The final day of Cabin-Con is mostly just a clean-up. We need to be out by 11am, which leaves us with a small amount of time to game after we eat breakfast, pack our stuff, and leave the place in good condition. Last year, we managed to squeeze in 3 games of My City by Reiner Knizia in this time frame. This year, we learned a new game and finished the weekend off with a classic card game.
Explorers
Explorers by Phil Walker Harding is a flip and write game about traversing the countryside and accumulating sets of resources. Each turn, the active player flips a card depicting two terrain types and chooses one of the sides for themselves. They cross off three squares of the selected terrain type. The other players can choose to either cross off three squares of the other terrain type, or two squares of the same terrain that the active player choose. Players can cross off a square anywhere on the board, provided it’s touching an existing square, and crossing off icons on the board will award you with various benefits.
There are keys and temples on each section of the board, to cross off a temple, you first need to cross off a key. The value of crossing off a temple decreases depending on how many players pillaged the temple before you. Carrots, fish and apples act as a set collection each round, the horses give you a bonus wild X for the turn you cross the horse off, and the maps allow you to take the active players’ selection with no drawback. The village tiles also give you points based on how many adjacent squares you manage to cross off. Finally, emeralds will give you a point every turn, from the turn that you cross it off.
There are a lot of short term goals in Explorers, which can be a lot of fun. Do you beeline for a temple, hoping to be there first, or is it more valuable to collect a full set of food before the round ends? Making players choose between multiple goals is really fun, and the game has an incredible amount of variability. There are 8 terrain tiles, which can be rotated in any orientation, the food, villages, emerald, and temples have different scoring styles if you flip each of the components, and all the unused terrain tiles offer bonus scoring elements as well! Speaking of the components, the boards are colourful, thick, and glossy, making it very easy to cross off squares, and wipe clean at the end. All around a great production.
Explorers somewhat reminds me of Cartographers, which is great because I love Cartographers. It’s obviously quite a different game when you drill down into the details, but it still evokes the same feelings. If you enjoy Cartographers, but dislike having players place negative points onto your sheet (an aspect I adore), perhaps Explorers will be more up your alley.
6 Nimmit!
6 Nimmit! by Wolfgang Kramer Is a little card game that was gifted into our board game family. We played it online during the pandemic, and Bigfoot put it into his BGG wish list. Someone local reached out and offered it to him for free! Such generosity.
In 6 Nimmit, the goal is not to get points. The first player to hit 66 points triggers the end of the game, then, the player with the lowest score is the winner. The game starts with 4 cards placed on the table, and 10 cards in each player’s hand. Simultaneously, all players play a card, then, in numerical order, they’re placed into each of the rows. They’re not freely placed, however, they simply slot in next to the card they’re closest to in ascending order. Should a card slide into the 6th slot, the player who played that card must take all the cards in that row as their score, and their card becomes the 1st card in that row.
I’m perpetually amazed at how much tension and excitement can be achieved by a card game. The reveal as all players flip their played cards, the gasp as someone sneaks into a row you didn’t expect and the anguish when you’re forced to take a row with a dozen points or more is just delicious.
Cabin-Con Recap
There was a lot of thought and talk that went into planning this year’s Cabin-Con, and while the dust has barely settled, I’m reflecting on this year’s experience and deciding how we’ll want to change for next year’s event. As I said in my Day 1 post, the original impetus for Cabin-Con was to give us the opportunity to play all those big games we love, but couldn’t get played during our regular Wednesday game nights. We flung ourselves into this event, acquiring Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated with the sole intention of playing it back to back to back. Bigfoot had also recently received his Anachrony: Infinity Box, and Oath, both highly anticipated games at the time. You can read about our experiences in detail here, but what ended up happening was on the first day, we arrived, and played a few small games, Arboretum, Lost Cities: Rivals, and Cartographers, before breaking out A Feast for Odin after dinner. The next day, we played Clank Legacy from 10am until 5pm, making our way through 4 whole games before tapping out. Starting at 8pm that night, we unboxed Anachrony and literally spent 2 hours just sorting the pieces and learning how to play the game. I won’t lie and say I wasn’t filled with despair when the first turn was being taken around 11pm. The next day started with Oath, which ended up being a full 5 hours to endure one play through. Two players were duking it out back and forth in a war of attrition to decide the victor, while the other two players were having a miserable time, unable to get any kind of footing to do anything meaningful. That afternoon we tried My City and enjoyed it quite a bit. Finally, that evening we just played a bunch of small games that we already knew, including The Crew, Vikings, QE, Azul, and Project L.
Upon reflection of Cabin-Con 2021, we agreed that while we were glad about some of those big experiences, but we all agreed that the most joy came from just playing a bunch of shorter games. This lead us to set up Cabin-Con 2022 the way we did, parcelling out 4 equal blocks of time, where each of us could pick whatever game we wanted to play. Then the rest of the time was for ‘open gaming’, shorter games that didn’t need any extensive rules teaching, and a firm NO UNPUNCHED GAMES policy.
