The Builders: Middle Ages

Plays: 4Px1.

The Game

The Builders: Middle Ages is a simple card game in which players race to build 17 victory points worth of buildings. On your turn you have three actions points to spend, and there are only three possible action types, each of which can be repeated if desired. Firstly, you may pick a worker card from among the five available on the table and put it in your hand. Secondly, you may pick a building site from the five at the centre of the table and place it in front of you. Thirdly, you may assign a worker from your hand to one of your work sites. Every building requires specific skill points to complete, and will award money and/or victory points upon completion. Each worker has specific skills which can be applied to building construction. When you assign him to a site, you must pay up front. He stays at the site until the building is completed, after which he can be sent to work at another site (and of course must be paid again because that's a different job).

Five workers and five building sites are available at the centre of the table. The next cards from the draw decks are also visible, so you can plan ahead a little.

This is how you send a worker to a building site to work. You want to fully utilise his skills. This particular worker is a very good match for this building. I am only one roof-tile skill point away from completing this building. When I complete it I will earn $12 (top left of building card) and 3 victory points (crown icon).

Some workers. The numbers at the top right corners are their wages.

If you want to send more than one worker to the same work site within the same turn, sending the second worker requires 2 action points. The 3rd worker costs 3 action points, and so on. It is costly when you rush-build. You may purchase actions points at $5 each, which is expensive, but sometimes necessary.

The game ends at the end of the round in which one player achieves 17VP.

The Play

Kareem taught Jeff, Ivan and I to play. The game is straight-forward and intuitive. It is actually quite evocative. I image running a construction business will be just like this. You need to start with humble projects. After you've built up some capital, you can afford to employ more workers, to take on bigger projects, and to run parallel projects. Cash flow management is important (sigh... trust a gamer to use such big words for such a simple family game...). The game is a race to 17VP, and although there is some competition in grabbing cards you want, I think it is more important to manage your own business efficiently than to hate-draft to deny your opponent cards (unless those cards are useful to you too). Action points are precious and must not be wasted.

Everyone starts with one random apprentice, with only two skill points.

Those two on the left are my completed buildings, worth 5VP in total. I only have one ongoing construction at the moment. It is possible to have multiple projects running.

This is supposed to be a brisk, casual, 30-minute game, but we four hardcore gamers turned it into a thinky, full-hour-plus game. Analysis Paralysis! The game is all about picking workers and buildings that match up well, but it's not possible to arrange perfect matches all the time. We were trying to squeeze out every little bit of savings and efficiency that we could, thinking and rethinking our moves. I don't think normal, sane and healthy families would play like this.

Kareem and I aimed for the minimum requirement of 17VP, and we managed to achieve that in the same round. We also spent money to buy actions in order to build some more smaller buildings for points. He managed to build more than I did, and won the game. Ivan was very close behind. Jeff was further behind because he could not complete his big cathedral in time. It he had completed it, he would have outscored Kareem and I. So it was right for us to rush to trigger the game end.

At game end, I had 7 completed buildings, and 5 workers in my pool.

The Thoughts

The Builders: Middle Ages is a light, appealing family game and casual game. It is easy to teach, and the beautiful artwork will help when introducing it to non gamers or casual gamers. There is some strategy - the pacing, the cash flow management, how to assemble your team of workers, and how to pick buildings. Just don't overthink it!

Mat Goceng

Plays: 4Px3, 6Px1, 3Px2.

Mat Goceng is published by Manikmaya Games, a company from Bandung, Indonesia. They gave Meeples Cafe a few review copies, and Log asked whether I wanted one. I skimmed the overview at BGG, thought it sounded interesting and harmless enough, and said why not.

The Game

Mat Goceng is a secret-identity card game using Batavia (now Jakarta) of the 1920's as the backdrop. At the start of the game, every player is dealt a secret identity card. To win, you need to fulfill the objective of your character when the game ends. There can be more than one winner. The game ends when one player loses all three of his life points. He automatically loses. The others check whether they have fulfilled their winning condition.

A face-down identity card. The three glasses of coffee facing forward means you still have three life points. Rotate your card each time you are injured. Silver coins are $1, gold coins $3.

On your turn, you must challenge another player to a duel. He may decline by paying you $2, and after that you must challenge another player. If your challenge is accepted, you move on to the duel. You start the fight by playing a card from your hand. You and your opponent take turns playing cards until one side is not able to or unwilling to play any more. That side loses the fight and loses one life point. Each card has two link colours - the top colour and the bottom colour. From your second card played onwards, the top colour of the card being played must match the bottom colour of the previous card played. In the best case, you can chain up all five cards in your hand. If you are very unlucky, you may only be able to play one card. Now here comes the twist - you can ask other players not involved in the fight to help you by playing a card from their hands. They can help you out of kindness (i.e. for free), or they may ask for some, aah, coffee money. At the end of a fight, both combatants draw back up to five cards. However the busybodies helping out don't get to draw cards. They only get to do so at the end of their next turn, or after they get involved in a fight as a combatant. So helping others is risky, because you are depleting your hand, and a weak hand may attract attention of the unwanted kind.

You don't need to worry about the Indonesian language text on the cards. Some cards have icons representing special abilities. There are only four such icons to remember.

During a fight, every card played must link to the previous card by colour. White is a wild colour and can be used to link to any colour.

If you are down to your last life point, you must reveal your character. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing. You may attract attackers, but you may also rally defenders because some players may not want you to get eliminated, or at least not yet.

To picture the game better, you need to understand the character objectives. I can't recall the names of all the characters, so I'm going to give them nicknames.

Mat Goceng is the Hero (bottom centre). His goal is to make sure the Lady Boss (bottom left) doesn't get killed. The Lady Boss' goal is to be the richest when the game ends. The Foreigner's (top centre) goal is to have the Lady Boss dead (either killed by him or another player). The Arab's (top left) goal is to be the richest. Darkie's (top right) goal is to have the Hero or the Chinese dead. The Chinese's (bottom right) goal is to have either Darkie or the Foreigner dead. At the minimum player count of three, the Hero, the Lady Boss and the Foreigner are in play. When the player count increases, the other characters are added in this order: the Arab, Darkie, the Chinese.

