Hadrian’s Wall

 

The Game

Hadrian’s Wall is a paper-and-pencil game. I was about to call it a roll-and-write, because each player gets a piece of paper and ticks boxes off it. However there is no dice. In this game you are not constantly reacting to die rolls and deciding what to do with them. There are cards drawn which introduce some randomness, but mostly you know what resources you are generating every round, and you carefully plan how to use them. You have more control and more long-term planning than the typical roll-and-write game this is mostly about positioning yourself as best you can to handle whatever the dice deal you.

The game is played over 6 rounds

Your personal game boards (there are two of them) are complicated and intimidating. It takes some effort to explain and remember what all the sections mean. Generally to mark any box you need to spend resources. Some boxes give you a benefit. Some are just steps before the next box which does. The benefit can be a resource, which in turn lets you mark other boxes. So you can create some chain reactions. Some boxes when ticked unlock sections with new functions. These are things you can plan for and work towards. 

This is just part of your first player board

This section has the four main victory point tracks. 

This is part of your second player board, showing three types of citizens.

These are the remaining two citizen types. 

Some boxes help you produce more resources at the start of every future round. More resources means getting more done. Ultimately some boxes give you points, and that’s how you win the game. 

Some tracks have dependencies on others and may not overtake them.

At the end of every round the Picts attack. They may attack the left flank, centre, or right flank of your army. If you have developed all the sections of your army enough to repel the Picts, you’ve done your job. However if any enemy gets through, you are penalised. The penalty gets more severe the more instances that Picts get through. So defense is something you must not neglect. 

The game is played over a fixed number of rounds. After the final round, the highest scorer wins.

The Game 

The game is intimidating at first, but once you get over that initial hurdle, this becomes a game with a lot to explore. Building the wall and training your army are a must. It is a matter of deciding how fast and how complete. You can do okay without completing everything but you’ll be in trouble if you are too far short.

The five classes of citizens is where the game opens up many possibilities for you to explore. The five classes offer different abilities and scoring opportunities. You can’t be everything everywhere. You have to choose. 

The game is pretty much solo. You don’t interact much with your opponents. It works well on BoardGameArena.com as an asynchronous game. In fact it might work better in this mode than playing in person. If you have a slow player and you play in person, everyone must wait for him to finish the round before you can start the next round. If you play in online asynchronous mode, just logout and come back the next day. 

This is almost a deterministic game. Little randomness, no hidden information. Your challenge is how to make the most of your resources. You have many options. There are different ways to increase your abilities and different ways to score more points. You choose some and you need to commit to work on them to get a worthwhile return on investment. One particular building type lets you reduce points lost due to poor defense against the Picts. If you go for this, you can afford to work less on defense. 

The game ends after six rounds. This is like life. There are many things you want to achieve but your time and resources are limited. So you must decide and utilise your resources well to maximise your score. Towards late game you will get a sense of which things are too late to start work on and which you need to prioritise to get the most out of. 

This above is what the end of one game can look like on the second player board. I have completed the advancement track for the first and fourth citizen types, and almost for the fifth as well. However I had only utilised the unique abilities of the first, second and fifth citizen types. I had planned to use type 4, but eventually didn't. Because... priorities. 

Of the four victory point tracks, I mostly ignored the purple track. Getting to 15 on a track allows you to build a monument. That's something to work towards too. 

The Thoughts

This is almost a solitaire game. You mostly work on your own boards. There is a lot to keep you busy. There are many different strategies to pursue so there is replayability. Every game you can only specialise in a couple of functions provided by specific citizen types. Each new game you can try different functions and different combinations of functions. There is fun in creating chain reactions. If you utilise your resources well, you can spend them to generate more resources which you then spend to do more things. It is fun to do this kind of planning. It’s all open information so it’s up to you to analyse your board situation and find those opportunities. 

boardgaming in photos: Jaipur, Blood Rage, Agricola, Caverna, Puerto Rico

These are some older boardgames which I recently played with my old friends Allen and Han, all played on BoardGameArena.com. 

