boardgaming in photos: gaming at Meeples Cafe and at work

15 Nov 2015. Shee Yun (10) saw Michelle and I preparing to play Russian Railroads. She seemed curious, so I asked whether she wanted to play. She said yes. This was my first time playing with three players. We used a different side of the board from the 2-player game. There were more work spaces we could use.

This time my strategy was centred around industrialisation. I had built all five factories (purple arrow-shaped tiles along the bottom edge of the player board). I had also activated my second industry marker - the purple hex-shaped wooden pawn. I didn't put much effort in railroad track building. The best I had was a grey track, i.e. Level 2.

The red, yellow and green pawns are player workers. The blue pawns are temporary workers you can fight for every round. The space you need to use to recruit them is on the left side of this photo - that space showing two blue men.

22 Nov 2015. Machi Koro Deluxe, which contains both the main expansions, Harbor and Millionaire's Row. The dice are different. The side showing a mountain means 1. There are renovation markers now. They are needed due to the powers of the cards in the Millionaire's Row expansion.

The Demolition Company is a card from the Millionaire's Row expansion. If your die roll activates it, you earn $8 but must demolish one of your landmark buildings. This is a building you need to be careful with, lest you demolish any expensive landmark building.

The Moving Company lets you, or rather, forces you to give a building to another player. This can be quite annoying to your opponents if you combo it with many Loan Offices. When you build a Loan Office (for free!), you gain $5, but each time it is activated, you need to pay $2. However if you conveniently give the Loan Office to an opponent, you will never need to pay the $2. The obligation is passed to your opponent. Evil! Both of these are from Millionaire's Row.

Look how much fun Chen Rui is having with these new evil cards in Millionaire's Row.

I have played many games of Machi Koro with my children. Since adding the Harbor expansion, I have never won. They like to gang up on me, but in this game there aren't that many ways you can collaborate. However I still do lose to them all the time. It was only after we added Millionaire's Row that I started winning again. Comparing the two expansions, I think Harbor is almost necessary if you want to play regularly. It makes the game more variable because of the market mechanism (not all buildings are available all the time). The added cards also mean more variety. Millionaire's Row adds some more cards, some of which are a little quirky. It feels less necessary, but if you've played a lot of Machi Koro, spicing it up now and then is always good. The way we played - mixing all cards in - may not be ideal, because there are probably too many card types, which makes collecting the same cards difficult. The cards may be a bit too diluted. I'm too lazy to sort out the cards though, so I'll probably continue to play this way. We still have lots of fun this way.

This was worth taking a photo. It had been such a long time since the previous time I won a game.

27 Dec 2015. The children suggested FITS, which I hadn't played for a long time.

The numbers not covered are worth victory points. The solid circles not covered will entail a penalty.

3 Jan 2016. I brought the family to Meeples Cafe. It had been a long time since our previous visit. Log from Meeples Cafe always keeps for me a complimentary copy of every issue of the Spielbox magazine. By then I had accumulated quite a stack. Our visit was a belated birthday celebration for Chen Rui, who is a December baby. It was very crowded when we got there. Thankfully we didn't go too late. Our table was one of the last few remaining.

The children wanted to play Cloud 9. We had played this before quite a few times. I don't insist on trying out new games, but I do try to avoid playing games we already own. We might as well play at home. Cloud 9 is an excellent family game. I recently tried its new incarnation Celestia. I prefer the older game, because it is simpler.

The children asked to play Dixit too. Now we do own this game, but their argument was the cards in this set was different from the ones we had. They did have a point, so we played. I (green) did very poorly. I think I came last.

Forbidden Island was another game the children suggested. We had played this quite a few times. We played twice this day, beating the easy difficulty level without breaking a sweat, but losing when we moved on to the normal difficulty level. It was quite exciting though, and in my opinion much more fun than the easy game.

This was the first game which we won.

This was the second game. The helicopter pad was in a far corner, on the right, which was a pain. It kept flooding, and we had to keep going back to pump the water away. The moment it sank, the game would be lost immediately because we would not be able to leave the island. In this photo it was flooded again, i.e. showing the blue side.

We lost the game. The water level reached the deadly stage before we could retrieve all four artifacts. The flooding had cut off our path, and we had to rely on special abilities or specific cards to get to the helipad.

The game we enjoyed most this trip was Coconuts. The idea is to use a catapult (in the shape of a monkey) to launch rubber coconuts into plastic cups. The game starts with many cups in the centre of the table. Whenever you successfully land a coconut in a cup, you claim that cup and place it on your player board. The goal is to claim 6 cups to build a pyramid. This game is harder than it looks. The catapults are not precise, and the rubber coconuts often bounce. Sometimes a coconut drops into a cup only to immediately bounce out. Sometimes it lands in a different cup after bouncing out. It's crazy!

Chen Rui taking aim.

Scoring is exhilarating.

17 Jan 2016. I played Zombie Tower 3D with the children.

21 Jan 2016. Teck Seng wanted to learn Catan, so I brought it to the office. Teaching and playing this game again reminded me how wonderful it is and why it has become a classic. In our game Eva and Teck Seng competed fiercely for the longest road trophy. On one of Eva's turns, she built three roads at one go to overtake Teck Seng and wrestle the trophy from him. Intense! I started upgrading my settlements to cities earlier than the rest, which helped me gather more resources. By the time the others started doing it, ore and grain became very scarce. I was fortunate to have started doing upgrades when supply was higher than demand.

I was green. I had two separate regions, and I never linked them up.

22 Jan 2016. I brought 10 Days in Asia to the office also upon a colleague's request. I told them this was geography mahjong. The game we played was very funny. Teck Seng and Xiaozhu played as a team. With two heads thinking, they should be doing better than the rest of us. However they kept making mistakes and tripping over each other that they ended up doing worse than everyone else. We kept hearing them exclaim oh no we should have played this card, or oh gosh we should have picked that card, or why did we place this card here? It was more entertaining than a comedy show.

We got to a point where three players were one card away from winning (excluding the duo of Teck Seng and Xiaozhu naturally). It was nail-biting. We exhausted the draw deck and had to reshuffle the discard piles to form a new draw deck. At that time I could sense I was not likely to win. I needed a China card or a Thailand card, but I hadn't seen them so far, so they must be in the hands of the other players. Sure enough, I later learned that Teck Seng and Xiaozhu had both the China cards, and Ruby the Thailand card. Ruby was the one who announced victory. However when she showed us her 10-day itinerary, we spotted a mistake. She had planned to take a train from Thailand to South Korea, but the train networks of these two countries didn't overlap. Ooops. Eventually we decided it was a tied game with no winner.