Cabin-Con 2022 came and went without a hitch. It functioned like a well oiled machine, the four of us all knew what to expect and slipped into our roles easily. Some part of me feels like the experience was dulled compared to last year, but that’s probably just because it wasn’t new. We knew what to expect, and we knew what we wanted. Each day we played games from 9am to midnight with only a short break for dinner and a campfire each evening. Leading up to the weekend, I was nearly vibrating with excitement, but during the con there was a calm air around us. Maybe we over-plannned the weekend, because we knew the games we were going to play well in advance. The weekend had a ‘business as usual’ vibe. There were no real surprises, no unexpected hits, just, great game after great game. While that doesn’t sound like a bad thing, I personally missed the excitement of discovering a whole new game.
What I didn’t expect what just how exhausted I was when I got home after the weekend! A lot of great and heavy games were played, and because there was very little rule teaching or punching games, it was just hit after hit to my poor feeble brain. 23 plays of 21 different games is no small feat. 1,760 minutes (or 29.33 hours) of actual game play time leaves a mind over-worked and soggy. As far as the winner of Cabin-con 2022 goes, Bigfoot won an impressive 10 games (Barenpark, Beyond the Sun, Cartographers, Karuba, Gaia Project, 7 Wonders, Glen More II, Twice as Clever, Race for the Galaxy and Explorers), Otter claimed victory over 5 games (Sagrada, Gaia Project, Scythe, Castles of Mad King Ludwig, and 6 Nimmit), I won 4 games (Arboretum, Karuba, Eclipse, and Food Chain Magnate), and Bear won a solitary game right at the end of the weekend (Race for the Galaxy). In case you’re thinking that my math is off, 5 games had no winners (Pandemic: The Cure, So Clover, The Crew x2, and Bullet⭐). Fortunately, while I do track plays and scores, none of us really put stock into who wins or loses the most. There are no trophies to be won here.
So what’s next? What might change for Cabin-con 2023? It’s hard to beat the raw efficiency we achieved this year, and playing great games that we already knew how to play means that there were a lot less negative feelings (Oath, I’m looking at you) or despair (starting Anachrony at 11pm was a bit of a mistake). That said, I somewhat lament the original reason for Cabin-con, which was to play games that we otherwise wouldn’t choose to play on our regular Wednesday game night. The vast majority of the games we played over this weekend, we’d opt to play during our regular game days. By contrast, we haven’t touched Anachrony since last year, despite all of us expressing interest in returning to the game. I suspect next year we’ll relax on the “No new games” policy just a little bit. Perhaps we’ll bring along more dexterity games, as those were notably absent. In the end, we all had fun, and I can’t wait to return in 2023
It’s Sunday Funday people! Our second full day of gaming means both Bear and I get to dictate what games we played! Yesterday we suffered through Gaia Project and enjoyed a very weird game of Scythe. But today I’m taking my friends where they never go willingly. To the world of fast food management.
Breakfast
Block 1 (Me!)
Lunch
Block 2 (Bear)
Dinner/Campfire break
Open Gaming
Bullet⭐
Being the parent of a toddler, it seems impossible for me to sleep beyond 7am. So as per usual I was first to rise. I took the morning to walk along the beach. When I came back, I prepped breakfast and made coffee. I was still the only one awake so I broke out Bullet⭐ and played a solo game as Rose Blanchett vs Starry Night Sky
If you’re curious about how the Bullet game plays, check out my review of it here. Bullet❤️ and Bullet⭐ are identical, except that the 8 heroes in each box are all wildly different from one another.
Starry Night Sky is a bit of a weird boss, their pattern requires that you don’t have a single bullet of a specific number on the turn that you break a shield. If you do, then you’ll lose a life. At the same time, you can’t just go wild in breaking shields, as if you break more than one shield in a round, you’ll lose a life.
I promptly lost this solo game, but I always enjoy exploring the different bosses and characters.
Eclipse: A New Dawn for the Galaxy
The first big multiplayer game of day 3 was Eclipse. Now, I’ve already written about my experiences withEclipse, but the more we play it, the more enthusiastic Bear seems to be to return to it. This time, I took control of the Hydran Progress, a science/tech focused race. I don’t know how other groups play, but for the first 6 of 9 rounds of the game, there wasn’t a single combat. There was a lot of building and upgrading, but no combat. Our forces swelled as we all kitted out our best fighters to tackle the problems that were on our doorstep.
I built out my galaxy tiles in such a way that there was only 1 way into my quadrant of the map. I then plopped 4 star bases on that doorstep and attached 2 missile modules to each and a high-powered computer. If anyone wanted to take my territory, they’d need to survive first. I also managed to take the only wormhole generator that appeared in the game, which allowed me to zip out the back door and take over several planets nearly uncontested in the end.
That being said, my star base strategy left me wanting for brown resources; my fleet was severally out numbered. But I doubled own on my smart missile strategies, shaving off the hull of my ships to fit more ordinance. The best offence is a great defense, as they say.
It worked well in the end, I took several planets from Bigfoot, but he managed to survive my volley during my siege of the centre tile. It was my first time even using the missile tech, it’s not a strategy our group has really explored. While Bigfoot managed to hold the centre, I took the win of the game due to the tiebreaker.