Jaipur is a 2-player card game. It has been a while, but the game is still as enjoyable as I remember. It is always tempting to take multiple cards from the centre row, but then you are always anxious whether the new cards which refill the row present an even better opportunity to your opponent. There is always the tension of collecting more to redeem a greater reward, or redeeming quickly before the juiciest rewards are claimed by your opponent. 

Blood Rage is my weakness. I really suck at playing this game. We've played this some years ago, and I did poorly. Now, I am doing just as poorly, if not worse. It isn't really a complex game. I have no idea why I can't even play this half decently. I think I have some kind of mental block when it comes to this game. It's not because of the battle theme. I'm not against wargames. I have no idea why. 

I had played a lot of Agricola in the past, but it had been a while, so I was a little rusty. This was my farm in the early game. I had two cattle, but I couldn't breed them because I did not have enough space. In fact the cow had to live inside my house. Not exactly hygienic. 

Needing to analyse fourteen occupation cards and minor improvement cards was a little overwhelming. Gosh I was rusty. However there was also sweet nostalgia. Eventually I only managed to use a small subset of my cards. 

One thing I am annoyed with is how they have changed some of the names of the worker placement spots. "Plow" is now called "Farmland". "Sow and bake bread" is now called "Grain utilisation". Seriously?! "Plow and sow" is now called "Cultivation". I find this frustrating. Why not keep things simple and straightforward? Okay, maybe this is the grumpy old man talking. He is incapable of letting go of the past. "Family growth" is now called "Wish for children". 

This was my farm near game end. I had wanted to upgrade my house to a clay house, but I didn't manage to gather enough clay. So we still lived in a wooden house by game end. 

Caverna is a reimplementation of Agricola. Some aspects were changed and simplified, several things were added. This was the early game. 

I have played the physical game. There were many game components to manage and it was quite a lot of work. You have so many options that it is exhausting to go through them one by one. The upside is you can try different buildings every game so there is much replayability.

Family members in Caverna don't score as many points as those in Agricola. They only score 1 point each, compared to 3 points in Agricola. However it is still useful to have more family members. You get more things done. I (red) worked hard on making kids, and I managed to reach the max of 6 family members. Han focused more on arming his family members. He had three armed family members and I had only one. Only armed family members can go on adventures.  

By the end of the game all of my forest and mountain spaces were developed. I did not have to lose any points from undeveloped spaces. One cute thing about this game is your dogs can help to guard sheep. So some sheep can be left in the fields as long as you have enough dogs taking care of them. 

Puerto Rico was once the #1 game on BGG. Many years ago I bought it because it was #1. At the time I had not played many Euro style games. My favourite games then were games like Axis and Allies. When I first read the rules of Puerto Rico, I was confused. This is it? This is the #1 game? It seems too simple. Where is the excitement? Later as I learned to appreciate Euro games, I understood the fun in Puerto Rico. 

Han beat us by a large margin. He had two large buildings. He had four quarries, which gave him deep discounts on buildings. 

Jakarta Traffic

The Game

Jakarta Traffic, being about Jakarta, is, of course, a game from Indonesia. However the designer Simon Schmieder is actually from Germany. He now lives in Indonesia. This game was crowdfunded successfully on Kickstarter. Simon came for the Asian Board Games Festival in Malaysia last year. At the time I wasn't able to try his game. He was here again this year, so I took the opportunity to try Jakarta Traffic. He sold out all the copies he brought by the second day of the fair. This is a popular game! 

In this game you play gojek drivers. Gojek drivers are delivery guys on motorcycles. They deliver items and also carry passengers. Since they are on motorcycles, they can weave through traffic. You use a phone app to hail riders. This is a pick-up-and-deliver game. The main way you earn points is by picking up items and delivering them to specific destinations. The road network is intimidating at first, but once you get familiar with identifying paths, it is not as scary as it looks. On your turn you move from one terminal of a road network on your tile to any other terminal of that same road network. This can be quite a distance if that road network is large. Some road networks have multiple terminals, which means you have options. Before you move, you have the option of rotating a tile or replacing a tile with the one in your hand. These will modify the road networks on the board and change your possible destinations. There are many ways you can change the networks. One important restriction is you can't change any tile that has tokens on it.

