Category: Board games
Dice Tower West: Viva Las Vegas

Dice Tower West: Viva Las Vegas

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I initially was unsure if I was going to be able to attend the inaugural Dice Tower West convention due to the impending birth of my niece, but when I found out she wasn’t going to make an appearance until after the convention, I decided to make a quick stop to Las Vegas.

I arrived just after midnight on Thursday night, enough to basically head over to the Westgate Resort (the former Hilton on the north side of the Strip for those familiar with Vegas) and go to bed so that I could hit the ground running that morning. I had a list of four games I wanted to play, and ended up playing three of them, so I was pleased with myself. They were Captains of the Gulf, Wingspan, Forum Trajanum and Passing Through Petra.

Ran into Suzanne and Mandi of the Dice Tower first thing on Friday morning. These ladies are truly inspirational and bring so much to the hobby.

I checked in Friday morning and received a super cool swag bag with the Dice Tower West logo on it. Inside was a free game, a Dice Tower Pin and Dice Tower dice. I also liked that the lanyards were of the thick variety, so that I could decorate it with my Meeple Lady pin as well as all the cool flair I’ve collected from various conventions. Dice Tower West had a decent library, and I particularly enjoyed the section on the convention floor that featured large games like Giant Azul!

Squeee! Look at this Giant Azul! You definitely will not mistake the pieces for Starbursts.

My first game of the day was Captains of the Gulf. @boardgamegeekCA taught me this game, designed by @jasondingr and on my list of to-play games, which is about fishing in the Gulf. The game has multi-use cards and a rondel for actions, which can affect the pacing of game. It has a very Glory To Rome feel to it, where the strength of your actions are based on various upgrades or licenses you have on your fishing boat. And man, overfishing the Gulf has some negative consequences, which made our game resource poor toward the second half. And as I’ve mentioned before, I love how Jason designed this game in honor of his grandfather who was a fisherman in the Gulf. Had a great time playing this!

I was so happy I got a chance to play Captains of the Gulf!

Next up was a bird-themed card game that was surprisingly a little mathy: Piepmatz. @Nettersplays taught this game, in which you’re trying to match sets of birds and collect the most seeds from the bird feeder.

It’s me and the lovely @Nettersplays!

Sounds simple, right? Well, you have to play stronger birds than what’s displayed in the main tableau, which then you’ll receive into your personal tableau the bird you just knocked out, all the while avoiding squirrels and crows. Nobody likes these guys because they will take your cards! The mathy part comes from playing certain cards to overtake the birds in the middle tableau while avoiding the predators.

Piedmatz is not the only bird-themed game I played this at this convention.

I then played a game of Push, which is a fun, quick push-your-luck game that I regret not picking up at BGG Con last year when it was offered as convention swag. I do love push-your-luck games and egging others on by saying, what’s the worst that can happen? Well, you can lose all your points in one particular color! You keep drawing cards and placing them however you want into three columns, with none of the same color or number in each column. If you can’t place a card, you bust. If you don’t bust, you can pick up one of the columns for points, and the next player takes the second column, and so forth. There’s also a card that forces you to roll a color-sided die, and if that color pops up, you lose your entire stash in that color.

Push is a fun push-your-luck card game that anyone can play. It’s a much better Uno.

I then played The Estates. Played it for the first time back at BGG Con, and I most enjoy screwing people over in the game! It’s super cut-throat bidding on blocks, developing the streets and building high-rises.

The bidding in The Estates is so tense and brutal!

Next up was Obsession: Pride, Intrigue and Prejudice set in Victorian England, a deck-builder and worker management game, which was super neat. This particular theme is usually reserved for lighter games and/or card games, so I was pleasantly surprised to see a substantial game set in this era, which, if we’re splitting hairs, the Jane Austen books were actually set in the Regency era, but I digress. I had never heard of this game before so I was happy that @erykmynn taught it to me!

These dapper dudes would probably be fun at your party!

You build your deck of fancy ladies and gents, and sometimes the occasional selfish cad who will just ruin your parties! Each turn, you choose to host an event and play the matching cards from your deck and worker meeples to activate the location and/or the cards, and gain resources. The cool thing about this game is that in addition to managing your deck, you’re also managing your worker meeples as they rest up one round until they’re available again. Unless you spend your turn and reset, in which case, all your cards and workers are available again.

These workers are so exhausted from working your events that they need to rest for one round.

After dinner, which we then discovered our hotel rooms varied WILDLY, we hung out in our friend’s room, which had THREE BATHROOMS. Oh, and a pool table, vintage Playball pinball machine and decor that immediately sends you back to your grandma’s basement.

In case you were wondering what it was like to party in the 1970s.

We played a quick game of Push, and then we launched into my favorite game of the whole convention: Wingspan. Oh. My. Goodness. This game is so darling! It’s a lighter game than I usually would bring to a table, but man, HAVE YOU SEEN THESE EGGS? it’s a chill, short engine builder with gorgeous artwork, and I’m so happy that Netters taught this game to me.

Wingspan is just darling. I can’t wait until I get my copy!

The game plays over four rounds, with objectives that’ll score each round, and you use your allotted set of action cubes to play bird cards on different terrains, collect resources, lay eggs or gain more cards. As you build out on you tableau, when you activate that row next time, you’ll get to activate each card that’s already placed in that row. Bird cards come in various VPs and abilities, and the whole game is just delightful to play.

I love the scientific look of the cards, especially with all the information on these birds.

Next up, I played Mayday! Mayday! It’s a 45-minute drawn-out hidden-role in which good and evil players are trying to make their way into an airplane cockpit. The first group will take 4, and then it gets whittled down to 2, and then one last vote. Each player has three cards, and if you have more broken hearts than whole hearts, you’re a bad guy. I pretty much laid low the entire time and refused entry anyone because I was suspicious with everyone! And guess what? Us baddies won. Woot!

GloryHoundd, Dr. GloryHogg and I are the best cylons ever.

After that, I entered exactly one round of Just Two, a variation that @whatseplaying created using two sets of the game Just One. Instead of writing clues for one word, there’s two words in play, and the rest of the folks just get to pick whichever one they want to give a clue to. Per the usual rules, when two clues match, they’re discarded, and the guesses has a chance to look at the leftover clues. Epic, especially when the guesser picked the correct two words!

We all then went grabbed a nightcap at the casino bar at 2 a.m. and hung out for an hour or so. Good times with all these fun people!

Drannnkkksss with all these cool people!

I began early Saturday with a mind-melting game of Forum Trajanum. My buddy Karlo, who I had met when he lived in Phoenix for a brief period, taught one of the new games from Stefan Feld. Players are working together to build a monument on the main board, while developing their own Colonia on their player board.

Forum Trajanum is one of Stefan Feld’s newest games and it’s super heavy!

The cool mechanism in this game is that you remove two action chits on your player board, pick one and give the second one to the player on your right. Then, you have two actions to choose from, or if you want to do both, then you have to spend workers from your pool. So many agonizing decisions!! But figuring out how it all works together, while trying to score objectives during three periods, was something I couldn’t wrap my head around until way too late into the game. I would definitely play again, probably on more than a few hours of sleep. It’s definitely Feld’s most complex game to date, in my opinion.

Making agonizing decisions about which chit to pass to your neighbor and which one to keep for yourself.

Next I played Gugong with @ruelgaviola and @geekygaymerguy, who I met for the first time and is just as fantastic and friendly in real life! Theo taught Ruel Gugong, and the game immediately went onto his to-buy list. Gugong is set during the Ming Dynasty, and officials want fancy gifts in exchange for favors. On their turn, players use cards in their hand to activate various locations on the map by playing a card in higher value than what’s sitting there already. You place your card down, pick up the old card and put it into your discard pile. Your pile of discarded cards will then become your hand of actions in the next round.

I had a blast playing with all these wonderful people! Insert all the heart-eye emojis!

The game has an added element of managing your cubes from the general supply to your personal supply, a mechanism that I personally love, as well as moving up various tracks on the board and getting bonuses for picking up the right card for the round. I heard the KS version is just gorgeous but I think the base game is just as beautiful, and really, you can just spend a few bucks buying glass beads to replace the jade on the board.

Gugong is such a great midweight euro, and I totally want to add this to my collection.

