The quiz picture this time is of a nice dice rolling game. I picked this as sadly the same company recently had a failed kickstarter for another game, the mechanics were again quite simple and perhaps that is what deterred people from backing it, however simple rules does not always correlate to bad game. Anyone know the quiz picture?

The last quiz picture was not guessed at all despite being one of the more popular MB titles among gamers it was Thunder Road. In it players race cars along a dirt road shooting one another. Last car standing is the winner.

Concordia with "salt" played on the Byzantium board

(a poor picture of) the central board in Santiago, the dark lines are irrigation ditches for the fields

Table 1 – Concordia: Salsa, Santiago, Cockroach Poker, Kakerlakensuppe, Sushi Go!
Table 2 – Vikings, Capital, Kingdomino

Sadly a picture of the board did not come out so you are left with a picture of a player screen.

Table 3 – Dice Forge, Touria

The spotlight this time is on Kingdomino by Bruno Cathala and although he is not my favourite games designer he has created a number of games which I think are quite nifty such as Madame Ching & Abyss, Kingdomino is I believe another it is a light game and plays quite quickly in about 15-20 mins.

The light brown at the bottom of the screen was speculation, sadly this player could not get any brown crowns. so it scores zero.

The aim of the game is to score points by playing 12 dominoes to a 5x5 grid (each end of the domino fitting one square of the grid). Each of the domino halves features one of 6 terrains and a few of them also contain a feature with a number of crowns on one of the squares, when you play a tile to your area one of the squares terrains must match the terrain of a tile it is orthogonally adjacent to (the other terrain does not have to match), fortunately at the game start you have a multi-terrain single tile which any land may be placed adjacent to.

Bidding in a 2 player game (same as the 4 player except 4 different coloured pawns in 4 player) Green gets first and second choice from the new set of tiles to the left.

At the end of 12 rounds scoring takes place, each area is scored separately an area consists of squares of the same terrain orthogonally adjacent to one another and each area scores the number of squares multiplied by the crowns. The winner is the player with the most points. However placing tiles is just half the game, all the tiles have numbers on the back and each round consists of drawing 4 tiles, placing them in numerical order (the weaker tiles have low numbers on them whilst the stronger tiles and those with crowns on have higher numbers), players then in the previous rounds order (ie the one that had chosen the weakest tile last round) chooses a tile for the next round, this then dictates the player order for the following round.

The green player scores 20 for forests (10 tiles and 2 crowns)

Overall it is a light game though some smart thinking has to be done deciding whether player order is important or a particular strong tile, the art as in a lot of games is to try to make sure you are not competing against too many other players for key tiles. Our table played it twice 3 player and opinions were favourable, it is more a filler game but would also make an excellent bridge game and with its chunky pieces and simple mathematics (low multiplications) should also be attractive to younger gamers.

Medway Area Boardgamers