boardgaming in photos

28 Jul 2013. I have been playing a lot of Ascension (on the iPhone) lately. Mostly with Han - we have two concurrent games running at any one time. Also due to either pressing some wrong buttons or some auto matchmaking when a game invitation timed out, I hooked up to play against some strangers. Once I was beaten 117:58. Gosh there are sharks out there!

This screen capture is a game I played against Han, where he made very good use of Lifebound heroes. Some Lifebound heroes have a Unite power, which gives you additional benefits if you play (or have played) another Lifebound hero on the same turn. He had five Lifebound heroes, three of them had such Unite powers, and their Unite powers include drawing a card. That's how he managed to draw and play so many cards. All five of his Lifebound heroes came into play this turn.

Sabre the Moonlit is one of the more powerful Lifebound heroes. He's expensive (cost 6), but if you can make use of his Unite ability often, he's very much worth it.

I should be thankful I didn't lose by more than 20pts.

This is another game. On his turn, Han managed to completely exhaust his deck. 18 cards, all drawn and all played. On the top right corner you can see that the hand cards icon, the green draw deck icon and the red discard pile icon all show zero. The current Event allowed drawing a card when discarding a defeated Fanatic, which helped.

16 Jun 2013. Shee Yun, Chen Rui and I played some games. Chen Rui requested to play Kakerlaken-Poker. Except for two-player games, all cards must be dealt out to every player, which makes holding cards quite a challenge, even for adults, when there are only three players. So I use this method which I learned from Chong Sean - make use of the tile holders from 10 Days in Asia.

I like the artwork and style.

Notice that cards of the same insect have different drawings, e.g. the two spider cards.

28 Jun 2013. Zaiham is my colleague. He used to play a lot of Magic: The Gathering during secondary school days. I thought he might be interested in boardgames, and invited him to play. It has been a long time since I did any boardgame evangalising. I picked Blue Moon, because it's a card game and many cards have unique special abilities, so it has some similarities to MTG. It worked really well! We played four or five games back-to-back, and that's just with the basic races Hoax and Vulca. We haven't even started exploring other races.

The other game I introduced to Zaiham was Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation. This time a boardgame, but there is card play, and the characters have unique special abilities too.

Now Zaiham has started playing MTG again. He got together with a bunch of old schoolmates and they all jumped in together. Now he plays regularly at a shop near his home. I guess it was a fruitful session - I encouraged him to start gaming again. Now that he's deep into MTG, I probably won't be able to get him to join many of the boardgame sessions. But it's good to have helped rekindle an old passion.

30 Jun 2013. Playing Ubongo with the children.

What coloured gem to pick?

The cooking game - A la Carte.

27 Jul 2013. I asked Shee Yun whether she wanted to play a game. She said yes. I suggested Tales of the Arabian Nights. It had been a while since I last played. I thought it would be good for learning English and for practising drama and storytelling skills. For her, not for me. The English in the game is still a little challenging for her, and she often had to ask me how to read a certain word and what it meant. But I think it's a good opportunity for learning. She even won!

Chen Rui was supposed to be drinking her milk, but she wanted to watch us play.

I certainly had a love story full of twists in this game. I fell in love with a dentist's daughter, only to find that she was already married, and had a daughter old enough to marry. She asked me to marry her daughter instead. I said no. She got upset with me and sent thugs to beat me up. I ran away, but they eventually caught up with me and beat me silly - they crippled me! Eventually I found my true love in Russia and got married. Married life was more restrictive than I expected. The wife would only allow me to visit one city per trip, so I must go home immediately after visiting a city (and bring souvenirs I presume). Since I was a cripple and thus could not travel quickly, my movement on the map was greatly hindered. If I needed to visit a particular city, I needed to adjust my itinerary to avoid all other cities en route and on the way back.

Being married was not all bad though. Every time that I successfully made a healthy baby, I gained 1 Destiny point. Being a cripple was not all bad either. Whenever I scored Story points, I would score double. The adventures of a cripple are always more impressive.

