18th August 2022

Broadsword! It's a Thursday and we're in Aldershot for some gaming fun!

According to Wikipedia, HeroQuest was originally published in 1989, which makes me feel very old.
The version that we are playing though, is the 21st iteration.

So grab your staff and pull on your loincloth as we set into vaguely generic fantasy world of HeroQuest in search of treasure.
Alternatively, take on the role of Zargon and oppose the heroes.

What's in a game?

• ​Game board: The game board depicts was is essentially a underground dungeon. It displays rooms of varying size differentiated by colour which are boarded by a perimeter corridor, 4 more corridors go north, south, east, west and sort of divide the rooms into 4 areas along with a large central room.
• Miniatures: HeroQuest is a miniatures heavy game and comes with several types of all plastic miniature.
  • Heroes: There is a miniature for each of the game's heroes; barbarian, elf, dwarf & wizard.
  • Monsters: Enemies abound in HeroQuest and include goblins, orcs, skeletons, zombies and more.
  • Furniture: As well as closed and open doors, there's dungeon dressing for tables, altars, bookcases and so forth.
• Tiles: card tiles are used to represent hidden doors, traps and dead ends among other things.
• Cards: There's also a variety of cards in the game.
  • Hero cards: Each hero has their own card that details their stats, which are
    Attack
    Defence
    Body
    Mind
    Also listed are their movement dice and starting equipment.
  • Monster cards: Each type of monster also has its own card. Monster basically have the same set of stats as the heroes.
  • Spell cards: There are 5 sets of spell cards, 1 set of 15 (Dread Spells) is for the Zargon player. The remaining 4 sets of 3 cards each (Based on fire, earth, water & air.) are for the wizard and elf players.
  • Treasure cards: This is a deck of cards that contain both treasure and booby traps such as wandering monster and the like.
  • Equipment cards: This deck contains various pieces of equipment that can be purchased with the cash the heroes acquire and will improve their abilities and stats.
  • Artefact cards: These cards represent items that are particularly powerful, they cannot be bought but only found in specific dungeons throughout the campaign.
• Game master's screen: This is a 3-panel card panel of the kind that could be found for RPGs and is used by the Zargon player to hide their stuff.
• Quest book: HeroQuest has a 14-part campaign that is detailed in the quest book. There's also space for industrious players to create their own quests.
• Dice: 2 types of dice are used in HeroQuest.
  • Red dice: There are 2 red dice, these are typical six-siders.
  • Combat dice: These are not the usual six-siders. Instead 3 faces show a Skull, 2 faces show a White Shield and the remaining face shows a Black Shield.
• Character pad: A pad of character sheets to be used by players to track the stats and wounds of their characters.

HeroQuest's components are all generally good.
The board, tiles and cards are of an acceptable quality.
The dice are also fine and in a move that pays homage to the original HeroQuest, there still aren't enough of them to split conveniently between the hero players and Zargon player! The game really could do with a few more combat dice!

Probably the biggest components are the miniatures. All the heroes and monsters miniatures come in single colour plastic according to type, heroes are red, goblinoids are green, undead are beige and so on.
I'm pretty certain the sculpts are all new as well, the games has undergone cosmetic changes due to licensing issues regarding the original.
Speaking of sculpts, I found their quality to be... OK. If I were assessing the miniatures exclusive of the game, they wouldn't be good but since they are meant to be part of a game; and in that context they're pretty cool. Especially since I feel that they're designed to hark back to the original style and design, which I think they do a good job of doing.

The scenery and dressing is also a bit of a mixed bag. The scenery in this version is all made of plastic and is much more durable than the original scenery which in part was made of cardboard.
However, that cardboard scenery with its printed artwork was a lot more colourful. The modern scenery in comparison is a just drab, monochrome, grey plastic.

HeroQuest's art is good wherever it appears, mostly on cards and has a brash, chunky cartoony aesthetic that suitably fits the style of the game.

There are a few icons in the game that are easily learned, the Zargon player has to learn a bit more due to having to comprehend the scenarios in the quest book but again, it's not an obstacle.

How's it play?
​Setup
Before any play can begin, one player must decide to take the role of Zargon who is essentially the 'Games Master' in RPG parlance and controls all the enemy forces that oppose the players. Whoever plays Zargon will probably be doing so for all 14 quests presented in the quest book.
Up to 4 other players will assume the role of heroes adventuring through the campaign. Generally, once players have chosen a hero, they will stick with that hero until the end of the campaign. Having said that, there's nothing to stop players swapping or switching around heroes if they so desire.

• Zargon player: The Zargon player should familiarise themselves with whichever quest is being played from the quest book. It will tell them how many doors they need, how much scenery, what and how many monsters, which dread spells to use and so on.
  The Zargon player should gather all the required items and place them adjacent to the central playing area.
  Monster cards: Place these face-up adjacent to the central playing area so they are visible to all players.
  Treasure cards: These should be shuffled into a face-down deck adjacent to the central playing area.
  ​Screen: The Zargon player should keep the quest book hidden behind their screen.
• Hero players: Players should decide which of the available heroes they are using between them.
  Copy stats: Each player should take a sheet from the character pad and copy the stats and information from the hero card for their chosen hero on to the sheet.
  Spells: Whoever is playing the wizard should take 3 sets of spell cards, that is a total of 9 spell cards. The elf player should take the final set of 3.
  The wizard and elf players are free to decide who gets what sets.
• Game board: Place the game board in the central playing area. The Zargon player should place the stairs tile in its appropriate spot as dictated by the quest book. All players should put the miniature representing their hero on the stairs tile.
  Then the Zargon player should read out the quest's flavour text to the other players.

On to play
In HeroQuest, all the hero players will each take their individual turns and then the Zargon player will finally take their turn.
Generally this is done with the player to the left of the Zargon player going first with turns progressing to the left until eventually the Zargon player goes last.

The general flow of play will involve the heroes exploring the dungeon game board (Which is unpopulated at the game start.) and in response, Zargon revealing what the heroes encounter, be it doors, dead ends, traps or monsters and so on.
Once the heroes have had their turns, Zargon can act. This means they can move any visible monsters to attack the heroes. Thus if no monsters are visible on the board, Zargon basically does nothing.

• Heroes: The hero players can move and perform one of the following actions.
  • Move: A hero can move before or after performing an action. They cannot split their movement.
    Roll dice: The active player rolls the 2 normal red dice and the result is how far they can choose to move in their turn. There are some limits though.
    Orthogonal movement: Heroes cannot move diagonally.
    Other heroes: A hero may move through a space containing another hero but cannot  end their movement there.
    Monsters: Heroes cannot move through spaces occupied by monsters.
    Trap: When a hero steps on to a space with a trap, their movement immediately end and the trap is triggered.
  • Actions: One of the following actions may be performed by a hero.
    • Attack: A hero may attack a monster, this can be melee or ranged.
      Melee: To engage a monster in melee, a hero must generally be orthogonally adjacent to it (No diagonals allowed!), there are some weapons such as staffs that allow heroes to attack to attack diagonally adjacent enemies.
      Ranged: A hero with a ranged weapon can pretty much attack any enemy they can see and is in line of sight. More on line of sight below.
      Roll the dice: The attacking player rolls a number of white combat dice equal to their attack score and each skull result deals 1 wound to a monster.
      Monster defends: When a monster takes 1 or more wounds, the Zargon player rolls combat dice equal to targeted monsters defence. Each black shield result blocks a wound! Any wounds which are not blocked by the defence roll are inflicted on the targeted monster and they lose an equivalent amount of body points.
      Weaker monsters tend to have only 1 body point and will be eliminated by any damage.
    • Cast spell: The wizard and elf may cast 1 spell. Depending on the spell, this can target themselves, an ally or a hostile monster. If cast on a ally or monster, line of sight rules apply.
      Each spell card will describe its effect and once it is resolved, it is discarded from player and cannot be used again in the current quest.
    • Search for treasure: When a hero is inside a room (Corridors cannot be searched for treasure.) and there are no monsters present in that room. The active player may search for treasure, this will have one of several results:
      Draw treasure card: The active player draws a card from the treasure deck. This may result in them receiving gold or potions. It may also result in encountering a wandering monster, which must be fought or triggering a trap.
      Quest treasure: As per the quest book, some rooms will contain a specific item or treasure, usually as part of the scenario.
      Artefact: Also as per the quest book, searching certain rooms will grant a specified artefact card to the active. Artefacts are generally better than mundane items.
    • Search for secret door: Provided there are no monsters in sight, the active player may search for hidden doors. This can be done when the hero is in a room or corridor and searches the entire room and in the case of a corridor all the corridor which is in line of sight.
      If there is a secret door in a room or corridor, the Zargon player must reveal it to the hero players and place a secret door tile on the relevant space on the board:
    • Search for traps: This is fundamentally identical to searching for secret doors except it reveals traps.
    • Disarm trap: If a hero has a tool kit they may attempt to disarm a trap that has been revealed by moving on to the trap space on the board.
      The dwarf hero as his special ability may disarm traps without a tool kit.
      Roll the die: A combat die is rolled, the result will determine if the trap is neutralised or trigged - in this case whoever was attempting to disarm the trap suffers whatever effect it deals out.
• Zargon player: For a large part of the game, the Zargon player will be reacting to player actions in their turns. Revealing doors, traps, monsters and dead ends as they are encountered by the players.
  • Monsters: Monsters are only active during the Zargon player's turn and even then only revealed monsters become active.
    Movement: No dice are rolled to move monsters, instead they have a set number of squares they can move before or after acting. The fastest monsters move 10 spaces which will nearly always outpace heroes!
    Attack: Functionally, combat for monsters is identical to how it works for heroes except as far as I know, monsters do not get ranged attacks. When monsters are adjacent to heroes they can attack them. The Zargon player rolls a number of combat dice equal to the monsters attack value and each skull potentially inflicts a point of damage to a hero.
    Hero defends: Heroes can defend damage by rolling dice equal to their defence value and each white shield result blocks 1 point of damage. Any unblocked damage is dealt to the hero's body points.
    Dread spells: As per the quest book, some monsters may be equipped with dread spells which can be used against the heroes. As with all spells, the caster of a dread spell must have line of sight on their target. Once a dread spell is resolved, the card is discarded out of play.
• Other rules: There are some other rules which also apply in HeroQuest.
  • Line of sight: Both heroes and monsters can see as far as a straight line could be drawn. Thus they can see all the way down a straight corridor but not round a corner.
    For the purpose of targeting ranged attacks, allies do not block each other's line of sight but opponents do block line of sight. Thus a hero cannot target the 2nd monster in a line of monsters and vice versa.
  • Looking: This is a free action and can be used at any time in their turn even in between moving spaces and as often as desired.
    When a hero player decides to look, the Zargon player must reveal any features, traps or monsters which are in line of sight.
  • Doors: Doors always closed when encountered and can be opened as a free action.
    Once opened, doors cannot be closed again
  • Treasure: When the heroes acquire any kind of treasure (Other than that found on a card.) it should be recorded on one player's character sheet.
    Gol coins can be collectively spent at the end of a quest,
  • Traps: Various types of traps are featured in HeroQuest, there are spike traps, pit traps and so on. Generally inflict 1 wound as well as a some other effect (Such as falling down a pit.). Triggering a trap generally ends a hero's movement.
  • Death: Monsters die when they reach 0 body points and the same is true of heroes. If a hero reaches 0 body points, they are killed and their controlling player is eliminated from the current quest.
    Fortunately, new heroes can be recruited in between quests.
  • Potions: Players can discard potion cards out of play to gain their benefits.
    Using a potion is a free action and can be done at any time. They can even be used in Zargon's turn and in fact can be used by a hero player after they reach 0 body points. Needless to say, potions can be lifesavers.

