Neanderthal

Plays: 3Px1.

The Game

Neanderthal is a Phil Eklund design, and he is famous for complex rules and rich themes. Neanderthal is the sister game of Greenland. It was released later, but the setting is of an earlier age, so I guess you can call it a prequel. In this game you play prehistoric human species, the Neanderthals being one of them. You evolve, you develop language skills, and you form tribal societies, ushering the very start of human civilisation. At game end, you score points based on the structure of your society and your achievements.

In the middle you have the player board, which is double sided. This is the basic side, which means you have some vocal communication abilities, but nothing fancy yet. If you develop your brain enough, you will flip the player board to the advanced or tribal side. That means you've established a tribal society. The card on the left is your marriage system card. You draw a random card at the start of the game. The card is double-sided, each side showing a different system. There are a total of three marriage systems in the game, but you will have access to only two of them, those on the card you draw. Each system has pros and cons, and also determines how you score points at game end.

At the top right you have your workers. This is a worker placement game. If you look closely, one of them is bigger. That's your alpha male. If you get to use him, he gives you some bonus abilities. The discs are your vocabulary. I find vocabulary a rather abstract concept. It is an unusual mechanism. Usually you want to have many free vocabulary discs on hand, because they give you advantages in certain situations. E.g. having more swear words gives an advantage when fighting. Many actions in the game require you to commit a vocab disc on a card. This temporarily locks the disc, leaving fewer discs in your free discs pool. The action you want to do is not yet complete, until you find a way to remove the locked disc. Only then your action is complete, and you'll enjoy the benefits, plus the disc is returned to your pool.

These 12 cards form the common play area, representing prehistoric Europe. Every card is the habitat of an animal specie. Neanderthal is a worker placement game, so these habitats are where you send your workers to.

Sending your workers to a habitat does not guarantee you'll reap the benefits. You need to roll dice. The more workers (well, actually hunters) you send, the more dice you roll. In this photo, the two rows of icons on the left tell you what you need to roll to gain some benefit. The first row says if you roll two successes (usually 1's and 2's), you gain 3 workers, and you get to unlock one black and one orange vocab disc. The second row says if you roll four of the same number, you get to claim this habitat card. The information on the right side tells you what you can do with the card after you claim it. This particular card can be converted to a domestic animal. If you manage to do so, every round it will give you two new workers and let you unlock one black vocab disc.

The board situation changes. Global cooling causes habitats to shut down due to ice cover (1st row, 3rd card in the photo). Fewer habitats lead to fiercer competition among players. Sometimes players claim habitat cards. In some cases a new card is drawn to replace the card taken, but in some cases that space is left blank.

More than one player may send hunters to the same habitat. In such cases they will do one round of fighting before they hunt. Some people may die in the fight. Whoever remain standing get to attempt to hunt. The player with fewer hunters get to hunt first. If he is successful, other players leave empty-handed. This is an interesting dilemma. If you have more hunters, you have an advantage in fights, but you will be disadvantaged during the hunt.

This is an event card (bottom half) as well as a daughter card (top half). At the start of every round, an event card is drawn and resolved. It then becomes a daughter card to be auctioned off to players. The event card deck is the game timer. When the deck runs out, the game ends. The deck starts with 10 cards, but more may be added during the game. This happened many times in our game. That's a good thing, because 10 rounds is not enough to get much done. The events in the game are brutal. You can easily lose half your population, and your precious elders.

This is a reference card. The left section are all icons for events. The game has many rules and it is hard to remember all.

When bidding for daughter cards, you bid based on how many vocab discs you are willing to commit. I won this daughter by committing three discs. When the discs are still on the card, the daughter is not mature yet. She can't marry yet, and she doesn't give any benefit. You need to remove all the discs to get her to a mature age, and only then she can take a husband. Once married, both you and the husband's owner get to enjoy the benefits. You can send your own tribesman to court and hopefully marry your daughter, but it is more difficult. You might as well let others send their tribesmen. It saves you some effort, and one worker. If you are adamant about others not sharing your daughters' powers, then you'll need to spend the effort.

This is the basic side of the player board. To flip over to the advanced (tribal) side, you need to upgrade your brain. There are three spaces on the brain, and they can hold at most two discs each. The space between the black and white sections of the brain may hold one black disc and one white disc. It is holding one white disc now. You need to have 5 discs on the brain in order to advance to the tribal age. This is not easy to do.

There are four spaces for elders - the 3, 4, 6 and 5 spaces. It is not easy to promote people to elders. For the 3, 4 and 5 elder positions, you need to have upgraded specific parts of your brain sufficiently before you can promote. In this photo the #6 elder is still an elder-in-waiting, because of that black disc beneath him. That disc needs to be removed before he is officially an elder, and his elder powers take effect.