Glen More II: Chronicles
Up to this point we had played a LOT of space games, but now it was my turn to pick the game. My first choice was Glen More II: Chronicles, with accompanying soundtrack provided by The Real McKenzies
Glen More II: Chronicles is a tile placement and resource management game. Players take turns moving their workers around a tile selection roundel, moving from the back of the line onto any tile they want, then placing it into their kingdom and activating all adjacent tiles. Then the tile row is refilled and the player who is now in the rear may take their turn. If players leap over several tiles to claim a particularly important one, then it may be several turns before it’s their turn again.
The goal of the game, is to have more of certain resources than your opponents, as scoring is almost entirely dependent on “How many more of X do you have than the player with the least amount.” For example, if I have 5 whiskey barrels, while Otter only has 1, then I have 4 more than he does, which would net me 5 points at the end of each round.
Now you might think to yourself, “If someone leaps ahead, then I’ll just scoop up every tile left behind!” Unfortunately, at the end of the game, players lose 3 points for every tile they have in their kingdom, more than the player with the leanest kingdom. Urban sprawl is punished here.
Glen More II: Chronicles is always a delight, and I love the production. The custom meeples are charming, the art is bright and green, and any excuse to put on punk bagpipe soundtracks is a win for me.
Food Chain Magnate
Because Glen More II is a slightly faster game than the ones we’ve played this weekend (Eclipse and Gaia Project, looking at you), we also managed to squeeze in a game of Food Chain Magnate with a couple expansion modules, namely Coffee, Parks (Lobbyists), and Fries!
The first four rounds of the game are generally quite quick. I know some people complain about rote openings, but I don’t mind them, personally. In my game group, two players generally take the recruiting girl while two others take the trainer, and from there, the strategies diverge. I quickly put up a burger billboard in the top left corner on a house with a garden, with the expectation that players would fight over delivering that good, then I’d cash in on the coffee sales. Unfortunately, Bear beat me to placing the coffee shop right on their driveway, but thankfully, Bigfoot won the bidding war and sold the burger, which ran right by my restaurant, allowing me to sell my coffee.
Bigfoot and I hit $100 on the same turn and both generated the CFO. He placed a park in the lower corner, touching two more houses, and a mailbox campaign started generating interest. I put a second coffee shop right next to Bigfoot’s restaurant, and one next to the park. Now I’d sell 2 coffees to each of those houses every time they ate at Bigfoot’s Blues Bar. I picked up the luxuries’ manager, and now my strategy was set!
What I didn’t anticipate was our CEOs dropping to two open management slots when the bank broke for the first time. I had plans to play trainers and generate coffee at the same time, as my coffee production was still quite low. Should I skip producing coffee for a round and let my trainer work, so I can produce even more coffee in future rounds? Should I eschew the luxuries manager and take less money and train? It’s quite hard to know which way to go sometimes. In the end, I succeeded at selling 3 coffees at a base price of $20 to houses with gardens, making it $40 per coffee, and my CFO worked his financial wizardry to turn that into $180 in a single turn. Bigfoot was selling several goods, but at a base price of $7, plus a $5 benefit to some of his goods.
The bank broke just in the nick of time, as one more turn would have spelled disaster for my luxury coffee strategy. One more round and Bigfoot would have doubled my income easily. As it stands, the game ended with me in the lead with $395 to Bigfoot’s $362.
This play left players a bit salty on the coffee modules, claiming it’s too hard to counter. Unlike selling food to houses, you need to ensure that you have the demand, and you’re selling it less than or closer to your opponents, but there’s no way to steal someone else’s coffee sale. The combo of the luxuries’ manager with the coffee seems really strong. My rebuttal is that my coffee production just couldn’t scale. I’m lucky the game ended when it did, as one more turn would have dropped me into second place. In any case, I really enjoyed myself, as I always do when I play Food Chain Magnate.
Twice as Clever
After dinner and a fire, we returned for an evening of casual, open gaming. The first game that got pulled out was Twice as Clever, the second in the That’s Pretty Clever line of games. I’ve only played That’s Pretty Clever a paltry handful of times, as roll and write games generally don’t light my world on fire.
If you know how to play the first one, you’re 80% there on Twice as Clever. The active player rolls all three die, chooses one to place on their scorepad, take the action corresponding with the colour and value of the die, move any die with a value lower than the die they took onto the platter, then roll the remaining die. They continue this until they have 3 dice on their sheet. Then, all the inactive players may choose one of the rejected die and make a mark on their own sheets. A round consists of each player having a turn being the active player, and the game concludes after 4 rounds.
One of the trademark features of a roll and write game is triggering cascading combos. Marking one thing off your sheet that lets you make another mark over here, which gives you this bonus, and that lett’s you do this thing… you get the idea. Twice as Clever does that very well, and it’s an absolutely fine game, but it’s not one that I would ever see myself reaching for again. Inactive players sit and stare at the dice they want while the active player ponders their own pad, then that blue 5 you desperately needed gets re-rolled. If you enjoy roll and write games, I think this will be a hit, it does all the things you expect from this genre of games, but like I said before, these games just don’t excite me.
Race for the Galaxy (x2)
Before anyone says anything, I only own the base game of Race for the Galaxy, and I love it. I’ve heard the expansions are pretty rad, and I’ve dabbled a bit on Board Game Arena, but I’m pretty content with the base game.
Bear on the otherhand, had vauge memories of distaste for this game, so this was finally the opportunity to re-teach the game to him, in a safe, welcoming environment.
