Jump Drive

Jump Drive is the easy version of Race for the Galaxy, by the same designer Tom Lehmann. Race for the Galaxy is one of my favourite games. Many people complain about the many icons and how hard they are to learn. I guess they are a little intimidating at first, but once you understand the general principles in the game, they are manageable. You don't really read the icons. You just need to understand the key rules. Then the icons become reminders for what the card powers are. For any more complicated card powers, there is text on the card you can read. To me the icons are functional and practical. 

Jump Drive has been around for some time. I've never had any urge to try it, since I'm comfortable with Race for the Galaxy. I don't need a kiddie version. Sorry I sound nasty calling this a kiddie version. It is a different game, and it could have been given a wholly different theme, and be an independent game. It is quicker and more straight-forward than Race for the Galaxy. 

Jump Drive is a card game. It is set in the future, when humankind has just invented jump drives which allow interstellar travel. This is a tableau game where you will play cards into your own area. Cards mostly help you draw more cards every turn, or score points every turn. The game ends when someone has 50 points or more. Think of this as a snowball game. As you add more and more cards which score points to your tableau, the points you score every turn snowballs. There is an exciting acceleration which you are trying to achieve, almost like achieving terminal velocity to launch yourself into outer space. 

Every turn you may play one or two cards, and if you don't, you do something called explore, which is to draw several cards then discard some, so that you get a net of two more cards. The explore action basically helps you find good cards you can play. When playing a card, you have to pay for it using other cards from your hand. Cards in the game are either worlds (i.e. planets) or developments (i.e. technologies). If you play just one world, you get a rebate of 1 card. If you play just one development, you get a discount of 1 card. However if you want to play one world and one development, there is no rebate or discount. You need to be able to afford them. Some worlds are military worlds. You don't pay for them, however you need to have accumulated enough military strength from existing cards in your tableau. 

Cards you manage to play give you various abilities, and the most common two are income and victory points. Income means cards you get to draw every turn. Victory points are generated every turn too. Some cards have other abilities, but there aren't that many different powers in the game. So this is a pretty straight-forward game. 

This screenshot from BoardGameArena.com shows the cards we have played every turn. The asterisk icon means no cards were played, i.e. an exploration was done. Usually you try to play at least one card every turn, but sometimes you can't afford one. If you are familiar with Race for the Galaxy, one difference you'll notice is that duplicate cards are allowed. Most if not all of the art is from other games in the Race for the Galaxy universe. I have played so much of Race for the Galaxy that I'd prefer Jump Drive to have a different theme and use different art, because it's a good game in itself despite sharing several similarities. The same art makes me compare it to Race for the Galaxy, and when I do that, Jump Drive feels like, well, a kiddie version. And that's not fair at all. 

This Rosetta Stone World is probably the most complex a card can be in Jump Drive. This is a compact and fast card game. You must play efficiently, because otherwise the acceleration will catch you unprepared. You build your tempo to achieve terminal velocity. There is no direct player interaction, but watching your opponents' tempos is important. If they are rushing, you don't want to be left behind, or you need to prepare for a powerful enough boost to be able to overtake them. Players may surpass 50 on the same turn. When that happens, you want to have a more powerful engine so that you score more than everyone else. 

boardgaming in photos: Innovation, Race for the Galaxy, Carcassonne

8 Oct 2023. I played Attika with younger daughter Chen Rui. This was quite a brutal game. I almost connected two temples, but Chen Rui cut me off. We had instances of starting new settlements to grab land and resources from each other. The more I play this game, the more I appreciate it. I have an urge to find an English version. Mine is German. The game was first released in 2003, and it has never been reprinted. That's a shame. It's a great game! 

13 Oct 2023. I played Innovation with Allen. I'll never tire of this game. This is Carl Chudyk's magnum opus. It is an evergreen in my top ten games. It's an unusual game, and also a little challenging to learn, but once you get into it, it is full of surprises and crazy situations. It's a wild ride. 

