Bus

Plays: 4Px1.

The Game

Bus is one of the earlier games from Splotter Games, first published in 1999, more than 20 years ago now. Games from Splotter are now a blind buy for me, but when I heard about the reprint, I still did a bit of research before deciding to preorder. Afterall it is an earlier work and it might not be as well designed as their later games. However I found that the reviews were all good. People all said this was a strategic and cutthroat game much like Splotter's other games.

Prior to my research, the only thing I knew about Bus was the unusual * cough * ugly * box cover, which was of the same "unusual" level as Roads & Boats. This is the new box cover, and I find it lovely.

This is the old box cover.

One thing I like about the game components is the ziplock bags in the five player colours. They also provide a grey bag and an orange bag for the shared game pieces, but I prefer to use my own transparent ziplock bags for these. The rulebook (top right) looks like a bus timetable, which is nice.

These are the player pieces. The cylinders are action tokens. You get 20 for the whole game. They are single-use, so you will have at most 20 actions for the whole game. That funeral pyre in the background is made of bus routes. The bus markers on the right are for keeping track of your bus level, or how many passengers you can deliver each time you make a run.

A big part of the core game mechanism is worker placement, and the worker placement bit reminds me of Dominant Species. In the first half of a round, you take turns placing action tokens on the right side of the board. Everyone must place at least 2 tokens. From the 3rd cycle onwards you may pass. If you continue to place tokens, there is no restriction on how many. You may keep placing until you run out of tokens, or you run out of spaces to place tokens. One way the game ends is when only one player has any action token left. So it is possible for a few players to intentionally speed up the game by using up their tokens.

Once everyone is done with placing tokens, you go into the second half of the round - executing actions. Some action spaces are marked A to F. A is always the strongest action, and F the weakest. When placing an action token, you place on the A space first. The next player who wants to perform that action type must place his token on the B space, and so on. When executing the action, you don't execute from A to F. You execute from left to right. So some stronger actions are executed later than the weaker actions. That's important to consider.

The full board looks like this. At the start of the game, there are four (orange) passengers at the four corners of Central Park. In the upper right and lower left you can see two train stations. During the game new passengers enter play through these train stations. The roads are where you build your bus route. Everyone has only one route. You may not fork off (sorry that doesn't sound quite right). You may only extend your route from one of the ends. There are many black circles on the board numbered 1 to 4. They are for buildings, of which there are three types - home, office and pub. At different times of the day passengers will want to go to a different building type. Your job is to help them get there. Each passenger you deliver using your bus route gives you 1VP. This sounds simple, but it is not. The average score of the game is about 7VP, i.e. about 7 passengers delivered in total. The numbers at the building spaces dictate the order they must be filled. You must fill all the #1 spaces before filling any #2 spaces, and so on.

You can see the three building types - home, office and pub.

As part of game setup, every player sets up a 2-length bus route, and places two buildings. Kareem (red) and Allen (yellow) connected their routes to one of the train stations, to secure passengers. That's a smart move. I (green) decided to keep to the centre, hoping that by being where the busyness was, I could leech other players' passengers even though I had no connection to a train station. That did not work out so well, to put it nicely.

Let me briefly explain some of the actions you get to do in this game. First, you get to extend your route. There are strict rules around this, and as a result it is rare to have two routes overlapping on the same street. Your route will often meet others' routes at junctions, but they usually won't overlap. You can increase your bus capacity. Every round only one person gets to do this, so this action space is often hotly contested. You can place buildings on empty spaces. You can bring passengers into the city. The most important action is running your bus, called Vroom. Before any bus runs are done, you must check the time of day to determine what building type the passengers want to head to. Every building fits only one passenger. For each passenger, you examine whether the junction he is at has a building he wants to enter. If so, he just walks in. If there is none, or they are taken up by other passengers, he needs to look elsewhere. These are the passengers you as bus companies get to serve. If your bus route connects a passenger to his desired building type, you deliver him for 1VP. Your bus capacity determines how many passengers you may deliver per Vroom action.

