Hi Gaming friends!
If you don't already know, every Tuesday afternoon since the pandemic began, a group of us has been meeting via Zoom and playing online board games in real time on Board Game Arena (BGA)
Some games we play all the way through, and some of them we don't manage to finish before we run out of time (life gets in the way!) so we continue to play them "turn based" throughout the week.
Sometimes we play a game that one of us is really familiar and is willing to teach, sometimes we play something none of us have played before and we just muddle our way through, and sometimes we go back to a tried and trusted favorite where we all know the rules (unless of course someone adds in an expansion we weren't expecting 🤪)
(Click any of the game names to be taken to the game page on Board Game Arena)
This week we played:
61 Autumn Leaves (61 feuilles d'automne)
M knew the rules to this one and had played it before - I just saw it on the front page of BGA and thought it looked fun and relevant - especially with labor day coming up and the "official end of summer" with it (something as a Brit I will never understand - if the weather is hot and sunny then it's summer lol!)
Anyway, this is a really nice and gentle "roll and write" where the aim of the game is to score as many acorns as you can - you get to roll 3 dice - then you use:
- one for which area of your board you're going to fill in (there are 6 to choose from and each area has criteria you have to meet in order to be able to place a number there)
- one to be the number that you enter into the area (making sure it meets the criteria) and
- one to be left over and added to your "leaf total"
when you reach specific totals (11, 21, 31, etc) you get bonuses. As soon as one person reaches 61 on their "leaf total" the game is over and the person with the most acorns wins.
I really enjoyed this game and actually looked to see if it was available to buy - I couldn't find it anywhere - so if any of you have seen it, please do get in touch
We also played
Again M knew the rules to this one and wanted to teach us. This is a pattern building or set collecting game involving the idea that you're trying to get various animals to line up and have their photos taken. The aim of the game is to fill your player board with as many of the correctly situated animals as possible - line 1 requires all different animals, line 2 all the same, line 3-4-5 pairs or triples and then there is also color to take into account - get rows and columns of animals in all one color and you get a bonus.
There are four sets of animals on the board and you choose one animal from one set. Depending upon which animal you choose, makes a difference to which animals from the other sets you get to collect. There are only 6 rounds so it's quite a quick game to play
It sounds complicated (or, I'm making it sound complicated!) but actually it's quite simple once you know how. And fun! And the BGA adaptation makes it easy to see what your options are - I'm not so sure how I'd get on playing the tabletop version - I still think it would be fun but perhaps more "thinky"
Anyway, there's a nice descriptive video here on how it's played
Another game we played was
Now - I had to look up how to describe this one as the mechanics are a little difficult to explain - Board Game Geek says it's about "hand management" and "layering" and I'm inclined to agree but I also think it is a drafting game - I think this would be a lovely one to play in person for the aesthetics but quite possibly a nightmare to score - one of the things I love about BGA!
So - the aim of the game is to score as many rosettes as you can by creating paintings by layering cards one over top of the other and shuffling them around to get the best possible composition of criteria. You draft cards from the deck but have to "spend your inspiration" in order to collect ones that are newer in play. I really enjoyed the layering mechanism but got a bit frustrated when I kept running out of inspiration and had to keep drawing the first card from the pile - I guess running out of inspiration is something artists do have to contend with!
There's a really great short video on this game here:
So - that's it for this week - come back next week to see what we played 😀. There are so many great looking new games on BGA - I'm hoping that I get some time to learn some new ones! Thanks to my Tuesday afternoon Zoom group (M, T and S)