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Lisa and I played a two-player game of Hacienda tonight and although it was looking good for me through 99% of the game…she jumped ahead at the end when she placed an awesome water blob (seen on the left edge of the image above). I ended up with too much money at the end and no chance to convert that into victory points by buying an additional Hacienda in the next to last round. Arrrrrrg….I’ll get you next time!
Overview
Cambria, designed by Eric Vogel and published by Vainglorious Games, is an area control & dice rolling game for 3-5 players lasting 20-30 minutes. Players represent Hibernian warriors attacking the thinly protected Roman fortresses and roads near the end of the Roman occupation of Britannia.
Players take turns rolling dice and placing cubes or the Legion pawn onto the roads that lead to the fortresses. When a fortress is completely encircled by cubes, the player with the clear majority of cubes becomes the winner of the victory point token on the fortress. Some fortresses award points to the clear second place majority holder (if one exists). If no clear second place majority holder exists, the points are not awarded.
Unlike games like Samurai which awards tokens as soon as a city is encircled, Cambria only awards victory points when a single clear majority holder exists. If a tie exists for first place, the fortress and its victory points remain contested.
Cambria relies on the outcome of rolling two dice for the placement of cubes. On their turn, players roll the dice and are allowed to place a single cube on an unoccupied road that leads to a fortress represented by either of the dice. For example, if the roll was a three and a five, the player could place a cube onto a road that leads to a fortress designated with a three [b]or[/b] to a fortress designated with a five. If doubles are rolled, the player is allowed to place a cube on an unoccupied or occupied road (allows for the removal a rival player or the Legion pawn).
Fortresses are worth from two to six victory points so, as you might expect, rolling a one has special meaning. A roll with a single one and any non-one (e.g. a one and a six) grants the player the option of placing a cube normally (using the six) or placing the Legion pawn on the road represented by the non-one die (i.e. the six) The Legion pawn is allowed to kick off rival players when placed and places a block on awarding points since a fortress can only be awarded when it is encircled completely by cubes. If double ones are rolled, then the player must move the Legion pawn.
Any time the Legion pawn is moved by a player, that player has the option of placing a cube onto one of the unoccupied ships to the west of the land mass. The cube remains on the ship and can be used on subsequent turns to modify the value of your roll. Immediately after rolling the dice, at the start of your turn, you may choose to modify one of the die using any single cube you have placed on a ship in a previous turn. For example, if you’ve rolled a three and a five and you have a cube on the three ship, you may remove the cube from the three ship, and convert the five to a three. After the optional conversion, your turn progresses normally with the new values on the die. You are free to remove a cube from a ship without modifying the roll (for purposes of placing the cube on a road).
When six or fewer fortresses remain on the board, the game ends and final scoring takes place by evaluating all remaining fortresses for a clear majority awarding points as if each fortress was completely encircled.
The winner is the player with the most victory points.
Components
The cubes are plastic. The Legion pawn is wooden as are the victory point tokens affixed with stickers showing their point values. The board is a small, non-folding, rectangle of chipboard affixed with the map. The dice are smaller than I expected but functional. The box is oversized and very thin and showed a fair amount of top down crushing/deflection. You would not want to stack anything on top of this game.
The artwork is relatively austere (shades of light green), but functional.
Conclusion
I’ve played Cambria numerous times covering all numbers in the allowed player range and I’ve played the game with adults in my gaming group and with my kids. I must say that the game is fun. The randomness of the dice is mitigated to some degree by using cubes on the ships. In the end, you are at the mercy of the dice so the game is not heavy.
The play time is short making it perfect for a lunch-time game at work. Given a smaller box and maybe even a foldable board, one could reduce the size of the game dramatically.
The game does exhibit a fair amount of “take that” by allowing players to knock other players off juicy spots on roads and by dumping the Legion pawn in a hotly contested area. I’m not fond of the end game grab of incomplete fortresses as this can cause a wild swing at the end of the game.
With three players the board feels wide open but not overly so. It takes more of your own cubes to encircle the higher numbered fortresses which means you’ll be less involved in the lower valued areas. I’ve played games that flowed very quickly and were over in 10-15 minutes and I’ve played knock down, drag out, games that have taken 30-40 minutes to play.
With four players, the contention for cities is higher but both games I played with this number were very short. I’m unsure if that was due to the luck of the dice or a knee in the curve somewhere.
With five players, fortresses were highly contested, and there was a lot of blocking going on with the Legion pawn. However, there were a few rounds where people passed having no place of interest to place a cube. I can only surmise that five is just slightly too many players although I did still have fun.