I realised I had taught one rule wrong. When you draw a card from the draw deck, if you don't like it, you can immediately discard it. I had taught my colleagues that they must replace it with another card in their hands. Sorry...

in the media: Oriental Daily (Malaysia)

I was on a newspaper today - the Oriental Daily, a local Chinese newspaper. There was an article on boardgames, children and playing boardgames as a family activity. The reporter contacted me via my Chinese boardgame blog, and he interviewed me last Thursday. He asked me to recommend some games suitable for children. I picked from among the games I own. What do you think of the choices? Here's the link to the article at the Oriental Daily website. You may be able to use Google Translate to translate it into broken English. The printed version is below.

Zombie Tower 3D

Plays: 4Px4, 3Px1; 2 on easy difficulty, 3 on normal.

I sometimes get invitations to review games. Most of the time I decline. Only occasionally when the premise of a game intrigues me I would commit to play and review it. Playing boardgames and blogging are what I do to relax and to have fun, so I don't want to make any part of it feel like an obligation. When Cosaic first contacted me about Zombie Tower 3D, I had not heard of this game. It had some quirks which piqued my curiosity, so I thought why not.

The Game

Zombie Tower 3D is a semi-cooperative game. You are survivors stuck in a crumbling building infested with zombies. You are separated by jammed doors and fallen walls, and have no means to reach one another. The best you can do is shout to communicate and coordinate your survival efforts. You can pass equipment to one another through small slits in the walls. You can't see what's happening on your friends' sections of the building - where they are located, where the zombies and (non-player) survivors are, what equipment they have found so far. You can only communicate verbally. To win, you need to get out of the building. You must also each get a vaccine before you leave. There are two ways of leaving. The first way is by having one player get hold of both the communication device and the battery, and then everyone meet on Level 3 (I shall avoid the USA 1st-2nd-3rd floor vs UK / Malaysia Ground-1st-2nd floor dilemma by calling the floors levels). The second way is by everyone collectively gathering enough flares and then meeting on Level 1. There is a timer mechanism in the game. If you can't escape by the end of round 12, you lose. If any one of you dies, you lose.

Now here's the twist - this game is semi-cooperative. If you win together, victory points come into play, and only one player will be the winner with the highest score. The others do win too, but not all wins are the same. You score points based on how many survivors you rescue, and based whether you fulfill the three objective cards dealt at the start of the game. These cards require you to have specific items when you escape, which means you need to either have found and not used those items, or you need to have convinced others to give them to you if they have found them. This mechanism creates hidden agendas and competition among players, even as they all try to collaborate to ensure survival. Sometimes you intentionally delay the game hoping to find the equipment you need for scoring, lying to your friends that you still haven't found your vaccine. Sometimes you pretend not to have the shotgun your friend is desperately asking for, because you want the zombies to catch up with the big group of survivors he is leading and kill those survivors, who are worth 1 victory point each.

Sharing equipment is essential. E.g. if you have a gun but no bullets, or vice versa, it is useless. If one player has a gun and the other the bullets, they need to decide who to give his item to the other. Also each player needs one vaccine. An extra vaccine is of no use to you, but you need to make sure all your teammates get one, else you can't win.

This is a 4-player setup. You are supposed to only see your side of the building.

Jeixel, Calvin. In this photo I can see the cards of the player on my right, but I am not supposed to. Those cards on the board determine where new zombies pop up and where new survivors are found.

The sequence of a round is straightforward. First everyone simultaneously draw cards on their respective sides of the building to determine where new zombies and survivors appear. Then the players take turns using 3 Action Points to perform actions. Some actions require AP's, some don't. You can move. You can search, which means drawing a card from the deck for the specific level you are on. You can pick up or drop off survivors. You can heal yourself. You can use equipment. You can drop equipment through the slits on the walls, or pick up equipment left by others. You can even gain an AP by taking injury. Sometimes this is necessary.

Calvin, Kit Loong. When you search, you draw a card. The 3 card decks for each level are placed on the roof of the building. They have different card backs.

Ah Pek (Uncle) is cautiously guarding the staircase. In this photo you can see the slits on the walls. There are slits on every level.

After all players have completed their actions, it is the zombies' turn. Zombies on the same floor as humans will move towards the humans, prioritising the non-player survivors over the players. After they all move, they bite the humans in the same room as them. Survivors who are bitten turn into zombies (of course!). Players who are bitten take one point of damage. If you hit your health limit, you die and everybody loses.

Zombies go for survivors first and not the players. In this photo there are survivors on the rightmost rooms on Levels 2 and 3. So the zombies on these levels will all walk towards the right. The player character on the left is safe, at least for now. There is no survivor or player character on Level 1, so the zombies there will just chill.

This is one of the player characters. Each character has a different start location and a unique special ability. The big white box is for placing survivors tagging along with you. Survivors don't move on their own because they are too scared. They will follow you only if you tell them to.

The Play

My first two games were played with non-gamers. The idea of the 3D building immediately caught their attention. They told me the rulebook looked intimidating, but after I taught them the rules, they were able to digest them just fine. They found the rules logical and natural. They kept referring to Left 4 Dead, which I have not played before. In the first game I decided to just go for the normal difficulty level, and we lost rather spectacularly. I later found out that I had played one rule wrong, which made the game much harder than it should be. I had thought that zombies knew how to take the stairs to go hunt down humans on other levels. Actually they don't. We had inadvertently played in hell mode. For the second game, I played with a different group of non-gamers, this time playing with the correct rules. I was scarred from the first game and decided to start at easy difficulty. The difference between difficulty levels is the number of starting zombies during game setup. This time we won rather easily, and never got into particularly difficult situations. I think the easy level is mainly suitable for teaching the game or playing with casual players or children. When I played, I treated the game as a fully cooperative game. When you are still familiarising yourself with the game, you can choose to play this way. However the intention of the designers is there should be competition and hidden agendas amidst the collaboration.

To beat the game you need to communicate a lot and coordinate carefully. It is almost impossible for everyone to find exactly what he needs. Usually you will need to find ways to pass equipment among yourselves in order to win. Even just the basic requirement to win - everybody getting a vaccine shot - can be quite challenging. Sometimes you need to pass an item to the player sitting opposite you. That means first passing it to the guy on your left or right, and then him bringing it to the other wall to pass on to the final recipient. That can be very tricky to coordinate when the place is swarming with zombies. When we played we had to keep asking where are you, which slit is easier for you to get to, how soon can you get there, what else do you have, etc. Even after we finally gathered all the items we needed, coordinating the right time to get to the assembly point was a challenge too. Get there too early, and you may find yourself surrounded by zombies before your teammates are ready to leave the building.