Endgame
Play continues until the hero players complete quest objective, in which case, they collectively win! Otherwise, if all the heroes are instead killed, then the Zargon player wins.
Additionally, if the hero players retreat (By returning to the stairs tile.) for whatever reason then they also lose.

That's not the end!
Once a quest has ended, players can spend their hard won loot and cash to buy equipment. Weapons can increase a hero's attack score and armour can increases defence scores, while daggers and crossbows offer ranged attacks and so on.
When buying equipment, the player who will use it takes possession of the card. Furthermore, once all copies of a certain item are bought from the equipment deck , then that item can no longer be bought. Conversely, consumable items such as potions and daggers are returned to the equipment deck when used.

End Endgame!
If the hero players manage to succeed at all 14 quests, they have won the campaign.

Overall
There's quite a lot to write about here and my thoughts will probably wander, so please indulge me - and let's get started!

HeroQuest was a pretty ground-breaking game in 1989. Published by a mainstream games producer, it offered people who had never played an RPG an accessible slice of the RPG experience and introduced some game concepts to people who had never encountered them before.
It's also a window into how games played 35 years ago and what player expectations were like back then.

For example, a modern game with similar themes to HeroQuest probably wouldn't employ a roll-and-move mechanic.
Another example are rewards and the game's equivalent of levelling up: As explained below, HeroQuest rarely rewards to players - which come in the form of equipment upgrades. These upgrades occur quite infrequently but are quite significant statistically, i.e., going from 2 combat dice to 3 is a big jump.
A modern game would try and find a way to do the opposite and drip-feed players constant but low-impact rewards in what would be called a gameplay loop or moment-to-moment engagement.

HeroQuest occasionally also trolls player, forcing them to deal with multiple traps and putting no reward on the other side.

Mechanically, HeroQuest is actually a fairly straightforward game.
While heroes have 6 actions they can perform, 3 of those are almost identical actions and 1 is very situational. Players will find themselves moving and searching, opening doors and defeating monsters behind them, searching, then moving on.
Rinse and repeat.
While there are definitely some tactics that players can adopt and repeatedly employ, the random placement of challenges - particularly monsters who form the majority of heroes' encounters - means that players will need to adapt to situations and respond effectively.
There's also some randomness to player actions - the roll-and-move mechanic means that heroes may not reach their opponent when they need to and also may not be able to escape enemies when they need to.

The combat system is also straightforward and runs smoothly enough, it does feel quite swingy and unpredictable though but that might just be me grumbling about dice rolls!
We found that the tougher monsters are very hard to wound. Once their defence is high enough, they're generally guaranteed being able to absorb 1 wound from an attack. This means the heroes will need to rely on luck to get 2 wounds in an attack or use at least 4 dice to attack and have a passable chance of getting 2 wounds.
How do the heroes get higher attack scores?

This brings me to equipment. Generally, we ended up equipping the 2 front line fighters (Primarily the barbarian but to a lesser extent also the dwarf.) with weapons above anyone else as well as providing the elf with a crossbow. Getting an attack stat up to 4  and gaining ranged attacks were real game changers.

Getting the right equipment or getting equipment and using it the right way can enhance or change tactics, improve the odds of surviving, winning fights and so on.
What's also interesting is that at the end of a quest, the hero players have the opportunity to buy equipment. However, because the cost is so high, in practice it means they will only get to buy something once after every 2 or 3 quests. It means that the heroes will get maybe 6 or 7 pieces of equipment throughout the entire campaign and will need to choose wisely. 

Some equipment such as consumables seem very expensive for what they provide. During our playthroughs, we never seriously considered buying things like throwing daggers or holy water.

Thematically, HeroQuest is a bit of a strange beast.

It has obvious elements derived from tabletop RPGs such as having a games master, combat screen, dungeons to explore, character classes and stats, scenarios, campaigns and narratives, rolling dice for combat etc but there are also some key differences.

There's no experience points or levelling, instead character improvements happen via buying better equipment.
Also, a key difference for me is the role the Zargon player has, they are part games master but also part antagonist and opponent to the heroes which is different to the majority of RPGs. Why is this significant? Let me explain.

The HeroQuest campaign has 14 quests, it took us a total of 15 attempts to complete all of them, in other words we only failed 1 of the quests, the other 13 were completed successfully at the first try.

I think that in part this is due to the fact that we're all experienced gamers and it feels the game is targeted at the early teenage market so we mostly breezed through it.
(A little more about this below.)
I also think this because the game utilises a 'one vs many' system and I've always felt that it's very hard to balance this type of game fairly, 3 or 4 human brains will always have the advantage over 1 human brain.

This is compounded by the fact that HeroQuest has a campaign.
It means that if the heroes fail a quest, they will invariably have to repeat it again, why is this significant? The purpose of a campaign is to advance through the multitude of quests until the final one can be completed and it can be tedious repeating failed quests, especially if more than once.
When the surprise of knowing what is behind a door is gone, the game can become an exercise in rolling dice over strategy.

Returning to difficulty: I read that it was originally envisioned that the hero players would behave competitively and cooperation between them would make the game too easy.
This of course contradicts the RPG nature of the game and it contradicts the rule book too, which states the players should cooperate and they will collectively win or lose.
Finally, it also contradicts player sensibilities; without cooperation, the wizard in particular for example, has a fairly low chance of surviving a dungeon.

All of this leads me to suspect that either deliberately or accidentally, the game is skewed in favour of the players.
It sort of makes sense because it gives the campaign momentum and keeps events moving forward.
The problem though, is that it can become a frustrating experience for the Zargon player, who in essence has to lose over and over.
It may have been better to do away with having a antagonistic games master role and have a more traditional games master. I get the feeling though that it was done that way to make HeroQuest seem a little more like a 'traditional' board game.
It would have been even better if the game master role could have been automated entirely. I imagine though, that it would've increased the game's difficulty significantly.

Ultimately, I found HeroQuest just about engaging enough to keep my attention, you could never afford to become complacent. Not paying attention was a sure-fire way to get your hero into trouble.
​The campaign does have a narrative, however it's fairly generic and also fairly forgettable.
For me, the pleasure I think, came from the opportunity to play a game cooperatively along with friends.

If you want a light and accessible RPG adjacent experience that's easy to manage without much prep time, you could do a lot worse than HeroQuest.

If you're a parent or adult looking for a way to introduce youngsters to some more elaborate game mechanics and concepts or introduce them to a beginner RPG, then HeroQuest is definitely worth a look in.

17th August 2022

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

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

What's in a game?

