Not many games do this very well, but one of the mechanics that I absolutely adore is positive player interaction. When someone does a thing, and everyone benefits. Concordiadoes this incredibly well, a couple birds in Wingspanbenefit all players, but give extra benefit to the player who played the card, Brass: Birmingham has brilliant mutually beneficial relationships, where you can use other players things to fulfill what you’re trying to do to earn stuff for you, and the player whose stuff you used also benefits. I could go on, listing a ton of games as examples of this, as it’s one of the mechanics that when I hear it’s in a game, it makes me sit up and take notice.
So now I need to figure out why Isle of Trains: All Aboard has left me feeling cold, despite the entire game being built around this mechanic.
Let’s set the scene. Isle of Trains: All Aboard is designed by Seth Jaffee and Dan Keltner and published by Dranda Games after a successful Kickstarter campaign. This is a 2023 remastering of Isle of Trains from 2014, where they’ve added a bunch of things and completely revamped the art and graphic design. Isle of Trains: All Aboard is an attractive game, with vibrant colours, screen printed meeples, and bright and detailed train cars on each of the cards.
In Isle of Trains: All Aboard, players are racing to earn the most points by the end of the game. To begin, all players have a train engine. On your turn you can build train cars by playing them from your hand, loading goods on train cars (either your own or your opponent’s cars), delivering goods and passengers for various benefits, and take cards from the market or deck. Each turn you’ll have 2 actions to perform, then play continues round and round until the end game trigger has been reached.
The interesting twist in Isle of Trains: All Aboard is that all the trains that can carry passengers or goods generally have a special ability that gets triggered whenever an opponent loads them. This can be something like drawing 3 cards, or draw 2 cards and take an extra action. But this special ability never fires when you load goods onto your own train. You can only take advantage of the special abilities on your opponent’s trains when you load them.
The cards have multiple uses too. Every card is something that can be built, either a building for end game points, or a car on your train. Every card can be spent as a good to be loaded onto a train, and when you do build something, the cost is the number of cards you have to discard to build it. The cards are incredibly useful and versatile here.
Perhaps that’s where my criticism starts. It’s difficult to get cards into your hand, and keep them there. That’s obviously on purpose, the game is pushing you to use the mechanic of loading other players train cars so you get those powerful abilities, but that’s not always an option. Each train car can only carry a specific type of load (ore, oil, crates, and passengers). If you don’t have what your opponents need in your hand, you’ll need to inefficiently draw cards until you do. If the opponent’s train cars are full because they haven’t been delivered yet, too bad, you can’t access that ability.
Isle of Trains: All Aboard has a hand limit of 5 cards. If you’re over that limit at the end of your round, you’re forced to pitch cards until you’ve reduced down to that limit. This makes building things fairly difficult. To build a level 1 Boxcar, you need to have it, and 3 cards you’re willing to junk in order to build it. Assuming you have the max of 5 cards in your hand at the start of your turn, sure, you can pitch almost your entire hand to build that single car. Hopefully your remaining card will be something someone else can use, so you can quickly refill your hand. The end game scoring cards cost 6 each, so you really need to commit a whole turn by spending your first action to get the extra cards into your hand, exceeding the limit, then spending your whole hand to erect that station. If there were more actions per turn, or if that hand limit were higher, perhaps this wouldn’t grate on me so hard, but here we are.
For a train game, I did surprisingly well with almost no train (lost by a single point)
There is a mechanic where if you’re upgrading your cars, you only need to pay the difference between the levels. So a Level 1 boxcar costs 3, and a level 2 costs 6. If you’re upgrading, you only need to pay 3 cards and remove the level 1 boxcar from your train. This is helpful, but with the problem above of spending all your cards any time you want to do something, you can’t really keep cards in your hand to hopefully build later. More realistically, you’ll be drawing cards from the top of the deck and just hoping that you manage to pull the card that you want. It’s quite unsatisfying.
Each station starts by wanting 2 goods. Only one player can deliver to a station. When someone delivers to the station, they claim the card and have the opportunity to then deliver to one of the two extra contracts on that card. Each time the initial contract on a station is fulfilled, or, 3 passengers are delivered to a single location, the end game trigger progresses. Completing 4/5/6 progresses in a 2/3/4 player game triggers the end. I’ve mostly played 4 player games, and only once has someone managed to complete the secondary objectives. Getting 6 goods onto your train feels like a really steep ask, considering that if each player claims a single contract, you’re already approaching the end of the game. By that point it’s pretty likely that some of the cities will be close to being full of passengers and the game comes to a screeching conclusion before anyone really wants it to.