I had all five colours now, and four of them were splayed. 

I rarely get to ages 8 and above. 

In our game, this was the card which helped me the most - Industrialization. It didn't directly score points, but it helped me draw many cards to be added to my empire. More cards meant more icons, and that meant a much more powerful empire. I could bully Allen, I didn't have to worry about him piggybacking on my dogma powers, and I could piggyback on his dogma powers. 

I had so many cards! By now we had exhausted the Age 8 cards and we were going into Age 9. 

14 Oct 2023. I still play Race for the Galaxy against AI's once in a while. In this particular game I managed to score exactly 100pts. I normally play against 2 other AI players, and my winning rate is probably below a third. So I'm not actually very good at this. It's just that I usually take screenshots only when I win. Most of the time things are not that glamourous. 

The scores for this particular game wasn't high. What was unusual was I tied one AI for the win. We were both at 42pts. The tiebreaker in Race for the Galaxy is remaining hand cards and goods. We tied for that too, at 8. Ties are quite rare, especially when all three expansions are in play. 

15 Oct 2023. I did Carcassonne with my wife Michelle and younger daughter Chen Rui. Michelle and I are veterans, but Chen Rui is quite new to the game. Michelle knew I was the biggest threat and she kept persuading Chen Rui to gang up on me. 

In this photo, Chen Rui (black) was first to start a castle in this area. I (green) was next, placing my meeple on the castle on the left. I placed a regular meeple, so that if Chen Rui and my castles merged, we would both score points for the combined castle. Later Michelle (red) created a new castle on the right. She placed a big meeple, which had the strength of two meeples. If her castle merged with ours, her big meeple would overpower both of ours, leaving us no points. I told Chen Rui, see what your mom is doing to you; you should listen to dad. 

Eventually Chen Rui the newbie won the game. Michelle and I had been too busy tripping each other up.  

The highest scoring castle in the game was this one completed in the early half of the game. It had a cathedral, so it had a x3 multiplier instead of the usual x2. This single castle scored Chen Rui and I 63pts, which was huge. It was very hard for Michelle to catch up. However Michelle did manage to share that very lucrative central field with Chen Rui. I wasn't able to work my way in to neutralise them before the game ended. 

3 Nov 2023. I visited boardgamecafe.net (physically in Cheras) to buy some Exit games. My family likes them. Now some of them contain jigsaw puzzles. I got myself one, to see what it's like. I had not visited the BGC physical store for quite some time, and took the opportunity to browse. There were so many new games I hadn't heard of before. I bought the latest version of Through the Ages and also the expansion New Leaders and Wonders. Michelle and I used to play a lot of Through the Ages. We had a lot of fond memories. Let's see if I can convince her to revisit this. I'm going to ask the children to try this too. 

boardgaming in photos: Race for the Galaxy, Machi Koro, Star Realms

 

Younger daughter Chen Rui once saw me play Race for the Galaxy on my iPad and expressed interest. Since then I kept reminding myself to find an opportunity to teach her the game. By now she probably isn't all that keen. She was just curious then. I was just looking for an excuse to get her to play games with me. 

My copy of Race for the Galaxy includes three expansions, so the card deck is huge. In order to teach Chen Rui to play, I removed all cards from the expansions. The base game already has many cards, many more than the average card game. It is complicated enough. Better not overwhelm her. I had not played the physical game for a long time. I used to play this regularly with my wife Michelle when the children were young. That was before they went to primary school, ages ago. Now that I played the physical game again, it was full of nostalgia. Nowadays I play Race for the Galaxy only on the iPad, against AI's. 

I let Chen Rui use the light blue player cards. In Race for the Galaxy every player gets a set of player cards. I use green. Michelle used to play red. 

Playing the physical copy feels different from playing the digital version. On the iPad, the tempo is fast, and I am often lazy to think too much. I don't spend much effort to analyse and to think. I must admit I'm a little sloppy. The tempo in the physical game is slower, and I get to smell the roses a bit more. I am a bit more relaxed and take more time to consider my options. It is a nice change of pace. 

