Session - Machi Koro, Caverna, Euphoria | Opening - Caverna

24th of November 2013 (Sunday)

I had the opportunity to visit Boardgamecafe on a Friday night meetup for the first time at their new premises, the last time being way back in 2010 when the meetups where still being held at OTK Cheras. I was there mainly to pick up my kickstarter copy of Euphoria and Essen copy of Caverna but managed to sneak a round of Machi Koro in before leaving (the cost of all night gaming being too high at this stage of life).

Game(s) Played:
Machi Koro

Session – Machi Koro

Machi Koro is a card game published by the up and coming Japon Brand (who sold out their stock in 15 minutes at Essen this year) designed for 2 – 4 Players. Looking at the cover art and the card artwork reminds me of this funky old 2004 PS2 game called Katamari Damacy. I tried to look up the artist for Katamari Damacy but google yielded no results in English. Like Katamari Damacy, the artwork is cartoonish, vibrant and a wacky clash of colours which I really liked.

How To Play:
Machi Koro combines dice rolling and card building powers to create an interactive card game that is not a brainless kind of filler but falls more into the category of lightweight strategy. Machi Koro is a race to see which Player can be the first to build the 4 goal buildings each Player starts with which is how the game is kept short (unless you’re like our group from Friday night who were all on Engines-Of-Mass-$-Earning mode). Each building card is assigned a number, colour and effect and basically when the dice are rolled, building cards with numbers equal to the results of the roll get to activate their effect depending on their colour (blue = universal, green = on Player’s roll, red = other Players’ roll). Building effects inevitably provide Players with money which can be used to (a) build more building cards; or (b) build the 4 goal buildings which cost a lot of money. Man I wish I could do "How To Play" for all my games in 150 words or less.

My Verdict:
I had a lot of fun playing Machi Koro and from the cheers of "Chinese New Year comes early!", "whuuuuTTTT??", "8 AGAIN?!!?" & "Pay MONEY!" coming from our table frequently, I think my tablemates had a good time themselves. We did take a bit long as mentioned earlier because Gen Y has trouble with the concept of saving I guess, but once we had reached critical building card mass, the game ended with the last 2 goal buildings being built in consecutive turns.

There is a fair amount of luck in that against all probabilities, having building cards of each number doesn’t mean you’ll do better than someone who goes big on one number and hits the lottery, even with 4 Players. One of us didn’t have a number 5 building card and the rest of us rolled 5 six to seven times much to his dismay. Some building effects have directed and universal "take that" effects that are honestly quite brutal, so don’t take your money in hand too seriously.

However, despite singing its praises I’d have to pass on owning a copy of Machi Koro mainly due to the pricing which I felt was a little high at EUR25 (I vaguely remember this being the price Kaz mentioned). Notwithstanding the fact that there’s no copy to be had on the market anyway, EUR25 seems a little too much for a deck of cards, two dice and cardboard coin chips. But that’s just me and my limited disposable income, Machi Koro is still a good game that is easy to teach, fun to play and quick to wrap up.

I don't have pictures from game night but you can do the above... or go to boardgamegeek if you haven't already done so

Opening – Caverna & Euphoria

Caverna

Euphoria

Padawan Minigeek too busy on her iPad to notice the glorious unboxing of Caverna

Caverna’s size is one of those things where you actually need to see it to believe it. Then in disbelief you try and pick it up and you think "someone must have mistakenly packed a small log in here instead of Caverna". Curious, you open the cover and discover…

Oh so many animeeples! And vegiemeeples! It’s like Meeplopia!

Then if you suffer from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (like me)…

You place the rulebook on the table and start counting sheep… literally

And it gives me a deeply profound feeling of satisfaction to report that all bits and boards are wonderfully accounted for (my experience with Ora Et Labora has scarred me for life). Well this covers how the game looks like and Caverna looks simply amazing. I’ve already tried it so to see how it plays like, take a look below for the session report.

Doing my sheep counting whilst listening to Tom Vasel's Top 10 Underrated Games

This barely fits and I’m running out of plastic containers…

I kickstarted Euphoria way back in June and this is the second kickstarter project I’ve backed after Kings of Air & Steam. Compared to that, Euphoria’s time to delivery is excellent and the quality of the components and artwork make it probably the prettiest boardgame in my arsenal.

The sleeve is a BRILLIANT idea, especially for those who shelve their boardgames standing

Even the back of the box looks and feels like quality

Even better than just having the correct amount of bits & boards, Euphoria had extra!

Padawan Minigeek is turning into a high roller like her second aunt

I have to admit that my initial visual impression of Euphoria is that it feels more like a work of art rather than a boardgame. The colours, lack of colour, art style and components really contribute to the futuristic dystopian theme reminiscent of the social engineering facets of Alpha Centauri. In other words, this game is dripping with theme. Check out the session report below on how the game plays!

Session – Caverna

Player(s):
Hayen
Mo

Like most of Uwe Rosenberg’s games, Caverna jumped on to the scene with hardly any fanfare. Early comments from Essen seemed to indicate that Caverna = Agricola (farming & land clearing) + Ora Et Labora (craploads of exchangeable resources) = Agricola 2. That hardly seems compelling and even I wasn’t convinced until Concordia had run out of stock which resulted in Caverna being bumped up my "Want List". Whilst I’m not saying Caverna is better than Concordia, I’m very glad to have snagged the last copy of Caverna from BGC’s shipment.