I don’t want to hate Isle of Trains: All Aboard. On paper, I was super excited to play it! I had such high expectations for it, that I’m kind of crushed that it fell flat for me. It looks great, it comes in a small box, I love the multi-use cards, I just feel like it could have been more. I hate it when a game falls flat, especially when I was so excited for it before I started playing it.
I feel like it might be a better experience at 2 players, but it’s so rare that I play anything at that player count, I’m just left with a sour taste in my mouth. Isle of Trains: All Aboard isn’t for me, and that’s okay. I have seen some positive reports from the solo community, especially with the dozen or so scenarios included in the back of the box. So if you love train games, and play solo, you might have a better experience than I did.
Growing up, we joked that my mom not only had a ‘black thumb’, but a black aura. That any houseplant that came into our home was destined to die. This may be because she was a single mother raising 3 kids, or because we grew up in frigid northern Manitoba, but in any case, being unable to care for houseplants was a common joke in our home.
Now that I’m grown and living in a much more temperate zone, some greenery has started to adorn my windowsills. Mostly inspired by my wife, but still, it counts. A few of my friends are enthusiastic gardeners, such as Otter, who I’ve talked about before, has 10 foot tall sunflowers adorning the front of his home, his backyard is abundant with raspberries, and his living room couch fights for space amongst a dozen potted plants. Being in his space, I can really appreciate how having green, living things can make a room feel cozy.
Verdant is a puzzly card drafting game for 1 to 5 players designed by Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Aaron Mesburne, Kevin Russ, and Shawn Stankewich, and published by Flatout games. The game centres around a market row, with 4 tokens in the centre, and a room card below each one, and a plant card above each one. On a player’s turn, they much choose a token, and one of the two cards next to that token. Plant cards have a verdancy requirement, indicating how much love and care they need to reach their full potential. This can come from items, like the watering can or hand trowel, or from being next to room cards that give the appropriate amount of light to that plant.
If a plant reaches full verdancy, you clear the card of all its tokens and place a single plant pot onto the card, giving it bonus points at the end of the game. The room cards come in 5 different colours, and simply offer victory points if they’re adjacent to the appropriate type of plant. In addition, the tokens that don’t give your plants verdancy are a collection of furniture and pets that you can use to adorn your rooms. If your token colour matches the colour of the room, it doubles the adjacency bonus for that card.
One of the tricks of the game is that you cannot place a plant card next to a plant card, and you cannot place two rooms together. Instead, you’ll make a 5 x 3 chequerboard of cards as you try to maximize the number of plants you can sustain within your tableau.
The challenge here is that board games don’t exist in a vacuum, and it’s difficult to talk about Verdant without also mentioning Flatout Games prior project, Cascadia, especially because they both share the market row draft mechanism, but Verdant throws an extra choice layer on top, making you choose from a room or a plant in addition to the item on offer.
In theory, I feel like I should like Verdant much more than Cascadia. The choices are a bit more complex without adding on much more rules grit, but the breazy simplicity that was found in Cascadia and Calico feels gone here. Perhaps because you’re constrained to the 5 x 3 grid of cards, and you can never place a plant next to another plant, it’s just something more to keep in your head. In Cascadia and Calico, you COULD place any tile anywhere. It was freeing. You’ll do horribly if you place tiles without careful consideration, but you CAN do it, the only thing stopping you from doing so is the allure of victory.
Much like in Cascadia, there’s a fair amount of luck involved. There’s 5 plant types, 5 room types, and like, 8 different animals. Getting the right rooms and the right animals paired next to the plants of the correct time is hugely important. More than once I committed to succulents, because I had 2 next to the associated room, but then a succulent item never materialized to help boost that score. And the only other succulent card that came out that game had the wrong sunlight requirement. If another player just so happens to have the right cards come out for them, they’ll run away with the game, no matter how skilled the other players are.
As always, Beth Sobel’s artwork is incredible, and every gardener I’ve played Verdant with has gushed over the illustrations.
Verdant continues the trend of pleasant themes to lure people to the table. A lush green box, beautiful artwork, and an inoffensive theme of arranging plants and rooms does wonders in engaging those who may only be casting a passing glance at this game. But for me, it’s my least favourite of the trilogy. I utterly adore Calico, and I even quite enjoy Cascadia. It’s not a bad game by any means, but it also doesn’t exist in a vacuum. With these two other GREAT games made by the same company, let alone countless other puzzly tableau building games, I find it really challenging to recommend Verdant, unless you have great affinity for the theme.