Race for the Galaxy has a second and a third expansion arc. Expansions from different arcs cannot be mixed. I bought expansions in the second arc, but not the third. By the time I got to the second arc, Michelle and I no longer played the game regularly. We did play the second arc, and based on those games we played, I liked the first arc better. When the third arc came out, I read about it but never bought it. If it ever gets released in the digital version I would buy it and give it a go. 

The digital version is pretty good. When I play, I normally play two AI opponents. My iPad is old and if I add a third AI, it can't handle the additional computing and often crashes. When I boot up the game on the iPad, I can play 7 or 8 games in one breath, and it takes maybe 45 minutes or so. I learned a few tricks from the AI's. 

Chen Rui suggested Machi Koro. When my daughters were younger, the three of us often played Machi Koro. We all liked it. It had been a while since we played. Chen Rui and I tried playing just the base game, but using the market mechanism introduced in the expansions. I prefer having the market mechanism, but had not tried it with the base game. I wasn't sure whether it would work well. After trying it out, we concluded that it worked just fine. 

In the base game we only needed to build four landmarks. That felt rather short. I was too used to needing to build six landmarks. 

In the base game, normally all the buildings are sorted and laid out, and made available to everyone at all times. This is just like Dominion. If you have in mind a particular strategy, you can keep at it and buy as many of the buildings needed as you want. The only thing stopping you is other players buying what you want. So in the base game it is easier to execute planned strategies. 

With the market mechanism, there will only be 10 types of buildings available at any time. Buildings are drawn from a facedown deck. During set up you draw them and add them to the market until you have 10 types. If you draw a building which already exists, you group the similar cards. Whenever anyone buys the last one of any particular building, you draw a new building from the deck, until you reach 10 types. When using this market mechanism, there may be only one copy of a particular building you want. It becomes much harder to execute any perfect strategy. You need to adapt to the situation in the market. At the same time you need to react to your opponents' strategies. 

I bought many convenience stores (green #4 building). If I rolled a 4 I would make $12. I would stick to rolling one die for a while. Chen Rui was starting to roll two dice, so my mines (blue #9) could help me. Blue buildings activate on all players' rolls. 

Later Chen Rui and I asked elder daughter Shee Yun whether she wanted to join us. We played with the first expansion, which has boats. I asked them to pose for a photo, to reenact one taken seven years ago.  

April 2023

June 2016

We hear this all the time - "kids grow up so quickly!"  Now both my children have completed secondary school. The three of us don't game together as much as we used to, but it is still great fun when we have our sessions. 

This particular game of Star Realms was rather extreme. My life points (actually it's called Authority) went all the way to 109. Normally players start with 50, and your goal is to reduce your opponent's life points to 0. I more than doubled my life points because I had many blue cards in my deck. 

I am still regularly playing Star Realms and Ascension on my phone, more or less daily. I have almost all the expansions. I have played Ascension for more than 10 years, and Star Realms more than 8 years. 1500+ plays of Ascension, and 1100+ for Star Realms. I should promote them a bit since they've given me so much joy. Go buy them! 

New Frontiers (Race for the Galaxy: The Boardgame)

Plays: 5Px1.

The Game

I was a big fan of Race for the Galaxy back in the day. 800+ plays. The only game I have played more of is Ascension, at 1200+. I played Race for the Galaxy heavily throughout the first expansion arc, only slowing down around the third and last expansion in that arc. I bought the second expansion, but didn't play much. I didn't buy the third expansion arc. I bought and played the dice version - Roll for the Galaxy, and enjoyed it well enough, but I haven't tried the expansions. I skipped the simplified version, Jump Drive. That's not for me. And now, New Frontiers is the boardgame version of Race for the Galaxy. I hadn't planned to buy it, but when I had the chance to try it, I jumped in.

