January 2020 - Isle of Cats & Fast Sloths

This is my attempt at doing a monthly Bulletin of how we are doing at the club – pictures will follow as soon as I have the picky aspect sorted, I have ascertained that the camera I bought last year for club use is excellent at Macro’s but not a lot else so we may have to start with lots of close ups.

January was a great start to the year with attendance steadily climbing again and reaching 16 attendees on 28th January 2020 allowing us to have 4 tables playing, we also recorded the most games played in a month since August 2018 a total of 44 plays. Games played were :-

Ankh'or, Carpe Diem, Irish Gauge, Point Salad, 7 Wonders, Barony, Blank: Blankdemic, Bruges, Cacao, Caylus 1303, Codenames, Codenames: Pictures, Colors of Paris, Drop It, Fast Sloths, Five Tribes, Flandern 1302, Get Bit!, Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North, The Isle of Cats, Jaws, Jórvík, Just One, Letter Jam, Medici, Medium, Pass the Pigs, Pipeline, Prêt-à-Porter, The Quest for El Dorado, Roll for the Galaxy, Smash Up, Snatch, Sushi Roll, Terra Mystica, Terraforming Mars, Ticket to Ride: London, Tonga Bonga, Warsaw: City of Ruins, World's Fair 1893.

Before I give details on a couple of those games I thought I would mention that a lot of gamers are undertaking the 20x20 challenge (matching the year 2020), that is to choose 20 games then play each 20 times through the year – not as easy as it sounds as that is 400 game plays over 1 a day. I have not chosen mine yet but I doubt if they will be heavy games, Just One would be a choice but that means ensuring I get it played every other week at the club.

Four games had 2 plays namely Ankh’or, Carpe Diem, Irish Gauge and Point Salad, everything else only 1 – so lots of variety. Not surprising I suppose but my favourite games (not an easy decision)  from this months’ play list are all ones I own. First is Fast Sloths from Friedemann Friese an interesting race game where players move their piece around the board using various animals which all have their own attributes, for instance the Elephant moves slowly but throws your piece 3 spaces after it has moved whilst the Eagle picks you up from anywhere and carries you 6 spaces; there is a lot of scope in this game and I am hoping for repeated plays to explore the full range of animals provided.

The next game is Carpe Diem from one of my favourite authors Stefan Feld sadly let down a little by poor graphics making play a little awkward until you are used to it – the artwork is nice but too dark and several tiles (it is a tile laying game) have too many similarities to other tiles that at times they are difficult to tell apart (the bread hut and gold hut are very similar as are the Grape and Ivy fields) however the game mechanics are excellent, in turn players take a tile from a central display and add it to their personal display, the tiles have various parts of building or fields and the idea is to complete them to gain resources which are used to fulfil victory point cards at the end of each round. As with a lot of Stefan Feld games there are any different ways to score points and it is important to keep an eye on them all.

Last on this mini List is Isle of Cats a tile tessellation game that has recently been delivered from Kickstarter, in short players get an income of fish which they use to purchase cards, these cards provide game end victory point goals, in-game bonuses to income and access to cats. The cats live on an island and need to be enticed on board your boat with fish and a basket (provided by cards) so they don’t get their paws wet. The cats themselves are various shaped tiles which you use to cover squares on your boat, the more cabins you fill with cats the more points you will end up with.

Many other games were worthy of comment however this is all I have time for at the moment. If you are reading this why not pop along and see us you are guaranteed a warm welcome.

2019 Round-up

So first of all the clubs Poll results for the most popular game and then further down you will find some stats drawn from the clubs records.

9 people were kind enough to provide me with their personal top 10 from games played at the club which I think was sufficient to give an indication of the overall leanings of the club. Pole position was taken by Just One which garnered twice as many votes as any other game and over half of the participants voted for it (it was also the most played game at the club). Second place was Quacks of Quiedinburg, of interest is that it was the number 1 game for STAG (another Kent gaming group) whilst they had Just One in 2nd place despite our normal difference in gaming tastes. Third place went (to my surprise) to Azul, although a good game I did not think it would get that many votes. 4th - 10th in order were :- Splendor, Warsaw : City of Ruins, Concordia, The Oracles of Delphi, Sagrada, Bruges and Wingspan. Of interest to me is one of my favourite authors Stefan Feld had two titles in the top 10. Lastly a quick mention for Kerala, Chinatown and Tiny Towns which took 11th-13th place and had more than 1 voter.

In 2019 the club played 406 games a rise of 4.1% over 2018, this does not include multiple appearances for a game which are played more than once in a night which often happens with a few of the lighter games such as Just One, Rail Pass and Fuji Flush e.t.c.. There were 269 different games played however 192 of them only ever made one appearance at the club this leaves just 77 games which making multiple appearances and at their head was this years Spiel des Jahres winner Just One which recorded 10 plays, in fact the number of games played of this at the club would be nearer to 20 as initially it was being played several times a night. The second most popular games were Coloretto and Deep Sea Adventure with 9 appearances each, following them were Bruges (8), Fuji Flush (8), Tint Towns (6), Codenames (5), Point Salad (4) and Sagrada (4). Of those published in 2019 Tiny Towns, Point Salad, Wingspan and Rail Pass were the only ones to get more than 2 appearances at the club however several 2019 releases did not reach the UK until late in the year and some Essen releases will not get here until later this year.