Zombie movement follows very exact rules. They are predictable, and you must make use of this. The new zombies and survivors that appear every round can throw a wrench into your plans, but that's all part of the fun. You want to make use of your understanding of zombie behaviour to control their movement, e.g. halting them in their tracks by staying away and taking survivors away from the level they are in, or steering them in a particular direction by dropping of a survivor that way. Cruel, yes, but sometimes it's necessary. Think of it as saving yourself first so that you can in turn save more other survivors. When you are about to be bitten, you can push a survivor traveling with you forward to take the bite for you. But then he'd turn into a zombie and you'd have more zombies to contend with next round. You need to think of that too.

My non-gamer friends enjoyed the game very much and asked to borrow it. They were disappointed to find that it had sold out, but I told them there would be a Kickstarter campaign starting in February. That's Cosaic's current plan as far as I'm aware of.

Benz, Ruby, Xiaozhu, Edwin and Eva. Only Ruby, Xiaozhu and Eva were actually playing with me, but the others were interested and sat down to join us.

Kit Loong and Calvin standing behind were probably grumbling about how I had taught them the wrong rules in the game we played earlier, causing such a miserable loss.

My 3rd and 4th games were played with gamers. I decided to go for normal difficulty level straightaway, since this was not a complex game. Aaaaand Sinbad died a rather horrible death. He was rather unlucky. He was unable to save any of the survivors on his side of the building. They were all bitten and they turned into zombies, resulting is a large horde. His character was good with guns and could kill an extra zombie each time he attacked, but he couldn't find bullets for his gun, so he didn't manage to make use of his special ability at all. In hindsight we were a little careless. We should have foresaw Sinbad's sticky situation earlier and worked out how to help him out a few rounds earlier. By the time we realised the gravity of the situation, it was already too late.

Sinbad, Allen, Jason and I decided to have another go. This time we were more careful, and eventually managed to escape. We had to coordinate carefully when and where we were going to pass items to one another, and when exactly we were going to meet at the assembly point. To win the game you still need to last till the end of the round after reaching the assembly point, i.e. after the zombies do their moving and biting. I still played the game as a pure cooperative game, not quite bothering about the victory points. However my gamer friends were not so innocent. They were already thinking about post-survival bragging. Jason had two objective cards which required having the dynamite and the detonator. Allen had announced that he had them both and asked if anyone needed them. Jason tried to convince Allen that he needed the equipment to kill some zombies. However he didn't sound desperate enough, and eventually Allen didn't pass the goods to him. If Jason had put on a good enough show and convinced Allen to hand over the goodies, he would have become the top scorer. I was oblivious to all this during the game itself. It was only post-game that we discussed this, and I was able to appreciate the self-interest, brinkmanship and lying aspects that can emerge when playing this game.

Allen, Jason. This time I was playing with hobby gamers.

This time the character I played was the doctor. His special ability was he could turn a zombie back into a human, at the cost of one health point.

All the survivor tokens have a zombie side at the back.

The Thoughts

Zombie Tower 3D is a game with a wide appeal. The 3D tower is eye-catching, and the core mechanisms are intriguing. That's at least enough to get many to be interested to give it a try. It is not a particularly deep game, so it's not something gamers will play regularly or do in-depth strategy analysis on. This is a light strategy game which feels like a party game. You need to communicate a lot, and you need to coordinate your efforts meticulously. It's funny that despite all players being restricted to different sides of the building, the game is very high in player interaction. The information barrier forces players to actively contribute to the discussion.

The victory conditions in Archipelago share similarities with those in Zombie Tower 3D. It's either everyone loses, or there is only one true winner, the one with the highest score. Some complain that this makes the game less fun because a player who can't be on top will try to make everyone lose. I don't see this as a problem. In my view, we should stick to the theme and setting. In Zombie Tower 3D, surviving will always be more important than having more glory.

What would be funny though, is a group of players who should have won the game end up losing because of the mistrust among them. E.g. a player claiming he needs the shotgun to kill zombies coming at him, but others who do have shotguns being unwilling to give it to him because they believe he only wants it for the victory points. That player asking for the shotgun may actually be in trouble. Can you trust your friends?

This is a game that I imagine casual players can keep on playing and playing. For regular gamers, it still provides some challenge because of the randomness and the luck element. The normal level is not exactly easy to beat. I have yet to try the hard difficulty.

I thank Cosaic for this review copy. It's a game I will treasure. If you are interested in the game, watch out for the upcoming Kickstarter campaign, estimated to start in February.

Offical Website: http://www.cosaic.us
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cosaicboardgames
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cosaic_us

link: Bruno Faidutti - reviewing reviews

This article from Bruna Faidutti really struck a chord with me - Reviews. I too dislike giving games a number rating, and I think the most valuable part of a game review is what the writer thinks of the game - why he likes it or why he doesn't. Who would like the game and why? That's the reason my standard format for blogging about games has a Thoughts section. It is for the convenience of those who wish to literally "jump to conclusions". That's what I like to do.

Food Chain Magnate

Plays: 3Px2.

The Game

You are an aspiring fast food entrepreneur, starting a fast food business with just yourself, one restaurant, and no money. You recruit staff, produce food (and drinks), advertise them, serve customers who visit your restaurant (and restaurants later), and build up your business. You compete with your fellow players to earn the most money when the bank runs out of cash, which is when the game ends.

The first thing you do every round is corporate restructuring. No, that's doesn't exactly sound like fun, but it actually is quite interesting. What it means is you rearrange your corporate structure to determine what actions you can execute that round. You start the game with only one employee - yourself, the CEO. The CEO is always at the top of the organisation chart. You may recruit one new employee every round, and you may supervise three other employees. Supervising means activating an employee. All employees except the CEO need to be activated in order to work. Since the CEO himself can only activate three other employees, to sustain a larger organisation you need middle management, i.e. the managers. They don't do work themselves, but they supervise others. The lowest ranked manager, the management trainee, is only able to supervise two other employees, while the highest ranked manager, the executive vice president, is like Ip Man - he can handle ten. To train up your managers, you need, of course, trainers. That's another type of employee. You have marketers. They advertise your products, or your future products, or even products you don't plan to sell but you want to advertise anyway just to deny your opponents business. You have recruiters to help you recruit more efficiently, so that you don't rely on just the CEO recruiting one new employee per round. You have cooks, who cook burgers and pizza. You have the procurement department, which buys drinks. You have pricing managers, who reduce or increase prices, to compete with other fast food chains and to earn more money respectively. You have branch managers who open new branches. You have business developers who create new homes, and thus new market demand.

