Stone Age completes our collection of 10 out of the top 11 Family Games!

 Today we picked up Stone Age - I'd asked Andy at Battlequest to keep a copy behind as as quickly as it is reprinted, it goes out of stock and I'd heard so many good things about this game - but the problem was that it was 4 players max and we are a family of 5. Checking out the game, we found that the strategy may have been a little over Mayas head, so we opted to go for the game with Maya playing alongside someone else, or rolling the dice.

We had a play of the game after I had a go through the rules and played a few demo rounds. The artwork is beautiful and the components look and feel great. The game comes with a number of dice and a snazzy leather cup to give it a authentic Stone Age feel - all we need now was scraps of clothes and shaggy hair (and a beard for me!).

Although the artwork is beautiful, and therefore giving the game an air of complexity, the actual game is not complex at all, even though there is a lot to it. The basis of the game is to keep your family alive in the Tribe whilst harvesting resources like stone, gold, wood, bricks to trade in for scoring Building cards - which score immediately - and Civilisation cards - which score at the end of the game. The player has a set number of meeples to decide on each turn what they are going to do with them; send some for hunting for food, making tools to make the task of resource and food gathering easier, go looking for resources, attempt to make a new scoring house etc. Each one of these locations on the board has a set number of free spaces (from unlimited for food, to one for Tool Making) to place your meeples per round - a round being a choice of placing your meeples before passing to the next player and around all the players until the last meeples are placed.

Therefore you as a player have some tough decisions to make as it is not possible to cover all the bases per turn - do you go and gather food (you start with some food to live on at the start but this starts to dwindle per turn), or advance your knowledge of agriculture, or make new tools or go for a Civilisation card etc. There is even the possibility of increasing the size of your "family" of meeples by using the "woohoo baby maker" hut as we came to call it :) And so at the end of the round, all of the meeples are placed then everyone takes turns to complete the actions of their meeples depending where they have been placed - pick up a house card, gather resources, take a new tool etc.

At the heart of the resource gathering is a dice based mechanism. The more people you have place on a particular resource, the more dice you get to throw. The numbers are added and then the total is divided by an amount, depending on how rare the resource is - gold is harder to find than say wood. For example, if finding wood, a a player with 4 meeples would throw for dice and divide it by 3. A throw of 12 would equal 4 pieces of wood etc.

The only downside to this is what if people fail to purchase civilisation and building cards as we were doing; we were gathering and surviving and not really advancing. What happens there is that the resources on the table start to be used up - it's not necessarily a flaw in the game, but a question maybe not answered by the designers "Of course people won't hoard resources". The result of this is that items can run out - the rules answer to this is to add to the resources with matchsticks for example. But I guess this will happen less with time.

All in all this is a fantastic game with lots to see, lots going on and lots to do. The game does look complicated but in fact is quite easy to play and everyone knew what was going on.

Birthday game vouchers ahoy!!

Had a nice birthday which involved £50 of battlequestgames vouchers plus £10 from my loyalty card which was full. Mmmm now what do I get with these???
In the evening we also had a game of Scandinavian Ticket to Ride - Anita won - and a 5 player 7 Wonders which Kavita won.

Oops...not gamed or blogged in a while!!

Sorry folks, been a long while since I posted - basically it's because we've been busy and away on holiday in Cyprus! A nice week away in glorious sun...so lovely we didn't want to come back! But we did and back to reality. And playing games! A few things have happened recently, which I'll catch up on.

Firstly there was the regular meet up at Andys at the beginning of the month, played some games; Forbidden Island (A simpler version of the game mechanics of Pandemic), the worlds longest game of Fluxx, Mow, Metro and some odd wooden game with round stacked pieces; it was odd but fun - the game, not Andys get together which was great as usual.

Afterwards we also got Forbidden Island because the girls were really interested in it after seeing it laid out at Andys place. I took them through the rules and bought a copy - only £16! We've played a couple of games so far, both 3 player - one win and one loss. That will become a nice filler fav! We also played a game of 7 Wonders last week for the first time in ages whilst Kavita was out for a birthday treat. Another great 4 player game - I won with a massive 66 points - a record win so far!!

