Saturday started with a games of Ahau: Rulers of Yucatan. A well researched and caring game (checked by two professors of Mayan Culture) Ahau uses some pleasing and clever ideas embedded in a slightly tricky graphic design. Based in Guatemala, the game shows regions from 1-5 each of which contain cities and resources. The cities each have their own Gods and activating these Gods with matching tiles placed on your player board is a key part of the game. Putting your pieces in each city of a region will net you free buildings which are played on your player board for one-off and scoring bonuses; putting extra people on cities increases their action strength and can give you benefits when gathering resources. The game is complex, in places overly so, and could be improved with a home-made player aid in particular as the Gods/cities are not that easy to distinguish.
Nevertheless, the main decisions of the game are relatively interesting and straightforward – where to move your playing piece, in competition with other players, (by playing two cards one of which gives you strength to fight off the other players who may try to be in you region, and the other one which identifies your target region); which resources to take and when to match resources to temple tiles; which Gods to activate…and so on. There are several strategies in the game as to how you concentrate your pieces in the cities and whether or not to use tiles to activate Gods; and also how to build the temple on your player board; and whether to look for synergy amongst the tiles you use to build your temple – in brief, it’s all rather meaty and good and I enjoyed it.
Following that I had a quick look at AEGs offerings without playing most of them, so this is first impressions only.
Deep dive is a fast set collection push your luck game which looks pretty ordinary. Do you dive deeper of stick with what you find?
Shake that City has a wonderful cube delivery method where you shake a box and press a cardboard tab to deliver cubes like Camel cup only 9 at a time. One player chooses a colour and takes all cubes of that colour and uses them to build in a typical city-build game mechanic. Looked engaging but the city building seemed to follow classic rules; nevertheless it’s a decent game in a small box.
Cascadia Landmarks looks to be a worthwhile expansion to the original and I spoke to people who were enjoying it a lot.
I played Point City which I thought was ok but not as good as Point Salad – but I do think that’s terrific, so everything is relative as they say. Here you have buildings and resources cards in a grid and can take or build two adjacent cards. The buildings give you permanent resources or end game bonuses. It all seems quite ordinary and another derivative of Splendor. But. In typical Essen fashion we got a couple of rules wrong so I may be being unfair and need to play it again, and I’d like to do that.
Next up was a huge adventure: trying out Stefan Feld’s “most complex game yet” according to Deep Print. Civolution is a massive game – 21 resources, more than 21 action spaces, and the point salad one can expect from the author, Civolution was on demo at the stand and we had to sign up early this morning to get to play it – and only if we would commit to playing 3-4 hours. Explanation took an hour but was well done and then we were into the game. Playable in probably 3 hours on your second play, Civolution uses a mechanic whereby you roll 6 dice and use 2 each turn to select one of 21 actions. These actions are cleverly spread into a grid which show two dice – to use an action, spend the two relevant dice (eg a 6 and a 1) and take that action. Each action is upgradable twice and so part of your strategy will be deciding which actions you wish to focus on.
The centre board shows a map of numerous regions (forest, desert, swamp etc) each of which has spots for your tribes. Place a new tribe in a spot as you grow; kick out someone else if you feel like it but it will leave your tribe exhausted and unable to move unless healed. The game rewards spreading out into the map and having more tribes; more regions nets you more resources as each region type can give you 3 different sorts. There are 7 region types hence the 21 possible resources. Hunting in a region gives you food but only one player can hunt per region each round. Exploring in a region turns over adjacent mini tiles which reveal features of the landscape (Glacier, mystic oak…) which can affect players in neighbouring regions. Some of these tiles show building sites – build here to net points for your monuments.
Your player board shows an extensive “Console” which tracks everything in the game. The design is excellent, functional if a bit unthematic (but it was a demo version so this can change). At the bottom of the console is a set of human DNA properties – evolve these by spending duplicate dice. They are used, like the resources, to play cards. These cards are part of your starting hand (they will be drafted in the non-beginner game) and can be played (with difficulty) to give you benefits which help you to create small engines to move your strategy along. The cards are slid into your console and earn points at the game end; they can be played at different levels if you pay more resources and/or have developed more DNA properties. Higher levels give you more end game points.