One more thing you can do in the game is fight for the start player position for the next round. If no one fights for it, the start player marker is passed clockwise. Being start player can be crucial, and often people will fight for it.

In this photo above, the time is afternoon, and everyone wants to go to the office. All offices are now occupied (briefcase icon). There is one passenger at the train station at the lower right who is unable to get to any office. I guess it's work-from-home for you.

This clock device is an important aspect of the game. Normally the clock hand always moves clockwise one sector per round, changing the time of day from morning to afternoon to evening and back to morning again. This changes the passengers' desired destinations. Notice there is one action space next to the clock. If you place an action token here, you gain the ability to stop time. You have the option to do this just before the Vroom step, after everyone has done all the route extension, capacity increment and building placement. What this means is you can royally screw everything up for everyone. People may be expecting time to move forward, and may have executed all their actions based on this expectation. If you decide to stop time, their plans may well be all for naught. The thing is, you don't even really need to stop time. Placing your action token there already creates a major threat and forces people to think twice. The downside of it is though, if you decide to stop time, you must claim a time stone (the green or blue marbles), and each time stone is -1VP at game end.

There is an important concept called the MaxBus. MaxBus is the bus capacity of the player with the highest bus capacity. The strengths of the extend route, place building and place passenger actions are dependent on MaxBus. If MaxBus is 3, then a player may extend his route up to 3 times. This is if he takes the A action space. If you take the B action space, you extend twice. If the C action spaces, just once. The action spaces D to F are useless for now. What this all means is the actions will become stronger as the game progresses. The game will escalate and accelerate. It is important to watch out for this.

The game ends in three ways - when only one player has action tokens remaining, when time stones are exhausted, and when all building spaces are filled. All these can be manipulated by players, so you need to consider whether it's beneficial to you to drag on or to speed up.

The Play

I played with Kareem, Ivan and Allen. 4-players is supposed to be the best player count. Kareem had played Bus before, and warned us that scores would be low, around 6 to 7VP.

This is an open information game. Players actions have great impact on one another, i.e. very high player interaction. To get one simple thing done - sending one passenger to where he wants to go - takes a lot of coordination, almost like trying to align the stars. The game rules are not difficult. Compared to other Splotter games, this game is almost simplistic. Yet it is highly strategic. Many things are interlocked. You need to think and plan very carefully. There are many possibilities you must consider. This is in no way an easy game, despite how straight-forward it may seem.

Now Ivan (blue) had connected to the train station on the upper left. I (green) was the only one still running in circles at the centre not connected to any train station. More and more passengers were coming to the city via the train stations. Now there were no more #1 building spots. The next time anyone placed buildings, they would go to the #2 spots.

One thing I realised was that having more than one type of building at the same junction is usually a bad thing. Let's say a junction has both a home and an office. In the morning, let's say one passenger comes and occupies the home. Next round, when it is afternoon, the passenger will want to go to work. Since there is already an office here, he just walks in and doesn't need to take a bus at all. That's a business opportunity lost from the bus companies' perspective. So if you want to hinder your opponents, you may want to consider doing this to junctions on their routes. And you probably want to avoid doing this to your own junctions.

Every round before you deliver passengers, many other things happen, and the board situation changes. It is not easy to plan everything out nicely to make sure you can deliver. There are many things you need to do, and there are many actions by others which can mess up your plans. E.g. someone increases his bus capacity and delivers that one more passenger which you were planning to deliver. Or someone extending his route to reach destinations which he previously could not reach, enabling more deliveries. Everyone is fighting for those previous few deliveries. Yet despite the uncertainties, quite often the first action people go for is the Vroom action, because if you are slow to the party, there may be no more passengers left. Often the mentality is commit first, then try to work things out.

