USD ($)
EUR (€)
Dear Zatu,
A rather unexpected knock came at my door this morning, just as I was having my breakfast. All of these rather strange characters, led by Lord Aragorn, looked as though they were very lost. They kept leaping about and instructing me to head to Middle Earth for an adventure. I felt very uncertain about it all, but apparently not all those who wander are lost…I hope you know that you have my axe, Grace.
On the tenth day of Christmas, Zatu gave to me:
10 Lords a leaping – Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth – Pete Bartlam
On the 10th Day of Christmas Zatu gave to me the snappily titled Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth a.k.a. LOTR:JIME (or Jimmy to its friends.) Now we may not have 10 Lords a-leaping but we do have Lord Aragorn a-leading his friends Frodo, Gimli, Legolas et al around the varied lands of Middle Earth combating the various villains and fearsome foes of the Dark Lord Sauron.
LOTR:JIME is a co-operative adventure for 1-5 characters who journey as a party through unexplored lands to complete a given quest. The unique selling point of the game is that it is played in conjunction with a freely downloadable App. Now before traditionalists throw their hands up in horror I must say it works very well and though sceptical at first I’ve thoroughly embraced it.
The App, then, sets the scene whilst playing haunting music. It tells you which of the many double-sided large hex terrain tiles to lay out and where enemies may arrive. You tell it which of
the characters will be in the party and it takes care of all the logistics like a tireless GameMaster. It will scale up the number of foes you face in relation to the size of your party.
Each adventurer has their own deck of beautifully illustrated cards which reflect their special abilities and these provide the actions of moving, searching and fighting. Combat is resolved by drawing other cards from your deck to register hits and characters often have an ability to manipulate their decks to their advantage.
As you progress new tile locations are revealed and new foes will attack. There are also neutral characters you can meet who might provide support if you help them. All the time the App keeps up the narrative and records any goodies you may obtain.
It’s quite a tough game and you have to keep up the pace if you are to achieve your goal but if you are into the Lore of Middle Earth it’s great and, let’s face it, if you’re not you probably haven’t read this far!
My beginning to collapse games cupboard was also filled with the other games Zatu sent me:
9 Tangos in Kavango - Kavango - Grace Naomi
Ok ok I was slightly struggling to fit a game relating to 9 ladies dancing into this feature! And also I just wanted an excuse to write about this absolutely AMAZING game. So I absolutely love Ark Nova which is about building a zoo and filling it with a variety of different animals. In case you hadn’t worked it out - I absolutely love animal related games! But one of the challenges I have with Ark Nova is it takes a LONG time to play & the people I play with don’t always have that sort of time!
Along comes Kavango, which is nothing like Ark Nova in game play, but you collect animals into your conservation reserve! Conservation is at the heart of this game, including how it’s packaged (no shrink wrap here) with everything sustainably sourced. It’s only recently become available from a kickstarter campaign, which is why the ‘deluxe’ version is the only one in stock at the moment (though the beautiful wooden animal meeples and blocks are worth the price)!
The game is very similar to 7 Wonders (see 7th day of Christmas for more details) in that you take it in turns to build cards into your conversation area, based on the resources you have at hand.
Similar to 7 Wonders, the more resources you have from round 1 (grass, fish, invertebrates and trees), the easier it is to build more complicated animals in round 3.
This is a quick and easy game to learn and teach. I managed to teach it to my 90 year old Grandad (who picked it up quite quickly when I broke it down to him in stages). There are interesting facts on the card so you also learn about the area and its animals too. In addition to choosing animal or resource cards, you can also perform research to earn you money, which you then spend on upgrading your own conservation area as well as contributing to the collective ‘climate fund’. The addition of different ‘personas’ helps to add even more variety and gives you different benefits to give you a unique advantage in the game (these can be removed if you require a simpler version).
If you like animals, conservation and/or well designed games - this is for you. The artwork is beautiful, the gameplay is relaxed and non-confrontational and ultimately you end up with a unique conservation zone in a reasonable amount of time. When I want to play an animal game with minimal set-up and one which will be quick to play - this will be the one I turn to and you’ll find me dancing a tango in the Kavango!
Eight Maids a Milking- Coffee Rush - Emma Hunt
When we were given the 12 days of Christmas prompt, Coffee Rush was the first game that came to mind due to the little milk drop components in the game!
Players take on the role of baristas working in a busy coffee shop. They will be collecting ingredients through grid movement on the ingredients board to get the ingredients for the ever growing orders. Players move up to 3 places horizontally or vertically on the ingredients board. They collect the ingredients they land on and place them into the 3D coffee cups in their play areas.
Once an order is complete, it goes into the completed order part of the player board and the 2 players to the left of that player need to pick up new order cards equal to the amount of orders that have been completed. Completed orders can be cashed in to gain barista upgrades when collecting their ingredients. E.G. you can get an upgrade that allows you to move diagonally on the ingredients board.
Players need to try to complete their order cards before they fall off the 4th order tab on their player board. If this happens, the uncompleted orders will go into the penalty area of the play board and will equal minus points. Coffee shops do get busy after all as everyone is after their caffeine fix!
Specialty order cards that are completed and penalties that are gained get players rush tokens. These can be cashed in to allow players extra movement on the ingredients grid.
A player ends their turn by moving their orders down to the next numerical tab ready for their next turn e.g. orders in the number 1 spot that were not completed in that turn, move down to the number 2 spot.
End game is triggered when a player collects 5 or more penalty cards in their penalty area or if the coffee order deck runs out.
This game is a great insight into what it must be like to work in a coffee shop as it is very stressful. You get through a lot of the ingredients quickly. I love it because the components are 3D and you are literally filling miniature coffee cups with the tiny ingredients which is adorable.
I think this is the perfect Christmas gift for gamers who enjoy strategic games but also games with adorable components.
7 Wonders – Pete Bartlam
On the 7 th Day of Christmas Zatu sent to me, I hope, 7 Wonders! 7 Wonders is all about building the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World. Each player has one Wonder which they might build. Therefore this a very useful, non-party game for more than six. My own Group has recently expanded and I’m constantly on the lookout for higher player count thinking games. 7 Wonders is one of the best. It’s won a dozen awards, is straightforward to learn and not too long (they say 30 minutes on the box - unlikely!) making it a great Gateway Game. So, what do you do?
7 Wonders is one of those games where you have a hand of cards, choose one and pass the rest to your neighbour. This can be frustrating at times but it does mean you have some intel on what the other players have and what is more or less likely to come to you. You start with 7 cards (naturally!), play and pass until you have one card left which you discard. Mathematically minded amongst you will realise that if you are playing a 7 handed game you will never see any of the other cards of each hand you see again. So choose wisely.
The cards you pick are used to build structures, build your Wonder or generate cash. The game is played through three Ages, each being the round of 7 cards. Just to play mind games on the feeble-brained the cards are passed around in a different direction in each Age. Structures built in an earlier Age can help with later constructions. There’s a point salad of scoring at the end and you may have focussed on Military Might, Building your City or amassing a Treasury. And building your Wonder of course. Note you don’t necessarily have to complete your Wonder to win but it seems a shame not to.
6 Geese a-laying (from Wingspan) - Grace Naomi
Well this selection was a no-brainer! The 12 days of Christmas features many birds, almost all of which I’m sure you can find in Wingspan. This beautiful game revolves around four core actions: Selecting bird cards, getting food for your birds, playing your bird cards and of course, laying eggs.
There is SO much variety in this game that you will never play the same game twice. As you build your board of birds, you gradually unlock more advantages e.g. gaining more food or cards or eggs, or even scoring yourself some extra points (especially where there are birds which enjoy eating others). My favourite is the penguin - because I think it’s just so cute! There’s limited to no conflict in this game, which for me is a massive plus (who needs extra tension at Christmas anyway) and is relatively straightforward to play once you’ve understood the four key actions.
There are a number of expansions you can add too including Europe (more birds), Asia (which provides better 1-2 player abilities, as well as providing additional player boards) and the wonderful Oceania (which adds a ‘wild food’ which significantly improves the ability to gain food for your birds). Having all three expansions, plus the original game does make you have a rather large deck of cards (a recent gift of an automated card shuffler has made a massive difference), but it also means you never know what’s going to come up next.
And if you aren’t a fan of birds, but dragons are more your thing then Wyrmspan is a similar styled game, but featuring dragons & their speckled eggs! Similarly beautifully designed and some tweaks (e.g. exploring caves) make it a great addition to your games cupboard/shelf. What’s not to love about baby dragons hatching out of eggs too?!
5 Gold rings: The Lord of the Rings; Duel for Middle Earth - Favouritefoe
Okay so the rings in “5 golden rings” isn’t really talking about bling. It’s about birds. Ring necked pheasants to be precise. In fact, with all the feathered friends featuring, you could be forgiven for thinking the song is a recipe for one of those bird in a bird in a bird roasts! But here we are like magpies, and our eyes are drawn to The One Ring! You know. That one. The one the world’s fate depends upon!
The Lord of the Rings; Duel for Middle Earth by Asmodee is all about that One Ring. Playing The Fellowship with its mission to throw it into the hellish fires of Mordor, or Sauron and his desire to catch Frodo and pals, the fate of Middle Earth depends on you!
Antoine Bausa and Bruno Cathala have brought a flavour of the celebrated 7 Wonders mechanics into this new 2 player set collection, drafting, area majority racing game, and it is brilliant! Deciding whether to take face up or face down cards which unlock those placed behind them is a recurring and fun dilemma. Taking place over 3 short chapters (rounds), the actions and bonuses are ideally balanced to keep the game romping along at a tidy pace.
And the opportunity to focus on collecting the loyalty of races, dashing for Mordor (or galloping to catch up!), and/or gaining control over the 7 regions in Middle Earth means that every game will require different strategies. This game isn’t just a reskin of 7 Wonders Duel. This game is a streamlined, accessible, addition to the family which I think I might like even more than 7 Wonders Duel!
And of course the other excellent games from the last 4 days:
4 Colly Birds - Piepmatz - Roger BW
The “Four Calling Birds” of the modern song were originally “Four Colly Birds”, i.e. blackbirds. And Piepmatz, by Ben Pinchback and Matt Riddle, includes blackbirds—as well as sparrows, greenfinches, chaffinches, yellowhammers, and bullfinches.
For 2-4 players, this is a game of garden birds queueing up to feed at two or three perches. Play a high card and the smaller birds may gang up to drive off the one that’s currently feeding, which you can then add to your collection; and if you set it up right, you can gather several in a single turn, as well as the seeds they were eating. Play a lower card that doesn’t start a squabble, and you can collect a card from your hand, but not of any higher value than the card you played. Squirrels will steal seeds from your collection, while crows will frighten away birds you’ve collected. At the end of the game, each mated pair of birds (matching type and number) gets you points, as do any seed cards , and having the most of a species.
Although the manual isn’t entirely clear, it’s a simple game but a subtle one, with calculations like the ones you find in Parade: what’s the largest bird I can play that won’t start a fight, so that I can collect this card from my hand? Or if I do want to start a fight, is there a way I can set things up so that I get multiple birds from it, or at least don’t leave something I want ready for my opponent to collect? If I already have half a mated pair and the other half comes out, obviously I want it, but my opponent knows that; can I use it to distract them into ignoring something else I’m up to? It can be a bit of a head-cracker but it’s always enjoyable.
3 French meeples - Carcassonne - Grace Naomi
Admittedly, we may have had to strretch the bounds of the carol a little to ensure we could include the games we all enjoyed, but today we have the wonderful game of Carcassonne (even better in The Big Box). This wonderful game (based on the French eponymous city) consists of building castles, roads and fields using beautiful wooden meeple.
It is simple to play whether for young or old, and you can adapt it accordingly. I’ve played with my 90 year old Grandad, who loves it & always requests to play it at Christmas, and my friend’s 6 year old loves playing it too (and sometimes beats his dad)! The ability to just play it ‘like dominoes’ where you’re just matching the tile pieces, or to add in more expansions if you want to add variety and/or complexity makes it a great game.
One of the best expansions includes the builder, which means if you place a tile on an existing castle/road where your builder is based, you can have another turn! This means you can quickly build high-scoring castles in particular. Another favourite (mainly because I absolutely love sheep) is the Hills & Sheep expansion (not in the Big Box), where you can place a Shepherd Meeple & draw sheep from a cloth bag to add to your field, but careful - make sure you don’t pull out a wolf who will gobble up your sheep!
