Harvest for the World

Scythe hasn't been out of the cupboard for a couple of weeks, so when Chris suggested it last night Andrew and I were amenable.

The box and components make this look a heavy game, but as we remarked approvingly last night, it plays very quickly. Each player represents a faction trying to become the dominant culture in an alternate Europe, but rather than just fight each other you're also trying to win over the local populace to your point of view - you might dominate the landscape, but if your opponents have made themselves more appealing to the locals, you won't win the game.

Each player starts with a faction board that has four 'slots' on it, with a top and bottom action. On your turn, you choose a slot and take either one or both of the available actions. The top actions: Move and Produce get you momentum on the board/resources from workers, Bolster improves your military might and Trade lets you pay money for resources. The bottom actions allow you to Build buildings, Enlist troops to your cause, Deploy a mech (which, unlike your production-minded workers, can fight for you) or Upgrade: making your top actions more profitable and your bottom actions cheaper to achieve.

Me

So you're expanding on the map and aiming, at first, to stay out of each other's way whilst you try and improve the virtual cards in your hand. Like Eclipse, combat becomes a more common by-product - or even just a product - towards the end of the game, when winning or losing can be crucial. However, losing a fight is not as punitive as in Eclipse, and indeed winning one can make your popularity suffer. So whilst the game encourages some aggression, you need to choose your battles.

Stanley loves it and we'd recently played it three times on holiday, and once when his Warhammer-playing pal Theo came over (competitive dad won that one). I love it too - it plays far quicker than Eclipse and is much easier to explain to newbies. Like another favourite, Caverna, turns (usually) feel productive and there's room for Plans B and C. My only criticism is the fact players can magically ping around the board as a result of certain powers (and the mines) kind of breaks up the theme slightly. But then again, in Wallenstein combatants hurl themselves into a giant tower, and in Eclipse you can ignore some of the universe and throw it away... so I think we can handle that minor idiosyncrasy.

Andrew having fun

Not sure what Chris is having

What I really like about Scythe is that there's a story to it - encounter tokens are liberally placed around the board at the start, and interacting with these allows you to make choices - they're always productive, but you can make them especially so and sacrifice your reputation (i.e. lose popularity!) or take the less alluring options and improve your reputation instead.

Several objectives allow you to place a Star to show you've achieved it - the moment any players places their sixth star, the game ends - although as I have found to my cost before, the player ending the game won't necessarily win it.

In the event, Chris found that knowing it slightly better worsened his game - possibly he thought too much? - as Andrew and I charged ahead. I focused on getting my buildings down and enlisting everyone I could - both give you ongoing bonuses for the rest of the game. My faction's special power was to take two options from the Encounter cards, so I travelled the board as far as I could maximising this - and inadvertently turding on Chris - twice - when I found myself stranded in his territory and had to fight my way out. I triggered the game end and took a solid win:

Sam  93
Andrew 62
Chris 23

With the time only 9.30pm, there was a multitude of options open to us. "Something that lasts half an hour!" Andrew said. "Forty-five minutes" Chris countered.

We played Cosmic Run. This is such a fun filler, but I'm starting to wonder if the recipe for success will always be the same. I ignored the alien cards early on and just pushed myself up the planet tracks; as we've found in the past, that seems to lead to the win - and so it was in this case.

Sam 69
Chris 42
Andrew 39

The alien cards are a lot of fun, but are they busted? Probably not, and this is just a random cluster of track-rewarding by fate. We'll see what happens next time.

Andrew called it a night and Chris and I had a quick run at Keltis: The Dice Game, the most challenging part of which - for me - was assembling the four-piece board, much to Chris' amusement. "It's double-sided!" I protested, with some (minor) justification. I got my revenge in the game itself when despite getting confused over which colour we were - in a two player game - I managed to nab the win by a few points.

Nice way to end the weekend, thanks chaps.

