Play My Gold Mine

Not sure why they make a big deal of “Open & Play”. We’ve been doing that with our games for years..

My Gold Mine is a nice little game. Particularly if you allow nice to mean “Setting up fellow players for a bit of dragon flambé”. The rules are simple enough. Each turn you have to decide whether to head for he exit or pick up some more gold and maybe move towards the dragon (a brave move).

The risk is that if you find yourself occupying the same position as the dragon you end up roasted and out of the round. Some of the moves let you mess with your fellow players, swapping places with them or dragging everyone towards the exit when you’re ahead in the game.

The game plays over three rounds and the tension racks up nicely as you head for the final that will decide the winner. It was great fun and comes strongly recommended. Even though I didn’t win..

Decktective: Nightmare in the Mirror

A great way to spend a couple of hours

We had a great time tonight playing “Decktective: Nightmare in the Mirror”. It was passed on to us as something we might enjoy. We did. It’s a card based game which turns each player into a detective racing against time to crack a tricky kidnap case. Clues have to be evaluated, shared and decoded and a crime scene examined. It’s great fun, very clever, and you can only play it once. But then you pass it on to the next person who might like it.

There are more games in the series. We are definitely going to seek them out. Strongly recommended.

Bought some board games

Now I just have to work out where to put them….

I found out about the board game sale via the Yorkshire Boardgaming group on Facebook. This morning I was down in a garage in Willerby looking at hundreds of games arrayed on trestle tables. I started with a little pile of potential purchases, but then things stepped up a gear when I was told that everything was being sold at half the sticker price. I ended up with a boot full.

We’ve not played all the games just yet, but we did have a quick go at Tonari last night. I bought it because I liked the look of the game art on the box (this is how I buy most of my games). It turns out to be extremely strategic, with simple rules, pleasing play pieces and lots of scope for cunning. We can work our way through the rest of them over the next few weeks.

On Tour Board Game

We’ve just had another in-person board game night. The novelty of being in the same room as everyone is starting to wear off a bit, but it is still much more fun than online. We played a game called “On Tour” which is all about planning routes over the USA or Europe. You take it in turns to throw dice to get numbers you have to place on a map to form a route of continuously ascending values.

I was spectacularly bad at it. I think this was because I made some bad decisions early on which destroyed any prospect of making progress. The game itself is beautifully produced and the artwork is very well done. Don’t expect to finish the game in 20 minutes like the rules say though. It took us a couple of hours to get complete all the routes. Perhaps we’ll be a bit faster next time. And maybe I won’t put adjacent values at opposite sides of a continent.

Play Mantis

Mantis is a nice little game. Except that it isn’t nice. And it isn’t little. There are loads of cards, each of which poses the question “Which of the three colours on the back is on the front?”. Gameplay involves either scoring “I’m going to user the colour on the other side to match with cards I have and score points” or stealing “I’m going to use the colour on the other side to match with cards I don’t have and steal them from someone else”.

Get ten scored cards and you win. And that’s it. There really isn’t much else to tell. The game is beautifully presented, with an entire back story that will tell you a lot more about shrimps that you thought there was to know. The rules are simple, but how you apply them and what you do is up to you and can get surprisingly deep. This is not a game that you will spend the entire evening playing, but it is a great way to get the party started.

The Estates is a great game

We’ve started having in-person game nights again. With real people. At the last one we played The Estates. This is a fantastic game. The gameplay has you playing as a construction company vying with others to put buildings on tracts of land. If you manage to fill your tract, you get points for the bits of the buildings you made in it. If the tract is not filled, all of those in it get negative points.

It is great. Highly strategic, with with plenty of bluff, counter bluff and whatnot. One wonderful thing about the game is that every turn involves an auction, which means that even when it is not your turn you can either buy something you’d rather like or try to scupper another player by forcing the price up.

The gameplay forces a kind of cooperation. It would be impossible to fill a tract with just your own buildings. However, since there can be only one winner, it also forces chicanery and double crossing. It is the kind of game that you really appreciate playing in the same room as everyone else.

I’ve put in an order for a copy for Father’s Day……..

