out the allotted amount as per player count face-up on to the blank spots on the board. This means that some of the worker spots are randomly generated each game.
• Events:
  Event tiles: Put out the basic event tiles on to their allotted spaces on the board.
  Special event cards: Shuffle these cards and deal 4 face-up on to their allotted spaces.
• Cards: Determine the starting player; then each player should draw cards from the deck, starting with the 1st player who gets 5, then 2nd gets 6 and thus forth.
• Meeples: Each player takes only 2 meeples in their colour, the remaining 4 will be acquired before the game's 3 later turns. 

Now we're pretty much ready to go.

On to play
The objective in Everdell is to construct the best city, that is the city that scores the most victory points. Players achieve this by playing critters and constructions into their tableau.
​When somebody becomes the active player, they can perform 1 action from a choice of 3 and then player progresses to the player to the left. Players continue performing actions until they have to or choose to stop; in which case the season has ended for them. Everdell is played over 4 seasons.

• Place worker: The active player may place a worker on a available spot. This will allow them to gain a mix of resources, cards or victory points depending on which spot it is.
  Some spots only allow for the placement of a single worker but some allow multiple players to make use of them. Furthermore, some cards that may get played have spots to place workers and acquire whatever benefits the card confers. This means a player may end up placing a worker in another player's tableau!
• Play card: The active player can play a card as their action, cards provide lots of actions or abilities which can be performed, too many to list here.
  Broadly speaking, cards come in two categories; critters and constructions which can also be common or unique. Cards also have a type such as Tan Traveller or Green Production which affect what function the card performs.
  For example Tan Traveller cards have a once-only benefit, but Green Production cards produce something whenever a production phase is triggered.
  Playing a card requires spending the relevant resources, having said that, the game has some synergy between cards and some critters can be played for free if the linked construction is already in the player's tableau.
  Players can play card types in sets to acquire event tiles/cards; e.g. the Grand Tour event can be earned if the player puts 3 destination cards into their tableau.  
• Prepare for Season: Players can continue taking actions until they run out of workers and cards that can be played, when this happens, the player must prepare for the next season.
  This involves taking back their workers plus an additional worker or two from the supply, players may be able to re-activate production cards in their tableau or take cards from the meadow, all depending on the season.

When all players have prepared for season, then the current season is over and play moves to the next one.

Endgame
When the 4th season is completed, then the game is over.
Victory points can be scored from a variety or sources, including cards, tokens and events.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
It's obvious that a lot of thought and care has gone into the game's presentation and charm. It's one of the best looking games I've seen in a while and I always appreciate the extra effort committed to a game.

Hmmm, what else to say about Everdell; for the most part, it's initially a pretty solid, straightforward game, although it feels a like a bit of a slow burner.
While the game's cards provide players with a variety of approaches choices and plays to make. Having said that, the game's action-economy is actually quite tight, almost too harsh. E.g, in the 1st season, players will only have 2 workers to gain resources in order to play cards, it means players will have to pay close attention to optimising their plays and actions. card synergy can make a big difference.
It gave me the feeling that players will need to know what they're doing from their first action in order to play Everdell competitively.

Additionally, in comparison to other tableau building games, it feels like the tableau in Everdell provides much more limited benefits that lacks the satisfaction putting together a good tableau.
​At best, production cards are reactivated once every other season - or round - but because players have multiple actions in a single season, it means a lengthy gap before those reactivations. This is something players will need to consider when playing cards.
All of this makes the choices in Everdell important - which is the sign of a good game.

Ultimately though, I just found it a little unexciting and unengaging and while it wouldn't be my first choice, I'd have no qualms about playing Everdell again.

19th October 2021

Tuesday evening has come around again and we're at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club.

The first game of the night was Unearth; a dice-rolling, worker placement game set after a distant apocalypse where players command a band of 'delvers' searching for lost wonders of the long past age. Basically archaeologists sans the bullwhips and giant rock chases!

What's in a game?