Feld of Dreams

Thursday rolled around with seven-day inevitability, like the next phase of the moon. And Andrew and I debated what to play... we both felt a bit Euro-y, so straight-up combat was out. I suggested La Granja, but Andrew didn't bite. Maybe that's too Euro-y... instead we went for our perennial two-player favourite, Macao.

Many Feld fans seem to think this is his dud, but I like the fact that - unlike Castles of Burgundy, say - the theme is tangible. I like the way it combines that dry engine-building stuff with the chance-based dice wheel - which admittedly isn't remotely thematic, but I suppose you could argue it represents fate - the best-laid plans, and all that...

In this instance I didn't really have a plan. As usual I played by the seat of my pants, especially at the start where Andrew was choosing his cards before me. I took cards that were easy to activate - specfically, cards that allowed me to trade in violet, green and grey cubes for gold. But the seat of my pants wore pretty thin as for the second half of the game I was picking up mostly blue and red cubes, meaning my activated cards did nothing except stand around and watch me flail.


thanks to As a Board Gamer

In contrast Andrew had built some kind of Heath-Robinson Macao machine, where cards triggered cards and he seemed awash in cubes and money. Despite my nabbing the first player spot and, at one point, building a 12 point lead, Andrew surged past me during the 11th round, and surged again in end-game scoring, courtesy of a long chain of ownership in the city. I didn't jot down the scores, but it was something like

Andrew 85
Sam 65

We didn't debate the next game for long - Take It Easy is another fave and, abandoning the recent meme of calling themes, we returned to the rhyming couplets of old. Andrew was far more creative in this regard, although I can't recall too many specific calls Bertie Mee was definitely involved. I found myself unable to break away from the fact that 'four' rhymes with 'door' so a third of my calls involved visitors knocking or pressing bells.

I began with a decent 167 and followed it up with 154 to give me a solid score, but Andrew's first round deficit was obliterated by his best round ever of 204 (I think) and he claimed the win:

Andrew 356
Sam 321

And as Finn was finally dislodged from Andrew's lap, we called it a night.

That end of term feeling

Tonight was the final evening of the most sparsely populated GNN season for a long time. For some reason, it had a knockabout craziness to it, perhaps because we were not battling until the final seconds over a hard-fought title, but instead watching me stroll over the finish line thanks to attendance alone.

We (Sam, me, Joe, Ian and Katy) began with Sam’s boys, Joe and Stan, indulging in a couple of rounds of Codemasters with pictures. I didn’t note the scores, but I do remember Katy’s impudence in suggesting I’d made a mistake in giving my clue. Although the spymaster is supposed to stay silent, I couldn’t let this go unchallenged, and I reminded her to “never patronize the Spymaster.”

Then, while Sam put the boys to bed, we decided what the next game might be. Isle of Skye was almost our choice, but we decided it might be a bit much with five players and two newbies.

Instead we went for Fool’s Gold as a nice push-your-luck game that everyone knew. Before long, the sledging started, with Joe loudly questioning my tactics on my first move.

After the generous first round (except for me, who’d played quite badly as Joe had noted) the game got meaner and meaner. Gems were snatched from our hands by false alarm cards, and gold nuggets were replaced by card after card of silt.

It was close at the end, with Ian beating Joe beating Katy on a tie-breaker.

Ian 26
Joe 26
Katy 26
Andrew 23
Sam 21

After this, Sam introduced us to Om Nom Nom, the simple game of trying to eat things without being eaten yourself. A load of dice decide how much of the lower two links in the food chain are available to eat and then the players decide which cards they want to play in order to eat those things. The clever bit is that everyone has a card from the uppermost link in the food chain. So, if you think “ah, there’s lots of flies, I’ll play my frog” then there’s probably someone else around the table who had already thought of that, and will play their hedgehog to eat your frog.

Doing things that no one else is doing seems to be a good strategy. I got lucky in round one, scoring 16 points while my nearest rival had but three. It was too big a gap to bridge. Meanwhile, Joe, with one point after two rounds decided to go Dirk for the third and final round. Dirk did better than Joe did.

