ElGordo

You are a Martian sent to Earth to collect a sample of different earth species to see who is really running the place. Collect as many as you can before the puny Earthling defenses can stop you!

Components

A rulebook and 13 awesome looking six sided dice with the following sides:

1 Chicken
1 Cow
1 Human
1 Tank
2 Death Rays

The container the game comes in can also double as a dice rolling cup. I personally love grabbing a fist full of dice and chucking them across the table, but for those who have smaller hands like my 9 year old daughter, the cup works great.

Game Play

First choose a target number of points to play to. The game instructions suggest 25 and that seems to be a good number, making for a fairly quick game.

Players take turns grabbing all 13 dice and rolling them. Depending on what’s rolled you will:

1. Set all tanks aside.(the pesky human military sent to stop you)
2. Pick one group of Human, Cow, Chicken or Death Ray dice rolled and set those aside as well.
3. Roll any remaining dice you choose or stop rolling and record your score. In order to score, you must have set aside at least as many Death Rays as tanks.

One thing to note is that you can only collect a certain population once per turn. So once you load a herd of cows or chickens (a herd of chickens? That’s probably not right..) onto your spaceship, you cannot add anymore of that population on any subsequent rolls this turn.

Scoring

You will score a point for each Human, Chicken, or Cow you abduct. If you are able to abduct at least one of each type, you score an additional bonus 3 points for all your hard work.

Summary

In addition to being just another press your luck type dice game on the market, Martian Dice also has an additional set collection decision you must make each roll which really adds to the game. Plus how many games do you own where you are shouting “Come on! Gimme some chickens!” before you roll?

A simple, fun filler and currently my favorite dice game. For 10 to 15 bucks, this is a game everyone should have on their shelf.

Ticket to Ride: Asia comes with a double sided map board – One side with the Legendary Asia Map, the other with the Team Asia Map. This is not a standalone expansion, so you’ll need the train pieces and train cards from another set of Ticket To Ride to play.

Legendary Asia is a standard 2-5 player game with the main difference from other Ticket to Ride games that came before being the addition of mountain routes, shown on the map as spaces with an “X” symbol placed on them. In order to claim a mountain route, players must discard one train for each X-marked space in that route. This reduces the player’s train inventory, but it also rewards two points per discarded train.

The Team Asia Map really changes how Ticket to Ride is played. Up to six players can now play, teamed in pairs sharing a total of 54 trains per team, working together to complete routes.

Information sharing is limited between teammates. Partners are not allowed to discuss in-game strategy with each other, and cannot reveal the destination tickets they have chosen unless they spend a turn to do so. At the start of the game, each player can move one destination ticket from their hand to their team’s pool of shared information, but in order to share others, they will have to skip a turn.

Drawing train cards works differently in Team Asia as well. Every time a player chooses to draw train cards, they must choose to place the first one in either their private hand or onto a shared rack. The second card drawn must be placed in the opposite location (your hand or the rack).

Both of these maps are great additions to the Ticket to Ride family. The discarding of trains in Legendary Asia opens up some interesting options to really accelerate the end of the game and leave your opponents stuck with several trains they didn’t have time to play, while Team Asia really breathes some fresh air into the game system and makes for a unique experience. It can be agonizing watching your teammate struggle to figure out why you picked a certain card!

If you’re intrigued by the idea of playing Ticket to Ride in teams, I would definitely pick this up. Team Asia has provided several great couple’s game nights for us, and the Legendary map is a great addition to the game as well. Big thumbs up for this expansion!

Finca has 2 to 4 players taking turns collecting different types of fruit and delivering them to the towns of the island of Mallorca represented on the gameboard. For each delivery made, players collect tiles with victory points on them…most points at the end wins the game.

I’m not really sure when this game takes place, but you are delivering fruit on a donkey cart, so we will assume it takes place in the distant past or that Mallorca is a poor backwater place…

GAMEPLAY

Finca is a pickup and deliver game with a few really neat features. Foremost of which is the movement and fruit collection system for your farmers. Players begin the game by placing their farmer pawns onto one of several different windmill blades laid out in a circle. A picture of one of the 6 different fruits appears on each blade. Movement is determined by the number of pawns on the blade. If there are 3 pawns on the blade, you move 3 spaces this turn. As pawns move onto and off of the blades, the number of spaces each pawn can move will change constantly throughout the game. As you move around the windmill blades, you will also collect donkey cart tokens which are needed to deliver fruit to the towns.

The fruit you collect is determined by the number of pawns on the particular blade you end your turn on. If there is a picture of oranges on the blade you land on and there are a total of 4 pawns on the blade, you collect 4 oranges!

