Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor

Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor is a standalone game in the Forest Shuffle family, with the same core mechanism but a different set of cards. You collect cards from a common area. You play cards into your own tableau to score points. In the process you often need to pay with other cards, and they go to the common area, thus making them available to other players. The game is about collecting and playing cards which combo well and give you many points. 

One new element in Dartmoor is the bogs. In addition to trees, you can play bogs as habitats. Animals and plants can be attached to them, similar to trees. However they are played sideways, and other cards can only be attached to top or bottom (two each) and not to the two sides. 

If you have played Forest Shuffle, you will feel right at home. It will be a familiar experience but there is some variation. I find that the game is mostly about deciding on the combo or combos you want to make and then focusing on them. You do want to watch what your opponents are doing and try not to give them cards which help them a lot. However it is more important that you build your own super combo. 

One small variation in Dartmoor is your cave cards have special powers. You get to draft your own cave card during game setup. 

I went with a bog strategy. I had some cards which rewarded me if I had the most bogs, so I focused hard on making sure I stayed in the lead. Han also had many bogs. Thankfully I drew many cards which supported a bog strategy, e.g. those which let you play a card as a bog for free. That helped me secure my leading position in bogs. I had many cards which scored points based on the number of bogs I had. I ignored everything and just worked on bog related cards. I only occasionally looked at others’ tableaus to see whether I needed to deny them any specific lucrative cards by playing them as my bogs. 

Similar to Forest Shuffle, Dartmoor wasn’t particularly interesting for me. Seeing the many animals and plants is nice, and I can understand the fun in collecting cards which combo well. I can certainly see why the Forest Shuffle series is popular. 

Diced Veggies

I must say this game is gimmicky, but it does work and it's certainly eye-catching. Talk about creative use of dice! 

Dice in the game represent different cooking ingredients. They come in five colours, representing five different ingredients. At the start of the game, you roll them all and randomly organise them into a slab like this. Players then take turns using that cardboard cleaver to cut sections of dice off the slab. This is how you collect ingredients to cook various dishes. Actually it's a little troublesome using the cleaver, we ended up mostly using our fingers.

When you carve sections off the slab, you can take as many dice as you want as long as the total is not more than 10. For example in this photo above, you can take the three dice at the bottom right - green 5, beige 3 and green 2. When you cleave a piece off, you cannot break the slab into two. It must be a proper straight cut and not a jagged line. Most of the time you are cutting one of the corners off. 

As more and more dice are cut off, eventually the slab will run out of one of the ingredient types. This is when the next player will have the option to reroll all dice, adding those which have been used and discarded, to create a new slab. 

You use dice to cook dishes. This is standard contract fulfilment. You have a special power token which lets you change one die to a different value or different colour. This power is refreshed every time the central slab is reset. 

In addition to the dishes you can cook, you have optional special missions that can be attached to each dish. If you can fulfil these additional conditions, you score extra points. 

This particular special mission works perfectly with this dish. It requires discarding an extra mushroom (beige die), but it scores 3 points per mushroom in the recipe. 

This is a pretty simple game and it's something for the casual audience. A bit too simple for gamers, but it'll work as a family game. 

New York Zoo

I didn't know this was an Uwe Rosenberg game until halfway through the game. It being a polyomino game should have tipped me off. The polyominoes in this game are animal enclosures in a zoo. Everyone starts the game with an empty zoo. You collect enclosure tiles to place in your zoo. You also collect animals to place in these enclosures. Animals will breed. Whenever an enclosure is fully occupied with animals, you get to claim a bonus tile. Your goal is to be first to completely fill your zoo with tiles. 

The main game board is that long piece at the top. It is a long circular path with many stops. On your turn you move the common pawn (the elephant) along this path, taking up to 4 steps at a time. Depending on where you stop, you claim either an enclosure tile or two animals. You then place them on your player board. 

The orange spots on the main board are not stops, they are breeding points. You can't stop there, but whenever you pass a breeding point, that particular animal type breeds. In any enclosure with at least two animals, you get one new animal. Yes, just like in Agricola. 