Think of this little board as the constantly updated list of orders in the gojek riders app. This board specifies the current contracts you can fulfil to score points, i.e. deliveries you need to make. Information here includes what to deliver (pink disk), where to deliver them to (green building), and how many points you score for making the delivery (star). What's interesting about this board here is whenever anyone makes a delivery, this board changes. The goods being delivered drops to the bottom position and all other goods move up a rank. The building that has just received a delivery shifts to the inactive section on the right. Other buildings shift down, and an inactive building moves to the top spot. As you can see, this is a huge change and can really mess up your plans. The game becomes a race to fulfil contracts, because if you are slow, your goods may devalue and you may need to reroute. You can plan for the changes on the contract board. This is an open information game. If you think someone will make a certain delivery soon, you can predict how the board will change, and you can figure out what you should do next to maximise your points. 

One possible tactic is delivering two items at the same time to the same building. That's an efficient way to score points. 

This is the player board. There are four spaces for stars at the bottom right which means the game ends when someone makes the 4th delivery. The battery charge token at the top right is an important part of the game. Every turn your phone consumes battery charge, and when your battery is flat you cannot pick up goods or complete deliveries. You need to find a charging station to charge your phone.

Notice there are three chat tokens. When you meet another player, you hear gossips and claim one chat token. Chat tokens are worth points at the end of the game. When you meet another player, both of you gain one level of battery charge, because while chatting you also charge your phone using your power banks.  

In case you cannot work out any useful path, one last resort is rolling the dice. You go where the dice tell you to. This is equivalent to taking unknown alleys and seeing where they lead you eventually.

The Play

This is a pick-up-and-deliver game. Every turn you are solving a puzzle. You try to figure out how to get to a specific tile. If you can't work that out, you have to go for the second best option. I find that often you can work something out, by either rotating a tile or by playing the tile in hand. For new players this can feel overwhelming, but once you learn to read the map, it is actually not as daunting as it initially seems. 

The policeman token is placed whenever anyone rotates a tile or replaces a tile. It temporarily protects that tile from being further manipulated. The policeman only gets moved if someone changes some other tile. 

There is urgency in making deliveries, because if you don't do it quickly, the supply and demand will change and your plans can be ruined. Even if you can still do something with the goods in hand, you probably won't be scoring as many points, or you may need to take a longer route to get it delivered. 

You can also think of this as an efficiency game. You not only have to do the deliveries quick, you also want to maximise the earnings from each delivery. This is a perfect information game. You can calculate what may happen in the next few turns, so there can be analysis paralysis if you play with people who want to calculate many steps ahead. Make a honking sound and tell them to just move dammit. 

The tile you have in hand is important. One useful tactic is swapping it with another tile on the board even when you don't need to do it to build a path for movement. You do it for the sake of giving yourself more options on a future turn. 

The Thoughts

This is a game with a very local feel. Local as in Indonesia local, not Malaysia local. All the elements come together to create a unique experience - the art, the setting, the mechanisms. This is a mid-weight game which non-gamers will be able to pick up. I like how it delivers an immersive experience. 

At the recent Asian Board Games Festival I had the opportunity to meet and exchange stories with industry players from other Asian countries. They all find that in South East Asia, and perhaps even in Asia as a whole, it is card games which sell. When some publishers decide to make a boardgame, it is an experimental project for them, to see how well a game with a board sells. Thus far, they find that card games still do much better than boardgames. For better or worse, that is our current reality. Jakarta Traffic, being a boardgame, being able to achieve such success, is no simple feat!

17: Diciassette

The Game

17 is a game design from Japan, originally called Diciassette which means seventeen in Italian. What attracted me to try this game is the similarity to my own game Pinocchio, and also to some extent Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves too. I want to see how others do it. The common mechanism between these games is how cards will be drawn or played, and something bad happens when the sum of the card values reach or exceed a certain number. This is what happens in Black Jack. The number is 12 in Ali Baba, 21 in Pinocchio, and of course 17 in 17. 

In 17, you have a hand of three cards. You take turns playing cards to a row at the centre of the table. You can play your card face up or face down. At any time if you think the total has reached 17, you may call for the round to end. Face down cards are revealed. If you are right, you get a point token, and the last player to have played a card gets a penalty token. If you are wrong, you get the penalty token instead, and the last player gets a point token. You play multiple rounds until a player wins by having three point tokens. 