I do wish that there were some ways to mix up the layout of the map in some way to keep the game interesting. Fixed map games like Hacienda enjoy a large following of home-grown maps that keep the game interesting and I wish that there could be some way to spice the game up a bit after multiple plays.
I also wish that there was a two-player variant of the game although I suspect that that would require some form of ghost third player like Alhambra.
I’ve rated Cambria a 7/10 mostly due to its simplicity of play, size, short time length. It’s not a “brain burner” but it really does fit well as an opener/closer for your game nights or for an after lunch game while at work.
My BGG trade for Hacienda arrived today and I read through the rules while looking at the bits. I traded away my copy of Amyitis…good riddance.
Hacienda plays 2-5 players (supposedly best with 4) but supposedly good at all player counts. Hacienda is a relatively simple to understand tile laying game. Players vie for placing land tiles (top left) along the bone-shaped perimeter of the board, placing animal tokens (top center) or watering holes in the yellow-ish areas of the board. In two scoring rounds, players score their herds of animals and land tiles in how they’ve been placed relative to fixed markets, watering holes, etc.
In reading the rules, the ever growing herds of animals can flow in an almost Through the Desert-like caravan in attempts to reach watering holes and markets. However, there are no area encirclement rules and there is an economic addition with money being used to purchase land and animal cards. In another interesting twist, the board is two-sided providing the bone-shaped symmetric layout of land tiles and the flip-side providing a asymmetric layout. Looks like neat stuff and looking forward to playing with Lisa and/or the kids.
Now, to get writing my review of Cambria over the next couple of days…
First up on the agenda was a five player game of Cambria. I’d played with all other numbers of players and really needed to get in a five player game before I started writing my review. The game was highly cut throat and very defensive lasting a bit longer than I was accustomed. Still fun but the small map does make it pretty tight with five. More on that in my upcoming review.
Next up was Jamaica. Nobody had played but me and with five, it also drug a bit. I ended up making a mad dash to Port Royal leaving everybody else behind the positive point line but one player at +2. Good family game but not as deep as what I normally like on game night. The artwork still rules.
Last up was Santiago. I’d never played with five and I must say it was fun but boy was it important who was in control of placing the water. Nice game and looking to more plays.
Jared was a new player to our group. He’d played a game of Cambria with us over lunch and I hope he enjoyed the other games we played. I was glad to have another player on an otherwise lightly attended night.
I finished up my homemade version of Fire last night. The base is solid cherry 1.5 inches thick and the dowels are oak. It’s a dexterity game (pull dowels out without causing a collapse for points) that looks good enough to leave setting out on a coffee table or something.
Here are some in progress shots:
I was contacted through BGG and received a copy of Cambria for review. I’ve only played one game so far and haven’t collected enough material for my review but I thought you might like to see a few images and get up to speed with what I’m currently playing around with.
Although I can’t comment at length yet on the game itself, the fact that it supports 3-5 players and possesses a small number of bits, minimal space requirements, and quick play time (20 minutes!), I’m thinking Vainglorious Games and Eric Vogel may have a great little lunchtime game to play at work.
The Festival Internacional de Juegos held in Cordoba, Spain held a gaming photography competition this year and so I figured I’d give it a shot by sending in a few entries. Along with several prizes they were going to pick 29 images to show in an exhibit in the Palacio de la Merced in Cordoba.
Although I didn’t win any of the prizes I did manage to have two of my entries selected for the exhibit of 29 images. I’m honored to have two images selected from the 306 images sent in from 22 countries.
An online virtual exhibit can be found here. Thanks and it was fun.
My images are macro shots from the games Manila and Torres.
I cracked the shrink and set up the board for some sample rounds of Yspahan tonight. After cracking the box there was nothing to “punch”. The only cardboard in the box was the main board, the smaller tower board, the smaller caravan board, and the four individual player boards. The game is chock full of dice, three yellow and nine white, lots of little brown camel-eeples, cubes, wooden discs (gold), a small deck of cards, a couple of white cubes for keeping track of the rounds, a white pawn to represent the supervisor, and a black pawn to represent the starting player.
Everything appears well made but I have to admit that my heart sank a bit when I pulled out the rules. The book uses the same dreadful font and layout as Amyitis and Caylus. I was 50/50 for slogging through the rules on previous Ystari games and I felt a catch in my throat as a wave of doom spread over me. However, my fears were assuaged after just one pass through the small rule booklet and I sat down to play a few sample rounds.
The theme of the game pits players against one another as they populate souks in the four neighborhoods of the city. Each souk is composed of one or more individual buildings of a single color and players attempt to place cubes on those buildings. The game progresses across three seven-day weeks and the neighborhoods are cleared at the end of each week. The more souks you complete the more points you get. However, to complicate matters, an intersection between two streets separate the neighborhoods and the supervisor moves up and down the street. Whenever he stops, cubes in neighboring shops are moved to the caravan board. Sometimes players want cubes on the caravan board and sometimes they don’t. When and which cubes to move is a decision the player would rather make rather than to have it foisted upon them by another player.
