13 at the UNO Community Center on 8/18 for an evening of games rated 8.0+ by BGG users as well as being a request night.

Welcome to Kelsey on her first visit

The gaming world has evolved, with gamers pledging funds for games yet to be produced. A Kickstarter pledge often results in the game arriving a year or more from the end of the campaign. Our 9/25 session will feature games that our members have crowdfunded (Kickstarter, Gamefound, etc) expect to play from among River Valley Glassworks, Wondrous Creatures, Sea Dragons, Agueda: City of Umbrellas, Honey Buzz, Cascadia, Flamecraft, The Fox Experiment, It’s a Wonderful World, Canvas (and expansions), Creature Comforts, Dead Reckoning, Earth …..and more.

IN: Steve, Tim, Matt, Tony & Rachel, Reimi, Nicole, Chris W, Rob O, Anna, Zach, Kelsey, Danny

Sky Team (led by Tim) 2024 2-player SdJ winner where players are a pilot and co-pilot at the controls of an airliner. Your goal is to work together as a team to land your airplane in different airports around the world. To land your plane, players need to silently assign their dice to the correct spaces in your cockpit to balance the axis of the plane, control its speed, deploy the flaps, extend the landing gear, contact the control tower to clear your path, and even have a little coffee to improve your concentration enough to change the value of your dice. If the aircraft tilts too much and stalls, overshoots the airport, or collides with another aircraft, you lose the game…and your pilot’s license…and probably your life. Tim said that the plane successfully landed to thunderous applause throughout the cabin for him and Reimi. 

Wondrous Creatures (led by Matt) 2024 worker placement, drafting, set collection and engine building game where players are animal enthusiasts on an island filled with unique and special creatures. Players are given a crew of 3 animals and a captain as they explore the island. The captains all have asymmetric abilities that can be unlocked. Two unique abilities will allow players to break placement rules with their crew/captain combination.

Players place their crew on the island board, getting benefits based on the adjacent environments where they are placed. The four different environments are connected to the 4 resources that each player has on their dual-layered player board. The resources will be spent to add incredible creatures into the player’s reserves, gaining their abilities. Even though players start with 4 creatures in their hand, there are over 100 unique animals that can be found in the wild. Instead of taking a resource from an adjacent environment, players can take a creature with a matching environment icon into their hand. Once in a player’s hand, they can then spend the resources to add the creature to their reserve. Players can earn victory points during the game and really load up on end game points through the variety of creatures available.  Player turns are really quick with only 4 different actions available. Wondrous Creatures is filled with colorful and unique animals that are fun to collect. The artwork is whimsical and the wooden crew pieces look great as they fill the island.

Fans of Everdell, Wingspan and Ark Nova should enjoy Wondrous Creatures.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/400366/wondrous-creatures

Wilmot’s Warehouse (led by Tim) 2024 storytelling game where players work cooperatively to organize the warehouse, using memory, imagination, and silly stories the group makes up. Players draw product tiles from the stack, discuss what they look like, and place them somewhere they’ll remember. After each tile is placed, it is flipped over and can’t be looked at again until the end of the game. As a result, the team has to remember where previous tiles were placed as the group decides where to place new ones. At the end of the game, in a five-minute rush, the team has to match all 35 face-down tiles with customer cards. Consult the team’s performance review to see how well you did! Our intrepid quintet was 35 for 35 and beat our previous best time by a full minute (under a minute total elapsed time) !!!

Harmonies (led by Tim) 2024 abstract pattern game, with simple rules, and a beautifully implemented nature theme. Players optimize by synchronizing, but at the same time try to outbalance luck by diversifying their scoring options, while growing a beautiful 3D habitat in front of them. Landscapes are built by placing colored tokens and creating habitats for their animals. To earn the most points and win the game, players must incorporate the habitats in their landscapes wisely and have as many animals as they can settle there.

