First play of James' new game from Kieron - Darjeeling. As the name suggests, this game is about tea. Not war, not empires, just picking tea. It's a nice looking game with some neat pieces that fit into the master board depending on the number of players, and with some interesting mechanisms.
A whole set of tiles are set out on the table in the shape of India (or Sri Lanka or China). Players control tea pickers who move around the country, picking tea where they land, with a new tea bush springing up in the location they vacate. Players create shipments of tea by combining the tiles together in the right colour, getting bonuses based on the demand for that type of tea (using a clever 3D demand mechanism where the distance between two barrels in the bonus - easier seen than explained).
James got an early lead by shipping a very small shipment right away. Stuart and David started to ship medium-sized shipments soon after, and David caught up and was neck-and-neck with James for most of the game, with Andy waiting to ship a couple of huge shipments. This latter tactic may work better with fewer players but once Andy had shipped, everyone else did too, and the income from this shipment was unfortunately short-lived.
The game was a bit fiddly as you had to remember to score your shipping points at the beginning of your turn, and then take and replace tiles - as David noted, it would work brilliantly as an app with all the game housekeeping done for you. But it was a light but clever game that played in an hour, so definitely one to play in an evening alongside another shorter game.
Final scores: James 99 (the game stops when a player reaches 100 but there are negative scores for unused tiles), David 92, Stuart 70, Andy 58.
Another new game next from David - a card game called Valley of the Kings. This was expected to be the shorter game but with a lot of text to read on the cards and a lot of options to (over)think about, it actually took two hours, but I expect we'd play it quicker next time now we've familiar.
Like Dominion, the cards have multiple purposes - as artifacts (and so VPs when added to your tomb), as money (to buy more cards) or as actions, following the option written on them. Each player has a deck of cards, initially of low value, which are enriched by purchasing new ones. Stuart spotted first that thinning out the deck by discarding the original cards (preferably into others' decks) was a good tactic to ensure quality cards coming up more frequently in your hand. We were all a bit late to start shifting cards (as artefacts) from our hands and into our tombs. Stuart and David both started entombing sets of blue cards (the points are N squared, where N is the number of unique cards you have in a set) but with David to Stuart's left, he couldn't build up as a big a collection.
Another clever game we should play again soon before we forget how to play. Final order: Stuart, David, James, Andy
A whole set of tiles are set out on the table in the shape of India (or Sri Lanka or China). Players control tea pickers who move around the country, picking tea where they land, with a new tea bush springing up in the location they vacate. Players create shipments of tea by combining the tiles together in the right colour, getting bonuses based on the demand for that type of tea (using a clever 3D demand mechanism where the distance between two barrels in the bonus - easier seen than explained).
James got an early lead by shipping a very small shipment right away. Stuart and David started to ship medium-sized shipments soon after, and David caught up and was neck-and-neck with James for most of the game, with Andy waiting to ship a couple of huge shipments. This latter tactic may work better with fewer players but once Andy had shipped, everyone else did too, and the income from this shipment was unfortunately short-lived.
The game was a bit fiddly as you had to remember to score your shipping points at the beginning of your turn, and then take and replace tiles - as David noted, it would work brilliantly as an app with all the game housekeeping done for you. But it was a light but clever game that played in an hour, so definitely one to play in an evening alongside another shorter game.
Final scores: James 99 (the game stops when a player reaches 100 but there are negative scores for unused tiles), David 92, Stuart 70, Andy 58.
Another new game next from David - a card game called Valley of the Kings. This was expected to be the shorter game but with a lot of text to read on the cards and a lot of options to (over)think about, it actually took two hours, but I expect we'd play it quicker next time now we've familiar.
Like Dominion, the cards have multiple purposes - as artifacts (and so VPs when added to your tomb), as money (to buy more cards) or as actions, following the option written on them. Each player has a deck of cards, initially of low value, which are enriched by purchasing new ones. Stuart spotted first that thinning out the deck by discarding the original cards (preferably into others' decks) was a good tactic to ensure quality cards coming up more frequently in your hand. We were all a bit late to start shifting cards (as artefacts) from our hands and into our tombs. Stuart and David both started entombing sets of blue cards (the points are N squared, where N is the number of unique cards you have in a set) but with David to Stuart's left, he couldn't build up as a big a collection.
Another clever game we should play again soon before we forget how to play. Final order: Stuart, David, James, Andy