I then purchased the only game at the con: Targi. Targi is a tense, puzzly 2-player game that I just learned the month before, and it definitely has moments where you can be so mean. I love it! A grid of cards are laid out on the table between two players, and they take turns placing one of their meeples on action spots on the outside border. Where their three meeples intersect can create a fourth and fifth action for the round. But you can’t place your meeple in front of your opponent, so they can block you from gaining resources or collecting cards, and forcing you to take a less-than-ideal action because that’s the last space left. Meanwhile, you’re also building your tableau of tribe cards you’ve collected, which gives you VPs from the cards itself and how you arrange it in front of you. I highly recommend this game! (Even if my buddy Mark is all kinds of mean.)

Mark plotting to take a mean action against me in Targi.

Next, I checked out Drop It from the library, and boy, am I horrible at this game! It’s a light, dexterity game in which you’re dropping various pieces into this plastic contraption, and you get points based on where it lands, a la Plinko. But if your piece lands and touches a piece of the same color or shape, you get zero points. Fun for the kids and light gamers!

I could not for the life of me drop my pieces in a way that they would score!

I then ran into Kevin and showed taught me his new game Calico, which is planning to be on Kickstarter out in the fall. This quilting game that features cats is a puzzly tile-laying game. Players have two hex tiles in their hands, and they place one on their turn into their player board, which starts with three objective tiles on it. The objectives will score points based on what surrounds it as tiles come in various colors and patterns. There are also cat tokens you can gain based on pattern requirements or clusters on the board as those pretty things keep the cats happy.

Calico is a tile-laying game in which you’re scoring objectives and keeping cats content.

We then played Carpe Diem, another Feld game that I really, really like! You’re building a district onto your player board by picking up a tile on the main board at one location. Then, you can only move your meeple into two different spots from that location (making a five-pointed star on the board), so getting somewhere may require a few turns. But by then, the tile you need might not be there. At the end of each round, which there are four of them, you are required to fulfill two objective on the side board. If you cannot fulfill an objective, you get negative points. Each objective intersection can only be scored by one person during the entire game, so it’s also a race to score them first if you can. The game itself is plagued by some production issues (the green and dark green are very hard to distinguish), but overall, it’s a smooth Feld game that plays in about an hour.

I’ve played Carpe Diem twice and have won both times! #winning

Lastly, I taught a game of Newton. It has been about 6 months since I’ve played this so I was a little rusty on the rules, but it’s a fun midweight tight euro game that plays in about two hours. You play cards onto your player board, which allow you to take a specific action depending on the symbol of the card. If you play another card with the same symbol in the same round, then that action’s strength will increase — either moving farther along your route or accessing more powerful cards or covering harder-to-reach bookcases. It’s really satisfying when you make some good combos!

Newton always ends so quickly, and I can never fill up my bookcase!

And then just like that, two days in Las Vegas were over. I’m pretty surprised that I didn’t even hit up the casino because in a previous life pre-board games, I went to Vegas a lot! And like growing up in Los Angeles, it was an easy weekend getaway for fun and some debauchery. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right?

I got a chance to meet Rahdo. What a nice guy! He said the top of my head was really warm.

Before the drive back home to Phoenix, I also visited Meepleville Cafe, but I’m planning to write a longer piece about that cool place next time. Stay tuned! All in all, Dice Tower West was a chill and fun convention. I had a wonderful time hanging out with friends and meeting lots of new gamers! I can’t wait to go back next year, hopefully for longer than two days, as there were lots of other folks I wanted to game with but just didn’t have time for.

Until next time, Dice Tower West! Thanks for creating an inviting and fun gaming space.
1846: The Race for the Midwest: A good introduction into 18xx

1846: The Race for the Midwest: A good introduction into 18xx

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This review of 1846: Race for the Midwest was featured on Episode 54 of The Five By.  Check out the rest of the episode, which also features Otys, Wingspan, Lanterns: The Harvest Festival and Gizmos.

If the world of 18xx is something you’ve been interested in but never knew where to start, check out 1846: The Race for the Midwest.

Published in 2016 by GMT Games, 1846 is a great introductory game into the world of 18xx.

The rulebook for 1846 is a little daunting to go through on your first go-around. I’d highly recommending finding someone who can teach and run the game so that your first experience is as smooth as possible. There is quite a lot to keep up with, and having a game of all inexperienced players could potentially turn you off from these types of games. And that would be unfortunate, because 18xx games are fantastic.

Well, fantastic if you love super crunchy, math-heavy, puzzly and economic games that manipulate the stock market and can be sometimes kind of mean. There’s a whole bunch of 18xxes in the wild, and if you learn one 18xx, many of the other games are built upon similar concepts with slight tweaks in gameplay, so really, you’ll be ready to jump into all the other train games soon enough.

We are building routes and collecting incomes! Choo-choo!

In 1846, 3-5 railroad tycoons are competing to earn money and build the best stock portfolio by investing in and operating railroad corporations within the Midwest during 1846-1935. Players begin the game with $400 and begin first drafting private corporations that may provide some income for the first part of the game. The drafting here is important because many other 18xx games start with an auction, and if you’re not a player with any 18xx experience, a misstep at this starting auction can be brutal.

In 1846, each round consists of a stock round and two operating rounds. Game play continues until players break the bank, and the person with the most cash in their personal stock and the value of their stock shares wins the game.

A large component of 1846 is that each corporation has their own treasury, which is used to lay down tracks or upgrade tracks and purchase trains, and this treasury is completely separate the player’s personal stock portfolio and bank. The crux of the game is balancing when to infuse money into your corporation to do actions, or pay fully yourself and other stockholders out, either action affecting the stock price of the corporation.

During a stock round, players taken turns buying stock from the stock market or a share from a corporation’s treasury, paying the market price for it.

Taking the Grand Trunk, or as affectionately like to call it “Grand Funk,” Railway to victory!

Players can also purchase the President’s certificate, which is two stocks of a corporation, and launch that corporation and put it on the map. You can get to select its initial stock value. Each corporation has exactly 10 shares. The person holding the most shares is the president of the corporation.

Then comes two Operating Rounds. Each operating round consists of issuing share to the market to raise capital, and then laying down one yellow tile onto the board. The player can also lay down a second yellow tile or upgrade one tile. All tile lays and upgrades cost money, depending on the cost printed on the empty hex or the preprinted which it replaces. Upgrades must be done in a specific color order: yellow, green, brown and gray, and the new tiles must preserve its type (city or not) and the orientation of the previous tracks laid out.

City tiles have spaces for tokens to be placed by corporations for a cost. These tokens have the potential to block other corporations from going through your city, which is bad news for running your route.

What is running your route? Depending on what type of train you have at the start of the operating round, this determines how many hexes you can reach and how much revenue you’ll be receiving for that operating round.

Next comes the payout. To pay full dividends, divide revenue by 10 and pay this amount to each shareholder for their personal bank.

To pay half dividends, divide total revenue by two. Round this amount down to the nearest $10 and retain it in the corporate treasury. Divided the remainder 10 and pay this as dividends to each shareholder.

1846: Race for the Midwest in all its glory. Those cubes aren’t part of the game; we used them to more easily calculate our routes.

Depending on what the corporation pays out, this will determine if the price of the corporation stock goes down one, stays the same, or jumps once, twice or three times.

After you complete a corporation payout, you may purchase trains to use for the next round, if your corporation has money, as trains get very expensive, very quickly.

And thus begins the brain-burnery dance of running your corporation so that others will invest in it so you have money to do things and increase the price of your stock, while making money for yourself so that you can purchase stock in the hopes that it’ll become valuable later in the game.

GMT Games’ 1846: The Race for the Midwest is a great introductory game into the world of 18xx.

Game play continues until the bank breaks, and 1846 usually takes 4-5 hours to play. Each player cashes out their shares at the current stock value, and adds to their cash on hand, and the person with the most money wins the game. Money left over in a corporation’s treasury does not count toward anything in the end.

If you like route-building and economic stock games, and have more than a few hours to devote to a game, then 1846 could be for you. And you really, really have to not care about what the board look like as well. Because, more often than not, the board and hexes for an 18xx are really boring looking and plain, and 1846 is no exception. This game however has excellent components, all thanks to the high quality production of GMT.

And that’s 1846! Choo-choo! And this is Meeple Lady for the Five By. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as meeplelady, or on my website, boardgamemeeplelady.com. Thanks for listening. Bye!

Promenade: Deck building with an artful twist

Promenade: Deck building with an artful twist

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I recently made a jump back into deck-building games, rediscovering old classics like Dominion and playing new favorites like Paperback. It’s not that I disliked deck builders, but rather games with other mechanisms would often hit the table first. For those unfamiliar, a deck-building game is a card game where construction of a deck is the main focus of gameplay.

