Micah's

Suburbia, subdivision, and now castles of mad king ludwig. These game are all great games to have come out recently. I think castles is a fun an interactive way to bring anyone into the gaming hobby and keep them in it. Castles is so simple and elegant that it will be open my collection forever.

How you play?
It’s easy you buy rooms and add them to your castle. That it. He fun comes in the variety of home and the integration of each room with the one next to it. There are 8 types of rooms that you could add to your castle in aims to receive completion bonuses. Each room will give you a benefit when you have filled every door way with another room or a wall from another room. Those benefits could give you money, points, extra turn, more bonus cards, ext…

Strategy and goal:
In the game there is a race for goals anyone could claim for their own. But also each player get bonus cards which give you a personal goal. Through out the game you are trying to clam as many of the goals that you can. Each player will also get turns to be the master builder. The master builder arranges the rooms that will be for sale that round and when people buy those rooms they pay the master builder for them. As the game moves forward the master builder position become powerful due to your knowledge of people’s goals. You are able to make the rooms they desire expensive and the ones you want cheap.

Thoughts:
If you have played suburbia and liked it you will like this game. This by no means replaces suburbia but is a great little brother. It’s a perfect game to teach and to play with anyone. It offers replay ability like no other. Sure what you do every games is the same but rooms, goals, and bonuses are sure to change what you do each game. If you have not played suburbia you don’t understand the wonderful feeling you get at the end of the game when you get to see your final castle built. It’s fun to see how things paned out and what rooms ended up next to each other. As you build your castle you also build the story of your castle, giving the reason for why the servants must walk through the Kings chamber to get to theirs. It’s a fun and visually appealing game.

If you are wondering whether or not to buy this game, wonder no longer. Go out and buy this game and I promise you will enjoy it.

the settlement of Catan is a highly interactive and competitive task. It consists of three main tasks settle, produce, and expand. Let’s take a look at these goals up close.

Settle:
The first thing you do in the game is settle the land. There are five terrain types providing five different goods. Quarries provide rock, fields provide hay, pastures provide sheep, forests provide lumber, and pits provide clay. Your task in settling is choosing your two settlements to cover as many of these five reassures as possible. You also have to consider the probability of those terrains being able to produce. Each tile has a number on it which correlates with the dice rolled. If you are on every type of resource but out them on unprovable numbers then they will not produce any goods, resulting in bad settlements. So you have to put your settlements on good probable and as many resources as possible, if you are unable to get all goods you could trade for what you need.

Produce:
Production is like I said earlier based on a roll of the dice. At the beginning of each turn a player roles two dice and the number that is rolled is now able to produce. Whoever is settled on the number rolled receives that resource. Whatever resource you are unable to produce you then will have to trade with other players who are producing that good.

Expand:
Now this is meat of the game.
-In expanding you are building roads which allow you to settle once again, giving you even more probability to produce. Each of your settlements must be at least two roads way from anyother settlement. Roads not only provide the expanse of your new rule, but also can award you two victory points for having the longest road of all other players.
-You also can build city’s. Cities are improved settlements that double the production of that settlement.
-You are also able to build development cards. These cars are a sort of wild card, they can give you a benefit in goods, in victory points, in buillding roads, and also building your army. If you have an army card you are able to protect yourself from robbers who try and seal your resources. If you gain enough army cards you get the larges army bounds and recive two victory points.

The game then is played until a player had ten victory points. You get one point for each settlement you build and two for each city. Every other point awarded is though development cards and the two bonuses for longest road and largest army.

What I think:
This game is a great gateway game. If you are trying to get people into the hobby this game is suitable for sure. If you are trying to impress your gaming buddies with a new game this is not it. This is a classic game and people will always be playing and buying this game. It is probably best described as the monopoly of this generation. If you are starting in this hobby get this game and move on the some of the expansions but if you like something a little less luck and a little more strategy this is not a game for you. If you are looking for a good interactive game for your none gamer freinds this is the game for you!

This game is a simple, quick and enjoyable game.
In the game there are three routes of victory. You can please your panda by eating different colored bamboo. You could please the farmer by growing bamboo certain height’s. You can please the emperor by building land in different patterns.

In order to please them you can take 5 different actions to do so.

One, You could move the panda and eat a piece of bamboo on the tile you move to.
Two, You could move the farmer and grow bamboo on the tile you landed on and the ones of the same color adjacent to it.
Three, You could Take more land tiles and play them on the board.
Four, You could take a piece of river to irrigate your bamboo.
Five, You could draw more goal cards.

On the second round of the game you start rolling a die before taking your actions. This die will either give you another action, move the panda for free, grow bamboo for free, take an enhancement tile, allows you to take two of the same action, or you could take any of the extra actions you desire.

