wooden board for The Settlers of Catan

I think this looks wonderful. If you are interested, enquire at: http://www.etsy.com/shop/WhoodWhisperer

Fleet

Plays: 2Px4.

Fleet is a Kickstarter game that I would not have had the opportunity to play if Allen hadn't bought it, because I usually don't follow Kickstarter games. It turned out to be a pleasant surprise for me.

The Game

Fleet is a card game and a development game. Like Race for the Galaxy and San Juan, cards are multi-purpose. A card can be used as money, to bid for licenses and to launch ships. A card can become a ship, if you pay the cost of the ship. You play the card in front of you. You can do this once per round. A card can become a captain. You are allowed to do this also once per round. You just put a card in your hand face-down, and slide it under a ship already launched. Manned ships can start fishing. Licenses that you own, ships that you launch, and fish that you catch all score points at game end.

Top left corner is the cost of launching this card as a ship. Top right corner is the victory point worth if launched as a ship. Bottom left corner is the monetary value if the card is used as money. The ship type depicted is only important for determining whether you can launch this ship. You must have a matching license for the ship type. Once you launch a ship, the ship type doesn't matter anymore. All launched ships behave the same way. They catch the same type of fish token (there is only one type), their maximum capacities are the same - four.

The core of the game is the licenses. These are large cards that form the license deck. Every round a number of licenses are available to be auctioned to players. You can buy at most one per round. A license has two purposes. First, it gives you the right to launch a specific type of fishing boat, e.g. a tuna fishing boat. You must have a license before you can do any fishing. Second, it also gives a special ability. This special ability is what makes the game. One license lets you launch two ships instead of one, and you get to draw extra cards when you launch ships. Another license gives you discounts whenever you buy another license or launch a ship. License abilities are enhanced when you own more than one license of the same type. So there is incentive to bid for a license even if you already own one of the same type. You do it not just to deny your opponent. You can benefit from it.

The tuna fishing license lets you launch tuna fishing ships. Its special ability is you can draw two cards at the end of a round, as opposed to one. If you have two tuna fishing licenses, you draw three cards and discard one. The more licenses you have, the stronger their effect becomes.

One particularly interesting license is the processing vessel license. It lets you move fish from your ships to the license card. Fish that have been moved to the license card can be spent to draw cards, and also can be used as money. This license is interesting because of the 4 fish per ship limit. When you ship fills up, you don't gain any more benefit from it. But if you have a processing vessel license to clear off some fish, you can continue to fish.

The game ends either when the fish run out, or when the licenses deck runs out.

The Play

I have only played with two-players so far, and I suspect the game will be better with more. The game is tight. There are not many rounds, and it feels like the game end approaches before you are ready for it. So every auction is important. Decisions are not just during the auction itself. You also need to think about how much money you will have going into the auction, and what licenses may be remaining in the deck. It is arguable that outside of the auctions, the game is multiplayer solitaire. In fact, outside of the auctions, the decisions are mostly straight-forward. However since the game feels so succinct, and the auctions are so critical, I feel that there is still a good decision-to-work ratio.

The need for cards is a constant pressure. Every round by default you only get to draw one card, right at the end of the round. You need to use your cards wisely, and you need to get an engine going to draw more cards into your hand. The licenses are mostly about drawing more cards, or saving money, which is basically saving cards. You constantly struggle to gain cards, and then you need to use them efficiently to score points. There aren't that many rounds in a game, and when you are short on cards, you may waste one or more rounds doing nothing other than drawing that one card per round. That is painful.

I wonder whether games tend to be shorter with two players, because there is a higher likelihood of rounds where neither player can afford to buy a license. In such situations the licenses on offer are discarded and new licenses are drawn for the next round. This speeds up the depletion of the licenses deck.

Ships launched in the early game will likely hit the four fish limit, so processing vessel licenses tend to be more desperately fought over. I am not sure yet whether they really are that crucial. I need to explore further whether there are strategies which would make them less important. I think if a game ends quickly, the processing vessel licenses would see less use.