The variety in your employees means the variety of actions you can take. You need to manage how you train your employees. Employees in training cannot work for one round. Some employees can no longer do their old work after being trained for a new position. You need to recruit new blood to take up those old positions. You also need to manage costs. You don't need to pay any salary to employees at the entry level, but once an employee is trained, you need to pay him a $5 salary. If you run out of cash and can't pay, you will be forced to fire your people. Sometimes if you don't want to pay an employee, you can fire him just before pay day. It's legal.

This reference chart shows all employees in the game, and also the training paths, or upgrade paths. The management trainee (first box in second row) is most versatile and can be trained to take up many different roles.

This game can take up a lot of space because of the cards. If you want to lay them all out neatly, be prepared to need an extra table. Cards with a white bottom half are employees. Cards with a solid colour are milestones.

This is an org chart. The boss (CEO) is at the top, and you can have up to three layers. If you have managers (black cards) in the second layer, they can supervise other employees in the third layer. The cards at the bottom are the milestones I have claimed.

This was my org chart after my company had grown bigger. I had three managers in the middle layer which allowed me to have a whole bunch of workers working in the third layer. I had quite a few other employees who were not working this round. Three of them were going to be trained by the three trainers who were working.

So how do you make money? Let's start with advertising and generating demand. Your marketers place different forms of ads on the game board to influence the homes. E.g. a burger ad which successfully influences a home will place a burger token on the home, representing that family now craving for a burger. As long as this demand is not satisfied, e.g. no restaurants selling burgers, or they had sold out, the burger token stays on the home. If the ad is still in effect next round, a second burger token will be placed on the home. More tokens will be added as long as the limit is not reached. The limit is 3 tokens for a middle-income household, and 5 tokens for a high-income household. When a family finally visits a restaurant which serves the foods (and drinks) they want, these tokens representing demand are removed. Next round, tokens may be placed anew if there are ads influencing the home.

Ads take effect at the end of a round, while dinner time happens in the middle of a round. That means if you want to advertise a specific food type and sell that food type, you need to do the advertising in the round before you produce the food.

Customers only visit restaurants which fully satisfy their needs. E.g. a family desiring two burgers and a pizza will not visit a restaurant which can serve it only one burger and one pizza. They would rather eat sandwiches at home. Now if two (or more) restaurants can fulfill their demand, they will first consider two factors: driving distance and price. Naturally they prefer nearer restaurants, and lower prices. If two restaurants are still tied after considering these, the next deciding factor is the number of waitresses working that round. If there's still a tie, then it is broken by player turn order. Once a family dines at a restaurant, the tokens at their home representing demand are discarded. The tokens of the restaurant chain representing stock are also discarded, because the food has been consumed. Any leftover food at the end of the round will spoil, and will be discarded.

All food (and drink) types have a base price of $10. Pricing managers can modify this, both upwards and downwards. There's a milestone card which permanently and irrevocably lowers a player's price by $1. Other than the price, there are also bonuses to consider. Some milestones give a $5 bonus to every unit of a specific food type sold. Rich families give a 100% bonus when they dine. So if you have a pricing manager than changes your burger price to $20, and a rich family eats at your burger joint, you are earning $40 per burger instead of $10.

This is what you do in a round. This player aid looks like a restaurant menu, which is nice.

The purple squares are homes, i.e. families, i.e. customers. Homes with gardens (green) attached are rich homes. A game starts with only middle-income households. Once you have a business development manager he can help create new rich homes or upgrade existing homes to rich homes. The food (and drink) tokens on the homes represent what they want to eat, i.e. the effect of ads. The white 2x2 tiles with logos are the restaurants. Location is important, because distance is one of the factors when a customer decides where to dine. The greyish blue tiles are the ads, and the food tokens on them indicate what type of food they are advertising. Those single red, yellow and dark green squares are supply points for drinks. When your buyers go past them they get to collect the corresponding drinks - soda, lemonade or beer.

The numbers on the homes and the ads have meaning. Homes and ads are resolved in ascending order. The effects of a lower numbered ad are determined before that of a higher numbered ad. Low is normally better. An ad that goes first gets to place a token on a house first. If the house reaches its limit for demand tokens, any subsequent ads will have no effect on it. As for the numbering for houses, low is not necessarily better. Lower numbered households go out to eat earlier. If you are in competition with another restaurant chain selling the same food type, and they sell cheap while you go high-end, you would want the middle-income families to have low numbers, but the high-income families to have high numbers. You would be hoping that the cheapskates buy up your competitor's food, leaving the rich families to buy your expensive stuff and pay you a big tip.

With 3 players, you only play a 3x4 map. At the top right corner, just off the board, you can see a large rectangular ad. That's an airplane banner ad. The plane flies in a straight line, and every house it flies over will be influenced. There are three pizza tokens on the airplane ad, which means the ad campaign will run for three more rounds.

One of the most important aspects of the game is the milestones. These are strong special abilities which you need to fight for. To claim a milestone card you need to achieve a specific condition, e.g. if you are first to advertise burgers, for the rest of the game every burger you sell gives you a $5 bonus. If two or more players achieve the same condition within the same round, they all get to claim a milestone card. Let's look at another example. If you are first to place an ad, for the rest of the game your ads are permanent, and you never need to pay your marketers. Normally ads last a specific number of rounds, and if you want to place a new ad, you need to assign a marketer to do it. Also, normally you need to pay a $5 salary to marketers except for the entry level marketers. Milestones are good, but sometimes they are a constraint or a hindrance. Using the same example, although perpetual ads save you some effort, it also costs you some effort. Your marketers are forever tied to the same ad campaigns, and you will need to recruit more marketers, and train them, to start any new ad campaign. There's one milestone which saves you up to $15 per round in salaries, however it hinders you from achieving another milestone which requires you to be first to pay $20 in salaries. You need to choose your milestones wisely. Milestones also drive your strategy. If you get the $5 per burger bonus, you will naturally want to sell more burgers.