A Good start to the year 2020 - Codenames - Pictures

The first post of the year and it is a bit bland, I do not expect to get pictures sorted until later this year. I now have faster broadband so pictures will upload quicker (it was 2 hrs+ in the past) however I do not have a mobile and cheap cameras do not take good pictures in dim light, when I overcome this issue we will have pictures.

Last Wednesday was a good evening with 11 attendees allowing us to run with 3 tables during which we played Blank: Blankdemic which is a flux-like game but which has lots of blank cards to which the winner of the game rights a permanent new rule for future games, thus the game evolves and develops with time and proved to be an excellent Ice-breaker. My table also played Codenames and Codenames: Pictures, the latter I had never played before and was pleasantly surprised with how well it did play. Our table also played Get Bit!, Cacao and Point Salad.

Table 2 was with Table 3 for Get Bit and Blank-Blankdemic but split off to play Terraforming Mars with I believe the Prelude and Venus Next expansions. Having played only once with these expansions Prelude just gives a starting boost so knocks about 20-30 minutes off the game whilst Venus Next adds another score track to gain victory points on however the extra cards effectively give you an extra avenue to explore but makes it less effective to concentrate on a particular strategy especially as Venus cards seem to be slightly more powerful - but this is just from 1 play Table 1 started the club early and played Smash-Up this was followed by Concordia and by two games of Irish Gauge. They finished the evening with Imperial Settlers : Empires of the North.

Next time I will try to get all links working and if I had not had such a stinking cold you would have had end of year stats too. Anyway - this is a start and I have left plenty of room for improvement.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

I realised we had not posted anything for almost a year so just a short hello to say we are still here, I am currently compiling the stats for 2019 - the secret is out of the bag and this years most played game is Spiel des Jahre winner “Just One”, but other stats to follow.

Please feel free to send me your top 10 favourite games for this year as I am compiling a list of “Most favourite game” at the club. Only proviso is that it comes from this years 266 played games which can be found here :-

https://boardgamegeek.com/geekplay.php?userid=894818&redirect=1&startdate=2019-01-01&dateinput=2019-01-01&dateinput=2019-12-31&enddate=2019-12-31&action=thumbs&subtype=boardgame

We are most active on facebook but we still pick up stuff here and on Boardgamegeek. Look for us to be a little more active here too this coming year. Hope to see you soon and

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Deadline for your top 10 games is extended to 31-12-2019

Summary of what we played in 2018

Sushi Go! The most played game at the club this year and all-time.

It has been a while since I last put something up for which I give apologise, but the club is still going strong and I thought I would give end of year statistics of what the club has been up to. These are drawn from information kept on our page on Boardgamegeek at :-

https://boardgamegeek.com/plays/thumbs/user/MABG/subtype/boardgame

 This year we played 390 games slightly down on last years’ 448, however we only had one Saturday event in 2018 which may have had a slight impact. Only 79 of the 248 titles played this year had multiple appearances leaving 169 titles with only 1 play (68.14%), this is a bit sad and I wonder if we are forever chasing flavour of the week or are most games just not reaching a high enough standard to deserve a replay?  I also wonder whether this is also reflected in the games we buy for play at home.

A stack of 26 games, so a stack of 248 (the number of different titles played) would be nearly 10 times this amount, quite a bit of shelving space.

Top of the chart this year was Sushi Go! with 8 plays, following were Fuji Flush & Istanbul The Dice Game (7 plays); Bruges & Cafe Fatal (6 plays); Majesty For the Realm, Capital & Bunny Kingdom (5 plays); 7 Wonders, Reef, Flamme Rouge, Om Nom Nom  & The Quest for El Dorado (4 plays).

Om Nom Nom had a repeat appearance in the annual top games played at the club, a typical lightweight filler with simple rules, engaging and an excellent intro game for non-gamers.

Only 4 of these games Sushi Go!, Capital, Flamme Rouge and Fuji Flush appeared in the top plays list for 2017. The clubs favourite game has to be Sushi Go! as it is the third year in which it has appeared in 1st or 2nd place.

Cockroach Poker in 2nd place of most played games at the club.

The full Tally at the club since we started on 23rd April 2014 is 1871 games, this does not include games which have multiple plays at the same or a different table on the same night, so the true sum is quite a bit higher. 733 Unique titles have been played with of course Sushi Go! standing out as the most played game with 34 plays, following are Cockroach Poker (21), Bang the Dice Game (20), Port Royal (20), Splendor (18) and Fuji Flush (17); it is not surprising that these are the most played as they are regular filler games at the club, the more substantial games have a lot fewer plays and it depends on your perspective as to what that includes, as examples we have Flamme Rouge and Traders of Osaka with 12 plays a piece, Russian Railroads at 9 and Concordia at 8 plays.