Four ships launched, but only three have captains, so only those three can fish. Five licenses, two of which are processing vessel licenses.

The Thoughts

I quite enjoyed Fleet. It's crisp, condensed and tight. It's a tableau game, like Race for the Galaxy and 51st State. It's not as varied or rich as these games. There is less combo-making. However there is a certain succinctness that I like. It's no prolonged engine building. It's a quick knife fight where every moment and every decision is crucial, and you can't afford to make many mistakes.

boardgaming in photos

Blast from the past! My first game of Axis & Allies, in 1997, in St Charles, a town near Chicago. I was in the US for a company-provided training. I was very excited to find the game in a hobby store in St Charles. This is the 1985 Milton Bradley edition.

My opponent was my roommate, Puneet Karla from India. I've completely lost touch with him now. Look at that concentration!

29 Mar 2013. I brought Java to OTK (Boardgamecafe.net). Between this and its better known brother in the Mask series Tikal, I think I like Java better. I feel Tikal has a significant luck element (tiles you draw, treasures you find). Maybe the problem is I often play Tikal as a two-player game, and in two-player games the luck element has a bigger impact. With three or four players, at least the trailing players can gang up on any leader who has a lucky break.

I enjoy the 3D spatial element of Java. Nowadays many newer Eurogames have no spatial element at all. In Java, the players have much freedom to build the play area. In every game the board can develop very differently. There may not be many ways to score points, but within these ways, the players have many possibilities to explore - many ways to create and split cities, many ways to ensure your people are at the top positions in cities, and many ways to block opponents.

After Java, we played Goa, another older game. This one has no spatial element at all. This is a development game. The main scoring criteria is your various abilities, and during the game you use your abilities to execute actions which help you improve your abilities. There's a feedback loop thing going on here.

The player boards. One of the areas I decided to focus on was colonisation, the rightmost vertical track on the development board at the bottom. At this point I had reached the highest level. In the plantation board at the top, I already had three colonies in the second row, with one last one to go.

The round markers are placed by the players to indicate which tiles will be auctioned off and by whom. When you auction off a tile to another player, he pays you. You can buy it yourself, but you'd be paying to the bank then. These tiles on the central game board are mostly plantations, resources and special abilities.

One funny thing happened in this game. I had forgotten an important rule and only realised it near game end. I didn't tell the others until after the game. When you take a plantation, it comes fully loaded with spices. You don't need to take a produce action to fill it up. I had forgotten about this, and throughout the game we took empty plantations. I had inadvertently created an ironman version of the game. After the game ended and I told the rest this mistake, their reaction was: wouldn't that make the game too easy? Oooh... we have some hardcore tough guy gamers here.

5 Apr 2013. We played El Grande at OTK. This is a pre-2000 game. I recently read an old article by Michael Barnes saying that 2000 was the year that German games became Eurogames and everything went downhill from there. I don't agree with every detail in the article, but I do agree with some of the observations. Some newer games tend to be unnecessarily convoluted, without really adding much or even any strategic depth. Player interaction is sacrificed. Games become solitairish efficiency exercises. El Grande is not a game I particularly fancy, because I'm not a big fan of area majority games. However I think it is clean, crisp, direct and sometimes even brutal. I sometimes miss the simplicity and clarity of these older German games.

That province of Old Castile near the centre was hotly contested. And then someone (probably me - green) plonked down the scoring tile that modified the VP value from 6-4-2 to 4-0-0. This means now only the top player will score 4VP. The rest get nothing.

This disc is for secretly deciding where to assign your men who are stationed at the castle. During a scoring round, there is a castle scoring where players score points depending on the number of men they have in the castle, and after that they secretly send their men to one province, which can alter the scoring in that province. There is a bit of double-guessing here.

It was a close game, with final scores ranging from 103 to 108. I came in dead last.

