Playing board games online at yucata.de

Tags

bgg, boardgames, games clubs, german, online, pbem, Social, yucata.de

The appeal of board games for most of us is to be able to sit around a table, get out a game and play. This is how I play a lot of my games – 2 player with my partner, with a group of friends in a house, or at a games club. Indeed the seems to be a lot more games clubs out now than 10 or 20 years ago, so even if your family and friends don’t share your passion for board games there are plenty of places to find new friends that do (not suggesting you need to jettison your existing friends 😆 ). However there may be times when you want to play a game but unable to set up a face-to-face meeting, to scratch that itch we have online board game sites.

There are several websites that offer the ability to play a variety of boardgames, some concentrate on real-time play (where you all play the game in a single session), asynchronous PBEM (you are notified by email when its your turn), or a combination of these. For this post I’m going to look at Yucata.de which I discovered only a month ago.

Yucata’s User Interface

Yucata is a German based website offering, so far, eighty different game titles with more in the pipeline. There are well known games such as Carcassonne H&G, Roll Through the Ages, and Stone Age, as well as lesser known games. There are some that are now Out Of Print that are eagerly snapped up at a premium price when  copies are put up for sale, so online may be the only place to play them. The site is intuitive to use and easy to navigate and most of the titles use authentic graphics adding to the appeal. You can set up invitational games, where you specify a list of friends to invite, or public ones that have an open invite to anyone – they have a page listing the open invite so you can join in on a game set up by others. A nice feature of the invitational option is you can invite more people than the game can play, so for instance if you have a list of twenty friends, you could invite them all to a 4 player game and the first three that accept will join you in the game. The games tend to be played over several days as you will find most people will be in dozens of games and taking turns as they arise. This is not to say people don’t play in a single session and you will see open invitational games with the note “live game” or something similar.

Stone Age on Yucata

I’m finding the site quite addictive. For the most part the ability to dip in and out is great as I can grab ten minutes every so often and play some turns on a bunch of games – a great way to break up whatever tasks you are doing in real life, and in the evening I’ll leave it on in the background diving in when the message pops up saying its my turn on some games. I’m taking part in some tournaments of with players in a BoardGameGeek guild including one for Stone Age that’s seven games simultaneously as half of the first stage (so trying to remember what strategy you are using for each is interesting). I am also learning new games, its a great teaching tool, so that I can then teach others when playing physical versions face-to-face.

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Is it a train … game, or book

Tags

boardgame, book, catastrophe, english, environmental, german, swarm

On Sunday I went to play some boardgames, which often includes games I have never played before. One of the games we played was Der Schwarm by Kosmos, which was carefully unwrapped by Jon as all looked on.
Kosmos is book publishing company so amongst the games they publish is a line of literature-based games of which The Swarm, to give it it’s name in English, is one. Based on the novel by Frank Schätzing where the world is facing an ecological catastrophe caused by previously unknown marine life forms. Each player represents a nation sending their scientists out to confront the threat. Although we played the German version, you may be pleased to know that Z-Man games have now published an English edition (the game itself is fairly language neutral, its only the rules and player quick-ref boards that were in German).

The game has a central player board on which shuffled tiles are placed face-down to form uncharted sea surrounded by land squares (where players may start from and form new bases on). The tiles show either 2, 3, or 4 connection swarm patterns and in the game you collect these then place them down to form connected networks. Around the edge of the board is a score track and each player starts on 20 research points, so obviously meaning they can go down when spent. Hmm this sounds like a train game. Around the edge of the board are placed Action Cards, and players rotate in player order selecting a card, the first available card costs zero, opting to take the second instead costs you one research point, the third instead two points and so on. Cards are shifted to close gaps after one has been chosen. So that’s why a positive point balance is needed at the start. The Action card line consists of 13 cards (which are shuffled and randomly placed each round) as we were playing 4 players, 3 or 3 player games have less, followed by two blue special action cards (the game has 6, 2 used each round), a green research station action,  finally followed by a stack of turn-order cards where you choose what order you want to play the turn at and select a special power for the turn. The action cards allow specific actions such as build research station (where you place a station and a researcher on that station), place/move a ship (so you can pick up undiscovered sea tiles into your hand), utilise a researcher (place additional researcher on a base, or place down network tiles upto the total number of researchers you have on the board), and monster moves.

The game consists of three turns, on each you take turns selecting action cards (paying the requisite research points if you opt to not take the first one available), once all action and turn order cards have gone you then (in the new turn order) take turns performing an action card. Each player also has a Joker card to give them an additional action that can be used so long as action cards are left to be played, which is nice as it allows any action to be carried out even if you don’t manage to grab the required card. Once all actions ave been carried out each player has their largest network scored. Then onto the next round. After the final round there are bonus points scored for having bases on 2,3, or all 4 sides and another if you have connected those bases to the central Swarm Queen square.

