24th November 2019 Sunday at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking. The 50 Fathoms hiatus continues, so it's board games instead. We began with 'Tsuro: The game of the Path'. And that's what Tsuro is, a game about paths, quite figuratively. It's also quite abstract and there's not much to say about the theme. What's in the game? The game comes in a small package.
How's it play? Set up is quick and simple.
Endgame Play continues until one of the following conditions are met:
Overall
Tsuro is a small game, quick to setup, quick to learn and quick to play. It is essentially a light 'programming' game that requires a small amount of scrutiny and forethought to try and predict your moves. The real danger in the game however, comes from the other players, it's impossible to predict what tiles they will play and its impact on you. Essentially you can't rely on planning more than 1 move ahead and have to adapt to other player's moves as they occur, this is particularly true later in the game as the board becomes fuller and options become smaller. All this unpredictability makes Tsuro fun, as long as you don't try and think too much about what moves you can make. Additionally, Tsuro plays with up to 8 participants, combined with it's accessibility make it a good choice for party games and fillers.
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29th October 2019 Tuesday night gaming at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking with the board game club continues. The final game of the night was 'Grand Austria Hotel'. It doesn't take much imagination to realise that this is a game about running a hotel. That's right, keep those restaurant customers happy. Manage all those hotel rooms. Maintain the prestige of your establishment. All the fun! Joking aside, Grand Austria is pretty good game. The rules are fairly straightforward to learn, but there's a lot of things to think about and take into consideration. A lot of things! What's in a game? Grand Austria Hotel has a lot of components. They are all quite colourful and well made.
How's it play? We begin with setup.
The turn order is a little unusual in Grand Austria Hotel. Every player gets 2 turns in a round. All players are given a token with 2 numbers on it - which is when their turns will occur. Turns proceed clockwise until all players have had their first turn, then goes back anticlockwise so that the last player was also the first player. In a 4 player game, the first player will have a token that shows '1/8' and the fourth player will have a token showing '4/5'. Actions The first thing the active player can choose to do is to take a guest card from the main game board. Depending on which card is taken, the active player may have to pay for it. The further the card is to the left, the more it costs. Gaps in the row are replaced by sliding cards from the left to the right and adding new cards on the furthest left. This is a 'conveyor belt' mechanic. Action board Actions in Grand Austria Hotel are determined by dice. The number of dice used depends on the number of players. In a 4 player game, 14 dice are used. The first player rolls all the dice and and places them as required on the action board. There are 6 columns on the action board. After the dice have been rolled, they are placed in their relevant space. If 3 1's have been rolled, they are placed into the '1' column, this is done for all 6 columns. This determines both the effectiveness and number of each action that can be performed. The more dice there are in a column the more effective that action is and the more often it can be performed. Every time an action is performed, a die from that column is removed. If a column has no dice, that action cannot be performed (Unless performing the 'copy action' action!). The 6 actions are:
Additional actions As well as the actions listed above, players can perform some extra actions.
Endgame Grand Austria Hotel is played over 7 rounds, thus each player has 14 turns to use. Prestige is scored at the end of rounds 3, 5 & 7. During prestige scoring, before prestige is scored each player's prestige score is lowered by 3, 5 or 7 in each related round. Prestige points translate in victory points, but if a player's prestige points are too low, that player will lose victory points instead. Additionally, if a player is above the prestige threshold, they get a bonus, if they are below, the receive a penalty. This depends on the 3 prestige reward/penalty tokens that were placed on to the main board. At the end of the 7th round, points are scored from various sources, such as staff cards, occupied rooms, remaining food, drink & money, objectives and prestige tokens. Any guests left in your restaurant loses points. All points are tallied, highest score wins. Overall
So Grand Austria Hotel is a game about acquiring customers, fulfilling their needs and preparing rooms for them in your hotel. The game is quite a balancing act as it forces players to juggle preparing rooms and fulfilling the needs of their customers. Players also need to pay attention to the prestige track, as failing to acquire enough prestige can be seriously detrimental. The bonus objective can earn quite a lot of points. Money too can be a problem, it's quite hard to accumulate money and is also something you need to think about. Whilst there's a lot going on in this game, the rules aren't too complicated. Optimising strategies is really important here. But the available actions and their effectiveness is unpredictable. So Grand Austria Hotel forces players to both think ahead and be adaptable, whilst providing players with lots of meaningful decisions. These are things that make Grand Austria Hotel a good game. 26th October 2019 Saturday evening has rolled round again and we're at Matakishi's for some gaming goodness. Tonight we played '1830', or to give it its full name; '1830: The Game of Railroads and Robber Barons'. As you will have surmised, this is a game about railroad building. Actually, it's probably fair to say it's the game about railroad building. What's in a game? 1830's components are very 'old-school' and clearly favour function over form.