The game is a great gateway game to teach your friends and family. The components are great and its fun to move around the panda and eat the bamboo. Other then that the game is to simple to play often and I only use it with non gamers.

If you are looking for a simple family game, get Takenoko. If you are looking for a heavy game with lots of replay ability I would look for another game.

Amerigo is a game of discovery and development.
Your goal in Amerigo is to make your name and influence greater than any other explorer who is out to take your new discovery for their own. Before I get into how the game works I must first explain the main mechanic of this game. It’s a dice tower. You drop cubes into the top of it and on its way down some cubes get stuck and some knock out cubes previously stuck making different color cubes and less or more cubes come out.

Every round you take 7 turns. In a turn you take the main action cubes for that turn and send them down the tower of destiny. If only that color comes out, that’s the amount of action points you can take, and what type of action you can take, that turn.
Usually more then one color will drop out. On that occasion, each player has a choice between the type of action that came out. The number of action points per turn is determined by the largest number of the same color cubes that came out that round.

So you have 7 main actions to make your name go down in the history books and those actions are…

EXPLORE (blue cubes)
When exploring you move your boats and discover new lands. Once you have discovered a new land you automatically get to set up a settlement. Being the first person to explore and settle on a new land will gain you bonus points. So the more you explore the better. The more you explore and settle the more possible points you will have the chance to make with other actions. It is also valuable to explore already owned lands to gain some influence in the land.

CANNONS (black cubes)
Man the cannons! In Amerigo, as you are exploring on the open seas, you are always at risk of a pirate attack. So to keep these ruthless no good pirates from taking your well earned victory points, you build cannons to fight then off. Every time you fight pirates off however, some of your cannons get destroyed and you have to continue to rebuild them to stay safe. If you don’t have enough cannons to fight off the pirate scum, all of your cannons are destroyed and each pirate takes a victory point from you.

PLANNING (red cubes)
Once you have settled on a new land you need to help your people to thrive. So you start planning your city to fill the entire land. In this stage you examine the layout of your land and plan to build certain buildings that will gain you the most possible influence and best suit your people, or just get you the most Victory Points.

PROGRESSION (brown cubes)
As your cities grow and become a thriving new land, you need to gain new technologies to help you complete your goal of a great name. So in this action you gain any number of ideas that will eventually lead to a new discovery that will make your way to victory clear. Many of these new technology will help you know what route of fame you would like take. As you gain ideas you gain technologies and victory points along the way.

BUILD (green cubes)
In the building phase, you take your perviously made plans and start building them on the most opportune area. As you build you may find natural resources that you may be able to produce later on in the game for more victory points. You also are aiming to complete the most possible buildings in your new land to gain completion points and settlement points. Every time you build you have a choice to build your own buildings which are easy and cheap but if you spend a little more you can build the buildings your people want and gain more victory points.

PRODUCTION (yellow cubes)
During the production phase, you are aiming to take your recently found natural resources and develop them. Each production you gain doubles the value of that certain type of resource. So each chance you get to produce you should.

BONUS ACTION (white cubes)
On this action you are able to simple move up on the track and possibly become first player. Wherever you land on the track you gain the ability to utilize the color your marker is on instead of moving on the track when white cubes are rolled. As you move up on the bonus track you gain victory points along the way.

Overall: I think this is a great game! It’s an easy enough game to teach. It may be hard for non-gamers to remember all the possible choices and actions but it’s quite simple if you play games. It’s an easy game to play and there is much replay ability with ever changing new lands, technology order, pirate intensity, and production order.

Unless you hate dice towers, then I would recommend it.

This game is as simple as “Bid” or “Work” and from there it expands into a wonderfully complex and enjoyable euro type game. In this game you are settlers to a new world and you are trying to build your new towns into productive cities. The meeples are the pioneers to this new land that you use to produce your new cities.You use an assortment of different color meeples for everything in this game. You use meeples to bid on/ build new buildings in your home town, and you use them to bid on first dibs at the new shipment of boats and workers. You also use meeples to work on your own building, an opponent’s building, or on the buildings that are up for auction this round.
It’s interesting from there how instead of paying the owner of the building to use theirs you are instead giving them the workers that you have placed on their buildings in exchange for the building’s benefits.
The game is run in how many meeples you have and what color. You have to use the same color meeples to work on buildings more then once and you must increase the amount of meeples every time you or an opponent uses it. Every time you bid on a building and win, you lose the meeples you bid with. The same thing happens if you used them to work on other player’s buildings. Misusing your total number of meeples makes the amount of actions you have next round far less. So you need to balance between whether you should use your meeples to gain buildings and resources or if you should store them up for more actions later.
The game is wonderful and has pretty good replay ability. I would desire more buildings but it still is an excellent game. I would think about picking it up if I were you.