It’s hard to imagine that Agricola has existed since I was in high school. The things I would have done to have known about Agricola’s existence during the years when I was living with my primary gaming buddy. I can guarantee you, we would have been playing Agricola over and over again, as it feels like the kind of game that you can replay endlessly and just get better and better at.
Agricola (or Misery Farm as many have dubbed it) is a worker placement game about building up your farm and family. You can build fences and stables, expand your home, have kids (cough cheap labour cough), collect wood, stone, reed, and raise sheep, boar, and cows. Just in case you were worried there wasn’t enough to do, you can also work the land and grow grain and vegetables as well.
The end game scoring in Agricola awards you points for how much of each object you’ve acquired over the course of the game, and punishes you with negative points if you ignore them. Being a jack of all trades is key on a farm.
Agricola begins with a small selection of key action spaces, with a new action space getting revealed every round. Each player has 2 workers in their farm. From the start, you are tasked with generating enough food to feed your family at the end of every harvest. The first harvest is 5 turns away from the start, giving you a bit of runway. The subsequent harvests come progressively quicker. By the time you get past the halfway point of the game and the harvest start happening every other turn, you better have some kind of food generating engine rolling, and/or be producing a surplus of food. If you can’t feed your people during a harvest round, you need to beg, which is more negative points. Keep in mind an average score in Agricola is around the mid to low thirties, negative 3 points could represent 10% of your total score, all for failing to generate enough food during a harvest.
Almost half of the worker placement action spots in Agricola generate some kind of resource: wood, clay, stone, reed, grain, vegetable, sheep, boar, or cow. A major component to Agricola is that every round, each of those spaces generate and stockpile their resource. If those resources don’t get picked up by someone, they continue to generate goods, making those spots even more attractive in the next round. It can be agonizing trying to decide if you want to take the juicy 9 wood that have built up over 3 rounds, or if you really need to play a new occupation card before someone locks that spot down. Can you do both? Will someone steal all that wood out from under you?
Another component to this game that makes it amazing replayable are the two types of cards that are either dealt out or drafted at the start of each game. There are more than 100 of each of the minor improvement cards and occupation cards, and both give your family special bonuses and powers once they’ve been built or claim. The minor improvements are tools that players are using to gain extra resources or to break the rules of the game. The occupation cards generally cost food to play (except the first one’s free), but these give you persistent powers, with things like “Every time you go fishing, get an extra food” or “any time you take wood from an action space, you may leave one wood behind and take two food instead” or “Your people can eat rocks.”
I understand the theme here is that you’re trading your rock sculptures for food, but I choose to believe that I’m feeding my family a plate full of rocks.
Each player receives 7 of each type of card at the beginning of the game, and it’s up to them to separate the wheat from the chaff. Each player needs to figure out their own synergies and make the occupations and improvements they were dealt work for them, as there’s absolutely no way that any player can play all their cards. When just dealing out 7 of each type of card to each player, there is the chance that someone will be dealt some amazing combo that allows them to become the king of the swamp. I find that the draft variant is more satisfying, in that all players get to see more cards, and have more opportunity to build towards something, rather than trying to make sense of the lot they were dealt.
Now, Agricola is called misery farm for a reason, and the first half of the game is tense as you’re trying to get your farm up and running from scratch. Gain and Vegetables grow every harvest, and having more than one animal after feeding your family will result in getting more animals, so it’s in your best interest to invest in these industries early to reap the rewards over several harvests.
The challenge is that everyone is trying to get their farms running in the same way. And you’ll be damned if your neighbour gets those 3 sheep one turn before the harvest. Likewise, everyone is contesting for the limited number of resources that are being generated each round. Sure, you got the sheep, but did you get the wood you needed to build a fence to keep them?
Agricola does still make me bury my head in my hands as I try to map out how to get an engine started from nothing. Trying to optimize and maximize my few turns in the early game to set myself up for success in the late game is crucial and difficult but satisfying. It’s a tense game, with the penalty for playing poorly utterly punishing. With all this tension and misery, when you manage to come out the other side victorious, it’s blissful. You feel like you’ve overcome a significant challenge, you earned a victory, not stumbled into one.
I could ramble on and on about how much I adore Agricola. It sits as #8 on my favourite games of all time list for a reason. It’s utterly satisfying to play, it’s engaging, and exciting, even 17 years after its original release. I highly recommend Agricola, for multiple plays. Uwe Rosenberg crafted a brilliant modern classic board game that stands the test of time. There is always room on my table for another game of Agricola.