Shee Yun's character had reached Baghdad and won the game.

My character was still toiling far from home. Just when I was about to achieve the required Destiny and Story points, I had an encounter which allowed Shee Yun to send me to a far corner of the board. Since I was crippled, and married, and not rich (these add up to a huge restriction on movement) I could not make it back to Baghdad in time.

My skills and statuses at game end. When I gained the Respected status, it caused me to lose the Crippled status. I guess when you are respected, people pretend not to notice your disability.

Shee Yun's skills and a treasure at game end. During this game she encountered a passage that needed precisely this set of keys, but unfortunately it happened before she obtained them. It would have been interesting to see what would happen if she had the keys at the time. I'm sure it would be quite an adventure.

The Road to Canterbury

Plays: 3Px2.

The Game

I'm quite sure this is the first time I've seen any setting remotely similar to that of The Road to Canterbury being turned into a boardgame. You are greedy priests accompanying three groups of pilgrims on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. You tempt them to commit sins, so that you can sell them pardons. You make them sin so much that they die from their sins. After the fifth pilgrim dies, you reach the end of your journey. You tally scores to determine who the most profitable priest is. There is a special place in hell reserved for priests like this.

When distilled down to basics, what you do on a turn is just this: play a card, and draw a card. There are three types of cards - sin cards, pardon cards, and relic cards. Sin cards and pardon cards have 7 possible values - greed, gluttony, pride, wrath, luxury, envy and idleness. A sin can only be pardoned by a pardon card of the exact same kind. Relic cards are single-use special power cards. When you play a sin card, you play it on one of the three leaders of the pilgrim groups. You keep track of what kind of sins you have tempted pilgrims into committing. The first priest to have "mastered" all seven sins gains a big bonus. Others who achieve this feat will gain bonuses too. When you play a pardon card, you must play it on a matching sin card or cards. You earn money depending on how many sin cards you are pardoning at the same time. You place a cube of your colour on the pilgrim whom you are pardoning. The pardoned sin cards are turned face-down, but are not removed. They still count towards the total number of sins the pilgrim has committed. When the count reaches seven, the pilgrim dies from his sins.

Sin cards.

One of the pilgrims, a knight.

The gameboard is a fat cross. The big central section is only for tracking which sins each player has tempted the pilgrims into committing. The yellow, blue and green scrolls represent the three groups of pilgrims. A pilgrim tile is drawn and placed on each scroll. This is the leader of group. Sin cards are played offboard next to the leaders. The map on the right represents the road to Canterbury. It is basically a countdown track.

Dying is a complex process. It is basically a mini scoring round. Whoever has the most cubes on the dead guy must move one of his cubes to the Road to Canterbury and score points accordingly. This is actually a countdown mechanism - the game ends after the fifth pilgrim dies. Others' cubes are not discarded, but are kept aside near the pilgrim group this dead guy is in. They will be needed for end-game scoring. Whoever played the seventh sin card that killed the poor guy gets something too - a Last Rites token. You can use it to take an extra turn. If unused it is worth $3, i.e. 3VP. After the leader of a pilgrim group dies, another pilgrim is randomly drawn to take his place. The priests continue to tempt him to sin and then pardon him. Business as usual resumes.

The Last Rites token.

The game consists of quick turns of playing and drawing cards, as the tension builds up until eventually someone will die for sinning too much, and then there is a pause to settle funeral matters. The actions you do are not complex. It is the various ways of scoring that you need to digest and understand how to be competitive at. There are four hree long-term goals to keep in mind - you want to make pilgrims commit all seven types of sins, you want to have pardoned a pilgrim the most times before he croaks, at game end you want to be top personal pardoner for the most number of pilgrims, and finally at game end you want to have done pardoning as much as possible in the three pilgrim groups. All these can give big chunks of points, but you may not be able to do all. The pardoning action itself and killing pilgrims give points too, but these are usually smaller and more tactical gains.