This is the other side of the player board - the tribal side. It looks very different, but it actually contains much of the same information as the basic side. The elders positions 3 to 6 are still here (along the leftmost column), and you get two more elder positions with new powers. This board organises the elder powers by phases of a game round.

This is a marriage system card. It lists the point values of various components of your society, and these vary depending on the marriage system you choose to adopt. A marriage system card may lock down some of your vocab discs. This particular marriage system above (harem) locks down one disc in each colour. This is an important consideration when you determine whether you want to switch to another system. One advantage of this harem system above is your husbands in your tableau area may move about to fight suitors from other players. Normally husbands (in this game) stay home and do nothing.

The game ends when the event deck runs out. This is not exactly predictable because some events will cause an additional event card to be added to the deck. Even when you draw the last card, and expect the game to end that round, the supposedly final event may just add yet another card to the deck. Planning is tricky near game end. You may be tempted to do something that takes a longer time but will score many points, but it is risky. If you choose to do smaller things that score few points, the game may extend, and you are left with nothing valuable to do in that additional time given.

The Play

I played a full three-player game with Ivan and Allen. I think the game is best with the full complement. There were many rules to go through and explaining rules took a long time. If you look past the many rule details, Neanderthal is essentially a worker placement game, with dice. There will be some randomness. I was spectacularly unlucky with my die rolls in the game we played, especially in the first half. I think I made no progress at all in the first three rounds. I assigned most if not all my hunters to hunt a large animal, and they failed. That meant I had wasted a whole round. If the game were a 10 round game, I had just wasted 10% of my game because of bad luck! Some events may cause elders to die. You roll dice to see whether your elders die. When such events happened, I kept rolling the exact numbers that would kill my elders. I attempted to send my tribesmen to woo others' daughters. They kept getting rejected, and sometimes they even got killed. That can be interpreted as the young man falling into depression and killing himself, or he was upset and distracted when returning home and got into a fatal accident. However we chose to interpret such incidents as the young fellow offending the girl and getting castrated. He then bled to death. The players at the next table were probably wondering what kind of horrible game we were playing, or what kind of psychos we were.

Ivan said to think of the game as a simulation. That means many random disasters will befall you, just like how life was tough for prehistoric man. This can be off-putting because Neanderthal is not an easy game to learn. If you spend so much effort to learn to play it, only to find that you are being played by it more that you are playing it, it can leave a bad taste. This certainly flashed through my mind because of my epic level of bad luck. However the epicness got so high it became entertaining. Amazing even. Eventually my bad luck dissipated and things got more normal. You do still have some control in the game. There are ways to mitigate risks. Your efforts do sometimes yield results, at least often enough that the whole exercise doesn't feel futile.

The courtship aspect of our game triggered further inappropriate table talk. Daughter cards with vocab discs are immature, and cannot be married. However it is viable to court such daughters. During the action resolution phase, it is possible that the player owning the daughter unlocks the discs and makes the daughter mature first, before the other player who has sent a suitor successfully woos the daughter, and the young couple gets married. It's a win-win because both players will gain the daughter's power. How the three of us pictured the situation was this: On the eve of the daughter's 18th birthday, the suitors queued outside her tent waiting for midnight. Once the clock struck 12 and she turned 18, it was time for the wedding and the bedding. Sometimes the vocab disc unlocking failed. We interpreted that as the parents having miscounted the daughter's age, so they had to tell the suitors to go home and come back next year. The players at the next table were probably wondering what kind of sick people we were.

Ivan (yellow) did well and was first to advance to the tribal age. At this point his player board had been flipped to the tribal side. He had two elders. Other than the marriage system card, he had five other cards in his tableau. 1st row, 2nd card is a trophy. Trophies are worth points but give no power. You can win such trophies by hunting some animal species to extinction. 2nd row, 2nd card is a domesticated animal. Domesticated animals are worth points and give some benefits. You need to win such cards from the board before you can do domestication. This particular animal is not fully domesticated yet. There is still a white vocab disc on it. The disc needs to be removed before the point value and the benefits take effect. The other three cards are daughter cards. They are all mature - no discs on them. However none were married yet at this point, partly because the suitors I sent kept failing to impress them.

This was Allen's (red) play area taken at the same time. Allen's player board was still on the basic side. He had three discs on his brain, so he was two discs away from advancing to the tribal side. He had two daughters, and both were married to Ivan's tribesmen (yellow).

This was my (green) play area taken at the same time. When you compare this against the previous two photos, you will appreciate how poorly I fared. I only had one vocab disc on my board, and this was the first free disc. That means I hadn't progressed at all! I only had one daughter, and she was very very immature (3 discs). Notice that among my workers there was one yellow worker which came from Ivan's supply. This was due to some inter-specie marriage event.