That Time You Killed Me is an abstract strategy game for 2 players, designed by Peter C. Hayward and released in 2021. It’s kind of like chess, but with more murder. Murder by squishing. Squishy murder.
As the story goes, you’ve invented time travel! Yay! Except someone else is claiming that they also invented time travel. And they’re going to kill you to keep you silent. Unless you kill them first to silence their claims. Unfortunately, because time is all wibbly wobbly, there are several copies spread out amongst the timelines, so you’re gonna have to do a lot of murdering before the job is truly complete.
There are 3 zones of play, the past, the present, and the future. Each player starts with one pawn in each zone. The goal is to manoeuvre your pawns and push your opponent into the wall until you’re the last pawn standing on two of the three zones of time. Players can only focus on one zone at a time, and only one pawn be active during a turn. Each turn, a single active pawn can take two actions. Those actions include moving orthogonally in their current zone, or jumping forward and backward through time, popping up on other zones and creating copies of themselves.
That Time You Killed Me has 4 chapters in the box, and we have so far only played with a single chapter. The first box introduces seeds which can planted for an action. When a seed is planted, it grows over time. From a seed grows a pointy murder bush that is immovable and kills all who are pressed against it. Moving forward in time it blossoms into a mighty tree that is felled with the slightest touch and crushes anyone on the other side.
The other side of the creation coin, is un-creation. For an action, you can unplant a seed and remove the bush and tree from the next two timelines. With a limited number of seeds in the game, you may find yourself hording seeds on your side of the board to prevent your opponent from erecting a murder bush right in the path of future you. Time is fickle like that.
That Time You Killed Me has all the things that make an abstract strategy game great. The feeling of being smart when you lay a trap and lure an opponent in, the mental stress as you puzzle out several permutations before deciding on which one would be best to progress. But the game also greatly benefits from the fact that designer Peter C. Hayward is an actual author, and he flexes his narrative muscle to great effect here. That Time You Killed Me is a delight to behold, from the story and context given in the rule book, to just how the game has this emergent narrative as your clones fall backwards in time to suddenly squash an unsuspecting pawn.
Seriously, the narrative element is strong, and gives flavour to the entire game. I so enjoy this over other abstracts like Hive or Santorini where there is a theme, but it’s fairly pasted on. Here, the theme works with the mechanics, even if sometimes it’s a bit weird.
I’m incredibly excited to check out the other boxes to see what the game has in store for us. On one hand, it’s already fairly mind bendy when you are considering all the moves you can make on one board, plus the time travel element of jumping boards. Adding more complexity on top of 3d chess will make my brain hurt, but it’s a hurt that I’m so looking forward to.
The real challenge for me will be finding more opportunities to play two player games.
Apparently 2024 is the year that I dive into Valdimr Suchy games. In the last 6 months I’ve played Pulsar 2849, Praga Caput Regni,Evacuation, and now, Woodcraft gets added to that pile as well. With this experience, I’m starting to get a feel for Valdimr’s designs. Medium-heavy euros with tight a tight economy, and an interesting action selection mechanism, and Woodcraft fits that definition incredibly well.
Learning Woodcraft isn’t terrible. I used both the rule book and the Game in a Nutshell How to Play video. Between the two, it wasn’t hard getting started. There were a few non-intuitive things, like the helpers all have production on them, but production doesn’t produce during an income phase. We all expected that would have been the case just due to the terminology, but no. gaining production is completely separate from income. There are a few other tedious rules, such as when you plant wood into your pots, you can take a free cutting action. This isn’t represented anywhere on the boards in a helpful manner, and I completely missed the rule in my excursion to learn the game.
In Woodcraft, players take on forest sprites who love to build beautiful creations out of wood. During the game you’ll buy and sell lumber, grow your own trees, hire assistants, collect tools to store in your attic, improve your workshop, and fulfill contracts. With only 14 rounds (13 in a 4 player game), your real task is to make every action count.
The contacts to fulfill generally have various wood requirements (3 different types of wood in the game, represented by green, yellow, and brown dice), and each wood has a pip value requirement that has to be met exactly. To do this, you’ll probably use the saw to cut a die into two, maintaining the sum of the original die, splice scrap wood to increment the pip value, and even glue two dice together to form a larger die.
It’s surprisingly fun to cleave dice into two, or stitch them back together to fulfill the contracts. Many of the contracts reward you with various goodies, sometimes even including more dice. There’s a great feedback loop of spending money to get resources, using the resources to fulfill contracts, which give you more money. Money in this context is blueberries.