One interesting aspect of the game is some cards show their values on their backs. So everyone knows what they are even if you play them face down. Some cards have special abilities, e.g. reversing the order of play, or removing other cards from the row. There is a trap card which penalises whoever calls for the round to end. 

The Play

I did a 2-player game. The game supports 2 to 6. The 2-player game wasn’t interesting for me. I think the game will work better for a larger group. You have three cards in hand, but you don’t always have many options. If you have exposed cards (cards with values on their backs too), and the total will hit 17 when you play them, then they are not valid options. You might get caught in a situation when you’ll go bust openly no matter what you play. So you probably want to consider playing those exposed cards much earlier before you have too many of them. There is a bit of hand management in this game. You can save good cards for the right moments. 

The feeling of playing this game is everyone taking turns to be the vulnerable one who might get penalised. Wherever you decide to play a card to the row, you are taking a risk that the total might hit 17 and someone might call for the round to end. Based on player count and turn order, you can manipulate who will be more vulnerable. Which card you choose to play, and whether you play it face up or face down influence this. Let's use an example. If you can play a 5 to make the apparent total go to 16, and you want to put the next player in a difficult position, you would choose to play the 5 face up, so that everyone knows the end is near. The next player will have a dilemma, unless they have the special power card which removes other cards from the row. 

The Thoughts

I need to play this with more players. I feel this should be a minimum 3-player game. It works differently from both of my games, delivering a different experience. This is a light game so non-gamers can easily learn to play and can quickly enjoy the game. There is bluffing and hand management, so even for experienced gamers there are interesting tactics to consider. This is a clever game with some original ideas. 

Asian Games: the Drama series, Watchlist, Folded Wishes

I shall continue to write about games I tried at the Asian Board Games Festival (Malaysia) in Penang. This time I will write about games from Taiwan and the Philippines. Drama Job Hunting is a party game from Taiwan. It is the fourth and latest game from the Drama series. It is the simplest version to date. It can be used as a children's game and for education purposes. 

If this game were to be translated to English, I think an apt name would be Drama Queen. 

Let me talk about the core idea in the series. Every round an options card is drawn and shown to all players. The card lists six items. One player will be the actor for the round. The actor draws a number card which will show a number between 1 to 6. Only he gets to see this. He must then act out the item under this number on the options card. He can't speak or use sound effects. He can only use gestures and facial expressions. The other players all try to guess the correct answer. After everyone has made a guess, the correct answer is revealed. Whoever gets it wrong is penalised. However if everyone gets it wrong, then the problem is the actor. The actor is penalised instead. You can decide up front what the penalty should be. So yes, this can be a drinking game. If you are not playing with children. 

In Drama Job Hunting, the possible answers are all occupations. This sounds easy but on some cards the occupations are similar, for example taxi driver, ambulance driver and bus driver. Generally this is easier than the other versions. This might not be very interesting for seasoned gamers. I find the other versions more enticing.

Drama Bar is different in that you can't use gestures of facial expressions. You can only use your voice. The options card shows a specific phrase you must say. The list of six items are the possible situations in which you say this particular phrase. Let's use the example below to better illustrate this.

The phrase you have to say here is simply "Sorry". The 6 different situations are: 

1. Accidentally touching someone on the bus.
2. Being late. 
3. Your girlfriend forces you to apologise.
4. Your phone rings when you are at the library.
5. You forget the person's name.
6. You are asking a person to let you pass through.

How are you going to express these different situations by simply saying "sorry"? Not so simple eh?

This one is "What time is it?"  The possibilities: 

1. Mom who is cooking in the kitchen saying this to Dad who is in the living room.
2. Your friend is late by one hour.
3. Your employee is late by one hour.
4. You are asking a passer by the time.
5. You have overslept and you are panicking, asking the person lying next to you.
6. You just remember that there is a show you want to catch.

When playing Drama Bar, you have to cover your face, so you won't be able to express yourself using your facial expression. This can be quite challenging indeed. So far this is my favourite among them all. 

I am guessing Drama Oscar is the first in the series. You need to act out an emotion, and that emotion can be caused by very different things. 

