Touching Base

So Here I go again, bringing you a new blog the first of 2023. My intention was to push out a blog much earlier this year, but circumstances did not allow it. So, what’s new with BGHaven you might say, what has been going on since the 1st of January? I think I will divide this into three parts, the new games that have become part of my collection, upgrades to my existing games as well as plays that I have shared with family and friends.

New additions

So, the first game to become part of my collection in 2023 was Explorers of the North Seas (aka Explorers) by Shem Philips, the same guy who brought us the still popular Raiders of the North Seas (aka Raiders). “Explorers” shares the same artwork you find in “Raiders” as well as the same universe but that as far as the similarities goes. In Explorers players take on the role of Viking crews intent on establishing outposts and bringing back hard-earned resources from new localities they visit. While Raiders had a fixed gaming board, Explorers comes with a procedurally grown board that is made from hexagonal tiles which players play to the table on their respective turns. This feature in and of itself is a strong predictor of substantial replay value when it comes to this game. 

As the game progresses, Explorers will see players move their Viking longboats around the gaming board intent on colonizing and bringing back resources they find. The gaming pieces for this game are fantastic. You have wooden Viking meeples like those in Raiders, plastic Viking longboats as well as wooden animal meeple representing the animal resources exposed on the growing map. You also get wooden outpost tokens which players can call upon in certain circumstances to further their objectives.

Undoubtably Explorers is a game that has its own charm while offering a scenario that is moderately confrontational as one would expect from these games. There is, as can be expected, a certain amount of thug-of-war between players vying for resources but this is a Eurogame at heart and one that focuses squarely on final, end-of-game, point scoring rather than player elimination. 

Another game which I obtained just the other week is the latest expansion to the immensely popular Wingspan by Elisabeth Hargreaves. This expansion is focused on the birds of Asia and comes with the same impeccable production values of its predecessors. However, “Asia” brings some new ideas into the mix. It is the first Wingspan expansion to cater for a 2-player, stand-alone game, out of the box. You don’t need the previous expansions or the base game to play the “Duet” (2-player) version, just the Asia box. Additionally, thanks to this newest expansion, the game now offers the possibility for playing with up to 7 persons using a method that the expansion calls “flock mode”. 

Obviously, you will still be able to play traditional Wingspan using the cards that come with this expansion. So, if you are not inclined to try the 2-player “Duet” or the 6-to-7 player “flock mode”, you can skip all that and use the new cards by just adding them to the base game, with some card adjustments. Asia also comes with some additional bonus and automata cards (for solo play) that you can tap into to make game play even more interesting. This variety of gaming options is what makes this expansion perhaps the best one I have seen for this game.

Gaming Upgrades

This first quarter of 2023 saw me upgrade some components for a game I was gifted in December called Imhotep – Builder of Egypt. The base game comes with several cardboard cut-outs to represent boats and player resource cards. While functional, these components come across as bland especially when you use them in conjunction with the coloured wooden blocks used to represent stones. Tapping into AliExpress, I found a 3D printed set of plastic boats and player resource cards for a good price and bought them. The 3D printed plastic tokens really made the game pop. Ironically, when I told the players joining me for a game that these plastic components did not come with the base game, they were very surprised. The 3D boats are well produced with special recessed areas for each stone token you can load onto them. They Also have markers at the prow end to mark the minimum stones necessary before the ship can set sail to a designated port. The plastic player resource boards are also well produced, mimicking wooden pallets and painted in the colours attributed to each player.

Another simple upgrade I bought was for a card-based game I own called Lost Cities. In this instance the upgrade was merely card sleeves tailored for the specific card size used in this game. Even though this does seem like a trifle thing, in truth the cards were in desperate need of these sleeves. The card stock used by Kosmos for this game is questionable at best and the cards were already showing some serious wear and tear after perhaps a total of a dozen plays. I am hoping that with these sleeves I will be able to get more mileage out of this game. As an aside here I must say, from my experience with Kosmos games, the quality of the materials they use is indeed cheap and mass-market. While substantial effort is evident in terms of the artwork itself, the choice of cardboard for inserts as well as card stock is disappointing. 

Board Games played.

2022 ended on a good note in my books when I had the great pleasure of hosting my first, live, Wingspan game with some great friends. The game truly flowed, and everyone was very much into it, almost from the start. I am eager to propose this incredible game to other gaming groups should the opportunity arise.

The first game of 2023 was a bit of an experiment with a group of players I am fond of playing board games with. We have been playing board games together for several years now and their genuine interest in the games I table has always encouraged me to find new titles they might find interesting. However, as is to be expected, in the intervening years there were marriages and kids. 

For this reason, putting board gaming events together became a bit of a complicated matter. We never seemed to be able to finish a game or to find the right “mix” to ensure that we eventually did. After some duds and various aborted attempts, I can finally say that I have managed to find the optimal event timeline to board game meetups, given my current reality as it were. I am a bit amazed how it never really occurred to me before, but there again, as with most group-focused epiphanies, you need a perfect combination of circumstance and approval from all those concerned. 

For past gatherings, eating or snacking was given precedence over the actual game itself. This meant that we would meet up, open bottles of wine or pour out drinks while snacking on an assortment of nibbles. Then we would have lunch or supper, following which we would play the board game. Since we have kids in the equation, this often meant that we never finished the game we intended to play. This happened more often than I care to admit. 