Race for the Galaxy is an action selection tableau bilding game designed by Tom Lehmann. It’s often critisized on being brutally difficult to teach. Luckily, 3 of the 4 of us already knew how to play, so I could focus all my attention on teaching Bear.
I spent the bulk of the teaching time showing him how to read the iconography, as every card is laden with icons. The downside of this approach is it repells new players. The plus side of the iconography is once you know how to read the language, you can parse a lot of information very quickly.
We played twice in a row at Bear’s request, which is fairly unusual for our group. We’re very much a ‘play it once and move on’ kind of table. After the second game Bear had warmed up to the system and was able to find the joy in the game (probably because it was the first game he won all weekend). I suspected it would, as he’s a big fan of other tableau building games such as Terraforming Mars and Ark Nova.
Hopefully with this revelation, Race for the Galaxy will hit our table with much more frequency.
The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine
To cap off the night, another space game. Much like last night, our brains were pretty fried from the long weekend of heavy games. We played 10 rounds or so and lost 8 in a row. One day we’ll be less tired and more successful, but it won’t be this day!
And thus ends Day 3! Day 4 will only contain two short games, but will also have my concluding thoughts on throwing a cabin-con!
Saturday is our first full day of gaming. The schedule for Saturday was:
8am Breakfast
9am – 1pm Block 1 (Bigfoot)
Lunch
2pm – 6pm Block 2 (Otter)
6pm – 8pm Dinner/Campfire break
8pm+ Open Gaming
Gaia Project
Bigfoot had the first block of time where had full control over what game we would play, free from veto, but not free from my derisive sneers. He could pick any game in the world, and he chose one of his absolute favourite games, Gaia Project, which I’ve written about in my Bigfoot’s Trash Taste post.
Gaia Project, designed by Jens Drögemüller and Helge Ostertag is the spiritual successor to Terra Mystica (another of Bigfoot’s favourite games). In Gaia Project, players control an asymmetric faction and must terraform neighbouring planets into their home environment before developing colonies and improving their infrastructure. This is a big game with a lot going on. Players are tasked with balancing several resources as they expand into the far reaches of space.
I can see why Gaia Project (and it’s fantasy partner Terra Mystica) are so beloved. The decisions offered here are wide and varied. With 14 different factions all playing differently, there is depth to be plumbed. This is a tough game that rewards appropriate planning and capitalizing on being a turn ahead of your opponents. There’s no randomness to throw you off your game, everything is deterministic, which I generally enjoy. I still think it’s still a bit too much for me, after we finished our 5 hours game I had a splitting headache, but there’s no way I can say that this game is objectively bad. For my money, I’d say Gaia Project is better than Terra Mystica, even if only because it jettisons the need for priests. One less resource to juggle means one less bottleneck to force yourself through.
Maybe Bigfoot’s taste isn’t as trash as I remember… but don’t tell him that.
7 Wonders: Armada
Our game of Gaia Project went longer than Bigfoot’s allotted time, but wanting something light to buffer between big games, Otter chose to play 7 Wonders with the Armada expansion
7 Wonders is a classic game that serves as the introduction to modern board games for many players, and amongst our group of board game enthusiasts, 7 Wonders remains a tried and true favourite. So of course we’re going to change it by adding expansions!
If you haven’t played 7 Wonders before, it’s a civilization building card drafting game, where players simultaneously choose cards from a hand, reveal their choices, then pass the hand of cards to the next player. At the end of the game, the player who has accrued the most points, or culture, has won the game.
7 Wonders: Armada adds a whole extra board to the right of your normal player board. When you build a non-resource card, you can spend additional resources to progress a ship of the same colour up its track. These tracks will offer some naval combat power, inflict taxes upon everyone at the table, a flurry of victory points, or, the opportunity to settle an island, which can offer some unique enhancements to your civilization.
This expansion also adds a few cards into each of the ages, meaning you’ll play 7 cards per age instead of the usual 6. These extra cards offer more ways to interact with the players who are not your neighbour, like, granting you the ability to buy a resource from someone 2 seats away, or, choosing someone to combat with, meaning at the end of the round you’ll evaluate 3 combats instead of the usual 2.
At the end of each age, in addition to the usual combat with your neighbors, there is now a naval combat that all players participate in. Whoever has the strongest naval military of all the players earns points, while the weakest loses points.
These may seem like small changes, but they actually address a lot of the problems I have with 7 Wonders. I like being able to interact with more players at the table, I like using leftover resources, and I like the little boosts the island cards offer (even if I ignored them to my own demise). I’ve seen this expansion on sale for as low as $8. At that price, I cannot recommend this one enough.
