Siath

While there really is nothing new in this version, it is a good deal of fun, and a great way to adjust the game for a smaller get together or for two people to play. Also, this isn’t an expansion, but a full standalone, so if having fewer players is your norm, it is a great version to pick up instead of the other standalone versions requiring more players. Outside of this, it is everything you have come to expect from Ticket; A simple, easy to learn, train adventure.

This game, while not an expansion for ticket, is likely not the first ticket you’ve played. Because of that, I’ll move straight to the new features. Passengers!

You have 3 (I believe) passengers at the start of the game. You play them on a city you connect to using your turn, then on a future turn, send them for a ride. Each city has a number of numbered tokens under it. When you send your passenger for a ride, you pick up the top token as you go through a city. You can only send your passenger to cities that you have trains connecting, or, with the new passenger card, you can use one opponents route for each card you have. The tokens you pick up are added to your score.

Overall, this is a fun new version giving the game an interesting new mechanic.

A lot of people say that they prefer this version or that version of Ticket. Personally, I like most all the versions, and just think they are a great way to change things up and not let the game get stale.

Ticket Europe is simple, fairly quick, and fun. You spend the game trying to make your own routes, preventing your friends from connecting their routes, and trying to have your routes be in a continuous line for longest route.

The game is fairly simple. You start out with routes to complete, and cards to complete them with. You can pick a few of the routes you drew, or all of them (been playing expansions recently, can’t remember how many for the basic version), and then get started.

Playing trains between cities is how you complete a route. The number of segments in the route are how many cards you need, and the color of the route is the color the cards need to be. For the grey routes, it can be any color, but they must be the same color (eg, you go for a 2 segment grey, you can use 2 blues/greens/reds/etc, but you cannot use a blue and a red, that’s just crazy, there are rules). Locomotives(rainbow cards) can be used as any color, but if there are darkened locomotive(s) on the route, you need that many to complete the route.

On your turn you can do one of three things. You can draw cards, which is the most common action. This involves drawing some combination of 2 cards from the 5 face up cards(everyone knows what you’re going for) and the draw pile(you don’t know what you’re getting). If there is a locomotive face up, you can draw that, but it takes up both your card draws.

The second thing you can do is place trains, which was described above. The third option is drawing new routes. If you have completed your routes, or are confident you will soon, or simply want to be bold and daring, you can draw a few new cards (again, the specific number escapes me). You must keep one of them each time you do this.

As you go, you score routes. 1 segements – 1 points, 2s – 2p, 3s – 4p, 4s – 7p, 5s – 10p, 6s – 15p. Points are tracked with the tokens around the outside of the board. At the end of the game, any routes you completed add their value (the number in the corner) to your score. Any incomplete routes subtract from your score. 10 extra points are awarded for the longest continuous route.

All in all, this game is a ton of fun with many expansions that offer a large degree of variability and fun new tasks, goals, and maps.

Tsuro is a lot of fun, and a great quick game between larger commitments. There is a fair bit of strategy of which piece to play when, combined with large amounts of chaos for what other players are going to do.

The game is fairly simple. Take 3 tiles, choose a starting spot, take a turn. A turn involves placing a tile, moving your dragon to the end of the appropriate path, then drawing a tile if possible. This continues until one person is left on the board. Other possible endings include 2 players dying simultaneously or the last 2 players colliding.

The only problem encountered while learning the game was the idea of the dragon tile. The directions aren’t terribly clear on how it work, for us, at least. At first it seemed incredibly pointless. No one really saw what it did. In our first round, there was no use/need for it. In our second round, it made much more sense.

This is how we interpreted the use of the dragon tile. If a player goes out, their remaining tiles are returned to the draw pile. Then, any player with fewer than 3 tiles, starting with the player holding the dragon tile, draws a tile, until all players have 3 tiles, or there are no tiles left. Before drawing tiles, the player with the dragon tile can return it to the bottom of the tiles, to be drawn by the next person who needs a tile when none are remaining.

Overall, Tsuro is a fantastic, simple game that is a large amount of fun for a very small time commitment.

