Tournay is a card-based game where players aim to score the most prestige points (PPs) by building their own town.  It’s by the same designers as Troyes (which was why I pre-ordered a copy) but, whilst it uses the same art style as Troyes and a couple of similar-ish elements, Tournay is very different to Troyes and not the card game version of it at all.

In the middle of the table are 9 decks of cards – levels 1, 2 & 3 in colours red, white and yellow.  The cards are buildings and characters – buildings can be activated to use their abilities; whereas, characters have effects when buildings are placed or triggered in the same row/column as the character card.  For example a character card may earn a player cash when they activate a white building.  Whilst you can build over placed cards, as your town can only be 3×3 in size, it is plain from the start that you need to find a good balance between buildings and characters and place them so they have synergy. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »