Sagrada

The quiz picture this time is a party game and although they are not my preferred type of game there are quite a few (including this one) that I find a lot of fun.

The last quiz picture was correctly guessed as A Fistful of Penguins a fun filler game from Wattsalpoag Games who tried to launch Echidna Shuffle through kickstarter earlier this year and although the designer Kris Gould has some excellent titles under his belt (Claim It, Buccaneer Bones, Jet Set and Switching tracks to name a few) sadly this one did not get its funding.

The games played this time at the club were :-

Table 1 – Ladies & Gentlemen, Cockroach Poker,  Kakerlakensuppe, Dead Cat: A Quantum Physics Card Game, Overseers, Stroop, Kakerlakentanz 

Table 2 – Sagrada, Ginkgopolis, Capital, Sushi Go!

Table 3 – Abyss, Biblios

A very quick review this time as I have been reading several rule manuals and this has taken up a lot of time however I am now capable of playing and teaching Haspelknecht, Martians: A Story of Civilization and Papà Paolo. I have picked Sagrada a nice lightweight game of placing dice in a grid to score points, it plays in about 12-15 mins/person and it even has a solo variant which I have played and seems to work quite nicely. The box contains several small decks of cards 4 player boards and 90 dice in five different colours (18 of each), the first deck of cards contains frameworks for glass windows laid out in a 4x5 grid (these are what you place your dice on) 2 of these double sided cards is dealt to each player and they choose one each to play and slide it into their player board, this also gives a level of difficulty (3-6) which is equal to the number of tool tokens you get given.

The four player boards

Next 3 tool cards are dealt out, you may use only one per action and they will cost you tool tokens and they help you place the right dice in the correct positions, then 3 goal cards are dealt out, these show what points are available in the game e.g. 5 points for a multicolour column, lastly each player gets a secret goal this is just a single colour for which you get “pip” points at the games end.

An example set up of points cards and tool cards

The game lasts 10 rounds, each round you will get the opportunity to take 2 dice, therefore all players can complete their windows but there is no leeway for error, the start player takes one more die from the bag than twice the number of players and rolls them, each player round the table then may take a die place it on their window, the last player gets a double turn and each other player takes their second die in reverse order, the last die is placed on the turn track. There are numerous rules of placement, each die must be placed next to another die on the window (orthogonally or diagonally), no die may be orthogonally adjacent to a die of the same number or colour, a die placed on a non-white window space must match the number or colour shown on the card.

Three of the cards for sliding into the player board, hardest on the left easiest on the right

The game does play quickly but there is still plenty of challenge as players try to place difficult dice whilst also trying to score points from the goal cards and not leave any dice for your opponents, good planning ahead is rewarded however there are elements of luck such as the colours you need being drawn from the bag or your needed numbers rolled but there is also skill in choosing certain dice to keep as many future options open as possible also a keen eye on your opponents choices and needs helps improve your chances. Overall it is an enjoyable game and fast playing, very colourful and fun, our table had a good time, I trailed miserably behind the other two failing on most of the goals and missing 2 dice from my window at the end, I was definitely out-played by the others.

The bag with 90 dice

Kingdomino

The quiz picture this time is of a nice dice rolling game. I picked this as sadly the same company recently had a failed kickstarter for another game, the mechanics were again quite simple and perhaps that is what deterred people from backing it, however simple rules does not always correlate to bad game. Anyone know the quiz picture?

The last quiz picture was not guessed at all despite being one of the more popular MB titles among gamers it was Thunder Road. In it players race cars along a dirt road shooting one another. Last car standing is the winner.

Concordia with "salt" played on the Byzantium board

(a poor picture of) the central board in Santiago, the dark lines are irrigation ditches for the fields

Vikings player board at end of the game

My Warsaw in "Capital" - it did not win

Table 1 – Concordia: Salsa, Santiago, Cockroach Poker, Kakerlakensuppe, Sushi Go!
Table 2 – Vikings, Capital, Kingdomino

Sadly a picture of the board did not come out so you are left with a picture of a player screen.

Table 3 – Dice Forge, Touria

The spotlight this time is on Kingdomino by Bruno Cathala and although he is not my favourite games designer he has created a number of games which I think are quite nifty such as Madame Ching & Abyss, Kingdomino is I believe another it is a light game and plays quite quickly in about 15-20 mins.

The light brown at the bottom of the screen was speculation, sadly this player could not get any brown crowns. so it scores zero.

2 of the dominoes

The aim of the game is to score points by playing 12 dominoes to a 5x5 grid (each end of the domino fitting one square of the grid). Each of the domino halves features one of 6 terrains and a few of them also contain a feature with a number of crowns on one of the squares, when you play a tile to your area one of the squares terrains must match the terrain of a tile it is orthogonally adjacent to (the other terrain does not have to match), fortunately at the game start you have a multi-terrain single tile which any land may be placed adjacent to.

Bidding in a 2 player game (same as the 4 player except 4 different coloured pawns in 4 player) Green gets first and second choice from the new set of tiles to the left.

At the end of 12 rounds scoring takes place, each area is scored separately an area consists of squares of the same terrain orthogonally adjacent to one another and each area scores the number of squares multiplied by the crowns. The winner is the player with the most points. However placing tiles is just half the game, all the tiles have numbers on the back and each round consists of drawing 4 tiles, placing them in numerical order (the weaker tiles have low numbers on them whilst the stronger tiles and those with crowns on have higher numbers), players then in the previous rounds order (ie the one that had chosen the weakest tile last round) chooses a tile for the next round, this then dictates the player order for the following round.

The green player scores 20 for forests (10 tiles and 2 crowns)

Overall it is a light game though some smart thinking has to be done deciding whether player order is important or a particular strong tile, the art as in a lot of games is to try to make sure you are not competing against too many other players for key tiles. Our table played it twice 3 player and opinions were favourable, it is more a filler game but would also make an excellent bridge game and with its chunky pieces and simple mathematics (low multiplications) should also be attractive to younger gamers.

Skyline

I used to play this a lot in my late 20’s, sadly not so much these days, anyone got any ideas?

Last weeks quiz picture was from Octopus' Garden quite a sweet tile laying game with some nice simple mechanisms and lovely artwork.

Part of the Forbidden Desert

Great Western Trail player board

Table 1 – Russian Railroads, The Bucket King

Table 2 – Forbidden Desert, Kakerlakensuppe, Cockroach Poker

Table 3 – Great Western Trail

Table 4 – Power Grid: The First Sparks, City of Spies: Estoril 1942, Flamme Rouge, Skyline

No time this week for anything in depth so I will cover Skyline a light filler game about building high rise buildings and which uses dice as the building blocks. The box contains three types of dice (base, middles and tops), some victory point tokens and a base board. A player may build three types of buildings, purple (2 high), blue buildings (2, 3 & 4 high), and orange buildings (3, 4, 5 & 6 high), a building must first have a base die, the player may then build a top on a purple base or blue and orange middles on their respective bases (these are all on the middle die) the top die has 2 blue tops, 1 orange top and three blank faces.

The different dice types

The centreboard showing what may be built

On a turn a player may choose any three dice or they may choose the “pool dice” which contains 1 of each type and any other dice that the players have placed there on their turn, they roll their chosen dice then may use as many of them as they wish for building, provided they build at least one block they may re-roll as many of the other dice as they wish, before re-rolling you may place any other dice they want to keep to one side this re-rolling process may continue so long as they build at least one die each time. Difficulties occur if they cannot build in such a case they have a choice, they may put a die in the “pool” or they may destroy one their buildings under construction. At any point in their turn after building or placing in the dice pool/destroying a building a player may stop their turn and returned unused dice to the correct dice piles. Any buildings completed collect the player points, the higher the better e.g. 2 stories 4 points, 4 stories 16 points, 6 stories 36 points.

A players position with several buildings partially built

The game lasts 9 turns, is short (about 10 minutes 2 players if they know the rules) so it is an ideal filler however I would say that the luck factor is very high, generally a player who is lucky enough to roll orange blocks will win, it is not a game that will set the world alight its rating is 6.0 on the geek and I do not feel it should be any higher.

Die Burgend von Burgund aka Castles of Burgundy

I have had my delivery from Shire Games amongst which was this game, this is one of the sprus before punching out. What is the game?

The last quiz picture was correctly guessed as Elixir a deduction game from TSR although there is a luck element it is a fun and colourful game of collecting and mixing ingredients for magical potions .

Nice to see 4 tables running again, games played at the club this week were :-

Table 1 – Village, Century: Spice Road, Splendor   
Table 2 – The Castles of Burgundy, Pyramids

Table 3 – King Chocolate, El Grande, Harald

Table 4 – Ticket to Ride Map – India,   Santo Domingo

Ticket to Ride at the club on the India map

Century Spice Road fairly early in the game

El Grande mid-game at the club

A little bit of excitement at the club this week, I had got several rules wrong with Village, the first is that the game starts with the bag being filled from a reserve whereas I started the game with all cubes in the bag, this caused a big difference in the amount of plague (black) cubes drawn each round last week we had only 1 come out in the first round, whereas with about 30% less cubes to start with we had all 6 come out this week, however the “time loss” was mitigated by my other error that in the artisan markets you have a choice of using time or cubes to make your purchases as opposed to items costing both. With the correct rules it  made cattle and horses much easier to obtain and a lot more tiles were traded in the market.