How's it play? Setup 1830 was originally published in 1986. The version we played was published in 2011 by Mayfair Games. There was some head-scratching during set up as it turns out in this edition there are several variants of the game. We had been trying to set up the 'basic' version of the game, which apparently is different to the 'classic' version (Which is what we wanted to play.). The basic version of the game should be the classic version, do you hear Mayfair Games! Anyway, on with setup.
Bidding Bidding only occurs once in the game (Right at the start.). Players have to bid for the right to buy one of the private companies. Auctioning is actually very straightforward. One player makes a starting bid (Whoever is nominated as 'The Banker' should start.), then proceeding clockwise, each player has to make a higher bid or pass. If a player passes, then they are out of the auction permanently. When everybody has passed, then the player who was the highest bidder, gets the 'privilege' of choosing which private company to buy first (Yes, even though you may have bid loads of money, you still have to pay to buy a private company!), also the highest bidder gets to take the 'Priority' card for the first stock market round. Second highest bidder gets second choice of buying a private company and so on until all the players have a private company. Stock market and operating rounds This is where the majority of the game takes place. At the beginning of the game there will be a stock market round followed by an operating round. Later on, there will be a stock market round followed by two operating rounds. Even further into the game, the stock market round will be followed by three operating rounds. Stock market round
When a company is floated, the following occurs:
So now we're on to the operating round(s). The following occurs:
Endgame Play continues until all the money from the bank has been paid out to the players. Winning is determined by who has acquired the most personal wealth. Players add up all the personal money they have accumulated and the combined stock market value of all the shares they own. The operating capital of any companies that the player may control is not added to the final tally. Highest score wins. Overall
It's a testament to 1830's design that 30 years on, it's mechanics and rules are still totally solid and watertight. The stock market round is well balanced so it has enough depth to be engaging and interesting, but is not head scratching in complexity. I really like it that player's money is entirely separated from the money needed to run a company. I also like how in order to maximise your personal profitability, you'll also need to invest in companies run by other players. Because no player can own more than 60% in a company, this will happen. The operating rounds give players plenty of choice and options when expanding their companies. Eventually there will be sets of intricate and convoluted rail networks interacting and criss-crossing with each other. Players also need to pay close attention to the money that their companies maintain as having a company go bankrupt will have serious consequences for the stock value. On the box of 1830, it says that it takes 3-6 hours to play and that's no exaggeration. It is the only drawback to 1830 is that I can think of. 1830 is a classic and there's no doubt about it. There are plenty of other rail building games and many of them are good. But if you've got the hours to spare, none are as good as 1830. It only remains for me to say that it seems that the game was last in print a few years ago. It's criminal that it's still out of print now, considering just how good a game 1830 is. 22nd September 2019 Sunday lunchtime at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking. Unfortunately 50 Fathoms is still on hiatus. Instead we shall play some board games. The first board game of the day was 'Roll Player'. Have you ever enjoyed creating characters for an RPG more than playing them? Then maybe, just maybe, Roll Player is the game for you. Roll Player is sort of a set collecting, dice rolling, worker placement game that's all about creating what is ostensibly a D&D character. The main of the game is that players use dice to generate their stats, but it's not a case of just rolling the dice. What's in a game The components for Roll Player are of a good quality.