Another deck builder I recently checked out was Promenade from game designer and artist Ta-Te Wu, who also designed Cat Rescue. Promenade, which is coming to Kickstarter on April 9 from Sunrise Tornado Game Studio, is a fun and interesting twist on deck builders.

Promenade will be coming to Kickstarter in April!

Promenade is a deck-building game about the Impressionist art market. Players are purchasing and exhibiting artwork, while working to increase the market rating of various types of paintings. As players acquire cards for their deck, the rating increases for that painting genre that was just purchased. There are five genres, represented by five different colors: portraits, landscapes, animals, seascapes and abstracts. The Impressionist style artwork is colorful and elegant. My personal favorite is this kitty cat.

Who ya calling Chubby?

Each player gets a player board with marked locations for a draw pile, two spots for their actions, and a discard pile. There is also a track on the player board so that players can easily see the market rating of the genres.

On a player’s turn, they can do two actions: haggle, acquire or show. Players may do the same action twice and in any order. When you haggle, spend a card to draw two more cards from your deck.

The different actions are displayed on the player boards.

When you acquire, players spend cards to purchase a card from the Promenade area, which is filled paintings or gold cards. Each card costs a different amount depending on where it’s sitting.

And this is where it gets economically interesting — gold cards in your hand are worth their printed value, but the value of the paintings in your hand is worth their current market rating, which is represented on a separate board that sits next to the main board.

As you spend cards from your hand to acquire a new painting, that painting genre goes up in its market rating. The gold value doesn’t increase but purchasing gold cards moves the gold marker up the board as well, but this marker only matters at the end when you calculate the end-game value of the gold cards in your deck. Players can also spend their gold card’s one-time special ability and remove the card from their deck.

As players purchase paintings, the genre of that painting goes up in market value.

So if players are just buying just the abstracts, the value of abstract cards in everyone’s deck will skyrocket.

Lastly, you can show. To show a painting in an exhibition in the museum, you must spend the cards in your hand to display it, and the cost of displaying your painting depends on which exhibition you want to place it in. Furthermore, the exhibition must be seeking that specific genre of painting, as depicted by the randomly placed invitation cubes at the start of the game in the exhibition space. Some invitation cubes are black, which means any genre can be shown there.

Only certain genres of paintings can be shown in each exhibit based on the invitation cubes.

When you decide to show your painting, spend your cards to place your painting there and you immediately receive victory points. Naturally, you get more VPs if you show a painting at the exhibit first, and you place your meeple on the card so people know whose painting was shown where. And of course, the market rating of that genre increases as well.

After your two actions, place the two piles from your action spaces into your discard pile and draw more cards from your draw pile. If there aren’t any cards in your draw pile, shuffle the discard pile and place it into your draw pile area and draw your cards. This is the fundamental mechanism for deck builders.

Paintings come out at specific locations in the Promenade.

As painting cards empty from the Promenade, the cost of each location increases with each refill of cards. The game ends when one or more of these conditions are met: 12 or more paintings are shown in the museum, the painting deck is empty, or any marker on the market rating board is at 70 or higher.

Players then calculate the value of their decks based on the paintings’ market values and gold ratio value. There are also end-game bonuses based on the cards in play, which five are randomly displayed out at the start of the game. The player with the most VPs wins the game!

What’s unique for me about this deck builder is the manipulation of the market. I also like the variety of having different end-game bonuses with each game, and how the exhibition invitations — what genre each exhibition is looking for — are also variable for each game.

Players begin the game with their starting gold and five random painting cards.

If you’re a fan of economic games and deck builders, or just love games about paintings, check out Promenade. The game plays in about an hour and adds an artful twist to your standard deck builder.

Thanks Ta-Te Wu for providing a copy of Promenade for review.
New Year, new games to play!

New Year, new games to play!

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Happy New Year, friends! Can I still say Happy New Year when it’s clearly halfway through January? I had a lot of post-holiday personal events going on through last weekend so I haven’t had much time to game, but there’s lots of gaming ahead scheduled for the next few weeks. Woot!

To get us started, I don’t do a 10×10 challenge, because, frankly, it kinda stresses me out to have that kind of deadline. For those who don’t know, the 10×10 challenge is to pick 10 games and play them 10 times during the course of the year. So instead, I have an informal list of games I eventually want to play for the first time this year. And yes, I totally know it’s not the same thing.

Petrichor: I don’t know much about this game, other than that players are clouds. Pretty, fluffy, pillowy clouds. The artwork and board are just so soothing and delightful to look at that so that’s pretty much all I needed to be intrigued by this game. Plus, there are colorful gems.

How soothing and peaceful does this game look?

Captains of the Gulf: I personally love the backstory behind this game regarding game designer Jason Dinger and his relationship with his grandfather. I had the pleasure of meeting and gaming with Jason last BGG Con, and, knowing what type of games he enjoys playing, I have no doubt that his game will be right up my alley.

The Golden Wilderness: This game has been unplayed on shelf FOREVER. It’s made by the non-board-game folks who created Leaving Earth, which, by the way, is a fantastic game, and the game is about the history of California. @idontknowrules has been not-so-gently pestering me for the past few years to learn this game and get it on table, and I’m committed to doing that this year, hopefully sooner than later.

As a Californian, it’s cool to see a game about the state’s history.

Tokyo Metro: The games in the Tokyo series are just adorable, and this auction/bidding worker placement seems to be the heaviest of the bunch. I have a couple good friends whose recommendations I trust, and they really enjoyed this one.

Wingspan: This new release from Stonemaier Games is a medium-weight, card-building game featuring gorgeous bird artwork and eggs. Yep, pretty, pastel egg miniatures in a variety of colors. It’s been getting all sorts of praise online, so hopefully I’ll be able to find someone who owns the game so I can check it out.

Caverna: Cave vs. Cave: I’ve also had this on my shelf for about a year. I bought this because I love Caverna and wanted to explore this quick 2-player version, even though I rarely ever play 2P games. But, in light of recent life changes, it looks like more of my 2P games will get on table this year, and I’m so looking forward to it.

I love me some Uwe! This 2-player game has been sitting on my shelf for some time unplayed.

Ticket to Ride New York: This 15-minute version of the classic game is sold at stores like Target, and it’s pretty cut-throat from what I hear. Ticket to Ride was the game that introduced me to the hobby, and having an even more accessible, streamlined version of the game on the mass market just makes me happy as I know it’ll introduce more gamers to the hobby.

And that’s my short list of games I’d love to play soon. Let me know which games are high up on your to-play list!
Top 10 games I played for the first time in 2018

Top 10 games I played for the first time in 2018

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When I started writing this post, I looked back at my 2017 list, and I had to laugh because I was so optimistic that 2018 would be less rage-inducing than 2017. This past year was still rage-inducing in regards to the outside world, but there definitely was plenty of moments of pure joy for me personally and within the board-game world. I have fond memories of the experiences I had in 2018, the friendships and relationships that grew, and most importantly, all the games that I played.

So without further delay, here’s my top 10 list of games I played for the first time in 2018.

10. Dominant Species

Despite the cones, this is not Cones of Dunshire. Dominant Species is brutal and punishing.

This game from GMT Games is a classic. And by classic, I mean 2010, which by board-game standards, is pretty ancient. I played this game for the first time back in January, and I honestly couldn’t believe I haven’t played this game sooner. It’s brutal, mean and literally a game of “survival of the species.” And for such a punishing game, the components itself are quite colorful and cheery: cones and cubes among a sea of bright-colored environments.

Players take on the role of one of the major animal classes (mammal, reptile, bird, amphibian, arachnid, or insect) and they’re all trying to survive and thrive on various terrains with their asymmetrical powers, all while the impending Ice Age is coming. Players compete to have the most of their species on various hexes as well as being dominant, which is determined by your animal class. Dominant Species plays like a typical worker placement but built from a war-game foundation. Just watch out for glaciers!

9. Dinosaur Island

I hope that T. Rex doesn’t eat my park visitors!

This was another game I played early in 2018, and OH MY GOSH — look at all these pink dinosaurs!! I came into this game thinking it would be all kinds of kitschy, but it’s a solid worker placement that comes with variable end-game conditions. Players can pick a short, medium or long game, and the game ends when scoring objectives are completed. And similar to Food Chain Magnate, you can only score objectives in the same round that everyone else does. Once an objective has been scored, the objective is closed for others in future rounds.