You have three temporary storage cages for animals on your player board. 

These along the bottom are special tiles you can claim whenever you fill an enclosure with animals. Quantities are limited except for those tiny single square tiles. Everyone will be fighting for the large ones. These help you fill your zoo faster. 

The game offers a pleasant play experience. It is light so I'd group this under the family game category. There are several tactics you can employ. There is some strategy to consider. The enclosures are of different sizes. One consideration is the balance between bigger enclosures helping you fill your board faster, and smaller enclosures getting filled with animals faster so that you can claim the bonus tiles. You will be watching out for claiming pairs of animals so that you can make use of every breeding opportunity. There are ways to hinder your opponents. You can grab what you think they want. You can quickly go past the breeding points before they get a pair of animals. 

Mid game

Late game

Just One

Just One is a game from 2018. It was nominated for many awards, and it won many too, the most prestigious one being the Spiel des Jahres (2019). This is a party game and a cooperative game. The idea is simple. Every round one person plays the active player and needs to guess a word. That word is known to everyone else, and everyone must give a one word clue to help the active player guess the word. These clues are written down independently. The twist is before showing the clues to the active player, they are revealed among the other players at the same time, and if any of the clues given are the same, these repeated clues must be hidden. If there are too many clashes, the active player may end up with just one clue or even none at all. As clue givers, your dilemma is you don't want to give clues which are so common that someone else would be giving the same clue. Yet if everyone avoids those obvious clues, then the clues you give might end up to be too obscure to help the active player. A full game is played for 13 rounds, and you try to get any many correct guesses as possible. Each round, the active player can only make one guess. Everyone takes turns being the active player. 

These two words below were the only two clues I had when I was the active player. What would your guess be?  

My guess was "alien", and I was right. That wasn't too hard. 

The words to guess are printed on cards. Each card has five words. The active player draws a card and shows it to everyone else without looking at it himself. He then states a number from 1 to 5. That determines which word on the card needs to be guessed. In one round we had this card below, and the word to guess was the fourth one - "cycle". 

These were the clues we gave - "wheel", "race", "repeat", "life". Would you have guessed it correctly? As you can see, we are making use of the fact that some words have multiple meanings, or are commonly used with some other words. 

Here are some other examples of cards in the game: 

The game is certainly playable as a family game, just that depending on the age of the children playing, you have to adjust how you give clues. 

We prepared a stack of 13 cards when we set up the game, because the game is played over 13 rounds. If we made a correct guess, we placed the card face-up. Otherwise, we placed it face-down. We were not doing so well. 

One of the words we had to guess was "drag". Other players gave clues like "pull" and "movement". I gave the clue "queen", because there is a term "drag queen". Some players did not understand at all why I gave this clue. Thankfully the active player understood and made the correct guess. In this case "queen" was an important clue, because he had to find one word which was associated with every single clue. The other clues were closely related, and many words were related to them. However to find a word which also related to "queen" was not easy, and the active player realised it was "drag". 

As you play, you kind of get a feel for what kind of clues your friends tend to give. I became known as the guy who gave quirky clues. So others would try to avoid giving such clues. Maybe one person will always give the simplest and most straight-forward clue. Others on the team can somewhat collaborate by letting him give such clues and avoiding such clues themselves. 

Try to guess this word. The answer will be shown at the bottom. The clues are "junior", "student", "starting", "school", "foundation", "pupil". 

Here's another one: "vision", "light", "dark", "underground", "car", "drill". 

