Our April 3 session will feature games that our table leaders crowdfunded through Kickstarter, Gamefound, Game Brewer, etc….. as well as prototypes in need of playtesting. Chris tells us that Quinn has a very good prototype.  Expect to play from among: Let’s Go to Japan, Charms, Words of a Feather, Sol: Last Days of a Star, Space Race: Card Game, Faeries & Magical Creatures, Zoo Vadis, Botany….and more, as our table leaders scour their respective collections for games they helped fund.

Hare & Tortoise (led by Tony) This David Parlett designed racing game was the very first SdJ winner in 1979, though originally published in England in 1973. We played as a 6-player, 3-team version on the original 1973 Intellect Games UK edition from the Herb Levy Game Collection. At first glance a children’s game with carrots propelling movement to win the race while shedding/chewing 3 lettuce, but it’s far more than that (and almost caused Ethan’s head to implode). A very clever game that has been reprinted many times over 50+ years.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/361/hare-and-tortoise

Manhattan (led by K-ban) 1994 Andreas Seyfarth (author of Puerto Rico) designed area control and hand management game, where players construct a skyline of skyscrapers over several districts. Each player seeks to have built the tallest buildings in the most city blocks of the Island. Each turn, players will play a card that illustrates which part of a city block they may place a “floor” on a building. The placement card is unique for each player in that the section they may place in is relative to their seating at the table. The player who has placed the top most floor controls that building. Each round, scores are tallied based on control of each of the neighborhoods, tallest overall skyscraper and total number of buildings controlled. At the end of four rounds, the player who has scored the most points through area control and tallest buildings wins.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/199/manhattan

Tikal (led by Matt)  1999 Kramer-Kiesling design where players explore Central American jungles in search of lost temples and the treasures within. Players send their team of explorers into the jungle, exposing more and more of the terrain. Along the way, players find temples that require further uncovering and treasures. Players attempt to score points for occupying temples and holding onto treasure. The game used a groundbreaking budgeted action point system that got repeated in the Mask trilogy that also included Mexica and Java (with mechanical similarities in the author’s subsequent Torres).

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/54/tikal

Dominion (led by Armando)  2009 Donald S Vaccarino designed deck-building game, where each player starts with an identical, small deck of cards and attempts to build an efficient engine. In the center of the table is a selection of other cards the players can “buy” as they can afford them. Through their selection of cards to buy, and how they play their hands as they draw them, the players construct their deck on the fly, striving for the most efficient path to victory points by game end.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36218/dominion

Codenames (group led) 2016 team based clue giving game where two rival spymasters know the secret identities of 25 agents. Their teammates know the agents only by their code names. Each spymaster wants their team to identify their agents first…without uncovering the assassin by mistake.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/178900/codenames

Kingdomino (led by Tim) 2017 tile drafting/laying game. Players select tiles with two sections, similar to Dominoes, to connect to their existing kingdom, making sure at least one of its sides connects to a matching terrain type already in play. The order of who picks first depends on which tile was previously chosen, with better tiles forcing players to pick later in the next round. The game ends when each player has completed a 5×5 grid (or failed to do so), and points are counted based on the number of connecting tiles multiplied by their valuable crown symbols.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/204583/kingdomino

MicroMacro: Crime City (led by Tim) 2021 cooperative deduction game. Crimes have taken place all over the city, and players want to figure out exactly what’s happened, so they need to look closely at the giant city map to find all the hidden information and trace the trails of those who had it in for their foes. The game comes with 16 cases to solve.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/318977/micromacro-crime-city

Cascadia (led by Sean) 2022 Randy Flynn designed tile-laying and token-drafting puzzle game, featuring the habitats and wildlife of the Pacific Northwest. Players take turns building out their own terrain area and populating it with wildlife. Players start with three hexagonal habitat tiles (with the five types of habitat in the game), and on a turn they choose a new habitat tile that’s paired with a wildlife token, then place that tile adjacent to their other ones and place the wildlife token on an appropriate habitat. (Each tile depicts 1-3 types of wildlife from the five types in the game, and players can place at most one round wooden token on a habitat.) Four tiles are on display, with each tile being paired at random with a wildlife token, so players must make the best of what’s available — unless they have a nature token to spend, so that they can pick their choice of terrain and wildlife. Each wildlife type scores VPs differently. Players score VPs for both wildlife types and for their largest contiguous terrain types – with a bonus if their group is larger than the other player’s. We still need to try the recent Landmark expansion.

Steve