How's it play Firstly there's set up: This is fairly straightforward.
Taking dice After a player takes a die, they must place it on to their character sheet board. When doing this, there are 3 things they need to bear in mind in order to maximise their scores.
Market cards There are several different types of card available to but from the market. When a player takes a market card, it is placed alongside the character sheet board in it's specified spot.
A new row of market cards is dealt every round. Endgame Play continues for 18 rounds until all 6 stats have 3 dice. Points can earned from several sources, these include:
Overall Roll Player is a game with an intriguing theme. Because placing a die has so many consequences, play slows down quite a lot when both choosing and placing a die, so there feels like there is a lot of downtime between turns. Apart from this, the game fine to play and when you complete Roll Player you will have an interesting character. My first Roll Player character was: 'A concentrating, knowledgeable, intimidating, dedicated, honest, famous, chain-armour-wearing, blessed-mace-wielding, druidic, elven chosen one who's good at sleight of hand. His name is Derek!'
16th July 2019 It's a Tuesday and the 3rd and final game of game evening at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking is 'Honshu'. Wikipedia describes Honshu as 'the largest and most populous main island of Japan'. Honshu the game describes itself as a 'trick-taking, map building card game set in feudal Japan'. So, there you go! What's in a game?
How's it play?
The objective of Honshu is to lay down map cards to create your province. When laying a card, generally the objective is to lay cards in such a way that matching terrain types are next to each other. First thing though, is set up.
Trick-taking
Play continues for 3 turns. Then before the 4th turn, players pass their 3 remaining cards to the player to their left. Once the 6th turn is completed, the players will have run out of cards. 6 new cards are randomly dealt to each player and play continues. After the 9th turn has been completed, players pass their 3 remaining cards to the player on their right. After the 12th turn, the game is over and we go to scoring. Endgame So once the 12th turn is over, it's time to score. There are several different terrain types and each type scores differently.
Overall Honshu is a small game that packs a lot in. It has a trick-taking mechanic that can be exploited to good use if you're canny, as well a a drafting mechanic. Which is quite interesting. The map-laying phase gives the player quite a lot of flexibility when putting map cards down, so you get a lot of choices and decisions to make. Honshu reminds me a little bit of 'Isle of Skye', both games are broadly divided into a acquisition phase and a map laying phase. Both games give players options for strategies (And both games allow you take another player's map tile/card!). Honshu is a little simpler, but quicker to play. And like Isle of Skye, I think Honshu is a good game and definitely worth trying. 12th July 2019
It's time for the second game of 'not WFRP' night. The second game of the night is 'Kingdomino'. Kingdomino is a tile placement game that's about creating a kingdom with dominos. Hence the name kingdomino - those professional 'board-game-namers' earned their wages with Kingdomino eh? What's in a game? Unsurprisingly, the main component of Kingdomino is... dominoes.
How's it play? First there is set up.
Endgame Now that all the dominoes have been placed, it's to score them.
Overall Kingdomino is a clever and unique game that seems to genuinely draw some inspiration from dominoes. Players are usually always given a meaningful decision to make. Which tile to take? How to place a tile in your kingdom? Kingdomino also has an interesting mechanic to determine turn order. The most important dominoes (Those with crowns on them.) have the highest numbers on their backs. This means that taking a valuable domino in one turn will result in being further down in the turn order in the following turn. It's a clever balancing mechanic and something to think about when selecting dominoes. There's also a potentially higher level of play. Watching your opponents gives your the opportunity to try and anticipate their moves and guess which landscapes they want to prioritise. Although, as with a lot of games, you have to be careful not to scupper yourself when trying to mess with other other players. Kingdomino is a small, colourful, quick to play and easy to learn game. Perfect for a start or finisher to an evening of gaming. It has enough depth and variation to give it replay value. And that's a good thing. 2nd July 2019. The second game of gaming night at 'The Sovereigns' was 'Isle of Skye'. In my imagination, one day someone was playing 'Carcassonne' and they thought. 'Y'know what this needs is more depth. Oh and it needs to be set in a remote part of Scotland!'. And the result of that thought was 'Isle of Skye'. In reality the link to Carcassonne is fairly superficial, both are landscape-based tile laying games and that's about it for similarities Isle of Skye also contains an intriguing trading mechanic. What's in a game?