Spotlight is on Castles of Burgundy an excellent game from Stefan Feld currently sitting at 11 on the BGG listing and to my mind astonishingly at number 10 on the their Strategy game list and although I agree it is a great game and I cannot quibble about its position on the “all games” listing in my honest opinion it is outstripped by many others on the strategy front as it lacks direct interaction and I would put most of Kris Burm’s games above Castles of Burgundy on a strategy-game listing. So what do you get in the box? You get 4 double sided player boards, loads of hexagonal tiles, 2 dices in each of some dice in player colours, a quantity of trade goods tiles, some “worker” tokens and “ingot” tokens; the player boards have a hexagonal design consisting of 37 hexes in concentric rings, the hexes themselves have varying background colours and different value dice pips, some in groups and some singles. The hexagonal tiles come in different colours matching the background terrain colours on the player boards, there is also a central board which holds the hexagonal tiles and trade good tokens available for the round.

A player board with helpful hints on tile powers on the left and possible actions on the right. 

At the start of a round (of which there are 5) the central board is filled out with a number of randomly hexagonal tokens equal to the number of players placed in each of the 6 zones colors of tiles matching the background of the spaces, additional hexagonal tiles equal to twice the number of players is placed in the centre zone, 5 trade goods are placed at the top of the board whilst in the first round 5 further stacks of 5 trade goods are placed on the board as well, the trade goods are effectively the round and turn timers for the game as each turn a single trade good is put into play, thus the game last 25 turns. Having set the board up all the players roll their two dice, the start player rolls another die to see where the goods token is placed then he takes 2 actions one for each die, the other players follow in kind, when all have used both their dice the start marker moves on, a new good is placed and everyone rolls their dice again. Every 5 turns all tiles left are removed and fresh tiles put out.

The central game board

So what actions can you do with your dice, each dice is taken individually to enact an action and there are 4 different actions you may do, the first is that you make take 2 workers from the worker pile, a worker may be used at any time to alter the value of any die you have, you may spend several workers in a turn. The second is that you may take any tile from the zone matching the value of the die you, any tile taken MUST go onto one of the 3 reserve spaces at the bottom of your player board. The third type of action is to place a tile from your reserve, to do so the colour tile MUST match the colour background it is placed on, it MUST also match the number on the die used and it MUST be adjacent to a tile already placed. The last action is to sell goods that are in your possession, again the pip value on the tiles must match the die. So why are you doing all this? Ultimately to make points, each time you complete any area on your board you get points dependent on its size, sold goods give you points (and an ingot), points also come from some of the special tiles (yellow) and animal tiles (light green).

A sample of the tiles in the game with a couple of goods counters to the right

All the tiles have effects most of the time when you add them to your map board, in addition to the above castles (dark green) get a free extra action, mines (grey) give an ingot each at the end of a round, ships (blue) allow you to take all the goods in one zone and improve your position on the start player roster, and buildings (brown) have varying effects dependent on the building. For first timers to the game all these different tile abilities can be a nightmare and a crib-card is essential, those that played at the club had quite a nice small crib sheet but the print was tiny, but this is probably more preferable to my crib sheet which is 2 sheets of A4.

One of the boards from last weeks game, apologies for picture quality.

So how does it play? It is a very nice game where you are trying to maximize your tile collecting within the limits of your die roll, keen management of your dice is imperative, you need to spread across your board as fast as possible to maximize your choices of placement whilst filling out areas as quickly as possible to get top points and although other players can take tiles you have your eye on it is essentially several players playing a solo game together. You are more likely to lose the game through unlucky die rolls than through another player actively looking to nobble you, aggressive players tend to take ships early to get first choice of tokens from the board each turn but other than that and putting a little thought into which tiles you take with your dice you can do little to directly affect other players. So as a strategy game it is over-rated but as a family boardgame it is well deserving of its high rating. The game is available on-line at Yucata (linked from the Ravensburger website as is another of their games Glen More), it is also at Boite-a-Jeux (which for me has the better interface) both of these sites are turn-based sites against real people and a game is likely to last at least a couple of weeks.

Village

Easy if you know it 

The quiz picture this time is of a magical game from way back

The last quiz picture was of The Settlers of Catan Card Game

Concordia board towards end of the game

Snatch an interesting take on word games

Table 1 – Concordia, Snatch, Dream Islands, Portal of Heroes
Table 2 – Village, Splendor   
Table 3 – Lords of Waterdeep with the Lords of Waterdeep: Scoundrels of Skullport expansion, Century: Spice Road

The spotlight is on Village which won the 2012 Kennerspiele prize and a well deserved winner it was, it now sits at 100 on boardgamegeek and is ranked at 73 of their strategy games so I was surprised to find that we had not played it at the club before, sadly it had been so long since I last played it that I had forgotten the rules so it took a little longer than normal for us to get started whilst I refreshed my aging brain with the rules. In the game each player runs a small farmstead through several generations (up to 4) and uses the members of their family (workers) to go into the town (the main board) to advance the player on the score track, but this is not a worker placement game despite placing workers. There are two very neat mechanisms in the game that make it intriguing to play (the use of “time” and cube collecting instead of worker placement as the driving mechanism) and with several routes to victory there is always lots you want to do.