Whatever happened to MouseTrap?

You know how old people are supposed to get cross about change? Wellllllllll.

They’ve changed the MouseTrap board game. The new one doesn’t let you eliminate other players by catching them. Instead you collect portions of cheese or something. Most unimpressed. I see this further evidence of the continuing decline of civilisation etc etc.

My advice: seek out the original and best. Proper sudden death action.

Codewords smut overload

We spent a very happy (and silly) evening playing Codewords. It’s a great web based version of a popular board game. Two teams take it in turns guessing their team’s words from a set of shared ones using one word clues from the “spymaster”.

When you start the game you can nominate the types of words that you are using as the start. Tonight one of our number thought it would be hilarious to use nothing but the “innuendo” selection of words. In the game we were playing as “spymaster” doing two things: thinking up clues for smutty words and trying to work out why some of the words are smutty in the first place.

We did win that game though, I’m quite proud of our use of the single word “stringy” as a clue for “snake”, “floss” and “hairy”.

Eight Minute Empire is a fun game (but longer than 8 minutes)

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Eight Minute Empire is an empire building game that didn’t take eight minutes for us. It took a little bit longer. Perhaps we were over thinking it. You have a very limited number of turns and the moves for your turn are specified by a shared set of cards that you work through as the game progresses. It does suffer a bit from the “seeing a card that makes for a lovely move and then seeing someone else use that card to make theirs” syndrome, but you do have the fun of making good moves that thwart others.

It is all about making sure that at the very last turn you have more territory than anyone else. This means it doesn’t matter if the following move would see you wiped off the face of the earth, the tactic I used was to spread myself as thin as possible at exactly the right time. It seemed to work, because I won one of the games. The online play works pretty well, the game looks good and the background music goes on for ever. I’m sure they are hoping that it adds atmosphere to the gameplay but for me the biggest problem with the game was that once I’d started playing there was no way to turn the music down again.

So, recommended for a quick burst of world domination, but make sure you turn the music down first.

Play Nomids

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Nomids is a lovely little game. There is a lot of chance involved, in that a good dice throw can make you a quick winner, but it also provides a lot of very nice “shafting mechanics” (in other words there are some neat ways that you ruin the game for another player. Having said that, when we played one person just kept winning. I guess they were just very lucky.

Actually, Nomids is as much a game framework, as a game in that the ten sets of little pyramids can be used in lots of other games that are described in detail on the game website, And it is rare to find games for up to ten players that are as much fun as this. Strongly recommended.

Cantaloup

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Cantaloop is about a man with a mission and a nice line in snappy dialog. Returning to his home town after a spell in prison for a crime he probably didn’t commit he’s recruiting a crew to take down the villain of the piece. Your job is to help in by guiding him through a series of scenes that play like a point and click adventure game from the eighties. The game is packaged as a spiral bound book. You flick between pages using your magic viewer (actually a red filter) to find out what your actions end up doing.

The scenes are really well drawn and after a while the interaction becomes second nature. Along the way you get to have conversations with the locals which are set out as scripted scenes, allowing those playing to hone their amateur dramatic skills. We’re a way into the first book in the series and having great fun. Well worth a look if you want to spend a few hours with friends or family solving nicely made puzzles and enjoying some truly awesome puns and one-liners.

Playing Cosmic Frog

Derek and Maggy about to do something devious with their green frog..

Derek and Maggy about to do something devious with their green frog..

So tonight we had our weekly games night. We played that game where you control a two mile high frog that can eat the landscape and regurgitate it. You know the one.

Or perhaps you don’t. Cosmic Frog is a game of strategy and combat that, once you get your head around the mechanism, works well. You use your frog to collect lumps of land which you then arrange in configurations that will earn you points at the end of the game. Other frogs are of course doing the same thing, and might also also decide to challenge you to a battle where you might get knocked off the board for a while and be forced to watch other players pick over your carefully curated terrain.

There are lots of special powers that you can pick up and use if you remember to reveal that you have them. And over time the landscape reduces and the game can come to quite sudden end.

The turn order is random which adds a bit of tension at the expense of you not being able to plan too much because you never know when you’ll be able to make the moves.