The Play

Allen bought this game and put it at my home for quite some time. I never got around to reading the rules, and eventually he read them himself and taught Han and I to play. Since a turn is just playing a card and then drawing a card, he underestimated the rules, and we fumbled through half a game before knowing what we were doing. At that point I had become a runaway leader and neither of them could catch me. I won the game with more points that both of their scores added. We decided to play another game immediately. This time we had a much better idea what we were doing and the scores were much closer.

One word describes the feeling of playing this game very well - brinkmanship. To pardon, you need to get people to sin first, but when you do so will you be setting up for your opponents? Pardoning a pilgrim who has committed the same sin multiple times is lucrative, but when you tempt him into indulging over and over, will another priest suddenly come up with the same pardon card that you are just about to play? Can you make sure you squeeze every last coin from the pilgrim before he dies on you? Playing a card is a simple action, but which card to use, and who to play it on, are things you need to consider. As the pilgrims sin more and more, you become more and more anxious about who's next to die.

Two factors add some excitement to the game - the relic cards and the death cards. Relic cards have powerful but single-use abilities, and can create some twists. Death cards are a special type of sin card. When drawn, they are immediately played onto a specific pilgrim. They count as sin cards. That means a pilgrim can unexpectedly die earlier.

Once we got into the rhythm, the game moved very briskly. It felt like a medium weight game that played like a light weight game.

The black player has succeeded in tempting pilgrims to commit every type of sin. The purple player is only one sin short. The pawn marks the sin that the church is denouncing, and pardoning this sin warrants a higher fee.

The Thoughts

The Road to Canterbury is essentially a card game. All you are doing is playing a card, and then drawing or selecting another to refill your hand. Hand management, and remembering cards your opponents have taken (when they take the face-up cards) are both important. It's hard to argue that this isn't a eurogame, but there's something about it that makes it feel unlike any typical eurogame. The mechanisms are quite abstracted and streamlined, but they still jive with the theme. And I definitely have not seen any other eurogame about sinning and death and unscrupulous priests.

I like the brinkmanship in this game. You constantly worry about setting your opponents up for scoring. You try to make use of every sinning pilgrim before he dies. Sometimes you need to prioritise which areas to fight for. The game is very interactive because you are fighting over the same groups of pilgrims. I think this is quite a clever design. A little thinky, and yet can be played at a brisk pace.

Edo

Plays: 3Px1.

The Game

Edo is the old name of Tokyo. Edo is a eurogame game with a medieval Japanese theme. It has simultaneous action selection, worker placement, and it is about collecting resources to construct buildings, which score points. Sounds like a very typical and boring eurogame so far? Yeah... I can't think of any exciting way to summarise it. But then trying to summarise it may not be a good idea. Some things get lost in translation. Let's take a look at some details.

A unique aspect of this game is the square action tiles. Everyone starts with three. In a round you can pick three actions. Each action tile has four quadrants, each quadrant representing one action type. That means you can only pick one out of the four actions from each tile. This creates some tricky planning and decision-making. Another memorable aspect of the game is how you need to send your workers onto the board. They need to be there to collect resources and to construction buildings. Sending them forth is not cheap. Travelling costs money, and every round every worker consumes rice. So you better do proper planning and make sure every trip is worthwhile.

These action tiles are the most outstanding aspect of the game. Each tile has four quadrants, but you can only use one of them in a round. Here the three actions I have picked are the ones pointing downwards. The first action is collecting wood. I have assigned two workers to this. They will need to work together with the two other workers I have sent to the board. When I execute this action I will move those two workers on the board to a forest location to chop wood. I have no worker assigned to the middle tile, so there will be no action. The third action allows me to buy a new worker using a sack of rice.