The Princes of Florence, according to that article by Michael Barnes, is the culprit of Eurogames going downhill starting in 2000. It is the beginning of the "multiplayer solitaire" games. But I like this game very much. I think the player interaction in the auctions are important and should not be belittled. I can see why player choices diminish towards game end, but I don't think it's a problem. I see it as players needing to plan carefully in the first half of the game, and in the second half they are mostly executing what they have planned and seeing their strategy come to fruition, with just minor tweaks and few deviations, and only when an opportunity presents itself.

I was the only one who had played before, and I thought I would win handily. My complacency cost me the game. I had underestimated the strength of Prestige Cards. At game end, Ivan's two Prestige Cards allowed him to overtake me to claim first place.

7 Apr 2013. Chen Rui and Michelle. We had a family boardgame session. Four of us played Ticket to Ride: Team Asia. I have played the Legendary Asia side of this expansion, but this was the first time I played the Team Asia side. The children have learned to play Ticket to Ride (the base game) on the iPad, so I thought they should be ready for this team variant.

Chen Rui and Michelle played red. Shee Yun and I played green. In the team variant, members of the same team keep their tickets, cards and trains separate, and may not share information. However there is a shared card rack where they can place tickets and cards. They try to use this to communicate their intentions and help each other. E.g. it's always good to place a joker in the shared card rack, in case your teammate needs it more desperately than you do.

Getting to Kathmandu is not easy. You need to play one yellow card or three white cards, and then draw six cards from the draw deck. If any are yellow (or white), or are jokers, you need to play more cards to claim the route.

Box cover.

Lancaster

Plays: 2Px1.

Lancaster is a worker-placement, victory-point-scoring, Euro-style game. There are so many such games nowadays that this description is enough to turn me off, and I fully expected to dislike to game. To my surprise, I didn't. I didn't fall in love with it, but the experience was better that I expected. Having played the game and analysed it, I still think I should feel cold towards it. But I don't. I haven't quite figured out why I have such mixed feelings.

The Game

Let's talk about the game. It is 1413. The new king of England wants to unite the nobles in England and conquer France. You play one of the great noble families and support the king in his endeavour. You earn glory (victory points) for various deeds. At the end of 6 rounds, the game ends and whoever has the most VP's wins.

Your workers in this worker-placement game are knights. They can be placed at three types of locations. You can place them at cities in England to gain various benefits, e.g. gaining new knights, upgrading knights, gaining the support of the earl, and gaining castle upgrades. You can send your knights to fight in one of the four battles with France. Committing a knight to a battle gives you an immediate bonus (e.g. knight upgrade, coins, earl), and if the battle is won, you earn VP's. You can keep your knights at your own castle. When they man one of the sections of your castle, they generate resources or enable special abilities, e.g. gaining political influence, gaining squires, and turing squires into new knights.

The game board. Each city in England gives one of two possible benefits. One of them is to claim one of the two earl tokens that represent support of the earl. The other one varies from city to city. If you pay $3, you gain both benefits. It's always good to have some spare change. At the bottom left are the four battles with France - the large thick tiles. The six octagonal tiles in the English Channel are the bonuses for committing knights to battle. Two have been flipped over (i.e. claimed) because two knights have gone to battle.

One unusual aspect of the game is when a knight is placed at an English city, his position is not absolutely safe. He can be displaced by another more senior knight, or another knight of equal rank but supported by a squire. New knights start out at Level 1, and the highest possible rank is Level 4. This knight rank mechanism adds a twist to the worker placement in this game. Another interesting aspect is each city has a minimum requirement - only knights of a certain rank or above are admitted. So you need to worry about your lowly Level 1 knights and how limited their choices are.

My green Level 1 knight in Suffolk is being kicked away by the red Level 4 knight - Allen's ally.

There is a new law phase in every round. Three new laws are proposed, and players secretly vote for whether to introduce them. In the case of ties, the law will pass and come into effect. It will also obsolete the oldest law currently in effect. There are always exactly three laws in play. When you vote, you have to think of not only whether the new law is good or bad for you and your opponents, but also whether the old law that may become obsolete is good or bad for you and your opponents. Most laws are along the lines of if you meet a certain criteria, you gain some benefits or score some points. Political influence is a currency that comes into play when passing laws. You can use it to help vote in or discard a law. Political influence is mainly gained by controlling earls. They give you political influence every round.