To me the measure of a good game is one I want to have another try at because I want to see if I can play it better next time. Cosmic Frog just about passes this test. It’s available for free on TableTop Simulator and I reckon it is worth a go if you are looking for new experiences for your game nights.

Dominion Online is awesome and free to play

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Dominion is a “deck building” game. Each player starts with the same set of cards and at each turn they can use the powers on those cards to do stuff, buy new cards and hopefully a few victory points. As the turns go round you cycle through your deck which means that the you get to use the good cards you have got, along with any bad cards like curses which other players inflict upon you.

In real life this kind of game can be a bit of a pain to play, what with the constant shuffling and dealing. However, it works incredibly well on the computer and you can play with a bunch of friends straight from the browser. Just go here and sign up.

The game experience is very good. Pro tip - change the shape of your browser window so that it is taller and thinner (like above) and you can see more details of the cards you’re holding.

It’s completely free to play, it only starts to cost money if you want to buy any of the add-on card decks. And I’m not saying it’s a great game just because I won. Even though I did.

Maketober Day 20: Making Enemies with Game of Thrones

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I never got round to watching the Game of Thrones TV series. But now I’ve played the board game. It was hilarious. In the game you take control one of the factions fighting for the famous “Iron Throne”. Not sure why, it doesn’t sound very comfortable. The strapline for the game is “win or die”. I was always fairly sure where I was going to end up when we started playing this evening, but I gave it a good go.

The game lets you make alliances. This is great fun. Some players tried to ally with everyone else. I allied with someone and then promptly attacked them. A move that didn’t end well for me. And I now have a reputation for treachery that will take a while to live down.

The game is all about strategy and planning, which put me at a bit of a disadvantage to be honest. But by the end I was starting to figure out how things worked. Unfortunately, by this time I was down to one footman and a single piece of land. Here are what I’m going to try and do next time we play:

  • Make an alliance right at the start and make sure that it is properly mutually advantageous. The game lets you perform supporting moves for other players actions. Use these with your ally as appropriate. There are also “raiding” actions you can use to frustrate opponents moves. Use them too.

  • Remember that you only need to capture a particular number of castles. This is quite easy to do without taking over the whole board. The trick is to pick the right time to ditch the ally and then go for it.

  • You can use ships to move people around very quickly. Discover how to do this and then use it.

  • Remember that you only have 10 moves before the game ends. So no point in playing the long game.

  • Don’t forget that the hand of cards you can use to augment your battles will be restored to you once you have used them all. So don’t be afraid to take people on.

These hints come to you courtesy of a player who finished sixth out of six, but I did have a good time. If you like games like Risk, Campaign and probably poker, you will have a bit of fun with this game.

My Little Scythe is pie fighting fun

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Over the last few weeks we’ve spent quite a few of our regular game nights playing Scythe on-line. I seem to have a love-hate relationship which Scythe. The love is directly proportional to how well the last game went. At the moment I regard not coming last as a badge of honour, and I’m working my way up from there.

My Little Scythe is stepping stone (or gateway drug if you prefer) to the “proper” game. When we played it today I spotted a lot of the gameplay elements in a much simplified form. And you don’t have battles. You have pie fights. One of the things about full fat Scythe that I find a bit annoying is that some features of the game just seem to be there to make the gameplay more complicated. There are (to me) needless interactions between game elements and lots of different ducks that you have to get precisely in a row to be able to make progress. Perhaps what I’m really saying is that I don’t have the mental horsepower and concentration to play the game properly.

My Little Scythe is much simpler and I liked it a lot. But then again, I did manage to win.

Netgames is great for, er, network games

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This site is a hidden gem. For a while I was concerned about telling everyone about it on the blog in case everyone started using it and it got too busy.

Then I got real.

It is network gaming as it should be. Zero effort to create games, no crashes, no grinding of busy icons. It just works and the game implementations are spot on. And there are versions of some of our favourite games.

We tried Avalon and Codenames and they worked really well. All players need is a phone each (although it works fine via web browser on a PC too). And it is free, although they’ll take donations for a very worth cause.

Netgames.io