Playing the haul from Spiel!

Layers is a pattern matching game for 1-4 players that takes about 30 minutes. It’s from some of the same team that brought you the Fold series of games (two of which are also covered in this project).

Whilst a distinctly different game to the Fold games, you can feel that DNA running through it. Each player gets five pieces of card, the cards have holes cut in them and different coloured patterns on either side. The active player will choose a target card from decks for either 3,4 or 5 layers. Each player will then try and match the target pattern by combining the cards in front of them on top of each other, on the right side, in the right order, and in the right orientation. A scoring tile is drawn for each round which tells you how your score will be changed depending on if you solve the puzzle 1st,2nd, 3rd and so on.

It retains the innovation from Magic Fold of a timer after the first player solves a puzzle. Ensuring that games don’t have long periods of one person sitting around waiting for slower puzzle solvers.

It adds a piece of card you use to cover your solution once you think you have it, this replaces the small tokens grabbed for solving used in the Fold games. This has two benefits, it stops other players looking at your solution and trying to use it to help them, but it also stops you from seeing if your own is wrong and wanting to go back on your “token grab”. It’s a small thing, but it does address an issue that could occur in more competitive games of Fold-It.

While it is fun, it does feel like you are taking an IQ quiz or a Mensa entry test at times!

It is a game we have played with a few friends, and in general, I think it’s a bit of a return to form of the originally Fold-It in terms of being an innovative mechanic and a clean pure abstract game. It retains some of the improvements from iterations on the Fold-It and ditches perhaps some of the cruft.

Magic Fold is a traditional race to the end of the board game for 2-4 players that takes about 20 minutes.

It is the 3rd game in the Fold series and I believe debuted at Spiel 2018. Magic like its predecessors (including Battlefold described earlier in this project) its core mechanic is driven by folding a piece of cloth so that only certain key symbols are shown.

It’s a very traditional game aimed at getting your magic carpet to the palace before your fellow wizards. Snakes can waylay your path and set you back, and shortcuts can help you move forward.

Whereas Battlefold generally added complexity and depth to the original mechanics, in many ways Magic fold is a simplification. The addition of a time limit is definitely a good improvement to stop incredibly long turns when a couple of players just can’t figure the fold out (it only starts after one player has solved a pattern, so it only kicks in once at least one person is sat around waiting). The fact you have multiple options for puzzle matching (one for each action token) this time means you can pick something a little easier and still get a win. This is a good improvement in the sense that whilst it still gives a bigger reward to the faster puzzlers, it’s not so black and white a penalty as in previous games, being an ok puzzler can still give you a bit of progress in this game. The provision for the game to be played entirely with an easy deck of puzzles, or with a harder deck is again a nice improvement to adjust difficulty. The genie tokens you pick-up which act as wild cards again help balance out the skill difference between players, especially as you receive one when you fail to match a puzzle. This catch-up mechanic and everything else here makes it potentially the most kid-friendly Fold game yet.

We picked it up because Fold-It we loved (primarily for its innovation, though the main puzzle solving mechanic very much appeals to Amanda). Also, Fold-It was expensive and difficult to get hold of in Europe if you hadn’t got it at Spiel, so we didn’t want to take that risk with this. That and the deal that included Battlefold made it an obvious purchase for us, even if in the final evaluation I don’t think it will see much use.

There is nothing much wrong with this game, but outside the fold mechanics, it really feels like a very traditional family board game from decades gone by. For me, that doesn’t really appeal. We have played it once, and its not been something we have wanted to suggest to our friends, given the other games available.

This tactical combat game for 2-4 players takes about 30 minutes to play.

Its last year’s follow-up to the game that debuted at Spiel two years ago “Fold-it”.  Its ancestor was an innovative game that involved playing restaurant chefs competing to fulfil orders. The core mechanic were these clever pieces of cloth that each player got. Each close was split into a grid of various food dishes. You had to fold along the lines to correctly to only show exactly what had been ordered by the customer. It was a frantic game where the order card was flipped and everyone was then scrambling to correctly fold their cloth to match the required order and grab a wooden token until none were left and that player lost a life. A nice mix of puzzle solving and dexterity.

This game takes that same mechanic but uses it to drive part of a small tactical combat game. You can play as one of four heroes, each with different special abilities, (and importantly unique cloth patterns). When the card is flipped giving you the target icons you need to show, how fast you match it will determine your position in the initiative order, and which icons you have showing will determine what extra actions you have available. There are wildcards on some of the target patterns, which means when you get really good you can start trying to think what would be tactically useful as an extra action this turn.  You might turn up traps that deal you damage, a treasure that will give you a one-use card from the treasure deck,  or bonus movement, healing or attacks.

Each hero gets a unique passive ability, a unique cloth (so the assassins cloth features slightly more treasure than others for example), and a unique attack. You move around the board and try and kill the other players before they kill you. For 3+ players there is also a ghost mode that helps mitigate player elimination. Dead players become ghosts and get a different set of abilities and different winning conditions. They can no longer harm the living, but they can still interact with other players and have a way to reach victory.

Aside from needing to stick on the character stickers for the wooden chits you use to represent them on the board, the component quality is quite decent. The pieces of cloth are made of the same excellent non-creasing material that was used in Fold-It.

We’ve played the game a few times with friends, and overall I would say its a fun enough game. It probably goes on about 10 minutes too long for the level of simplicity of most of the mechanics in the game. It’s a nice evolution of Fold-It, but it’s not really got enough depth to its mechanics to compete as an interesting tactical game.

Kuan is an abstract strategy game for 2 players that takes around 10 minutes or so to play.

