A blog containing the board games we play at Medway Area Boardgamers, Maidstone, Kent.
Spiel is approaching and I have spent a couple of weeks putting my Essen purchase list together – over 450 games looked at, reviews read and websites visited – quite time consuming thus the lateness of this report. The last 2 weeks of gaming will follow on Monday or at the latest Tuesday.
A fun start to the evening with Zombie Dice from Steve Jackson Games.
The idea of the game is to collect as many brain symbols as possible without busting by being “shot” 3 times. There are 3 different coloured dice with 3 different symbols with different probabilities attached to each colour, on your turn you take 3 dice and roll, brains are VP’s, footprints are rerolled along with enough dice to take your rolled dice up to 3.
Zombie dice, shot down again and not a brain in sight
On the whole I found this game to be heavily luck based, which dice you draw is random and the limited probability knowledge available is not sufficient to balance off that luck or in my case lack of luck.
Seven of us then split – four to play Abyss a 2014 release from Bruno Cathala and Charles Chevallier and three to play Steam from Martin Wallace.
The Abyss box
The idea of Abyss is to collect victory points, these are on “Lord” cards and land tiles. On a turn you get to do one of three things, collect a cash card, take a stack of discarded cash cards (usually singles) or purchase a Lord card with cash cards.
Cash cards
Cash cards come in various types and you must collect the correct cash cards to purchase a Lord card.
Three Lords
As you collect Lord cards they provide in game benefits one of which is keys, collect 3 keys and you immediately collect a land card which gives additional victory points but immediately nullifies the benefits of the Lords used. The game is well balanced has nice mechanisms, the graphics are atmospheric and all those that played enjoyed the game immensely.
A Land tile in Abyss
I joined two others on another table to play Steam, the successor to “Age of Steam” (AoS) to which it bears many similarities. Steam is a railway game where players take turns to lay track between towns and then move goods along those links, in moving the goods you earn cash or victory points; the cubes are the key to the game and the mechanism of taking a special action each turn is how you get influence over them.
A 2 link track between Syracuse and Scranton
Our game played well with us all within a few points of one another for the majority of the game, it was only by protecting a monopoly of cubes at the end that one of us gained an advantage. This was my first time with Steam my previous games having been with AoS, there were not many differences between the 2 games but those that were there did make the game play quite differently.
One of the differences twixt AoS and Steam, the latter has a resource cube track from which you can take a grouping of your choice, this is limited and not refreshed.
Gone was the angst of knowing how many loans to take out and gone was the careful cash calculations, instead I felt a carefree attitude towards the cash and loans. The other major difference was the game end, in Steam it felt “messy”, in AoS because of the cash restraints every build is done with a purpose and must be cost effective in Steam there was no such constraint, random building took place and the specialist actions were of little use. On the whole I will remain an AoS fan, although I expect with its more user friendly cash and scoring system, those who have been brought up on Steam will prefer that version.
A new high for the club as it continues to grow, still only a few months old and we have reached 10 attendees, it was lovely to see everyone. We started off with Camel Up whilst waiting for the last few to arrive, some of whom were early enough to get into the game and take it up to its maximum of 8.
Camel Up's board. Note the acrobatic camel stack...
This game has some nice mechanisms which mesh together well and it is well deserving of this years Spiel des Jahres award. The randomness of movement can be frustrating at times but that is all part of the game and as a quick reactive game it is a winner and makes a nice filler.
And now, in close-up, an amazing feat of Dromedarian balance!
The players split and I saw Ticket to Ride appear on another table, not being a game I enjoy that much I sat down at the table where Nauticus had been placed. Nauticus is an interesting resource management game designed by Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer. In your turn you choose an action which every player gets to do, and as the active player you get a small bonus. These actions are paid for with workers and cash and allows you to purchase hulls, masts, sails and goods, points are awarded for completed ships and goods transported.
Nauticus' board, showing the "action wheel" in the centre, from which actions are chosen. The graphics are appropriately...well, nautical, I suppose.
There is more to the game than I can write here; our game tripped along quite nicely with different tactics being employed and we were all quite close at the end. I devoted 2/5 of the game to collecting and scoring crowns which gave me a handsome 42 points but did mean that I was not doing much else and my turns were a little dull.
In Nauticus, it's all about the boats...and here's some bits of boats: hulls, masts, sails. You can see a completed one-mast ship in the top-left corner.
In the meantime the other table had replaced TTR with a new game from GMT – Thunder Alley which is based on Stock car racing. I know nothing about this game despite some research and we thank another correspondent for this run down of the game played which I understand was the Nascar version. (to follow)
Thunder Alley's race-track, and lots of flapping hands...
As I knew nothing about this game I did a bit of research and found the quick rules which gave me a loose idea of what it is about but not how it feels in play, I also discovered that GMT are already working on a reimplementation of the game due for release in 2015 called Grand Prix which I found a bit odd but perhaps it is more of an expansion than a re-theme. Time will tell.
The green driver is just about to go round the bend.
The club welcomed a new member to its fold who I hope had a good time. The first game of the evening was Age of War, a dice rolling game where you are trying to get tiles.
On your turn you roll 7 dice and try to match battle lines (symbols) on one of the cards, you then re-roll to try to overcome the next level victory and the tiles goes to a player when they conquer every line.
