When I heard the designer of Carcassonne had a new game, I knew I wanted to check it out.  Players build forts and towns in the land of Albion (Roman Britain) where the south is tame but the north is inhabited by the Picts who are less welcoming to the Romans.  Each player controls Settlers (who build buildings and collect resources) and Legionnaires (who increase military strength in their region).  The first player to complete three level 4 buildings (including one in a far North region where it is most hostile) wins.

MOVEMENT
An interesting gameplay mechanic is movement.  Each turn, a player can move as many of their own units as they want.  The number of regions (distance) each unit can move is dictated by what buildings the player has built.  At the end of the player’s turn, all settler units are returned to a home camp. Read the rest of this entry »

El Paso is a push-your-luck game where players are cowboys who are trying to loot towns and get away before the sheriff arrives. The players loot 7 towns one after the other. Each town contains loot tiles which each display one of 6 loot types (cattle, gambling, horse, cash, saloon, gold) and a number from 1 to 5.  Each turn a player either commits to a turn of looting, or moves on to the next town.

LOOTING
All players that decide to loot lay one of their cards face down – each card shows a type of loot and a number from 1 to 8 – and these show what loot each player will try to take.  Then, the dice are rolled – each dice shows 2 cattle brands, 2 dice icons and 2 sheriff stars. If any sheriff stars are rolled, these dice are frozen for this town. If all 5 dice now show sheriff stars, the sheriff has arrived – any players who are looting are caught and must discard all loot tiles in their possession (victory points are unaffected). Read the rest of this entry »

Many people have compared Atlantis to Cartagena but I shall review Atlantis from fresh as not everyone has played Cartagena (and will add a few notes about Cartagena at the end).

In Atlantis, 52 stacks of tiles are laid out in a trail leading from Atlantis to the mainland with one water tile in the middle.  The tiles are either in stacks of two tiles or single tiles.  Each tile shows one of 6 different symbols and each has a number on them from 1 to 7.  Players have three meeple (which they will move from Atlantis to the mainland) and a hand of cards which each show one of the different symbols.  The goal: To collect as many points as possible.

Each turn, a player plays a card and moves one of their meeple to the next tile along that shows the matching symbol. Read the rest of this entry »

Langfinger was one of my favourite games (initial review) at Spiel 09 – simple, cute, fun and small. 

Further plays reveals that there are definitely tactics to the game.  The placing of your cubes which will determine you actions and their order  offers some interesting decisions and quite a lot of trying to work out what the other players will be up to too.  Mentally crossing your fingers that they won’t take the spot you want adds a nice excitement.

Also, the fencing of items (which is how you convert most goods into points) is really key as it can be a complete bottleneck.  Having lots of hot stolen goods is (literally) pointless if you can not fence them. Read the rest of this entry »

In Cheese, players flip a piece of cheese (made of foam) and score points depending upon how it lands.  One corner of the cheese block has a nibble taken out of it.  When the cheese lands, if the nibbled corner is facing downwards the player gets no points and the turn moves on to the next player.  However, if the nibbled corner is facing upwards the player scores points: 1 point if the cheese is resting on its largest side, 3 points if resting on its long edge, and 9 points if resting on its short edge.  A player that scores points on a flip can gamble those points and take another turn immediately; however, if they do not score any points on their next flip then they lose all the points for that turn.

The cheese block has large round holes in it of three sizes and these start the game filled with foam discs so it is a single, solid block.  When a player scores points they remove a foam disc (small for 1 point, medium for 3 points and large for 9 points) from the cheese to keep to record their score.  Removing a disc changes the balance of the cheese block slightly.  The first player to 12 points wins. Read the rest of this entry »

Infinite City is a tile laying game.  The first thing to strike you is that the rules are very, very short.  This definitely appealed to me but the short rules do not mean the game is shallow.

The goal of Infinite City is to score as many points as possible and points are scored depending upon which tiles your markers are on at the end of the game.  To set-up, five tiles are placed face-down on the table in a cross shape and each player is given 15 markers of their colour and dealt a hand of 5 tiles, which they keep hidden from the other players.

On a player’s turn, they select a tile from their hand and place it face-up orthogonally next to a tile already in play.  They place one of their markers on this new tile and then follow the written instructions on it.  The instructions have lots of different effects such as swapping the position of two tiles in play (along with any markers on them), removing all markers from a single tile, playing another tile immediately, adding more tiles to your hand, swapping hands, and so on. Read the rest of this entry »

The rules for 7 seemed relatively straight forwards when read, but when you see the game laid out it can be quite daunting as there are a lot of different decks of cards, different tokens, even several boards.  (Not that daunting is necessarily a bad thing.)

In 7, the players are heroes in a fantasy setting working together to stop the Unnamed returning to the world.  The players win if they can close all 6 portals, or if they can collect the 7 pieces of armour with at least one hero having a Might score of 30+.  If all 14 cataclysms take place, the players lose.  However, whilst the game is co-operative, there can be only one winner (so long as all the players don’t lose) and that will be the player with the most might. Read the rest of this entry »

Carson City is a people placement game that I really enjoyed on my first play (initial review).  Lots to think about and plenty of difficult decisions.  I was looking forwards to my second play and was interested to see if it would offer new challenges and opportunities.

During my second play, all the different characters continued to have their own appeal which was great as it meant no-one feels they’re left with a choice of total duds, although you can still find the characters that best fits your plan are not available because other players have already taken the ones you’d like most. Read the rest of this entry »

I enjoyed Factory Manager a lot when I played it (initial review here).  A second play (again with experienced gamers) was just as enjoyable and a chance to try my gained knowledge to improve my efficiency.

Like my initial play, I found there were lots of decisions to make which is not common to find in a relatively short game.  So, it held my interest as before and kept my brain very busy.  I still really like how the turn order is balanced by the later players getting discounts on all their purchases.  It’s a really nice game mechanic as it means that turn order doesn’t over-dominate the game, which means players who have more workers available because they’ve gone the manpower efficiency route don’t automatically get to dominate the game.  I can’t tell yet if it’s almost too balanced as few players have bid for these tiles in my games and no-one’s ever bid more than one worker, but it’s a nice system. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the first of my on-going updates of games which I have already reviewed, have now played again and had some more thoughts about them.

Tobago is a fun, relatively simple game with some fresh gameplay mechanics, a beautiful board and lovely pieces (initial review here).  I’ve even seen talk of it being a nominee for the Spiel des Jahres – I can imagine that coming true but it’s a long way off yet.

On first play, the game may seem fun but shallow; however, this play of Tobago revealed that there are some light tactics to be found within the game, especially in the final turns.  Adding clues to multiple treasure searches is a great way to gain treasure cards without neccesarily needing to move to pick the treasure up – so it pays to co-operate with others.  However, one player will always find it tempting to dominate one treasure by playing lots of their own cards on it.  This is fine early on but doing this late in the game means you’d better be able to pick it up yourself because no-one else is likely to do it for you. Read the rest of this entry »