Valley Games usually has one or two games that intrigue me each Spiel (Container, Municpium, Master Builder) and this year it’s Crows.  Crows is a tile placement game where you try to entice as many crows to the tile which has has your shiny object on it.  Players know how the Crows will move at the end of each round, as they follow a set of rules, so placing the tiles and your shiny object strategically is they key to scoring points.  It seems like attracting crows away from opponents’ shiny objects will be half the battle (and fun).  Plus, there are a few special actions that can be earned and used too.  The games sounds cute and a little bit different plus, for some reason, I like the idea of the crow meeple pieces.  I’m not expecting too much from it and hope it will be one of the lighter games I enjoy from Spiel this year.

With so many new games coming out each year at Spiel, we often give them nicknames to make it easier to remember which one is which.  The game Powerboats is like Formula De but with boats, so got nicknamed as ‘Formula Boat’.  Battlestar Galactica is co-operative with a potential traitor like Shadows Over Camelot so gets called ‘Cylons Over Camelot’.  And Claustrophobia got called Dungeon Hulk (as it’s Space Hulk in a Dungeon).  As there is tile-placement in Crows I’m already calling it ‘Crowcassonne’.

Ys is an area control game where players gain gems and points by placing their pieces in different areas of the city.  It’s a fairly simple game but with some clever subtleties and interwoven game mechanics that make it stand out.  I usually split out the game description from my opinion but  I’ll look at each one as I explain them on this occasion

Hidden Value Piece Placement
Each player has a set of wooden cylinders in their colour which have a value on one end from between 0 to 4.  During the game, players take turns placing two of their pieces into any of the 3 areas in any of the city’s 4 neighbourhoods, or onto the market grid.  An interesting game mechanic is that one of the two placed pieces is placed with the number showing (numbered end face-up) and the other piece is placed with the number hidden (numbered end face-down).  This means that players have some knowledge of what the competition in each area might be but not exact knowledge.  I found this created really interesting gameplay as it allows for a bit of bluffing as well as posturing. Read the rest of this entry »

In Vineta, players are Norse gods trying to sink the city of Vineta in order to score points primarily by removing houses from the sunken sections.  The game board is made up of nine city sections that fit together to create make a city comprising of 3 rings of 3 areas. Lots of coloured houses are placed on the city areas at the start by the players (usually quite spread out).

Each player has a hand of cards and two secret objective tiles – one shows which city area the player will get bonus points for if it is the one area that survives, and the other tile shows which colour of houses they will get bonus points for if any of that colour survive too.

Each round, players take turns playing a card from their hand.  Cards fall into two main types – wave cards and special actions. Wave cards have a value of 1 to 4 and, at the end of the round, the city area with the highest wave total will sink. Read the rest of this entry »

Like me, you may know Wabash Cannonball as Chicago Express as that’s the name under which it was released by Queen Games.  For this review, I’ll refer to the game as Wabash Cannonball as that’s the name of the iPhone app and the original game, but the games are (as far as I’m aware) the same.

THE GAME
During the game, the players develop railroad networks in America.  Different to many games, players don’t own a single railroad company but, instead, can buy shares in any of the railroads and earn money from dividends. Going clockwise, players take an action to either start an auction for a share in a railroad, extend a railroad (in which they own shares) by 3 pieces of track, or develop a space.  Each round, there are 3 auction, 4 development and 5 lay track actions available.  When two of these three action types have all been used, the round ends and dividends are paid to railroad shareholders.  The dividend paid per share is the railroad’s value (based on the spaces it runs through) divided by the current number of shares owned. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I’ve referred to Jamaica a couple of times (in previews of Sobek and Tikal II) because of its visual design.  So, I thought I’d give it a proper review as it’s a really good, light game.

In Jamaica, players are pirate captains who are having a race – the first pirate ship around the island ends the game and ship with the most points wins.  Each player has their own deck of actions cards and holds a hand of 3 cards.  Each card shows two icons – the left one shows the day-time action and the right one shows the night-time action.  The actions are: move forwards, move backwards, take gold, take food, take cannons and each card has a different mix of these action icons.