This time round, we decided to turn things around. In agreement with all those involved, we first laid out the Board game, set out a few nibbles and some drinks and started playing. For better or worse, this worked! While I did not manage to wedge in the two games I had planned, we did successfully complete a board game and that is something!

Through this experience I also learnt the importance of ensuring that a game or games don’t overstay their welcome during any given event. The reason is that, in most instances, players will have a moderate tolerance to game duration. Lengthy sessions or back-to-back games are not everyone’s idea of a perfect games' night after all. Furthermore, the purpose of the board game itself should be to foster socialisation in a pleasant atmosphere, if players feel stressed out because of game duration you could lose them as potential players for future events. There is an element of diplomacy you also need to factor in, a kind of give-and-take worked around a degree of compromise. Yet now let me focus a bit on the game that was played and which, to my knowledge, was thoroughly enjoyed by those at the table.

The game in question was Imhotep – Builder of Egypt. It is not the newest of games out there, it came out in 2016 after all, but one of the more entertaining I have played in a while. There is an element of “take that” in it but overall, the game flows and there is little perceived downtime in between turns. What makes Imhotep so interesting is the fact that there are various ways you can score points and not all points are scored during play. At times you will take actions that will result in points being scored at the end of the game. This mix of diverse point scoring strategies can prove to be a bit distracting as I realised during the game I played. Putting it bluntly, I literally threw the game with a very misguided move right towards the end. Obviously if I were to play it again, I would not repeat that mistake again but this time round I did.

Despite my questionable gameplay, I still did not feel taken aback once the dust settled. I still could tell myself that I had enjoyed the experience and that I would gladly play another game of Imhotep if the occasion ever arose. I was also glad I invested in the 3D printed boats and the coloured resource player boards. For one, once the “stones” were loaded onto the 3D printed boats, docking them at the selected harbours was easier as you could not accidentally drop pieces during the movement.  This also led me to muse about some minor reservations I have with the game.

Mind you, these issues are very minor, but they can be a bit irritating if you happen to have an unsteady hand. Three of the point scoring locations require that you stack stones in some configuration or other. The stacking having a direct effect on scoring. Knocking some of these stacks over can be very unnerving. The worst among these must be the Obelisks scoring card. Here players will pile up any stones shipped there, one on top of the other, to score points at the end of the game. While the “stone” pieces are not particularly small, it is easy to knock a stack over while trying to place further stones nearby. The second worst one must be where you must build a sort of wall that ends up being around 5 stones across and several layers high. Again, here knocking a wall over could be detrimental to end-of-round point scoring. The one which proved the least difficult to topple over from among these three, was the one where players stack tiles into a small, square-based pyramid with a 3-by-3 base, followed by a second 2-by-2 layer with a singleton piece topping the structure. 

To be fair, I don’t know whether there could be any better way to go around these stacking issues. You could use larger or heavier pieces, or a mix of both, but that would make the game significantly larger if not perhaps unwieldy. A further option could be to use interlocking pieces that would reduce accidentally toppling over, I am sure that there are some decent options out there. However, I must stress that this game is not a dexterity game by any stretch of the imagination. In practice you can always get over these issues above by allotting the placement of these "stones" to that player at the table with the steadier hands. 

From a gaming mechanisms perspective, Imhotep is all about keeping track of stone queues as they are loaded onto boats. Timing and placement of said stones are key to scoring, but players also need to weigh potential moves other players will most likely make on their turn. For you might think you are loading your pieces to head for the obelisks site, only to have another player take that same boat and dock it in the marketplace. True you will get to choose cards from the marketplace cards but that may not be in your best interest pointwise.

Interestingly, I figured that the best play should be one where you posit landing favourably on at least two out of the four locations that will be visited during a given round.  Think about it, if you know that a stone you have just placed stands to earn you points in at least two locations, you would have effectively reduced unfavourable dockings by 50%. To do so, you need to tie your stone placement with that of others. So, for instance, if say opponent A is more likely to visit the Obelisks or the Tomb locations, and those are sites you are also interested in, then playing your stone on the same boat could be a good plan. Balancing all these hypothetical scenarios on each turn is not an easy task and personally I think I would have to play several games to determine whether it is possible to achieve this kind of play consistently.

It could well be that someone will opt for a purely disruptive play against you that offers no benefit other than the reassurance that you will not score as many points. I have seen two such moves during the game I played. On the other hand, you need to consider that there are very few moves performed per round, so each action taken by a player becomes significant. Basically, you cannot really afford to waste a turn just to stop someone else, there must be some benefit in it for you also.

To be fair I don't believe I have other games in my collection that come close to this one. In Imhotep, you do not build any point-scoring engines, nor do you reap any direct benefit by placing a particular stone within a queue, that comes later. Also, even when you do score points for placing a particular stone or stones within a queue, it's often directly impacted by whatever countermovement your opponents will execute on their turn. 

At the end I must say that I highly recommend this game. It offers some interesting decisions, plays smoothly and you get the feeling that there is very little downtime in between plays. Also, it can be played easily within 60 to 70 minutes. Having said that the first time you play this game ensure you factor in an extra 15 minutes to explain the rules because you will need them with new players. As for upgrading the gaming pieces, I am aware that this is not for everyone and that it comes at a cost. Yet, if you can afford to upgrade the boats and player resource boards, you will most likely enjoy the game a bit more.

So that’s all for this blog, I hope to be able to get back to you with other game-related news and updates some time soon. For now I will sign off and wish you all...great plays and favourable rolls!