We made two rule mistakes. The first one was the number of action tokens. We played with 21 per player, when it should be 20. I didn't realise that each player colour had one extra backup token. I told everyone to use all of them. The second mistake was much more severe. I had misinterpreted the clock rule. I said that for the clock to tick, someone must place an action token, and use it to move the clock hand. This made things unnecessarily difficult for us. Every round someone had to "take one for the team" and spend one token just to keep the clock ticking. If the clock didn't move, it normally meant bad business for everyone. This probably dragged our game too. It certainly distorted our game experience. In our game the clock action was not a threat to stop time. It was a necessity to keep the game progressing, and we found ourselves playing a game of chicken to see who could not hold out and must sacrifice a piece just to make the clock tick. Sorry guys.

Kareem (red), Allen (yellow) and I (green) had many touchpoints. Ivan (blue) was a bit more isolated and he had a monopoly on some areas. At first I thought it was a good idea to have more touchpoints with others, because there would be more passengers going around, and I would be able to leech the passengers off others' routes. There would be more opportunities available. The problem was there was also more competition, and I often lost out. A monopoly is more powerful because once you grab a passenger and send him to a location which only you can reach, no one else can steal him away from you. If your bus route has all types of buildings, your customers will be super loyal, always taking your bus to bounce about the three building types on your route.

The road names all seem to be related to Splotter Games and their games.

Due to my incorrect rule explanation, we did not claim a single time stone the whole game. Kareem found that strange because in his previous game, the game ended when all time stones were claimed. He looked up the rules, and found out we had been playing wrong all along. By then it was late game, and we decided to continue with our silly ironman version of the game.

Overlapping routes rarely happen, because of how route extension works. Planning your route extension is important because this is a land grab. You not only stake your claim, you also block others from expanding. If you are not careful, you will be denied lucrative paths and you will be forced to make detours.

Now the only building spaces left are the #4 spaces.

Nearing game end.

The Thoughts

After playing Bus, I feel torn. It has many of the qualities of other Splotter games. It doesn't have some of the problems of other Splotter games. The qualities include being highly strategic, competitive and unforgiving. It is heavy, brain-burning and brutal. Yet it doesn't have the fiddliness of many other Splotter games, like Antiquity and Indonesia. In fact this lack of fiddliness makes it feel like a more modern game. It is more streamlined and polished. Yet after playing the game, I did not like it immediately like other Splotter games. Other than Antiquity and Indonesia, I also love Roads & Boats, Food Chain Magnate and The Great Zimbabwe. At first I wondered whether the unforgiving nature was what made me uncomfortable about Bus, but all Splotter games are like this. Why is Bus different? Eventually I concluded that the fiddliness in the other games is actually a soothing balm for me. When it keeps me busy, I feel like I'm doing something constructive and meaningful. I feel like I'm making progress. This is the kind of feeling that development games give us. So even if I lose badly, I feel I've contributed something to society. I still know I have screwed up and I lost fair and square, but I am consoled that throughout the game I have built something I can take a photo of. Bus is so streamlined that I have nowhere to hide. I can't find any excuse for myself. I need to face its brutal honesty.

Despite being an early design, Bus does not feel so. It actually feels more modern than some other Splotter games. My feelings towards it are complicated, because the mind tells me I should like it more, but the heart is siding with its younger siblings.

boardgaming in photos: Chicken Cha Cha Cha, Villa Paletti, La Granja

28 Dec 2019. Teaching my niece Lauren and my nephew Oswald Chicken Cha Cha Cha. We played this in Kota Kinabalu, my hometown. I live in Kuala Lumpur, and my sister lives in Melbourne. It is not often that we happen to be back in KK at the same time. I brought a few children's games to give to my niece and nephew. My own daughters have owngrown them.

Chicken Cha Cha Cha is a simple memory game and it is very easy to learn.

My sister Mei joined us to play Coconuts. I won! (6 cups stacked).

29 Dec 2019. I never managed to remember the rules of Villa Paletti. I find them a little convoluted. This is supposed to be a children's game, and an award winner.