I keep thinking of Just One as a game from India, because Jaswant is a common Indian name. The concept is very simple. Yet it is captivating. A clever idea implemented well. This is something casual gamers and non-gamers can quickly get into. It's an excellent game for a social setting because all those clues will trigger much discussion. It's a great ice-breaker. 

~~~ Answers ~~~

Clues: "junior", "student", "starting", "school", "foundation", "pupil". Answer: "primary". 

Clues: "vision", "light", "dark", "underground", "car", "drill". Answer: "tunnel". 

Innovation: Cities of Destiny

I continue my ongoing online games of Innovation with younger daughter Chen Rui, who is now away from home. We have moved on to playing with the expansion Cities of Destiny. I'm sure later we will cycle back to the others. Although the latest rules for Innovation have been implemented on both Yucata.de and BoardGameArena.com (available if you participate in early testing), we are still playing with the older rules on BGA. I think they work just fine. 

I had thought the Cities of Destiny expansion would be rather simple. I had played it a few times in the past, and it was mixed in with other expansions. I only skimmed the rules, and since it was mixed with other expansions, I didn't assess it closely by itself. That's a problem of being sloppy when I play games online. The cards from the Cities expansion do not have any dogma powers. They all have six icons instead of four. Cities can help you in gaining majority in icons. You get to draw a city card when you play a new colour, or when you splay a colour in a new direction. 

Cities introduces some new icons. The arrow icons let you splay your stack in a specific direction. The flag icon counts as an achievement if you have the most cards visible in that colour. This is a temporary achievement. It counts only when you fulfil the condition and the flag is still visible. 

Plus signs let you draw cards

The special achievements that come with Cities are along the lines of melding a city which lets you splay in a direction when the stack is already splayed in that direction, or tucking a city with a fountain or flag icon. You don't draw cities that often, so these are not easy to achieve. 

This was one unusual situation. Chen Rui had four Age 10 cards, but her top green card was still an Age 1 card, the city of Jerusalem. Also she had many cards in her blue and yellow stacks, but till now they were still not yet splayed. 

We now play with the variant of requiring one extra achievement to win the game. This makes our games go a little longer. We reach the later ages more often. It's always exciting to get there. Many of the powers in Age 10 are crazy. 

In this particular game, Chen Rui and I were tied at 6 achievements. We both needed two more to win. I had this Kuala Lumpur card in hand and it had a fountain icon. The fountain icon counts as an achievement as long as it is visible. It is better than a flag because it doesn't require you have the most cards in the colour. On my turn, I managed to claim the Age 9 achievement, and then play Kuala Lumpur, to gain two achievements on the same turn. That ended the game. Chen Rui told me she could have gained two achievements too on her turn. She had Taipei city, which also had a fountain. It also had two clock icons, which would help her achieve the special achievement requiring 3 icons in all 6 types. So she just needed one action - to play Taipei. This was one very close game! 

Cities of Destiny introduces the endorse mechanism. You can use the dogma power of a card twice if you have a city which has the icon associated with the dogma, and you are willing to spend a card. Endorsed dogmas pack double the punch. 

This expansion is not as simple as I expected. I had thought it would feel like a mini expansion. It feels close to a full expansion experience. I am quite happy playing with just this one expansion by itself. It doesn't need to be combined with other expansions to make a more satisfying game. And hey, Kuala Lumpur is in the game. That's certainly a plus! 

Shackleton Base

Shackleton Base is a heavy eurogame about developing and operating a moon base. This is a worker placement game in which you build domes, attract employees, mine resources and make money. Every game there will be three corporations out of seven in play, and they determine the human enterprises happening on the moon. Working on projects for these corporations is how you score points.

Every round you draft cards which will decide the types of workers and resources you get, and also your turn order for the round. Workers come in three colours, red, yellow, and blue. If you place them on the main map to collect resources, the colours are important. Red workers collect money, yellow workers collect natural resources, and blue workers collect corporate specific resources. When you place workers to do construction, buy cards or perform corporate specific actions, their colours matter less, but you will get a bonus if you use the preferred colours. 

Only those three on the left are workers. The astronaut in white is in use when the space tourism company is in play. These are tourists and not workers. And they look impatient. You can almost see their frown. 

This is your player board. These tiles are domes, i.e. habitats you can build on the moon. You need to spend resources to build them, and once built, every round you need to pay for maintenance. When you build a dome, you place it on the main board. The spaces opened up on your player board become available accommodation for workers. Workers which are placed on the main board to collect resources will be attracted to domes, with priority given to players with the most domes where they work. When you attract these workers to your domes, they generate resources for you or give you discounts. Placing the right kind of workers in the right spots gives you various benefits, including end game points. 