The game starts with $50 per player in the bank. Before the game starts, every player secretly decides how much more to add to the bank. They get to choose between $100, $200 and $300. This information is not revealed until the money in the bank is exhausted for the first time. Once this happens, the additional amounts are revealed and added to the bank, and the game continues until the bank breaks for the second time. The money pool size has an impact on how you want to play. It affects the length of the game and the tempo of the game.

The Play

I played my first game with Jeff and Vence. All three of us were new to the game and we blundered through the first few rounds, not exactly sure what we should be doing. Both Jeff and I made a mistake with our production cycle, producing food too early when our ads had not yet taken effect. We were unable to sell our food and had to throw it in the bin. However that turned out to be a good thing, because one of the milestones was to be first to waste food. The reward was a fridge - you can keep up to 10 food tokens at the end of every round. I think this milestone is particularly helpful for new players. Once you master the game and the production cycle, this milestone should be less critical.

I went for a McDonald's strategy. I built a huge corporation. I sold cheap burgers. I sold many of them. I think what helped me most was my large company. I recruited aggressively. Being able to have many employees working means being able to do more things in a round. I claimed the $1 discount milestone, which helped me tremendously in competing for customers. I earned less per burger, but I was able to sell many of them. Jeff and Vence did not actively tried to stop me. I had the momentum and eventually won the game. By the time Jeff thought up a plan to slow me down, it was too late, because the bank was almost out of money.

In this first game there were many employees I hadn't tried, so I felt there were many strategies and tactics I hadn't experimented with yet. My second game was against Allen and Han. They were both new to the game. I tried something different this time. I got myself a luxury manager and a business development manager. I wanted to go high-end. That didn't quite work out. Han had gone for a discount strategy, and for a few rounds made a killing, denying both Allen and I many customers. I did manage to bring my master plan to fruition, but only had time to run it for one round before the game ended. Han commanded a big lead and we were nowhere near him when the bank broke for the second time. In hindsight, since I had wanted to try the gourmet burger strategy, I probably should have opted for a longer game and selected the $300 additional bank money card.

Allen struggled a bit with his business, and for some rounds even had to worry about paying wages. All three of us started the game with similar recruitment decisions, but Allen's strategy diverged earlier from Han's and mine.

I think the game will be more interesting with more players. With only three, the competition is not intense enough. Perhaps I should say with only three players, you need to proactively compete and not allow a runaway leader. In both the games I played, we had a runaway leader because the other two players were not aggressive enough in trying to hold him back. With more players, I suspect the players will be forced by the game system to compete. There are only five types of foods and drinks, and the number of milestones also stay the same. The runaway leader problem may be partly because of the shorter game length. We mostly opted for the low or medium amounts to feed to the bank. A shorter game meant less time to catch up. My first game took about 4 hours, and the second game around 3.

This was my second game. I played at Allen's home.

Ethan, Allen and Han. The game board or map area takes up only a little space. It is the card supply, the org charts and the milestones which take up a lot of space.

The Thoughts

I feel that Food Chain Magnate and The Great Zimbabwe are a new generation of games from Splotter. Compared to older titles like Antiquity, Roads and Boats and Indonesia, they are much less fiddly. You have fewer components to manage. The games still have very good strategic depth. I think it's a big achievement that the tediousness can be reduced while maintaining the same strategic depth. The player interaction is high, compared to Roads and Boats and Antiquity which sometimes have low player interaction.

Food Chain Magnate is a very typical Splotter game. It has the unique style which many fans love. The game is unforgiving and unapologetic. You need to know it well to fully appreciate it and to play well. Decisions in the early game are important. If you make a mistake, it can be impossible to catch up. The milestones are very important. You need to go in with a plan. You can't just blunder about and hope something will work out eventually. This is the kind of game that makes you feel alive. You feel that your every decision matters. Every call is life and death.

One possible point of contention is the early game may feel scripted, as in there are only a handful of good opening moves. You can't do a lot in the early game because you have few employees, so the decision tree is small. The crucial decisions are who you employ to get your company going. Then there are the milestones. You know you must compete for them. Of the 17 milestones, some can't be achieved quickly, and among those which can be, some are better than others. So the early game is about going for these better ones. It is no surprise that the early game can feel scripted. At the moment I don't think it's a problem. I think of it as an extended game setup phase, where players jostle to gain different starting strengths. After the opening game, there is still plenty of strategy space to explore and to compete in.

When The Great Zimbabwe was released, I didn't order a copy. After I played it, I bought a copy. After I bought a copy, I never played it again. When Food Chain Magnate was released, I didn't order a copy. Now that I have played it, I have ordered a copy. I just hope it won't suffer the same fate as The Great Zimbabwe and never get played.

my 2015

In 2015 I had 638 plays of 118 distinct games. There was a big drop in total plays, but it was a distorted number because I played 483 games of Ascension in 2014, while I "only" played a combined total of 380 games of Ascension and Star Realms in 2015. The number of distinct games I played had dropped a little, and that was not distorted by anything I can think of.

I still mostly played at Boardgamecafe.net. Thank you Jeff for steadfastly organising game nights. My old boardgame buddy Allen went on a long hiatus of more than 6 months, so I had been playing fewer games with him in 2015. But he's coming back. And he has a long backlog to work on.

I had hoped to repeat what I did in 2014. In 2014, I put in conscious effort to schedule to play a long game or a rarely played game about once a month. Unfortunately this didn't work out quite so well in 2015. I didn't play The Great Zimbabwe, Clash of Cultures, A Few Acres of Snow and quite a few other games as I had hoped. I was more passive in 2015 than in previous years. I usually just showed up on game night, and played whatever others wanted to play. I thank Ivan for being our main rules reader and game teacher. In 2015 I researched games less. I read fewer rulebooks. I made fewer concise reference sheets. I taught games less. Thankfully I didn't enjoy boardgames less.

I started a new job in August. Work was busy, and I found that I had less time to blog about my hobby. Sometimes my backlog of blog posts got (and still gets) embarrassingly long. My new job was game related, but it was mobile games and not boardgames. That was enough excuse for me to bring some games to the office to teach my colleagues. For research purposes of course. Everyone fell in love with Love Letter.

I acquired significantly fewer games than previous years - only eleven! Ten games purchased and one home-made. That was the lowest record since I started keeping track. This was just continuing the trend from 2014. I actually bought very few games in 2014 too. Many of the new games were gifts from Allen.