Players in Dinosaur Island are competing to build the best dinosaur amusement park. The game plays through several phrases in each round, from collecting DNA combinations to create dinosaurs, upgrading technology and building park attractions, to having actual visitors visit your theme park, and hoping for the best those visitors don’t get eaten. Sure, exciting carnivores will bring more visitors to your park, but if you don’t ensure security gates are at a high level, well, we all know how that plays out in those Hollywood movies, don’t we?

8. My Little Scythe

Squee! Let’s have a pie fight! These figurines are way adorbs.

This new family game from Stonemaier Games is just darling! I got a chance to play it for the first time during Gila Monster this summer, and it truly is delightful! The game was created by a father who wanted to game with his daughter, and Stonemaier ended up publishing the fan-made version a year later. My Little Scythe comes with these chibi figurines of the original Scythe characters. ADORABLE.

The game also takes elements from Scythe — choose one of the actions on your player board, but not the same one you just did — and players move across the board, picking gems, apples or quests, and working to score objectives. And instead of combat, the game incentivizes you to drop resources where other players are, because that moves you up the friendship track. In the end, friendship is magic!

7. Bruxelles 1893

Bruxelles 1893 has these dapper gentlemen meeples with top hats.

This is another older board game, circa 2013, but I can’t believe so few people have ever mentioned this game! Bruxelles 1893, a colorful game in the Art Nouveau style, is crunchy worker placement that has a clever puzzle element to it. Workers are collecting resources to build buildings, and buying and selling artwork to gain money.

The game also comes with a dial, which players can adjust to determine which resources are needed to build a building, and players can affect how much pieces of artwork will sell by moving this square across a board. The game continues for five rounds, and it’s another one of those games where you definitely cannot do most of the things you want to do. And at the start of each round, the worker-placement sections of the board are selected, which is another neat element of the game, so the building you built might not even be in play for the round. This game is totally underrated!

6. Arboretum

I played this new edition of this older card game for the first time this year. Arboretum is gorgeous and unassumingly brutal. At the start of each turn, players take two cards, play one into their arboretum and discard another card. You’re building paths of beautiful trees in order to possibly score that path at the end of the game. But you can only score that tree species if you have the highest sum of those tree cards your hand.

I love balancing that push and pull between keeping cards in your hands versus playing them down into your arboretum. You can also prevent opponents from scoring large paths by hanging on to certain tree cards. The card game is inviting enough to introduce to new gamers but strategic to engage heavy gamers like myself.

5. Catch the Moon

Players place ladders in Catch the Moon, and each game has been a masterpiece!

Catch the Moon is such a beautiful game. I just purchased it in November at BGG Con, but it’s already risen to one of my most-played games in 2018. And yes, I know it’s only a 20-minute game, but it’s one that people immediately want to play over and over again. The table presence of this game also draws curious passers-by, and more often than not, they take a seat at the next game.

Catch the Moon is a dexterity game in which players take turns adding wonky ladders to a main centerpiece that sits atop a cloud. Roll a dice, and the dice tells a player to either place a ladder that touches exactly one or two ladders, or the new ladder must be the highest point. If any ladders fall or touch the base, or the player doesn’t follow the dice’s directions, they get a tear drop because the moon is super sad. Try to get the fewest tear drops, and don’t get the last tear drop, and you’ll win the game. Each game of this has been different; some creations go up super high, while others stay really low, just barely hanging on and not scraping the cloud base.

4. Sidereal Confluence

Sidereal Confluence is a live negotiation and trading game with asymmetrical alien factions.

Sidereal (which rhymes with ethereal, and, believe me, it took me some times to figure out how to say this word correctly) Confluence is a bonkers real-time negotiation and trading game that plays up to nine players who are asymmetrical alien factions working to research and run various technologies. The kicker is that they often don’t have the resources to run those technologies, hence they need to find the resources from others.

This is one of my favorite games to run at the convention, because you can assemble a large number of participants, as I think a larger player count works best for this game. There’s yelling, trading for future favors and making less-than-ideal trades because you really, really need that one last blue cube, and the time is running out. (I set each trading round to 10 minutes.) And when you have an alien race like Kt’Zr’Kt’Rtl (complete with a pronunciation guide), you know the game is gonna be insane.

3. Teotihuacan

Teotihuacan was my favorite game of BGG Con this year.

I had the pleasure to play Teotihuacan at BGG Con, and it did not disappoint. In Teotihuacan, each player is a powerful noble family working to build the temple of Teotihuacan. You’re using your workforce of dice to move around the board like a giant rondel. Depending on the value of your dice, you receive various resources at each location, and then at the end of your turn, your dice levels up.

As with its predecesor Tzolk’in, the game is a lot about timing your actions correctly. Instead of the giant wheel cogs in Tzolk’in, the game is all about moving your dice in a way so that it levels up at the right moment, so that you can get resources to build temple steps and gain technology, among other things. Dice are moving in one direction in order to ascend to 6 pips, and then you get a reward and start over again at one location.

2. Feudum

Come play with us! We’re very friendly!

Picking between No. 1 and No. 2 was super difficult as these two last games are equally exceptional, but for the purposes of this list, I had to pick which game belonged in which spot. For No. 2, it’s came down to Feudum. Feudum, despite its whimsy artwork and endearing behemoth, is quite a beast to learn and equally to play. But it’s definitely worth it, in my opinion.

Feudum combines elements of Concordia with using card play for taking actions, but adds area control on the board and maintaining influence in various guilds to gain benefits for various actions. It’s one of those games like Lisboa where all the actions itself aren’t difficult per se, but the interconnectivity of those actions and guilds is what makes the game truly shine. This game is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea, as I saw some criticisms online about this game being unnecessary complicated instead of complex, but I don’t agree with those assessments. It’s hefty, crunchy and pays off when you find that group of people who enjoy these type of games and are willing to put in the time to peel away at the game’s layers.

1. Coimbra

I love love this game, even if I’m not very good at it.

And we’re at No. 1! What edged Coimbra a bit past Feudum is its accessibility. Coimbra is an equally crunchy game, but when it’s just four rounds and plays in about two hours, more people will likely dive into this game than Feudum. Plus, people love brightly colored game boards, and there’s lots of dice! But the dice isn’t used for chucking!

In Coimbra, the dice are rolled each round, and players take turns selecting dice in which pips matter for the first half of the round, and then the color of the same dice matters for the second half of the round. In the first half of the round, players collect character cards the give them special abilities or end-game scoring points. Character cards are mostly selected from higher to lower pips, and paid for with either money or military resources. On the second half of the round, the color of the dice will give you that income resource based on there you’re sitting on one of the four tracks. Tracks galore in this game, and I always enjoy balancing all the different resources and having two different incomes. What a fantastic game!

And that’s the end of the list! Let me know what some of your favorites were this year, and what you’re looking forward to next year, either with board games or life happenings.

Happy New Year, and hope everyone has a wonderful 2019!
BGG Con 2018: Another excellent time in Dallas

BGG Con 2018: Another excellent time in Dallas

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Holy forkballs! It’s December already! Where did November go? Man, it’s been a busy, fun, amazing few weeks, and now that I’ve had some to come up for air, let’s talk about all the gaming I did at BGG. 

This is my fifth consecutive BGG Con, and my fourth year volunteering for Team Geek. If you’re on Team Geek, you work eight 2-hour shifts throughout the course of the convention. And you get to do so in a sweet, sweet jersey. There’s also a volunteer dinner the Tuesday night before the convention so you can meet and hang out with fellow volunteers before the con gets underway on Wednesday. Here’s a photo of Team Geek from Jenny, who is also on team Geek:

Tuesday

I arrived in Dallas on Tuesday morning, had a wonderful breakfast with an old Phoenix friend at Yolk. What an adorable breakfast place, and my skillet was hearty and tasty. I was pleasantly surprised that they had an option for turkey sausage, considering I’m in the heart of Texas, where everything is all about other meats that I don’t eat. 

I arrived at the Hyatt Regency at DFW after breakfast, checked in, took a quick nap (don’t judge — I flew out of Phoenix at 5:30 a.m.), and started volunteer shifts. As a veteran Teek Geek member, I got the first selection on volunteer shifts, so I was able to knock out three of my shifts on Tuesday before our welcome dinner of Mexican food. Yums!

Julie was leading volunteers on Tuesday who had signed up to work that day. Jon of JonGetsGames stopped by to help, too! 