The resource collection and construction on the board are area majority contests. Once you have buildings in the cities, you start making money from them every round. How much you earn is dependent on how many buildings you have there compared to others. The number of castles that can be built in a city is dependent on the number of houses already built there. Players will compete over these limited slots too. There is often a race to reach resource locations. The output of a resource collection action depends on how many workers are at the location. The more workers, the fewer resources per action. So players will want to race to get to vacant locations. If you want to be mean you can send your workers to crowd a location, and cause everyone there to be unable to gather any resource. But then you would be wasting your workers and rice too, and other players not involved will point and laugh.

Ultimately it's a race to score points. Buildings are worth points. Some in-game actions are worth points. There are a few ways to score endgame points. The game ends after a player reaches 12pts.

The brown location is a forest. According to that table, if there is one worker present, a collect wood action will give 3 wood. If two workers are present, the action is worth 2 wood. If four or more workers are present, the action is worth nothing.

City locations are red or pink. The tiles in the cities indicate how much money you earn when you have houses in the cities.

The Play

As is typical for Han, Allen and I, we executed many of our actions simultaneously and often did not follow turn order. We only paused and waited when some actions could impact other players. The game flowed quite smoothly for us. There were quite a few times that I found I was unable to do what I had in mind, because two of the actions I wanted to execute were on the same action tile. This aspect of the game turned out to be trickier than I expected.

Sending workers out to the board was challenging. It was like making a deep treasure-hunting dive. You only have this much oxygen and you want to make sure you accomplish as much as possible before you have to resurface.

My houses and market (the rightmost one which has a different shape). In the background are sacks of rice.

The Thoughts

Overall Edo is still a rather typical eurogame about collecting cubes and converting them to points. The macro level is not very interesting. The execution layer is more interesting. There are tricky tactical decisions to make. You need to think about how to compete with your opponents, and how to make use of your actions and workers as efficiently as possible.

Star Wars: X-Wing

Plays: 3Px2.

Star Wars: X-Wing is one game I have been interested to try for quite some time. It is unabashedly an expansion-eyeing game. The base game comes with an X-Wing fighter and two TIE fighters. Given how rich the Star Wars universe is and how many types of spaceships, characters and weapons it has, these three basic fighters will not be satisfying to anyone who likes the game. Plus the nice spaceships will surely drive the collector's urge.

The Game

Star Wars: X-Wing is a dogfighting game set in the Star Wars universe. The basic scenario (which is the only type that I have played so far) is just shoot-down-all-enemies. The playing area is your table. You fly around the battle space and try to kill off every enemy fighter. There are some more sophisticated scenarios like escorting and protecting a particular spaceship.

A TIE fighter. Each fighter in the game comes with a few pilot cards. You pick one pilot to fly the fighter.

A pilot card. The orange 5 is the skill level. 5 is quite mediocre. The red, green, yellow and blue numbers are attack value, defense (evade) value, damage value, shield value. A TIE fighter has no shield, and is destroyed upon taking the third point of damage. The text at the centre is the special ability of the pilot, the icons below it are the actions the pilot can take after completing movement. The number in the lower right is the point value of this card. Better pilot + fighter combinations have higher values.

Before the start of a game you need to agree the point values to be used by both sides. Every pilot and equipment has a point value, the better ones having higher values. Both sides of the battle need to mix and match and come up with their own line-up. Once the battle starts, the procedure is very straightforward - plan, move and shoot. The first thing you do in a round is secretly plan movement for each of your fighters using round disks. Different fighter / spaceship types have different discs, and thus different types of movement. E.g. TIE fighters are better at turning tight corners than X-Wings. Also some movements are more strenuous to some fighters than others, causing a penalty when such movements are made. Once every fighter has a movement assigned, the players take turns moving the fighters. This is done in order of pilot skill level, with lower skilled pilots moving first. You take the movement strip matching the movement type you have chosen earlier, place it in front of your fighter, and then you pick up your fighter and place it at the other end of the movement strip. You've completed movement. There's a type of movement which allows you to flip your fighter. When you do this, you turn your fighter 180 degrees after moving it to the other end of the movement strip. After movement, the pilot can usually take an action. Options vary from pilot to pilot. E.g. if a pilot chooses to do Focus, later on whenever die rolls show the Focus icon, it can be converted to hits or misses.