How's it play?
First, there's the set up. The scoring tiles are shuffled and 4 of them are placed on the main game board. Each tile has a different method or way of scoring points. Each player is also given some currency (Which they keep hidden behind their screen at all times.). The game is played over 5 turns and the game is scored at the end of these 5 turns: In each turn different scoring tiles will used for scoring. In the 1st turn, one tile is used, in turns 2 & 3, two tiles are used and in turns 4 & 5 three tiles are used. Once set up is completed, the game begins. There are 3 phases to every turn. Income Each player draws currency from the gold supply. Trading The trading mechanics in Isle of Skye are like no other game I've played. Each turn, all the players will acquire some tiles and must sell them, but they use their own money to do so!
Playing tiles Once all of the tiles have been bought, players have to lay their tiles. The rules for laying tiles is pretty straightforward. Tiles can be placed down in any orientation, but must honour all the other tiles that it is adjacent to. Each player creates their own 'map' independent of all other players. Overall? I Liked Isle of Skye. I particularly like the mechanics for selling tiles. You given some intriguing and risky strategies to use. If you draw tiles you don't want, you can try to sell them at a low price to get rid of them. But underselling the tiles may help someone else with very little benefit to yourself. Conversely, putting a high price on tiles may them price them out of other peoples' ranges. Ending up with you paying a high cost for tiles you don't want. Additionally, because you use your own funds to put a price on tiles. If you price your tiles too highly, you will be left with little gold to buy other player's tiles. There's lots of potential decisions here and that's good. When laying tiles, there's lots of decisions to be made too. As well as the 3 land types, field, mountain and water, there are also features such roads, lighthouses, farms etc. All of these can be used in scoring, but they will do so differently over the rounds. So you need to prioritise how you lay tiles to maximise scoring. So like I said I like Isle of Skye and it's been added to 'the list'. 7th May 2019 It's a Tuesday, so naturally that means gaming down at 'The Sove...' er.. wait? The Sovereign has its family dining area fully booked out and they didn't bother informing us? Marvellous! By that I mean crappy. So we need an alternative venue... It's a Tuesday, so naturally that means gaming down at... 'The Wheatshef' in Woking. The evening started off with 'Tiny Towns'. Tiny Towns has a plot about being tiny animals building a town. It's strange because it's a meaningless addition to the game. Yes, it's a game about building a town, but whether it's tiny or not makes no difference. What's in a game? Game board: Each player has their own 4x4 playing board, in Tiny Towns you are building your own individual town and not a collective town. Wooden cubes: Yes Tiny Towns is obviously a soulless cube pushing Euro. So the game comes with an abundance of wooden cubes in 5 glorious colours. Buildings: Tiny Towns is always played with exactly 7 different types of buildings, no more, no less. What these buildings are will change from game to game. But there are 7 different shaped and coloured wooden blocks used to depict what buildings are used in the game. Monuments: This is the 8th type of building in the game. Each player will have a single monument block to represent which monument they posses - all monuments are unique and generally confer some sort of bonus on the player Cards: The game has a stack of oversized cards that represent both normal buildings and monuments. Hammer: The game has a wooden hammer, used to represent who is the first player and thus also the round's 'master-builder'. So all the components are placed in the centre of the gaming area and each player takes a game board. The cards are used to determine which buildings will appear in this game. The cards need some explaining. Each of the 7 building types has 4 different cards (except the Cottage - there's only 1 cottage card).