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

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

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

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

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

How's it play?
Setup

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

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

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

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

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

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

16th August 2022

It's a Tuesday and were at The Sovereigns with the Woking Board Gaming Club for some gaming goodness.

​Have you ever watched the classic Jaws movie and decided, 'y'know I wanna be the shark going round chomping on hapless swimmers'?
Then this might be the game for you!

Jaws is a asymmetrical game of 2 halves where up to 3 players take on the roles of film's 3 protagonists and 1 player becomes the shark. 
At first the protagonists will seek to defend Amity Island from shark attacks before finally engaging it in a deadly cat-and-mouse game.

Jaws is played over 2 acts (Essentially 2 different games in reality.) and as such, has a lot of double-sided components mostly relevant to each act.
For the purposes of this blog, I'm mostly going to write about each act separately.

Act 1
What's in a game?

• Game board: This is a double-sided board.
  Amity Island: For act 1 on one side is depicted Amity Island, the fictional setting for the film. It looks like Amity Island is modelled after Martha's Vineyard - which is cool as Martha's Vineyard was used for location filming.
  The island is divided into several different areas, Many of which are numbered 1-8 as well as beaches denominated as N,S,E & W. These areas also include features suck as the docks or mayor's office.
• Meeples: Jaws uses quite a few meeples. They are all wooden tokens
  There are meeples not only for Brody, Hooper and Quint but also their boats which have room to hold their respective meeples! - Except for Brody, he has some binoculars to make up for it instead!
  Obviously there's a big meeple for the shark.
• Cards: Only 1 type of card is used for Act 1.
  Event cards: Each event card will list some of the sections on the map where swimmers will appear. E.g, if an event card states NN3, 2 swimmers will in section N and 1 swimmer will appear in section 3. They may also list a special move that becomes available to the 3 crew or hero protagonists.
• Player boards: Player boards are also double sided.
  Each of the 3 crew (Brody, Hooper & Quint.) gets their own player board. These boards list the moves and abilities of each hero, many of which are similar but some of which are unique to each hero.
• Shark board: That's right, the shark gets their own double-sided board.
  The side used for act 1 allows the shark player to track how swimmers they've eaten. It also has spaces to track barrels attached to the shark.
• Tokens: Jaws has several types of card tokens.
  Crew tokens: To go along with their boards, the 3 crew get tokens. Quint gets 2 barrel tokens, Hooper gets a... fish finder token and Brody gets binoculars and 'beach closed' tokens.
  Swimmers: There 16 swimmer tokens in the game, all of them can be tasty treats for the shark.
  Shark tokens: There are 4 'power tokens' that the shark player can use once per game to give them an edge during act 1.
• Action log: This allows the shark player to secretly track their hidden movement, usage of power tokens and also track what information they have to give to the other players.

That's it for the Act 1 components, now on to...

Act 2
What's in a game?

• Game board: The other side of the game is used for Quint's boat, 'The Orca'.
  The Orca: This side of the board shows open sea and has 8 spaces to place the 8 tiles that form Quint's boat in this act. There are also spaces to place the 'Resurface' deck, 3 cards and a discard pile. More on resurface cards below.
• ​Orca tiles: There are 8 tiles used to represent Quint's boat which appears in act 2. They are double-sided, with one side showing the boat undamaged and the other wrecked. 
• Meeples: Act 2 uses the meeples for the 3 crew and the shark, the boat meeples are not used.
• Player boards: The other side of the player boards provide information on the actions that players can perform in Act 2. It also has a tracker for their hit points.
• Shark board: The shark board for act 2 displays the moves the shark player can perform and tracks the shark's (Very High!) hit points.
• Cards: Act 2 uses several of types of card.
  Gear cards: There are general gear cards as well as specific gear cards for each of the 3 crew. Generally they will be weapons and will show many dice are rolled to inflict damage. Although they are also attachable weapons and accessories which negatively affect the shark.
  Resurface cards: These cards will show areas where the shark might resurface to attack The Orca. It also shows how may dice the shark player rolls to attack and how hard it is for heroes to hit the shark back.
  Shark powers: The shark player will have a number of these that they can use to surprise the hero players.
• Tokens: There are tokens for both the crew and the shark.
  Targeting tokens: There is 1 round card targeting token for each player.
  Resurface tokens: There are 2 sets of 3 resurface tokens, each token in a set is labelled A, B or C. They are also round and made of card.
• Dice: There are 3 red six-sided dice that come with the game. They are not typical six-siders, instead of numbers they show 0, 1 or 2 'hit' icons.

Phew, I think that's it for rules!

Component quality for Jaws ranges from average to very good. Things like the cards and tokens are your pretty standard cardboard affair, which is fine.
The dice seem to be made of acrylic and although they're not as nice as wood, they feel quality with engraved icons instead of printed ones.
The wooden meeples are the standout component, particularly the wooden boats for Hooper and Quint, as well the shark meeple inspired by the films iconic artwork and I think they're cool.

As far as I can tell, the Jaws game has a relatively restrained use of photo art sourced from the film which only appears on a number of the event cards and even then it is used sparingly. It's wise decision in my opinion, as too much can make a game look cheap. The game also seems to reference artwork used for the shark from the film but because it's actually art, it looks good.
Otherwise, art used throughout the game is good, the swimmers tokens and player boards all look good.
The best artwork is found the Amity Island side of the game board though, it's an excellent illustration with lots of pretty detail.

There isn't too much iconography and what there is, is easily understood. Most of the rules information on components comes as written text.

Act 1
How's it play?
​Setup

• Choose players: 1 player should be the playing the shark and the other players will be taking on the roles of the 3 crewmates. If there are less players than heroes, then they should split the roles between them.
  Player boards: Give all players their relevant boards, meeples and tokens.
  Brody gets his board, as well as his binocular and beach closed tokens.
  Hooper gets his board, meeple, boat and fish finder token.
  Quint get his board, meeple, boat and 2 barrels.
  The shark player gets their shark meeple, power tokens and action log.
• Player board: Put out the player board.
  Brody: Put the Brody meeple on the Amity P.D. space.
  Hooper: Put the Hooper meeple on his boat and put the boat on the western dock.
  Quint: Put the Quint meeple on his boat and place it on the eastern dock.
  Put all the remaining barrels on the shop space.
• Shark: The shark player should put their marker on the 0 space on their swimmer tracker. They should keep their 4 power moves face-down and hidden from the other players.
  The shark meeple IS NOT placed on the board at the game start.
• Event cards: Shuffle the event cards into a face-down deck.

On to play
During Act 1, the shark player will be attempting to eat as many hapless swimmers as possible!
Meanwhile, the crew players will be using barrels both to try and locate the shark and to attach them to the shark. The more swimmers the shark eats, the more advantage the shark player has during Act 2.
The round is broken down into several phases and follows a more or less traditional turn order with each player having a number of action points they can spend to achieve their actions.
Phase occur as follows.

• Event phase: 1 card is drawn from the event deck, it will distribute swimmers to various locations throughout Amity Island's beaches. It may also confer a special rule for this round
• Shark phase: The shark player has 3 action points to spend in this phase and basically has 2 types of actions they can perform:
  • Move: All shark movement is hidden and tracked by noting it in the movement log. For 1 action point, the shark can move a space.
  • Eat: For 1 action point, the shark may eat a swimmer. This is hidden from the other players (For Now.) and also logged in the action log.
  • Power tile: The shark player may play on their power tiles, which they do by playing it face-down. Power tiles are once-only special abilities such as extra movement or extra stealth. Once used, they are removed from play.
  • Declare: Once the shark player has finished their actions, they must declare certain information to the other players. This can be done in any order the shark player sees fit.
    They must how many swimmers they've eaten and at what beaches is was at.
    They declare and name regions they passed through that contains a barrel.
    Finally, they must declare if they used a power token but not which one was used.
• Crew phase: The hero protagonists each get 4 action points to spend in this phase and the player can choose the order in which the 3 crew act. However, a hero must complete all their actions before play progresses to another hero.
  There are a number of similar but also unique actions available to the hero protagonists.
  • Move: All the hero protagonists can spend action points to move. Brody doesn't have a boat and must stay on land, while the other 2 must stay in their boats on the sea.
  • Pick up barrels: Brody can carry and deliver 1 barrel from the shop space. Hooper and Quint can pick up multiple barrels from the sea or docks. Hooper can also deliver barrels to Quint.
  • Rescue swimmer: All the hero protagonists can spend an action to remove a swimmer at their current space from the board.
  • Use binoculars: Once per turn, the Brody player can spend an action use their binoculars while at a beach. If the shark player is at the targeted space, they must reveal their position and put the shark meeple on the board.
  • Close beach: Another Brody ability. If the Brody player is at a empty beach, they may spend an action point to put their 'Beach Closed' token on that beach.
    The next time an event card would place any number of swimmers on the closed beach, flip the token to the 'Opening Soon'. Then if a following event card would add swimmers to that beach, instead return the token to the Brody player. Thus, this action protects a beach from 2 event cards.
  • Fish finder: Once per turn and for an action point, the Hooper player may put their fish finder token into their current location.
    Then the shark player must respond in one of the following ways.
    If the shark is in the same space as the fish finder, they must put their shark meeple on the relevant space on the board.
    If the shark is on a orthogonally adjacent space, the shark player must declare 'nearby'.
    If neither of the 2 above conditions it met, then the shark player must state 'neither'.
  • Launch barrel: Once per turn and for action point, the Quint player may fire a barrel into their space or a orthogonally adjacent sea space.
    If the shark is in the space that was targeted by the Quint player, they must declare the barrel has hit them and add it to their shark board.
    If no shark was in the space, the barrel remains there and acts as a sensor to detect shark movement during the remainder of Act 1 or until it is picked up again.
• Next turn: Once all the crew have taken all their turns, play progress to the next round, beginning with the event phase.