Generally for a first play, I try to dip my toes into every mechanic. That said, Woodcraft is the kind of game where there are 5 different things you want to do, but you only have time to focus on 1 or 2 of them. You cannot do everything in Woodcraft, and the winner is probably going to be the person who does their one thing the best. At the end of our first game, one player managed to earn 3 tools, despite the attic having like, 12 spots to hold tools. Perhaps the next time I play, I’ll really try to focus on the attic and see how well it goes.
Woodcraft feels like a solo game. The interaction comes from someone taking contracts or helper cards before you, claiming public objectives before you, and selecting actions on the action wheel. The further back the action is on the wheel, the better the benefits you’ll receive for taking that action. It’s frustrating when the player right before you takes the action you wanted, gets the bonus benefits for it, then moves it up into the segment of the action wheel that doesn’t give you any benefits for playing it. Beyond that, you’re pretty free to run your own game.
I made a critical blunder in the middle of the game that probably cost me 2 whole turns to fix (representing about 15% of my entire game), which put me squarely into last place. As with most of Suchy’s games, the economy is tight. Every blueberry can be used, and taking an inefficient action can cause a terrible bottleneck that you need to dig yourself out from.
There’s a definite puzzle in the game of Woodcraft, that action efficiency challenge has me wanting to go back and get better. It’s not really a game that you can appreciate at a single play. I feel like the more you understand the levers and consequences at play in this game system, the more you’ll be rewarded with those sweet, sweet chestnuts (Points. Chestnuts are points). And that’s really why this is a first impressions post and not a full review. I have thoughts on Woodcraft, conflicted feelings, but I know there’s a lot more depth to plumb. I just don’t know if I’m going to put forth that investment to get good and find the joy in this tight puzzle.
Last week I talked about 6 Nimmt!, which is a great little card game that needs nothing other than to shuffle the cards, deal them out, and play. Following up on that post, I want to talk about No Thanks, which I have been enjoying immensely lately.
No Thanks, designed by Thorsten Gimmler and first published in 2004 is a single deck of 33 cards, numbered from 3 to 35. The game begins by distributing the tokens to each player, burning 9 cards off the deck, then a single card is turned over. The start player has a choice. To either take the card and any chips that may be on the table, or, say “No Thanks”, and place a chip onto the table, passing play to the next player. Round and round it goes until someone takes the card and all the chips.
The game ends when the deck runs out of cards. Players earn points based on the face value of all their cards, then subtract a point for every chip they have in their supply. The catch is if someone has a sequence of numbers (like 25, 26, 26, and 28), only the lowest card in that sequence is scored. The player with the lowest score is the winner.
And that’s all you need to know to play No Thanks. Another game that can go from being in the box to playing in less than 5 minutes, and can support a wide range of players (from 3 to 7). I love games where each players turn is so small. Everyone stays in engaged as they’re constantly making decisions and evaluating the game state.
What separates No Thanks from a game like 6 Nimmt, is that in No Thanks, Everyone has access to the same information. There’s no hands of cards, or hiding how many chips everyone has, or trying to remember who took which card, everything is face up on the table. This makes significant room for goading your friends into making bad decisions. “Come on Otter, take the 33. You already have the 35, once the 34 comes up, you’ll be golden!”
While the excitement in 6 Nimmt is in the reveal of the card everyone chose each round, No Thanks revels in the excitement of the push-your-luck of letting the pot of chips grow and grow as the cards go around and around the table. It’s subtle, but a card that you initially dismissed and tossed a chip in becomes more and more tempting as that pot grows. Not only are the chips worth negative points at the end, they represent a significant amount of power. If you can drain someone of all their chips, suddenly they’ve lost the ability to pass, and you can stick them with a series of terrible cards, driving them into the ground.
Image Credit: Jose Luis Zapata De Santiago (@zapata131) via BGG
Of course, that situation is rare. Thoughtful players won’t allow that situation to happen to them, but it does give No Thanks the feeling of good strategy. When a player wins, it’s not because of blind, dumb luck. It’s because they played well. Whether they made good decisions on which cards to take, or if they just played the other players better, it remains to be seen.
Because a game of No Thanks is so fast, It’s real easy to play over and over again. It’s the kind of game that accompanies good conversation, or just an activity to engage with while you’re spending time with your favourite people. No Thanks is an absolute winner in my book. It’s more approachable than 6 Nimmt, which means it gets played with a wider variety of people. I find that it particularly shines during late nights at the campsite with a big bowl of snacks and some adult beverages as it’s effortless to teach and play. Any game that’s this approachable, and still exciting and fun to play is an easy recommend from me!