Once every fighter has moved, you start shooting. This is also done in the order of pilot skill level, but this time the higher skilled pilots shoot first. This means the lower skilled ones may get killed before they can retaliate. The first thing you do is check whether you have a shooting angle on any enemy fighter. If you do, you then check whether it (or they) is in range. If it is, then you shoot by rolling dice. Every fighter has an attack strength and a defense strength. The attacker rolls a number of dice according to his attack strength, and the defender rolls a number of dice according to his defense strength. If the attacker rolls more hits than the defender rolls misses, the defender takes hits. If the defender has shield, the shield is damaged first. If no shield is left, the defending fighter is damaged. Once a fighter reaches the max damage point, it is shot down.

That is basically it. There are other things like pilots' special abilities, characteristics of different types of fighters, and weapons and special equipment that fighters can be armed with, but in a nutshell you are doing: plan, move and shoot.

The Play

Han, Allen and I played a very basic scenario, with Han playing Luke Skywalker flying the X-Wing, and Allen and I playing some unknown pilots flying TIE fighters. It was 2 vs 1, so naturally Han could pick a star pilot while Allen and I only had enough points for two mediocre ones. We intended to attack from two different sides, forcing him to be exposed at least on one side. At one point we managed to chase him to the edge of the table. He must make a flip, because otherwise he would fly off the battle space and lose (escaping means conceding). He was cornered, and both Allen and I were bearing down on him. Allen and I decided to each turn a different direction, so that no matter how Han turned, one of us would catch him. However Han made the bold move of charging straight at where we were. Both of us had swerved aside, and completely lost our firing angle. What a waste! Eventually Han was able to take us down one by one, and won the match.

Han played Luke Skywalker and piloted the X-Wing on the left. Allen and I piloted the two TIE fighters on the right. We were planning to surround him and attack him from both sides.

Han was chased to the edge of the table and had just made a flip, which left him vulnerable. A flip is usually a strenuous move which causes the pilot to be unable to take a pilot action in the next round. See that triangular token with a red exclamation mark. That's a reminder. Allen and my TIE fighters were approaching.

Guessing your opponent's intention is a big part of the game, so the planning stage of every round is the most important stage. The movement and shooting stages can usually be played on autopilot. There isn't that much to mull over, and the decisions that need to be made tend to be straightforward.

In my second game I played the good guys. I played the rebels and Han the empire. We had more fighters and used a higher point value. In addition to the X-Wing, I had a Y-Wing too. Not as nimble, but it can take more damage. In addition to two TIE fighters, Han had a TIE fighter advanced. It was piloted by Darth Vader too! My X-Wing was piloted by Luke Skywalker, so it was father vs son (sorry to those who have not seen the movies). Darth Vader was one very tough nut - his special ability was he had two pilot actions instead of one. Halfway through the game, Allen arrived and took over from Han. We had some amazing attack rolls, but in those rounds the defender rolled wonderfully too, which meant no damage. Eventually Luke was shot down, so it was a tragic ending. Killed by his own father. The empire won.

That in the background is the TIE fighter advanced, piloted by Darth Vader himself.

The Y-Wing.

Darth Vader in the TIE fighter advanced leading his remaining henchman to finish off the Y-Wing.

Shooting in this game is very exciting. It doesn't take many hits to destroy a fighter. It's not easy to score a hit, because not only the attacker needs to make good rolls, the defender also needs to make poor ones. However there is always a possibility of a hit whenever someone shoots, so that keeps you on your toes. Both sides constantly try to manoeuvre their fighters into favourable positions, to get within firing range, to avoid being shot at, and also to maximise their odds when shooting.