This is the main game board. Every hex can fit six domes. Whoever is first to build in a hex must also build a solar panel. You want to build domes because they allow you to collect resources from the hexes. When you place a worker on the main board, he is placed facing a row of hexes. He collects resources from every hex in that row which has a dome. If you have a dome in a hex, you get the resource for free. If you don't and you are making use of others' domes, you have to pay them. Due to this mechanism, there is a tendency to want to build domes in straight lines. 

I placed a red worker here, and he is facing two occupied hexes, both with my (green) domes. 

Other than placing workers on the main map to gain resources, you can also place them here to perform three types of actions. Although the three action types are colour coded, you can use off-colour workers, just that you won't get a bonus. Generally you try to use workers of the matching colours. The yellow action is for construction. The red action is for buying tech cards from one of the three corporations. These cards give you all sorts of benefits and actions. The blue action is called the corporate action. You get to perform actions associated with the corporations and with the reputation track. 

For work on the Shackleton Base to be viable, the three corporations must be able to run profitable businesses. You build the basic infrastructure on the moon base, and this infrastructure needs to serve a purpose. For new players, a specific combination of three companies is recommended - a mining company, a space tourism company, and a research company. Corporations all have these round blue tokens which can be placed onto the main board. They represent resources which are related to the corporations. When you use workers to collect resources from the main board, these are the corporation-specific resources you can collect. The mining company introduces Helium-3 to the game. The space tourism company introduces tourists to the game. 

All corporations come with a set of project cards, and at any time three are available for purchase. These cards are worth points, but more importantly they also offer actions and abilities which directly or indirectly score points for you. 

This is a mining corporation. When in play, Helium-3 will be mined on the moon. This corporation offers opportunities for players to trade resources for points. 

Shackleton Base is a development game. You need to build domes so that you can collect more resources every time you deploy a worker to the main board. You also want to attract these workers (whether placed by yourself or others) to come live in your domes. They give you benefits when they are placed in the right domes. You need to decide how many of the three companies you want to work with. It's probably difficult to work with all three because you will be unfocused. Working with only one might not give you enough opportunities to score points. I think two is a good number, and you have to decide how much to get involved in each company. There is some cooperation among the players. When you are first to build in a hex, you know that solar panel you build can be used by others. Your opponents will be using your domes to collect resources, but you do get paid for this. When you place a worker on the main board, you have to consider whether this worker will later decide to live in your opponent's dome. There are several interlocking aspects you have to think about. 

One thing I learned the hard way was I should have deliberately planned to attract yellow workers to my domes to give me maintenance fee discounts. I noticed that everyone did that. I spent a lot of money on maintenance because I did not have yellow workers on my board. I fell behind in developing basic infrastructure. You want to get many domes out there, because domes on the moon mean better efficiency in collecting resources, and also more space on your player board for workers. 

I decided to focus on space tourism. It was fun. I bought several project cards which made a good combo. Space tourism helped me score many points during the game. Unfortunately my weak infrastructure meant fewer points scored at the end of the game. I did not do well at the end. 

Han (pink) was first to build the largest dome complex - 6 connected domes 

I built much capacity to bring space tourists on trips

Two large dome complexes

Workers living in your domes give you benefits, provided they are of the right type

Tourists (in white) can temporarily stay in your domes

Everyone gets a character card which gives you a unique ability

These are the components relevant to the research corporation

Game in play

Very satisfying to see my happy customers

This is an enjoyable heavy game. It feels to see how the base grows. It feels almost organic. While competing with other players, you also want to make use of what they have done. A blue token they have placed on the board is an opportunity for you to collect valuable resources. If they have charged up the communal battery, maybe it's time to use the stored power. Despite the competition, these is also a sense of building something together. You don't win by damaging what others have built. You win by making good use of what they have built. Much of the competition is in the form of grabbing opportunities and resources before you opponents do so, for example buying project cards, mining natural resources, fulfilling public contracts. Most of the game mechanisms here will be familiar to experienced eurogame players. What I enjoy in the game are the symbiotic relationships among players and how you balance working with the corporations in play.