With Christmas a day away, I just wanted to thank you for reading my blog this year.  Things recently have been very hectic so it has been difficult to post many new reviews in the last month. I shall be posting new reviews in the next couple of weeks and getting back to normal.  There are still so many games from Essen for me to review too.

My first review will be of a game that was only for pre-order at Spiel and my copy arrived this week just in time for a games session.  The game is called ‘Village’ by Eggertspiele and Pegasus Spiel which I thoroughly enjoyed – a tight and clever eurogame with a great looking thematic board.  Your villagers (meeple) start to die off as time passes so you have to consider that in their placement as well as collecting resources, using limited placements, and trying to score points.

Meanwhile, I have put some more games for sale on eBay and will be adding plenty more over the next couple of weeks.  The current games (http://search.ebay.co.uk/?sass=eisley&ht=-1) include:

• Friedmann Friese’s Friday
• Haste Bock (Shear Panic)
• Hart an der Grenze
• Garibaldi

Until then, I wish you a Happy New Year and I look forwards to reviewing more games for you next year.

James.

With Spiel now long over, it’s time for me to reduce my games collection to accommodate the new games.  So, as difficult as it is to part with games, I am auctioning lots of board games via eBay including recent and older games.  There are currently 44 games for sale including:

• D&D: Castle Ravenloft
• Ghost Stories: Jean-claude Van Rice expansion card
• 7 Wonders expansion: Manneken Pis, Brussels
• Amun Re
• San Marco
• Dungeon Bowl
• An unpunched copy of MB Games’ Shogun (before it got renamed… twice)
• The much sought after Lord of the Rings Risk expansion (Gondor & Mordor)
• and a lot, lot more

So, if you’re looking for a bargain, check out my board games for sale on eBay: http://search.ebay.co.uk/?sass=eisley&ht=-1

I shall be adding over 40 more in the next week too.

Time hasn’t allowed me to recently but new reviews will be posted soon when I will be covering lots more Spiel releases.

James.

In Power Grid: The First Sparks, players have stone age clans trying to expand into new areas.  The First Sparks is a simplified (and differently themed) version of the very popular game Power Grid – I’ll talk about how the two compare at the end but will write this review from the point of view that you haven’t played, or know, Power Grid.

THE GAME
During the game, players need food to feed their clans so they can expand into new territories.  Food is gained by clans in areas using tools and knowledge.  Food comes in various forms and each token of each type is worth different amounts of food  (crops=1, berries=2, fish=3, bears=3, mammoths=4).  The board is a landscape of hex zones each with a food type in the centre and split into 3 areas. Read the rest of this entry »

In Stalag 17, players are prisoners of war assembling their escape plans – the first to have all 3 of their POWs escape wins.  At the start of each escape attempt, some dice are rolled which determines what equipment (food, uniforms, maps,etc.) will be required for this escape attempt as well as a normal dice (1-6) which is the runaway score that a player needs to equal or beat too.

Players take turns taking, discarding and placing cards.  One their turn a player can:

• Play 1 card from their hand in front of them face-down (taking a replacement card from the draw deck)
• Draw 2 cards (both from the draw deck or 1 from the draw deck and 1 from the discard pile)
• Discard: any 1 card, or 3+ cards that are the same, or 5+ cards that are all different
• Escape Read the rest of this entry »

In Drum Roll, players are putting on circus shows with the winner scoring the most prestige points (PPs) after three performances.

To score PPs, players need to hire performers (which costs cash) and give them the enough equipment, costume, etc. (represented by colour cubes) so that they can give great performances.  Each performer can give a 1-, 2- or 3-star performance; however, each performer needs a specific colour cube for each level of performance – so a 3-star performance requires 3 cubes of the exact colours.  Each of the 5 types of performer give different benefits (gaining cubes, generating cash, reducing salaries, etc.) and the better the performance, the better the ability.  Instead of delivering their 3-star performance benefit though, the player can flip that performer’s card which earns PPs (and reduces their salary each round) but means they player can not use their ability any longer. Read the rest of this entry »

Not be confused with Krok Nik Douil’s game also called Mammut, this Mammut is a game by Queen Games.  Players try to gather tiles which all score in different ways.  This sounds very normal but the way the tiles are gathered is a very interesting mechanic delivering a funny and humorously evil game.

The game is played over several rounds – scoring occurs after each round and the player with the most victory points (VPs) wins.  Each round 31 double-sided tiles are mixed up in a bag and then dumped onto the table and spread out.  The tiles show fur, claws, axes, meat, fire and animals.  Some tiles have question marks on them and these will only get turned over to reveal their actual value when scoring starts.

On your turn, you can either (a) take some (or all) of the tiles in the centre (if any remain), or (b) you can take all of another player’s tiles but you must put one of them back in the middle.  Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Dragon Rampage is a clever, dice-driven game by Richard Launius who has created games including Arkham Horror and Defenders of the Realm.  Dragon Rampage though is a bit more light-hearted as players are running from a dragon’s lair with as much treasure as possible.

On their turn, a player rolls the 7 special dice in a way similar to Yahtzee as a player can use 2 re-rolls to re-roll as many or as few dice as they wish (apart from dragon results which are instantly locked).  When the player stops rolling, they record how many of the 6 different results they scored.  The round ends when all players have had a turn and each of the different results is evaluated.  The players with the most of each result get a benefit.  Read the rest of this entry »

A beautiful photo at Carcassonne by Andy (or the demonstration version of Carcassonne has got out of hand)

Following on from my Alhambra at the Alhambra post, just this week my friend Andy visited Carcassonne and he took Carcassonne the game with him.  He didn’t know of my Alhambra visit but, instead, was inspired by my photo of meeple at the world’s highest pass (5,416 m / 17,769 feet).

Here is one of his photos which is an absolutely superb shot.  Is it just me thinking, “I wonder if that city’s actually finished?” and “That’s a lot of players sharing one road.”

You’ll note how Andy has all 5 colours of meeple from Carcassonne in his photo whereas my photo of multiple meeple in the Himalayas only has 4 colours.  The reason for that is that one of the meeple fell down a gap between the stones on the large cairn where I took the photo as I set them up.  I heard it fall way into the 4-foot high pile of stones so I knew he was a goner.  They say never leave a man on the mountain, but he was totally unreachable. Read the rest of this entry »

Some years ago a friend of mine who is a teacher told me about a co-operative exercise he’d created for his students where they organised search-and-rescue operations.  It sounded great and we discussed how it had potential for a board game as he plays some Eurogames.  So, I was very interested when Meltdown 2020 was announced.

In Meltdown 2020, players are trying to evacuate their meeple from the area where reactors are starting to meltdown.  Each player starts with 3 vehicles which each have a speed (spaces it can move) and a capacity (max number of meeple it can carry simultaneously).  The vehicles are a bus (spd:2 cap:4), car (spd:3 cap:3) and a helicopter (spd:4 cap 2). Read the rest of this entry »