It's Fathers Dad this weekend, so I hope we'll get a chance for a few more games - including a first test of Smallworld.

A game in the top ten family games we don't have you say? Not anymore!

Last Saturday we all took a nice walk into town, sun was shining and we thought why not. And as we were walking past Battlequest we thought we'd pop in - a more accurate description is that I persuaded the others to come with me lol. Anyhow whilst in there I spotted Smallworld, one of the few top ten family games we don't have. I showed it to Anita and another customer enthused about its good points.
I knew it was based on a game we used to own called Vinci. I was introduced to this game and found it was great. This changed though with my own copy when I found that the rules were overly wordy and the rules difficult to understand.
This version is a lot more simplified and easier to play it seemed and Anita was sold so we got it. Hopefully we find this a lot of fun to play!

Italians take a pounding in the Desert

So, we haven't played Memoir '44 in a while, so in the dying embers of the girls school Easter holiday, Roshni, Maya and I replayed a battle in the desert back in 1941 between retreating Italian forces and the British 4th Armoured Brigade in a scenario called "Beda Fomm". The basics of the set was that a large column of retreating tanks and men were caught by a small British blocking force. Whilst they held the Italians at bay, the rest of the 4th Armoured swept up from the south with a mixture of tanks, elite tank units and infantry. Roshni and Maya played the part of the Italians.

The trap is sprung! The Italians are caught by the blocking force on the main road whilst the rest of the 4th Armoured charges up from the south.

Harsh! A single Italian tank catches the full force of 4 dice hits from the tank on the hill.

A line of dice showing another crushing shot against a single Italian tank.

It's not going well for the Italians!!

The Italians are thrown into disarray - tanks burn to their front, British infantry 

charge in from the South and rear

Ouch! Still some fight in the Italians yet!

The Italians fight back!!

The British charge with an Infantry Assault...oh nuts...

Has the British Trap failed???

Then again perhaps not - that's an Armoured Assault card btw...

Surrender or be destroyed!!

Mama mia...

Like in the actual battle, the Italians tried to split their resources between cracking the roadblock and defending against the southern attack instead of rushing the roadblock in force and rolling over it before the 4th Armoured could save the small force there. Yay for the good guys!! 

Bank holiday! What does that mean?? Games! and Buy a new one too!

Bank holidays ahoy! Buy one bank holiday, get one free, even if you don't watch the Royal Wedding! Which we might. Anyhow, with a BHM and a holiday Friday so close, if you take three days off in the middle, you get eleven days off in total! Wowzers - so what does this mean for us and gaming? Well, an opportunity to nip into BattleQuest Games for starters, and to play some games.

Andy was celebrating one year since opening (wowzers again, really??!) and we celebrated with him by buying a new game ;) This one is a filler named Mow (A unilateral language word for Moo I think, being the manual is in a million and 3 languages.) - a card game based on cows and flies. I kid yee not. The basic premise is that each player gets 5 cards, each card will have a picture of a cow, a number from 0 to 16 and some or no flies. There is also a turn direction indicator, showing the flow of players; this is decided by the first player.

Each player in turn selects a numbered card, for example 8 with 4 flies and places it on the table. The next player has to then place a card higher or lower than 8. If they place 12 for example, all numbers between 8 and 12 (9, 10, 11) are now locked out and the 3rd player must place a card lower than 8 or higher than 12. If they cannot, they must pick up the cards on the table. These cards are put aside for counting up later.

There are some numbered cards with 0 flies, but as the game is based on the idea of winning by having as few flies as possible at the end of the game, it is better to retain these than a card with flies on.

As each player puts down a card, they must also pick up one from a deck to retain a hand of 5 cards. Some cards are special which allow for example two of the same number to be placed, a locked gap number to be used etc. These are few and fair between but are useful. They are also useful for allowing the player to change the player flow - eg a player who has just picked up 5 cards could get stung again with another load of cards.