Act 1
​Endgame
Act 1 will immediately end if 1 of the following 2 criteria is met:
Barrels: 2 barrels are attached to the shark by the Quint player.
Swimmers: The shark player has eaten 9 swimmers.

On to play
During Act 2, the shark player will be attempting to either totally destroy The Orca or deal enough damage to the crew to what amounts to eating them. Meanwhile, in turn, they will be attempting to deal enough damage to the shark to defeat it.
Play takes place over a number of phases.

• Resurface options: The shark player draws 3 resurface cards and places them in their allotted spaces on the game board.
  Each card has information on the location of where the shark might attack as well how many damage dice will be rolled, how hard it will be for the crew to attack the shark and finally, if the shark will 'shake off' any attached objects.
• Shark player choices: The shark player now decides on an action.
  Resurface token: From the 3 available resurface options, the shark player chooses which one to use and places the corresponding resurface token face-down in front of them.
  Shark abilities: The shark player may play one of their shark ability cards face-down in front of them. Each one of these cards provides the shark player with a bonus or surprise special move of some sort.
  Once played, a shark ability card is discarded out of play.
• Crew Preparation: Now it's the turn of the crew players to make plans.
  Move: Each hero can move up to 2 tiles on The Orca unless they are in water, in which case, they must spend their entire movement to get aboard The Orca.
  Prepare gear: From their hand, each hero chooses a weapon to use, there are slightly different rules for the 3 weapon types which is explained below.
  Crew players may also use a 'chum' card that forces the shark player to reveal one of the 2 resurface tokens they didn't use which narrows the choices down for the crew.
  Use targeting token: Each crew player now puts down their targeting token on to a space, obviously choosing one of the spaces shown on the resurface cards. There are some rules for this though.
  Ranged: When using a ranged weapon, crew player can put their targeting token anywhere on The Orca.
  Melee weapon: While using a melee weapon, a crew player can only put their token on their own space or a orthogonally adjacent space.
  Attachable weapons: Targeting for these weapons is identical to melee weapons.
• Shark reveal: The shark player now reveals the resurface token they chose and places their shark meeple there.
• Crew attacks: Any crew players who correctly targeted the space that the shark resurfaced in, can attack it.
  The weapon that the player is using determines the number of dice used, sometimes it includes a bonus. The amount of 'hits' results rolled becomes the damage done to the shark. However, the resurface card will have a 'evade' value which is deducted from the damage dealt. If 4 damage is done and the evade value is 2, only 2 damage is done, it's possible to reduce damage to 0 this way.
  Attachable weapons are a little different, they automatically hit the shark and have a ongoing effect until the shark player manages to shake them off with a shake off action on a resurface card.
  To be honest, we found the attachable weapons to be of little value as the shark player generally managed to shake them off almost immediately.
  
• Shark attack: Once the crew have had their attacks, it's the turn of the shark! 
  The shark player can attack a part of the boat that they are adjacent to or a member of the crew that is in the water.
  In a similar manner to the crew players, the shark player rolls a number of dice as shown on the resurface card they chose.
  If it is dealt to a crewmate, then that's the damage they take.
  Attacking the boat is a little more complex, each tile 2 numbers, one is the attack value needed to damage the tile and the second larger number is the value needed to outright destroy the tile. Damage does not accumulate and must be applied in a single roll to have an effect.
  Damaged tiles: These are flipped to the other side and have a new value to beat to destroy.
  Destroyed tiles: Are removed from play.
  In either case, any crewmates on a affected tile are put into the water.
  Finally, as a bonus action, the shark player gets a free attack at crewmates who are in the water adjacent to them.
• Next turn: Once the shark player has had their attack, they remove their meeple from the water surrounding The Orca and take back any resurface tokens that were used. The resurface cards are then discarded
  The crew players take their targeting tokens.
  Then a new round begins.

​Endgame
Play continues until 1 of 3 criteria are met.

If the shark's damage exceeds its tracker, it is defeated and the crew collectively win.
If The Orca is totally destroyed, the shark player wins, or, if the damage on all the hero protagonists exceed their tracker, they are all eaten and the shark wins!

Overall
It's been a long time (And I do mean a long time!) since I watched Jaws but I feel the game does for the most part a good job of thematically emulating the movie.
Having Brody rushing around the island kicking pesky swimmers off the beaches and closing them only to have them open and fill with swimmers again felt like the movie. On the other hand, having Brody run around collecting barrels for Quint was strange.
While the shark popping up to attack swimmers before vanishing was cool, Hooper and Quint in their boats playing a cat and mouse game with the shark while trying to rescue swimmers seemed a bit strange. Especially considering the heroes are the cats and the shark is the mouse, which is a bit of a reverse of how the film plays out.
Having said all of that, Act 2 does a excellent job of emulating the protagonist's final confrontation with the shark.

So overall... This is more of a comment than a criticism on the game's theme.

Now, on to game play.
Act 1 presents an interesting cat-and-mouse challenge to the players which will change contextually according to how swimmers are distributed by event cards.
The shark player needs to eat swimmers but avoid spaces that the crew players might target and if possible, avoid the barrels that detect the shark.

Astute crew players will need to balance their efforts between trying to protect beaches with lots of swimmers and also covering lesser used areas. While the busier beaches might provide a target-rich environment for the shark, the shark player may anticipate the crew players protecting those beaches and avoid them for smaller 'quieter' targets.

I get the feeling that if the shark gets a lot of kills or very few, it will have a big influence on who will win in Act 2. Certainly, the shark getting 5 kills (Which is exactly in the middle.) led to a very close finish.

Act 2 also presents a sort of cat and mouse scenario with differing dilemmas for the shark player and the crew players.
The shark player will generally be faced with deciding whether doing damage or avoiding it, often the resurface cards will not allow the shark player to do both. The shark player will may also have the opportunity to target the crew instead of the ship. Eliminating one of the crew can be very beneficial as it lowers the number of attacks the shark may have to face but generally, it's harder and will take longer to kill a crewmate than it is to destroy one of The Orca tiles.

The crew players also face a dilemma. They know the 3 locations where the shark might resurface so with 3 protagonists could target all 3 locations, but this means spreading their firepower and it'll be a tall order defeating the shark this way. So the crew will need to try and anticipate which option the shark player will choose and this require assessing a bunch of contextual elements such as how much damage the shark will do, how high it's evade is and how damaged that part of The Orca is. 

All players will need to adapt to the random circumstances provided by the resurface cards and will probably have to trade off one strategy for another.
It presents the players will meaningful decisions to make, which is always a good thing.

However, there are somethings I definitely do not like about the game.
Firstly, Jaws is a one-vs-many game and I'm not a fan of this game type. Generally the mechanics of one-vs-many games can never balance for the fact that multiple human brains will have an advantage a single human brain. For the most part, it's fairly inherent that 3 players will see more strategies and opportunities than a single player.
Also; when someone is playing the 'one', games can be become a lonely experience since all the other players will be against them.
I can't help but wonder if the shark could have been automated and have the game be fully cooperative.

Secondly, because this is such a asymmetrical game, it means that one set of rules must be learned by the crew players and another by the shark player.
That's not the end of it!
Because there are 2 acts, it means that there are actually 4 sub-games that must be learned.
Luckily, none of the rules are particularly complex or hard to comprehend but even so, it feels like a lot of effort to play a game, then have to learn a new set of rules to continue. More effort than the entertainment the game delivers.

Normally I don't bother blogging about marketing or sales but I have to wonder who this is aimed at? Dedicated games, movie fans?

Most dedicated gamers are with good reason wary of licensed games. They tend to be quick cash-ins with lacking game.
To be clear I don't think that's the case for Jaws, while the rules are light-ish, there's depth of gameplay to found in the cat-and mouse mechanics that pits players against each other. I just didn't find it particularly compelling.

Jaws is a great, classic movie and I'm sure there are collectors of Jaws memorabilia and merchandise but will they care enough about the game to play it. I'm sure it will end up in the collections of those fans but will they be compelled enough to make make the effort to learn and play the game?

If you're really after a Jaws experience and are happy with the game's 2 act structure and cat-and-mouse gameplay. This is by no means a bad game and worth a try.
For me this didn't hit the spot and I have no desire to play it.

11th August 2022

Thursday is here again and we're in Aldershot for more gaming goodness.

Do you like dungeons (Of the D&D kind of course...)? Do you like interior decoration?
Well now you can channel your inner ​malevolent Changing Rooms desires in this tile laying game of stylish dungeon creation for your fiendish and and most definitely picky overlord!