Cities (led by K-ban) 2024 drafting collaboration between prolific Australian designer, Phil Walker-Harding and Bostonian Dr Steve Finn. The game is played over eight rounds. Each round, players use their workers to collect 1 scoring card, 1 city tile, 1-2 feature tiles, and 2-4 building pieces. City tiles are made up of park spaces, water spaces, and building spaces. Building pieces are placed on building spaces of the same color to form buildings, which can be 1-4 stories high. Whenever a player fulfills an achievement, they place one of their wooden rings on the achievement board. At the end of the game, players add up the points they have gained from all of their scoring cards and achievements. We played in the Lisbon setting, with public rewards for parks and green buildings.

Bohnanza (led by K-ban) 1997 Uwe Rosenberg bean trading classic game that has been reprinted several times and expanded even more. There’s a recent re-theming , Dahlia’s, with flowers instead of beans (Sean has that edition) In the game, players plant, then harvest bean cards in order to earn coins. We played using the  very nicely produced 25th Anniversary edition of the game. Each player starts with a hand of random bean cards, and each card has a number on it corresponding to the number of that type of bean in the deck. Unlike in most other card games, you can’t rearrange the order of cards in hand, so you must use them in the order that you’ve picked them up from the deck — unless you can trade them to other players, which is the heart of the game. On a turn, players must plant the first one or two cards in their hand into the two “fields” in front of them. Each field can hold only one type of bean, so if a player must plant a type of bean that’s not in one of their fields, then they must harvest a field to make room for the new arrival.  Next, two cards are revealed from the deck and the player, on turn can then trade these cards as well as any card in their hand for cards from other players. After all the trading is complete — and all trades on a turn must involve the active player — then the turn is ended by drawing 3 cards from the deck and placing them at the back of one’s hand. When you harvest beans, you receive coins based on the number of bean cards in that field and the “beanometer” for that particular type of bean. Flip over 1-4 cards from that field to transform them into coins, then place the remainder of the cards in the discard pile. When the deck runs out, shuffle the discards, playing through the deck two more times. At the end of the game, everyone can harvest their fields, then whoever has earned the most coins wins. The key to this 45-minute classic is the trading. If you haven’t played it, give it a try.

Cosmic Encounter (led by K-ban) 1977 Eon classic re-released by Fantasy Flight and still going strong with expansions galore. Three Cosmic newbies acted as Aliens able to break the rules of a card and token area control game. Our 5-handed game was very close with a 4-way tie for having 4 colonies before a shared victory on the last encounter settled things. Our Aliens were The Oracle, The Loser, The Glutton, The Clone and The Zombie….every game is as different as the mix of alien powers. Still one of my all-time top 10 games, as my friend Herb Levy introduced me to the original Eon edition back in the early 1980’s – you always remember your first.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/39463/cosmic-encounter

Business Mogul (led by Chris W) Chris’ prototype economic game.

Old Biddies (led by Tony) 2024 cat themed bidding/auction and deck building card game where you don’t need to be a childless cat lady to play and/or enjoy. Players are old ladies trying to attract cats. Bidding with high cards can win more cats but if a player bids their lowest card and lets everyone else fight over the cats, they will have the advantage on the next bid. Possessing the catnip bag allows that player to break all ties…both theirs and others. There are a few power cards thrown in to make things interesting. Additionally, if a player wins the most days in a round, they earn a round bonus – so even small numbers of cats can have an impact. 

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/421214/old-biddies

IN: Steve, Peter, Jennifer, Rosie

ON OUR TABLES: Wuerfel (Dice) Bingo, TransAmerica, Texas 5’s (Muggins) Dominoes

We changed the hours for our 3rd Thursday of the month sessions at the Milne Public Library to 4 to 7 PM. This resulted in adults attending. One of the attendees, Peter, is visiting the Berkshires for a month or so from Binghamton, NY and may be joining us on 9/25 as my guest.

FWIW the Williamstown Library is now lending board games….among the games spotted were Splendor, Azul, Century: Spice Road, Codenames, Ticket to Ride – First Journey, Forbidden Island, and Terra Nova. There is also a ginormous SCRABBLE set on display. The North Adams Library has a similar collection but I’m unsure whether or not they also lend games to their cardholders.

Steve