The setting is the same as the series. You are aggressively expanding intergalactic empires, developing new technologies, colonising new planets and producing goods. You score points in many ways, and when game end is triggered, the highest scorer wins.

Race for the Galaxy, a card game, was inspired by Puerto Rico, a boardgame. Puerto Rico had its own card game, San Juan. The two card games have similarities, the most important of which is spending cards in hand as money to play a card. Race for the Galaxy is more complex and richer. The setting is completely different - interstellar expansion vs the age of colonialism. New Frontiers has many elements from Race for the Galaxy, and shares many with Puerto Rico too. It feels like a combination of both games, a true descendant of both.

Everyone starts with his own player board with a unique start world with some abilities. This one in the photo gives one blue resource and +1 military strength. That stack of white rectangular tokens is money. Your starting money depends on the initial player order.

The small board at the bottom with 5 player discs is the player order board. Some actions let you modify the player order, e.g. moving your disc to the first position, or swapping your disc with the one before you. The new player order takes effect next round. The seven rectangular tiles in the middle are the action tiles. When you take your turn, you pick one of them which hasn't yet been picked this round to perform an action. Everyone else gets to perform the same action. However you will enjoy some extra benefit. There are seven action tiles, so every round some will not be picked, even when there are 5 players. Not all action types will happen in a round.

The chevron-shaped tiles at the top are developments, or technologies, that you can buy during the game. Quantities are limited so you often need to race to buy them, especially the large developments - there is only one copy each. Developments are double-sided. Before a game starts you decide which side to use. So there is some variety in setup.

The number in the diamond shape is the cost. The number in the hexagon is the point value.

Large developments are double the size of regular developments. If you plan to buy a large development (which you should), you need to leave enough space on your board for it.

The central area of your player board is for your developments. The recesses along the edges are for your planets. Planets which you have discovered but not yet settled are put on the right. In this state they give you no benefit and have no point value.

Two of the development spaces are red. At the planet slots you can also see a line marking a threshold. Whenever any player uses a red development space, or controls more than 7 planets (including the home planet printed on the player board), the game ends after that round.

Whether you settle a planet peacefully or capture it by conquest, you need colonists - the little blue men. You need to collect them, and you use them whenever you settle a planet.

The actions in New Frontiers are similar to those in Race for the Galaxy. You Explore to discover new planets. You Settle to colonise planets. You Produce to create resources on production planets. You Trade/Consume to convert resources to money and victory points. You Develop to buy new techs, which improve your abilities. There's an action which lets you activate a goal tile. Goal tiles affect all players. When the game ends, anyone who fulfills the conditions stated gets to score points. When you pick the action related to goals, you get to draw three goals and pick one to activate. Naturally you want to pick one that works well for you but not for others. The goal is temporarily kept face-down, so that only you know what it is and can prepare for it. Others can only guess based on what you do. Only when the next time someone activates a new goal then your older goal will be revealed.

Developments and planets are worth points. Goals give you points. There are two common strategies - military and consumption. Going military means building up your military strength and conquering high-value military worlds. Going the consumption path means producing many resources and consuming them to gain points. Race for the Galaxy players will be familiar with these.

This is the Explore action in progress. The active player draws planet tiles from a bag, and then everyone takes turns to pick one. The planets are double-sided, one side mostly in black and white and the other in full colour. The black and white side is for before you colonise it, and the colour side is for after.

The gold coloured ship at the bottom left is just a storage ship. Some of the goals in the game require that you store some items here. At game end you score points based on how many you have stored.