After dinner, we got our badges and free games, one of which was a sweet Everdell glass pint, and started gaming! First up was Teotihuacan: City of Gods, which was high on my to-play list for BGG. Kevin Russ, who I had met at RinCon two months prior, taught us how to play, and man, do I love this game!

 Teotihuacan was my favorite game of BGG Con this year.

In Teotihuacan, each player is a powerful noble family working to build the temple of Teotihuacan. You’re using your workforce of dice to move around the board like a giant rondel. Depending on the value of your dice, you receive various resources at each location, and then at the end of your turn, your dice levels up.

The board looks incredibly intimidating but the iconography is clear in terms of what rewards you’ll receive at each location, and game play, in my opinion, is pretty straightforward. Making the most of those actions is much more difficult.

As with its predecesor Tzolk’in, the game is a lot about timing your actions correctly. Instead of the giant wheel cogs in Tzolk’in, the game is all about moving your dice in a way so that it levels up at the right moment, so that you can get resources to build temple steps and gain technology, among other things. Dice are moving in one direction in order to ascend to 6 pips, and then you get a reward and start over again at one location. Can’t wait until my game group gets of a copy of this game!

Next up, I learned and played Catch the Moon for the first time from Eric. I can’t say enough great things about this darling game. It’s one of the few games I purchased at BGG Con because I immediately fell in love with it. And true story: Eric is really good and mean at this game! 

Catch the Moon is darling! Don’t mess up and make the moon cry!

Besides it being just adorable to look at, this dexterity game is easy enough for people to jump into and interesting enough to keep even the heaviest of gamers engaged. On your turn, you roll a die, and you place a ladder onto the cloud either touching one other ladder, two other ladders, or it has to be the highest point on the cloud platform. If you make ladders fall, the moon gets super sad and you receive a teardrop. If you get the last teardrop, the game ends and you’re eliminated, and the person with the fewest teardrops wins the game.

Getting some pre-con gaming in with Netters, Mitch, Eric, Daniel, Kimberly and Sum Fat Kid. 

I then played Tokyo Jidohanbaiki, which is a game about Japanese vending machines and drinks. It’s a little — literally, teeny tiny — game where place your smol soda bottles on drink crates and not have them explode, but also when you choose for them to explode, you can wipe out your opponents.

Look at these teeny tiny soda cans!

Wednesday

Today was the first day of the convention. I worked two shifts at registration, which I love doing. I love greeting folks and seeing everyone’s excited and happy faces on Day 1.

I then met up with some Arizona folks to play some games before  dinner that evening. I got a chance to play Meeple Circus for the first time. That game is a riot, and the circus soundtrack adds a nice touch for this game. I’m not normally a fan of adding apps or tech to board games, but this was stupid fun. I mean, who doesn’t love stacking meeples in a dexterity race while circus music is playing in the background?

Stacking meeples and animals in real time in Meeple Circus, which has its own circus soundtrack. 

We then all went out to dinner to a vegan restaurant called Spiral Diner. This was all of our first time visiting this place, and, even though it’s quite a haul from the Hyatt Regency, it’s definitely worth checking out.

It’s Greg Dickson of Hooked on Geek, Andrew, Dr. GloryHogg and GloryHoundd!

I ordered an El Paso burger with a cashew patty and pistachio ice cream for dessert. Both were super yum and tasted like what I would normally eat as a non-vegan.

I ordered a cashew-based patty for my El Paso burger.
I had to try the pistachio ice cream. Excellent! 

We then arrived back at the hotel to teach my favorite game to run at a convention: Sidereal Confluence. I enjoy having a large amount of people playing this game since it makes for a better economy, and luckily, seven people signed up to play. And I know live negotiation games aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, or that maybe I’m not even the best teacher of it, but I do enjoy sharing this game with others as I feel like it’s not a game that would normally get on table on a regular game day. 

Sidereal Confluence is a table hog! I also love using my giant tweezers in the game.

I then ran across Eric teaching Eco Links, which is another real-time path-building game in which you’re trying to connects animals through a path. Even though the game is light, it reminded me of playing an 18xx because you’re playing these tiles on a board and looking for that sharp curve.

Eco Links is a real-time tile-laying, road-building game where players connect all the bears.

Thursday

On Thursday, I woke up early (for me) to game with Moe and play Fort Sumter at 9:30 a.m. Fort Sumter is a 2-player card-driven game that pits the Unionist and Secessionist player against each other. The game plays for 25-40 minutes, and takes place over three rounds and ends with a Final Crisis confrontation.

Here’s Moe teaching me to how to play Fort Sumter early Thursday morning. 

Similar to other CDGs like Twilight Struggle, players have a hand of cards and play them for events or action points. What’s different about this game, besides it taking a fraction of the time of a game of Twilight Struggle, is that in each round, you get a secret objective that you’re playing toward for extra victory points.

Fort Sumter plays in 25-40 minutes, and it’s a tense CDG!

I enjoyed the push and pull of this game, and that escalation of the game as more cubes come into play. This game is part of the GMT Lunchtime Games series, strategic games designed for the lunch hour. It’s a great game to play if you’re interested in learning how to play a card-driven game and don’t have an entire half-day to play.

Next up was lunch with Netters and Mitch, and then Netters taught me The Estates. Jeremy and @fencedingates also joined in on the game. This game is right up my alley! It involves bidding and blocking people, and is all kinds of mean! You are bidding to build pieces to place along three different streets, and any incomplete streets will score negative points in the end. Players can also dictate how long the game will go, and I love the closed economy of it.

Netters did a great job teaching this game. I enjoyed the bidding and just hanging out with all these cool folks. I wish Netters and Mitch lived closer to me!  

I then taught this game I had heard about on Tuesday from JonGetsGames: Eye My Favorite Things. This game can be a tad absurd but it’s fun with the right folks. You pick a category for the person on your right, and they write down their top 5 items for that category and rank them, as well as something they hate in that category and rank them as a zero. Then you get the cards they wrote on, and then it becomes a trick-taking game based on what you think they ranked all the items they wrote on their cards. You do this three times, and then the person with the most VPs wins the game. It’s a game that compares random categories like soup, world problems, board games and ice cream flavors altogether.

Eye My Favorite Things was the biggest surprise of BGG Con! 

I then met up with some friends at a meetup for female content contributors and their friends. Netters and I organized one last year and it was a nice refuge from the hustle and bustle of the main convention floor, and it gave people a chance to get to know each other in a smaller setting. The two games I played were — yep you guessed it — Catch the Moon and Eye My Favorite Things.

Oh, hai, friends! A great time was had by all!

FridayF

I started my Friday with a lovely game of Coimbra with these cool folks, Joe, Julie and Chris. I absolutely adore this game, and, even though I’m completely horrible at it, I’m always down to play it.  It was a wonderful way to start my morning. 

Coimbra is soooo good! So many tough decisions and working hard to make all your character cards work well together. 

Chris and I then went to meet Jason and Donna Dinger for lunch, and Jason taught us Ground Floor, designed by David Short. In Ground Floor, you’re the CEO of a company, and you have to manage hiring new employees, expanding your office and scheduling your shipments. In addition, you’re literally building floors into your office building. That was a neat visual component to the game! The game plays for about two hours, and man, you quickly start running out of actions and can’t do everything you want to. I had a great time playing this!

Each player has their own board, which you start to build out for your company.

Jason then taught us another game, The King of Frontier. It’s one of his favorite games, and he managed to secure a copy of the first edition, since the new one has been completely revamped with a completely different aesthetic. I mean, who doesn’t want to play a game with these stick figures?

This little stick-figure guy is ready to build his lan, and do some funky dance moves, too.

It’s a neat tile-laying game that has a follow mechanism, and you’re building out a little kingdom and collecting resources on your player mat. Jason showed me photos of what the new edition looks like, and I think it has lot a lot of its charm with the new art.

I then attended a meetup from the Inside Voices Network. I played Wangdo with a different Eric and Chris. It’s a cute little area-control game where you draw bears from a bag in order to place them on the board. But you can only place a bear when you have the appropriate colored bears matching the spots surrounding that location. There are also cards you can play to benefit yourself or hurt an opponent, and the game is a race to collect all the tokens.

Wangdo is a fun quick area control, set collection bear game. 

And the bear pieces look like yummy gummy bears. 

Squee! These cute bears are not candy though. 