The Play

I first played Mat Goceng with my family, as a 4-player game. We had a lot of fun with it. In the early game no one knew who was who, so we challenged one another to duels rather randomly. However once someone was injured twice and had his/her identity revealed, things suddenly became much more interesting. Teams formed naturally, some wanted to kill off the exposed character, some wanted to protect him/her. Somehow during our games, elder daughter Shee Yun tended to ally with me, and younger daughter Chen Rui with my wife Michelle. Chen Rui became so accustomed to this convention that in a later game under a quite different situation when she should have helped to finish Michelle off in order to win the game, she came to Michelle's rescue instead and fended off Shee Yun and I. What a loyal daughter she was. She was not playing to win. She was playing to have fun. I can't say that's wrong. There is no rule against saving your mum.

Chen Rui and Michelle were not supposed to be a team, but they teamed up anyway because Chen Rui said so.

Chen Rui jumped up and down happily when she won the fight.

Initially we never declined a fight, and everyone held on to $5. This was good for Lady Boss and the Arab. Everyone having the same amount of money meant they were both richest and they were in a position to win. The Hero and the Foreigner probably should have intentionally declined fights to make another person richest, to upset this balance. Sometimes when you are weak, it is actually good to decline fights. Getting killed means you lose. If your objective is something other than being richest, you don't really mind spending money. Well, unless you want to confuse others, which is a valid strategy.

Another thing that we didn't really explore was asking for bribes when offering support to the combatants. Later on when I played with the gamers at Boardgamecafe.net, we made better use of this mechanism. Spare cash can be a life-saver for badly injured characters. They protect you from challenges. Money flowing around can greatly upset the plans of the Lady Boss and the Arab. Observing who cares most about hoarding money is important to guess who are playing these characters.

The BGC folks had tried Mat Goceng before, and were not particularly impressed. However I found out that they had played some rules wrong. They didn't realise that white is a wild colour. That made things quite tough. Also they thought each player had four life points instead of three. I was interested to see how the game played with the full six players, so I persuaded them to give the game another try.

Our game was quite lively. Rowdy, in fact. They said the game worked better with the right rules. Our game culminated in a final fight between two teams - the Hero and the Lady Boss (Wai Yan and another player) versus the Arab and the Foreigner (Dith and I). Both combatants had one life point left so we knew this was the finale. One of the pairs would definitely win, and the other pair would definitely lose. Unfortunately for the other two characters, Darkie and the Chinese, no matter what they did at this point, they would lose, because neither combatant (Arab or Lady Boss) was a character they wanted dead. They would not be able to fulfill their win condition. However they still jumped in to support the final fight, just for the heck of it. After a long and noisy duel, the Lady Boss kicked the Arab's butt, so the good guys won.

The Thoughts

Although this revisit left a better impression, the BGC folks were not bought over. The card play mechanism works well enough. Their main complaints are the randomness and the character balance. Challenges in the early game are pretty much shooting blindly, and sometimes a player can feel rather helpless, like Darkie and the Chinese in our game. I personally am not convinced that the game is flawed. At least not yet. I think in the early game when information is scarce, players need to tread carefully and avoid injuring anyone too much, which can easily lead to the game ending abruptly before one can react. However me making such a statement brings out another issue - isn't a game flawed if it is fun only if played in a certain way? Then the counter argument - well if you play randomly without thinking about consequences, don't blame the game becoming random.

I quite like how the characters are designed. This is meant to be everyone for himself. There is no predetermined teams like in The Resistance, Bang, Werewolf or The Message: Emissary Crisis. However, due to the possibility of multiple winners, alliances form naturally because the situation encourages it. Win-win situations arise, and they are opportunites players want to grab (unless you are Chen Rui). Alliances can break easily and shift quickly, when the game situation changes. I find this volatility interesting. When the Lady Boss or the Arab is leading in money, they will be happy to help anyone trying to kill off another character; and vice versa. In the case of the Lady Boss, she should even betray the love of the Hero who is always trying to protect her. She can win even if he dies. Despite Lady Boss and the Hero seeming to be a natural alliance, it is not always the case that they will form a team. The Hero can win while the Lady Boss loses. The Hero will want to kill off any character in order to end the game, because he wins as long as the Lady Boss is alive. He doesn't really care whether she is the richest.

I do think the game has a significant dose of luck, in whether you draw a good combination of cards, whether you draw those valuable special ability cards, and whether you are making the right guesses (sometimes you do have to make guesses based on limited information). You can negotiate, threaten, bluff and form alliances to mitigate luck and improve your odds of winning, but this is a light card game, and sometimes bad luck just strikes and you can't wriggle your way out. It's not that there's nothing you can do, just that sometimes despite your best efforts things still don't work out. I think that is fine, given that this is the rowdy party game type. This is no Battlestar Galactica.

Too bad this game didn't work out with my gamer friends. They may not exactly be the target audience, but it would have been nice if I can bring this out to play with them once in a while. My kids, especially Chen Rui, like the game a lot. She doesn't see the nuances above like I do, but she does have fun with it, even if it's just teaming up with mum to beat dad up.

I think Mat Goceng has some unique elements to offer and is not just another secret identity game. The only thing which I don't think works is the 3-player game. It seems to usually result in a 2-vs-1 with the Hero and the Lady Boss teaming up against the Foreigner. The 3P game seems a little dull.

Terra Mystica

Plays: 5Px1.

The Game

Terra Mystica, published in 2012, is a heavy Eurogame that is very well received among gamers, winning many awards. I'm a bit late to the party in this, only playing it for the first time recently. In this game each player plays a unique tribe, and tries to expand his territory and upgrade his civilisation. There are 14 different tribes in the game, allowing many permutations. The game supports up to five players. One important aspect of the game is terraforming. There are 7 terrain types on the board, and each tribe can only build on one specific terrain type. So you have to terraform the lands next to your dwellings to the suitable type before you can construct a new dwelling there.