The Big Box comes with 13 expansions and is (often) much cheaper, especially with Zatu discounts (!) than buying the expansions separately. As such an easy to play, relaxed game, this is perfect to play after Christmas dinner when you want something simple, yet fun to do with your friends and family.
2 Hawks from Cascadia - Pete Bartlam
On the 2nd day of Christmas my true love gave to me 2 Turtle Doves. Well, we’re a bit short of doves at the moment with a lot more hawkish sentiment in the world today so I give you Hawks. Red-tailed Hawks to be precise in the beautiful, peaceful game Cascadia by Randy Flynn.
Cascadia, which is a real area in the NW of North America spanning the US-Canadian border from the Rockies to the Pacific, is an area of outstanding natural beauty providing habitats for a rich range of wildlife.We have Chinnook Salmon leaping in the sparkling rivers, majestic Roosevelt Elk wandering in the pine forests, fierce Grizzly Bears doing what they do in the woods, the ubiquitous Red Fox getting everywhere and soaring high above the solitary (or two in our case!) Red-tailed Hawk all rendered by the evocative art work of Beth Sobel.
This tile-laying game has each player creating their own wildlife zones of linked habitat tiles. There are 5 habitats: Mountains, Forests, Prairies, Wetlands and Rivers which each carry the icons of the creatures that can live there. Maybe three, two or just one type of wildlife, in the latter case you will be awarded a Douglas Fir cone for housing the right Wildlife Token.
Cascadia proceeds by selecting and laying a tile and adding an associated Wildlife token. When all the tiles are laid you score points for each of your largest areas of the five habitat types plus a bonus if yours is bigger than anyone else’s. You also score points for having your Wildlife arranged in patterns as laid out on the Wildlife Scoring Cards. These will represent natural patterns like a line of Elk in the Forest Salmon winding along a river, Bears in family pairs or our eponymous Hawk soaring solo. And if you get two solo Hawks you get 5 points. Happy Days!
And a Partridge in an Everdell Tree - Ella Jones
The woodland magic of Everdell, featuring its central tree decorated with colorful wooden critter meeples and mini event cards, will keep you entertained all Christmas! Players each build a woodland city, made up of the following cards:
Blue- governance
Purple- Prosperity
Green- Production
Red- Destination
Brown- Traveller
Seeing as it's nearly Christmas, let's think of these as technicolor gift parcels! Here's some highlights of what you can find inside!
Christmas Eve Midnight Blue:
The Innkeeper is a lovely, generous Badger from the base game who can be discarded (worth it as he only scores 1 victory point) to play a critter for 3 less berries. Bargain!
Mistletoe Green:
Of course, the reliable, all-rounder Farm card is a classic in the base game. EVEN better, the Mistwood expansion features variations of this card (in design and functionality): showing the farm decorated in blankets of snow, as well as in the other 3, warmer seasons.
Not forgetting The Doctor from the base game, the wise hedgehog carefully prescribes berry potions (very lovingly detailed in the rulebook of the base game). Every time production is activated, players can earn an extra 3 victory points with this card (1 point for each berry). This is also a very festive act of goodwill, supplying vital berries to make critters better!
Chocolate Coin Brown:
The beautiful butterfly: The Poet is a lovely example of this card type, from the Newleaf expansion. It allows players to draw all cards of a chosen color from the meadow, scoring a victory point for each drawn.
Santa's Hat Red:
The Lookout enables players to copy any basic or forest location, for a reasonable price of just 1 log, 1 resin and 1 pebble. Not bad at all!
Perfect Purple:
The main event has to be the prosperity cards, offering numerous victory points during gameplay and at the game end. Occupying The Farm, the Harvester and Gatherer mouse couple (previously Husband and Wife) score a whopping 7 points at the end of the game when paired together.
Not forgetting The Baker from the Newleaf expansion, a kind bee proudly carrying fresh bread, who earns 2 victory points at the game end, PLUS up to 6 victory points (2 points for each of 3 berries). That's a grand total of 8 victory points, for a card costing just 3 berries (that could even be played FOR FREE with The Innkeeper, for example). For Everdell lovers, Newleaf is definitely the expansion I recommend gifting them this Christmas the most, featuring numerous new critters and constructions, reserve tokens, player redeployment tickets and even a train!