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Viticulture - Joe Packham
My game of the month is not a new game by any stretch. Viticulture is 8 years old in fact! Being that board games age roughly twice as fast as dogs that are veritably ancient. But I got to see Viti in a fresh way this month. With the easing of restrictions, I got to my first proper games night in a year. By popular demand Viticulture Essential edition was chosen for our inaugural game.
3 of the 5 players had never played Viti before. Teaching it to them and answering their questions, seeing them grasp its concepts was refreshing. “Why would I sell a field?” “Why wouldn’t you sell a field?!” It was quite a special experience to watch them all fall in love with the game as the seasons rolled on. From the initial frowns of “theirs so much to do before I can fulfil wine orders” to the fast-paced and wide-eyed focus of the end game. It was an idyllic game night experience.
It was novel for me too in that I’d never played with 5 players before. Competition on the wake-up track was as fierce as the action spots. Opening up the third space on each action meant the game scaled well. But so much was happening each year, so many visitor cards flying around, that the state of play changed excitingly fast. The point trackers were playing leapfrog up the scoring track right up to the super tense final year. It was just fantastic, and it reminded me once more that Viticulture is still one of the best games on the market. Highly thematic, very tactile, richly strategic, super competitive. You have to go a long way to find a more elegant and enjoyable worker placement game.
Red Rising - Hannah Blacknell
June is the first month where I have been able to actually play outside with people without needing to play exclusively outside. A milestone for the last 18 months as I am sure most of you will agree. This means I can play card games again without the wind taking cards off for a holiday in the bushes! For me, there are two stand out games this month, both because I have had real success with introducing new gaming pals to them.
But I chose the game that I had played the most, and that is Red Rising from Stonemaier Games. This game is lighter than many of the other games they produce like Viticulture, Scythe and Tapestry. It is a handcrafting game. Your aim is simple: get as many points as you can by creating the best hand possible. You play cards down to take advantage of their “deploy” ability, and then pick a card up to have it in your hand perhaps to score or perhaps to use its deployability.
High production quality is that which we have come to expect from a Stonermaier game. Red Rising comes with bright plastic cubes and a deck of high quality beautiful unique character cards. The cards are all characters from the book series that the game is based on; the Red Rising trilogy by Pierce Brown. The powers on these cards and the ways they work together is entrenched in the story in the books. Your hand is crafted with cards that each have points on them but also work together synergistically to get you bonus points too. Some cards will need you to have certain colours or even certain named characters in your hand. This game for me is excellent solo and multiplayer, and for the price is excellent value too.
Just for anyone who was curious, the game that narrowly missed out this month was Sagrada!
Meadow - Tom Harrod
Some games grab you with their charming good looks. And, being the gaming magpies that we are, we often fall for them in a heartbeat. All it takes is the merest of glances at the components sitting on the table and boom! We’re smitten. Meadow, by Polish team Rebel Studio, is one such game. Karolina Kijak’s serene, endearing artwork washes over you like a calm, babbling brook. Its four 3D devices each hold separate decks of cards. Two intriguing boards, with nooks cut out of them, make you stroke your chin. Consider your interest piqued, the second you gaze at any one of the unique 184 cards.
There’s no denying: Meadow looks lighthearted and quaint. Beware, though! There are strategic thorns below the surface. This game has a bit more going on under the hood than first meets the eye…
The setting sees you strolling through countryside meadows. The cards are worth points; they’re the sights you see and the memories you make along the way. You start with one card in your tableau and an assortment of others that make up your hand. Your turn is simple. Slot one of your tokens into either the bonfire board to trigger an action to get cards. Or, you slot a token into the main board to draft one of the 16 face-up cards. (The latter is akin to Quadropolis: the number on your token equates to the card your take from that row/column.) You add it to your hand, then play a card from your hand.
Each card has symbols on it, that relate to the creature. (Grubs, trees, insects, birds, critters, reptiles, and so on.) To play a card, it’ll have at least one – often many – requirement(s) needed in your tableau. Requirements are thematic, like a food chain. The clever twist is that when you play a card, you have cover up that requirement in your tableau. You have to be cautious about what you cover! At the same time though, it can chain a few future turns together (a bit like in Everdell). One card helps you play another, which then helps you another. It’s so satisfying when that happens!
Cosmic Encounter - Rob Wright
I’ve been double jabbed and had more swabs up my nose than Tyson Fury… bring on the face to face gaming! Yes, games nights can now be a thing again and after last month’s praise for Twimp (cute!), this month’s game of the month is another space-based classic, Cosmic Encounter!
A very simple (and old game) in the main – the first player(s) to colonise five other planets (you start with five base planets) wins! You do this by sending an invasion force to another planet or joining as reinforcements. Invaders and defenders then play cards of varying strength which they add to their ship total. The biggest total wins! Fairly straightforward… only it’s not. Each player has a different race and each race has a different ability that affects the way they fight, how they lose ships, how they get extra power or even how they win the game. And there are a lot of races… oh so many races…
The above is an oversimplification of the game, but I urge you to play this. Made in 1977, the same year as Star Wars, it hasn’t earned the same respect as the space wizard hairdresser movie but really should. Its asymmetric bluffing gameplay and card-based combat/rival system make it surprisingly fair and its combat but not combat makes it very accessible. It really is in a class of its own and holds up today. It also takes a lot shorter to play than most games of its type.
Most of all though, it is so much fun – there’s a lot of room for silliness around the boardless board, and my goodness, couldn’t we all do with a bit of playful silliness right now?