Fortunately, I have to disagree with the early comments from Essen about Caverna because the game is so much more than just being labelled "Agricola 2". In Caverna, you’re a family of dwarves looking to build their homes in the mountainside, farming their crops, rearing their animals, adventuring for loot and most importantly of all, digging for rubies (this should have been GOLD but that’s a personal opinion). Caverna is more like a Dwarf Fortress boardgame (a very beautiful one) minus the sickness and disease.

At dinner the night before, my brother had asked me what Caverna was. I told him that it’s Agricola 2. He frowned at that remark (he didn’t really like Agricola) and asked, "What’s the difference?" "You play as Dwarves", I replied. "That actually sounds interesting". LOL! I sold him solely on the theme of dwarves.

To explain Caverna in all its intricacies and depth would call for a review (maybe in the future) so to shorten an already long post as it is, I will post some in-game pics and generally comment on both our strategies as best as I can remember them.

Caverna is basically divided into two types of activities, improving your farming or improving your mining. Players will inadvertently be doing some of both but my ratio leaned more heavily on mining whilst Mo spent more time on animal husbandry. My overall goal was to mine my mountain clean of ore, arm some of my more loony dwarves and send them happily looting into the horizon then build an ore = VP room whilst expanding my dwarf family to its maximum number of five.

Here you can see that I (blue) was just about to grab all the ore and had some farming to shore up my food requirements, Mo (red) would use his remaining turns to slash and burn his forests and use his wood to build lots of pastures and sow lots of veggies

I had left myself in a fix by leaving the two corners of forests (upper & lower left) which were difficult to get rid of. My tunnelling was far more organized.

Mo’s ultimate goal was to have the Food Chamber & Fodder Chamber, both rooms which complemented his strategy perfectly

And here you see his final product, just 3 short rounds from the previous picture. His donkeys (the grey animeeples) alone gave him 15 points! (1 per donkey + 3 from Fodder Chamber)

Admittedly we made a few mistakes in Mo’s favour, firstly we did the breeding phase in Rounds 1 – 3 despite it being no harvest and that newborn animals cannot be harvested for food

This is my game end dwarf homeland, with the major ore & rubies loot at top. The Treasure Chamber didn’t end up giving me as many points as I liked because I had to use some rubies in an emergency

Time Taken: 120 minutes

Results Of Game
Winna – Mo (83 Points)
Dead Last – Hayen (61 Points)

The obligatory winner pose although I have no idea what sort of pose he was trying to achieve

We both loved it and Mo immediately proposed another round which puts it firmly in the 8/10 rating. There is so much to do in Caverna and more than that, there is a coherency in the manner in which you perform your actions. Farming is necessary for the food you require to feed your dwarves whilst mining gives you access to more dwarves and some animals which you can’t get through conventional farming and in a 2 Player game, this dovetails very nicely in that you can focus on one aspect whilst your opponent focuses on another. Unlike Agricola, it never felt like my "only" available plan was always in danger of being screwed by an opponents’ ill-played worker which relieves the level of tension and leaves you to focus on maximizing your Player’s score. Definitely hitting the table again this week.

Rating: 8/10

Session – Euphoria

Player(s):
Hayen
Mo

Euphoria is a fast paced dice rolling game that goes up to 6 Players, Player count has been an important factor for me lately due to the fluidity of the number of Players in my various gaming groups. Apart from being drop dead gorgeous, the quality of the components in Euphoria is truly a sight to behold in a kickstarter that (to me) ticked all the right checkboxes in being a successful project.

Euphoria is set in a dystopian world where your people/drones have lost their sense of joy and artistic development has not only been stunted but devolved for the human race in the post nuclear fallout era. Each Player's goal is to be the first to stamp their authority over this world and either further the cause of social engineering or lead the uprising in the faint hopes of rediscovering what cheeseburgers taste like.

At its heart, Euphoria is a blessedly simple game where you want to be the first to put down your ten authority tokens and thereby being declared the winner. There are only 4 locations where you can place authority tokens but it is easy to be overwhelmed with the number of different options available when playing for the first time.

Took this picture right after setting up and then waiting for Mo to arrive

My recruit was "Pete The Cannibal"... eugh... A Wastelander recruit and I had chosen to "Make Workers Toil" instead of relax in my Moral Dilemma, thereby beating Mo to the punch by 1 token at the end since he chose to be morally positive

I played as purple and you can see here I opted to build as many markets (those square tiles) as I could, this not only advances my cause but also puts penalties on my opponents who don't have an authority token on the markets

And if you declare sufficient allegiance to your faction (in my case, the Wastelanders) they allow you to place authority tokens on the factions' recruits. Good ol' Pete the Cannibal won the day for me

Those are the cutest (and only) miner meeples I've seen in my life

There is some element of luck in that if your dice rolls are above a certain value, you lose your highest valued die and this happened to Mo 3 times I think. I let Pete the Cannibal eat one of my workers for some resources but being a habitual low roller, my workers never seemed to run away

Time Taken: 120 minutes

Results Of Game
Winna – Hayen
Dead Last – Mo

Mo hates dice rolling games with a vengeance. He actually loves to hate luck based games and abhors games without perfect information. Guess what he said...

"Do you have to work tomorrow?"

Rating: 8/10