Andrew 24
Ian 18
Sam 10
Katy 9
Joe 3

It was still early, and Joe had come to the realisation that you can keep drinking Budweiser and never get drunk. The games continued with Magician’s Night, the glow-in-the-dark game of pushing things towards other things.

Charging up our magicians

Since it’s only a four player, Joe decided to sit out the first game. There then followed a, shall we say, full and frank discussion about what Joe might be doing in the dark while we play. Sam claimed that there was a bit mid-game where the lights suddenly come on, in case Joe got any ideas.

As for the game, once we’d remembered how to set it up, Sam won.

After this, Joe played and Sam sat it out, with a win for Katy.

Since there are no placings, it can’t be leaderboard, but it was a lot of fun.

Next up, much to Katy’s despair, was Skull. She insisted that she didn’t like it and we insisted that she did. Or would, once she got the hang of it.

During the game, people kept coming up a cropper on Ian’s skull. However, he himself won no actual hands of his own, leaving him in last place.

1. Andrew, 1 flip, 3 tiles left
2= Katy, 1 flip
2= Sam, 1 flip
2= Joe, 1 flip
3. Ian, no flips

Finally, the played Pairs, as whiskey and Jaegermeister were brought down from the high shelf. Pairs was as Pairs is: blueberries killed off Ian and Sam. Joe didn’t score at all after round two. There was controversy near the end of the game when Katy, in first place, twisted for the match and Sam accidentally drew two cards. The card he initially showed was okay for Katy, but he took it back and played it again with the right card showing, which bust her. She complained, have briefly thought she’d won, but Sam was firm on the rules.

However, she only had to play safe in the next round and wait for enough people to go bust to win.

Katy 22
Andrew 18
Ian 16
Sam 12
Joe 8

Which ends the season! Congrats to me for my win in Points, and to Katy for the Medal Table, and to Adam for Points Ratio.

And that's how you play Viticulture

Thursday evening at my house is a pretty regular thing, and normally it's just myself, Andrew and Ian. We stopped bothering everyone else as they all appear to have other things going on. But as Adam had recently contacted me about his gaming yearnings, I let him know it was on, just in case - and he turned up! How we warmly embraced him upon arrival! How we wished he'd stayed home just an hour or so later!

Adam hadn't seen the games cupboard/wall in a good while and was suitably impressed/unnerved. There were many games there he hadn't played, but with Andrew and I hankering mildly for Viticulture (Ian was absent), Adam was more than amenable.

And he was all yellow

"Nothing happens for the first hour" I pontificated sagely. "And then it all speeds up at the end"

Forty-five minutes later, Adam had established a ten point lead, and was surging toward the finish line. Andrew and I were having Cheltenham Road flashbacks, to the time when GNN was nearly renamed Adam Wins News, so regularly did he trounce us at everything we played. The two of us had started in a kind of knuckle-cracking, couple-of-press-ups fashion as we shook off the cobwebs of the day: not so much putting our ducks in a row, as noticing that we had ducks and going "Ooooh! ducks!". We'd forgotten that Adam is not a man to stand around idly admiring poultry, and by the end of the first year he had planted grapes, harvested them, and was eyeing up a growing stack of orders in his hand. I'd sown a single field, sold another, and Andrew was preparing to show round a bunch of visitors.

Hillmannnnnnn!!!

I would like to add here for the record that we did help Adam in the early stages: suggesting what cards to begin with, to take that extra worker, and so on. We were marking out our own graves! The creeping custard had slid into the house at half eight - by the time we'd warmly embraced, opened our brews, explained Viticulture, played Viticulture and packed Viticulture away in a stunned daze, it was a night-is-young ten past ten.

How does he do it?