The game is played over a fixed six rounds. Every round starts with collecting resources, e.g. money, workers. Then players take turns performing actions, until everyone passes. There are many action types, e.g. terraforming and building dwellings, upgrading your buildings, spending magic power to perform special actions, upgrading your technologies, and sending priests to temples. There is a natural competition when you try to grow your civilisation. You fight for space with your opponents and it's annoying to bump into one another. However when your opponents build near your buildings, you get the chance to gain magic, so there's a little love-and-hate thing here. After everyone passes, there are rewards at the end of the round if you meet certain requirements.

You win the game by scoring points. There are a few ways to score points during the course of the game. Every round, one specific action type will give bonus points, e.g. building dwellings, or building large buildings. These round-specific bonuses are randomly determined at the start of the game, you can plan ahead for them. You will gain points for upgrading your techs. You gain points when you form a city, which is a group of connected buildings with at least four buildings and a total size of seven. Some tribes have special scoring abilities. At game end, there are two main ways to score points. The players with the largest connected territories score points, and you also score points based on your standings at the four temples.

The Play

I did a full 5-player game. Chee Seng and I were new to the game. Kareem, Ivan and Ainul had played before. There were quite many rules details to go through so the game-teaching took a while.

This was the initial setup. Since Chee Seng and I were new, we used the recommended setup for beginners, which is supposed to be quite balanced, and thus gentler for first-timers. The 6 tiles at the lower left are the round tiles, showing what actions would grant bonus points for the round, and what rewards would be given if which conditions were met. The row of parchments at the bottom show special actions which can be taken only once per round by one player. These cost magic power.

This is my player board. At the top left are the magic power tokens. They need to be fully charged before they can be used. You charge them by moving them first from the lower left bowl to the upper left bowl, and then from the upper left bowl to the right bowl. Only tokens in the right bowl can be used. At this moment I have none. The bottom left section are my buildings. You always start with building dwellings (the bottom row), and then you upgrade them to more advanced buildings. When a building is built, it is moved to the game board, revealing icons on the player board. Revealed icons indicate your income at the start of every round. So the more buildings you build, the more income you receive. The circle of terrain types show that my required terrain type is forests (green). The other terrain types are laid out to show how difficult it is to terraform them to become forests. E.g. to terraform from desert (yellow) to forests, I need to do terraforming three times.

The little table next to the terrain circle is my terraforming tech. I can upgrade it to make terraforming cheaper. The little table with ships is my ship-building tech. I can upgrade it to allow my tribe to travel further along rivers and to connect disjointed sections of my civilisation. The bottom right section is my tribe's unique ability - when I form a city, I earn an extra 5 points.

Kareem (red) was quickly hemmed in. Ivan (brown) was on one side, and I (green) was on the other. I expanded hurriedly, even building a bridge in the early game (which might not have been a good idea). I had terraformed one tile next to Kareem's building but had not yet built on it. The other players could have terraformed it to other terrain types if they wanted to, since I had not yet claimed that piece of land.

These are the cult four temples. You can increase your standing by sending your priests here. Priests are not easy to train. The highest positioned players at each cult temple score points at game end. During the game, when your marker passes those purple circles, you gain magic power (we called it charging up your magic - I couldn't help associating this with charging up my handphone).

Both Ainul (yellow) and Kareem (red) had built their fortresses, and they were intimidating! Not to worry, your opponents can't destroy your buildings in this game. It's a Eurogame in this regard. Chee Seng's (blue) tribesmen were good shipbuilders, and he was able to travel along rivers easily, allowing him to expand willy-nilly. He was all over the place!

I (green) had a major misunderstanding of the rules which screwed me up. At this point I had formed one city near the centre of the board. I had planned to form another city on the right side, by building a dwelling on the red terrain connected to my existing city, and then upgrading it. I had thought that once I had formed my first city, it would be sealed off and be considered a complete and isolated city. I didn't realise that if I connected more buildings to it, I would actually be expanding it. This meant I had to grow my second group of buildings towards the lower right (the yellow terrain) first, form my second city, and only after that I could try to link up these two cities to form a large connected territory. Eventually I only managed to form my second city, but not link it up to my first city, because Kareem swooped in to cut me off. Aarrgghh! What a costly miscalculation!!

Quite many players had cities at this point in the game - those four hex-shaped counters indicate cities.

My player board. For my building upgrades, I went for the left path only, i.e. dwelling to trading post to fortress. I didn't build any temple (round tokens) or the sanctuary (rectangular block). At the top right, I had fully upgraded my terraforming tech.

Close-up. Look at those three fortresses (huge cubes) near one another.

Near game end. It is amazing to see how much terraforming had been done.

Chee Seng and I were the newbies, and our aim was modest and simple - to not be the last player! We exchanged positions a few times during the game, but at game end he outscored me. I had committed much effort to fighting for the largest connected territory, but I ended up only tied for third place because of my mistake. I generally dislike area majority scoring, so I didn't feel like competing at the four cult temples. Another biiiig mistake! What was I thinking?! My only consolation is I can only do better in the next game.

Ivan won the game with a comfortable margin, already commanding a daunting lead by mid game. His tribe was the dwarves, and their special ability was they scored 1VP for each terraforming action performed. In one of the rounds he passed very early, saving his workers and resources for the next round, in which he made a slaughter by doing tons of terraforming and constructing lots of dwellings which was what scored points that round. After that point none of us were able to catch up to him.

Kareem the guru (as proclaimed by Ainul) was severely hemmed in, but still managed to beat the newbies - Chee Seng and I. This is a game with decent depth and little luck, and veterans will trample all over the newbies.

The Thoughts

I can now appreciate the richness in the tribes of Terra Mystica. You really do need to play to their strengths. The different combinations give much replayability. I like the spatial element in this game. Nowadays many Eurogames use the game board as a tracking tool or as an abstract way for players to compete. It is refreshing to see some solid old-fashioned physical on-a-map action. It reminds me a little of The Settlers of Catan, how you race to grab land and compete to build the best infrastructure.