The Play

We did a 5-player game. This is the max player count. When discussing New Frontiers, it is hard for me to resist comparing it against Race for the Galaxy and Puerto Rico. This wouldn't be useful for those who have played neither. Taking New Frontiers as an independent game, I would say it is a development game. You start with one humble planet and some rudimentary abilities. You grow your space empire by developing techs and settling new worlds. The developments are all laid out for you to pick. You can decide up front what strategy to pursue. There are quite a few broad strategies you can adopt. Military, consumption, a specific resource type or world type, or development. It is usually good to focus. Not that it is absolutely necessary for winning, but I think it does help. You waste less. You create a snowball effect. You need to watch what others are doing, so that you can try to make use of the actions you know they will pick, and you can minimise helping them with actions you pick. Every turn everyone has the chance to do the same thing. If the active player picks Settle, everyone gets to Settle. The difference is in the small benefits of the active player. That's one way to see New Frontiers - you need to make these small benefits count. As you augment your abilities, small benefits can be amplified. You want to build an efficient empire. You want abilities which synergise well.

You want to make good use of your opponents' choices. If one guy is regularly performing Produce and Consume, it would be good if you have one or two production worlds where you can produce goods, and then sell them for money. Since the guy will be picking those actions, you need not spend your picks. You may be focusing on a completely different area, e.g. developing weapons to conquer military worlds.

You want to catch your opponents unprepared. If you are the Consume guy, you want to perform the Consume action when only you have goods to consume and nobody else. They would be completely wasting that Consume action you pick. Or Produce. If your opponents have no production capability, or their storage is full and they can't produce more, you want to pick Produce so that only you get to enjoy the effect. This is one of the tactics in this game.

The game is mostly open information. Everybody gets to watch what everybody else is doing. You can do a lot of analysing. There certainly can be analysis paralysis. There is no direct aggression. Your attacks are mostly just grabbing something your opponent would want.

When I played New Frontiers, it kept reminding me of Puerto Rico. It looks very much like Race for the Galaxy. Some developments and worlds use the same artwork and have the same name and powers. However the colonist mechanism is from Puerto Rico. The action selection mechanism too. There is no simultaneous action selection like in Race for the Galaxy. The simultaneous action selection is the core identity of Race for the Galaxy. You need to guess the intentions of your opponent. Buying developments in New Frontiers is more like Puerto Rico, because you get to pick what you want. You are not at the mercy of card draws. When I played New Frontiers, everything felt familiar. I felt like I had played the game before. There weren't new surprises, instead it felt comfortable and soothing. It was like catching up with an old friend sporting a new bold hairdo.

I had settled the four planets on the left (they are showing the full colour side), but not the four on the right (showing black and white side). If I did Explore now, I would need to discard one of the planets not yet settled. I could discard one of the settled planets, but that might not be a good idea.

I was mostly going for a military strategy. My homeworld had some military strength, and I developed two military techs. The first world I settled gave me military strength too. In addition to the military path, I also wanted to do Alien (yellow) worlds. My second world helped in that. By using it I managed to settle my third world, the 9-value Alien world. Overall I wasn't very focused. My techs and worlds were a little messy.

This is what a 5-player game looks like. The game takes up quite a bit of space. There is a lot to digest.

The Thoughts

I used to play Race for the Galaxy heavily, and I really like Puerto Rico. However now that I have played New Frontiers, which inherited a lot from both ancestors, I don't have a strong urge to buy it or to play more of it. Not that I dislike it. It's just that I don't find anything particularly new and exciting about it. What New Frontiers did was make me feel I should revisit its ancestors. Had I not played either of them, and played New Frontiers with no relevant previous experience, I would probably feel differently about it.

One thing that I am uncomfortable with is how easily you get to pick the developments to buy. In Race for the Galaxy, you only get to develop what you draw, and it's not easy to develop a particular family of techs you want. In New Frontiers, the moment the game starts you can already look at what's available and plan which developments to aim for. It felt too easy to me. To be fair, Puerto Rico works the same way as New Frontiers, and I don't have a problem with it. So I must admit I am biased. My problem is I am playing the game with the baggage of knowledge of its ancestors. It is so similar to both that it felt unnecessary to me. Compared with Roll for the Galaxy, I find Roll for the Galaxy more different from Race for the Galaxy, and thus it kept me interested for a longer time.

The components of New Frontiers are excellent. Classy. Probably a little overproduced, especially the resources. The box is bigger and heftier than standard boardgames.