The goal is to collect the type and number of fruit that matches the exposed tiles on each town. Once you have the correct matching fruit, you load them onto your donkey cart and deliver them to the town to collect the tile.

There are bonus points that can be earned by collecting sets as well as bonus points for having the most of certain types of fruits.

The number of fruit is limited as is the number of donkey carts, so if the supply of one of them runs out, then everybody has to give their supply back to the central pool, which is a nice way to stop people from hoarding any one type of item.

You have to be aware what fruits the other players are collecting as you play. If you wait too long, one of the other players may deliver the same fruit you are collecting to one of the towns, leaving you stuck holding a bunch of fruit that no town wants.

SUMMARY

The components of the game are great. Instead of the traditional wooden cubes that seems so common in games, Finca has these fantastic wooden fruit pieces in the shape and color of the fruit they represent. It really helps sell the theme of the game. People just want to play the game when they see all these cool fruit pieces laid out.

Finca is a nice light game that I find works well for most gamers and works especially well in introducing new gamers to the hobby. It sits alongside Ticket to Ride in my collection for that purpose.

The premise is simple: Lead your Adventurer into an abandoned temple grabbing as much treasure as you can and get out before getting killed. Whichever player has the most treasure wins. Or in the games I play, just getting out at all will win you the game.

As you make your way around the board, you can choose to dig for treasures in a series of areas, each with its own potential Adventurer killing hazard.

You first encounter a room with walls that continually move to crush you. As you leave that room, a giant rolling boulder, straight out of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark begins to chase you down the corridor, rolling faster and faster as the game progresses. To avoid the boulder you can take a shortcut across the board jumping from stone to stone over a lava pit, taking the chance the next stone you jump to will sink into the lava, taking you along with it.

You could also choose to take the underground river shortcut, with the possibility that you may be swept to your doom over the edge of the waterfall at the end of it. Or choose the rickety old bridge which could collapse sending you tumbling into the darkness below!

Although it always seems that no matter what route you choose, that boulder is constantly getting closer and closer and closer….

To start the game, each player is given cards representing 2 different characters (you get to use the 2nd one if, or most likely when your 1st character dies). Each character has a special ability that can be used once during the game, such as the ability to move an extra space to stay ahead of that boulder.

You move around the board rolling a number of dice. The more treasure cards you have, the lower the number on each die needs to be to give you a movement point. So the greedy players are most likely to get crushed by the ever present boulder. I am speaking from experience here…

The game is basically a luck driven dice fest, but it is just dripping with theme and can be knocked out in 45 minutes or less, making it quick fun. There is no deep strategy here, just a great game of push your luck action. The Adventurers: The Temple of Chac is wildly successful at recreating the sense of being in a pulp adventure movie staying just one step ahead of danger like Indiana Jones.

The whole family should enjoy this one. I have played this game about half a dozen times and have not yet had my Adventurer make it out alive….and yet I still have a blast playing!

Along with 16 plastic game pieces shaped like those from Tetris, players get 4 scoring boards with rows of white dots on them, a board holder, and a random starting card showing which of the game pieces they must use to start the round.

The basic premise of the game is to slide your 16 pieces one at a time onto a board while leaving the least amount of gaps in the rows as you can. Cards with shapes that match your game pieces will be turned over one at a time and each player slides their matching piece onto their board, orienting their piece as best they can to complete rows and leave the least amount of gaps. The more complete rows you can build with no gaps, the more points you score.

Do this for all four boards and whoever has the most points wins. Now, this would be mind numbingly repetitive after a very short while. Luckily each board after the first is different and provides additional challenges and replayability.

The 2nd board has numbers printed within some of the dots. Your objective here is to cover all of the dots without numbers while leaving the dots with numbers exposed, gaining points equal to those numbers.

The 3rd board is similar to the 2nd but it adds black dots which take away 5 points for each one of them left exposed.

The last board has 5 pairs of matching symbols. Your goal here is to leave both of the matching symbols exposed to gain 3 points per pair. Having one of the symbols covered while the other is exposed loses you 3 points.

Although I am a fan of FITS, this game might not “fit” (heheh) everyones play style. For one thing, there is technically zero player interaction. Each of the players could be in seperate rooms and the game would essentially play the same, since you are building your boards on your own.

However, I find that with the group I play with, there is a constant banter and chatter among us during the game as the cards showing the next piece to be placed are flipped over. I’ll be saying something like “Come on, come on…don’t be that one shaped like a plus sign… that will totally screw up my board” And of course that ends up being the card to the laughter of everyone else around the table at my expense. Hmmm…maybe I need a new group?