Scythe
Otter had pre-planned on having our friend Clare arrive in the afternoon. Clare is a sometimes guest to our gaming group, but one of our great experiences was playing through the entirety of Scythe: Rise of Fenris together. I actually really enjoyed that campaign, as the ending felt climatic. Depending on your performance throughout the campaign, you got some significant benefits, but the final battle was for all the marbles. I enjoyed the feeling of “anyone can still win this”, and the final game was TENSE. It probably helps that I won that final game, but who can really say? 😉
For those who haven’t played before, Scythe by Jamey Stegmier is an action selection game where the threat of combat is often more powerful than actual combat. Set in an alternate history version of 1920 Europa. Workers farm the land with scythes, while heavily armoured mechs loom on the horizon. Each player takes control of an asymmetric faction that offers various abilites and powers when the mechs have been built, and, each player’s action selection board is different from each other. On your turn, you’ll place your pawn on one of the four actions on your action selection board. You’ll take the top action, which can be Move, Bolster, Trade, or produce, and if you have the necessary resources, can take the bottom action as well, which can be: deploy, upgrade, build, or enlist. Players keep taking turns building up their forces until one player manages to play their 6th achievement star. The end game scores are tallied, and the player with the highest score is the winner.
Scythe is high on my top games of all time list, and probably my favourite game that includes direct attacking. I generally enjoy the arc of the gameplay. Everything starts slow, your factions move at a glacial pace, and everyone is locked into their own island, cut off from the world by a river. Only by building the mech that grants Riverwalk can you adventure forth and spread your influence.
In this play of Scythe, we included The Wind Gambit expansion. This module adds in impressive airships with 2 abilities that can be swapped in and out each round, as well as an alternate ending condition. Following the advice of the rulebook, all the airships had the same power, units moving out of the airships space get +1 movement, and players don’t lose popularity when forcing workers to retreat. I think this combination of cards would have been more interesting had we gotten to the end game where stealing resources was possible. The new game end card said, “When the first player places a star in a category that has no stars, they earn $5. The game ends when someone either places their 6th star, or has $40”. Otter just so happened to get a great combo going where he could do the top and bottom sides of two actions back to back (Bolster, build mechs, produce, upgrade, then repeat). This got him 4 stars very quickly, but left his popularity in the toilet. The 4 stars, and the coins he earned from the bottom row actions, left him within striking distance of ending the game. A few turns later he earned his 40th dollar and ended the game just after the first combat and each other player had only 1 star on the board.
I think if the game had continued on, his engine would have spluttered out. Sure, he had a commanding lead, but I do think it would have made for an interesting end-game. Going forward, I wouldn’t play with the alternate ending conditions. I also didn’t feel like the airships added too much, other than general aesthetic.
Bigfoot already wasn’t a fan of Scythe, and this play didn’t change his mind. It was anticlimactic and didn’t have a chance to get interesting or exciting. This play may have also turned Bear off the game as well. Otter and I are still enthusiastic though, we’ll probably try to play through the fan-made campaign soon with a different group of people, but at the time of this writing, I have no idea when we’ll squeeze that in!
So Clover
So Clover was the game of choice while waiting for pizza to be delivered. If you haven’t played it before, So Clover, designed by François Romain is a cooperative word association game. Each player is given a plastic clover and 4 cards. Each of these cards slots into one of the four quadrants of your clover. Each card will have a word along each edge, but you only need to consider the words that are facing the outside edge of your clover. Your goal, is to write a single world on each edge of the clover that will allow the others at the table to re-assemble your clover once the cards are shuffled. Sometimes you’ll have words that just work well together, like Skin and Suitcase (clothes was the clue given in this case). Other times, a stroke of genius will have you connect two seemingly impossible words, like Quilt and Sausage (Homemade won the day here). And sometimes, you’ll get absolutely stuck on a word, unable to shake the meaning of a word, like Charge and Cow. I couldn’t think of ANYTHING other than electric milk, so I eventually just went with Amp and hoped the other three sides of the clover would lead them to the correct answer.
It did not.
It has got to be difficult coming out with a new word association game when there are such giants already published. Games like Codenames, Just one, and Decrypto are so fun and clever, I can’t imagine trying to compete against them. So Clover has done it, we had an absolute blast playing this, and I’ll be picking up my own copy for the next time I visit my family back in the Canadian prairies.
Castles of Mad King Ludwig
Castles of Mad King Ludwig by Ted Alspach tasks players with building an extravagant castle with no plan or forethought. Players take turns taking the role of the ‘Master Builder’, where they arrange the available rooms into different prices, then the other players take turns buying the rooms, giving their cash to the master builder, and finally, the master builder paying the bank for whichever tile they take.
Players need to place their tiles into their castle, matching entrances, scoring points based on adjacency, and scoring bonuses if they finish the room.
It’s mildly annoying that you’ll never finish your castle. The game ends after a certain number of tiles have been bought (dictated by the number of cards in the deck), and when the game ends, a final scoring happens. The player with the most points is the winner and players are left reflecting on their architectural failings. Maybe if you didn’t spend so much time getting the bowling alley to fit next to the flower bed, you wouldn’t have come in last place.
I really enjoy Castles of Mad King Ludwig. Years ago, I played this along side another Ted Alspach design, Suburbia. At that time, I proudly proclaimed that Suburbia was the better game and I cast Castles of Mad King Ludwig aside. Today though, I feel my tastes shifting. I like that the room market is controlled by the players, even if sometimes the Master Builder makes arbitrary decisions that shunts the room you desperately needed into the $15,000 slot.
The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine
One of the highlights of Cabin-Con 2021 was The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, designed by Thomas Sing and published by KOSMOS. It was a light and easy cooperative trick taking game that was exactly what our brains needed after a brutal day of playing Oath. We blazed through a couple dozen games that weekend, and this year, we returned to our interplanetary adventure, hungry for more.
The downside, we embarked on this game at 11pm, after a VERY full day of big games. Brains were tired and SOME players (me) were incapable of counting cards. Foolish misplays were abundant, and we ended up failing against the same chapter 8 times in a row.
If you haven’t played The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, the game begins by dealing out the entire deck to all players. cards vary from 1 to 9 in four different suits, and 4 more cards, numbered 1 to 4 in black serve as trump cards. The story blurb is read out, and goals are distributed, based on the requirements of the specified mission. In general, you’re trying to make certain players win certain cards. The rub is, communication is extremely limited. You may not talk to your comrades, and you can only show one of your cards, which you place a token on to indicate that the card is the highest, lowest, or only card of that suit in your hand. If the card doesn’t match one of those three descriptors, then you may not show it.
The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine is a great little game to play with friends. There’s very little at stake, losing just means reshuffling and trying again. Sometimes, multiple tries in a row.
And that’s all we played on day 2 of Cabin-Con 2022. Come back soon for Day 3!
Last year, my game group and I booked off an extra long weekend and congregated at a beautiful ocean side cabin. We then proceeded to shut ourselves inside for the entire weekend and gorged ourselves on board games.
The impetus of Cabin-Con 2021 was we felt like we had a backlog of big games that we couldn’t reasonably play during our weekly Wednesday gaming sessions. Add into that the Legacy games we want to play, but don’t prioritize over new experiences or old favourites, we figured setting aside a whole weekend would give us ample opportunity to tackle this backlog
Last year the big events were playing through 4 games of Clank! Legacy in a row, unboxing, learning and playing an Anachrony Infinity Pledge (which took us from 8pm to 2am), and playing through Oath for the first time (a brutal 5 hour experience).
While the inspiration of Cabin-Con was to play these bigger games, we all agreed that the most fun part of the con for us were the periods where we just played several small games in a row. No big commitments, games we already knew how to play and enjoyed. One evening saw us play The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, Vikings, QE, Azul, and Project L, and we had an absolute blast.
Armed this this knowledge, this year we’ve decided to parcel out 4x 4 hour chunks on Saturday and Sunday and assign each chunk to a person. That person gets to pick all the games we’ll play during that period of time, then, in the after dinner portion of the evening, we’d just have easy, breezy open gaming, driven by group consensus.
Day 1 of Cabin-con had the group congregate at my house in the early afternoon, as we didn’t even get access to the cabin until 4pm. Now, you might ask yourself, why rent a cabin for the weekend if we all live close to each other? The answer is really that doing so gets all of us away from our daily responsibilities and allows us to really commit our time to the weekend. In theory we could all just gather at one of our houses but none of us have enough spare beds, and the separation from our daily lives is important for rest and relaxation.
Pandemic: The Cure
I’ve gone on and on about the Pandemic games. I reviewed vanilla Pandemicback in May when I actually caught COVID, and I reviewed Pandemic: Fall of Rome just a few weeks ago when I fell under the weather. Pandemic: the Cure is the dice game version of the Pandemic formula. This one is more abstracted than other entries in the series. Each of the (livable) continents is represented by a disc with a transparent dice pip. Die of various colours are rolled and placed onto each of the discs. These d6 don’t have the regular distribution of pips on them, the Red dice have two 6 sides, two 1 sides, and 1 4 side. The yellow, blue, and black die all have various die faces that make it more likely for them to appear on different continents.
The flow of the game is to have players travel to various continents, treat the diseases, which moves them from the continent disc into the centre ring, and then either take samples (which tie up your dice until you discover a cure), or, treat them from that centre ring back into the general supply.
Each character in Pandemic: The Cure have their own dice pools to roll as well. My character, the Contingency Planner allowed me to move dice from a continent onto the CDC board, which is how you pay for the event cards in the game. To win, you need to collect samples of the diseases, then after your turn, roll the disease samples you’ve collected and meet or exceed 13. Once a disease is cured, it’s much easier to treat, and players win the game once all 4 diseases are cured.
I haven’t played Pandemic: The Cure for years. My partner and I used to play Pandemic all the time, and this was a great way to vary the gameplay before the Survivor series had been announced. This version of the game is lighter, easier, and more prone to luck. Like every good game of Pandemic, you’ll be cruising along treating diseases, thinking all is fine in the world then WHAM all of a sudden cascading outbreaks are ravaging Asia, and Blue illness that has been slowly building on Sourth America is spilling over into the North America, and the situation is dire.
The big wrinkle in the game is that you can re-roll your action dice as many times as you want, until you use them. However, one of the die faces has a bio-hazard symbol which will advance the infection rate, and when you cross specific thresholds on the infection rate track, you’ll re-roll all the diseases that happen to be in the treatment area, and add in more cubes. things can spiral out of control incredibly quickly.
Speaking of quickly, this game is also extremely quick. With some luck you can have your first cure within a few turns. In the same breath, pulling 4 blue cubes and rolling all 6’s can cause cascading failures that will haunt your dreams.
I should return to Pandemic: The Cure soon for a deeper look. I enjoyed the experience quite a bit.