"How do you do it?" Andrew asked him. Adam said he tried to only ever take an option on the board if he got the bonus with it. Can it really be that simple? I hope not. I'd be disappointed in both the game, and Adam. 

Adam 21
Andrew  15
Sam 12

So we played Cosmic Run. This is mine and Andrew's new favorite filler: a race for points as meteors barrel their way past you and you befriend and exploit mathematically-minded aliens. Andrew went the card route; regularly picking up little helpers. I ignored them until the end, trying to force the pace by racing up the planet tracks. Adam did a little of both... it was tight in the end, so tight that Andrew realized if he'd played his last turn differently he would have won by at least 4 points. But he didn't!

Sam 59
Andrew 58
Adam 48

Adam still had half a glass of wine, so I suggested the ten-minute game of predation: Om Nom Nom. But by the time I'd explained the rules - which took about 30 seconds - I realized I was too tired to play. We called it a night. Great to have the slinking tapioca back at the table!

You know where you are with a one

Tuesday’s at Sam’s brought a collection of gamers in from the balmy September evening. We were eventually seven, but while we waited for Hollie, six of us bashed out a game of For Sale.

During the opening round I only got a bunch of middling cards to use in round two, so I can’t complain about my middling position. Even the iconic 1 card in my hand didn’t help. Ian had the 30 card, and used it immediately to nab $15,000. He wondered if he might have overpaid for it, as everyone else went low that round.

Andy $55,000
Matt $49,000
Joe $42,000
Andrew $41,000
Sam $37,000
Ian $33,000

By the end of this, Hollie had arrived and while she and Sam talked about animation, everyone else decided what they wanted to play. As it was, Joe, Andy, Ian and Matt chose Isle of Skye, while I joined up with Hollie and Sam.

We looked at the games cupboard, although games section-of-wall might be more appropriate now. When asked, Hollie said she felt like something sci-fi-ish, which left our choices a bit limited. If only she’d said “engine-building with a vague medieval European theme pasted over the top” we’d have had no end of possibilities.

In the end I pushed for Quantum as being shorter than Eclipse or Ascending Empires, and longer than Cosmic Run and less silly that Galaxy Truckers. However, I’d forgotten how complicated it can seem on its first play. Hollie was more or less guided through her first two moves by Sam. He even suggested that she attack him if he thought it was the right move.

But there’s no denying Sam mastery at the game as he suddenly won the game by putting down one cube, getting a card that increased dominance enough that he was able to put a second (and his last cube) down.

Sam 5
Hollie 3
Andrew 3

Isle of Skye remains a mystery to me, and I was aware of people complaining about tiles and money, but little else. The game ended:

Ian 78
Joe 74
Matt 73
Andy 72

At our end of the table, we began a game of Cosmic Run. More dice, but less confrontation, with fate being the meanest opponent. It was all about avoiding the minus points at the bottom of the planet tracks, mostly. Other than that, Hollie and I used the previously untried crystal method. It works pretty well.

Andrew 72
Sam 66
Hollie 66

While we played Cosmic Run, the other four played Money, the cunning Knizia game. Was Andy distracted by his overwhelming sense of deja-vu? He kept mentioning a niggling memory that he’d played it before. The scores were fascinating. Ian was pleased with his 500 points (more than twice his previous score) but was in for a rude awakening.

Joe 810
Matt 530
Andy 520
Ian 500

All except Joe had a full set of a currency, while Joe had most of one, and some scoring sets from others. Last time we played, there were five players. I suppose with one less, there’s more opportunity to diversify.

Now, we were all together for a rousing game of 6nimmt. Andy set off home and Hollie preferred to watch. The remaining five suffered through a tough first round, followed by a second round in which Joe manfully took all the hits for the rest of us. In the third and final round, Matt picked up a cornucopia of cows, while Ian’s clear round almost saw him steal the win.

Sam 30
Ian 33
Andrew 35
Matt 53
Joe 76

And as we head toward the last week of this sparsely populated season, I top the table in points, Adam has points ratio and Katy still has the medal table, even though she’s not been here in weeks.

