boardgaming in photos: Pandemic Iberia, At the Gates of Loyang, Zooloretto

5 Oct 2018. My copy of Pandemic: Iberia now sits at the office. Sometimes if I have free time on Fridays end of day, I go ask Benz and group whether they have time to play with me. I'd say "We need to have a meeting". In a recent game, I drew the nurse character, which involved using this marker at the lower left which looks like a target. This nurse marker always follows the nurse. Wherever the nurse ends her move, the marker must be placed in a region adjacent to her. All cities in the region are protected by the nurse, meaning no new disease cubes can be added. In this particular photo, Braga is protected and there is no risk of a 4th cube being added to trigger an outbreak.

We have started playing with the advanced variants in Pandemic: Iberia. The disease variant is simpler than the hospital variant, so we started with the diseases. Each of the four diseases has an advanced version, and you can play with one of these advanced versions in play, or more. Having all four in play will most likely be suicide. We are doing one at a time now. The advanced blue disease makes the blue disease spread more during outbreaks. Normally when an outbreak happens in a city, all adjacent cities get an extra disease cube. For this advanced blue disease, all cities 2 steps away get an extra cube too if they currently have no cube. It becomes important to avoid outbreaks of the blue disease. We managed to beat the advanced blue disease.

21 Sep 2018. The advanced red disease is harder to treat. If a city has 2 or 3 red cubes, you need to spend 2 actions instead of 1 to treat one cube. We did not manage to beat this one. Containing the red disease bogged us down. Maybe we should have spent less time on it and instead just race to find all cures.

21 Oct 2018. I played Dragon Castle with Chen Rui again. We picked a dragon card and a spirit card which we had not tried before. This dragon card (left) gives 1pt to every temple which is adjacent to a face-up purple tile. The spirit card, when activated, makes a tile available if its top or bottom edge is not blocked. Normally a tile is available only if its left or right edge is not blocked.

Chen Rui's big frown when she is not winning.

The dragon card very much determined how we built our new cities. We specifically planned to leave some face-up purple tiles.

This was Chen Rui's new city. She planned for the long-term - so many small groups of the same colours not yet linked together. She was going for big groups, which gave a better tile-to-point ratio.

I had many face-up purple tiles, and they covered every temple I had built. Those two blue tiles at the bottom were dead. I would not be able to form a group of four. They were blocked off by temples. I took them only because I wanted to deny Chen Rui who needed them.

Chen Rui's city was tall, but she had too few temples.

We played Azul again too, and this time I taught her the advanced game using this side of the player board. The 5x5 wall on the right has no pre-set pattern.

If you look closely at her player board, you can see that she is planning a pattern similar to the wall in the basic game. By planning this way, you will avoid creating any dead zone. There won't be any conflict between your rows and columns. However it may not be most efficient in scoring, and also your play becomes less flexible. Chen Rui managed to collect a set of 5 tiles (red) worth 10pts, which was no easy feat. However she still lost the game, thus the long face.

3 Nov 2018. My wife Michelle said she felt like playing At the Gates of Loyang, and I said yes! She seldom plays boardgames nowadays, and I'd be happy to play anything. She thought about this game because we were discussing the term "bland", and the bland food in the PC game Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom. That's a game about China too.

The card on the right is a regular customer, and this is an important part of the game. When you take on a regular customer, you are committed to deliver specific vegetables to him over four rounds. This gives you a steady income stream. There is a risk of penalty if you fail to deliver as promised. You need to plan your production properly and make sure you deliver. At the Gates of Loyang is a game of logistics. You manage both supply and demand. You want to produce a lot and deliver a lot. Sometimes you create the demand for what you produce, sometimes you commit to a demand and work out how to produce what is required.

19pts is a respectable score.

4 Nov 2018. My whole family has played Zooloretto before. We also own a copy of Aquaretto. Recently younger daughter Chen Rui said she liked Zooloretto and that it would be good if we had a copy. I have no idea where that came from. I don't remember her liking the game that much. The last time we played it was a long time ago. Anyhow, since she liked it, I bought a copy, and we played. When I took this photo I told her not to hunch. She decided to hunch even more. That's Chen Rui the Cheeky.

At the bottom right I had a fertile male panda meeting a fertile female panda, so they produced a baby panda (round token). On the left I had two fertile flamingos too. However they were both male, so they produced no offspring. I casually commented that these were gay flamingos, thus no babies. That term stuck, and from then on Chen Rui kept saying gay flamingos. She made it her goal in life to collect gay flamingos (well, technically she was just collecting fertile male flamingos). She is the kind who does crazy stuff.

I told Chen Rui that Zooloretto and Aquaretta can be combined into an advanced game. I have not read the rules to that yet. I wonder how it works and whether it would be complicated.

In my panda enclosure I managed to get a second pair of fertile pandas. They produced a baby panda, but this time I had no space for the baby. It had to go to the barn. This was bad for me. It would be a 2VP penalty per specie at the barn.

This was the second game of Zooloretto played recently. I filled all four of my enclosures perfectly!

Having played Zooloretto again, I am still not a particularly big fan, and I still prefer the simplicity of Coloretto. The additional game mechanisms in Zooloretto are not necessary to me. I can understand how Zooloretto is more appealing and feels more fulfilling. Coloretto feels simplistic and a little dry in comparison.

I suspect that the scores in Zooloretto will tend to be close. Most people should be able to fill or almost fill their enclosures. The difference in scores will likely be just from the difference of one or two animals in the enclosures, or the difference of one or two animal types in the barns. That dampens my excitement a little. It feels like I do more in Zooloretto, but the extra work doesn't really matter that much more. The difference is still more or less like in Coloretto. In fact in Coloretto the colours you collect well can give you a big advantage over others.

This was my second recent game of At the Gates of Loyang. This time Michelle and I used the other side of the player board - the red side, or what I call the Chinese New Year side. The only difference is aesthetics. There is no difference in gameplay. One slight problem is the prices of the vegetables. The prices are 3, 4, 5 etc, and not 30, 40, 50. Those 0's are actually icons representing the traditional Chinese coin, which has a square hole in the middle.

The game takes up much space. In this second game, Michelle took a lead from the early game. I had a poor start, not having any decent regular customer. I almost had to take a loan. Both of us preferred to avoid loans. It took me a long time to catch up. Most of the game I was trailing two points behind Michelle. I managed to catch up to her right at the end of the game. Tiebreaker was cash in hand, and we were tied in that too! The next and last tiebreaker was vegetables in hand and in the fields. Michelle had much more than me, so she was the eventual winner.