Barenpark
After the world succumbed to various virus outbreaks, we decided that instead of being health care professionals, we’d do better building our own Bear Parks. Barenpark is a polyomino tile placement game by Phil Walker-Harding. In Barenpark, you place tiles on your board, cover icons that give you more tiles, and proceed until someone has filled in their entire board. There are various scoring objectives, like having 3 or more pandas in your park, that decrease in value as people achieve it.
I love Barenpark, but something has changed. I’m suddenly very bad at this game. I don’t know what I’ve done, but as the end of the game approaches, I seem to have 8 1 or 2 square holes all over my park that I then need to laboriously take tiles and cover up. I think the short term goals overtake my long-term strategy just a bit too easily.
Arboretum
After Barenpark we packed up and migrated from my house to our Cabin. We unloaded, claimed beds, then promptly started playing games again, starting with Arboretum by Dan Cassar. I reviewed over a year ago, so you can check out that post if you want my full thoughts on the game. In this specific game I was allowed to collect every Maple tree, so I just, put them in a line! That single species scored me 17 points, which alone beat everyone else at the table.
It’s fun playing Arboretum and seeing the player to your left discard a card that you want desperately. They say “Don’t let him get this one!” But every other player prioritizes achieving their own goals over preventing other players from getting what they need. It’s a delicate balance, ensuring you’re doing whats right for your board, but not allowing other players to just run away with the game.
Sagrada
Sagrada was one of the first reviews I ever published on this site, and it still holds up to this day. In Sagrada players take turns rolling and placing die into their window grids, taking care to adhere to the die placement restrictions printed on their player mat, and following the sudoku-esque rules of not having of the same number or colour adjacent to one another.
In this game, I managed to complete my board, and I had a decent score from my secret objective, but I failed at getting the same colours in each of the rows. I ended up last with a score of 50 points.
Beyond the Sun
After dinner and a campfire, we launched into our first big game of the con. Beyond the Sun by Dennis K. Chan is a worker placement space civilization game in which the players are collectively discovering technologies and progressing the lengths of human knowledge during the spacefaring future. That may sound like a co-op game, but you’d be deceived! Beyond the Sun uses a a tech-tree to unlock worker placement actions, forcing players to research the prerequisite technologies before gaining access to the later abilities.
In addition to researching techs, there’s a sideboard where players are launching ships in an effort to control and colonize various planets. The challenge becomes holding onto control of the planet for a whole turn you can then take the colonization action! Our game saw a LOT of action on this board, each of the colonies were hotly contested. I tried my best to assert my dominance, but failed to research any of the final level technologies. The game ended with me narrowly missing the victory, 64 points to Bigfoot’s 66.
I really enjoyed Beyond the Sun. The variability is quite good with a wide variety of techs available, and the tech tree will build out different each time. This was only my second physical play, but it’s growing on me fast. I suspect it’ll debut in my top 100 the next time I redo that list.
Cartographers
I once called this “The best game I never played”, on the account that I played it a bunch on digital platforms. I’ve finally put my hands on a physical copy of the game, and continued to have a blast. I’m a little sad that my artistic skills leave quite a bit to be desired, but the gameplay is still fast, fun, and satisfying.
I actually like having the monsters in the deck, that little bit of engagement with my neighbours is just enough to make this exciting, and throwing a wrench in my plans makes for a more interesting game in my opinion. I do want to seek out the expansions to this game, as I find myself wanting more monsters, more goals, and more shapes to play with. I don’t want to change the formula, I just want more of it!
Karuba
To end the day, we played Karuba by Rudiger Dorn. Karuba starts by giving everyone the exact same puzzle and the same tools to solve the puzzle. The winner will be the player who can best utilize their tools to solve the puzzle.
One player pulls a tile randomly and announces it to the table. The other players find the same tile, and all players place the tiles on the board, trying to create paths to lead their adventureres to their designated temples, or discard the tile to move their adventurers along the paths they’ve created. The first player to get an adventurer to their temple earns 5 points, and everyone else who manages to do so after that gets diminishing returns. The game ends when someone has gotten all 4 of their adventurers into their temples, or, the stack of tiles runs out.
This is another game that we played a bunch during our COVID isolations. We played on Tabletop Simulator for a little over a year, and the scripted mod was so fast and easy to play that it became our go-to selection.
We played Karuba twice, I won the first game, and Bigfoot claimed victory over the second one. I tried to ignore a temple and instead placed a bunch of the gem paths along a single line, but I wasn’t able to collect enough points to win the second game. Sometimes I like trying out strategies that seem counter-intuitive to the spirit of the game, just to see if they’ll work!
Slay the Spire: The Board Game, designed by Gary Dworetsky, Anthony Giovannetti, and Casey Yano and published by Contention Games is currently running a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. As a fan of the video game it’s based on, I have been eagerly anticipating this game since it was announced nearly a year ago.
To start, here’s my Slay the Spire credentials. I’ve played Slay the Spire for about 71 hours on Steam, and an additional 60 hours on Android. My favourite character to play is The Defect, with which I’ve reached Ascension level 8. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to even just beat the game with The Watcher. After 16 runs I’ve just today finally managed to do. I think I’ve reached the 3rd act boss half a dozen times, but I kept on losing to that final hurdle. While I’d never call myself a Slay the Spire expert, I’d definitely class myself as an enthusiast.