The game has many moving parts. It's a gamer's game. It is challenging, and it gives me much to think about and to strategise over. It's a VP game, and I find that I'm constantly trying to analyse the situation and work out the most efficient ways to earn points. I need to make the most of the round-specific bonuses. I need to plan for the two main scoring methods at game end. I need to make good use of my tribe ability. I find that I'm thinking more about scoring points than about growing my tribe, advancing my civilisation and hindering my opponents. Because of this, I feel like a bean-counting accountant. It may be because this was my first game, so I spent much energy analysing how the game works and how to score points, and I didn't really get into the fantasy-world civilisation-building theme. The tribe abilities become more like cold mechanical tools to be used for maximising point-earning, as opposed to being the character and backstory of each unique tribe. Perhaps I don't quite get into the theme because I am not a big fan of the fantasy theme anyway.

Terra Mystica isn't something I would seek out to play, but I will happily play again if an opportunity comes up. There is still much I can experiment with, and also different tribes to tinker with - not just how to play a tribe well, but also how to play against a tribe well.

Mord im Arosa

Plays: 3Px1.

The Game

Mord im Arosa would be classified as a dexterity game. Strictly speaking it's a listening game. You stack up eight box tops of different sizes to form a building. There is a small square hole at the top of each box. Logically thinking, when you complete the building, the holes are all lined up, so if you drop a cube from the top of the building, it should fall through the air well all the way to the bottom box, landing on the table surface. However the air well is narrow, and human hands are imprecise, so the cube will tend to bounce around and land between the 1st and 7th floors instead. The premise of the game is you need to listen to the sound of the cube bouncing inside the building - the Arosa Apartments - and guess where it has landed.

The Arosa Apartment has eight floors, the Ground Floor, plus Levels 1 to 7.

To investigate a specific floor, you lift it up this way to reveal the cubes there.

The backstory is a murder investigation. As part of the game setup process, every player seeds the building with a few of his own cubes. Two red cubes - the murder victims - are also added. The first few rounds are played to find where the victims are. Once they are found, their locations are marked on the investigation sheet. These are the crime scenes. The proper game can now start.

On your turn you have two options. You try to find evidence incriminating other players, or you try to destroy evidence incriminating you. To do the former, you pick a floor, and then declare who among your opponents have cubes there. This can be more than one opponent. You then open up the floor to reveal all cubes there. For each opponent whom you have correctly accused, he must add cubes from his supply to the investigation sheet. For each opponent whom you have incorrectly accused, you need to later add one of your own cubes to the building as a penalty. This means in future it will become easier for others to find your cubes in the building. You then take all the cubes that you have found in your hand, put the floor (and those above it) back, and finally drop those cubes back into the building one by one. You also add those penalty cubes at this time. Everybody will be eagerly listening to where each cube lands.

If you decide to cover your tracks (i.e. destroy evidence), instead of trying to find your opponents' cubes, you need to find your own. Similarly, you need to specify a floor first, and then you check whether you have any cubes there. If you are right, you get to remove cubes of your colour from the investigation sheet. They must be from the corresponding floor, of course. If you are wrong, the penalty is, again, adding one of your cubes into the building at the end of your turn.

So the whole game is about forcing your opponents to place evidence (cubes) onto the investigation sheet, while keeping your own off it, or removing them from it if they are already there. The game ends when one player has 10 cubes on the investigation sheet (he is probably screwed), or when one player has used up all his cubes. Every cube on the investigation sheet is evaluated to determine how strong an evidence it is. Cubes (or clues) at the crime scenes are worth 3pts. Cubes on the floors immediately above or below the crime scenes are worth 2pts. All other cubes are worth 1pt. Whoever has the most points is the murderer. Whoever has the fewer points is the winner.

The crime scene is on Level 6. Both victims (red) were found there. At this moment I (white) am the key suspect, because many eye-witnesses have reported seeing me loitering on Levels 5 to 7. Chong Sean (blue) has also been seen at the crime scene.

The Play

In theory you are supposed to tell where a cube has landed by listening. In practice it is quite impossible to be precise. You can roughly tell whether it is on a higher floor, a middling floor or a lower floor, but you need to rely on some guesswork to find it. Memory can help. If a floor has not been investigated by anyone for some time, chances are some cubes have landed there.

The game mechanisms are a little unusual, and it takes a little getting used to at first. It's not complex, just unusual. I'm quite impressed with how this simple concept of listening to a cube fall inside a cardboard structure has been developed into a detective game, a story about a murder investigation. I think this backstory is crucial in making the game work. It gives a context to players, so that everything makes sense, and it's not just a bland mechanism about listening to a cube fall. Certainly investigating a murder case and manipulating evidence sound much more exciting than dropping cubes and listening to how they fall.

There is a little push-your-luck in this game. When you investigate a floor, you can make a bigger gamble by accusing every other player. If you find cubes belonging to all of them on that floor, you will be forcing all of them to add cubes to the investigation sheet. However, for every player wrongly accused, you are penalised and you need to add your own cubes to the building. Bigger risks, bigger rewards, bigger penalties.

Chong Sean was betting on the 6th floor. This was still the early game - no evidence cubes on the investigation sheet yet.

Game end. Chong Sean (blue) was the murderer. Previously there was evidence found at the crime scene which implicated me (white), but somehow they went missing. Don't look at me like that.

The Thoughts

Mord im Arosa is simple and fun. The setting is a little disconcerting for a children's game, but I think it works very well as one. Maybe change the crime from murder to theft when explaining the game to children. It's a good family game, and it will work well with casual gamers too. It's a little gimmicky, but it does have some meat and can still sustain interest after the novelty wears off.

Las Vegas

Plays: 3Px1.

The Game

Las Vegas is a light dice game by Rudiger Dorn (Goa, Istanbul, Dragonheart, Jambo). It is played over four rounds only. In each round, each of the six casinos on the table offers at least one money card for players to fight over. Whoever wins the most money by the end of the fourth round wins the game.

During a round, you win money by placing your dice on the casinos. You start every round with 8 dice of your colour, and 2 dice of a neutral white colour. On your turn you roll all dice still in hand, and pick one of the numbers rolled. All dice of that number (whether in your colour or in the neutral colour) must then be placed on the correspending casino. Then the next player takes his turn. This goes round and round till everyone has placed all his dice. You then compare the number of dice at each casino. Whoever has the most takes the highest valued money card. Whoever has the second most takes the next highest valued card, and so on. One important twist is when there is a tie at a casino, all tied players are disqualified from that casino. This means two strong players may both get kicked out, leaving the spoils to a humble third party. It also means sometimes you can make use of the neutral dice to screw an opponent by forcing a tie between him and the neutral colour. Of course your opponents will try to do the same to you.