Next, we played a prototype that Chris was demo-ing called Hour Town by LO5 Games. This game is a real-time worker-placement game where you collect resources to build buildings, some of which are multiple levels tall. And there’s also an area-control element in which you contributed the most resources toward a building. I like the up and down frantic-ness of this game, which lasts about 20 minutes. I hope this game gets published! 

Hour Town is a fun prototype that Chris taught Eric and me. Sand timers galore! 

I then played a game of Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra. I was a little skeptical about this game, mostly that it was relying too much on being gorgeous and like how could it be better than Azul, which was one of the top games I played in 2017. 

I didn’t think it was possible to make Azul tiles look more like candy, but here we are! 

The verdict is that this sequel is worth playing! It changes up gameplay to make it more puzzly, and more importantly, it’s a fixed amount of rounds. You’re working to complete vertical columns, and there’s an added element where you only score columns to the right of the pawn. Thus scoring can ramp up if you build your window in the right order. I enjoyed that extra elements to the game. And it comes with this little cardboard box to discard pieces in it, which makes it easier to pour back into the bag. I don’t need both copies though. One should suffice in your game collection.

I ended Friday night with my usual BGG Friday Night Shenanigans by playing Yummy Monster and Coconuts with my girlfriends. 

My girlfriends and I are ready to feed the monsters! Now where’s the food items?

Yummy Monster is a flinging dexterity game in which each player is feeding a monster. Each player wears a mask over their face and slides cardboard claws onto their hands, and you throw pieces of food into the monster’s mouth, which is depicted as one of four walls you set up in the game box. It’s super ridiculous, but we had a lot of fun.

And of course, we love Coconuts. So much shenanigans. 

Fun fact: the longer we play this game, the worse we become at it. How does that happen?

Saturday

Saturday began with seeing some sun (even though it was freezing outside) when Rand, who is originally from Dallas, invited us and took a car-load of us to his favorite BBQ joint Lockhart. The place is a tad farther from the convention, but definitely worth checking out if you have access to a vehicle. The meat was tasty, and there wasn’t a 40-minute wait for the meats, which is the case when we go out to Hard Eight This place is casual, homey and right in the middle of the Dallas arts district. 

Amid the chowing down of the meats, I completely forgot to take a table photo of what we ate. But trust me, guys, this place was yum!

Saturday gaming began with Rescue Polar Bears. I’ve already been bracing myself for this game because everyone has been telling me how hard it is, and when you lose, these little guys die. 

Please save my polar bear family!

This game is a co-op action-point-allowance game where you’re trying to save the polar bears before all the ice melts. Brutal! But these components are just darling, and they make you super motivated to try to win the game by getting polar bears onto your boat and helicoptering them away!

We gotta rescue the polar bears before all the ice melts!

Saturday night was closing ceremonies. This is always a great time because so many game prizes were awarded! One year, I’ll totally win a prize package.

The main ballroom is packed for closing ceremonies. People want to win games!

I then unknowingly started a new tradition with my friends: teaching Battlestar Galactica immediately after closing ceremonies. This is my absolute favorite game, and I love teaching it to new people. I played this with Greg, Chris, GloryHoundd and DrGloryHogg. It’s my third year in a row that I’ve done this on the Saturday night at the convention.

All of our happy faces before the cylons tried to take over. Those dirty toasters! 

GloryHoundd even had this shirt on, which I totally should’ve guessed she was the cyclon. She later revealed she was, after DrGloryHogg brigged her and Chris. DrGloryHogg has no reason to brig Chris but Chris ended up being the other cylon. Good job, humans!

GloryHoundd was absolutely the cylon. 

The final game of BGG Con for me was Iki. The game is based in Edo, Japan, where artisans, street vendors and professionals are setting up shop. Players move their meeples along the city like a rondel. There’s also a track showing how protected your stores are from fire, and that determines the order for choosing how many spaces you want to move in the next round and the order to purchase character cards. This entire game has many clever elements! And some of the Japanese professionals are charming and based on historical writings.

When you do business with shop owners, you get resources and the shop owners gain experience. Timing also plays a large role because as shop owners maximize their experience, they move off the board and into your personal supply. So you might be expecting some resources, but another player has triggered your shop owner to be removed from the board. Iki is such a hidden gem, and I’m super sad that I can’t find a copy of it that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

And then just like that, six days came and went, and it was time to return to Phoenix, which was Chris’ first time visiting. Every year I say that I had an excellent time at BGG, and this year is no exception. It’s my one giant con for the year, and it’s truly an amazing experience hanging out and gaming with people I call my friends, even though they live all across the U.S. This year’s BGG was particularly special for me. Board-game Twitter just brings people together, you know?

I miss all these cool people and many others who had left by Saturday night! Can’t wait until we can all game again! 

Anywho,  if you’re interested in going to BGG Con next year, it’ll be moving to a bigger location in downtown Dallas, which means more tickets will be on sale! Staying at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Dallas will result in access to restaurants and nearby attractions, something I’m very much looking forward to. Because, man, does it get expensive uber-ing out of DFW to get some good grub.

If you made it all the way here, thanks for reading about my experience at BGG Con! I hope everyone is having a wonderful December! 
Lisboa: A Masterpiece from Vital Lacerda

Lisboa: A Masterpiece from Vital Lacerda

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This review of Lisboa was featured on Episode 46 of The Five By.  Check out the rest of the episode, which also features Mr. Jack, Lords of Waterdeep, Apocrypha and KLASK.

 

Lisboa is a game published by Eagle-Gryphon Games, designed by Vital Lacerda, with gorgeous artwork from Ian O’Toole. It plays 2-4 players, and even though the box says 60-120 minutes, my experience is it plays a little bit longer than that with maximum players.

Before we begin, Lisboa is by far one of the most complicated games I’ve ever had to teach, learn and play. In real life, rules explanation can take about 30 to 45 minutes. So if heavy games are not your bag, feel free to skip ahead five minutes. I totally will not be offended.

Lisboa is gorgeous, from outside the box to the game itself.

Lisboa is beautiful, crunchy and has a little bit of everything that a heavy gamer like myself enjoys. The game has area control, set collection, card drafting and tile placement. And probably most importantly, you get to decide your end-game scoring conditions.

The purplish-blue board game, whose color scheme is reminiscent of the Portuguese tiles the city is known for, is set in 1755, when Lisboa was struck by many natural disasters: an earthquake, fires and a tsunami, pretty much leveling the city. And now we’re all tasked with helping the city recover economically. We are taking turns to clear rubble, build ships and sell goods, get permits to construct public buildings, and set up shops so that the city can prosper. And we all want wigs. Lots and lots of wigs, which are VPs in this game.

The board is divided into two main parts: one side shows all the actions you can do on your turn, and the right side is filled with rubble and street locations for storefronts and public buildings.

The right side of the game features the city of Lisboa, where players are tasked to remove rubble, and build storefronts and public buildings.

What the game boils down to is its multi-use cards, and players picking from one of two actions with those cards from their hand of five cards. You can either tuck the cards into your portfolio, or play cards into the royal court to meet with the king, prime minister or master builder. These two main actions, either tuck or play, however, unlock a spiderweb of many, many other actions.

If you decide to tuck a card, you receive the reward or penalty for tucking that card. And then the card either gives influence for later or some permanent ability. You then can sell goods on an open ship or trade with the nobles, which will require goods. There are four goods in the game: gold, cloths, books and tools. Each noble wants a specific type of good, but all of them will take gold. If you trade the nobles, you can perform two different state actions if you meet the required good for that particular noble.

There are six different state actions you can choose from: recruiting officials (which you place on the board and will affect how other players meet with nobles), acquiring a plan (which you need to build public buildings), building a ship (which gives you influence and wigs when people sell goods to your boat), producing goods (if you have a storefront on the map), meeting the cardinal (which gives you Clergy tiles and benefits), and getting royal favors (which allow you to follow someone’s noble visit).

If you decide to not tuck your card, but instead play a card, you can visit a noble or gain the benefit from the treasury card. To visit a noble, you have to pay influence, and depending on who you visit, you can build a store (which is calculated by the rubble left at that intersection), take a decree card (criteria that will score you wigs at the end of the game), or open a public building (which requires to you already have a building permit of the same color in your possession and workers on the board).

Here are a few of the decree cards that score you VPs at the end of the game if you fulfill them.

As more stores are built in the city, it becomes less expensive to take that action because the rubble slowly get cleared. Rubble cubes are randomly placed at the start of the game so at the intersection of each storefront location, the price is calculated based on how many cubes are still there and which color, with beige being the most expensive and blue the cheapest. When you build, you remove one cube, and then pay the cost of the remaining cubes. And this is how you can collect sets of rubble on your player board, which will then unlock more spaces for cards to tuck and progress the game.