My situation was horrible in the first half of our game. Fortunately later on I spotted an opportunity - the marriage strategy. My marriage system was pair bonding, so each husband I had would be worth 3VP, which was high. I sent out many of my tribesmen to chase girls. I (green) had husbands in both Allen's (top) and Ivan's (bottom) areas.

This was my MVP who made my marriage strategy possible. He married Ivan's daughter, and the power he gained for me was in any courtship, my tribesmen would be successful. All my lads were Romeos because of him. No more risk of castration.

Three of the spots in northern Europe were covered by ice due to global cooling. We had fewer hunting grounds. Two spots were empty now because the cards there had been claimed as trophies.

At this point all three of us had advanced to the tribal age. Our player boards had all been flipped. Allen (red) saw that the marriage strategy was very effective, and decided to compete with me. He had sent 9 of his tribesmen to steal my wives! In this game it is possible to challenge a husband and try to take his place. Husband and challenger will fight. It is not easy to kill the other guy. Even if the challenger kills the husband, it is not guaranteed that he will win the heart of the missus. He still needs to woo her, which is not easy.

Allen's Operation Wife Stealing was scary. I had a lot to lose. Thankfully he was successful only in a few incidents, and I managed to retain most of my husbands, and thus the victory points.

In the end, Allen and I could not catch up to Ivan. He had many trophies, and he had domesticated animals too. Domestication was not easy to do. Allen did manage to win one trophy before the game ended. It was a large animal and it was not easy to hunt. We all cheered for him. To hunt a big animal you need to wait till you have enough people, and you will need to commit many if not all of them. Even then it is still a bit of a gamble. Such die rolls are very exciting.

The Thoughts

Neanderthal is certainly a gamer's game. It has many rules, and it has some unusual rules which require some effort to internalise. There are some unique and interesting ideas - quirky and endearing. This game will be somewhat challenging to learn even for experienced gamers. However if you take a step back and look at the whole, this is just a worker placement game, with a dose of luck. Your workers' actions aren't always successful, and disasters strike all the time. Sometimes you make no progress at all in a round, or you may even regress. This can feel very negative. I think it is bold of Phil Eklund to make such a design decision. I can appreciate the statement he is making. This is the prehistoric age after all. You have no vaccines. People die. Hunting mammoths is not exactly a walk in the park.

You do have some control amidst the unexpected twists of fate. You can mitigate risks somewhat. You can decide your risk appetite when sending workers out to hunt. You have space to strategise and try to improve your situation. You will eventually progress. You should think of Neanderthal as an experience game. Play for the experience and the story, and not purely for the competition and the battle of wits. Sometimes you really feel for your opponents when they lose half their population because of a stupid comet. The prehistoric ice age is not easy to survive.

The Mind

Plays: 3P & 4P x9.

The Game

Before starting to write about The Mind, the first thing I decided was I needed to write in a spoiler-free way. Now The Mind is no legacy game. Technically there is no story to be spoiled. However I find that a big part of the experience is discovering the tactics to play it well. So I'm not going to talk about what I've discovered and what tactics I have devised. I won't be talking about my thought processes when playing the game.

The Mind is a cooperative game. You win or lose together as a group. It accommodates 2 to 4 players. With 2 players, you need to survive 12 rounds to win the game. With 4 players, you need to last 8 rounds. In Round 1, everyone starts with 1 card. In Round 2, 2 cards, and so on and so forth. In Round 8 you'd be starting with 8 cards. There are 100 cards in the game, numbered 1 to 100. To complete a round, you need to play all your cards into a central discard pile. Cards must be played from lowest to highest. What makes this difficult, and this is the twist, is that players are not allowed to communicate about their cards. No talking numbers, no winking or eyebrow raising or coded hand signals. You don't know what cards your fellow players have. There is no turn taking in this game. Once a round starts, anyone may play a card at any time. If you have a low card, you'd better play it early. If you have a high card, you probably want to wait a while before playing, because most likely other people have cards lower than yours. Whenever a mistake is made, you as a group lose one life. A mistake means someone plays a card out of sequence, i.e. someone else is still holding a card that is lower. When this happens, anyone holding cards lower than the one just played reveals and sets them aside, and then the game resumes. When you lose the last life, you lose the game. You win if you manage to complete the required number of rounds.

You have a tool to help you - shurikens. You start a game with just one shuriken, but you may gain more during the game. At any time anyone may pause the game and suggest using a shuriken. If it is agreed, one shuriken is spent, and everyone reveals and discards his lowest card.

At the end of certain rounds, you get a reward, which can be a shuriken or an extra life.

That's all the rules. Every round starts with dealing cards out to everyone. Then upon an agreed signal, everyone goes into battle mode and the play begins. You will be watching one another and trying to guess who should be next to play his card. The whole experience is quite intense because you never know when a wrong card will be played. Almost every card play is a nerve wracking moment. Sometimes every correct card being played elicits a sigh of relief.