What's in a game?

• Dungeon tiles: These card tiles are all double-sided and come in 2 types.
  • Generic tiles: These tiles all have a 'grey' background and are also identical, one side features a room and the other, a tunnel passageway.
  • Dungeon tiles: These 120 tiles form the bulk of the game's tiles and they all have black backgrounds.
    Some dungeon tiles will contain assistant icons, more on assistants below.
    Decoration side: This side will display numerous types of icons to represent different decorations. Additionally, the decoration side may also contain a green symbol, this is symbol that can temporarily become a wild symbol when used in conjunction with a ​decorative mimic token. There may also be colour on the corner.
    Curiously, the manner in which the icons are presented on this side also provides information on what dungeon feature will be found on the other side.
    E.g., white icons at the edge mean a entrance way, so 2 white icons opposite edges of the tile would indicate a corridor, a white symbol on the edge of all 4 sides of a tile would indicate a crossroads. 
    This side also contains a unique number.
    Dungeon side: This other side displays various dungeon features such as rooms, junctions, tunnels, etc. Whilst many of the features will be grey, others will have colours.
• Starting tiles: There's one of these crossroad tiles for each player.
• Hourglass tiles: There are 3 of these and they're used to trigger the game end.
• Cards: Cards in Dungeon Decorators provide scoring opportunities to work towards and they also come in 4 types.
  Shape goal cards: This kind of card will score VPs for the player if their dungeon corridors and rooms matches the shape criteria on the card.
  Decoration goal cards: These cards can score VPs, provided the player meets it's decorative criteria.
  Blue boss goal cards: These cards are illustrated with a big bad boss who might be the dungeon's ruler. Boss cards provide a global scoring opportunity, that is, a boss card can score points for all players.
  ​Yellow boss goal cards: Functionally identical to the blue boss cards but providing a different type of global scoring opportunity and... in yellow.​
• Player boards: These come in player colours and each one features a humorous take on dungeon-themed interior decoration along with suitably cartoony artwork.
  Finally, each board contains 2 spaces to contain up to 2 dungeon tiles if a player decides to reserve them.
• Wooden cubes: Wooden cubes! There's only 4 of them though, coming in player colours, they are used to track players' scores.
• Pawns: These are the classic pawns you would find in classic games and come in player colours. They aren't used to move around a board or anything like that. Instead they're used to track turn order.
• Draft board: This board contains 2 rows of 5 spots for player pawns, one row at the top and one at the bottom.
  Between these 2 rows is another row, this time it's a row of 4 box shaped spaces to place dungeon tiles, between boxes 2 and 3 is the special 'middle' space. More on the draft board later.
• Tokens: There are 10 each of these 2 types of token.
  Arcane architect tokens: A round card token.
  Decorative mimic tokens: A colourful square token with a grinning face!
• Bags: Dungeon Decorators comes with not 1 but 2 bags (1 blue and 1 red!) to draw tiles from!

Component quality is good throughout Dungeon Decorators as you'd expect from any modern game. The tiles and tokens are all suitable sturdy as the cards, nothing bad here but nothing standout either.
The wooden cubes are a welcome addition and the traditional playing pawns are plastic - and that's fine, although to be honest they feel like a bit of left-field choice but they're also relatively big and practical, so that's good.

Most of the game's art appears on the player boards and cards, particularly the boss cards but it even carries over to some of the tokens. With bright and cartoony character art, it conveys the game's humorous theme and it's an appealing style.
Artwork for the corridors, junctions and rooms is straightforward but always practical.

There's quite a few icons to Dungeon Decorators though and players will need to learn them. This is most apparent with the decoration side of the dungeon tiles where there's the 'double-whammy' of not only having to learn what the various icons represent, but what their positioning in relation to each other means.
It's a bit fiddly and belies the games light theme and rules and will probably require referring to the rules.

How's it player?
Setup

• ​Dungeon tiles: Shuffle the ​dungeons tiles into a face-down stack. Remove 20 tiles from the game, then put 50 tiles into the blue bag, put the other 50 into the red bag, now add the 3 hourglass tiles to the red bag.
  Finally, give both bags a good shake.
• Boss cards: Sort the boss cards into their 2 types and shuffle both into face-down decks.
  Deal 1 card from both decks: These are the global scoring objectives for the game.
• Goal cards: Sort the goal card into their 2 types and shuffle them into 2 face-up decks.
• Players: Give each player the following.
  Pawn and game board in their player colours.
  A starting tile.
  Deal 3 shape goal cards and 3 decoration goal cards to each player, then everyone should discard any 2 of those cards. All discards should be done face-down.
• First player: Randomly determine the turn order for the game's 1st round. Player pawns should be placed accordingly from left-to-right along the top row on the draft board.

On to play
The objective in Dungeon Decorators is to create a dungeon in certain shapes as well as adding decorations to the dungeon in certain positions.
What these shapes and positions will be is determined by the 2 boss cards which will apply to all players and by individual goal cards players have hidden in their hands.
During each round, the active player's turn is split into 5 phases.
Dungeon Decorators does not follow the usual turn structure, once the active player has completed their actions, play does not progress to the player on their left, instead the next player is determined by whose pawn is next in line on the draft board.
The following occurs in a round:

• Draft board: First, any tiles still on the draft board from the previous round should be discarded out of the game.
  Drawing tiles: Tile will initially be drawn from the blue bag. Once all the tiles have been used form this bag, players switch to drawing from the red bag and it's the red bag that contains hourglasses which trigger the game end.
  Draw 4 tiles from the current bag and fill the 4 boxes on the draft board. For this, the decoration side is used. The order the tiles go on to the boxes is determined by the number on each tile. The lowest numbered goes on the leftmost and going rightward in increasing numerical order, so that the highest numbered tile goes on the furthest right.
• Draft tile: Whoever is first on the draft board goes first.
  They decide which tile they want to take and place their pawn on the adjacent spot on the opposite row. This will determine the player's position in the turn order for the next round.
  Middle space: If the player puts their pawn on the middle space which has no tile, the instead randomly draw a tile from the current bag.
  Then they take the tile.
• Activate assistant: Some tiles will display 1 of 4 assistant icons, these are immediately resolved when that tile is chosen.
  Goblin sapper: Allows the active player to take a generic tile which can be stored or played as per the tile placement rules (Explained below.).
  Burrow bro: The active player draws 2 tiles from the current bag, then along with the initial tile they drew, they choose which of the 3 to use, the other 2 are discarded out of play.
  Arcane architect: The active player take a arcane architect token.
  The active player may spend one of these tokens during their build phase. This allows them to reposition a tile that they've already played in a previous build phase, this includes being able to flip from one side to the other. Usual building rules apply.
  ​Decorative mimic: The active player takes one of these tokens, they can be spent during the scoring phase in their turn or during game end scoring.
  In either case, a  token can be used to make a green symbol represent any type of decoration for the purposes of a single scoring opportunity.
• Build: During this phase, the active player can chose one of the following actions.
  • Store: The tile just taken by the player can be put on to a empty box on their personal player board, each player board has room for 2 tiles.
  • Play tile: In this instance, the active player must then add the tile to their personal dungeon. There are of course some restrictions to this.
    Decoration tile: A decoration tile must be placed with at least 1 side adjacent to a wall on a dungeon card. A decoration cannot placed against a open passageway so as to block it.
    Dungeon tile: At least 1 open side of a dungeon tile must connect to another open passageway in the player's actual dungeon - it must be possible to trace a line from the newly placed tile to the starting tile. However a passageway from a dungeon tile cannot lead directly into a decoration.
    Furthermore, there should always be at least 1 unfinished passage way in a players dungeon after placing a tile.
  • Discard: If a player cannot build or store a tile, it must be discarded out of play.
• Score: The active player may reveal 1 or more goal card from their hand and score them. Points are immediately added to the score tracker and the played cards are discarded.
• Refill hand: If the active players has less than 4 goal cards, they draw from either of the decks, one at time until they have 4 in hand.
• Next player: Once the active player has finished their turn, player progresses to the next player on the draft board.
• Next round: Once all player have gone, new tiles are drawn to fill the draft board and a new round begins with a new turn order according to pawn positioning on the draft board.

Endgame
There are 2 ways the game can end.

If the 3rd and final hourglass is drawn from the red bag when refilling the spaces on the draft board, then the game immediately ends.
If the final hourglass is drawn during an action, such as placing a pawn in the middle space on the draft board our using a burrow bro action, then the current round is played out and the game ends with players having had even turns.

There are a variety of ways to score VPs.