Finally, there are the monument cards: 2 monument cards are dealt to each player at the start of each game. Each player will discard one monument and keep the other one (hidden until played). Each monument is unique, they can give you a 'one-off' or ongoing benefit. They can give you points. When played well, a monument can help you a lot. How's it play?
Constructing buildings is the name of the game. How is this achieved? Each building card will have a multicoloured 'tetris-like' shape on it. Generally this is always the same for each building type. Cottages always have 'L' shapes, yellow food producing buildings are always have a 2x2 square and green social buildings have a 'T' shape. However the colours of the shapes on the cards are different for each of the 4 types of each building. To construct a building, you must place cubes on your personal board that match the configuration as depicted on that card. For example: To build an Inn requires 3 blocks in a straight line and their colours must be 'yellow, grey and blue'. The inn can be built from left to right, or up or down. As long as the 3 cubes are in a straight line and the middle cube is grey and the end cubes are always yellow and blue, then a tavern can be built (if you choose). Then, to build it, the 3 cubes are removed from your board and a green building meeple is placed into one of the spaces vacated by the 3 cubes - and that's it. Well, that's not it, but that's a summary of the most important rule. So this is how a turn goes.
Endgame When a player can no longer place a cube on their board, they are eliminated from the game. Eventually they'll only be one player left and they can continue playing until they too cannot place any further cubes. Then scores are totted up and a winner is declared. Overall? So, thinking about this game. I feel that there are two distinct levels of play. The basic level of play involves maximising the placing of the cubes you receive. It is possible to place cubes in such a way that they can be used for more than one building. Especially since you do not have to construct a building if you have the cubes in the right place. This allows you to keep cubes 'in play' to be used for alternate buildings. It can give you strategies and options. Then there's the higher level of play. Looking at the choices of the other players and trying to anticipate their strategies. Not necessarily to try and mess with them, (You'll mess with the other players accidentally more than anything else) but just to improve your own strategies. Overall, I like Tiny Towns, it always gives you meaningful choices to make (Even if those choices are not entirely of your own making - which makes those decisions even more important!) and I think that's a good thing. Tiny Towns also has a mechanic that I've never seen before - I always like that. Play time is fairly brisk, a game seems to take no more than an hour. The first time I played Tiny Towns, everyone was up for a second game straightaway. The one significant criticism I have of Tiny Towns is that it has player elimination. That's something I don't like. Luckily it seems that when players are eliminated, it's close to the conclusion of a game. So, one grumble aside. Tiny Towns is a good enough game for me to get a copy of it. 26th February 2nd game of the night at 'The Sovs'. Tiny Epic Galaxies is a part of the 'Tiny Epic' line of games from Gamelyn. I guess that all of these games aim to deliver epic gameplay in a tiny box? Does Tiny Epic Galaxies deliver on this? See below. Well, it comes in a tiny-ish box, so that's a good start. Tiny Epic Galaxies is a card and dice game that combines elements of worker placement with push your luck to make a game about galactic exploration and expansion. Infact exploration and expansion are how you earn nearly all your victory points - and of course, the highest victory points wins the games. Set up To start with, each player is given their own 'galaxy mat'. The galaxy mat is used to track 3 scores. Energy, culture & galactic level (all explained below). Next, each player is given 2 secret mission cards, they then choose one to keep hidden face down next to or under their galaxy matt. The unused card is discarded. Then planet cards are dealt face up in a line. These represent newly discovered planet that players can exploit or colonise. Planet cards are explained in detail below, but it's worth noting here that there are always more planets available than players (by 1 or 2). Finally the control mat and the dice are placed where everyone can reach them. How to play Very simply: You roll the dice and then carry out the actions displayed on the dice. I think it's simpler to explain what some things do, then how play goes. Let's start with the galaxy mat.
Planets There are a number of features on every planet, all of them important.