I see New Frontiers as less of a boardgame version of Race for the Galaxy, but more of a Puerto Rico in space.

Race for the Galaxy on mobile platform (Beta)

Race for the Galaxy used to be my most played game, in particular the advanced 2-player version, which was a staple for my wife and I. The mobile version is in development now, I recently found out. It is at the Beta testing stage, and it is available for both iOS and Android platforms. I'm not sure how much longer the Beta will last. If you are interested, go sign up for Beta testing asap. Link here. The official launch date is early May.

I seldom play Race for the Galaxy nowadays. Now that I have my hands on the Beta version, I find myself playing it heavily. The AI used is the same one developed by Keldon. Keldon is a fan of the game, and developed a very good AI for it quite some time ago, in a PC implementation. I have played that. He has done such a good job that the official developer of the mobile version decided to work with him and use his AI.

Main menu. You can play against the AI or against other players. So far I have only played against the AI. I tried the multiplayer feature once, but was not able to get matched with any opponent. It might be because there aren't many Beta testers, or they are mostly in timezones different from mine.

It is a little difficult to play on a phone. Race is a game with many details, and in order to show that much information, it has to be shown in small sizes. It can be tiring to the eyes, even shortsightedness-inducing. Or perhaps the problem is with me - I'm getting too old for this size, or my phone - screen not big enough. When I tried it on the iPad, it was much better.

To view the details of a card, you can double tap or tap and hold. Details will be displayed like in the screenshot above. I tend to be too impatient to do this. I'd rather squint at the screen and get on with the game. Once you are familiar with the game, by looking at the picture and the rough positions of the icons on the card, you can generally guess correctly the functions of the card. Veterans will have no problems. Newbies may find this challenging. Race is not a mainstream game. Hobby games is not yet a mainstream hobby. So Race is a niche within a niche. That said, it is one of the better selling games. I hope the mobile version finds a large enough and profitable enough market, and introduces the game to many more players. It is a great game.

Normally you only see a summary of the AI's tableau of cards. You only see an icon for each card. The icon is similar to that on the physical card. It tells you whether the card is a world or a development, what goods it produces, whether it is a production or a windfall world, whether it is a civilian or military world, and the cost. The icon also tells you whether there are currently goods on the card. To see details of the AI's cards, you need to tap the AI area. The details will be displayed as in the screenshot above.

If you use the objectives module, the objectives will be displayed on the right side of the screen as icons. When you double tap to see details, this is what you see.

A summary of the AI's cards is at the top left. The cards in the centre are my tableau. My hand cards are at the bottom. I like how the user interface is designed. It is functional and easy to use. I did go through the tutorial. I already knew the game, so the main purpose for me was to learn the interface. Race is not an easy game to teach. The tutorial contains 3 lessons, and the rules are introduced bit by bit. The first two lessons use incomplete versions of the game. Only the third lesson uses a complete game. I think this should make things easier for newbies.

I defeated the AI. Usually I lose to it, and I am not enthusiastic about sharing those screenshots... I play with AI set to hard. It really is quite good and sometimes I learn some tactics from it.

boardgaming in photos: Race for the Galaxy, Ark, Pickomino, Yspahan, Arena: Roma II, 7 Wonders: Duel

29 Jan 2017. It had been a while since I played Race for the Galaxy, one of my most played games. I brought it back to Sabah to play during the Chinese New Year holidays. This set contains all the expansions in the first story arc - The Gathering Storm, Rebel vs Imperium and The Brink of War. The deck is monstrous and rather unwieldy, but I'm too lazy to sort the cards. I like the gameplay even though it's a little complex in this form.

I bought the fourth expansion Alien Artifact, and even bought a second copy of the base game because of it, since it's a new story arc. Unfortunately I didn't quite like the new mechanism in this expansion - the alien orb. I haven't played this expansion much, not even in the format excluding the alien orb. It is supposed to be better balanced than the first story arc. The fifth expansion has been released now - Xeno Invasion. I decided not to buy it, since I don't play Race much nowadays. No point getting it just for the sake of completeness.