• Goal cards: These should already be tracked on the score tracker.
• Boss goals: Boss cards reward VPs to players for having the most of some criteria related to dungeon or decoration tiles. The player with the most gains 10 VPs, 2nd place gets 4.
• Stars: Stars on dungeon tiles in a player's dungeon score VPs.
• Number of colours: Players score VPs for having different colours on dungeon tiles in their dungeon. More different colours means more VPs
• Amount of colour: Players also score VPs for the how many dungeon tiles of a single colour in their dungeon. The large the number of that colour, the more VPs.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
No doubt about it, Dungeon Decorators has a quirky theme along with quirky presentation to go with it.
At it's heart though, it's a pretty straightforward game of it's type, draft a tile and play it into a expanding network of tiles to maximise connections, albeit with a couple of nice little innovative touches in the form tile flipping and personal scoring opportunities, which I'll talk about below.
​
As is typical of this kind of game, players will need to position tiles in order to optimise the points they will score. 
Talking of scoring, Dungeon Decorators provides 2 clear routes to scoring points; how a dungeon is shaped and how decorations are placed which brings to me to the double-sided tiles.
​When placing a tile, players will need to choose which side to use and this will be heavily contextual. Players will need to take into consideration what tiles they already have in play as well as their personal goal cards and global scoring cards.

Unlike most tile-laying games, there's no connection between different scoring opportunities on the tiles, that is shape and decoration scoring is completely separate to each other with no way to place a tile to score both, it's one or the other. Yet, they also rely on each other or at least decoration tiles rely upon their presence of walls to be placed against. This means players will need to think, how can they can place a dungeon shape that allows me to play decorations.

Personal goal cards are also an interesting addition.
Firstly, they add some asymmetrical scoring opportunities which will lead to player adopting different approaches to what they prioritise and essentially some asymmetrical  tactics.
Secondly, they provide players with some flexibility when deciding how to prioritise certain elements of the game.
E.g., a when scoring goal cards, a player can choose to only draw shape goal cards and concentrate on playing dungeon tiles over decorations.

​However, even with these 2 innovative mechanics, I feel that Dungeon Decorators fails to stand out of the crowd. For me it doesn't feel different enough to other games of s similar type.
It's a perfectly acceptable game with solid core gameplay that provides an entertaining experience and I would happily play this if someone else wanted to but there are other games I would personally choose over Dungeon Decorators.

If you're a big fan of drafting, tile laying games and want to try something familiar but a fresh twist on the mechanics or the fun theme tickles your fancy, then you may want to give this a look-in.

5th August 2022

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

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

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

What's in a game?

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

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

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

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

How's it play?
Setup

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

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

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

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

Players now calculate their VPs.

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

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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

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

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

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

4th August 2022

It's a Thursday and we're round Simon's for a evening of gaming entertainment.
​
Cascadia: 'A land of falling waters,' generally referring to a large wilderness area in the Pacific north-west of the USA.

In Cascadia players vie to create a diverse landscape of habitats and wildlife in this tile placement game.

What's in a game?

• Tiles: Cascadia uses 2 types of hex tile, however, they all share some common features.
  Each hex space will feature 1 or 2 of the game's 5 habitats and 1-3 of the 5 wildlife types. Finally some hex spaces will have a pinecone icon - usually this is a hex that only has 1 habitat and 1 animal on it.
  Starter tiles: There are 5 of these and they are a little different from the main tile in that they are actually 3 hex tiles combined into 1.
  Habitat tiles: There are about 80 of these tiles.
  The game's 5 habitats are:
  Forest
  Mountain
  Prairie
  River
  Wetland
• Tokens: There are a 100 wooden disc tokens in the game that come in 5 types. Each type represents a different animal/colour.
  Bear/brown
  Elk/earthy brown
  Fox/orange
  Hawk/blue
  Salmon/red
• Bag: A small used in conjunction with the tokens.
• Cards: There are 5 types of card in Cascadia for the 5 wildlife types and 4 cards in each type, thus 20 cards in total. One card will be used from each wildlife type during the game.
  Cards provide different scoring opportunities for each wildlife type as explained below. Additionally each of the 4 cards for all wildlife have slightly different scoring criteria and are rated A-D with A being the easiest to score and D the hardest.
  The different types of card score as follows.
  Bear: Bears score for being solitary or in small packs as determined by their card,  generally they cannot be adjacent to other bears.
  Elk: These score by being in herds, the shape the herd must take will be dictated by the elk card used.
  Fox: Foxes score by being adjacent to different wildlife types.
  Hawk: These score by being in line-of-sight of other hawks, generally they cannot be adjacent to other hawks.
  Salmon: Salmon score by being in a continuous line, the longer the better.
• Pinecone tokens: These are standard card tokens that depict pinecones. After being acquired, pinecones may be spent to trigger a couple of special actions or score VPs at the game end.

For the most part the components are all high quality. The tiles and tokens are sturdy and the wildlife tokens in particular are chunky and tactile.
The pinecone tokens are average quality by modern standard - which means perfectly acceptable.
The same is true of the cards, they feel a little flimsy but since they're only used to display information and won't really be handled much, they too are perfectly acceptable.

The art used on cards is fantastic, having said that, each set of 4 only uses 2 images which are flipped and used a 2nd time, it's a minor quibble but it feels touch cheap.
Art on the tiles is good too but is hard to appreciate since they are relatively small. Importantly, it's also uncluttered, differences between habitats is for the most part very easy to distinguish. Similarly, the wildlife icons are easy seen.

As a minor aside: Prairies are depicted as yellow, which I guess represent dry grasslands. The yellow definitely does not represent desert! And yes; some of the yellow tiles have salmon icons on them, because, believe it or not, prairies can have water features.
If you ever play the game and someone says, 'why are their fish in the desert', then let them know!!
Anyway, back to talking about components.

The iconography is easily understood in Cascadia. It's obvious what the wildlife ​icons represent and the icon for pinecones is equally as obvious.

How's it play?
Setup

• Starting tiles: Randomly give a starting tile to each player who should put it face-up in their personal playing area.
• Cards: Sort the cards by type and shuffle them into 5 face-down decks. Draw 1 from each deck and put them into a face-up row.
  These will provide players will the scoring criteria for the wildlife tokens.
• Wildlife tokens: Put all the wildlife tokens into the bag and give it a good shake.
• Tiles: Select the number of tiles to use as per player count and shuffle them into some face-down stacks, the exact number of stacks does not matter.
• Drafting area: Draw 4 tiles and place them in a row, next draw 4 wildlife tokens and put them in a row adjacent to the 4 tiles.
  ​Thus there will be 4 pairs each of 1 tile and 1 token.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
In Cascadia, players will draft tiles and wildlife tokens, using them to create a personal landscape by placing tiles adjacent to each other and putting tokens on top of them in order to create habitats and patterns of animals to score points.
Cascadia follows a usual turn order with the active player resolving their action before play progresses to their left.

• Overpopulation: The first thing the active player must do is check the wildlife tokens in the drafting area for overpopulation.
  4 identical tokens: If all 4 wildlife tokens are identical, the active player must remove all of them, put them to one side and draw 4 new wildlife tokens.
  3 identical tokens: If 3 of the 4 tokens are identical, the active player may choose to put the 3 tokens to one side and draw 3 new ones.
  It is possible to trigger overpopulation multiple times dependant on the tokens that are drawn but regardless of this, once overpopulation no longer occurs, return all set aside tokens back to the bag (And give it a good shake!).
• Pinecone tokens: If a player has acquired any pinecone tokens on previous turns (See below for info getting them.) then they can be spent for 1 of 2 actions.
  Take any tile and token: This actions allows the active player to take any tile and any wildlife token, regardless of their positions in the drafting area.
  Remove any wildlife tokens: The active player may set aside any number of wildlife tokens and then draw new tokens to replace them. Rules for overpopulation still apply here.
• Draft: The active player takes one of the 4 pairs of 1 tile and 1 wildlife token and according to the following rules, places them in their playing area.
• Place tile: The active must put the tile with one of it's faces adjacent to the face of a tile already in play. When placing tiles, the habitats on the tiles do not need to match, i.e., you can place mountains next to rivers but's a good idea to do so. Larger habitats score more VPs later on.  
• Place wildlife token: Wildlife tokens can only go on a tile that contains the matching animal icon. E.g., a fox token can only be placed on a tile which has a fox icon.
  If a wildlife token is placed on to a tile with a pinecone icon, then the active player immediately takes a pinecone token and adds it to their personal supply.
• Replacements: A new tile is drawn from a stack and a new wildlife ​token is drawn from the bag to replace those that were drafted.
• Next player: Play now progresses to the player left of the active player.

Endgame
Play continues until all the face-down stacks of tiles have been depleted and only 3 tiles remain in the drafting area, which should also be a even number of player turns.
VPs are scored from several sources.

• Meeting the scoring criteria on the 5 cards.
• Players score VPs for the biggest single grouping of tiles for each of the 5 habitats. If a player has groupings of 2 mountains and 5 mountains, they only score the group of 5 mountains. The bigger the grouping, the more VPS
  Bonus: For each of the 5 habitats, bonus VPs are awarded to the player with the biggest grouping of that habitat and the player with the 2nd biggest grouping.
• Pinecones: Each unspent pinecone contributes a VP.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
The rulebook for Cascadia talks about the real life habitats and biomes that inspired the game and it's obvious that this is one of those games where a bit of extra attention has been put into the details. 

On to the game itself: Cascadia has a nice mixture of quick to learn rules and depth of gameplay.
This depth comes from forcing players to make tricky and meaningful decisions. This occurs because Cascadia has 3 axis' of play which will influence players' choices.