The emotion here is being secretly thrilled or tickled. The possible reasons are: 

1. You see your headmaster slip and fall.
2. You are a young and innocent lady and someone has just confessed their love to you.
3. You overhear a conversation and they are saying how handsome you are.
4. You are the top student and you see that you are top of the class yet again.
5. At the Oscars the host announce that you win the best actress award.
6. You hear on the radio that the Taiwanese baseball team has defeated the Korean team in a comeback victory. (context: this is a game from Taiwan)

Drama Arena is about kung fu moves and spellcasting. This is a version which gives you plenty of opportunities to be creative. 

You can even get two actors to perform at the same time, and they can fight each other. This one above is about casting a summoning spell. The possibilities: 

1. Summon the magical staff.
2. Summon the black tuna.
3. Summon the waiter.
4. Summon the giant peach. (I'm not sure whether this has any naughty connotation) 
5. Summon the Sphinx. 
6. Summon a portal. 

This card is for water magic. 

1. Dragon Shot.
2. Dragon Spiral. 
3. Waterfall Attack.
4. Water Storm. 
5. Rain Arrows.
6. Water Cannon. 

The Drama series is doing well in Taiwan, and they have four different versions now. Tom is interested to bring it beyond Taiwan. To do this in other regions and languages, a lot of localisation work will be required. If any publisher out there is interested, get in touch with him. 

Watchlist is a game from the Philippines. It is a real-time cooperative game that can be played in five minutes. One player is the undercover cop while the rest are regular cops. The undercover cop needs to help his team arrest all the suspects.

There are two sets of cards in the game and they are almost exactly the same. The only difference is one deck is in colour, and the other is black and white. The undercover cop gets the black and white deck, and the regular cops get the colour deck. At the start of the game, the undercover cop draws a certain number of cards from his deck. These are the suspects he must help his team arrest. The colour cards are distributed evenly to all the other players. The process in the game is everyone asking questions to the undercover cop to identify the current suspect. The undercover cop can only answer yes or no. You ask questions like whether the suspect is male or female, whether they are wearing a hat, whether they are holding something in their hand, and so on. One of the regular cops makes a guess by playing one of his cards. Only correct guesses will score points. 

Since this is a real-time game, the undercover cop will get bombarded with questions from all the other players. Whether the cards are coloured or black and white doesn't seem like a big deal, but this does pose a challenge. Some things in the drawings may be interpreted differently when there is no colour. 

Folded Wishes is a game that has gone beyond the Philippines and has reached the international market. Ludus is the original publisher, and B&B Games is the international publisher. 

Folded Wishes is an open information abstract game. Your goal is to arrange four of your pieces in a straight line. You will always have one tile in hand, and on your turn you will play this tile at one position along the edges of the play area. You place your game piece on this tile. You then push the tile into the play area, shifting that whole row of tiles. One tile will get pushed out from the other end of the play area. You'll pick this tile up for your next turn.

All the tiles have small icons and these are special powers you get to use. Some let you move your game piece, some let you move an opponent's piece, and some even let you swap your piece with an opponent's.

You can complete missions to earn additional powers. Missions come in the form of having your pieces arranged in specific patterns. When you earn a new power, the new power is linked to tiles in specific colours. You can only use these powers when you play a tile in that particular colour.

The game is chess-like, because this is a perfect information game. There are many tactics and strategies to explore.

Maracaibo

The Game

Maracaibo is a game from the popular designer Alexander Pfister. He has many bestselling games, but unfortunately most of his games don't quite click for me. They are fine, but I don't find them particularly interesting. Finally in Maracaibo I found a game of his I enjoy. 

Maracaibo is a game set in the West Indies during the age of piracy. Yes, you get to captain a pirate ship. The game is played over four rounds. One round is everyone completing a circuit around the Caribbean, starting and ending in Havana. When you sail, you have much freedom to choose how far you want to sail. The further you sail, the more actions you can perform at the port. Different ports along the route offer different actions. At two places the route splits and you have to choose. Eventually the branches meet again. So far all these sound very much like Great Western Trail right? I find it a bit of a stretch that this mechanism is used in a pirate setting. We are pirates and we should be sailing wherever we want and not following a schedule. We are not running cruise ships. But the game is fun, so this thematic disjoint is forgivable. 