At Casino #5 red and blue are tied at three dice each, so both will be disqualified, and white (the non-player colour) will become the winner. At Casino #6, blue will win the highest valued money card, but since red and white are tied for second place, no one will win the second money card.

The Play

The game is quick and smooth. Being a dice game, there is definitely luck, and you don't always get to do what you want. Instead you are often presented with multiple opportunities and/or dilemmas. You need to evaluate the potential risks and rewards, and decide how much you want to gamble. You need to pick your fights, since you can't fight everywhere. Early in a round you will have more options, since you still have many dice. As more and more dice are committed, you will become more reliant on luck giving you what you want. It is important that in the early stage of a round you pick wisely, so that you won't get thwarted by bad luck too easily towards the later part of the round. But it can still happen.

The risk management and the dwindling options feel a little like Pickomino, however unlike Pickomino, you only roll once on your turn, like in Airships. One thing I like about Airships is the single roll aspect. You don't need to watch your opponents roll dice over and over. Turns are quicker.

My strategy during our game was to delay commitment as much as possible. I tended to pick the numbers with fewer dice, so that on my turn I committed fewer dice. My dice pool lasted longer, and I could watch where Chong Sean and Michelle committed their dice before I committed too many of my own. I could delay my decisions until later - where to fight and where to concede. The delay strategy has its merits, but it is not always up to you to execute it. You are still at the mercy of the dice. One thing good about it is once your opponents have played their white dice, you know they won't be able to sabotage you anymore. But then it is still possible for your own white dice to mess up your plans if your die rolls suck.

My delay tactics worked very well for me and I won the game with a large margin. This was a great boost to confidence, after having lost two games of The Palaces of Carrara so spectacularly just before this. Then Michelle said, you do win at games of luck. Hey, it's skill! I haz dah Skillz!

Money cards on the left, start player card on the right.

The Thoughts

Kareem has recommended Las Vegas to me before, saying it's simple but fun, and now that I have played it, I fully agree. The casino theme doesn't seem appropriate for children, but I think Las Vegas makes an excellent family game. It will work well with casual gamers and as a party game too (but it supports at most 5 players). It's easy-to-teach, quick-to-play, has some strategy, presents meaningful decisions, and has decent player interaction. There is always an excitement in rolling dice, especially a mighty handful of them. Sometimes bad die rolls can be discouraging, but even with a poor roll you usually have options, just that you are in damage control mode as opposed to an opportunistic investment mode.

The Palaces of Carrara

Plays: 3Px2.

The Palaces of Carrara is designed by the formidable duo of Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling (The Princes of Florence, the Tikal series). I have read quite a few positive comments about it, but for quite a while I didn't come across any opportunity to try it. The English version seems to have gone out of print very quickly, although the German version seems to be still easy to find. Essen 2014 is coming, so I decided to give the game a go, and if I liked it I'd try to look for someone going to Essen to help get me a copy.

The Game

The game comes with a set of introductory rules and a set of full rules. I'll be discussing the full rules here.

On your turn, you pick one of three things to do: (1) buy bricks, (2) build, or (3) score. If you buy bricks, you first decide whether to turn the wheel. The wheel is a round table on which bricks for sale are displayed. It has six segments, and the prices of the bricks differ by segment. Every time you rotate the wheel, prices usually drop. Some brick types can become free. If you turn the wheel, you replenish it to 11 bricks, and then you pick one segment from which to buy bricks.

The wheel is the bricks marketplace. Every time it rotates, prices will drop. Let's take as an example the segment on the right with two black bricks, one green brick and one red brick. The red one costs $2, the green one $1, while the black ones are free (since no price is listed). However you can grab the black ones only if you select this segment to buy bricks from.

If you decide to build, you get to select one of the 9 buildings available on the board. The number of bricks to use depends on the size of the building, and the quality of bricks used determines in which of the six cities you may build. A picky city like Livorno only approves of buildings using white bricks (the highest grade). A cheapskate city like Lerici is OK with any type of brick.

The nine currently available buildings are in the lower left section of the board.

Buying bricks and building are simple actions in themselves. However the crux of the game is how you make use of them to work towards the third type of action - the scoring action - and also the game-end scoring. You can do the scoring action at most 6 times during a game, and it gives you money, or victory points, or both. The scoring action has three subtypes, two of which are not directly affected by your opponents, but the third one has a racing element. The first scoring subtype is the building type scoring. You pick one building type (there are six) and score all your buildings of that type. These buildings generate VP or cash based on their sizes multiplied by the VP or income value of the cities where they are located. E.g. I have two "Shield" buildings, a size-4 one in Lucca (a 2VP city), and a size-2 one in Massa (a 1VP city). I'd score 4x2VP + 2x1VP = 10VP. I will also gain two Shield tokens, one for each building. There are only five tokens per type that can be scored this way, so sometimes you need to race to grab them if you see your opponents constructing buildings of the same type. Once you've scored for a specific building type, you can't do it for the same building type ever again for the rest of the game, so you need to think carefully when to do it.

The second scoring subtype is scoring by building colour. All green buildings score VP, or all orange buildings make money. Similarly, this is a once per colour per game thing. No building tokens are earned though.

The third scoring subtype is city scoring. Every city can only be scored once per game. If one player has scored a city, that city cannot be scored anymore by anyone. Scoring the city is basically just scoring every building in that city regardless of building type. You earn VP or money depending on the city's type. You also earn building tokens for each building you have built in that city.

This is the player board. When you construct a building, you place it above one of the cities to indicate this is where you have constructed it. Livorno on the left only accepts buildings built with white bricks. Other cities are more flexible, to different degrees.

The row of boxes at the bottom are the scoring boxes. Once you score for a specific building type or building colour, you place one scoring pawn in the box to indicate that it is no longer available.

Your bricks, cash and building type tokens (none yet in this photo) are hidden behind your player screen.

