MEGAforce Boardgames Night: Lost Cities

As there were only two of us recently,  Grim dusted off his copy of Lost Cities by Reiner Knizia

He picked it up on the market a few years back, and it's still in excellent condition*.  This was his and my first play through.

Lost Cities

Aim 

The aim of the game is to assemble successful expeditions to various Lost Cities.  This is done with cards of differing values from five different suits.

Gameplay

Each player starts with a hand of eight and takes it in turn to either place a card in an expedition or discard a card face up in the centre.  Cards are numbered 2 to 10, and MUST be placed in ascending order, but they need not be sequential.  So a 4 cannot be played on a 6, but a 6 can be played on a 4.  

The five suits represent different destinations; Desert, Neptune's Kingdom, High Mountains, Jungle and Volcanic Caves (the latest edition has a sixth,  but this was an earlier copy). 

After playing or discarding, the player draws another card, either one of the face up discards or a face down card from the deck. 

There are also 'Backer' (aka Handshake) cards, representing financial backing for your expeditions.  Up to three of these can be played before placing any numbered cards, they are also tied to the suits.

Play stops as soon as the last card is picked up,  so you can get caught out with good cards un-played in your hand. 

Scoring 

Expeditions are scored by adding up the numbers, but each expedition costs 20 points, which are deducted.  The result is then multiplied buy the backer cards +1. This does mean that a negative score is made even worse as your backers want results, even at the  cost of your success. 

There are also bonuses for having enough cards in a run and penalties for only having backers and no expedition cards.

If this sounds complicated,  it plays really smoothly.  It's recommended to play three rounds, and we were well into the swing of things in the first round. 

End game showing the different expeditions and the discard desk

Conclusion 

Lost Cities is a lovely little game.  It doesn't take long to play, our three round game took less than 40 minutes and we were learning the rules as we went. 

The card design is nice too, the cards show a panorama of the expedition drawn in a 1920s/30s style. 

There's quite a bit of strategy for such a simple looking game; do you discard a card that your opponent will find useful? Do you risk playing that 7 on that 4, or do you wait to see if you can find a 5 or a 6?

Lost Cities is two players only, which slightly reduces its utility (suggestions for a four player variant are available on the website), nevertheless, it's definitely a high A Tier/low S Tier.

Lost Cities is published by Kosmos, and is available from them or the usual retailers. 

*I suppose this should ring alarm bells, it looked rather like someone had bought it, played it once and didn't like it.  We really enjoyed it though. 

MEGAforce Boardgames Night: Villagers

With MEGAforce down to two members recently, Grim and I tried out Villagers. There's a two player version which was ideal for us to learn the game.

What is Villagers?

Villagers is another game from Haakon Hoel Gaarder, designer of MOON, and is available from Sinister Fish Games. The conceit of the game is post Plague Europe. Settlements are struggling to rebuild and need to attract new workers. 

There's a stream of potential new villagers travelling along The Road, and players take these and try and fit them into their village.

The winner is the village that to amasses the most gold by the end of the game.

Gameplay 

Players start with one Founders card, the farm around which the new village will accumulate, eight gold, and a hand of five Villagers cards.

The game consists of Draft phases, where players alternate taking Villager cards into their hand, either from the face up cards on the Road, or face down from the Stacks placed above the Road and used to restock the Road during the Draft Phase. There are no restrictions on which Villagers you can draft, but you might not always be able to add them to your Village straight away.

Players can draft two Villagers, plus an extra one for each red Food symbol in their Village, to a maximum of five.

Once the Draft Phase is over, the Road is cleared and restocked from the Reserve (the cards not yet in play).

The Build Phase is where you add Villager cards to your village from your hand. 

Players take turns to build two cards, plus one per Build symbol, again to a maximum of five.

Example Hay Suit

Villagers mostly build up in chains, for example; Hayer, Grazier, Milk Maid and Fromager (see above), requiring certain existing cards which they are placed upon. The chains all fall into a series of suits, Grain, Hay, Wood, Ore and Grapes (two more are available in larger games with more players). Some Villagers also require Unlocking; in the chain above, the Milk Maid requires the Cooper. Ideally, you already have the relevant Villager in your village, which earns them two gold. Alternatively, you can call on the skills of an unlocking Villager in another player's village, but you have to pay them. As a last resort, you can pay the Bank if no unlocking Villager is in play, so Unlocking is a problem that money can solve.

There are three types of Base Villagers, Miners, Hayers, and Lumberjacks. Up to three of these can be built in addition during the Build Phase by swapping them for cards in the player's hand. These don't add gold or anything, but are vital to build those chains of villagers.

Play then continues with more Draft Phases and Build Phases until a Market Phase is reached.

There are two Market Phases. The first when the first two left hand Stacks are exhausted and the second when all the stacks are exhausted, signalling the end of the game. These are where you actually collect gold. Some gold will have been placed on Villagers during Build Phases and some Villagers have gold symbols. The Second Market Phase also allows you to collect Silver, which is simply a way of differentiating gold collected at the end of the game, it's worth just the same (this sounds odd, but it works fine in practice). Silver is often dependent on other cards in your village, such as the Peddler, who gets three silver for every two gold symbols in your village.

Extras 

There are Solitary Villagers, such as the Priest, who don't belong to any suit. They are mostly used to add Silver in the Second Market Phase at the end of the game.

There are also Special Villagers, who either have a one off effect, like the Tinner, who automatically unlocks all Villagers that you build for the Build Phase when she is played, or permanent, like the Monk, who replaces any one Villager in a chain.

The game part way through. We are in the Build Phase just prior to the First Market Phase.