Having 43 and 44 in hand can be dangerous. Once you play 43, you need to quickly play 44. You are not allowed to play two cards at the same time, so you need to play them quickly one after the other. Someone else might have 45, or 46, and when he sees 43 being played, he might hurriedly play the 45 or 46. That's why you need to be fast in playing 44 after 43.

A 4-player game is set up like this. Four lives (top left), one shuriken (bottom left), and a stack of round cards (right).

The discard pile is a common pile. Cards must be played from lowest to highest.

The Play

The topmost card in the discard pile is 34. The lowest card I have in hand is 63. I probably can wait a while before playing the 63. It is likely someone else has a card between 34 and 63.

In later rounds, everyone will have more and more cards in hand. Having 23, 25 and 28 makes me rather nervous. I will need to play them with only short waits in between, but not too short. Someone else might just happen to have 24, or 26, or 27.

Back home, I taught my wife and children the game, and we played using our Category 5 (6 Nimmt) set. Category 5 has cards numbered 1 to 104, so I just need to remove 101 to 104 to be able to play The Mind.

I did need to print another piece of paper to keep track of the number of lives, the number of shurikens, and the round number.

When one player has 99 and another has 100, this seems dangerous, but is actually not at all. The person with the 100 just needs to insist on holding on to it until everyone else plays. The 99 will eventually relent. When one person has 98 and another has 99, that's dangerous. It is very difficult for them to judge the right time to play their cards.

The Thoughts

Some call The Mind a team building exercise. It is indeed like a psychological test, or a social experiment. A big part of the fun is seeing how your group explores the tactics and how you develop your ideas on how best to beat the game. It is even better if the group does not discuss tactics. Let everyone work out a method that works for him, and also works with the others in the group. Through failing, you gradually discover what works and what doesn't. That journey is fun. Having played 9 games with different people and at different player counts, I feel I have developed a decent technique. However I still have not yet won a game, so my technique might not be the best.

Playing The Mind is a fresh experience. One way I would describe it is: real-time Hanabi. You need to play cards in ascending order, and you have many nervous moments hoping the card you play is the right one. My gut feel is once you and your group work out an ideal way to play, there will be no more feeling of discovery. You are just executing and hoping you get lucky enough to go all the way through. Even so, the number of games you are going to play to get to that stage will already be good value for money. Even if you have developed a solid method, victory may not be guaranteed. It will still be an exciting exercise with surprises. The rulebook suggests variants to make the game harder if you find the default easy.

Mysthea

Plays: 3Px1.

The Game

After playing Mysthea, I did a quick search on the net, and found that Mysthea is a rich world with many characters and stories. In addition to the Mysthea boardgame, there is also a role-playing game, and other boardgames.

The Mysthea boardgame is an area majority game with some engine-building. You play a character in the Mysthea universe. You summon fighters to vie for control of the regions. The game is played over three eras. There is area majority scoring at the end of each era. There are many other ways of scoring. After the third era, the player with the highest score wins.

Everyone plays one unique character (in my case, this guy in the middle, looking like a band leader of a hip hop group). You have only two troop types. The small ones are minions, and the big ones golems.

This is a player board. The track at the top is for keeping track of two currencies. I call the basic one juice (officially it is probably blood or elixir), and the rare one stars. Of the 9 spaces on this board, the bottom right is your discard pile. The other eight are for placing improvement cards. This is the chassis of your engine. Each slot has an icon and you must place specific types of improvements in the matching spaces.

This was the character I drew. I received 4 juice at the start of every era. Free money, basically.

The main board has five round islands, and each island consists of three regions of different terrain types. One unusual mechanism in this game is you can shift the islands around. When you perform such a tectonic shift, you first move the island you are on to the centre. You then force the island in between two other islands, pushing them apart. All the islands will shift and eventually settle into a new configuration, forming a circle again. When you do such a tectonic shift, you get to claim one of those tectonic shift cards on the right (not real name). These cards let you score points based on various criteria. Another important effect of tectonic shifts is monster movement. Monsters on the board sometimes moves one step clockwise to the next island at the end of an era. Sometimes you want to meet the monsters to fight them, sometimes you want to avoid them. With the possibility of tectonic shifts, sometimes it is hard to predict which island the monsters will be on at the end of the era.

At the bottom right you can see the card market. In this game many actions require playing cards. Everyone starts the game with a different set of basic cards. During the game you get to buy cards to improve your abilities and develop new abilities.