A few game-end criteria are randomly determined at the start of each game. When a player fulfills all criteria, he may declare game-end and earn 5VP for doing so. The round is played to completion, and then everyone scores game-end VP based on the game-end criteria cards. You don't have to declare game-end immediately after you meet all the criteria. Sometimes it can be beneficial to let things drag on a little. However usually the first player who is positioned to declare game-end will benefit more by declaring as soon as possible.

The Play

The rulebook explicitly warns players that games can end unexpectedly early. In both games that I played with Michelle and Chong Sean, I was caught unprepared when the games ended. Facepalm moment! Chong Sean had played before, and understood the tempo better. I was simply taking my sweet time trying to build a perfect engine. Michelle was smarter than me. She watched Chong Sean keenly and when she saw him starting to take scoring actions, all alarm bells went off in her head and she knew the end was nigh. I was still dumbly oblivious. I think one big mistake I made was being unfocused. I tried to build in too many places and in too many building types. I ended up being neither here nor there. I think in this game you need to know where to compete and where to concede, and you need to focus your actions and resources.

In both games Chong Sean went straight for the game-end conditions. That is the right thing to do, because the game-end condition cards are also the game-end scoring cards. If you can fulfill all (or many) of the game-end conditions, you will score well at game-end.

There is a tricky balance between quality and quantity. You want to buy higher grade bricks so that you can build in the more lucrative cities, but at the same time you also want to buy as many bricks as possible and as cheaply as possible, so that you can build more buildings and build larger buildings. This balance between quality and quantity often leads to tough decisions.

This was the end of the first game we played. Michelle (red) did not beat me (green) by one point. She beat me by one whole circuit of the score track plus one point. At the top of the board you can see that both Michelle (red) and Chong Sean (yellow) have scored two cities each. I (green) haven't scored any.

This was the second game. I did try to concentrate on the "Shield" buildings, having built four of them, but constructing buildings in so many cities was probably not a good idea. In this particular game, one of the objective cards rewarded the player with the highest valued buildings (by total brick cost) in every city. I went for every city hoping that I'd score some bonus points cheaply if there were one or two cities neglected by Chong Sean or Michelle. In the end I did not win majority in any of the six cities. Sometimes greed is not good.

This was the end of the second game. Chong Sean (yellow) scored 126pts, and he had looped me too! I really suck at this game!

The Thoughts

I have decided I want to buy a German version of the game. I find the game very interactive. Despite the simple actions, there is much to think about during play and you need to watch your opponents closely. You are taking small steps from turn to turn, but you want to make sure for each little step you are racing in a coherent direction and not floundering about. You need to have that big-picture strategic view. You need to know what you are fighting for and what you are giving up on. Spend energy on the former but not the latter. Unexpected opportunities sometimes turn up and force you to make difficult evaluations. Do you switch gears slightly to take advantage of this tactical opportunity? Or do you stick to your master plan? Is it worth the effort to deny your opponents? Can you make use of it effectively?

I get a feeling that the game structure (the distribution of the cities, the buildings and the bricks) and the actions that you can take are but the tools. The real game is in the four objective cards that are drawn at the start of every game. They set the stage for the game. Do you need to go for quantity or quality? Do you need to focus on the building type tokens? Do you need to build a large treasury? There can be many combinations of objective cards. It's like buying Memoir '44 and getting a scenario book with hundreds of scenarios.

This is a lean game. Your actions are simple. There aren't many components. It is amazing how rich the gameplay feels despite the modest number of components and the simple framework. I feel the designers have stripped away all unnecessary elements. When I look at each additional element in the full game (compared to the introductory game), I find that every single one of them can have a big impact to the game. They are not small variants that give you a little spice and variability, appeasing you in case you find the base game bland. They are all game-changers. No wonder the designers recommend playing without them for your first game (I didn't heed that advice though).

Playing The Palaces of Carrara is like finding a treasure cave in an erupting volcano. There is plenty of gold and treasures everywhere. You can take your pick, but you need to do it quick, and you want to go for the big ones if possible. All this while others are running around grabbing treasures too, sometimes fighting over the same artifacts. You want to exit with the biggest loot when the cave is overrun by lava.

boardgaming in photos: The Message, Escape

9 Sep 2014. Shee Yun (9) and I continued our exploration of Escape: The Curse of the Temple. Now we have moved on to the two modules in the first expansion. The green tiles here are the Illusions module. Upon completion of the two intermediate countdowns, they are removed and placed at the bottom of the stack. This creates holes in the map and players may need to re-explore those spaces. It's a little quirky, but not a major change. At least it didn't have a large impact in the game we played. We still kept the Curses module and the Treasures module. We beat the Illusions module without much trouble.

Then we moved on to the Special Chambers module. This adds a few unusual chambers to the game. Some allow players to place gems, which is a good thing, but to use them, two such chambers need to be used by separate players at the same time. This means your team needs to split up if you want to use them. There is another chamber which contains a chalice. If you discover the chalice during play (which is highly likely), you must exit the temple with it in order to win. Carrying the chalice from room to room requires an extra torch icon to be rolled. So the chalice slows players down. We managed to win again. Next, we will moving on to the second expansion.

12 Sep 2014. Playing The Message: Emissary Crisis at Boardgamecafe.net with a group of youngsters (which made me feel so "uncle").

This was only my second time playing this game. The last time I played, I think there were about 7 players. It was a lot of fun and we played quite a few games back-to-back. I always remember that experience fondly. So this time I was quite excited to be able to get 9 players (the max count). Sinbad and Allen were there. Sinbad has played before, and probably many more times than me. Six young men, who had not played this before, were happy to join us.

The Message is a hidden-identity team game, and a big part of the game is finding out who your friends are who your enemies are, while at the same time trying to mislead your enemies about your identity. At the beginning we were rather clueless about what best to do, and we happily started throwing black messages around. Whoever receives three black messages is eliminated. It is probably not a good idea to try to randomly kill people when you are not sure who is friend or foe. But it is funny, and it creates excitement.