Also, when you satisfy the requirements and build a public building, you then gain the rubble the public building will sit on, and then if there is a storefront along that street where the public building was just placed, then the storefront scores VPs. In all, a storefront can score up to three times, if public buildings are placed on the north, east and west sides of the board.

So after you either tuck a card or play a card, you carry out the actions that correspond with the tucking or playing, and then you take a card from one of the face-up piles and your turn ends. The game is played out over two identical periods. The first period ends when someone collects two sets of rubble or three of the four piles of cards are depleted. The second period ends when someone collects four sets of rubble or three of the four piles of cards are depleted as well.

Lisboa manages to keep other players engaged even when it’s not their turn. As with other Lacerda games, there’s an option to follow another player’s main action. At the end of the game, you score any decrees you’ve collected, the various streets are scored according to who has the most storefronts on that street, and you a couple other items such as ships, influence and money.

I love teaching this game, especially when I have the giant tweezers with me!

The interconnectivity of all these actions is what I love most about Lisboa, which I believe is a masterpiece. Each action isn’t difficult per se, but there are a multitude of microsteps that need to first happen in order for you to do something large like, build a public building.

And that’s the super quick overview of Lisboa! This is Meeple Lady for the Five By Games. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as meeplelady, or on my website, boardgamemeeplelady.com. Thanks for listening. Bye!

State of the Blog

State of the Blog

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This week is my blog anniversary! Happy four years to me! It was four years ago that I created my board-gaming alter ego and wrote my first post, and then a month after that, I went to my first BGG Con in 2014.

The blog originally started because the guy I was dating noticed that I was super duper excited about board games all the time, and, since he wasn’t a board gamer, said that I should write about all those things and find my people. So that I did. Around the same time, one of my favorite cooking blogs posted a how-to tutorial on how to start a blog, which I took as a sign, and created my website.

This design is sooo 2014! And I’m totally being serious because this was one of the more popular themes in WordPress that year.

My, how things have changed! (Thanks Wayback Machine for this classic gem!) I also can’t believe I left that awful photo of Caverna in the header for an entire year! Totes shaking my head. I then changed the header photo to Battlestar Galactica a year later and kept it up for almost two years.

I changed my blog’s header photo in 2015 to a much, much better image.

The first two years were just casual entries about gaming, and I feel like I didn’t start devoting extra time to actively creating content and being active on social media until about two years ago.

I also redesigned my website this past January to what it looks like today with my new logo, and 2018 has been by far my busiest blogging year. Woot!

So, if you don’t mind, let’s take a trip down memory lane. I’m digging out some of my favorites posts and blogger moments below.

My most-read post ever: Shogun/Samurai Swords/Ikusa. I get emails about this game surprisingly often, usually someone will remember this game from childhood and look it up in Google and run across my post. Lots of folks super nostalgic about this game!

My favorite photo shoot: Takenoko: Collector’s Edition. This was fun as I actually went outside in the middle of the day to take photos. Isn’t that panda darling? No joke, if my place was burning and I only had time to take one game, this would be it.

My first year-end top games list: Top 10 games I played for the first time in 2016.

A few super personal posts: Why I Play Board Games, Dating and recent Life Updates. Things have changed for me a lot since some of these posts, but it’s still nice to see where I was at that specific point in time.

My most-listened-to interview: I attended GMT’s Weekend at the Warehouse in October 2017 and, that year, I was doing interviews on my SoundCloud channel. I had a great time at the convention and met some really awesome people.

My first foray into a board-gaming podcast: I was co-host and producer of Hooked on Geek for six months, an experience that was invaluable, and shared what I learned during that time.

My first top 100 list: Check it on BGG, which I compiled in March 2018. Feel free to agree or disagree!

My first radio interview on Phoenix’s NPR station: This interview was done for the upcoming Arizona Game Fair.

I started editing rulebooks: My professional background is copyediting, and I feel blessed to be able to combine my two loves. (Where’s my red pen at?)

My first time as a guest on a board-game podcast: Check out Harold on Games as well as his other interviews with wargamers.

I launched an FLGS profile series: My first one was on Imperial Outpost Games in Glendale, Arizona.

I joined another podcast: I’m part of the Five By Games team.

My first article for a major website: I wrote an article on LifeHacker on the best board games for kids.

My goal for the blog was to write weekly, and I think that for more than half of the four years, I stuck with that. I’m proud of the work I’ve done here, and I’m happy to have made so many friends in the board-gaming community along the way.

I’ve learned so much about the ins and outs of the board-game industry, from game design and development to content creation either via writing, videos or podcasts, all the way to running your own game company or convention. For so many people who do this, often times this is not their primary job and that speaks volumes to me that a lot of the content we see is a labor of love.

I have these meeple magnets on my fridge, because who doesn’t love meeples?

I’ve also learned about how important visibility is in the board-game world. When I first started this blog, there didn’t seem to be too many women of color in this sphere, but that number has grown so much in just the few years I’ve been online in this community. It’s been so fantastic!

What warms my heart most are those times when every so often, I’ll get an email or message saying that seeing someone like me, a woman of color playing a heavy game or a wargame, inspired them to check out whatever game I had been writing about. Visibility matters 100 freakin’ percent. And equally important, making all gamers welcome. When you have a large and/or captive audience, it’s important to give a voice to people who aren’t the majority as well as to make sure that the gaming environment is safe for everyone.

In closing, thanks, dear reader, for sticking with me on this fun journey. Here’s to many more years of board gaming and blogging!

And whether you’ve been here for years or this is the first post you’ve read, say hello down below and let me know what you like most about my content.

Hi, I’m Meeple Lady, and I love board games.
Snakes and Lattes Tempe opens in Arizona

Snakes and Lattes Tempe opens in Arizona

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Around the corner from downtown Tempe’s Mill Avenue and across the street from Arizona State University on Sixth Street, a new board-game cafe recently moved in: Snakes and Lattes. Snakes and Lattes is a board-game cafe chain from Toronto, Ontario, in Canada, and it has opened its first U.S. location in Arizona.

Snakes and Lattes Tempe had a soft opening last Friday, and the place was already buzzing. The cafe is in the old Z’Tejas building, for locals who remember that restaurant, but the inside has been completely gutted and renovated into a space that chic, modern, functional and inviting for board gamers of all kinds. There are lots of large tables for bigger groups, square tables that can be easily joined and separated, comfy booths, and a bar to sit at.

Snakes and Lattes Tempe is in the old Z’Tejas building in downtown Tempe.

The cafe offers about 3,500 square feet of seating, and occupancy is at about 200 people. There are also two large patios that seat about 25 people, and, in typical Arizona fashion, the patios have misters and heaters to accommodate the desert weather.

Gamers can also sit outside on one of the cafe’s two large patios.

Currently, the game library is at about 700 games, eventually growing to about 1,000 games. The library is color-coded, too, so that people can quickly pick out a game based on group size and skill level.

Some gamers are checking out the wall of games at Snakes and Lattes Tempe.

“If you’re brand new and see a wall of board games, it can be overwhelming,” said Susan Lawver, game curator for Snakes and Lattes Tempe. Lawver has been instrumental in helping shape the cafe and picking out the games for the library. “We’re always looking for game suggestions,” she said.

This coding system and stickers on games help people select a game off the shelf.

Lawver has been training the Game Gurus, who are staff members who can help cafe patrons pick a game and teach it. Game Gurus are supposed to to be able to teach about 200 games and help out with questions. She also plans to designate a game shelf for local publishers and create events such as game design nights, when publishers and game designers can bring in their game for playtesting, tweaking and getting feedback.

This shelf contains heavier strategy games for cafe patrons.

Snakes and Lattes Tempe is also a full-fledged restaurant. The menu is diverse, with appetizers, burgers and sandwiches, salads, naan pizza and an entire category on poutine, as an homage to the cafe’s Canadian roots. Currently, the poutine options include: Classic Poutine, Loaded Poutine, Vegan Disco Fries, Chicken Bite Poutine, Korean Fire Chicken Poutine and All Day Breakfast Poutine.

“The menu is unexpected for a board-game cafe,” Lawver said. “We did a lot of specialty items, and we brought in a chef from Toronto and a local chef to carry the menu.”

And let’s not forget about the drinks. Snakes and Lattes Tempe offers about a dozen craft beers on tap as well as a large selection of wine, canned and bottled beer, cocktails and a full coffee bar.