The law board. The three tiles on the right are the current laws in effect, and the three on the left are those being proposed. Some examples: the law at the top right means for every Level 2 knight you own, you gain a squire. The law at the top left means for every three castle upgrades you own, you earn 5VP.

At game end, players compare castle upgrades and total knight strength, and score points according to their positions. They also score points based on number of earls under their control. Highest total score wins.

The Play

Allen and I did a two-player game. In two-player games, each player also controls an ally family, so we each controlled two colours. The ally families are required to keep the game balanced and to ensure the board doesn't become too empty. Ally families are limited in what they can do. They can gain new knights and upgrade knights, but they never earn VP's, money, earls or squires.

I focused on development. I sent most of my knights to English cities, and also aggressively upgraded my castle. It's good to upgrade your castle because upgraded sections automatically produce resources (or activate special abilities) without needing a knight's supervision. Allen, on the other hand, focused on the military campaign against France. Committing knights to battles meant he could gain benefits early. He also emphasised on upgrading his knights. By game end, he maxed out all his knights. There is a predetermined number of knights available at each rank and you can't have more than what the game components allow.

The player board. The long table at the top is where earls supporting you sit. You always gain one free political influence cube every round, and every earl supporting you gives an additional cube. Four of the six sections of my castle have been upgraded, giving me a total of $3, 3 squires and 2 political influence cubes every round. The small square boards on the left represent my ally's castle.

It was our first game and we played a little slowly, needing to digest how things fitted together. Also needing to manage both our knights and those belonging to our allies added a little complexity. I suspect the game is better with more players. There would be more competition, and also there would be no need for this ally mechanism. Turn order would also be more important, because coming last may mean all good spots would have been claimed by others by the time your turn comes.

The risk of knights getting displaced and also the minimum entrance requirement at the cities presented an interesting challenge when we did our worker placement (or knight placement). We also needed to take into account how the laws might change.

In the end I won the game, but only barely.

A battle allows up to three players to participate. If the total strength contributed by the players exceed the number on the tile, the English will beat the French. In this example (the tile on the right), red gains 5VP, green 3VP, yellow 1VP. However red and yellow in our game were allies, so only I (green) gained 3VP.

The inside of the player screen reminds you about the three end-game scoring criteria - total knight strength, castle upgrades, and earls. Squires, political influence cubes and money are hidden behind your screen. These coins here are from another game and don't come with the standard Lancaster game.

The Thoughts

Most aspects of Lancaster feel very typical of Eurogames. However I find that the various mechanisms generally mesh together well, and are also consistent with the background story. At least that's my best guess at why I don't dislike it as I thought (and still think) I should. Suddenly I feel much more open-minded about trying out other Matthias Cramer designs, when in the past I was only mildly interested. Lancaster is undoubtedly a VP-grabbing, multiple-paths-to-victory (a.k.a. balanced-to-the-point-of-feeling-staid), worker-placement, Euro-style game, but it's the little details that provide some uniqueness and freshness in this title.

gaming with the children

23 Mar 2013. I recently taught Shee Yun (8) to play Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation, and she liked it very much. The strategies are still slightly beyond her. To handicap myself, I ask her to randomly arrange my pieces before the game starts (but the identities are still hidden from her). It turns out that this handicap is not as big as I thought it would be. She has only beaten me once, when I played as the Light player. My Frodo was in a bad position and I couldn't get him out. I think the initial board positioning is more important for the Light player, because their character abilities are more specialised. Because of this game, Shee Yun kept asking me about the story of Lord of the Rings.

24 Mar 2013. Shee Yun requested to play Lord of the Rings the cooperative boardgame. This time even Chen Rui (6) wanted to join. This game is definitely beyond them, but since it is a cooperative game, I can still guide them along the way. It worked out well. They enjoyed themselves. Chen Rui didn't really understand the overall strategy, but she was happy enough. She knew she had to collect the sun, ring and heart tokens, and she understood it was bad to go near Sauron.