It is a fun concept and started a whole slew of games of the type. Its very simple, and great for playing with friends at parties. Personally, I prefer Cards Against Humanity, and I have heard that Sour Apples follows a similar vein.

You start with a few red cards(10 maybe? 8? not terribly important as long as everyone is even). One player pulls a green card and reads it aloud. Every other play chooses a card to play to that green card. It can be played because: it fits with the card, it is funny, it is random, or you are tired of having chosen red card. The player of the green card picks up all the red cards, shuffles them for anonymity, then reads them all aloud. At the end, the reader chooses their favorite/the best answer, and awards the owner of that red card the green card. First to seven green cards wins.

There isn’t really a lot of strategy in terms of how you normally think of strategy. Its mostly about playing to the person who drew the green card, whether they prefer silly, dry humor, accurate, random, dark humor, anti-whatever humor, etc.

Sure it doesn’t have a 12 page rule book, or come with 600 parts and pieces, and your winning doesn’t involve your opponent going bankrupt, dying, or suffering some horrible fate, but it can still be fun to play!

The game: play a card of matching number or color. If you can’t play, draw until you can. Repeat until out of cards. When you have one card left call, “Uno!” (because calling out “One!” would just seem silly). Specialty cards have to be played on other special cards, or matching colors. These include skip, reverse, and draw two. They cause the game to skip the next player, reverse the direction of play, or cause the next player to draw two cards. Wild cards can be played at any time. The player of the wild calls a color. Then play continues as normal. A draw 4 wild causes the next player to draw four cards.

There really isn’t much in terms of strategy, or planning. Its more about luck than anything.

Like many people, one of my first ‘real’ boardgames (as in, not monopoly/chutes and ladders/other basic boardgames) was Ticket. It was simple, fairly quick, and strangely fun for connecting train routes. Between trying to make your own routes, trying to prevent your friends from connecting their routes, and, if you can manage it, working to have your routes all be in a continuous line for longest route, it can definitely keep you on your toes.

The game is fairly simple. You start out with routes to complete, and cards to complete them with. You can pick a few of the routes you drew, or all of them (been playing expansions recently, can’t remember how many for the basic version), and then get started.

Playing trains between cities is how you complete a route. The number of segments in the route are how many cards you need, and the color of the route is the color the cards need to be. For the grey routes, it can be any color, but they must be the same color (eg, you go for a 2 segment grey, you can use 2 blues/greens/reds/etc, but you cannot use a blue and a red, that’s just crazy, there are rules). Locomotives(rainbow cards) can be used as any color.

On your turn you can do one of three things. You can draw cards, which is the most common action. This involves drawing some combination of 2 cards from the 5 face up cards(everyone knows what you’re going for) and the draw pile(you don’t know what you’re getting). If there is a locomotive face up, you can draw that, but it takes up both your card draws.

The second thing you can do is place trains, which was described above. The third option is drawing new routes. If you have completed your routes, or are confident you will soon, or simply want to be bold and daring, you can draw a few new cards (again, the specific number escapes me). You must keep one of them each time you do this.

As you go, you score routes. 1 segements – 1 points, 2s – 2p, 3s – 4p, 4s – 7p, 5s – 10p, 6s – 15p. Points are tracked with the tokens around the outside of the board. At the end of the game, any routes you completed add their value (the number in the corner) to your score. Any incomplete routes subtract from your score. 10 extra points are awarded for the longest continuous route.

All in all, this game is a ton of fun with many expansions that offer a large degree of variability and fun new tasks, goals, and maps.

I love this game! It is always an interesting experience, and despite having played many times, I still haven’t played the same game twice, and many of them are still yet to be discovered.

The game involves exploring a house with a group of friends, tile by tile. You choose your character, who has their own unique statistics, and begin to explore. Certain rooms have unique effects, as well as causing you to draw certain cards. Eventually, one of these cards will cause the haunt, which is based on the card drawn and the room drawn in.

At this point, you and your teammates need to work together to stop the haunt, and a possible traitor, and escape the house. There are unique ways to stop each haunt, and typically the forces working against you have a significant edge.

It is a great game that is a huge amount of fun with endless variability.