Each turn, the first player rolls two six-sided dice and allocates one to the day-time and the other to the night-time.  These are now fixed for this round and all players will use those results. Read the rest of this entry »

The original Tikal is a classic game of archaeological discover where players send their explorers into the jungle to find tombs and collect treasure.  Each player had an amount of action points each round that they could spend on a variety of activities, and the board consisted of hex tiles that would be revealed and placed by the players.

The news that Tikal II was being released was quite unusual as there are few direct board games sequels and Tikal is some years old (winning the Spiel des Jahres in 1999).  The images of Tikal II that were released looked very nice indeed.  Cool looking little flags and this time the action is set in a single temple.  Until now, the gameplay was a mystery but the rules have just been released.

In Tikal II, players reveal the insides of a temple by placing rooms (hex tiles).  Each room has a few doors on some of its sides (all of the same colour) and a player can move their explorer through these doors if they have the matching colour key.  Read the rest of this entry »

After many years of having Windows-based smartphones, I decided to change to an iPhone because (a) I didn’t like the look of the new Windows phones, and (b) I saw various board games being released on iPhone.  Zooloretto was the first major conversion and was the first one I bought when I got my iPhone.

THE GAME
Zooloretto is a light board game that won the coveted Spiel des Jahres award.  Players are all zoo keepers with their own zoos and they try to fill their enclosures with different animals.  However, there are some difficult decisions to be made.  On their turn, a player can either draw a tile from the bag and place it on one of the delivery lorries (which have space for 3 tiles each) or they can take a lorry and keep all the tiles on it.  The tiles are either an animal, a coin or a concession stand (i.e. popcorn).

So, do you take a lorry so you get just 2 tiles but ones that you want, or do you want or risk someone else takes it before you get a chance next turn so it will have more tiles on?  Read the rest of this entry »

THE GAME
Samurai is a game of tile placement where players try to surround towns and cities with their different strength tiles in order to capture as many of the three different types of tokens as possible.  The winner is the player who owns two majorities of the tokens (or has one majority and more other tokens than their opponent).  For a description of the game, please read my full review of Samurai the board game as the gameplay of the iPhone game is exactly the same (as you would hope). Read the rest of this entry »

Sobek is a small 2-4 player, Egyptian-themed game where players take cards and lay down sets of 3 in order to score points over 3 rounds.  During the rounds, 3 cards of the same type can be laid down as a set (wheat, cattle ivory, etc.) and you can increase a set already laid down by adding another set of 3 cards of the same type.

It might sound relatively ordinary but there are two game mechanics that caught my attention.  First, cards are taken from a row of 9 – only one of the first 4 cards can be taken by a player but if they take any card other than the first card they must put the others before it into their corruption deck.  The player with the most cards in their corruption deck at the end of a round will lose some points.  Second, the score for your cards is  the number of cards multiplied by the total number of scarabs on each (some have no scarabs) which sounds like a good system.  Plus, there are more scarabs on the less commonly occurring cards (like ivory) whereas the more common cards (like wheat) have fewer scarabs on them – the mathematical part of my mind likes the balance of that. Read the rest of this entry »

I was interested in Neuroshima Hex when it was released at Spiel a few years ago.  However, I didn’t get a chance to play it then, or since, so I was pleased to see it released on iPhone so I could finally give it a go.

THE GAME
Neuroshima Hex is a 2-4 player combat game using hex tiles on a relatively small hex grid.  Each turn, players draw 3 random tiles, discards 1 and play the other 2 tiles.  Some tiles have immediate effects, like grenades and push-backs, so aren’t placed on the board; however, the majority are units which do get placed on the board.  Some units can attack enemies (ranged and melee) and icons on the tiles edges show in which directions they will attack – the player chooses which direction they face when placing them.  Some other units boost the performance of some neighbouring units. Read the rest of this entry »