Our board at the beginning of the game, we are light on black cubes as I did the cubes set-up incorrectly.

The aim of the game is to gain victory points which are given for various acts but essentially is notoriety for good work for the village the majority of which are gained at the games end, the main board is split into 7 zones each of which has a different function and a number of coloured cubes are placed on them at the start of each round, these are pulled from a bag and the number is dictated by the number of players. Then in player order everybody takes a turn going round the table, on a turn a player must take a cube from an area and then may perform the function of that zone, play continues until there are no more cubes left on the board at which point the round is immediately over the village church functions are administered to, new cubes are put out and a new round starts.

The board before set-up

So the different zones (in brief) are the Church Archway where you can get a new family member (effectively marriage followed very rapidly by offspring but only 1 per cube action); Collect Wheat, you can only collect wheat if you have a worker still on your farm, the amount of wheat increases if you have a horse or an ox; then there is the artisans zone where you can collect an ox, a horse, a plough, a wagon or a parchment scroll, these are used in some of the other zones, however they cost cubes and “time” you may also turn your wheat into gold; the Town Hall where through promotion you can gain cubes and artisan products but this also costs cubes and “time”; the Market Place where you can trade your artisan products for victory points; the Countryside where you go travelling which costs a wagon, cubes and “time” for small in-game rewards and finally the Church where for cubes or “time” you can send a worker to be trained for the priesthood. The Travelling, Church, Town Hall and the Artisan area all require the use (placement) of a worker of which you only get 4 at the beginning of the game, the Travelling, Church and Town hall all give game end victory points depending on your presence at the end of the game.

The travelling section of the board, the first journey is using a wagon, 2 time and either 2 pink or 2 brown cubes.

I have mentioned “time” having to be spent for the majority of your actions, this is kept track of around the edge of your farm board and every time a player completes a lap with their time marker they MUST lose one of their workers to the graveyard initially this must be one of your level 1 (starting) workers, once all the level 1 workers are lost you must move on to your level 2 workers, similarly when using the Church Archway action you must collect a level 2 first and cannot move on to level 3 unless you have already collected all your level 2 workers. When a worker must be placed in the graveyard you decide which of your level 1 workers must go, it need not be the one that was doing the action at the time of the loss (and even though a loss is triggered this is dealt with at the end of the action so you still get the action even if you remove the one that just triggered the loss). There is the Town Book this is split up into 5 areas (Church, Travelling, Artisan, Town Hall and Farm) when a worker is removed from a zone it will fill one of the slots in the book for that zone and his deeds for the village will be recorded for posterity (and end of game victory points) however if all the slots for that zone have already been taken the villager is sent to a paupers grave, the game end is triggered by no spaces in the book or the paupers graveyard. you can manipulate time to cause an early demise, such as training a worker to make a Plough which costs 6 time, or you can be frugal by choosing actions which use little or no time such as wheat collecting.

The book with game end points for members in the book shown at the bottom

At the end of the round church administration is undertaken, first off anyone who added a worker to be trained for priesthood can pay 1 gold to have that worker instantly promoted to the church, any not paid for go into a bag with 4 dummy trainees and are drawn randomly until the total of all trainee promotions drawn or paid for is 4, at which point anyone can pay wheat to gain further promotion for any of their pieces in the church, the player with the most church members gets 2 points, rank within the church being the tie breaker.

A player board showing 1st and 2nd generation pawns, the "time" marker (currently at the bottom), some cubes and 3 artisan products.

Gold accrued in the game from the Mill (wheat into gold) can be used for Church training, a wild cube, traded for 3 VP’s in the Town Hall or is 1 VP at the games end. There is one exception to the taking of a cube on your turn and that is you may visit the well and pay in 3 cubes of identical colour instead to take an action of your choice and you may choose a spot where there are no cubes to be taken. Amongst the resource cubes there will be some black cubes, these reflect illness and cost a player 2 additional time to the action they are taking.

Overall there is a lot to take in initially however after the first round the game mechanics become second nature and the players can concentrate on tactics and making sound choices for gaining the most victory points, the game does reward good planning and clever use of the cubes, one player set up shop in the Town Hall and collected artisan products to sell at market, another player concentrated on travelling, the game is big enough that you there are lots of choices, and no one choice of actions is any better than any other it is the overall economy with which you play that will decide the winner. After the game one of the players went and bought their won copy and I do not think you can get a better endorsement of a good game than that.