Such a game would intimidate many adults.

We played at the easiest level. We had some unlucky tile draws in the early game, but after that things went quite smoothly, and we eventually destroyed the One Ring quite comfortably. I tried not to dictate what the girls did, but sometimes they felt lost and asked me what they should do. I tried to present them their options and encourage them to decide for themselves. However I think the reminders and tips I gave probably influenced many of their decisions. Anyhow, all is good as long as they enjoyed themselves.

None of the hobbits were very near Sauron by game end.

This is the final scenario board - Mordor.

30 Mar 2013. We had another family outing to Meeples Cafe. This game is Sticky Stickz. Every turn, the active player rolls three dice, and everyone races to pick up the tiles which match what the dice describe, using sticks with suction cups at one end. The game ends when three stack of tiles run out.

In this photo, the dice specify that you need to pick up tiles with only a single yellow furball, and its expression must be one of shock. Some dice combinations give multiple criteria, e.g. either 1 or 2 furballs will do, or either green or blue furballs will do.

This is how you do it.

The components of Feed the Kitty are cute. You get a bowl, wooden mouse-shaped tokens, and two special dice.

On your turn you roll the dice and they tell you what to do. The bowl icon means you need to surrender a mouse to the bowl. The mouse icon means you take a mouse from the bowl. The arrow icon means you give your neighbour to your left a mouse. The sleeping cat icon means nothing happens. When all but one player run out of mice, this last player with mice wins. You don't immediately lose when you lose all your mice. You just don't get to roll dice temporarily. You may get a mouse from your neighbour, thus bringing you back into the race.

This game is like LCR. There is no decision-making at all. I guess it's OK for entertaining children. It's not something you want to play with adults, unless you're gambling, or you're drinking.

Chen Rui had two mice left.

What kind of expression is that...?

I explained Monster Chase to the children. This is a cooperative memory game. In this game a child's bed is being besieged by monsters, and the players need to work together to banish all the monsters to the cupboard. Every monster is afraid of a particular toy. These face-down tiles in this photo are the toys. To banish a monster, you need to flip over the specific toy tile that the monster is scared of. More and more monsters will appear, and the players need to keep them in check and not let them surround the bed on all four sides. If the child's bed is surrounded, the players lose. The players win by defeating all the monsters in the monsters card deck.

That's the child in his bed on the left, and a monster on the right. This monster is scared of books.

These three cards are a countdown timer. Whenever a player fails to find the right toy to banish a monster, one of these cards is flipped over. When all three are flipped, a new monster card needs to be drawn and placed on a vacant side of the bed.

The first thing that came to mind when I saw these cards was - "Draw me like one of your French girls".

We played Escape: The Curse of the Temple again, twice. This time we used a timer. We didn't use the CD, so our game was a little easier. With the CD, there would be some points during the game that everyone needs to return to the start tile. Anyone who doesn't loses a die. We used my watch as a timer. We also set a slightly longer time than 10 minutes. We still lost our first game, but we won the second one. This photo shows our first game. We were close. The remaining two adventurers were very near the exit when time ran out.

We also played Qwirkle. I had played it once before, and had found it not bad. It was Michelle's first time playing, and she immediately liked it. She asked me to buy a copy. When the lady boss says so, who am I to object? Never underestimate the charm of a Spiel des Jahres game!

This is the first game I bought in 2013. Almost a third of the year is gone and only one new game in my collection. Looks like I will likely meet my self-imposed quota of no more than 18 new games per year. Maybe I should try to go for 12 this year.

boardgaming in photos

1 Mar 2013. Playing Fearsome Floors at OTK (Boardgamecafe.net). We did a full 7-player game, and there was a massive traffic jam at the entrance to the dungeon. In this game the players try to get their people to escape from the dungeon, starting from the entrance at one end of the dungeon, and leaving from the exit at the other end. There is a monster in the dungeon which will chase after the people and eat them if it catches them.