Each day of the week is played out by having the starting player roll a handful of dice and allotting them in like-numbered groups, lowest to highest, to the Tower board. Once allotted, players take turns selecting a level of the tower, taking the dice (leaving subsequent players with less to choose from) and taking the actions allowed for that level. Taking a set of dice is compulsory and actions range from taking gold, moving the supervisor, taking a card, taking camels, or placing cubes in the souks.
How the dice affect the cardinality of your move is somewhat confusing. When you place cubes you use the number of dice on the level. When you move the supervisor you move him the number of pips displayed on the dice. When you take a card, the dice don’t matter. A small cheat sheet would be helpful for beginners but I suspect it becomes old hat after a few plays.
After your compulsory action, players can optionally build one of the special buildings depicted on the individual players boards. Most of the buildings cost the player camels and gold and grant the player special abilities throughout the rest of the game: getting extra camels, extra gold, adjusting the movement of the supervisor, moving a cube to the caravan board, extra points when souks are scored at the end of the week, and placing extra cubes when populating souks.
The rules are pretty straight forward but the thin theme doesn’t allow for them to sink in. It will take a few plays to keep everything straight. The rules will need to stay close at hand.
After reading what I’ve written it sounds a little harsher than I intended although accurate. I’m confident I’ll enjoy the game and look forward to my first play. Anything that will let me use my dice tower can be all bad.
berserkley, last week’s BGG Geek of the Week tapped me for this weeks GotW. It feels extremely awkward to hold the position but alas, I get the fun of answering a lot of questions posed by those on BGG. Now’s your chance to ask me whatever you want on the running GotW thread on BGG.
I’m not usually one to spend a lot of money on a game, let alone a game that is only a limited run. Tinners’ Trail is a new venture from WarFrog Games and designed by Martin Wallace best known for his train/rail and war games. Tinners’ Trail sets firmly in the Eurogame camp supporting 3-4 players running about 75 minutes.
The box is signed by the designer and I secured #1206 out of the 1500 produced from the first run. It was shipped on the slow boat from England and it took about 8 weeks to arrive. Unfortunately the game box is almost an exact fit to the shipping box (no padding) and it suffered a relatively severe crush on one side. Luckily it only wrinkled the box and didn’t cause any splits or harm the contents of the box.
The theme of the game pits players against each other in the role of competing mining companies in Cornwall. The game lasts 4 rounds and each round comprises 7 phases:
Players attempt to build their 6 mines across Cornwall in an attempt to mine ore (tin & copper) at the lowest cost. The right to build a mine in a territory is auctioned off for cash and once built it cannot be moved. The cost to mine ore is determine by the number of water cubes in the region. The more water that exists, the higher the cost to mine. The use of water to drive cost is actually very thematic. Mines in Cornwall tended to be very wet and the deeper they dug the more water they found increasing cost.
The number of ore cubes you can mine during your turn is determined by many factors including the having a miner in the territory, if you’ve build a port (which helps bring coal to run the steam pumps – water again!), if you’ve built a railroad, or if you’ve built an adit (a horizontal tunnel into the side of the hill used to lessen the cost of draining water).
The first phase of the game sets the ore prices in the market which informs players which type of ore will be more profitable in the round. The second phase restocks an area of the board with the resources that will be available for building this round (adit, miner, port, railroad, steam pumps). The meat of the game is the action phase where players manager how best to use 10 “time points” to build resources and mine ore. Several actions cost money to build but all cost points on the “time track”. An interesting point to make is that turn order is somewhat like Thebes. The player farthest back on the time track is always the active player. With this rule, a player may take several actions before another player can react. In addition, the first player to pass will become the player that goes first in the following round.
Once all actions have been taken and the turn order has been determined for the following round, players the sell all of the ore that they’ve mined that round for its current market price. After receiving the cash, players then have the option of investing some of their money into companies outside of Cornwall. The earlier in the game you invest, the bigger payout you’ll have at the end of the game and investments drive the number of victory points you have. So invest wisely but not too much otherwise you may find yourself not being able to win auctions to build new mines where you want and not being able to pay for extracting the ore you need to ear money from the market.
As you can probably tell I’m pretty excited about this game. The mechanics seem very clean and although relatively simple, there is a multi-step process to turn ore into money into victory points. You can feel that there is some depth there. Throw in a healthy dose of theme which really seems to mesh well with the mechanics and you’ve got a sweet game. Anybody want to come over and play right now!