Amanda had picked this one out of the preview as something she thought I might like and actually bought it for me when she was picking up some games from the same stand. I have to say I am glad she did.

You get 10 tiles each, 5 red and 5 blue. The goal is to place a tile such that after that placement is resolved there is a line of 5 tiles of the same colour (either horizontally, vertically or diagonally). You can also win by forcing your opponent into a position where they need to place a tile and they do not have a tile in their supply they can legally place. The game is very reminiscent of “go” in that if you trap tile(s) between two tiles of the opposing colour, then you capture the pincered tile(s) into your supply, and your opponent must use tile(s) from their supply to match the colour of the tiles doing the pinching.

It is to connect 4 what snooker is to pool. I say that, because you are neither the red nor the blue player, it’s just whichever is the best piece to target on your turn for a victory that you care about. Which means (like snooker) placing a tile that brings you closer to victory, but doesn’t grant it, may very well help your opponent take victory on their turn.

The game is very easy to learn and can be played very quickly, and definitely feels like one of those games that are high depth but low-complexity.

The stone tiles, whilst having a kind of “pebbles found on the beach” quality to them, are quite nice. The matt is functional but perhaps could have been slightly higher quality. I am also not entirely sure about the cartoon characters used in the instructions and on the matt, they don’t seem to really fit the theme of the game (albeit the game is pretty abstract and the theme more or less just window dressing).

A few friends have played it and the feedback has generally been positive (though I would say not as positive as War Chest).

Not really my cup of tea (pun intended). However, Amanda was keen on this one. I believe it’s actually based on a webcomic series, and certainly has some lovely whimsical artwork. It’s for 2-4 players and takes between 30 and 60 minutes to play.

We were told it was a convention exclusive edition, though the only difference from the regular edition was the box itself (white cover, they did have some original boxes available as well with the regular box art).

The game is basically a fairly standard deck-builder. You each get a dragon to look after, which involves ensuring they nap, play, eat and get groomed as required. Each dragon gets a special ability that allows them to draw extra cards from their deck the first time a certain card goes into your active set.

The game revolves around trying to build up synergies either by purchasing memories for the current season (spring/winter/ etc…) or items from the market. Doing so will allow you to draw more cards, to build up more tea-leaves needed to enhance your buying power to get cards either from the memories or the market that will score more VP at the end of the game. As memories are purchased (e.g. Going to the fair with your dragon in the summer) the seasons progress until two memories are bought in the final season and the game ends. Then it’s just down to calculating the total VP that the deck you’ve built has given you.

My thoughts? The art and the story-telling ties beautifully with the mechanics. You really feel like you are raising this young dragon and buying things to look after them, and even spend time during memories on unique events during this relationship. The core mechanics are decent enough, you can build up interesting synergies between different cards to trigger turns with a huge number of card draws, leading to big purchases. You do have to balance powerful cards vs high scoring cards, they aren’t always the same. If you focus too much on building a deck with lots of purchasing power, you might find you can’t use that power to actually buy enough high VP cards before the end of the game. That all being said, the minimal interaction between players, and fairly basic nature of the mechanics isn’t enough to be engaging for me personally. The theme and setting are also not my favourites. I don’t hate them, but it isn’t enough on its own to get me on board with ok game mechanics.

We have played this game a few times with friends, and the general conclusion is that it is “ok”.

So the best way to understand this game is to watch the fantastic Let’s Play here.

My thoughts? The fact you get 16 different units, and in a typical 2-player game you will randomly be assigned 4 each, makes every game feel very different. There is so much replayability and asymmetry, which are both things I love. The simplicity of the mechanics is also a wonderful example of depth without complexity.

There is a little bit of a learning curve with how the discards work and how important coin counting is. This hurt Amanda in one of our early games, where she ended up in a position where she had to pass for 6 actions in a row. Its easy enough to avoid once you get the hang of it, but it can sting in an early game to feel so helpless.

The component quality for the unit “coins”, board and coin bags are all fantastic. The control markers almost feel a bit sub-standard, even though they are quite nice cardboard, they aren’t up to the quality of everything else. Also if you are flying it anywhere, put the coins in the draw-bags, because the plastic covering just can’t hold their weight.

I’ve played a few games now with different friends, and the general feedback is that people want to play more.

“Rescue cats from the street and help them get adopted in this purr-fect cooperative game for 1 to 4 players! ”

Published by SunriseTornado.com this is a fun little game where you play co-operatively with different coloured cards to try and get arrange them in order to trigger adoptions.

The game is basically co-operative puzzle solving. It has a nice mechanic where you effectively “push” new cats into the main board (the shelter) which then triggers pushing all the other cats along as well. You either take an unknown cat from the deck (“The Street”) or from a reserved set in-front of you (“The  Foster home”). The goal is to meet certain criteria of arranged colours to flip-cats over and get them ready for adoption. Then pushing them out of the edge gets them adopted and aids your end game scoring.

It’s a fun quick little game that I really enjoyed. There was enough innovation for me in terms of the pushing mechanic (and the constraints on it) that I hadn’t seen before. I also like that it is basically a puzzle you are solving together as a group. The theme is very well carried through into the mechanics as well, which is a big plus for me.

The only downside is it really needs a board to make it easier to keep track of the edges of the shelter. They give you 4 wooden cubes to try and measure out the space, but its a bit too easy to get confused about what is an “empty” grid slot, and what is beyond the edge of the shelter.

We’ve only played one game so far, and it hasn’t been one we’ve suggested to our friends out of the other games we picked up.