This is one of the monsters. You have one monster on the board in the first era. A second one is added in Era 2, and a third in Era 3. By late game it's hard to avoid monsters since there are three of them. At the end of each era, monsters may move and they may attack. Players fight monsters together. If you are unable to defeat the monster, you will lose troops. If you succeed in defeating a monster, you get a reward based on your contribution ranking. Whoever contributed the most manpower gets the highest reward.

The 2nd and 3rd monsters are already picked during game setup and placed on the side board. So you know what's coming.

This is the side board. There is a thin deck of cards on the left. These are the round cards - you draw a card at the start of every round. There are 9 spaces, which means an era can last up to 9 rounds. In the round card deck there are 5 terrain cards, representing the 5 terrain types in the game. There is one monster movement card, which makes monsters move one step clockwise. At the start of each era, one monster attack card matching the monster placed onto the board is added. For Era 1 you will have 7 cards in total, and in Era 3 you'll have 9. In each era you keep playing until you draw the 5th terrain card. The 5th terrain card tells you this is the final round for the era.

When a terrain card is drawn and placed, the number above it will indicate the victory point value for controlling this particular terrain type at the end of the era. At the end of an era, you process these round cards one by one. This photo above shows a situation in Era 3. When resolving the end of era, you will first score the misty regions, each being worth 2VP. Next you score the crystal regions (3VP). After that the monster Caerulas attacks. Then all monsters move one step clockwise. This fourth card is the monster movement card. After that the forest regions score (6VP). And so on and so forth. The last card is not yet drawn. It is the fifth and last terrain card, and it will be worth 10VP. Very lucrative.

As terrain cards are revealed, players gradually gather information about which terrains have low values, and which may have high values. Competition will naturally shift towards the higher value regions.

At the fifth position (lower left) you see an icon which means resetting your artifact. Everyone has an artifact which can be used twice per era. You need to use the artifact if you want to start a battle or if you want to do that tectonic shift thing. Once used, the artifact is turned face-down. It is refreshed at the start of round 5, and at the start of an era. Ideally you want to use yours before round 5, so that you will get to use it twice per era.

Most of the time you need to play a card to perform actions. You gain juice as indicated by the number on the card. You may then spend juice to perform actions like raising troops, deploying troops, moving troops. You can also spend juice to perform the action depicted at the bottom of the card. You may choose to place the card on your player board. This converts the card into a permanent improvement. Cards come in four colours, and the colours have meaning. Yellow cards score points. Green cards are accessories which will help you get more stuff done per turn. Blue cards are mostly upgrades to your various units. When you battle another player, you may commit a card to augment your abilities. In such cases, yellow lets your troops avoid battle, blue scores points, red increases your strength, and green produces juice.

This reference card lists all the things you may do on a turn. You get to perform one normal action and one special action. Of the three normal actions, I have described the card play above. The second normal action is buying cards from the card market. The third is gathering resources. You get at least 3 juice, and you reap resources from the regions where you have people present.

There are four types of special actions. Battling another player and tectonic shifts require the use of your artifact. The 3rd special action is likely the most frequently used - activating an accessory. Of course, you need to have played an accessory card to be able to use it. It is beneficial to play an accessory card early, so that you utilise your special actions as much as possible. Other special actions are not easy to do. The 4th special action is the Encounter. Every player has an Encounter token on the board, and it starts on a different island from your character. To perform an Encounter, you (your character) need to travel to the island with your Encounter token, then spend stars (the rare currency). You will earn points, and trigger an event (usually good). Each time you perform an Encounter, the star cost for the next one increases. It becomes harder and harder to do. The Encounter also gets moved somewhere else.

Each era has its own deck of action cards, and later eras generally have stronger cards. The cards have no text, so you need a (rather large and double sided) reference card like this.

The yellow disc at the bottom right is the yellow player's Encounter token. The yellow player's leader is here, so he can perform the Encounter action if he has the required number of stars. Once you perform an Encounter, the Encounter token is sent to another island. If you want to do the Encounter again, you need to hunt it down again, in addition to collecting enough stars again.

This is an Encounter card. The point value is shown on the card back, so everyone knows the value of the next Encounter. The two icons are your options. Do you want to trigger a treasure event or a chat event? You must pick before turning the card over.

This is the card face of an Encounter card. The upper half is what you get if you have chosen the chat event. You train a minion or deploy a minion for free. You also move your Encounter token 2 steps clockwise.

The number in the top right corner of an action card tells you which era it is from. These cards here are from Eras 1 and 2. There is a serial number at the bottom right. You can use this to look up the reference card or the rulebook.

This tiny envelope is for player-vs-player battles. You have the option of secretly committing an action card.

I have explained how regions score points at the end of an era. Defeating monsters gets you points too, and sometimes resources as well. You get points from tectonic shifts, from fighting other players, from playing yellow cards (insert football / soccer joke), and from chasing Encounters. So there are many ways to score points. You want to do so efficiently, and effectively. Every era you are positioning for the end of era scoring. Some eras are longer, some shorter, and you need to be nimble in reacting to the many possibilities.