Eventually we didn't play with the proper rules. Now the children were playing with it like a wooden block toy set.

Younger daughter Chen Rui (lying on the ground) feeling defeated by her two hyperactive cousins. All those wooden pillars all over the place.

Lauren being a good girl and helping to tidy up.

I'm joining in to play Chicken Cha Cha Cha, and I have no mercy on my nephew or niece. Pretty tail feather here I come!

11 Jan 2020. I played La Granja with Allen and Han. I had played once before, but had forgotten almost all the rules. So I had to learn from scratch. This is a player board. The three slots at the bottom are for inserting cards. When you insert cards this way, you gain special abilities. In this particular game, I did not like any of the special abilities on the cards I drew, and did not play any of my cards for their special abilities. In hindsight, that was probably a bad idea. If you play a special ability early, you will be making use of it throughout the game, and it should give you a decent advantage. I made one rule mistake for quite a number of rounds, making one more delivery per round than I was supposed to. Yet I still lost the game, despite this unfair advantage. Disgraceful!

This is the main game board. With 3 players, some spaces were off limits, and we blocked them off with game pieces.

Every round a number of dice are rolled and placed along this edge of the board. Players take turns claiming a die and taking the corresponding action. Once everyone has taken two dice, there will be one die left. Every player then gets to perform the action associated with that last unclaimed die. So you get to perform 3 actions in total.

Your player pieces represent different resources depending on where on the player board they are placed. You can see some arrows between some of the spaces. This means by paying a fee you may convert one resource to another. You do this by simply moving a player piece in the direction of that arrow. And paying, of course.

Along the edges of the central play area, you can see four of my (green) pieces. This means I have completed quite a number of missions on the main board. I must admit this achievement was due to me bungling the rules.

When a card is inserted at the top edge of the player board, it becomes a mission (or contract) you can complete. This is one of the ways to score points. You need to produce, manufacture or trade for the required resources, then deliver them.

23 Jan 2020. This kind of situation in Ascension is quite rare. Of the 6 cards in the card row, four are cost-8, one is cost-7, and one is cost-6. Normally even cost-6 cards are already considered very expensive. Having all cards being cost-6 and above meant for a long time we could only afford to buy the basic cards - Mystic or Heavy Infantry.

24 Jan 2020. We played Coconuts on Chinese New Year Eve after the family reunion dinner. My cousin Jia Cheng was pleased to have won the game.

EJ Insight (Hong Kong-based news portal)

A few months ago a news editor from EJ Insight, a Hong Kong-based English language online news portal, contacted me and invited me to be a columnist. I wasn't sure I could keep to any regular schedule, so I suggested why not he take any article from my blog which he thinks works for his portal, and just acknowledge the source. That worked for him, so we agreed on the approach. He still had to do some editing, since his target audience and mine differed. He sent me the edited version to make sure I was OK before he released it.

At first I thought EJ Insight was some young tech startup. When I googled it, I was surprised to find that it is part of the Hong Kong Economic Journal, an old, established newspaper in Hong Kong (link: main website, in Chinese).

The main Hong Kong Economic Journal portal.

Three articles from my blog were edited and posted to EJ Insight. After that they stopped. I am guessing boardgame related articles aren't popular at mainstream news portals, so after trying a few articles, they could already decide to stop. Still, it was nice to have had my own columnist page for a short while. My first article released was Axis & Allies & Zombies.

Tokaido app free download

The Tokaido app is free from now till 27 Mar 2020. I have played the physical version. Gameplay is so-so for me, but I love the artwork. The quality of the app is top-notch too.

Main screen.

Game in progress. At the top left you can see your character. Every character has a special ability. The three numbers are: red - current contribution to temples, blue - score, brown - money. The row of icons at the bottom are a representation of a segment of the game board. The game board is a path from Kyoto to Edo, divided into four segments. You travel one segment per day. There are various locations along the way. Where you stop gives you a different travel experience, which ultimately translates to victory points. There are various ways of scoring points.