• ​Ruins cards: These oversized cards come in 2 types.
  Ruins deck: There are 25 of these cards that come in 5 colours. Each card displays 2 numbers. A claims value in the top left corner and a stones value in the bottom right; more on these below.
  End of age deck: There are 5 of these cards and only 1 is ever used at a time, they only appears at the end of the game. Each card has a special rule that only comes into play when it is revealed.
• Delver cards: Conversely, delver cards are half-size. When acquired by players, they can be spent before an action to confer some sort of bonus or benefit to that action. 
• Wonders cards: The ancient world was filled with now-destroyed wonders and these cards represent those and come in 3 kinds; minor wonders, major wonders and named wonders.
  There is only 1 wonder card each for minor and major wonders (All minor wonders are identical, as are major.) but there are 15 unique named wonder cards.
• Hexagonal tokens: These six-sided tiles come in various types.
  Stone tokens: These are used to rebuild the wonders of the world and come in 5 colours.
  Minor wonders: There are 10 identical minor wonder tokens.
  Major wonders: There are 6 of these identical tokens.
  Named wonders: There are 15 unique named wonder tokens, each one attributed to one of the named wonder cards.
• Bag: Used in conjunction with the stone tiles.
• Dice: These are the workers of the game (The delvers.), there are 4 sets and each set consists of the 5 dice; an eight-sided die, three normal six-siders and a four sided dice.
• Model: This copy of the game came with a curious little model depicting a 3d version of the delvers and appears to serve no function.

​The cards and tokens are all good quality and you'd expect them to be. The dice are plastic and round edged, they roll well enough.
For the ruins cards, Unearth uses some distinct eye-catching colour palettes and isometric cuboid artwork to depict the long destroyed structures. 
For the delver cards, an almost cartoony style is used to illustrate the workers/dice.
Overall, I like the art style.
The game doesn't make much use of iconography, what there is of it is pretty simple to comprehend.

How's it play?
Setup

• Stone tokens: Place all the stone tokens into the bag and give it a good shake.
• Ruins deck: Shuffle the ruins deck and deal one card face-down to each player, this should be kept hidden.
  Then remove 5 cards, these are not used in the game.
  End of age card: Shuffle the end of age deck, draw 1 face-down and put it at the bottom of the ruins deck, thus it will be the final card drawn from the deck.
• Draw ruin cards: Draw 5 cards from the ruins deck and place in a face-up row.
  Stone tokens: Blindly draw stone tokens from the bag and place on to the face-up ruins cards; the stone value in the bottom right corner of each card will determine how many stone tokens go on each card.
• Wonders: Put out the minor and major wonder cards face-up, put the corresponding wonder tokens in a stack on each card:
  Named wonders: Shuffle the deck of named wonders and draw cards as determined by the player count, put them out face-up and place each card's unique wonder token on top of it.
• Delver cards: Shuffle the delver deck and deal 2 to each player.
• First player: Give each player a set of dice and determine the starting player.

On to play
In Unearth, players take turns and are attempting to use delvers to acquire sets of ruin cards, that is place rolled dice on ruins card and also build wonders by accumulating and placing stone.
Broadly speaking there can be 2 phases that the active player acts in, the delving phase and the building phase.

• Delver cards: The active player may choose to play 1 or more delver cards for their respective bonuses.
• Roll a die: The active player must roll a die, if they don't have a die available for any reason, then they must take back a die they previously placed on a ruins card.
  Declare: Before rolling any dice, the active player must choose which die to roll and which ruin to put it on to.
  Roll the die: The active player must roll the die they chose and place it on the ruin card they chose! What does this do, well read on.
• Results: What happens when a die is placed on a ruins card depends on what was rolled among other factors.
  1, 2 or 3: If the die result was 1 of these 3 numbers, then the active play may immediately claim a stone token from that card the die was placed on to. If the card has no tokens left on it, then they draw blindly from the bag.
  Completing a claim: After a die has been placed on a ruins card, total the value of all the dice placed on that card, if that value meets or beats the card's claims value (The number in the top left corner.), then that card can be claimed.
  The player who has a single die showing the highest value claims the card, the number of dice a player has on a card has no direct bearing other than possibly in tie-breakers. Players who lose out on claiming a card, acquire a delver card for each die they had placed on the claimed card, so it's not all bad.
  When a card is claimed, a new card is drawn to replace it.
• Building wonders: When a player acquires a stone token, they add it to their play area by placing it next to any other stone token they've acquired and increase their 'tableau'. The objective here is to create 'rings' of 6 stones and then fill the 'space' by building a wonder in the hole. There are however, some requirements.
  Minor wonder: A minor wonder can be placed in a space surrounded by tokens of any colour
  Major wonder: A major wonder must be surrounded by stone tokens of the same colour.
  Named wonders: Each unique named wonder will have it's own requirements to be met, e.g., this may include 3 of 1 colour and 3 or any other colour.
• Next player: Once the active player has completed delving and/or building, play passes to the player to the left.