The Play

I did a 3-player game with Ivan and Tim. Mysthea does have many mechanisms, but the big picture is not all that complex, and the individual mechanisms aren't either. The challenge for a new player is the many different action cards in the game. There's a lot to digest and you'll need to look up the reference sheet or rulebook often. It gets a bit better after you get familiar with the icons used.

Engine-building is a big part of the game. You want to build a decent engine so that you can be more efficient. Do more with less. Your engine is your permanent advantage. Due to the variety in the action cards, players will be building different engines, and their strengths and priorities will differ. E.g. I developed an advantage in gaining stars, so I decided to invest effort in Encounters.

There isn't much fighting between players. It is not only because of the limitation imposed by the artifact usage. Fighting is not always lucrative. Sometimes you'd rather spend your energy somewhere else, where you can earn more points. You don't need to fight a lot, but you will need to compete a lot. This is an area majority game, so there's simply no escape from competing. You lose out if you don't actively try to compete. You can't win everywhere. You don't need to win any region by a lot. Ideally you win many regions by just a little bit. You want to have the most gains using the least effort.

Your character is important. When you deploy troops, they must go to where your character is. So his location is effectively a restriction you need to work with. Troops can move after deployment, but since actions are precious, you want to save as much as possible.

This was the first era, so there was only one monster (in the middle of that island at the bottom). This was still early game, so there weren't many soldiers on the board yet. Movement within the same island is just one step to either of the other regions. Movement from island to adjacent island also requires only one step, but you may only move between the same terrain type. My character (green) is on the island on the right, standing in a misty region (white). To move to the island at the top right, it only takes one step because I can move directly to the misty region on that island. However if I want to move to the island at the bottom, I will first need to move one step to the forest region (dark green) on my island, and only then move one step to the forest region of that island at the bottom.

Notice the two black discs, on the island on the left, and the island at the top right. These are fortresses. They are Ivan's (black). Fortresses have a combat value of 2. However they can't move (of course), and they are dismantled at the end of an era. You need to build again next era.

This is my player board, and I have some upgrades now. The blue card at the top left gives me a star (valuable resource!) whenever I train a minion (small soldier). Stars are required to perform Encounters. Due to this advantage I had, during the game I spent much effort on Encounters, managing to do it six times (the max). The card at the bottom left lets me build accessories for free. I made sure I played this card before I started building accessories. That second card in the bottom row is an accessory. A big part of Mysthea is working out how to synergise your cards, and playing to the strengths of your cards.

The six Encounter cards I collected.

This was Era 2, so there were two monsters, on the island on the right, and the island at the top right.

This monster (centre) was going to get a good beating. Tim (yellow) had invested much manpower on this island. I (green) only had one lone soldier, but I was going to earn the rewards for 2nd place in beating the monster. This was a good deal, so little commitment for such a good reward. Ivan (black) could consider coming here to compete with me, since I only had strength 1. Tim could initiate a battle to kill my lone soldier, just to deny me the rewards, but it might not be worth the trouble. Initiating battle with another player requires using the artifact.

That guy at the top left is Ivan's character (black), and he was the Ip Man of our game ("1 guy fights 10"). Player characters have a default strength of 3, compared to 2 of golems and 1 of minions. Ivan's special ability was an additional strength of 2, so his character started the game with strength 5. Later, he played an improvement card to give his character a further strength increase of 3. That made his character strength 8!

This is Ivan's player board. His character card is at the top left. The second card on his board is the one giving him a strength boost of 3.

This was the side board situation in Era 2. The first two round cards drawn were monsters, so we knew early that yes, they would attack, and we knew where they would attack, because they wouldn't be moving before attacking. This made planning much easier. The two monsters having taken up the first two low value slots meant the terrain cards would occupy higher value slots - more points for everyone. All five terrain cards had been drawn, so the era was coming to a close. That last card still in the draw deck was the monster movement card. The monsters would not be moving at the end of this era.

This was a tectonic shift in progress. The island being moved was first thrust into the centre. The active player then had to decide which gap between the other islands to stick this moving island into. For each of the three options, who would benefit and who would lose out? How would this affect monster movement? How would this affect people who were chasing Encounter tokens?

This was Era 3, and all three monsters were on the board - on the islands on the left, right and top right.

Tim's (yellow) special ability was he earned double the rewards whenever he defeated a monster, so he had incentive to fight monsters. In Era 3, Ivan quickly grabbed the tectonic shift card which gave points based on number of monsters defeated (regardless of who defeated them). This was a smart move because all of us had more soldiers by Era 3, and we were strong. Also with three monsters on the board, the potential was high. When we did the end game scoring, I got all excited because I was able to keep up to and then overtake Ivan (it had been a tough competition throughout the game). However I had forgotten about that tectonic shift card. Once Ivan added the points from that card, he easily reclaimed the lead and won the game.