Snakes and Lattes has a full food and drink menu.

It’s been a busy few months for cafe owner Ben Castanie, from first getting the keys to completely renovating the space to the soft opening.

“We wanted to spend the time and not rush our opening because it’s our first location in the U.S.,” Castanie said. “We want to show the best of what we have to offer and put a lot of thought into what we did, the games, the food, and the alcohol, and we’re not going to stop there. We’re going to do a lot more.”

There’s also a gift shop inside Snakes and Lattes Tempe for various games.

Castanie said they have plans to sign a lease in Charlotte, N.C., and are also looking into another locations in Arizona and possibly Colorado. By the end of the year, he said, they’ll have more good news about future locations.

Susan Lawver and Ben Castanie stand in front the bar at Snakes and Lattes Tempe.

Snakes and Lattes Tempe will have an official, splashier grand opening in November. Lawver said they decided to go with a soft opening as to not overwhelm the staff and ensure that gamers have a great experience.

The cafe aims to draw the attention of ASU students nearby as well as families and gamers alike.

“I think Millennials are looking for more experiences instead of watching more screens. This’ll be a great place to take a date,” she said.

Andrew of Game State Show and his girlfriend, Ali, played at game during their visit to Snakes and Lattes Tempe.

If you go

Snakes and Lattes Tempe is open Tuesday-Sunday and is located at 20 W. Sixth St. in Tempe, Arizona. It’s $5 to play games, or free if you’re just eating. There is metered parking on the street and parking garages nearby. The cafe is also a few blocks from the light-rail stop. To get more information, visit their website, or find them on Twitter and Facebook.

 
RinCon Games 2018: Panels, Women’s Space, A Drink Surprise

RinCon Games 2018: Panels, Women’s Space, A Drink Surprise

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This past weekend was RinCon down in Tucson, which is a two-hour drive from Phoenix. Last year, I was only able to attend for one day. This year, the convention invited me to be a special guest, and I got to speak on some panels regarding subjects that are near and dear to me! How frakking awesome is that?

I drove south to Tucson on Friday after work and immediately jumped into a 7-player Sidereal Confluence, my new favorite con game after I busted it out at Strategicon. I’ve been bringing this game to conventions because I figure I can get a large player count for this game, which is absolutely fun and bonkers — if you love live negotiating! I got a chance to play this with friends I saw at Gila Monster, and a good time was had by all.

Sidereal Confluence is a live negotiation and trading game with asymmetrical alien factions.

We then played two games of Deception: Undercover Allies. The original Deception game is my favorite deduction-style game, so it was great playing this expansion. The new roles such as the Inside Man and Protective Detail made for some real nail-biters in finding the murderer. Plus, the microscopes and the police badges are a sweet addition.

I got a chance to play the expansion of my favorite social-deduction game.

On Saturday, I hopped into a game of At the Gates of Loyang, which is from my favorite designer Uwe Rosenberg. This has been one of my grail games to play, as I don’t know anyone local who has it. It’s an older game from 2009 and has the farming and harvest elements that are similar to his other games. I really liked the card-drafting mechanism for Loyang, in which players are placing cards from their hands into the courtyard to later pick two action cards. The player has to both pick a card from their hand and from the courtyard for their two card actions in that round.

I’m playing an Uwe game where I’m planting and harvesting fruits and veggies!

Then in typical Uwe fashion, you can plant and harvest your fruits and vegetables and complete orders from various customers. If you can’t satisfy some customers, then you’ll get a penalty. I need to find a copy of this game for my collection!

I then spoke from my first panel for the convention on diversity and inclusivity. Personally, I don’t have much experience doing public speaking so I’m always a little bit nervous doing these things, but everyone was so friendly that you can’t help but get caught up on discussions about making board gaming a better place for everyone. Topics such as how to promote welcoming spaces came up and how to best amplify those diverse voices in the industry. I was on the panel with Erin Escobedo, Jamie DuBois of Do Better Gaming, Jahmal Brown and Camdon Wright.

There was some good discussion on making gaming more welcoming and inclusive. (Photo by CritHitAZ)

I then met up with RinCon special guest Sarah Reed who taught me how to play her games Oaxaca and Project Dreamscape. It was a real treat finally meeting her in person and hanging out with her all weekend. I love the colorful artwork of Oaxaca and had a little too much fun activating some of the Handicraft Cards to target my opponents.

I love the colorful artwork in Oaxaca. You can target some of your opponents with some of the cards. But ultimately, the game forces you to specialize and be more efficient with gathering and crafting.

Come to think of it, we also started getting a little mean for Project Dreamscape! There’s an option to flip over cards, making it more expensive to get the cards we all want. Both games were really fun to play. I also learned about how Oaxaca came to be and gained useful information about creating prototypes during Sarah’s panel on Game Design, which also included David Short and James Earness of Cheapass Games.

It’s me and game designer extraordinaire Sarah Reed, who is originally from Sacramento. I’m glad we got a chance to meet in real life and hang out!

After that panel, I participated in a women in gaming panel with these lovely ladies: GloryHoundd, Marissa Kelly of Magpie Games, Sarah Reed and Griffin Maria. We talked about our experiences — good and bad — of being a female gamer, the role models we have or wished we had, and what motivates us to create content in a sometimes inhospitable environment. We all had different experiences and come from various corners of the board-game world. It was inspiring to listen to all these women speak.

Loved being on a panel with all these wonderful ladies. Karen Arnold Ewing (behind me in purple) is in charge of the convention and moderated the panel.

The Women’s Space came up in discussions as well. For the first time ever, RinCon dedicated a separate space for women to game in. This room was beyond fantastic — it had fresh-baked goods, snacks and a well-kept stash of products people could dig into.

Who doesn’t love fresh-baked goods? Women do it right!

Whenever I went into the Women’s Space, most folks were gaming but there were a few who just needed a quiet break away from the hustle and bustle of the main gaming areas. I think this is such a wonderful idea and hope that more conventions set up a place like this.

The Women’s Space was set up in a hotel suite away from the main convention floor. It was a nice retreat.

After the panel, I learned Gizmos, which is nothing like Potion Explosion despite marbles and a contraption from which the marbles come out of. It’s a quick engine-building game where you’re building these machines and scoring victory points. Certain machines will increase your capacity to hold various cards, which then will make your engine more efficient.

David Short taught us how to play Gizmos, a quick engine-builder that has marbles and a contraption that spits out marbles.

I then played Coimbra, which is my second time playing this game after Gila Monster. I cannot get enough of this game, with its crunchy decisions in a not-super-long eurogame. It’s essentially dice drafting in which pips matter for the first half of the round, and then the color of the dice matter for the second half of the round in receiving income or resources of the matching dice color. So crunchy! This is one I would love to add to my collection.

I love love this game, even if I’m not very good at it.

Lastly, I played Ginkopolis, which I first played at Arizona Game Fair. This game has card drafting, area control and multi-use cards. We played a 5P game that lasted into the wee hours of the night, briefly interrupted by some Eegee’s frozen treats at midnight. Also, on Friday night at midnight, the convention brought in some free pizza for a pizza party. Such cool perks from the con!

We played a 5P game of Ginkopolis that lasted in the night on Saturday night.

On Sunday morning, I signed up to teach Lisboa, one of my absolute favorite games and which I actually learned at last year’s RinCon, to some women in the Women’s Space. It’s a beast to teach, and I wanted to share my love of this game in a chill environment where people can ask all the questions they want. We got through the first half of the game before the time ended, but it seemed like most of them got the gist of it, enough to figure out if they would want to buy it. Also, the giant tweezers were a bit hit and made it very easy to point out iconography.

Had a good time teaching these ladies Lisboa. Hope they enjoyed the session!

After Lisboa, I purchased Oaxaca and found Sarah to say goodbye to her and have her sign my new game before making the trek back to Phoenix. The biggest surprise of the convention was finding out that RinCon named a drink after me! That is seriously the coolest thing! The drink was super yum and had a dragon on it to match the convention’s theme! Squee!!

I got a drink named after me! My life has totally peaked, and I can die happy.

And just like that, the weekend was over. I had a wonderful time gaming with old and new friends. I loved that the convention is so supportive in creating a safe and inclusive space for all types of gamers, especially with the addition of the Women’s Space. And thanks, RinCon, for having me as a special guest! Can’t wait until next year!

Cheers! And hope to see you at the next convention!