At some points in our games, we had a fair bit of confusion. I am not sure whether it was because some players made mistakes and caused others to make incorrect deductions, or because some players drew wrong conclusions based on partial information. Either way, wrong assumptions can easily escalate as everyone is watching everyone else's actions. Incorrect assumptions lead to incorrect actions, which causes others to make even more wrong assumptions. In one particular game, Ah Yung played two Prove cards on Player A (sorry I forgot your name) very early in the game, which meant he definitely knew Player A's identity. Throughout the game, I watched their behaviour and felt very sure they were teammates. However when the game ended, I was surprised that they were on opposing teams. What's funny is Ah Yung himself was shocked too. He too thought Player A was on his side. Player A himself knew he was on the other team. Since there were two Prove cards played, most likely one of them made a mistake when executing the cards, and this cause the whole game to be played under an incorrect understanding (at least for Ah Yung). We had a good laugh. It was too late to try to figure out who made the mistake, but it didn't matter. The dumbfounded expression on Ah Yung's face was priceless. Neither of their teams won anyway, it was an independent identity player who won.

The detective character was the most remembered character this time, and he featured in two of the three games we played. The player playing the detective character gets to see every single Prove card played by any player, which means he is collecting a lot of information. But I guess it can be tiring too having to digest and remember all this information.

One of the funniest moments in this game is when a player, through actions, leaks a very strong hint to his identity. Everyone starts laughing because it is so obvious. One guy's special winning condition (which applied only if his identity was an independent) was he would win if on his turn someone else won. Then for a few rounds we saw him trying to give a third red or blue message to another player, i.e. blatantly trying to hand the victory to someone else. One of the beneficiaries was me. I had two blue messages in front of me, and he directly sent me a third. However I just looked at him and smiled. I wasn't on the blue team. I was actually red. He had thought I was on the blue team because I already had two blue messages and no red messages. Little did he know that I had been screaming inside for always getting the wrong colour. Also one red message which I did manage to get earlier was robbed from me. When I got the third blue message and didn't declare victory, everyone started laughing, because the cat was out of the bag. I was either red, or independent.

The Message was just as fun as I remembered. It's very engaging because you need to pay attention to what everyone is doing, or saying, or looking at, or smiling about. It's a game with plenty of table talk and joking and teasing.

boardgaming in photos - Android Netrunner, Escape

24 Aug 2014. After playing a few coaching games with Android Netrunner veterans Nik and John, I decided to buy the remaining three expansions in the first expansion cycle. I also decided to sleeve all my cards - about 600 cards in total. By default I'm a no-sleeves guy, but after appreciating better the depth of Android Netrunner, I felt it was an heirloom, thus the urge to sleeve it. This is a game that can provide many many plays.

Previously I organised my cards in ziplock bags. Now that I have bought more, I decided to organise them this way instead. I didn't buy those CCG card boxes. I made my own, using the box of the base game. Cheap, and environmentally friendly. I use the boxes of the expansions as dividers.

Here's how I organise the cards. On the left half, starting from the bottom, the first three sections are for cards of the three runner factions. The fourth section is for neutral runner cards. The fifth is for a legal, ready-to-play runner deck. All non-card game components are put into that ziplock bag at the top. On the right half, the first four sections are for cards of the four corporations. The fifth is for neutral corp cards, and the sixth for a legal corp deck.

There are two expansion boxes hidden away. Here they are, right at the top of this photo.

I made my dividers using milk powder boxes. Not that I'm particularly stingy (though I am a little), just that spending time making accessories for your boardgames is a fun activity in itself.

Playing Escape: The Curse of the Temple with Chen Rui (7) and Shee Yun (9). We first played this some time ago at Meeples Cafe. It was something different, but I didn't intend to buy it then. The children didn't request it either. Recently, Chen Rui asked whether I could buy it for her, out of the blue. I checked around, and found that it was out of stock in Malaysia, and also out of print at the publisher level. Eventually I managed to find a second-hand copy in excellent condition. Then when we first played, Chen Rui said the soundtrack was too scary and she didn't want to play anymore. Previously when we played at Meeples Cafe we didn't use the soundtrack. We just used my phone as a countdown timer. Shee Yun and I continued to play. We tried all the variants in the base game - the treasures and the curses, and managed to win too. However, to get Chen Rui to play, some work needed to be done. I had to compose a non-scary version of the soundtrack. I used simple tunes. They were a little silly, but they got the job done. Finally Chen Rui joined Shee Yun and I to play.

We have not yet progressed to the two expansions. I want to bring Chen Rui up to speed first - to play all the variants in the base game first. Both of the expansions have several modules. Together with the variant modules in the base game, there are plenty more combinations to explore.

My opinion of the game hasn't changed much. It's not a favourite, but it's a great game to play with the kids. There is enough challenge, and the real-time aspect keeps you involved throughout the game.

Wildcatters

Plays: 4Px1.

Wildcatters is a 2013 Essen release from a small publisher (I think a self-publisher). I recently heard that a larger company is going to reprint it, so I was interested to give it a try to see what kind of economic game it is.

The Game

Players are multinational oil companies in the 19th century, at the start of the oil industry. They build oil rigs, produce oil, build transportation infrastructure, deliver oil to refineries, and eventually supply oil to various regions around the world. On your turn, you pick one of 8 region cards on the table to decide which region on the board you will take actions in. You will only get to take actions there or in one other white region. Due to this restriction of the region cards, and the limited number of rounds in the game, you need to piggyback on other players' turns, and you need to have some level of cooperation with your competitors. A region can only start producing oil when there are at least four oil rigs present. Building all four yourself is costly, so it is always good to have multiple players develop the same region. When one player starts producing oil, others who also have oil rigs in the region can piggyback on this player's action and start producing oil too. They need to pay him shares, so it's a win-win. When any player transports oil from a region, others can piggyback on this action too. Again, this means being able to act on someone else's turn. All these encourage players to cooperate.

There are two currencies in the game - cash and shares. Every turn you get a base $10 income, and possibly a few extra dollars depending on the region card you choose. You need to pay cash when you build infrastructure (oil rigs, trains, ships, refineries) and when you produce oil (i.e. convert an oil rig to a pumpjack, and place 3 barrels of oil on it). However when you use another player's train or ship, or when you piggyback on another player's produce oil action, you need to pay him in shares of your company. If someone delivers oil to your refinery, he is effectively forcing you to buy his oil, and you must pay him in shares too. There are many ways to spend shares of your own company, and it is important to make sure you keep a healthy number on hand, because if you run short, you will be forced to take a loan, and loans are expensive to repay.