The Thoughts

Mysthea, underneath the fantastic art and amazing sculptures, is very much a Eurogame, with multiple ways of scoring points. The area majority is the core platform on which you compete. It's a part you can't avoid competing in. You can't allow others to run away with it. Outside of this area majority scoring, there are many other ways you can score points, and different players may emphasise different areas. You want to build your engine, because it gives you permanent advantages. You don't want to fall behind in efficiency. Fighting other players doesn't happen much, because it is not always in your best interest to do so. However few direct attacks does not mean low player interaction. Area majority is all about player interaction. The tectonic shifts can also mess up your opponents' plans in a major way.

Fighting monsters is an interesting proposition because of the conflicting motivations. It requires significant commitment from the parties involved. Sometimes you want to contribute more so that you get the biggest reward. Sometimes you want to contribute just a little bit, so that you get some reward without spending much effort. Sometimes you pull out at the last minute, causing your compatriots to fail. Sometimes you join a winning fight at the last minute to snipe a reward from the then smallest contributor.

Some competition is of the first come first served nature. Good action cards turn up in the market. Do you quickly buy them, or do you want get your Encounter done first in case someone does a tectonic shift and royally screws up your plan? Often there are a few things you want to do, but you know when you pick one, someone else might beat you to another. Sometimes you want to do things in a certain order, e.g. collect resources, then perform an Encounter with those resources, then play a scoring card to score points. However due to the competition and the changing board situation, sometimes you are forced to make less efficient moves, lest you lose an opportunity completely. There are difficult choices to make. There are trade-offs.

Pandemic: Fall of Rome

Plays: 4Px1.

The Game

When I first played the original Pandemic, I never expected I would be playing so much of this game series. It was an OK game for me, decent but not earth-shattering. It was very popular when it was first released. It was a refreshing setting. It was easy to teach. People understood it instinctively. The Intensify mechanism was clever and effective. The main reason I have played this much of the Pandemic series is this group of friends - Benz, Ruby, Xiaozhu and Edwin. When they first heard of the game, they were keen to try it. After I taught them the game, they fell in love with it. Since then, we had journeyed through Legacy Season 1 together, we did Legacy Season 2 too. The original Pandemic had a number of expansions. There was a dice game, and then the versions featuring specific countries or regions or periods of history. I have played Iberia several times. I have bought Rising Tide (set in the Netherlands) but have not played it yet. I recently played Ivan's copy of Pandemic: Fall of Rome at Boardgamecafe.net.

In this Rome version, you play generals of the Roman Empire. Your job is to fight the barbarians threatening to bring down the empire. You need to create alliances with them, thus bringing them into civilised society. You can also wallop them back to where they came from. You need to save Rome from falling to the barbarians.

Let's look at the game board. It shows Europe and the Mediterranean Sea region during the time of the Roman Empire. There are five barbarian tribes (as opposed to the four diseases in the original Pandemic). The tribes have preset migration paths, and most of these eventually lead to Rome. To win, you need to neutralise all five tribes. You do that by either allying with them, or exterminating them. To form an alliance with a tribe, you need one person to collect a certain number of cards of the tribe's colour, then go to a city with that tribe's tribesmen (cubes), then perform the alliance action. So this is similar to discovering cures in the original, just that you don't need a lab. You need to talk to the tribesmen.

There are several ways to lose. Whenever a city is to get the 4th tribesman of a colour, the city is sacked instead, causing tribesmen to pop up in all neighbouring cities. You lose the game on the 8th sacking, and if Rome itself is ever sacked. The 8th sacking is similar to Outbreaks in the original Pandemic. If you need to place a new tribesman on the board but the supply has run out, you lose too. Rome has failed to contain the spread of this tribe. If the player deck runs out, it means you have run out of time to complete your mission, and you lose.

Every player draws a character card. You get some special abilities and one combat ability (eagle icon). There are battles in this game, and dice are rolled. If you roll the eagle icon, you get to use your combat ability. My character's combat ability is she gets to convert a barbarian directly into a Roman legion. The two cards on the right are player cards. Those tiny numbers at the bottom right indicate how many cards of that colour are in the deck.

One big difference between this Rome version and the original is the need to roll dice. In the original, treating diseases is deterministic. One action to remove one disease cube. In Rome, one action can be spent to battle once. In one battle, you get to roll as many dice as the number of legions you have, up to three dice. The die rolls determine whether you get to kill barbarians, or your legions get killed, or both. You need to have legions to fight the barbarians, so one of the actions in this game is recruiting armies. Armies can only be recruited at forts, so there's another action which let you build forts.