19 Feb 2017. We had a kind-of family day of boardgaming, playing quite a few games in one long afternoon. My wife Michelle joined us at the beginning, playing Machi Koro. This was her second time playing and she didn't do as well as the first time, because she was not very familiar with the game. My children Shee Yun and Chen Rui and I had played Machi Koro many times and we knew the buildings well.

The children ganged up on me again. This was understandable, since I was the leading player throughout most of the game. When one of their aggressive cards was triggered, they normally chose to target me. Sometimes when certain powers were triggered, they would even forgo their own benefit to help the other gain an advantage. E.g. when Chen Rui rolled a 10, she would use her Harbour to convert the result to 12 so that Shee Yun's Tuna Boat could be triggered. Chen Rui didn't have any Tuna Boat herself.

We now play with just the base game and the Harbour expansion. I have taken out the Millionaire's Row expansion. It feels better with fewer cards in the mix. With too many cards, the deck is too diluted and it is difficult to collect many cards of one type or of the same family to create effective combos. Maybe next time we should play with base game + Millionaire's Row, swapping out Harbour.

The children still enjoy Love Letter. The effort spent self-making this Adventure Time themed version was definitely worthwhile. The cards are already looking a little battered. I love the artwork in this themed version, which I found on BGG. Compared to the original, I find the original rather dull. I'm sure the children prefer the Adventure Time artwork too.

This is Ark, a game about Noah's ark. Shee Yun (right) suggested it. She is going to a missionary school now, and I wonder whether that's why she is interested in this game based on a Bible story. This was the first time the children played this game.

On the right half of the photo where animals are grouped into sets, these sets represent cabins on the ark. During the game your job is to load animals onto the ark. There are many restrictions and difficulties. Large carnivores cannot share a cabin with smaller animals, because they would eat the other animals. Herbivores cannot share a cabin with your provisions, because they would eat your provisions. Every animal has a weight and will tilt the ark one way or the other depending on which side of the ark you put it. The ark must be kept in balance. Initially I wondered whether all these would be too much for the children, but it turned out OK. We just kept reminding one another and they managed fine.

This is essentially an area majority game. There are five categories of animals, and you compete to load the most in each category. I remember when I first played Ark, it felt so-so. The setting was unusual, the artwork cute, but gameplay was not particularly interesting. Having played it again recently, my opinion did not change.

Chen Rui is good at Pickomino. Or she's lucky. But not so lucky this time. I managed to beat her quite comfortably. We did a 2-player game since Shee Yun was not interested.

The tiles in the centre are the score tiles. The numbers are the dice total you need to achieve in order to claim the tile. The worms are the victory points. When you claim a new tile, you stack it on top of your existing tiles. The tile on top is still vulnerable - other players may rob it from you if they manage to roll the exact number.

This is Yspahan, on older game that has faded away. Most newer gamers will not know it. It uses dice in an interesting way, like the more recent El Gaucho (2014). At the start of a round, the start player rolls a bunch of dice and then groups them by value. For the rest of the round, the players take turns claiming a dice group to perform actions, the strengths of the actions depending the number of dice in the group.

Things seemed to go rather too smoothly in the game we played. I think both Michelle and I managed to construct all six of our buildings, and Chen Rui managed five. I wonder whether we made a mistake. It felt too easy. We did mostly ignore the caravan aspect, and we didn't aggressively hinder one another. Maybe due to these we saved much energy and managed to build our individual engines efficiently. I felt a little empty though, because things went too well. Geez... gamers are hard to please...

By Day 2 of Week 3 (the final week of the game), only Michelle (red) had 2 cubes at the caravan - the smaller board on the right.

24 Feb 2017. I asked Allen whether he wanted to go to Boardgamecafe.net. He had to babysit his kids. So I went to his place to play instead. Arena: Roma II was one of the games we played. This is Roma Version 2. I had played Roma before, but had forgotten almost everything about it. I had to learn the rules from scratch.