The first comes from wanting tiles with specific habitats on them; players may want to expand their forests or rivers for example and will be looking for tiles that facilitate that.
The second axis comes from also wanting tiles with specific wildlife icons. If a player needs a fox token in a certain spot, then they'll need a tile with a fox icon.
The third and final axis comes from getting the actual wildlife tokens that are needed to score the wildlife cards.

​All of this means that it's unlikely that players will get all 3 that they want when picking a single pair which would be a no-brainer, they'll probably end getting 2 of they want and sometimes only 1.
​Players will need to adapt and re-strategize contextually, look to optimise their picks and finding other scoring opportunities. Players will probably have to gamble a little bit on getting what they need later in the game.

Pinecone tokens can of course change things. Used at the right time they can really open up a player's choices, getting any pair can make a difference, as can clearing all wildlife tokens in the drafting area if a player is really looking for a certain token.

Cascadia also has a fairly quick playtime, although it sort of occupies a game length that's way too long to be a filler but a little too short to fill an entire evening. I don't consider that a bad thing, you could just play twice! The randomness in setup and scoring gives it a lot of replayability.

If I had a criticism of Cascadia, it would be that sometimes the card scoring can be a little unclear and finicky. The rulebook does offer elaborations on this, but it's a definite little niggle.

Otherwise though, I think Cascadia is ab excellent tile-laying and set collectiing game.
For me it ticks a lot of boxes that good games should; straightforward rules, some depth for decision making and a brisk playtime.
It's one of those games I frequently like to carry in my board game bag when going to game events, so if I meet someone who's never met played Cascadia, they can try it.
As should you!

Gaming totals for July '22 are below.
It was a slow month for first plays but an overall increase in games played.
Looks like we fell back on playing games we knew and loved.

Total games: 57
Different games: 31
​First plays: 5

Saturday 2nd on Board Game Arena
Martian Dice - 16
Lucky Numbers - 28

Sunday 3rd on Board Game Arena
Pandemic - 3
Codex Naturalis - 22
Can't Stop - 17
Stella - Dixit Universe - 9
Lucky Numbers - 29

Tuesday 5th at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club
Raccoon Tycoon - First Play!
Paper Tales - 4

Thursday 7th Aldershot
Race for the Galaxy - 15
Honshu - 4
Heckmeck - 12
Sushi Roll - 6

Saturday 9th on Board Game Arena
Lucky Numbers - 30
Regicide - 2
Martian Dice - 17

Sunday 10th on Board Game Arena
Regicide - 3
Jump Drive - 9
Dragonwood - 11
Fruit Picking - 5
Azul - 6
Lucky Numbers - 31
Martian Dice - 18

Tuesday 12th at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club
Hellapagos - 2
Muffin Time - 3
In Vino Morte - First Play!

Thursday 14th Aldershot
The Crew: Deep Sea Mission - 31
Railroad Ink - 30

Saturday 16th on Board Game Arena
Regicide - 4
Lucky Numbers - 32

Sunday 17th on Board Game Arena
Regicide - 5
Railroad Ink - 31
Parks - 10
Can't Stop - 18
Lucky Numbers - 33

Tuesday 19th at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club
Switch & Signal - 2

Saturday 23rd on Board Game Arena
Race for the Galaxy - 16
Lucky Numbers - 34
Regicide - 6
Martian Dice - 19

Sunday 24th at The Sovereigns
Love Letter: Adventure Time - First Play! -
Switch & Signal - 3

Sunday 24th on Board Game Arena
Regicide - 7
Loco Momo - 10
Barenpark - 3
Sushi Go! - 14
Can't Stop - 19
Lucky Numbers - 35

Tuesday 26th at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club
Escape: The curse of the Temple  - First Play! -
Space Base - 13

Sunday 31st on Board Game Arena
Regicide - 8
Chromino  - First Play!
Space Base - 14
Railroad Ink - 32
Azul - 7
Can't Stop - 20
Lucky Numbers - 36

31st July 2022

It's a Sunday night and we're logged into Board Game Arena for a evening of gaming entertainment.

Chrome: A reference to colour (Not the browser!).
Ino: The last syllable of 'domino'.
Chromino: Colour domino!

And that's exactly what Chromino is - dominos with colours instead of numbers.

Caveat: We've only ever played Chromino digitally.

What's in the game?

• Tiles: These tiles are not the usual dominoes though. Instead of having 2 numbers, they have 3 colours. One colour on each end and one in the middle in any combination of 5 colours.
• Wild tiles: There are 5 wild tiles, these differ from the normal in that their centre spaces contain 'wild' colours which can be used as any colour.
• Bag: The physical version of the game also comes with a draw, that tiles are blindly drawn from.

There's very little to be said about the components here. No artwork is used, only 5 colours: blue, green, purple, red and yellow. These are bright plain colours too with no symbology to help colour blind players distinguish between them, which seems like a bit of a omission by today's standards.

Only 1 icon is used in Chrominos - which is the 'wild' symbol that always appears on a white background in the centre space.

How's it play?
Setup

• Starting tile: Randomly draw one of the wild tiles and place it into the central playing area.
• Players: Each player should randomly draw 8 tiles from the remaining tiles, keeping them hidden from other players.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
In Chromino, players take turns playing tiles from their hand with the intention of emptying their hand first and thus winning.
On their turn, the active player will perform 1 of the following actions.

• Play tile: If the active player can play a tile, they must do so, however, there is a specific rule when doing so.
  2 contact rule: When a tile is played, it must be placed orthogonally adjacent to another tile already in play and at least 2 of its colours must orthogonally touch matching colours. Mismatched colours cannot touch. A wild symbol counts as any colour and this applies to a tile in play or about to be played.
• Draw tile: If the active player cannot play a tile they must draw a new one.
  If the tile they drew can be played, then it must be played.
  Otherwise the new tile is added to the player's hand.
• Next player: Once the active player has played or drawn a tile, play progresses to the player on their left.

Endgame
When a player has only 1 tile remaining in their hand, they must shout "Uno!", or more sensibly just announce this is their last tile to all other players and then turn that last tile face-up for all to see. Play then continues normally. 
A new rule is introduced when a player has a only 1 tile left; which is that the last tile a player puts down cannot be a wild tile. If this would be the case, they must draw a new one instead.

Then, when a player places their final tile, the current round is concluded and any players who have placed all their tiles are declared winners.

Overall
From the brevity of the rules description, it's apparent that Chromino is a light game, which is no bad thing, it makes the game easy to learn and accessible to non gamers. It is after all, dominoes.

For me though, this level of simplicity makes the game unengaging.
I know there's a touch of strategy to be found from watching other players, possibly seeing which colours they're having trouble matching and trying to put those colours out to stymy them.
Also, when a player reveals their last tile, opponents will get an idea on how to block it but truth be told, it will also rely on luck to use these strategies.

This brings me to my main issue with the game: It's just very heavily dependent on luck more than anything else.
They'll be times when someone won't be able to play anything and will just have add a tile to their hand. This becomes even more frustrating when you watch an opponent then play a tile, this now means there's now a 2-tile difference between you and them - which in Chromino can be quite a lot.
And this seemed borne out in play. Often there would be a player - who through no fault of their own would have 2 or 3 more tiles than their opponents. Usually it meant they would never be in the running to win.

So unengaging and frustrating is how I would summarise Chromino.
​I'm not sure who would like it, fans of heavier games will shy away from this and more casual players will probably gravitate to more traditional games.
However, if you want a lightweight game a bit like dominoes... well you could just play dominoes.

26th July 2022

It's Tuesday! That means it's time to meet up with the Woking Board Gaming Club at the The Sovereigns.

Time to steal the idol... and escape, Indiana Jones has nothing on this real-time, cooperative dice game, well at least until those crappy rolls inevitably turn up!

What's in a game?

• ​Tiles: The game comes with about 20 tiles, they depict various different kinds of underground sandstone chamber from a top down view. There are several different types of tile but all of them display a number of exits and also show icons of some sort.
  Main tiles: This includes the beginning tile and the escape tile, it also includes gem tiles, more on gem tiles later.
  The backs of each of these tiles feature 2 adventurer icons, also more on icons later.
  Gem depot: This is not a game tile per se and is used to store gems and track the amount which get used.
  Basic tiles: These are the most common type of tile; as well as a pair of icons they also feature an entrance (Stairs.) and exits. They are for the most part empty but some contain 'gem spaces'.
  The backs of these tiles also feature 2 adventurer icons
• Gems: Basic acrylic tokens in translucent green.
• Meeples: There are 5 of these suitably fedora-wearing meeples, one each in every player colour.
• Tokens: Circular card tokens, again in each player colour. These are used to quickly identify which meeple belongs to which player.
• Dice: Lots of dice! 25 to be exact and enough to give each player 5.
  These are not normal six-siders and all the numbers have been replaced with symbols which match the symbols found on tiles. The symbols are:
  Adventurer X2: A green man running away (Presumably from a giant boulder?) while carrying a whip!
  2 sides on each die has the adventurer icon.
  Key: A blue key icon.
  Torch: A red torch icon.
  Gold Mask: A grinning gold icon.
  Black Mask: A leering black mask, the black mask result on dice is bad news.
• Soundtrack: Yep! The game comes with a soundtrack, it serves as the game's countdown timers for the game's 3 rounds and it also plays atmospheric, moody ambient audio!