In 2015 I started letting go of meticulously recording every game I played. I still recorded every game played, but I started leaving out details like who won and what the scores were. What triggered this was the many games of Ascension and Star Realms I had been playing. I just got sick of keeping screenshots of the final scores to be transferred to a spreadsheet later on. I did still try to remember and record who I played the games with, but if I couldn't recall who won, I didn't mind so much anymore.

Let's talk about the games.

This list is my fives and dimes of 2015:

1. Star Realms (207 plays in 2015) - Played on the smartphone, and mostly against Han. This and Ascension were my fragmented-time games. I took a quick turn whenever I had some spare time to check my phone. It was usually just once or twice a day. A game took around 4 or 5 days to complete.
   
2. Ascension (173) - Played on the smartphone, and mostly against Han. I got tired of it at one point, and stopped completely, but that didn't last long. I returned after about 3 months. Now it's a staple again.
3. Machi Koro (22) - Allen lent me his copy to try out with my children, and they loved it. I liked it a lot too. The children had been denying me a win with the Harbour expansion. They always worked together to stop me from winning, and they were always successful, at least when playing with only this expansion. It was only after we added the Millionaire's Row expansion that I started winning again.
   
4. Samurai Spirit (15) - This cooperative game swept me off my feet when I first played it. I then bought it, and played it solo many times to figure it out. I was very intrigued. Beneath the seemingly simplistic rules, there were quite a few clever nuances.
   
5. Love Letter (14) - A big hit with almost everyone I introduced it to, especially non-gamers.
6. R / BraveRats (12) - A microgame by Seiji Kanai of Love Letter fame. I self-made a Star Wars themed version. It was clever. Not as good as Love Letter, but still not bad.
   
7. Roll for the Galaxy (8) - Because I was a big fan of Race for the Galaxy. It was different yet familiar.
8. Templar Intrigue (8) - A fun social game. I already had a copy, but I self-made another one with an Infernal Affairs theme. It was the the perfect theme for this game.
   
9. Red7 (7) - Clever little game that can be played as a microgame (single round) or as a short game (multiple rounds with scoring).
10. Russian Railroads (6) - My birthday gift. I was curious and a little skeptical at first. It turned out to be a fine game. Not groundbreaking, but well-crafted and offering plenty to explore and experiment.
11. The Message: Emissary Crisis (6) - I have always been a big proponent. I taught my colleagues this game.
12. Ticket To Ride (5) - I probably played this on the iPad. I don't remember taking the game box off the shelf this many times.
13. MR4: Al Capone & The Chicago Underworld (5) - I discovered that the partnership game (4 players) was excellent.
    
14. Ticket To Ride: Switzerland (5) - Probably iPad too.

If we look at time spent playing instead of counts, a slightly different list is produced, favouring long games.

1. Ascension (173 plays, 86.5 hrs)
2. Star Realms (207 plays, 69 hrs)
3. Samurai Spirit (15 plays, 15 hrs)
4. Machi Koro (22 plays, 11 hrs)
5. Russian Railroads (6 plays, 9 hrs)
6. Food Chain Magnate (2 plays, 8 hrs) - The new game from Splotter Spellen. I was very intrigued by their previous game The Great Zimbabwe, and eventually bought a copy, but since then I had never played my own copy, which was a shame. When I heard they were releasing a new game at Essen 2015, I decided let's wait and see. I expected to like it, but I also expected I would not have much chance to play it many times. So I should save the money and not buy it even if I liked it. Then I played it. I liked it. I played it again. I still liked it. I told myself I didn't need to buy it. Then I bought it, at a higher price than if I had just simply decided to buy it during the Essen game fair period. Now I am waiting for it to be shipped to me. And I'm not sure when I will get to play it after I receive it. Why am I doing this to my wallet?
7. Virgin Queen (1 play, 8 hrs) - Sequel to Here I Stand. What a memorable day it was, playing this grand strategy game of European politics, warfare and religious struggles during the Elizabethan era.
   
8. Ticket To Ride (5 plays, 5 hrs)
9. Roll for the Galaxy (8 plays, 4 hrs)
10. Roads & Boats (1 play, 4 hrs) - I'm always happy to be able to find time and determination to do a long game like this. A Splotter game no less!
11. Ticket To Ride: Switzerland (5 plays, 3.75 hrs)
12. Love Letter (14 plays, 3.5 hrs)
13. The Message: Emissary Crisis (6 plays, 3 hrs)
14. Pandemic: The Cure (4 plays, 3 hrs)
15. Ticket To Ride: Europe (3 plays, 3 hrs)
16. Agricola (2 plays, 3 hrs)
17. Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deck Building Game (2 plays, 3 hrs)
18. Antiquity (1 play, 3 hrs) - Hands up if you're a Splotter fan.
19. Mansions of Madness (1 play, 3 hrs)
20. Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization (1 play, 3 hrs) - I liked the minor tweaks done to this classic. I still haven't decided whether I should buy it. The old version works well enough for me.

Now this is a list of games which entered my collection in 2015.

1. Roll for the Galaxy
2. Samurai Spirit
3. Kobayakawa - A clever microgame which I could easily self-make, but I wanted to buy a copy because I really admired the design. I was surprised how much thinking could go into a game you play despite the very short rules.
   
4. Russian Railroads
5. Pandemic: The Cure
6. R / BraveRats - This was the self-made game. I made it so I could play it.
7. Hanafuda - I bought a 100 yen copy at Daiso when on holiday in Japan. I hadn't known about the existence of this traditional game. I still need to find a rule translation so that I can play.
8. Red7
9. Epic - I rarely participate in Kickstarter projects. I supported this one because of Star Realms and Rob Dougherty. That reminds me. The iPad version of Twilight Struggle which I supported in 2014 still hasn't materialised, despite being a Playdek project. I hope they will eventually get it done, before the end of 2016. It's Playdek dammit!
10. Machi Koro Deluxe - I had played so many games using Allen's copy that it felt wrong not to buy the deluxe version when it became available.
11. Ships - This was my guilty pleasure purchase of Essen 2015. I bought it because it was a Martin Wallace design, and it was part of his transportation series (which started with Automobile, a game I love). Thankfully the game was good.

I did order Food Chain Magnate but it hadn't arrived, so it didn't count towards 2015.

The next list are the New-to-Me games, and when I first played them in 2015.