Smallworld is one of my favorites. Huge variability between race/power combos lead to a unique fight each time. You can dominate with a combo one game only to have it fail miserably against its perfect defense the next. A large part of the game also involves knowing when to give up on a combo and move on, and which combo is worth moving on to.

The game itself is fairly easy. You pick a combo, then get a number of units equal to the sum of the 2 big numbers on the race and power tiles. Then you deploy. Two units takes an empty land, one more for each enemy unit on that land, one for any additional defenses on that land (mountains, forts, troll caves). Some races/powers can give additional powers, but all in all, that is the game. Keep going until the turn counter reaches the end, then total your coins. You get coins based on your actions that turn, how many lands you hold when you end your turn, and any special abilities from your race/power combo.

The game is hugely fun, and about as simple as I made it out. There is a bit more detail I could go into (going into decline, each race/power’s abilities, what are good starter/ending races/powers, what races/powers are good to chain together) but that you can find out from reading the rules, playing the game, and conquering your own Smallworld.

Played it for the first time last night with someone who is not much of a gamer. They much prefer games like Uno, or Cards Against Humanity, simple or funny. Myself, I’m more about planning, scheming, trying hard to win.

And that gave me absolutely no edge in this compared to her luck at drawing cards.

One of the best parts about this game is as much strategy as you try to impose upon it, it will almost always come down to luck. One player will have better cards, or be able to use all your discards, or have some way to gain an edge.

That having been said, I still really enjoyed it, and loved that it was designed for two. Very few games are optimal, or even playable, with two people. It was also quite quick, and you can play as many or as few rounds as you choose.

The game is fairly simple, there are 5 locations, you can start an expedition in any of them. Your expedition cards have to be ascending, but do not have to be consecutive (e.g. 2,4,9 is ok, 2,5,3 is not). You can also play an investment card(s), which multiplies your success or failure, before you lay any expedition cards. Each time you play, you draw. Instead of playing, you can discard a card, which goes into that expeditions discard pile. After discarding, you draw a new card as if you played a card.

Scoring is fairly simple, but I prefer to describe it as such: you want as many points as possible in an expedition, with a minimum of twenty. Should you end up with less than twenty, you lose that many points, and if you have more than twenty, you gain that many. Each investment card is +1x the score of that expedition, such that 1 expedition card doubles the score, 2 triples, 3 quadruples. This happens even when the score is negative. No cards and only investments is negative twenty points, but expeditions with no cards do not have a penalty.

Overall, I look forward to many enjoyable rounds of this game.

I played this with my normal group. First problem we ran into: “Wait, can I do this? No… I can do… Nope… Wait, look that up again… I can do it, but only if I do that first?”

That was at least half of our effort. The rules were confusing and convoluted, and poorly written at the time. I have heard that since then they have released a new rulebook that is much improved, and good on them for their maintenance.

The other problem is, if everyone agrees to do this, it breaks the game, hard. Trade gas every time. It prevents infection, and as soon as someone tries, you know who the infected person is. We didn’t trade anything but gas until the last 2 turns, when we knew who the infected was, and were ready to exterminate the hive. There are some ways around this, but its a pretty good general strategy that really made the game a bit of a waste of time.

Well that doesn’t sound right… Anyway, back to Pandemic.

Pandemic is a great co-op game, forcing everyone to work together to defeat the various viruses in play. There is a fair bit of discussion about what each players best move is, and every turn there is a nail-biting few minutes where you distribute disease to new areas, with possibly severe ramifications for the game.

Just make sure you sort the epidemic cards in right… Two in the first two rounds of plays is hard to stand up against.

A fun game, which is easy to learn, though a bit tough to explain. We played without a traitor, though that seems like it would add even more strategy and fun. The random luck can be a bit cruel, but it isn’t painfully difficult. It has a fun theme if you like fantasy.

Some of the rules seem a bit silly with their leniency, specifically not being able to be too precise in your wording. As it was explained to me, you could not say “The Black Knight is a 3,” but you could say “The Black Knight is moderately powerful.” It just lead to us stepping around saying their value without stating it outright. This may be more important or interesting with a traitor, though, so I understand why they included it.