The start and end of every segment are always inns, where you stop to rest the night and have a meal. When you play the game, it is possible to use only the row at the bottom to perform your actions. The main playing area becomes ornamental, but it certainly is pretty. The player icons at the bottom indicate where each player is on the Tokaido highway. The numbers next to the player icons are the scores.

This is the final inn in Edo, your destination. Once everyone gets here, you do the final scoring to see who wins.

At the final scoring there are quite a few awards to be given. This collector award is given to whoever has bought the most number of souvenirs.

The chatterbox award is given to whoever has had the most encounters (made the most friends during the trip).

You also score points for your donations to temples. This depends on how you rank against the other players.

I, um, am in the last place - that 66pt guy on the far left.

Photosynthesis

Plays: 3Px1.5.

Photosynthesis was a farewell gift when I left my previous job in 2019, from Moon and team, so it has a special place in my heart. It is a beautiful game, and it did catch my attention when it was first released. I read a little about it, but did not go through the rules then.

The Game

3 Nov 2019. Chen Rui played half a game with Michelle and I. We had thought the game would be short, but it turned out to take much longer than we expected, so we didn't finish the game.

The game board is an empty plot of land. Players are different tree species, of different colours and shapes. You spread your seeds, grow them into trees, and eventually harvest the trees to earn victory points. As the game progresses, the game board transforms into a forest. At game setup, every player gets to place two small trees along the edges of the play area. You want to expand towards the centre, because trees harvested nearer to the centre are usually worth more points. The more leaf icons, the better.

This is a player board. You have the sunlight tracker at the top left. Sunlight is the currency of the game. You need to spend sunlight for all actions in the game. The top right section is your inventory of seeds and trees. When they are on your board, they cannot be used yet. You need to spend sunlight to take them into your hand, before you can place them onto the game board. The two rows at the bottom show the actions you get to perform. I'll start with the bottom row, which describes the sowing action. By spending one sunlight, you get one tree to produce one seed, and you place that seed on an empty space near the tree. If the tree is a small one, the seed may only be placed on an adjacent space. If the tree is a medium tree, the seed can be placed up to two steps away. If it is large, the seed can be placed up to three steps away. Sowing basically means fighting for space (or "chup" a spot, as Malaysians say), since every space allows only one seed or tree. The second row from the bottom shows the life cycle of a tree. By spending the indicated amount of sunlight, you get to grow the tree, from seed to small tree, to medium tree, to large tree, and eventually you harvest the large tree to claim a score tile. Each time you grow a tree, you need to have the next version of the tree already in hand. E.g. to grow a small tree to a medium one, you must already have a medium tree in hand, so that you can put it onto the board. The small tree is removed and goes back to your player board. To use it again in future, you need to spend sunlight to take it into your hand.

This is the blue player's board and trees, a very different flavour.

There are four stacks of score tiles, corresponding to the four grades of spaces on the board, from one leaf to four leaves. The score tiles have different values. Within each stack, they are sorted from highest to lowest. So the earlier you claim a tile, the better. In case a stack is exhausted, you claim your tile from the next lower valued stack.

One key concept in the game is photosynthesis (of course), which means collecting sunlight (the "money"). All trees exposed to the sun collect sunlight. In the photo above, that large yellow piece at the top left is the sun. The sun circles the game board in a clockwise manner, changing position every round. Each full cycle is one day, and the game is played over 3 days (4 for advanced players). The direction of sunshine determines whether a tree gets to collect sunlight. Trees directly facing the sun collects sunlight. Small trees collect 1, medium trees 2, and large trees 3. Trees may be blocked by other trees, including those of the same species. Trees block other trees of the same size or of smaller sizes. E.g. medium trees block both medium and small trees. The shadow, and thus blocking range, of trees differ by tree size. Small trees only cast a shadow of one space, and only blocks a small tree immediately next to it. Large trees cast a shadow of three spaces, blocking all trees within three spaces (in the opposite direction of the sun).