When shooting, the attacker rolls red dice, while the defender rolls green dice. This large star icon means a critical hit. In addition to causing one point of damage, a critical hit also causes same malfunction reducing the abilities of the fighter being shot at.

The Thoughts

Star Wars: X-Wing is brisk and exciting. It is smooth and simple, and also very flavourful. I like how the characteristics of the different spaceships really bring out the Star Wars setting. The game is mostly tactical, but I imagine when playing larger scenarios with more ships, there will be a bigger strategic element. The game is exciting because a fighter only takes a few shots to kill, and if you are very unlucky, it is possible to lose a fighter in one round of shooting. You get that sense of urgency that every round may be your last round.

If you are in the mood for a dogfighting game, I highly recommend Star Wars: X-Wing. It's not a heavy eurogame or a detailed wargame, but it does what it has set out to do very well. It's a game that lets you become a child again, going pew pew pew and playing with toys again.

boardgaming in photos

5 May 2013. Playing The Settlers of Catan with the children.

11 May 2013. Playing Villa Paletti with Shee Yun (8). I never quite remember the rules properly. We just play with the general idea of whoever causes the tower to topple loses.

19 May 2013. Chen Rui (6) likes Dixit and almost always requests for it when we visit Meeples Cafe. To her it's basically a guessing game. When Michelle and I play with the children we keep the clues simple - usually single words - and don't use any deep strategies or complex logic.

This was the first time I tried Tobago with Michelle and the children. It was too difficult for Chen Rui - the the elimination process to determine the possible locations of treasures was overwhelming. She gave up and Michelle took over playing for her.

26 May 2013. Shee Yun watched me play San Juan and Puerto Rico on the iPad, and wanted to learn too. After she had played them a few times, she wanted to play the physical copies. So we played. I'm glad she is interested in strategy games. I have hopes that when she grows up she will continue to play these with me. I guess this is true for every boardgamer parent.

Puerto Rico.

I guided her and gave her tips when we played, explaining to her the strategies.

My player board. This time I diversified my production. With the help of the Factory I earned $5 (which is a lot) every time there was goods production.

Shee Yun's island. She knew it was a good idea to get the markets. I reminded her too. She bought both big and small markets. She even managed to earn enough money to buy two large buildings, which I thought was praise-worthy.

2 Jun 2013. Playing Allen's copy of Battle Line. I have self-made a copy using normal playing cards before, and I have played Ben's copy before, but this was the first time I played using the tactics cards variant. Those two cards on the right are tactics cards. Previously I had thought tactics cards would be gimmicky and would not be necessary, but it turned out they are quite interesting and they are a worthwhile variant. Not absolutely necessary, but they are nice. Tactics cards are usually powerful, although some are more situational than others. When you use this variant, you can play or draw a tactics card instead of a regular card any time. The only restriction is if you have played more tactics cards than your opponent, you are temporarily forbidden to play another. You need to wait till your opponent plays at least one more tactics card. This means if you are first to play a tactics card in a game, you will be anxiously waiting for how your opponent will play one on you (or even one after another in two consecutive turns) before you can respond in kind. This variant is an interesting twist and the tactics cards' abilities feel just right - strong, but not overpowered.

15 Jun 2013. Taluva by Marcel-André Casasola Merkle has always been one of my favourite games. It's open-information (although there is a little luck). It's abstract, despite the wonderful artwork and components. I rarely dig abstract games, but somehow Taluva just clicks.

Your basic objective is to use up two of your three types of buildings. Building houses are easy, but you need to meet specific requirements to build temples and towers. On your turn you must draw a tile, add it to the play area, and then build something. Sometimes you can stack tiles, or even destroy others' houses. You need to visualise how the board situation can change, and how you can make use of the possibilities. Managing your houses is an intricate balance. You can't just rush to build all quickly, because if you run out, and then you get a turn where you are unable to build a temple or a tower, you lose immediately. Taluva is a clever and very spatial game (and special too).