Escape: The Curse of the Temple has good quality components. The tiles all feel suitably thick and sturdy. The acrylic gem tokens are kind you see in a lot of games which use them to depict gems, they are a sparkly, pleasing shade of green though.
The bespoke dice and meeples are wooden which is always a nice touch.

There's not much art to speak of, the tiles show flagstones and that's about it. It's clear artwork that does not get in the way.

About half a dozen icons are used throughout the game, luckily they most relate to the dice and there's never a need to refer to the rules - which is a good thing since this is a real time game with a countdown.

How's it play?
Setup

• Tiles: Put aside the Start and Exit tiles, then shuffle all the remaining tiles into a face-down stack. Finally shuffle the Exit tile into the bottom 4 tiles in the stack.
• Start tile: Put the Start tile into the central playing area, since it has two doorways, reveal and place 2 tiles from the stack and place them adjacent to the starting tile with the stairs connected to the exit from the start tile.
• Gem depot: Depending on player count, place 7-16 gems on the gem depot tile. 
  Also place 2 gems adjacent to the gem depot tile, these 2 gems can be very important later on.
• Players: Give each player the token and meeples in their colour, then give each player 5 dice for their personal use.
  ​Each player should then place their meeple on to the starting tile.
• Soundtrack: Prepare the soundtrack.

On to play
In Escape: The Curse of the Temple players are collectively attempting to explore a lost temple to find the exit and escape before becoming trapped.
It's not so simple though; not only must they find the exit, they'll also need to activate the gem tiles and spaces to make their escape possible.
The game is played over 3 rounds and does not use a typical turn structure. Instead, turns are actually synchronous, in other words, players perform all their actions at the same time and in real time!
This involves all players rolling their dice and resolving their actions simultaneously. How is this all done? Read on.

• Soundtrack: Begin the soundtrack, the clock is now ticking.
• Roll the dice: When a player wants to undertake an action it is resolved by rolling dice, getting a required result will then complete that action. This usually means get at least 2 specific symbols on the dice.
  Rerolls: Players are free to reroll their dice as much as possible (And will have to do so nearly all the time!) to resolve an action. However, that brings me to...
  Black masks: Any time a die gets a black mask result, it becomes locked. A locked die cannot be rerolled or used for anything. When this happens (And it will happen.) the affected player should leave the die showing the black mask. Luckily, we come to gold masks...
  Gold mask: When a die comes up with the gold mask result, the player can use it to unlock up to 2 black mask locked dice. Very useful!
  Set aside: After making a roll, the player may set aside a dice on any face for later use. A player may also change their mind and reroll dice set aside in a later roll.
  A good example of setting aside would keeping a gold mask result in anticipation of getting a black mask later.
  Aid: If 2 or more meeples are on the same tile, they may help each other by contributing die results to the other player's action.
  A player can even use a gold mask of their own to unlock another player's locked dice.
• Actions: There are several actions each player can perform, which they can do in any order as required.
  Move: The player may attempt to move their meeple into an adjacent tile. The tile they are moving on to will show 2 icons that will need to be rolled. Typically this involves a green adventurer and 1 other icon - sometimes another green adventurer.
  After matching the icons, the player can move their meeple into the relevant tile.
  Explore: If the player wants to move their meeple through a doorway that does not yet have a tile, they must get a result with 2 green adventurers on their dice.
  Once this is completed, they flip a tile from the stack and place it adjacent to the doorway they want to go through.
  When adding new tiles to the playing area, the doorway with the stairs is always used to make the connection.
  ​Gems: Some of the basic tiles have space for a gem and number of the main tiles will have 3 gem spaces (For 1, 2 or 3 gems.).
  What's important about gems? Well, they need to be removed from the gem depot tile and put on the gems spaces on the tiles in order to allow the players to escape.
  How is this done? next to a single gem space will be a torch symbol and a 4. As an action, if a player gets 4 torches on the dice, they can move a gem from the depot tile to the space on their current tile.
  For the tiles with 3 gem spaces, 1, 2 or 3 gems can be shifted, however, only 1 of those spaces can be used on a tile. Furthermore, it gets harder to achieve  to move more gems. E.g., it takes 10 torch symbols to shift 3 gems, which is impossible for a single player and requires a group effort - probably with 3 players!
• Turn of fate: This action does not require rolling dice, it does however, require unanimous agreement from all players.
  When this action is triggered, it allows all players to reroll all locked dice. It's a powerful move that can free up a lot of dice but it comes at a cost. One of the 2 gems that were put adjacent to the gem depot tile must be added to the tile, thus making escape harder.
  Since 2 gems were put to the side, this can be done twice in a game.
• End of round: When a gong plays on the sound track, it marks the beginning of the end of the 1st round. All players must return to the starting tile before countdown expires and a door shutting sound plays.
  If a player gets back in time, nothing bad happens.
  If a player fails to get back in time, then they permanently lose 1 die for the rest of the game!
  2nd round: The second round now begins and is basically a repeat of the 1st round, players must again move, explore and shift gems until this time 2 gongs play and must return to the starting tile or suffer the same penalty.
  Even if the exit tile is discovered in the first 2 rounds, at no point can the players use it to escape in those rounds. Which brings me to the 3rd round and the endgame.

Endgame
When the 3rd and final round begins, all players must get to the exit tile and successfully perform the escape action.

• Escape: Obviously this action can only occur in the 3rd round and when the player is on the exit tile. They must then roll their dice to escape.
  The player must get a number of key results equal to the remaining number of gems on the gem depot tile, plus one! I.e., if the gem tile is empty, they still need at least 1 key. If there were 3 gems on the tile, they would need 4 keys.
  What makes this worse is that players cannot help each other in the final escape. Players can only use their own dice, which is why losing dice in the first 2 round can be really bad as can having too many gems remaining on the depot tile.
• Boon: When a player escapes they may give exactly 1 of their dice permanently to another player as assistance.

The soundtrack has a total countdown across all 3 rounds of 10 minutes.

If one or more players are still in the temple when the countdown has finished, then they collectively lose the game.
If all the players have escaped before the time runs out, then the players collectively win!

Overall
I'm going to start by saying that I'm a bit ambivalent towards real time games.
I've played some good ones and can see how they have their place in gaming but for me but broadly speaking, it's not why I like and play board games. I like to think out my decisions and choices at least a little bit.
Add to the mix a push-your-luck dice mechanic and you've a game of a lot of quick frantic rolling. You really don't want to roll those dice off the table!

Having said all of this, I think Escape: The Curse of the Temple is a solid game and there's a lot to like about it.

Firstly, rules and theme mesh together well. Chucking dice as quickly as you can to escape feels good.

The synchronous dice rolling is a clever little system.
Generally real time games are always trying to impress upon players that they're up against the clock, this can be a little jarring in a game where players are having to wait for another player's time to run our and get their turn. By having synchronous actions, it heightens the sense of urgency as everyone is in it together.

Being able to provide assistance another player on the same tile is equally clever. It's an elegant mechanic that also feels organic and makes sense.

This means it would seem like a good idea to have players explore the temple as a group, it would make shifting gems and unlocking dice easier...
But there's a couple of rules that throws a spanner into that strategy.

Firstly; exploring as group can slow down that exploration. Players can't escape if they don't shift enough gems or find draw exit tunnel from the stack.
Secondly; players will want to avoid creating single long corridors, they will need to return to the starting tile twice and the further away they are from it, the further it is to get back.

This will force players to split up or go in pairs or stick close by if they have the option, at least for the first 2 rounds.
This can change contextually when certain tile are revealed or have to be put in play in a certain way or a player get too many locked dice and so on.
Players will have to think quickly and decisively as well as adapt to emergent events.

Escape: The Curse of the Temple obviously has a quick playtime - 10 minutes! That feels a little strange because the setup and explanation time almost feels longer than a single game.
It's reasonably easy to learn, I can't imagine novice gamers struggling to learn the concepts here.
It also not a game to be taken too seriously and leans heavily on luck which is not unusual for cooperative games. Although, even accepting this, a bad run of rolls can sour the experience.
​But treat Escape: The Curse of the Temple as a cooperative, silly, fun, filler of a game and it will be a enjoyable time. So long as your luck is better than mine... much better!

24th July 2022

​It's a Sunday afternoon and we're in The Sovereigns for some gaming fun.

With a couple of exceptions, the rules are broadly speaking, identical to vanilla Love Letter. Luckily, these additional rules don't break the game like some other reskins do but by the same measure, nor do they add anything to it and truth be told, can be easily ignored.
Which is something I would do since I've always found the original Love Letter to have the best implementation of the rules.

So is it worth getting Love Letter: Adventure Time?
​
If you've already got some version of Love Letter; unless you're a completionist or a fan of the cartoon then you can skip this.

However, if you're a fan and don't have a copy of Love Letter, it's a fantastic game and you should definitely get one and this version is a good as any.
In fact if you don't have a copy of Love Letter, you should get one regardless!