If you have played railway games I’m sure there are some aspects of the above that sound awfully familiar to you. It does have some nice aspects like the monster attack actions where points are deducted from whoever the monster attacks and added to your score, the number of points is dependent on how far they are along the track (and if they have chosen the special turn-order ability of reducing attacked scores by one). Mike, who won the game, decided it was best to keep his score down to avoid attraction of monster attacks but ultimately ignore their threat and concentrate on building a network.

On the initial reading of the rules, I wasn’t the only one who thought “hmm sounds like a train game” and Mike who I don’t mind admitting is better at train games than me got a winning strategy sussed. It was an enjoyable game, though I came third only because Richard who ended in 4th as the last action of the game did a monster attack on two  of my bases. That probably sounds bitter, and it isn’t meant to – I knew I hadn’t won and hadn’t done enough to secure 2nd, but it sounds dramatic if I say “oh if it wasn’t for that last action of the game by the player in last place”.

Having played the game once I would play it again, especially as I would now say “don’t be afraid to spend research points”.  I have played several economic train games where “money is tight” and a bad choice or two can lose you the game so I was over cautious on paying more than one or two points for an action. On hindsight it is worth doing if it allows you to complete what you need to do in the round. In the final round if I had spent 4 instead of 1 point to grab a researcher instead of a ship I would have been able to score 30 for 3 bases instead of 10 for 2 (plus  an additional 4-7 points dependent on which space it was placed) and been 2nd or even first if I’d denied Mike. Of course if Jon, who ended as second had done similar (he mentioned at the end he should have got another researcher as he ended with an under utilised ship action), then he could have won. Mike had said he’d gambled on a last round dash to win, and it paid off because he ignored monster attacks whilst others hadn’t (Jon stated he expected me to use a crab attack action to bypass my two bases, so he ensured he got the monster defence turn-order privilege, though I opted to use my joker to increase my network size).

TK Maxx the Queen of boardgames

Tags

bargain, games, german, price, shopping

If you are wanting to go shopping for boardgames, where do you go? Maybe you normally shop online at one of the independent boardgame e-tailers or even amazon, which is fine but sometimes its nice to look at actual game boxes and smell the cardboard, or should that be smell the cellophane that encases the box holding in all that “new game smell” you look forward to once you get a game home and open it in seclusion – surely its not just me that enjoys opening games?

If you are out for some general shopping around town, especially with your other half, rather than going with specifically intention of visiting a games shop, then persuading them to visit your friendly independent boardgame emporium can be a bind (my usual suggestion is to split up and meet later, though this can prove expensive!). If you are a bargain-hunter type of person, and I am, then there is a sneaky alternative in the form of the bargain clothing chain TK Maxx. For those who don’t know TK Maxx is a German company and they seem to have some relation with Queen Games, so often stock some of their games hidden in the toy section. So you can now suggest you both go there!

TK Maxx have this policy of reducing items that don’t sell after six weeks, which can often mean you get boardgames that don’t interest the majority of their clientèle for a lot lower than elsewhere. I recently bought Sultan for £6 and Catch-a-Cash for £3, both under a quarter of their RRP, and went home happy.

Sultan is a bid-bluffing game where each player gets the same deck of cards 15 cards numbered 1-15 that they shuffle and draw 5 cards from for each of the 3 rounds. In each round a player draws 5 gems from a bag and puts 4 up for auction each player then placers one card next to one gem (so you may get some gems where more than one player has put their card next to, some where only one has, or some where no player has put next to), in cases where more than one player has put a card to it, highest value wins with rules for ties. Each gem has a point value (1-5 depending on colour) plus you get additional points for collecting multiples of the same colour. Its a nice short game and the gem selection option does mean you can try choose gems in the hope that there will be one that you want that others are less interested so you get it unopposed.

Cash-A-Catch is a set collection game with a bell! Each player takes the turn as auctioneer at a fish market and turns over cards until another player rings the bell and buys the fish for a flat fee of 10€ to the bank, the auctioneer gets a commission of 1€ per card bought. Each player has a player-board that depicts two crates, one ice crate, and a trash bucket. The three crates can each only take a single type of fish, and so if you buy fish you cant store in these they go into the bucket for negative points at the end of the game. An auctioneer can, before they offer up the new catch sell all of the fish in one or more of their crates. You get more money for larger sets, however you may decide to sell small sets early, because of what happens when you sell. When a type of fish is sold other players with that type of fish in their non-ice crates have to throw them in the trash. So you may sell to make other players trash or sell because you know another player after you will most likely sell. In addition to the fish types there are Octopus cards that act as jokers, a fish thief that allows you to steal the top card off another players crate, and one that allows you to discard two cards from your trash bucket. Cash-a-catch is a game I first played a couple of years ago and enjoyed and thought it would make a nice addition to my collection at some point, getting it for so cheap was a bonus. Although you pay a set price for the catch you buy it does play like a Dutch Auction game like Merchants of Amsterdam though instead of waiting for a lower price before stopping the bid you are waiting for the size and contents of the catch.