You have a hand of cards. These are workers you can recruit, or buildings you can buy. Each card can also be goods you can sell, or an equipment you can use for completing a quest. Certain ports have demand for goods, and these are where you can sell specific goods to upgrade your ship. Every round some quests are placed at certain ports. If you manage to complete a quest, you gain some benefit. Both goods delivery and quest completion are first come first served. Maracaibo handles cards in an interesting way. At most ports you have the option of discarding your hand to earn a little money. It's not much, but at the end of your turn you always draw back to your hand limit. So it's a bit like free money every turn. What's tricky is if you want to keep a certain card to be used for goods delivery, or quest completion, you can't decide to keep one and sell all the rest. You have to sell all. You have a reserve area where you can place up to three cards. They don't count towards your hand limit, which means after you move a card to your reserve area, you do get to draw a card to refill your hand. However cards in the reserve area can only be used as a worker or a building. They can no longer be used for goods delivery or quest completion. So you still have a dilemma. 

Recruiting is an important thing you do in this game. Your crew gives you many abilities. Some of your employees are stationed at specific ports. You need to visit them to use their powers. As players recruit and grow their crews, they will gain different combinations of abilities. They will want to stop at different ports. They will have different strategic directions. 

You also get to upgrade your ship. In the beginning many sections of your ship have two discs on them. You need to remove these discs to activate the sections on your ship. As more and more sections become activated, you become more powerful. 

Two important things you do in the game are battles and exploration. The three major powers in the Caribbean are the English, the French and the Spanish (unfortunately the Dutch are sacrificed probably for gameplay purposes). You can help them conquer towns, and even capture towns belonging to their enemies. Doing these increases your influence with them, and also grows their power in the region. At game end, you score points from each major power based on how much influence you have and how strong they are. The best scenario is you have contributed much to their success, and they are also much more successful than their competitors. 

When you do exploration, you advance your pawn on a track drawn in South America. Every time you move, you claim the reward indicated at the spot you stop. Depending on your exploration capabilities, you have a maximum movement range. You don't necessarily have to fully utilise it, because sometimes you may choose a spot with an attractive reward than the furthest spot you can reach. Generally the further you go, the better the rewards. There are landmarks which give you bonus when you pass them. The first player to pass a landmark gets more points. So there is a race element here. 

By the time you are done with the fourth round, your ship, your crew, and your influence with the major powers will be very different from when you started. You do the final scoring, and the player with the most points wins. 

The Play

Maracaibo is a development game. It is a typical Eurogame with multiple ways of scoring points. This is definitely a point salad game. There is little direct conflict between players. There are no direct attacks. You do have several aspects in which you compete, but this is not a confrontational game. If you happen to be supporting different major powers, yes, there will be some back-and-forth tug of war as you work for different masters. Competition is mostly in the form of the early bird getting the worm. You don't need to compete for port space. A port welcomes all players. So the game is more about self betterment than about bringing down others. Whoa... that's another valuable life lesson. Maybe it was because we did a two-player game. With more players, the competition should be more intense. I imagine the war between the major powers will be more interesting too. 

One thing I did not expect was that by game end, I had played 20 cards - my workers and buildings. Making money is difficult. Many workers and buildings are expensive. In the first round I probably had only two or three workers. I was surprised that my abilities grew so much by the end of the game. This was hugely satisfying. It felt like a great achievement. 

This above is a career card. In the early game, it gives you some goals and rewards. This gives you some direction and purpose from early to mid game. At first I felt the points from the career card were significant. Only by game end I realised it was not much at all. However the monetary rewards were important, because in the early game money was hard to come by. 

The Thoughts

If you ask me why I enjoy Maracaibo but not other games by Alexander Pfister, I can't explain it well. If I analyse the game honestly, it is a very typical point scoring Eurogame, the kind I love to complain about. However when I am actually playing the game, I have a great time. I'm not particularly into the pirate theme, so it's not the theme. The only reason I can think of is I enjoy the feeling of progress, of building something great bit by bit. Hey, I had helped Spain conquer half of the Caribbean. It is a rewarding experience.