1. Patchwork (2 Jan) - A pleasant and unusual two-player-only offering from Uwe Rosenberg (Agricola).
2. Arkwright (2 Jan)
3. Samurai Spirit (9 Jan)
4. Pandemic: The Cure (9 Jan)
5. Dead of Winter (9 Jan) - This was a big hit in 2014, and it was not bad indeed. I would enjoy playing this again.
6. R (13 Jan)
7. Guillotine (18 Jan)
8. Zhanguo (30 Jan)
9. Virgin Queen (1 Feb)
10. Machi Koro (2 Feb)
11. Lost Legacy: The Starship (6 Feb) - These two are sibling games to Love Letter, but somehow not as much fun.
12. Lost Legacy: Flying Garden (6 Feb)
13. Hyperborea (6 Feb)
14. Star Realms (10 Feb)
15. Roll for the Galaxy (15 Feb)
16. Pick-a-Pig (8 Mar)
17. BANG! (8 Mar) - I'm not 100% sure about this. I might have played this many years ago, before I started keeping records.
18. Thunder Alley (20 Mar)
19. New Amsterdam (27 Mar)
20. Kingsport Festival (27 Mar) - updated Kingsburg.
21. Hansa Teutonica: Brittania (17 Apr) - This gave me an urge to collect every Hansa Teutonica expansion, but then I don't even play the base game much now. So after a while, I forgot about it.
    
22. Alchemists (30 Apr) - A non Vlaada Chvatil game that feels a lot like his work. It's from the same publisher, so the style being similar is not surprising. It's innovative and quirky. It's built on an interesting premise. It's a refreshing experience. I'm still unsure about the game balance, and I'll need more plays to understand it better.
    
23. Madame Ching (22 May)
24. Targi (28 May)
25. Morels (28 May) - I liked this one. A good spouse game.
26. Toc Toc Woodman (9 Jun)
27. Ice Cream Combo (9 Jun)
28. Sheriff of Nottingham (19 Jun) - An updated version of that smuggling-goods-and-bribing-the-customs-officer game. It was very interactive. It was more about gaming the players than gaming the system.
29. Kobayakawa (19 Jun)
30. Lords of Scotland (3 Jul) - A card game based on numbers and colours, but it offers a rich experience due to the very strong powers of each colour.
31. Timbuktu (10 Jul)
32. Abluxxen (17 Jul) - An innovative card game which I don't know how to categorise, which is a good thing.
33. La Granja (17 Jul)
34. Pictomania (31 Jul) - An enjoyable real-time party game.
35. Viticulture (31 Jul) - Decent.
36. The Princes of Machu Picchu (7 Aug) - Mac Gerdts designs are good but somehow most don't really grab me. This one does.
37. Cubist (21 Aug)
38. 1812: The Invasion of Canada (22 Aug) - Simple and minimalistic mechanisms, yet it provides very good immersion.
39. Infiltration (4 Sep)
40. Mottainai (4 Sep) - A refined and streamlined Glory to Rome.
41. Abyss (11 Sep)
42. Imperial (18 Sep) - Mac Gerdts' magnus opus. It reminds me that I suck at stock-holding games.
43. Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deck Building Game (23 Sep)
44. Russian Railroads (24 Sep)
45. Red7 (26 Sep)
46. Mansions of Madness (30 Oct)
47. Epic (1 Nov) - Crazy card powers vs crazy card powers.
48. Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization (10 Nov)
49. Food Chain Magnate (10 Nov) - Classic Splotter. It's unforgiving. Bad moves will kill you. You need to know what you're doing in order to stay in contention. This is not a game where everything you do will help you progress somewhat, and winning is a matter of being more efficient than others. In Food Chain Magnate you live and die by devising a strategy and executing it well. You really feel alive because you know your decisions matter a lot. They can make or break your game. If you feel lost, you are dead.
    
50. Ships (13 Nov) - You take small steps. You see cycles come and go. Ultimately it is the end game you need to prepare for. Everything you do is positioning yourself for the final showdown. Will you be ready? Are you timing your tempo right?
51. Codenames (13 Nov) - Now I understand why this was such a hit. It plays on the different personal backgrounds, past experiences, knowledge, perceptions and biases of players on the same team. It is the epic failures that makes this game funny, much more so than how cleverly crafted clues can be satisfying. This game forces you to be creative.
52. Celestia (20 Nov) - An updated Cloud 9, but I prefer the original because I'm stubborn that's why and get off my lawn!
53. Qwinto (20 Nov) - A thinky filler is an oxymoron, but this is indeed a thinky filler.
54. Broom Service (20 Nov) - An updated and built up Witch's Brew.
55. Roll Through the Ages: The Iron Age (27 Nov) - A variant which may tend to run a little long.

Now for my family. My wife Michelle had 78 plays of 39 distinct games in 2015. That was a big increase compared to 2014, and this surprised me. I hadn't realised she had been playing more. Her most played games were Roll for the Galaxy, Russian Railroads and Mystery Rummy 4: Al Capone and the Chicago Underworld. My elder daughter Shee Yun (10) had 98 plays of 41 distinct games. That was slightly less than the year before. Her most played games were Machi Koro, R (BraveRats) and Red7. Younger daughter Chen Rui (9) had 94 plays of 38 distinct games, which was slightly less than the year before too. Most played games were Machi Koro, Love Letter, R and Mystery Rummy 4: Al Capone and the Chicago Underworld.

The first thing I need to do in 2016? I need to catch up with the backlog at my blog!

Happy New Year and Happy Gaming!

Mansions of Madness

Plays: 5Px1.

The Game

Mansions of Madness is a Cthulhu mythology game. It is scenario-based, and the scenarios are one-overlord-vs-multiple-investigators affairs. Every scenario is a mystery, with the overlord setting up the solution and knowing how the scenario works, while at the start of the game the investigators don't even know what they need to do to win. The investigators need to look for clues to piece together the winning condition, and they need to achieve the winning condition before time runs out.

The scenario I played was from the Call of the Wild expansion. I have not played scenarios from the base game so I can't make comparisons. I just know the scenarios in the base game happen indoors, while in Call of the Wild the scenarios are outdoors.

Most players play investigators, and there are many characters to pick from. As an investigator you explore the map to search for clues, you encounter events and resolve them, you try to work out the objective of the scenario so that you can work towards victory. The overlord player is the dungeon master. He can summon monsters to attack the players. He gets to play bad events on the investigators. He manages the scenario, and he tries his best to prevent the players from winning.

The card at the top left is a character card with the basic information and stats. The two cards at the bottom are configurable traits of the character. You have options and you can select a specific combination that you like, or that you think will be most suitable for the scenario you're about to play. The card on the top right is an equipment card.

