What we played ... Week 3

Hi folks!!

Another week, and another game night with a lot of fun.

To open a night we played a puzzle game:
Cottage Garden (2016:)

Players: 1 - 4 

Mechanisms: Pattern building and tile placement

Playing time: 45 - 60 min

Designers: Uwe Rosenberg

The first of the Rosenberg´s trilogy puzzle games, in that one the players are gardeners challenged to fill their flowerbeds with plants (tiles), and when one of the flowerbed is full then score it. The game is play in several rounds until the gardener (dice) of the nursery pass to 6, and then will occur the last round. I think that is the easier to learn, is fast, always fun and playable with everyone, there are rules for games with kids.

Ready to play

Next, we split the players in two tables, in the first was played the game of the month
Blood Rage: Another game with new players but the same winner, 👏👏👏👏 congrats Jorge.

The first Era

The battle for Yggdrasil

At the end

And next Cryptid (x3) a good deduction game.

In the other table was played:
Dinosaur Island (2017):

Players: 1 - 4 

Mechanisms: Action point allowance system, dice rolling, set collection, tile placement, worker placement.

Playing time: 90 - 120 min

Designers: Jonathan Gilmour, Brian Lewis

If you like Jurassic Park certainly you like this game. In this game the players need to develop your dinosaur park, they do that in 4 different phases (research, market, laboratory and the park). In the research phase each player have 3 investigator, and they use for look for new dinosaurs or research for DNA from a mosquito trapped in amber (dice) or try to increase their cold storage. In the market phase the player can buy upgrades laboratory or attractions or specialist or DNA, only 2 times. In the laboratory phase the players use all your workers in the lab to gain some things for the park and future rounds. In the park phase the players receive  in the park as many visitors as the level of your excitement of the park and gain money and victory points for each survivor (patron) inside the park. Next occur the clean phase and start a new round. The end of the game is triggered hen there is only one objective card left unclaimed. This game is awesome, the components are very good even in the retail edition, there are a lot of rules in each phase to remember, my recommendation is make a summary for the rules, you will only need one sheet paper. After you were play 2 or 3 rounds, the game will become more easy. There are several ways to gain victory points but the objectives give us a path to follow. The victory points give us a player order in all the rounds, to be the first will be useful but would be difficult to recover he gap between players. Like i said, you choose the path that you will follow.

Setup

At the end

Merlin (2017):

Players: 2 - 4 

Mechanisms: Area control / area influence, dice rolling, set collection, worker placement.

Playing time: 75 min

Designers: Stefan Feld, Michael Rieneck

One of the most criticized games of these designers. This time we played without the king´s favor module, i think this module complicates the game. The idea of the game is easy, the players are knights of the Round Table that wish be the successor of the King Arthur in the throne. But never will be easy, you need repel the traitors, you can use Merlin as ally one time in each round, you need to use you henchmen in the principalities to gain benefits to complete missions. and to do all of this the game have 6 rounds, and in 3 of them the players score points.

This is a easy/medium game with hard decisions to take in every turn about the actions that want to do. At the begging of the round the players will roll all their dices, and would prepare all their movements for the round, because the knights only can move in one direction (clockwise). The players gain points for missions cards and for the 3 score rounds, at the end exist one more scoring. Always in this game the final score is always tight between the players. The components are good, the rulebook is good, and in the next game that we will play we will use the Arthur expansion that arrived the last week.

Third round

And that was our game night this week,

See you in our next post.