When the monster reached us, it was like a Christmas feast for it.

This is a simple game, but I badly mangled the rules when I taught the others the game. I have played it before, but it was quite a long time ago, and the reference sheet I had made many years ago was a bit too summarised for me to remember how to play properly. Eventually we had to restart the game. Sorry guys... Once we got the rules right, the game went very smoothly.

8 Mar 2013. It has been a while since I last played A Few Acres of Snow, a game I enjoy a lot (maybe because I actively avoid learning too much about the allegedly game-breaking Halifax Hammer strategy). This time I played the French and Allen the British. As is customary for me when I play the French, I started with a military focus. The French has an infantry in their starting deck, while the British don't. I quickly burnt Pemaquid (the red square at the centre of this photo with no game piece) to the ground.

The game pieces in this photo are a special upgrade done by Allen. He bought these village and town pieces separately. The pieces that come with the game are discs and cubes.

This game turned out to be quite a funny story. I had some initial military successes, while Allen focused on building new settlements. Later Allen's economic engine ran smoother and smoother, while mine struggled. He could afford to buy more infantry and other fighting units than me. We then brought the Red Indians in, using them to ambush each other's infantry. And then of course came the priests and Indian leaders which poached the Red Indians from each other. I knew my military campaign was doomed, and I wouldn't be able to defend against Allen's attacks if he put his mind to it. I hurriedly switched to work on settlements, hoping to catch up to Allen's progress and overtake him. Building settlements and upgrading them to towns are harder for the French, but the French locations tend to have higher VP values. In the late game, I counted and found that if Allen ended the game by building his last town, he would actually lose because I would have a higher VP total. I still had a few more towns to go if I wanted to end the game that way. It was a race against time. I needed to end the game before Allen's military crushed my hopes. Thankfully I was able to do so, and I won the game.

After the game, Allen told me that he actually had no infantry left in his deck when he decided to switch to an offensive strategy. I had been harping on how much stronger he was militarily that even he didn't realise he was not much better than me. I didn't realise my Indians had removed that many infantry units from his deck. It took him one full cycle of his deck to realise he didn't have any infantry left. Only then he started buying infantry again. And of course he kept very quiet about it, not wanting to reveal his weakness. We had a good laugh after the game. Noobs!!

15 Mar 2013. Playing Innovation with Han and Allen. Han returned to Kuala Lumpur from a one-year overseas work assignment, but was immediately posted to another out-of-town assignment, this time in Johor Bahru. Looks like the three of us won't be returning to those regular 3-players sessions just yet. Innovation is the only game that appears on all three of our top-10 lists (done early 2012).

I had a good start in this particular game, managing to score three consecutive achievements for Ages 1 to 3 (bottom right). Just the Innovation base game already provides a lot of variability and replayability. I still have not felt the urge to get the expansions yet. Maybe it's because I don't play Innovation as often as I would like to.

16 Mar 2013. This figure is some warlord character from the Lost Legion expansion of Mage Knight: the Boardgame. It looks good, but the wilting flagpole and sword need to be fixed. The expansion comes with a few new scenarios. The one that we played had this guy returning from exile (or something like that), bringing a horde of monsters, and trying to find and capture a hidden city. We had to prevent that from happening, and also defeat this warlord and his army before time ran out.

The actions of the warlord character are determined by card draws from a card deck especially prepared for him. He will move in a particular direction, recruit more monsters, or attack a nearby hero, depending on what card is drawn. The reference card at the lower left shows what he does depending on the card draw.

The expansion also comes with a new player character - a hot lady.

I had not played Mage Knight for quite some time and had forgotten some of the rules details, but once we got the game going, it felt very familiar, like an old friend. The expansion seems to maintain the flavour and feel of the game, just providing more variety in every aspect. Of course the new scenarios are a welcome addition too. Unfortunately we did not have enough time to complete the scenario we played. We only reached about halfway because we had spent quite some time remembering the rules and checking the rulebooks.