Endgame
Play continues until the end of age card is revealed, any instructions on that card are immediately resolved, then play continues until all ruins cards have been claimed.
​
Players then score for each set of the same colour they've collected. Sets range from 1-5 cards and score 2-30 points per set. there are also points for sets of each colour collected.
Players can then score points from the individual wonders they've built, they also score for building 3 or more wonders.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
The sum of Unearth's parts make it a fairly unusual game. It provides 2 distinct paths to scoring points and neither can be entirely ignored.
Set collecting is one way to earn victory points and the card collecting mechanics are quite solid, giving players who fail to acquire a card some sort of other benefit and the range of dice available to players that give them a couple of options is key to this. Players can play for the card or try and play for the stones - the eight-sided die has a slightly better chance of roll higher than a six-sider and four sided die has a 75% chance of rolling 3 or lower, they each give advantage but don't guaranteed success.

The other path to victory points - building wonders requires players to both plan ahead and also adapt to opportunities and changes as they appear, collecting stones of a particular colour can always prove tricky, especially if another player is also on the hunt for stone tokens. There are also some restrictions on how stone tiles are placed and depending on what a stones a player is trying to get, placing them may require a small amount of planning and forethought.

I found Unearth a little unengaging and I can't quite put my finger on why, maybe it's the game's slightly abstract nature or maybe that it feels like little is ever happening.
Very little seems to occur in a player's turn, quite often a player rolls a dice and there's no immediate effect, sometimes they get a stone, sometimes they don't, occasionally they get a ruins card. Often it felt like that despite my decisions, little was in my control.

All of this makes the game sort of light on decision making. Players choose which ruins card to gamble a doe on and when to use a delver card, or where to place a stone token when they gain one and that's about it. There's just not that much to it.
I can't find much to fault Unearth but then I can't find much to praise it either. It's all a little unexciting.

7th September 2021

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

The first game of the night was Merv.

What's in a game?

• Game board: Merv is a busy game and consequently has a busy board loaded with information, spaces and tracks!
  City: The central part of the board is dominated by a 5x5 grid, this is the city of Merv. The grid is considered to have a north, east, south and west side. It's also surrounded by 'wall spaces'.
  Caravansary: This is a 'caravan of camels' where players can go to buy spice.
  Influence track: As players complete certain actions, they move along this track which allows them to acquire different types of spice.
  Library: This is where players can acquire scrolls and as they do so, they will also acquire benefits or bonuses called breakthroughs.
  Marketplace: Players can travel to other settlements to buy various goods. The marketplace contains 4 inner cities and 4 outer cities.
  Mosque: Players can move along this track to acquire benefits and bonuses.
  Palace: Players can send courtiers to the palace to earn victory points - at a cost.
  Favour track: Used in conjunction with the Palace.
• City tiles: These are used in the city.
  Camel market: This double-sided tile sits in the centre of the 5x5 grid.
  Building sites: There are 24 of these other tiles that populate the rest of the city. Players will be able to construct buildings on these sites.
  When activated, building sites provide resource cubes in their colours as well as 1 of 6 actions.
• Caravan cards: This deck of cards is used to represent the 4 different types of spice available to purchase, however the distribution of spices is not equal on the cards, some are rarer. From most common to rare, they are; cinnamon, ginger, juniper & pepper. Caravan cards confer 2 bonuses'
  Doubles: Whenever a player completes a pair, they get a bonus depending on what type of spice it is.
  Set collecting: During the endgame, sets of cards score victory points.
• Contract cards: These represent business or trade contracts which players can complete for victory points and other rewards.
  Completing a contract usually requires a mixture of resources, goods and scrolls. Players will also require a minimum level of influence in order to complete contracts.
  Unusually, goods and contracts are not spent when completing a contract, they are simply placed on the card, which prevents them being used for other contracts.
  There are 6 types of contract card.
• Goods tiles: There 24 common and 24 rare goods tiles.
• Scroll tiles: These represent the world of academia in Merv
• Breakthrough tiles: Earn enough scroll tiles and a player will acquire a breakthrough tile, these tiles confer a bonus or benefit of some kind.
• Upgrade tiles: Used to upgrade buildings that are constructed.
• Scoring tiles: These score points at the end of every year and are acquired from the mosque track.
• Camel meeples: Wooden meeples.
• Resources: Little wooden cubes, now you're talking. They come in 5 colours and represent the game's 4 different types of errr resources? The white cubes are considered wild.
• Wall tokens: These wooden tokens are shaped in the style of city walls.
• Buildings: There are 9 each of these wooden tokens in each of the 4 player colours.
• Wooden disks: Merv has a lot of tracks that need tracking and wooden disks are used to track those tracks! There are 10 in each colour.
• Meeples: Each player gets a Master Meeple and 8 worker meeples in their colour.