Meanwhile there are objectives. Everyone gets one a turn and you may get more. Fulfilling them is quite easy and they allow you to upgrade those dice action tiles I mentioned earlier. There are also special tiles you can earn by filling more tricky objectives which give you stronger benefits. These are pulled from a bag – presumably there are lots of them.
Going back to the 21 dice action tiles, it’s astonishing what the breadth of choice is here and each tile that you upgrade has to be carefully thought out to harmonise your strategy. Each tile shows two possible actions so in fact you have 42 choices! For example: do you upgrade tiles which help you get a certain type of card more easily (there are 6 types)? Do you go for producing more tribes and perhaps migrating them to other regions? Do you increase the tiles which give you more dice modifiers (“ideas”) or the tiles that let you explore further and faster on the map. The choices are endless and game replayability is off the scale!
Finally: there are 6 tracks which you can move up representing different skills. Upgrading these comes from cards and actions you can pay for (money is another resource; as is food which pays for your tribes). One excellent idea in the game is that you draw multiplier tokens from a bag during set up. These tokens multiply the scores you may receive from certain of these tracks but some are drawn and placed on round end bonuses. Both of these give you objectives to aim for, for which you must compete with your fellow players. They are friendly competitions as everyone gets the points and multipliers with small rewards for being first – but the points you can obtain are motivating too!
The game rounds are driven by a centre board which guides you quite clearly on what to do. When you have used at least 3 of your dice you may perform a reset, re-rolling the used dice and if you like, the unused dice. Each reset moves the game counter along a track until the round end is triggered – after which players get at least one more turn and then a round scoring takes place. After 4 rounds the game ends. Point scores for experienced players hover at just over 200 points according to Deep Print; we stopped about ¾ of the way through as some people had to leave but we were around the 130 point mark.
Overall Civolution was very engaging, with plenty of planning to do but little or no downtime. It was exciting! So many options but each turn was simple; and of course you have to adapt to the dice you roll or generate dice modifiers which is not that difficult to do. The multiple scoring and objective chasing as well as the central map gave the game a moderately interactive feel – good enough to feel you are not playing alone but not as much as some civ games which for me was a plus as I don’t enjoy the military aspect of many civ games.
Overall: I will buy this game and play it multiple times with a tight group of gamers. It’s very Feld, very engaging, fun, and promises a plethora of juicy depth to discover. I love that the game is so well thought out, smooth, and has a clear arc with the upgrades and cards accumulating on the board. I can’t wait for it to come out now!!
Some quick looks at games played in the evening:
“That’s not a hat” is a small Ravensburger card game with a hilarious memory challenge a bit like Biss 20 but different. Simply pass face down cards that you have briefly seen around the table and try to remember what object each shows – to hilarious results when you can’t remember what’s what. Simple and lots of fun.
5 towers is a small card game from Deep Print which we enjoyed – lay out 5 tower cards and the highest bidder takes the number of cards he wants and adds them to their 5 towers. Cards have values from 15 – 0 where 0 is the tower top and 15 the base. Place them in order or tear down cards you built previously which penalise you greatly. The deck is run through twice so you have two stabs to get what you want and you have to be patient. Or not. If you cap your tower you double your points and your longest towers scores double too. You can get hosed or you can be boring. Simple and fun.
Douc in Danger is an intriguing trick taking game where players play simultaneously. One player, the ranger, is trying to save monkeys by playing a higher card in matching colour or a trump onto a monkey card played by a ranger. Any player can save the monkey or can put more monkeys in danger if they have matching numbers. Any monkeys not saved count negative for the ranger and then the roles rotate and hands are refilled. Other players play tourists who can choose to save monkeys but more often will try to give the ranger more negative points. There are three rule sets and we didn’t try the third but I found the game disappointing as it was less fun and more chaotic than it looked.
Phew. That’s it for Saturday!