Anyway, FITS is fun, quick and extremely easy to learn. You can be up and playing within 5 minutes of opening the box. With the availability of several expansions adding additional boards, the game can be as expandable as you want to make it.

The game has players investing in the early days of the commercial airline industry. Essentially this is a stock/speculation game – that may sound boring…no actually it DOES sound boring, but with designer Alan Moon of Ticket to Ride fame, it is anything but!

The game is simple to learn, and moves quickly with little down time before you do one of 4 actions available on your turn:

1. Buy one or two planes of an airline and place them on a route on the gameboard – thereby increasing the value of one of the 10 available airlines. Take a share card.

2. Play share cards. You receive cash for each card played.

3. Trade “normal” airline shares for the special Air Abacus share cards. The majority owners of the Air Abacus shares gets a substantial victory point boost during the 3 scoring rounds. You almost have to keep pace with the other players investments in Air Abacus or you could find yourself falling severely behind.

4. Take money from the bank, the only way to get cash other than playing share cards.

It sounds simple enough, but money is extremely tight in this game and the decisions you are faced with each turn are excruciating. Should you buy the routes you want now or next turn? Buy the ever important Air Abacus shares instead? Lay down some shares to generate some cash? Where should you place the planes you purchase? Which route will grow your airline the most and possibly interfere with the growth of competing airlines?

All game reviews are subjective but I can’t recommend Airlines Europe highly enough. It’s a game with enough strategy to interest gamers but simple enough to appeal to non-gamers and those looking for the next step up after Gateway games like Ticket to Ride. The game moves quickly with minimal downtime even with 5 players.

The game looks great as well, especially once those planes start to fill up the board. Overall just a great game.

Horse Fever is a quick, fun game in which players try and influence the winner of a series of horse races to earn cash and victory points.

Players begin the game by randomly selecting from among 12 different characters which represent the horse stable they “own” as well as their starting cash. Before each race, players will have the option to purchase cards from different decks which can alter the outcome of the race.

The Assistant cards can grant financial bonuses. The Horse cards directly affect the movement of the horses along the track (good cards played on the horses you bet on, bad cards played on the others). Stable cards let you invest in other horses and the Goals deck give secret objectives which can result in additonal victory points at the end of the game. There are also cards that let you borrow from the bank of the mob!

After card purchases, each player places their bets. Each of six the horses has odds displayed on a blackboard which give a general idea of what place they are expected to finish. Players then choose a horse token to bet on – when the tokens for a particular horse are gone, no further bets can be placed on that horse. This is a neat mechanic of the game, designed so that not everybody can bet on the favorite.

Each player can bet on up to 2 horses to either win, or to show (finish in the top 3). Correctly selecting a winner nets 3 victory points and up to seven times the amount bet, while betting on a horse to show gets 1 victory point and twice the amount bet.

Once the race starts cards are turned over which move the horses along the track. After each turn of a card, two “sprint” dice are rolled which indicate which of the horses move an additonal space.

Part of the fun of the game comes from the sense of humor the cards have. The ball and chain card played on a horse stops it from moving on the first turn, while the card showing the red pepper being placed near the back end of the horse moves it even further than usual to start the race. Crude…but funny.

Horse Fever gives the player several strategic decisions to make before the beginning of each race, but no tactical decision to be made once the race starts. If you prefer a horse racing game where you directly influence the horse during the race, like you are the jockey riding it, there are other games that might suit you better.

Personally, I enjoy the method Horse Fever uses. Once the race starts, it feels like a horse race should. Fast and furious with everyone around the table yelling and cheering for their horse to GO GO GO! and groaning when the sprint dice moves another horse past the finish line ahead of your horse just at the last second.

Good fun and definitely worth buying if you are considering a race game for your collection. Components rated 3 stars for use of small size paper money, rather than full size or even coins or cardboard chips.

Tobago is a treasure hunting game with a very unique mechanic for revealing each of the four treasures buried on an island.

The gameboard is an island consisting of hexes. Players will take turns laying clue cards which constantly reduce the possible location of a treasure on the island to a single hex – then race their game piece to that hex to dig up the treasure.

The treasure is then divided among the players who contributed a card to the location of that treasure. Each player receives a treasure card varying from 2 to 6 points for each card contributed. Most treasure wins the game.

The components to Tobago are absolutely top notch, from wooden huts, palm trees and and “stone” statues. The first time playing Tobago might cause some head scratching as everyone tries to decipher which of their cards can be played on which treasure to narrow its possibe location, but once that hurdle is cleared the game really shines.

There are additional features that add to the game such as cursed treasures and magical amulets which give the players additional abilities on their turn. It all adds up to a great game that I can bring out with just about any of my friends and family.