Merv has top-notch components; the cards and tiles are all good quality. cubes, tokens and meeples all look good, made of wood and feel solid, the walls are the standout components here and really look nice when set on the on the board and surrounding the city.
​
Despite its busyness, the game board is well illustrated and colourful, artwork on cards is also clear and colourful.

For the most part the iconography is clear and easy to understand.
Unfortunately, this does not extend to the symbols used to represent the game's 6 actions, these were a constant source of confusion and error.

​For example; the mosque action uses a minaret symbol but actually involves moving camel meeples along a track, but the symbols with camels on it is used to represent the caravansary! Why? Because the caravansary used camels to move spices! However, in game, the caravansary action only is used to get spices and has nothing to do with camels
This means that camels are used to represent spices and minarets are used to represent camels! It verges on the ridiculous.
It didn't help that all 6 symbols were the same colour so that it matched the colour theme of the board.

How's it play?
Setup

• City: Randomly choose one side of the camel market tile and place it at the centre of the 5x5 grid.
  Shuffle all of the build site tiles and randomly place them in the city, filling out all 24 spaces.
• Caravansary: shuffle the caravan cards into a face-down deck.
  Draw 8 cards and place them face-up in a row along the edge of the board close to the caravansary space. Then place camels on cards according to the number of players.
• Contract cards: Put the contract cards face-up into their 6 respective decks with the highest value card at the top and in descending order, making the earlier contracts more valuable.
• Library: Place the scroll and breakthrough tokens on their Library spaces.
• Mosque: The upgrade tokens go on to the mosque track, as do 4 camel meeples.
• Marketplace: Place a camel meeple on each of the 4 inner cities in the marketplace.
• Tokens: Give each player their meeples, disks and building tokens.
• Player order: Determine starting player.

I'm sure I've missed some steps, but it's pretty much covered.

On to play
Merv is played over 3 years and in each year there are 4 rounds, players have 1 action per round, thus 12 actions in total.
Taking actions in Merv are quite unusual, play takes place around the 5x5 grid and each round takes place across 1 side of the grid (Starting on the north side.), then in the subsequent round, play moves clockwise to the next side of the grid and so on, so by the 4th round, a complete circuit will have been completed.

