Archive for the 'Troyes' Category

New reviews will be online next week.  I’m about to launch the new boardgames community site I’ve been working on – hopefully tomorrow – so that will give me an opportunity to write-up some new reviews.

I had a day off from coding yesterday to attend the games day at Eclectic Games shop in Reading (UK) yesterday which featured games from Z-Man Games.  It was a day tournament where you get assigned to random games against random mixtures of players. I played Grimoire, Bridge Troll, Troyes and Skyline 3000.

I shall add reviews of Grimoire, Cave Troll and Skyline 3000 soon. I really enjoyed Skyline as it felt like Manhattan (one of my favourite games with 4 players) but with different challenges.  Bridge Troll was very interesting and I liked it although it took a while to get my head around how to get what I wanted.  Read the rest of this entry »

Troyes was in the top games on the Spiel Fairplay rankings throughout the show.  Fortunately, I pre-ordered my copy as it sold out quickly.

Troyes is a mixture of worker placement and dice allocation.  The goal is to earn the most victory points (VPs).  Players start with a few workers and one use for these is to place them in one of the 3 principal buildings: town hall (yellow), palace (red) and bishopric (white).  At the start of each round, players receive 1 coloured dice for each of their workers in these buildings (yellow dice for workers in the yellow building, etc).  Players roll their dice and place them in their area of the town square.

Before the main actions, 2 event cards are drawn which threaten the city and cause negative effects (like a loss of cash).  The first player (and maybe players after them if required) will need to discard dice to combat the immediate effects although this doesn’t remove the events from the board. Read the rest of this entry »

I posted about the forthcoming Troyes a week or so ago.  I’ve now read the rules and it looks excellent.  Players each roll dice (based on how many meeple they have in the council buildings) and these create a dice pool.  Players then take turns using the dice to activate different parts of the city to gain resources and money.  Players can use their own dice for free but have to pay other players to use their dice.  This sounds like a fresh addition to worker placement and I’m very keen to play it.  So much so, I’ve pre-ordered it.

Unfortunately for me, Troyes combines together two game design ideas that I’ve been playing with in my own prototypes.  But, hey ho, that’s the way it often goes and I’m really looking forwards to playing Troyes.

Link to pre-order page and rules: http://users.skynet.be/fb514094/News_eng.html

James.

A couple of forthcoming games have caught my attention recently:

TROYES is designed by Xavier Georges who created Royal Palace and Carson City – both of which I like a lot, especially the latter. Troyes is a city building game using dice – it sounds like players use a central pool of dice but can also buy them off of each other too.  Players have secret agendas too.  Definitely one I have to try and/or buy.

STRONGHOLD: UNDEAD is an expansion for Stronghold and itsounds like there is an undead army storming the walls of the castle instead of the goblins, orcs and trolls.  One big difference sounds like there is no glory points this time – purely the task of breaking into the stronghold before 8 game turns are up.  The glory points of the original game were an interesting system but people I have played with (and myself) found the amounts of them required to win meant it was very difficult for the invader to win after turn 6 (out of 10).  So, a straight break-in or not  with a new type of army sounds great.

I’m really looking forwards to trying these at Essen and I may even pre-order them.

James.

(Note to publishers out there: I’m much more likely to pre-order and buy a game without trying it first if the rules are available to read beforehand.  Sure, reading a few rules can make me realise a game is not for me, but not having rules to read means I’m much less likely to pre-order it).