The victory point tiles, note the clan symbols in the bottom right hand corner, you can get bonus points for clan sets
The group then split into 2 tables with table 1 playing a new game Rococo a game about dress making for balls in the 18th century, the main mechanics of the game consist of collecting worker cards (deck building) which are then played to gain special actions. (Apologies but sadly my knowledge of this game ends here, I will edit this bit when I have learnt more from one of the players).
Beresford Quimby writes: I was on the Rococo table, so can give a bit more background. As Mr. Gamer points out above, each turn you get to select from a small deck of "employee" cards (which can be added to at a cost throughout the game), and the employees can do various things such as gathering dressmaking resources, recruiting other employees, taking money to the king to pay for decorations for the ballrooms (including the all-important terrace firework display)...and, of course, making dresses. There's a lots of interesting choices, and a variety of strategies can be adopted to collect victory points: making and hiring out your dresses to the nobles is a key activity, but where and when you place them within the ballrooms of the palace is important, and the choice of decorations you fund can make a big difference when combined with clever placement of dresses. I'm keen to give this one another go, as I think there's lots of fun to be had navigating different paths than the one I pursued on this occasion.
The Rococo board
In the meantime the second table settled down to an old favourite Carcassonne, which is highly popular and an excellent gateway game however with three experts at the table there promised to be a fair amount of cut and thrust. For those not familiar with the game you pick a tile from a bag, place it to the tableau adjacent to any previously played tile after which you may place one of your meeples on that tile. A tile may have a number of features, Field, Road, Monastery and or Town, when you place your meeple you must choose one of those features.
From left to right, Blue muscles in on reds field, red muscles in on blues road whilst blue has been diverted from joining the red/yellow field (bottom right).
Scoring occurs when a feature is completed. I soon found myself outmanoeuvred by my two competitors and had to muscle my way in onto my opponents towns roads and fields in order to stay in touch. Despite our different tactics it was interesting that in the final scoring the lead that one of us had built up was whittled away and we all ended up with respectable scores although we did have a clear winner.
Score board for Carcassonne, yellow on 81 points a clear winner.
Our table moved on to Ra a game that at its conclusion tends to leave people with mixed feelings about it. The game has been recently rereleased as Priests of Ra where there have been a number of changes to the rules and tiles used in the game, personal choice will dictate which version you prefer.
Mid game, the Nile begins to grow as does the Monument collection
The game is about collecting sets of tiles, however nothing is simple in this Reiner Knizia game where you either add a tile to the current group available or you auction those already there. Bidding is done with Sun tiles that you have open in front of you so everything is quite calculating, however in the draw bag is a large number of Ra tiles which act as a randomiser on when a turn ends, so there is also a gambling/push your luck element in the game which can badly affect those cold calculations.
Game end, the Nile scores because it has flooded whilst Monument sets score for multiples as well as different types
The game was played in a light-hearted fashion with the Nile and flood tiles conveniently helping the victor to his win.
The Biblios deck
The last game was Biblios, a simple card game explained in these pages before, on this occasion found 2 of the players going head to head on a couple of the victory dice allowing the third player a runaway victory on the uncontested dice.
Meanwhile the other table finished off with the start game of the evening Age of War which coincidentally is a reimplemented Reiner Knizia game.
This week at the club we started with a quick filler of Polterfasswhich made its first appearance a couple of weeks ago, an intriguing game where the skill is to outguess your opponents and roll good "dice". Each player as a barkeeper in turn rolls barrels under a cup with numeric values on their ends whilst the others guess collectively what that value will be.
The Brown barrels here may alter the score from a minimum of 7 to a maximum of 11
I have difficulties in this type of game as I can never assess my opponents correctly probably a reason why I never play poker, from the start this was a 2 horse race and the 75 points finishing mark was crossed whilst 3 of us were still having difficulty getting a positive score.
There had been a request to play Terra Mystica so three of us sat down to play this highly rated game currently sitting at number 4 on boardgamegeek one space behind one of last weeks games Agricola.
The Witches Player board
The game is about getting victory points and these come from 3 main sources; having the largest territory at the games end, 4 cult tracks where points are awarded for your position on each, and lastly in-game scoring. Players in turn take an action until all players pass, the actions include terraforming and building a house, upgrading a building thus gaining additional rewards, sending a monk to increase your influence on cults and taking a power action using magic.
Player board of expanded empires
Other actions can also improve your position. Expansion is the way to victory but careful timing of having the right resources available to gain in-game bonuses is also important. Sadly as it was a learning game (including myself trying to refresh rules as we went along) led to the game ending after 5 turns, however all players enjoyed themselves and are now prepared for a full game in the future.
Green has created a city
In the meantime the other 4 started their evenings playing with Splendor a recent release that seems quite popular, a simple trading game which promises to be a good gateway game into the hobby and plays equally well as a filler for more experienced players.
Splendor tends to be played in silence due to all the mental planning that goes on, this game was no exception except for one moment of laughter, as in a lot of games a moment often occurs where everyone thinks it is somebody else’s turn, the difference here was that nobody actually knew whose turn it was at all.
Cards from Splendor
This was followed by Havana a game from Eggertspiele which uses the same iconography as in some of their other games.
In Havana you buy tiles which provide victory points from either end of two rows in play. To do this you play two cards from your hand which have various abilities; each player has the same cards which are played out before you can pick them up again, the cards also create a 2 digit number which dictates player order. Sadly
Victory point tiles with turns supply of cubes and money at the top
Closer look at some buildings with an increased supply available
Last was Loot which was introduced last week.
A very strong Pirate fleet in Loot
Overall a good solid evenings gaming
