I was feeling a little bit sick as I was getting ready for the evenings Fenland Gamers Friday meetup at The Luxe. I really did feel like not going. A multi coloured yawn felt imminent. But I battled on getting ready, which was basically putting my MtG stuff together and a couple of small box games in a bag.

At our fabulous hosts The Luxe I got everything set up for the evening. Which is basically getting our folding table out and chairs round it. I put two play mats out ready for playing MtG. This was a change from the normal routine. Which was bought on because earlier in the week a new member to the group had said they were coming along with a friend to play MtG. So that was what I was geared up for.

The start of the session came, only one person (an existing member) had turned up. I checked my phones and there were missed calls from Jonathan. He was blocked in by an ambulance and other cars with flashy lights. He’d be along as soon as he could get out of his drive way.

While waiting for people to show the two of us played a couple of games of MtG using my two standard decks, the mono blue mill and the golgari aggro mid range. The honours went one a piece.

At the end of the second game Jonathan arrived. But no one else had. Luckily he’d bought a couple of games with him. One of which was a new game. So we decided to have a learning game of Heaven and Ale. You know our approach to new games, learning on the fly.

Sometimes, depending on the publisher, the included rules are multilingual. Sadly not in this game. This was the German edition of the game, which meant Jonathan had to track down the English translation and print them out. Luckily that is the only bit of translation that the game needs, the rest of it is language independent. For non gamers, often the German version of the game is cheaper than the UK version, and is worth that little extra of visiting the bgg site for a translation (or the English rules may be on the publishers web site).

Continuing the tradition of being kind to readers of this blog, and having punished you enough already in this post, the headline for this game is I liked it.

Ok for those that are interested I’ll now go into what I liked about the game.

This is a nice tile placement game. I do like the method of getting tiles. It uses a similar mechanic to Glen More and Tokaido. You are selecting a tile space on the track, buying the tile, and placing on your player mat. Unlike the two mentioned games where the last placed player on the track takes the next move. Players take turns moving irrespective of position on the track. This variant of the mechanic is refreshing.

The price of a tile is determined where you plan to place the tile on your player mat. There is a shaded side, and a sunny side. The sunny side doubles the cost, and when a tile gets activated on it, it moves the matching resource tracker on your player mat. The shaded side does nothing to the purchase price, but when the tile gets activated it generates money.

Which means you have a nice series of decisions to make in this game. The first being the tile to select on the track. Which tile you want next, how far along the track you are prepared to travel, followed by which side of the player board will you place it.

There are two ways to activate tiles. The first is to select a scoring space, and the other surround an enclosure. The enclosure option adds up the values of surrounding tiles, which decides which enclosure tile you place there. This tile then allows you to advance your abbot token a number of spaces, and activate a number of surrounding tiles. These activations are the way you advance your resource tokens and abbot on your tracker, plus also generate income.

The one thing that isn’t great is what seems like the over complicated end game scoring. I’m not going to explain it in detail. But it involves getting your abbot as advanced as possible to determine point multiplier and a conversation ratio. That ratio is used to try and advance your least advanced resource token at the expense of your more advanced one. You want that advanced as far as possible because your last placed tokens position is the value you multiply the point multiplier with! See even that brief explanation is complicated. Imagine reading the rules and trying to work it out.

In our game I got a nice engine going, that exploited abbots sharing high value tiles. I was initially concerned that once the starting money had gone, that there would be issues getting more money. But the first couple of rounds I generated lots of money while the others struggled and ran out. Which meant that on one round they advanced around the track very quickly, leaving me to just pick up a lot of tiles. I completed two enclosures that round. The final round I scored barrels and picked up a lot of max point barrels. I think I was the only one who filled there tile spaces.

I’ve gone all fancy in the above photo to show a combo that worked well for me. When I activated that abbot on the scoring, those two four cost resources scored twice. Also that abbot being shared by two enclosures meant it would also get activated twice.

So you can guess from that above paragraphs that I smashed the game, and won. Jonathan was observing what I did during the game. So in future plays expect to see similar tactics from him, and used against me. Things will definitely be more competitive.

A great game, a nice change from the usual mechanics that hit the table.

Once again thanks to Jonathan you get the chance to see hobo Darren.

I have to admit I was disappointed that the MtG players didn’t show. I was all prepared for playing MtG, and fought through that feeling sick. It was lucky that Jonathan showed and had games with him. Otherwise the evening could have been a total washout. If you say you’re coming it’s good manors to let the organisers know if you can’t make it. As one other member did last night. We can’t cater for all eventualities, so we plan the games we bring along based on numbers and requests.

A big thanks to The Luxe for being great hosts once again.

UPDATE (5/1/19): Jonathan sent the following to me this morning:

“Looking at the Heaven and Ale playthrough, I think we were playing the monks incorrectly. The monks only score adjacent tiles when ‘triggered’ by using a purple scoring disc. They do not score adjacent tiles when placing a shed; all they do is move the Brewmaster 1 step per monk activated, when a shed activates them – something we were not doing.”

The joys of our style of learning a game, discovering the misplays afterwards! Plus there was no guarantee that we wouldn’t make misplays even if we had read the rules before hand.