• Place meeple: When a player takes their turn, they place their Master Meeple on one of the 5 spaces on the currently active side of the grid and activates one of the 5 building sites in that column/row. When this happens, the following occurs.
  Build: If there is no building on the activated site, then the active player must put one of their buildings there.
  Resources: The active player gains a resource in the colour indicated on the site they activated, furthermore they also gain resources from any sites of the same colour in the same column/row, provided those sites also have buildings. Thus it pays to position buildings in certain ways over turns to be able to generate multiple resources at a time as the game progresses.
  If those buildings belong to other players, then those players additionally acquire resources.
  Then one of the following is chosen.
  Deploy soldier: The active player may place one of their soldiers on to a tile with a building that is not already protected, this protects the building and earns them influence. What is protection for? More on this later.
  Gain favour: Move a space along the favour track at the palace.
  Action: The player use the action on the activated site, actions are the main staple of Merv and players will be using them most of the time.
  Camel market: If the active player has chosen the middle space of the 5, then they can access the camel market tile. The active player may use one of the tiles 4 special abilities by placing a camel meeple on the abilities' space, alternatively, they may collect all the camel meeples previously placed on the camel market tile.
• Actions: There are 6 types of action in Merv.
  Caravansary: This action allows the active player to purchase caravan cards by spending resource cubes, they will also acquire camel meeples if they're on the purchased caravan card.
  Caravan cards come in 4 types, the number of different types a player can hold at any time depends on how far they've travelled along the influence track.
  Every pair of caravan cards earns the player a bonus and sets earn victory points at the end of the game.
  Library: When a player takes the library action, they can spend resources to purchase scrolls. For every 2 scrolls a player acquires, they also acquire a breakthrough.
  Scrolls also have uses elsewhere.
  Marketplace: This grants the active player access to the marketplace which consists of 8 cities, this requires establishing a camp in one of the 4 inner cities. The first player to do this acquires the camel on the city.
  Once a camp has been built, the player can spend resources to buy goods from that city, they may also buy goods from adjacent cities by spending the required goods and a camel meeple. In later actions the player can expand their network of camps and thus do away with the need to spend camels to reach those cities.
  Camels spent this way are placed on caravan cards in the caravansary.
  Mosque: There are 4 camel meeples on the mosque track and taking this action allows the active player to move them. They may move as far as they want, provided they can pay the cost in resource cubes for each move. Every time a player advances along the track, it earns them a bonus; this might be a building upgrade, scoring upgrade and so on.
  Palace: The palace consists of 2 elements; the 4 halls and the favour track.
  Moving up the favour track scores victory points for the active player.
  Each of the 4 halls has 3 spaces and a cost, paying the associated cost allows the player to place meeples in these halls, which will score the player victory points at the end of every year for either scrolls, spices, good or buildings on mosque building sites. Points are earned by spending the advancements made on the favour track.
  Wall: This action allows the active player to build walls around the 5x5 grid, they can build as many segments in action as they can afford in resource points.
  Walls provide protection to the buildings they shield and also earn the player influence.
• Complete contract: If a player has the required mix of influence, resources cubes, goods, spices and scrolls, they may complete a contract in their turn and immediately score the contract's victory points.
  Completing a contract generally requires multiple actions, fortunately completing a contract itself is a free action.
• End of round: At the end of the round a new turn order may be established for the following round.
• End of year: Once the 4th round has been completed, the year has reached its end, but it's not quite over. There are still a couple matters to conclude.
  Invasion: In years 2 & 3, the Mongol horde invades and every unprotected building is destroyed! Although players may bribe the Mongols to leave a building alone with a resource cube matching the site's colour.
  End of year scoring: At the end of each year players score points, these come from several sources.
  Buildings: Each building scores the player a point.
  Scoring tiles: Scoring tiles acquired from the mosque track score points.

Endgame
Once the 3rd year is over and has been scored, there is there final scoring to calculate.
Sets of caravan cards score points.
Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
Merv has several approaches to acquiring victory points but resource cubes is key to nearly all of them and the resource cube economy is very important. Acquiring cubes may conflict with choosing actions if the building site a player wants to activate produces cubes of a different colour, players will have to make choices and adapt.
Having said that, it pays to diversify but it also pays to pursue one one strategy such as the caravansary or mosque track.
Completing contracts feels like more of a bonus for sharp-eyed players than a long-term approach.
Players also need to consider palace actions, placing workers into the right spaces in halls and moving along the favour track can be a good source of points.

Players will need to also look towards defending Merv from attackers, losing buildings also loses the ability to gain resource cubes in later turns and of course loses victory points for the affected player(s).

Merv is definitely on the heavier side of board games, but to be honest it didn't feel deep, just fiddly.
I never got the feeling that I was making clever plays, instead I got the feeling that Merv was a heavy game made for the sake of being a heavy game.
When I took an action, it often felt like I was doing 2 half actions instead of 1 whole one and it took multiple different actions to achieve something.

E.g., I would undertake the marketplace action and acquire a good, Was I able to sell that good? No!
What about spices, what if I'd acquired spices? Can't sell them either.
To sell something, that is to complete a contract, I needed influence, which earned by building walls and also scrolls, which are acquired by visiting the library. Of course I also needed resources cubes.
​I know that some people will love this idea but I found it unengaging and a little dull and verging on tedious. Merv feels a little dry, unexciting and detached.