Briefly, top row, l to r; First Market Phase card, four Stacks, three piles of Basic Villages. Next row, l to r; The Road of six Villagers, the Refresh pile and the discard pile.

Below that are our villages, arranged as we saw fit. You can see some of the chains building up.

My village, with a very creditable 171 gold.

Grim's winning village with 186 gold.

Summary

Villagers is a great fun game. Of course, there's more to the rules than my brief description above, you'll have to play to find out.

I did find the art style a little jarring, it works wonderfully for Moon, for this game I'd have preferred a more 'Medieval' style, but that's just me.

If you like a game with more interaction with other players, there are expansions that introduce various Villagers who can effect other villages (in the base game the Apprentice can do this, but I don't think any other villager can) among other extra effects.

I'll give Villagers an 'S' Tier ranking, just behind Moon.  It looks to have a lot of repeat playabilty and there's a real sense of the different crafts relying on each other to thrive.

MEGAforce Boardgames Night: Gloom

The most recent MEGAforce games night saw three rounds of Kingdomino, wherein each of us won one game, followed by a game of Gloom.

We have played this before, but I've not discussed it on here, so here goes.

Gloom

Gloom is a card game, the aim of which is to heap Misery on your weird Gothic family before bumping them off.

You can also play cards that add Hope to your opponents' families, reducing their Misery scores or even preventing that character from being killed. 

Each turn you can, usually, make two Actions, usually playing an Action Card, and then redraw up to a hand of five.

It sounds pretty grim, but there's a dark humour to it; the cards include such oddities as 'surprised by topiary' and 'mauled by manatees' and the descriptor, unless detailing additional game effects, can be grimly amusing too.

Card play often includes some additional effect; you might play a card on an opponent to add Hope to one of their characters,  but they get to draw extra cards from the deck, or even your hand. Or a card adding Misery  to one of your family might also cause you to discard your hand,  or portions of it. 

But the really clever part is the design of the cards. They are printed on transparent plastic. This means that values added to a character cover up and replace existing values (and make scoring much easier to calculate).

Here you can just see the red Misery scores, but they are covered by the grey 0 and black Hope scores gained from the "blessed by the bishop" card. When properly stacked, you only see and use these top values.

There are other details, such as icons which can grant bonuses when certain deaths are inflicted, such as the heart on Samson's card above, and there are cards which negate or alter others.  I used 'smoke and mirrors' early in the game to prevent Grim inflicting a death on one of his family. 

Strategy 

You can only play a death card on a character with some Misery, and death cards must be the first played in your turn. There are, of course, exceptions to this with certain cards. 

It can be worth killing off another player's characters if they have a very low Misery score to prevent that player harvesting more Misery later.

There seems to be a system in the placement of the three possible Misery/Hope positions. I've not examined this closely, but it felt like the bottom spot came up on Action Cards less often than the others.

Winning 

The game ends when one player bumps off all their characters,  at which point all players add up the top Misery scores for their deceased characters. 

The three deceased members of my family at the end of the game. 

Gloom plays well and can be great fun. This time we emphasised the story element by narrating how the various action cards play, which certainly added to the fun.

It's not a game I'm desperate to play every time, but I'll certainly enjoy another go if it's suggested, earning it a solid place in A tier.

Gloom is produced by Atlas Games and available from them and many other online retailers.

Hanabi and Sushi Go; MEGAforce Board Game Night

We played a couple of different card based games recently, Hanabi, by Antoine Bauza and Sushi Go by Phil Walker-Harding.

Hanabi 

We played on 4th of November, so Hanabi was very appropriate. It's a cooperative game involving a group of firework manufacturers putting on a display.

Unfortunately, all the labels have been lost, so we have to rely on clues from each other, and hope to get the display ready before an oncoming storm.

This works by each player having a hand of five cards, but players never see their own hands. All the other players do, and this is how they can give hints. The cards are one of five colours (white, red, blue, yellow and green) and one of five numbers. The fireworks must be built up in numerical order, must be a single colour and there can only be one of each colour.

On their turn, players can give a hint to another player by telling them which of their cards are a particular colour or number, or discard one of their own cards, or play one of their cards. The number of hints are limited, but can be bought back by discarding, and playing a wrong card brings the storm closer.

We played a couple of games, scoring 14 the first time, and 18 the second, out of a maximum of 25.

Endgame, apparently this score is 'Excellent; the crowd are delighted'

A great fun game, with a straight forward mechanic, but requiring a good bit of thought (and, apparently, a better short term memory than I possess). 

Definitely A tier.

Sushi Go

A fast, fun card game where the object is to build a meal over three rounds, making sure you have enough puddings at the end of course.

We've played Sushi Go quite a few times now, and it's a good one to have handy to fill in ten to twenty minutes at the end of an evening.

When I first played, this was my first experience of 'pick and pass', where the players swap hands each turn. Thus you know what each hand is after a while, and strategies can be built around denying players cards that might benefit them.

Some dishes are worth points on their own, some are worth more in combinations, and some require other cards.

Puddings are played through all three rounds, but are only applied at the very end, gaining or loosing points for having most or least puddings.

While I don't like Sushi, I really enjoy this game. Part of this is the speed of play, there always seems to be time to squeeze in a quick game. Partly for this reason it earns a solid A.

Two good A tier games*. Hanabi is great for getting the mind working. Sushi Go for a quick game.

Both games are available from various online retailers, and at least one chain of UK booksellers stocks Shushi Go.

*Don't let that put you off, both are very highly recommended, but they don't quite provide the gaming experience that I get from, say, Moon.