When barbarians invade, they follow certain migration paths. This is quite different from the original. When a barbarian card is drawn and a city is specified as the target, the new barbarian may not necessarily appear at this city. He only does so if the previous city in the migration path already has a barbarian of the same tribe. Else, you trace backwards along the migration path until you reach a city with a barbarian next to it. Because of this rule, barbarians progress step by step towards Rome, and you have a bit more predictability.

This section tells you how many cards you need to collect to form an alliance with each of the five tribes. The black and the white tribes need five, because there are many black and white cards in the deck, more so than the other colours. The blue tribe only needs three cards.

The white building is a fort. You need to be at a fort to recruit armies. If a barbarian attempts to invade a city containing legions, the barbarian cube is not placed. The legions prevent the barbarian invasion. However all legions will be sacrificed. If you happen to have a fort in the city, or a player pawn is present, then only one legion needs to die per invasion thwarted. Legions don't automatically remove barbarians (cubes) already present in a city. You need to perform the battle action to try to remove them.

Since the setting is the classical age, you don't have airplanes, and your pawns don't get to fly to any city you choose. However you do get the sailing action. You can move from one port city to another in one step, if you expend a card of the same colour as the destination.

There are event cards in the player deck, similar to the original. However there is a new mechanism. Event cards give you two options - normal event and super event. The super event is usually much more powerful, but to use it, you need to move your sacking marker one step. That is a big deal. You get closer to losing the game. In the game we played, we did not use the super version of any of our events, but the option to do so was tempting. One more thing to think about, one more option to help you save Rome.

After forging an alliance with a barbarian tribe, you become able to convert their tribesmen to legions. So doing the alliance thing is not just an arbitrary goal to allow the game to have a victory condition. There are practical implications which help you defend Rome and push back the onslaught.

The Play

I played with Ivan, William and Irvin. One difference between Rome and the original is the game setup. The initial cubes (barbarians) will always be placed in 9 predetermined cities near the homelands of the tribes. The setup varies only in the number of barbarians being placed. This is logical and thematic.

There were five tribes we needed to "settle", and there were two ways of "settling" them. It was either we befriended them, or we kicked them back to where they came from. Both were valid and realistic. Since there were five tribes as opposed to four diseases in the original Pandemic, having the same person collect cards of the same colour felt more difficult. Thankfully not all colours required five cards, some needed fewer. Due to the difficulty in collecting cards, exterminating tribesmen was sometimes tempting. The invasion of barbarians followed predictable paths, so extermination felt like a manageable option. If we could clean the table of a particular tribe, and quickly wallop any new invaders, we would not need to bother with the card collection effort. As the game drew on, we found it harder and harder to contain the tribes. Barbarians were everywhere and it was too late to push them back. Eventually we went the alliance path for all five of the tribes, and we brought peace to the Roman Empire.

It is difficult for one person to collect many cards of the same colour. You need to get your friends to pass you the right cards. Going solo is high impossible.

You can see the port icons (anchors) at the port cities. Moving from port to port takes one action only if you spend a card of the destination colour. That city at the lower left is black, blue and white. To travel there by sea from any other port city, you can spend a black, blue or white card. Rome is a port city and has all five colours, so it's easy to rush back to Rome by sea if there's an emergency.

At one point we had only three green barbarian cubes in the supply, which was dangerous. We needed to quickly convert some barbarians to legions, or kill some of them, to prevent the cubes from running out.

Lutetia was the reason for almost running out of green cubes. It was sacked multiple times, causing green cubes to pop up in all neighbouring cities.

In this Rome version of Pandemic, you need to lead legions into battle to get rid of barbarian cubes. There is some randomness now and things are no longer deterministic. You can sometimes get an unlucky streak, losing legions without beating back the barbarians. You lead legions in offensives, and you also shift them around as defensive measures to slow down the advance of the barbarians. Although there is some randomness, I feel it is not too much. You do generally expect to lose troops, and you also expect to be able to kill barbarians. So you will plan to replenish your troops. Best to recruit early in the game, when the recruit action is more effective.

The alliance token of the white tribe was still in the supply, which meant we hadn't established an alliance with them yet. This was the last tribe we needed to ally with before we could win the game.

The Thoughts

Fall of Rome looks very different from the original Pandemic. If you count the rule differences, you will find many. However it somehow manages to feel very familiar. This is despite the different problems you have to solve, and new options you have to help you win. If you like the Pandemic series you will enjoy this game. Very different, yet familiar. Kind of like Johnny Depp in a different role.

Hammer of the Scots on Kickstarter

Hammer of the Scots is a game I enjoy a lot. A new deluxe edition is on Kickstarter now. I want to do my part to recommend this excellent game to people. Here are some of my older blog posts where I wrote about the game: link to posts.