Play continues until the deck has run dry and the cards on the table have been collected by an unfortunate player. The players then count up the flies on the cards in their hand and any they have been forced to collect. The winner is the one with least flies.

This is an exciting little filler to start an evening or between games. It's backstabbing nature and ease of play is of great appeal to us.

We then played 7 Wonders just for the heck of it :)

Bring out an old favourite - oh, and go on then, 7 Wonders

With the weekend nearly over, having spent most of it at the in-laws celebrating a joint birthday for Maya and her cousin Anusha, we decided to use up the rest of the Sunday afternoon/early evening playing some games. Firstly I grabbed an old favourite that hasn't been played in a while, Zooleretto. It has been some time since we last played this and I, and probably all of us, had forgot how much we enjoyed it. 

The premise of the game is to build and run the most successful Zoo - each player starts with a zoo board with three locations for animals, a 6 animal spot, a 5 animal spot and a 4 animal spot. There is also a Barn on the board for spare animals that cannot be located. 15 tiles are also separated from the bag and placed aside for the End Game. 

Each player receives a "lorry" - a wooden container with three slots. These are placed in the middle of the table and a black bag is passed around from which the player draws a tile and places it on one of the free slots on a wooden lorry. The tiles could be an animal (elephant, tiger, panda etc), a coin for financial deals (the player starts with 2) or a Refreshment Stand. 

The lorries gradually fill up, with players trying to place animals and other tiles in a combination that they want but hope no one else wants. Play continues, with drawing of tiles, until a player decides they want a particular lorry - at this point, they pass on the bag without drawing and simply take the lorry of their choice - this can be a lorry with one, two or all three spaces filled. 

Once the player has taken a lorry, they take the tiles and either place them in empty animal spots (the same animal can only go into the same enclosure - no flamingoes into the tiger pen, as much as we want to!), into their own money supply or as a refreshment stand for an enclosure. If the player has no room for an animal tile (or more), then that spare animal has to go into the Barn. Animals in the Barn cause negative points at the end of the game. 

Each enclosure has two point values (well three actually) - a Full value, a Only One To Go value and Only a Few Animals + A Refreshment. This sounds complex, but in reality it isn't. 

For example, the 1st Enclosure with 6 animal spaces scores 10/6 - this means if you fill it with 6 pandas for example, you get 10 points at the end of the game - only 5 pandas, you get 6 points at the end of the game. If you say for example put in only 3, but you have a Refreshment Stall in the bottom right of the enclosure, the player is allowed 1 point per animal e.g. 3 points in this case. No Refreshment Stall = 0 points! 

So the aim is to fill those enclosures - some enclosures also give coins for filling them up; coins can be used to open up a new 5 space enclosure, buy animals from other players Barns (1 coin to them, 1 to the bank), remove an animal from your own barn etc etc. It's all down to management of the Zoo as well as picking the animals, but it's done on a very simple level that even Maya can appreciate. That's not to say its too simple for adults. 

Animals can also have offspring, for example some animal tiles come with a Male and Female symbol, which when placed in the same enclosure, produces a small round baby animal tile which can be used to bolster an enclosure number. Animals can only be paired once, so a new male or female would need a new male or female tile to produce a 2nd child tile. 

Finally, when all of the tiles are used up, the tiles from the 15 separate ones are used for 1 round then the game ends. 

Scoring is based on the following: 

Successful filling of enclosures;

Number of similar refreshment types = 2 points per type (eg three apple carts = 1 type = 2 points)

Number of similar animal types in the barn = -2 points per type (eg 1 camel, 2 tigers, 2 pandas = 3 different types = -6 points). 

This is a highly enjoyable game to play and the final winner is hard to determine until right until the end. It's loved by every one in the family and they are always up for a game. It's full of strategy and management that's not too hard to handle, so fun for everyone! 

Afterwards we also had a game of 7 Wonders just because we love it so much! It's hard to think we'll ever find a game to replace it!