When the Kickstarter campaign finally launched, my heart dropped. $135 CAD for the base game, plus $16 for shipping. $150 is firmly out of the impulse buy category for me. The campaign itself had extremely few details on what the board game did differently from the video game. I knew a straight port wouldn’t be possible, there’s much too much math involved to make it enjoyable or playable. Over the next few days, more details came out, and various creators who got preview copies published their content. While helpful, the lack of information on the actual pledge page is disappointing. What was helpful was the release of the Prototype rulebook, and a playable version of the game on Tabletop Simulator.
I roped in Bigfoot, who, like me, is an avid board gamer and has significant experience playing the Slay the Spire video game. This made teaching a breeze, he already knew the flow of the game, the iconography, and some of the strategy (like how important defence is, and why we should focus on tackling elites). He assumed the role of the ironclad while I took on The Silent.
How to play
Slay the Spire is a deck building dungeon crawl where the goal is to defeat enemies to earn rewards to acquire better cards and relics with special abilities until you finally defeat the boss. When normal combat starts, an enemy is placed into a row, one for each player. Enemy cards may also summon minions into their row.
Players have 3 energy each turn to play cards from their hands, and by default, draw 5 cards. A die is rolled which will affect everything that has a die ability. Some monsters will have different attacks based off the die roll, while others will simply do the same thing every time, while others will work through a series of static effects.
Players play their cards, generating block to shield themselves from damage, and swords, which do damage to the enemies. Players can target any enemy on any row with their attacks, enabling some great collaborative play. After all players have finished playing cards, any unplayed cards are discarded, and the monsters take their turn. Starting from the top left and moving to the bottom right, monsters attack. Any damage is negated by shields, but should those run out, then hp is reduced. If anyone’s hp drops to 0, the team has lost.
Should the players be victorious, they acquire rewards. Coins that can be spent at shops, potions offering clutch 1 time effects, and new cards they can add into their deck. Each character starts with a basic 10 card deck, and has a pool of 60 cards from which they can add from. Each character also have 20 rare cards which are very powerful, but harder to obtain.
First Impressions
A key component of Slay the Spire is upgrading your cards. At a rest site, you can choose to either heal hp, or, upgrade a single card. This can reduce the cost, or increase the ability of the card itself. The board game handles this by utilizing double-sided cards in sleeves. When you upgrade a card, just pull it out of its sleeve, flip it around, and put it back into it’s sleeve for the remainder of the game.
So what’s different from the video game? Well, the math has been reduced. All the strikes and defends generate 1 hit or shield respectively. Weakness now just reduces the number of hits generated by 1, and vulnerable doubles the damage the next time the target takes damage. Stats effects have been turned into cards that either effectively reduce your draw then disappear, or a card that goes into your discard pile that will cause trouble when it appears in your hand. Burns, which do damage if they’re in your hand at the end of your turn, or green spirals, which will sap your energy when drawn. The Silent’s poison is now persistent, it doesn’t tick down at the end of a round. Shivs offer a 1 damage attack, but can be saved from round to round, allowing you to build up for a big combo. The Defects orbs don’t cycle in order any more, you can choose to evoke any orb of your choice. As I mentioned before, a lot of items and monsters are controlled via a single die roll at the start of the round turning a lot of the encounters and relics from deterministic effects that can be planned around, into a more random experience. I suspect this was done to reduce the already significant upkeep this game requires.
Slay the Spire: The Board Game is a very faithful adaption of the video game. Halfway through the first act of the game I put on the Slay the Spire OST, and suddenly everything just felt right in the world. It really feels like Slay the Spire, even with all the difference I mentioned above. The relics seem to be much less useful in the board game. In the video game, the relics are the lynchpin of your engine. Here, they seem to offer minor rewards. I haven’t explored enough to say for sure, but I think a large part of what makes Slay the Spie (and other roguelikes) special and what brings people back again and again, is finding those crazed combos.
Let’s talk about the $15 elephant in the room. Just who is this game really for? I have a hard time imagining board gamers dropping $135 on this crate of cards when so many other deck builders already exist for much less cash. And anyone who wants to play solo can just buy the video game for as low as $10. Some will argue Slay the Spire: The Board Game is cooperative, you can use this a tool to introduce others to the game, but at it’s current price, you can buy 15 copies of the video game to give away as gifts. And for people who are already attuned to the video game, there isn’t much new for them to discover here, other than the ability to play with friends.
I understand the joy of tactile play. I adore board games, but I am not willing to drop that kind of money when I can play the video game on the go. That said, if you’re a board gamer who loves Slay the Spire, and/or loves cooperative games, this is a slam dunk. I do think the video game is the superior version, there’s no upkeep to track, no chance of missed rules, and the gameplay loop of building a deck, racing up the spire, dying, and just restarting from scratch is so fast and so fun. The physical production is super cool, but I shudder at the thought of tearing down after a game. Flipping all the upgraded cards, breaking down the cards back into their appropriate decks, etc. I think Slay the Spire: The Board Game is more of a luxury piece of merchandise for those who really love Slay the Spire. A beautiful and lovingly crafted game that is less meant to be played for hundreds of hours and more of a physical object for fans to own and showcase, much like the dozen steelbook video games I’ve purchased in the past.
