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50 shades of grey. No, not that one! I mean all the ways in which this hue appears in our board game collection. Thunder cloud, gunmetal, nickel, silver……..it pops up both light and dark. And March is all about celebrating grey in all its various shades. Perhaps to make the vibrant Easter colours of April pop even brighter. Maybe because it is one of the most versatile offerings in the paints box. Whatever the reason, here are 5 top game suggestions from David and me that put grey at the centre of the games to play in March.
Kutna Hora: The City of Silver: Favouritefoe
In this game the clue as to its propriety is in the title – The City of Silver! And silver is indeed the name of the game. Euro-gaming goodness awaits in KUTNA HORA. As you mine for the shiny stuff, you will be exercising your action selection skills to build up your precious metal empire and make money. Not to mention working on St Barbara’s Cathedral (lucky Babs!)
But your actions must be chosen carefully, and timing is critical as your winning strategy will depend upon your plans all falling into place. Not only that but your goals and the prosperity of the city itself must be carefully balanced. Guilds with asymmetrical powers also bring in an exciting and individual focus upon what’s the best thing to do and when that cleverly impacts upon the best laid plans of the other players.
Trash Pandas: David Ireland
Grey may be a dull colour, but these furry little critters are anything but dull in this fast playing, chance taking card game. Gamewright Games have created another wonderfully fast paced game for 2-4 people that plays out very quickly. The objective is simple: gather the most amount of trash possible before the trash deck runs out. On your turn, you take the specially crafted d6 which has 6 different available actions on it. The gambling then commences. Once you roll you gather the corresponding token on the die. Do you stick or twist? Stick and play all the actions you have gathered, or twist and roll again with the opportunity to gather more actions? But if you roll an action you already have, your turn is finished before it even started!
The panda pressure is high in this one and it is very much driven by your greed and how much you think you can push your luck. Fall behind and it ramps up even more significantly. It is critical to note that if you successfully gather all 6 differing actions labelled on the die, then you get a significant bonus on top of getting to play out 6 actions on your turn, so it is very much worth considering.
The added joy on this one is you don’t truly know how well your opponents are doing as the score is incredibly tricky to follow. And this ramps up the need to gamble to try and ensure you are the player on top at the end. I love Gamewright Games and this is another one that is highly enjoyable and ticks all our boxes.
It’s a Wonderful World: Favouritefoe
IT’S A WONDERFUL WORLD was featured in #rainbowboardgames (for a different colour) but it’s so good that it deserves to be in it every year! It’s a banging drafting, hand management, engine building game set in a dystopian future. Using a variety of construction cards, you choose whether to recycle them for their resource value or build them for their ongoing bonuses and victory points because your job is to build a better future.
The cards you get to use will come from your hand which (in multiplayer mode) is formed by picking and passing cards between players. As such, you know that each card you give up could be the perfect one for your opponents! Deciding whether to get your resource engine running by going hard on recycling or stashing higher VP cards for later. It’s an exquisite dilemma. Once resources are allocated, they are fixed, and constructed buildings are stored to start producing in subsequent rounds for you.
Grey industrial cards and energy cubes are an integral part of this game. They’re the basic building blocks of many resource generous cards. And because they are the first resources to produce at the end of each round, they can help complete other buildings that will give you rewards to help generate even more resources/VPs as you go along the line of colours. Not only that but it could tip you into first place for each of the round end bonuses which re linked to majority resource production. It also has an excellent solo mode, several expansion (including a fun campaign) and now there’s even an exclusively two player version (It’s Wonderful Kingdom!)1
Roborally: David Ireland
This has to be one of the greyest games available, surely. Someone will tell me otherwise, but this game is built on grey. Roborally sees 2-8 players racing around the most hazardous of boards to hit checkpoints and cross that finish line first. It is Carnage!!!
I fell in love with this game instantly on first play. Each turn, players programme their robots with a sequence of five moves. Forwards, backwards and assorted turns. Then the movement commences, and each robot moves in order of activation. All robots move their first programme, then the 2nd, through to the 5th programmed move. In Between each move, players need to factor in the board elements, robot lasers, and the damage that will be caused,
not to mention the other robots’ possible moves. If it goes wrong early, the pain in having to watch it play out when your robot is going in a direction unplanned is wonderfully painful. Which is why I instantly fell in love with the game. I shunted into my brother's robot (all the way back in 2012 when first introduced to the game) and then watched his robot drive off the board and lose a life, restarting back on the start line. It was epic, I laughed a lot, and the game was a hit for me.
With up to 8 grey robots crashing into each other, cutting through each other with on board lasers, and generally getting carried away with the various board obstacles and hazards taking you in directions you certainly didn’t plan for, what’s not to enjoy?
Piepmatz: Favouritefoe
You wouldn’t think a little card game abut songbirds would have a place in a feature about the colour grey. But there’s an entire suit in PIEPMATZ that’s grey, and it’s just one of many that will make your math-brain melt….until it suddenly clicks!
The game is set collection which centres around enticing birds away from birdfeeders and collecting seeds along the way. To get a bird, however, you need to play a bird from your hand. And you want birds because only the player with the most birds of each suit will score for the eggs on them at end game. And on top of that you’ll want pairs of birds – one male and one female - for more points.
On a turn, you will add a bird from your hand to the queue at one of the bird feeders. But you can only play a card that is a lower value than the bird currently at the bird feeder. If you can’t then you add a bird card from the display (or draw blind from the deck). If the total value of the birds in the queue is then more than the value of the card at the feeder, then you take the bird from the feeder. You’ll also take a seed card from above the bird feeder, and you take the one from the slot that corresponds with the difference in value between the sum of the queued birds and the bird at the feeder (just taken). Sometimes, you can set a chain in motion that will let you take more than one card in a single turn. How? Well, because the card at the front of the queue moves into poll position, and if the cards behind it are still worth less, then you’ll take that one too!
But not all seed cards come free. If there’s a pesky crow or a sneaky squirrel sitting alongside the seed card you have to take then they will force you to give up seeds or birds. Either way, it’s a wren-ch! A small box with a big think, Piepmatz is a brilliant and challenging twist on set collection!
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