Oh, and the title’s a bit tenuous, but I did notice that in tonight’s games, several had an important (if sometimes illusory) role for the one: For Sale, Quantum, Cosmic Run and (sort of) 6nimmt. One: it’s a number you can trust.

Imperial Mint

On Saturday, Ian, Andrew and I found ourselves at Chris' house. Whilst the children played Minecraft we opted for a more combative affair - Chris's recent purchase: Imperial Settlers.



The box cover has a slightly Super-Mario-esque character on it that suggests a friendly family-type game, but the contents told a different story. Each player begins with a small, book-mark shaped board that is divided into three: production, feature, and action. Over the five rounds of the game, you'll pick up production at the start of the round, and use it to build cards: more production is more production, feature is a whenever you do X, get Y element, and action is a kind of cashing in: either on the card, or potentially other people.

Because for all that Imperial Settlers is a very Euro-y engine-builder, it has high screwage potential. Everyone starts each round with a raze token, and that can be used to either raze a card from your hand, or (if you have two raze tokens) a card somebody else has built! You get a reward for doing so, but razes aren't the only combative element. Ian's saboteur card let him steal resources form opponent, something he did with alarming regularity to Chris (alarming at least until we discovered we only get to use our cards once per round - after we discovered that, he just stole from Chris once per round)

Also, there are two types of cards: your bespoke deck (I was Egyptian, Ian Barbarian, Chris and Andrew Roman and... something else?) which once built is impervious to raiding, and the common deck, which can be targeted but are much cheaper to build.

My ongoing aversion to text on cards meant I was never going to fall in love with it, but it's a clever design and if you like a bit of engine-building mixed with some roughhouse tactics, it would scratch an itch.

Sam wins
Andrew
Chris
Ian

Didn't write down the scores, but I think that's correct...

We followed this with the new palette-cleanser of choice: Cosmic Run! Roll dice, get your ships up to the planets as fast as you can (before they explode!), but don't forget those Alien Cards. I can't remember who won. Andrew? Me? Great game, though.

Finally we bashed out a quick game of Push It. I don't remember who won that either (Chris?) but I do know it wasn't me: I was stuck on zero points for quite a while, then one point, and I think I finished on a baggy, saggy, draggy three points! A new low?

Andrew and Ian made their way back to Bristol and Chris and I settled down to watch Match of the Day. What a night! Thanks chaps!

Cosmic Man

Tonight's blog title is named for Andrew, who so nearly pulled off a hat-trick off impressive wins.

We began with Cosmic Run, designed by Biblios Man Steve Finn. Unlike the GNN favourite filler, there's no hidden knowledge here, and - as yet- no shit-eating. But there's a fair bit of luck-pushing, as everyone tries to push their ships up 5 planet tracks before the planets themselves get blown apart by meteors.

Mix in some tech and alien abilities and it might sound like it's getting complicated, but it was actually super-simple. It was also fast, furious, and fun, and Andrew claimed his first victory of the evening, managing to twice get himself up the track on the hard-to-please number 5 planet by rolling five of a kind:

Andrew 61
Sam 60
Ian 38

There was some crazy talk of playing Railways before we settled on the equally-crazy Viticulture, the crazy game of high-tension booze production. Everyone sold a field! We began playing to the manner born, but although Ian's winery attracted many visitors, they pissed on the presses and puked in the cellar. No engine-building for you, as the boardgame nazi might say.

Whilst I built a small but diligently productive winery, Andrew concentrated on filling some big orders. In the end, they took him to a superlative victory as he obliterated the scoreboard on a high-drama final round:

Andrew 26
Sam 25
Ian 6

We finished with Push It. Could Andrew make it a clean sweep? It was a close game, with the scores at 9-9-8 at one stage - but ultimately, no:

Sam 11
Ian 10
Andrew 8

That was that!