Control mat
Dice rolling
When rolling the dice, player's will roll 4-7 dice (dependent on the level of their galaxy), all the dice are identical and have 6 different symbols. These are:
Rerolling dice After rolling their dice, the player can choose to re-roll some or all of the dice they just rolled. A player can choose to re-roll 2 or more times, but each additional re-roll after the first will cost a point of energy. There you have it, more or less all the rules. Play continues until a player's victory points reaches 21 or higher, this triggers the end game. Play then continues until all players have had an equal number of turns and then points are totted up. At this time players reveal their secret missions, if the objective is met, the the points are added to the player's total. Secret missions tend to add 2-3 victory points to the total, which is about 10-15%, so not insubstantial. I've played Tiny Epic Galaxies several times now and I always enjoy it. There are 40 different planet cards and they always appear randomly. I've found that quite often judicious use of their special abilities can give you an edge. So you need to pay attention to which ones appear, they're more than just victory points and resource generators. Add to this the unpredictability of the dice and you have a game with a lot of genuine replayability. There is one thing I will mention and that is the potential of the 'culture generation' strategy. If you have at least 2 ships on planets that generate culture and keep at least a point of culture on your galaxy mat: Anytime another player activates a culture die, you can spend a culture die to follow them - and generate 2 culture, giving you a net gain of 1 culture at no outlay (other than the initial point of culture). You can do this as often as you want whenever someone else activates a culture die with absolutely no drawback. Now this does requires a particular set of circumstances to occur, but they are not too uncommon (we encountered it the 1st or 2nd time we played it entirely by accident): I'm not sure if it's overpowered or not. It feels like it straddles the line between genuine strategy and exploit so I'm not too certain whether it's a legitimate criticism or not. Ah well. Despite that potential issue, I think it's still a good game to play. Is it epic? Well it's certainly good, although Tiny Good Galaxies' probably doesn't have the same ring to it! 22nd January 2019.
Another game night at 'The Sovereigns', err wait - they were shut for the night so we relocated to the 'The Wheatsheaf' for the evening. So... another game night at 'The Wheatsheaf'. Orleans is a worker placement game set in medieval France. In most worker placement games, your 'workers' are generic. In Orlean, they are not. This games differenciates itself from other games in this genre by giving you different types of workers. During gameplay, each player has their own board. To activate an option on your board requires 2 or 3 workers to be placed on the relevant spaces on your board, depending on what it does for you. Example: Activating the 'villager' action requires you to place a farmer, fisherman and craftsman in the relevant spots. This allows you to recruit a fisherman, craftsmen or a nobleman. If you cannot (or choose not to) place all the required workers to activate an option, then the workers remain placed on your board until all the required spots are filled by your workers. Whereupon they are removed from your board and placed into a bag (more on this later). When you recruit a worker, you move your marker down the relevant track (there's a fisherman track, craftsman track etc). When you move down a track, as well as gaining the worker, you may also gain an additional benefit. Moving down the craftsman track gains you a 'technology wheel', going the fisherman track gains you extra money and so on. When all the workers of a particular type are recruited, no one else can move down the track. Even though you acquire lots of workers, there are limits on how useful they are. Firstly; all workers not placed on your board are placed into a bag (1 bag for each player). Secondly; at the start of the turn, you draw 4-8 workers from you bag (depending on how far along the 'knight' track you are. This can limit your options, because you won't always draw what you want. But also provides you with some intriguing choices in order to maximise your strategy. The game also contains a mechanic to rid yourself of workers for a one-off benefit, if you feel that you've acquired too many or they've become obsolete. The game also has a central map that represents the region around Orleans which you can travel around and acquire trade goods and allows you to build guild halls in other locations, (all done by worker placement activation). Winning the game requires earning points by collecting trade goods, collecting influence markers, building guild halls and accumulating money. The setup and explanation of the rules took a while (it's not too complex, but you have a lot of choices you can make) and We didn't manage to finish a full game. But it has a bit more depth than most worker placement games in my opinion and a bit more to think about. It will require a couple of plays to know what you're doing. I enjoyed it and look forward to playing it again. |
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