This is a 2-player game. The game board is a long strip divided into 9 sections. On your turn you roll 3 dice, and use them to perform actions. If you place a die on the coin space (leftmost section of the strip), you earn coins according to the die value. If you place a die on the card space (rightmost section), you draw cards according to the die value. If you place a die on any of the seven spaces in the middle, you trigger the power of the card on that space. Six of these spaces only allow a specific die value. The 7th space - the bribery space - allows any die value, but you must pay coins according to the die value. Playing a card does not require spending a die, but there is a cost in coins.

You start the game with 10 Victory Points, which prepares you for losing VP in the early game. Every empty space in the middle seven sections causes you to lose 1VP at the start of your turn. So it is important to try to fill up your side of the strip. The game ends in two ways. You lose if you lose all VP. The game also ends when the VP tokens run out. You compare scores to see who wins. The VP tokens are the light blue and light green square tokens.

The most important element in the game is the card powers. At the top left corner of each card you can see the cost for playing the card and its defense value when being attacked. There is much variety in card powers. Some let you score VP. Some let you attack and try to remove your opponent's cards. Most cards are triggered by a die, but some require no die. In this photo, the card on the right lets me discard another one of my cards and then score VP according to its defense value.

Cards come in two colours. Green cards are buildings, yellow cards are characters.

My Ballista card lets me attack a card directly or diagonally opposite it, but it may only attack buildings and not characters. If Allen limits himself to character cards at these three positions, he will not need to worry about the Ballista. You may play a card to an occupied space. It will replace the existing card.

The second space from the right is the bribery space. You may use any die to trigger the card here, but you must pay a cost equal to the die value.

In this photo both of us had filled up all spaces. Arena: Roma II is all about how you make good use of your cards and how you respond to your opponent's cards. There is interaction between cards, e.g. how the Ballista may only attack buildings, but most card powers are individual and don't synergise with other cards to create combos. The key is how to match your card play with the board situation. If you have a card which scores points based on how many character cards your opponent has, you probably want to hold on to it until your opponent has played many characters. Or you can play a Ballista to entice him to play more characters first.

Allen and I played two games. I had a horrible start in the first game. I kept losing VP because my hand cards were high cost cards and I was unable to earn enough money due to low die rolls. It took me a long time to fill in the spaces on my side of the strip. That was painful. The second game was kinder to me. No death spiral in the early game.

Arena is a fast-paced game. There is some strategy. There aren't that many rounds - just enough for you to feel satisfied that you've done something, exercised some mental muscles. How the VP chips work is interesting. It is not necessarily about scoring as many points and as quickly as you can. If your opponent's rate of scoring points is higher than you, that's suicide. You are just expediting the game end and digging your own grave. You should instead try to force him to lose points, or you should attack his point-scoring cards. You need to slow down the game. There is an interesting balance between being constructive and being destructive. In the early game, destroying your opponent's cards can force him into a bad position, and you may even be able to force him to lose the game by running out of VP's.

I also taught Allen to play 7 Wonders Duel. I had played it with Michelle a few times, but playing it against Allen allowed me to see some aspects which I hadn't seen before. One of these is the tech tokens. When playing with Michelle, she preferred to collect many different science symbols, hoping to achieve a science victory. She didn't go for pairs of identical science symbols to claim tech tokens. When playing against Allen, we made more use of these tech tokens, and I found that some of them synergise rather well. They can also help tremendously when pursuing a specific strategy. The other aspect which came into play more was the military aspect. Responding to military threats is not just about keeping your opponent a safe enough distance away from your capital, it is also about denying him victory points. Having a military advantage can also force your opponent's hand when he is picking cards from the table. You can force him to pick military cards to protect himself, allowing you to take another card which you want, or which he would otherwise have wanted. It is interesting to see how 7 Wonders Duel gradually reveals some of these subtleties.