Whenever a refinery is filled up (5 barrels delivered), the oil can be supplied to the continent where the refinery is located. The refinery owner earns four shares (of any company) per barrel, unless the barrel is his own. If you process your own oil barrels, you either supply them to the continent without earning any shares, or you discard them and earn shares as if you are processing other players' barrels. Barrels supplied to continents are placed in the scoring boxes for the respective continents. At the end of Round 5 and at game end, area majority scoring is done for every continent box. Whoever has the most barrels score some points, second most scores a little less, and so on. Scoring is also done for share holdings for each of the four companies in the game, and for cash on hand. These are the main ways to score points in the game. There are other ways such as building refineries, selecting certain region cards, and collecting wildcatter tokens.

The Play

I did a full 4P game with Jeff, Dith and Vence at Boardgamecafe.net. Jeff has played Wildcatters once before, which was handy. Although I had read the rules, there were some finer points which I wasn't sure about, and also some which I had misunderstood. The game supports 3 or 4 players. With three players, all four oil companies will still be in play, just that one of them will be neutral, and the game setup is slightly different. I think the game is best with four.

This was the start of the game, after the initial setup was completed. Every player gets to place items onto the board for free as part of initial setup. Placement depends on setup cards dealt, so you need to work within some constraints. The setup sets the stage for the rest of the game. It provides variability from game to game.

Now Canada (i.e. northern half of the North America region) and West Russia both have four rigs, which means it is already possible to start producing oil when Round 1 starts. During setup, every player must place one refinery (large rectangle with 5 circles) on a different continent. I (green) placed mine in West Russia, Jeff (red) in the eastern half of South Ameria, Dith (yellow) in Canada, and Vence in East Asia.

Players need to build trains and ships to transport the oil produced. If others use your trains or ships, they pay you shares of their companies. If you expect to do much transportation in a region, it may be worthwhile to build your own infrastructure so that you can save on shares which you would otherwise have to pay to others for their services.

Region cards. On your turn, you must pick one, and your choice limits where you can act. Each card gives some bonus, e.g. cash, shares of a specific company, victory points. Some cards give a one-time-use privilege of clearing a non-full refinery and supplying the barrels there to the region where the refinery is located. Normally a refinery only supplies oil when it is full.

The round tokens with W's are the wildcatters, the namesake of the game. These are individual oil prospectors and small companies hoping to make a fortune in the oil rush. Every region with potential to produce oil is seeded with one or two wildcatters during game setup. When a region produces oil for the first time, each wildcatter produces one barrel of oil too. The wildcatter tokens and the oil barrels on them are auctioned to the players (i.e. multinational companies) who have presence in the region. Wildcatter tokens are worth victory points at game end. The first token is worth 2VP, but every subsequent token is worth 2VP more, so they can contribute a significant chunk of points at game end.

When you start producing oil, you swap your oil rig with a pumpjack (round disc) and place three barrels of oil (wooden cylinders) on it.

Shares and money. At the top left, you can see that Jeff (red) and I (green) have supplied some oil to North America.

Jeff's (red) oil tanker has just delivered three barrels to his refinery in South America. Two more slots to fill, and the refinery will be able to supply oil to the region.

Round 4. We are all still very much focused on the four regions where we have set up our refineries. By now the oil in Canada is almost fully depleted. In the row of boxes at the bottom, you can see that only North America, Russia, South America and Asia have received oil. Europe, Africa and Australia have been neglected.

One minor complaint I have about the game is the cards are quite thin. But then I wonder whether it is intentional, because during the course of the game you need to hold many cards in your hand, like this. What I'm holding in my hands in this photo is quite normal. In fact, I did poorly in this game. I think most of my opponents have even thicker stacks of cards. The cards don't have different denominations. No 5's or 10's, only 1's.

Round 6. This is after the intermediate scoring at the end of Round 5. Now Jeff (red) has built a refinery in Africa, and I have shipped 3 barrels there. West Russia's oil is almost depleted now. Dith (yellow) is going solo in USA - noone else is working with him in developing the region. That's an expensive effort for him, but when he does start producing oil, he will be able to grab both the wildcatter tokens there.

From this photo you can see that I (green) have been mostly collaborating with Vence (blue), while Jeff (red) mostly partnered with Dith (yellow).

One ironic thing in our game was the Middle East (i.e. West Asia) never produced a single drop of oil. Jeff and Dith developed it late. I think at one point Jeff could have initiated oil production there, but he decided not to do so because it would not have given him many points, and it would have benefited Dith too.

Game end. Vence (blue) and I (green) still had many barrels in Russia and Asia not yet transported to refineries. What a waste.

The final score. Jeff (red) won with 81pts.

The Thoughts

Wildcatters is a game with character. Definitely not a mechanism-looking-for-a-theme kind of game. I like how you need to collaborate with your opponents, while at the same time try to not allow them to benefit too much from the joint ventures. The restriction imposed by the region cards means you need to think carefully and plan carefully where you want to act. The limited number of actions makes collaboration necessary. You want to leech off others' actions. Gaming the production lifecycle is interesting. You try to grab opportunities at every step. In the game we played, I think we all tried to do a bit of everything, and didn't really attempt to focus on any particular stage of the production lifecycle, e.g. only doing the refinery part, or only doing the prospecting and production part. I wonder whether such strategies are viable.

I like 90% of the game. The 10% that stops me from wanting to buy it is the area majority scoring mechanism. I have this thing about area majority games. This mechanism tends to rub me the wrong way, and I can't really explain why. It's the same reason Dominant Species was just OK for me. Strangely, I love China. In Wildcatters, scoring mostly revolves around area majority. There are twelves areas to compete in - the seven regions to supply oil to, the shares of the four companies, and cash. That's area majority overload for me!

This is a game with a lot of heart. If you like medium-heavy economic games, and don't have anything against the area majority mechanism, I encourage you to give Wildcatters a go.