Every round starts with shifting the sun. Everyone then does sunlight collection simultaneously. After that each player takes a turn spending sunlight to perform actions.

The Play

11 Jan 2020. This time I played with Han and Allen.

Sunlight was coming from the lower right direction. The small blue tree would block the small green tree behind it. Next round the sun's position would shift clockwise, and the small green tree would still be blocked, this time by the other small green tree on the left. If the blocked tree grew into a medium tree, it would no longer be blocked by these small trees, but then these two small trees might grow too, and block it again.

These were our out-of-play components. At the start of the game, all player boards are full. Each player has two small trees on the board, and some seeds and trees on hand. Whenever you do a growth action on the board, the component (whether seed or tree) being replaced is to be returned to your player board. If your player board is full, that component is put out of play. Components are limited, and some components being out of play means you have less flexibility. If you want to avoid components being put out of play, you need to spend sunlight to take components from your player board into your hand, freeing up space. Having more components in play is beneficial, because the sunlight cost of taking components from the player board varies. The more components you have in play, the easier it is for you to use the cheaper spaces. However, sometimes it is hard to avoid wasting components when you need to spend sunlight urgently to fight for prime real estate.

I was green, Allen blue, and Han yellow. In our game, I hurriedly squatted at the central spot, because that was the most lucrative spot.

The six corner spots are the safest in terms of catching sunlight. For 3 out of 6 rounds per day, you are guaranteed to have sunlight. I was in no hurry to grow my trees at these corners, because at least half the time they wouldn't be blocked.

The nearer a tree is to the centre, the more likely it will get blocked. Look at those pitiful small trees surrounded by larger trees.

Locations nearer to the centre are more lucrative, so you do want to fight for more central spots. Also the earlier you harvest, the better. However I suspect ultimately quantity is more important than quality. If you manage to harvest more times than your opponents, I think you will likely win. Only when you are tied in the number of harvests made then quality determines the outcome. This was what happened in our game. Han managed to plan for and execute more harvests. Although some were done at less ideal locations, his total score was eventually comfortably ahead of us.

The number of rounds in a game is fixed. The game is an open information game. Towards late game, many steps can be calculated accurately. It takes at least five rounds for a tree to complete its lifecycle, from seed to small, then medium, then large tree, and finally being harvested. If you want to harvest at a particular spot, you know your sowing deadline is 5 rounds before the game ends. The game can slow down towards game end when everyone tries to maximise those final rounds.

There's a fox under this tree. In the game there are other animals too.

That large (green) tree at the centre was mine. I occupied this spot for a long time before finally harvesting my tree. Everyone has only two large trees. They are not easy to block, and they absorb much sunlight. It can be a painful decision to harvest it, because your sunlight income will drop. It's a tricky thing to manage. You still have to harvest because that's how you score points.

There are two optional advanced rules. Once you are familiar with the game, you should play four days instead of three. I suspect this will shift the balance of the score tiles. More will be claimed, and it is also more likely some stacks will be exhausted, and the next stack used.

The second advanced rule is seeds and trees may not grow if in shade. This should be interesting and much more challenging. Many trees in the photo above would be stunted. The board dynamics would change.

In the final few rounds, there is less incentive to sow or to grow trees, because there wouldn't be enough time to harvest. Players would be carefully calculating ROI (return on investment). Leftover sunlight is worth points (1VP per 3 sunlight) so you don't want to waste sunlight.

The Thoughts

Photosynthesis is beautiful and eye-catching, but it is not a light and breezy game, as the artwork and theme might suggest. It is anything but harmonious. It is cutthroat and competitive. You fight to grab land. You block sunlight to starve your opponents. It is a perfect information game with no randomness, so it feels chess-like. It taxes the brain, sometimes it is even intimidating. Sometimes players will take a long time to think, and this may be annoying to impatient opponents. I would say the ruthless competition is true to the theme. Trees in a forest do fight for sunlight. It's the law of nature.