Those tiles at the top left are a minigame. When you encounter certain events, the overlord will set up such minigames for you to solve before you can proceed further. In this particular minigame you need to connect the start and end tiles, and you only have a limited number of moves per turn to turn the tiles or to swap their positions.

Our particular scenario started with the four map tiles in the lower left forming the initial play area. The two additional tiles in the upper right were added as we explored the edges of the map. Edges with cards mean you can explore and thus extend the map.

That one on the left is one of the monsters. The one on the right is one of the investigators. The investigator is in a shed now, and when she exits she will run into the monster.

This is an event card. It says you need to solve a puzzle (i.e. a minigame) before you can enter the location you are trying to access.

As the investigators explore more, the map area grows.

That disc is a non-player character (NPC) in our particular scenario. He is a source of clues.

The Play

Spoiler Alert: I will talk a little about the scenario I played. No specifics and no answers, but if you want to play this scenario completely fresh, you may want to skip this section and go straight to the next section - The Thoughts.

Ivan taught the game and played the overlord. Jeff, Sinbad, Kareem and I were the investigators. At the start of the scenario, we the investigators regained consciousness at a camp surrounded by a mysterious mist. We couldn't remember what happened or how we got there. We just had a nagging feeling that there was something important we needed to do. But what? There was a dodgy-looking stranger at our camp urging us to move. We had to keep questioning him for clues. He obviously knew something we needed to know. We kept him close as we explored the area, trying to figure out what it was we were supposed to do here. Our scenario had a countdown mechanism, so we knew time was not on our side. There was an urgency to quickly find out our mission.

The monsters summoned by Ivan in the early game were more annoyances than threats. We could kill them if we wanted to, but they were just distractions Ivan threw at us. Killing monsters was not how to win. We needed to focus on learning the winning condition, and then achieving it.

The clues we picked up were mostly mumbo jumbo. We could not make much of them. It took a while to collect enough mumbo jumbo for them to start making sense. And they still didn't make a lot of sense. We were mostly Eurogamers, so we applied more of our Eurogamer instincts than our Ameritrasher skills. We worked out that to win the game, we needed to bring one artifact off the map in one specific direction before the countdown ended. If we picked the wrong artifact or wrong direction, we would lose instantly. It was not just about beating the clock. We started the game with four artifacts. Now one of the them was consumable, i.e. if we used its power, it would be discarded from the game. Obviously that could not have been the key artifact. If it were, the investigators could have used it up before they realised that it was the key to winning. There was no way a scenario could be designed with such a flaw. It turned out that we were right (of course!). This was doing deduction based on our experience as gamers and the logic in game design. It was not based on being immersed in the story of the scenario. For the rest of the mystery, we had to rely on the written passages in the clue cards, i.e. the mumbo jumbo. We probably took them too much at face value, e.g. we just considered whether the clues were hinting at a particular artifact (or direction), but we didn't think deeply enough about whether the clues meant to tell us to pick that artifact or not to pick that artifact. At least in my case, that was the Eurogame mindset working. I hadn't immersed myself in the narration enough. At one point we, the investigators, made a wrong conclusion about the direction we should exit in, and Ivan reminded us to think deeper about the clues we had on hand. It was then we realised that a particular clue which we had thought meant to tell us to go in a particular direction actually meant to tell us not to go in that direction. Ooops! Communication breakdown!

Eventually we agreed on what the clues were trying to tell us. What remained was to get the job done before time ran out. At that point the board was infested with monsters. The big monsters were out too. We knew we had no time to fight them. We needed to run for it. I was a little thankful that we had "wasted" some effort in killing the little monsters in the early game. Otherwise there would have been even more of them around to drag us down at this crucial moment. I'm still not exactly sure how to balance between killing monsters to prevent a build-up, and ignoring them to focus on getting the scenario objective completed ASAP.

Kareem had a Spider-tingling feeling that our conclusion might be wrong. In Star Wars-speak that's "I have a bad feeling about this". There was another artifact which we had considered being possibly the artifact. Kareem hadn't completely dismissed it. However it was in a house far away from where we were, and that house was now a party house for monsters. Even if we could get to it and avoid getting eaten by the monsters, we likely wouldn't have time to bring it off the map. So we stuck to the plan. Well, mostly. Jeff, Sinbad and I ran in one direction with our prized artifact. Kareem went on a side quest. He ran towards the second artifact. A bold move, but eventually it just got him killed. Jeff, Sinbad and I managed to force our way through the tangle of monsters, and we succeeded in getting our artifact off the map. It was then time for the final reckoning. We got the direction right, but unfortunately Kareem's hunch turned out to be right. We had the wrong artifact all along. The real one was the one he died trying to extract.

Running with the wrong artifact, we got lost in the mist, and ended up back at camp, and we collapsed into unconsciousness. We came to only to find that we had forgotten why we were here, and what we were trying to do. We just had a nagging feeling that we had something important to do, and we had to do it quickly. Then a suspicious stranger walked up to us and said, "Hurry up!".

More and more monsters were popping up and we were starting to get overwhelmed.

The big ones were here now. These were a major pain. We didn't have to fight them, but even if we tried to leave their presence, we might still get injured because monsters get a free attack whenever you try to run away from them.

This was the climax. We were ready to exit the map with the artifact which we decided was the right one. It was the moment of truth. And.... truth hurts.

Game end. Kareem died a horrible death, torn to pieces by three monsters.

The Thoughts

The most important part of Mansions of Madness is the stories and the narration. To fully enjoy the game, you need to immerse yourself in the narration, and not play it as a mechanism-first game. You need to be imaginative. The system is much more than a mathematical problem. The flavour text is not just flavour text. It is part of the core of the game.

The solution to a scenario is variable. It is determined by the overlord when he sets up the game. The clue cards being used will differ depending on the solution the overlord decides upon. The map grows in different ways depending on how the exploration cards are distributed. So a scenario will rarely play the same the next time round. However if you have played a scenario, you will know much about it such that the second play will have fewer surprises. You will already have a rough idea what clues to watch out for and you may already be able to devise a general strategy. In fact if you see the same clue cards coming out again, you will know that the solution will be exactly the same as before. Thus, I would argue that a scenario is technically replayable, but in practice your subsequent plays will be less interesting. This may not be a problem. My copy of Tragedy Looper comes with 10 scenarios, and I haven't even done half of them.

Merry Christmas

... and have a great 2016 ahead!