Louis XIV is mostly a worker placement game but it’s quite unusual.  First of all, there’s no board; instead, there are 12 mini-boards laid out corner-to-corner in a square grid – this makes it easy to flip over any of the mini-boards but it also leaves spaces where various tokens get placed too.  Over 4 rounds, players try to earn as many victory points as possible.  Players can earn many VPs by fulfilling their mission cards which are completed by collecting the power chips shown on each card.  There are 4 types of power chip as well as one type that counts as any type.

Each round, players receive 5 cards – each card corresponds to one of the 12 mini-boards.  Each turn, players can play one of their cards and place up to 3 of their cubes (workers) from their supply onto the mini-board that matches their card.  Also, they can move any of the newly placed cubes onto an adjoining mini-board so long as they leave at least one cube behind and do not spread in two different directions at once from the same mini-board.  As players only have a limited amount of cubes, they can use their turn to add some cubes to their supply instead of placing.  Players discard the last card left in their hand so usually get 4 turns. Read the rest of this entry »

Occasionally, a friend of mine runs an all-day boardgames tournament at the games shop (Eclectic Games) in Reading (UK) where anyone can turn up and play.  The day consists of around 5 or 6 games each played with 3 or 4 players and the people in each group changes every game so you get to play with most people present.  Saturday was the fourth of these tournament days (called BADGER which stands for Berskhire All-Day Gaming Extravaganza in Reading) and I got to play games that were mostly new to me.

The games I played were: Read the rest of this entry »