Valentines Board Game Marathon Games

Anyone who has seen my features from a few years back about playing the whole of my collection in a month will know that I never shy away from a challenge. For us, Valentine’s Day also coincides with our wedding anniversary, and since our shared hobbies are boardgames and triathlon, we have a decision to make for Valentines. Our choices for stuff to do together flip flop between sweating our way around a run and cycle or settling in for some strategic eye sweating board games.

February is not made for running or cycling, it is too cold and icy, and nothing would possess me to run on a treadmill so this year we have planned a Board Game Marathon. We have the day off and will spend it playing all of our favourite games, and eating all the best snacks. I am very excited.

First things first the accompaniments, we are starting off in the morning with some hazelnut lattes, a bit of porridge and our warm up game of Point Salad. We have not played this one in a long time, although it has been played plenty, judging by the state of the cards in our copy!

In Point Salad your turns are very simple, you either select and draft two of the face up veggie cards, or you draw one of the objective scoring cards. You will be collecting scoring cards and then trying to make your veggie selection fit with your needs. These cards will be things like 4 points per pair of pepper and onions, and so if you had that you definitely want to stay clear of a card that says -2 points per onion. It can be played as a complex maths challenge. Or if it is me, then play fast and loose with your decisions and just try your best. It might not be a surprise to hear that I don’t often win this one, but I love it anyhow. This is a good warm up game to get the synapses firing but it doesn’t take very long at two as you remove a bunch of cards from the deck.

After that, it is time to set up Terraforming Mars Ares Expedition whilst another kettle is boiled and a lovely pot of tea brewed. Years ago, we played the original Terraforming Mars, just the base game and it wasn’t love at first play. We found it a bit slow to start, I understand this is improved by the Prelude expansion and we also found it a little fiddly and long to play. However, then Ares Expedition was released, and we LOVE it. It is in both of our Top Tens. This is a slimmed-down version of the game that still involves card drafting and resource management, but it is a little simpler in its execution and sings for us. The phases of the round are decided by each player, and ideally they want to not be the same one so that you get to do more things on your turn. However if you pick the phase then you get to do a bit extra, so you do want to make sure that you are not selecting left field options for no reason… We love the way that the play is simultaneous, and generally a lot of what you do on your turn does not hugely affect what I get up, except perhaps with the ocean tile flipping.

Since it is a celebration of our togetherness, then I think a bit of co-operative play is in order, and so we will be playing the Crisis expansion. This is a crisis management where you are trying to keep the planet alive post terraforming. Last time we squeaked through by the skin of our teeth, but I think that we may have fudged a couple of rules. Safe to say, we have unfinished business that needs finishing.

We are not usually early risers so we are by now going to be long overdue lunch. It is winter and so a soup with a toastie is going to be the sustenance we need to see us through the day. I have been really enjoying the simplicity of a wintery tomato soup with a crispy cheese toastie so I think that will be featured. It also boasts the ease and simplicity of not taking long to cook.

We have been listening to a bunch of audiobooks together lately which have mostly been sci-fi or dystopian based. The biggest time sink of which has been the Red Rising trilogy. So I think this will be the next game to hit the table. Red Rising is a hand management game that draws a lot of inspiration from the card game Fantasy Realms. During your turn you will be trying to curate the best hand possible, whilst also playing down cards for their ability. We really enjoy the implementation of the theme of this game, and I will say that I think the artist's representation of the characters is really great, as are the thematic powers for each card. This is one of those games where the ending of the game can sneak up on you, so you need to be sure that you keep an eye on the tracks. In a two player game, the game ends when one person has achieved two of the three end conditions; 7 helium, 7 influence cubes on the institute, or position 7 on the fleet track.

As for our next meaty adventure, I think it will probably either be building a zoo in Ark Nova or farming our fields and building a community in Hallertau. Both of these games offer us reasonable degrees of strategy whilst also allowing us the freedom to try out new things each game.

In Ark Nova, you are aiming to build the best zoo, managing your own card engine, money and workers to ensure that you get everything you want done in each round. You’ll be building enclosures for the animals and enlisting the help of partner zoos and sponsors to ultimately help you perform enough conservation and sell enough tickets to cross over your two paths, triggering the end game. At two players we find that these turns go quickly and the game is pretty quick between us. We really want to get the new Marine Worlds expansion too.

In Hallertau, you are doing Uwe Rosenberg farming things for much of the game. You are trying to best manage your fields, crops, sheep, hides, wool, meat and milk to ensure that you are able to build buildings at the end of each of the six rounds. As play goes on, the buildings will become more expensive, and you will need to build quickly as the more you build the more workers you will get next round and more importantly that is chiefly how you get your victory points. This is a worker placement game where the spaces aren’t blocked, they just get more expensive. I really enjoy how the worker placement board changes round to round in what is expensive or not. This for us is also a Top Ten game, and it shot straight in there after only a single play.

Just whilst dinner is cooking - I reckon it will be some kind of rice dish as that is one of our favourite cuisines, we will get a few rounds of The Crew: Mission Deep Sea in. This is a co-operative trick taking mission based game. There is a story narrative that goes along with each game, but if I am honest I don’t really commit to the story, I just want to manage to complete the challenges. Strictly speaking, this is a 3-5 player game, however there is a dummy player that you use in the two-player game that we have become quite attached to and really enjoy playing with. It doesn’t particularly need much effort to run the dummy player and it offers a bit of open information and closed information to you throughout the game.

After dinner, there is really only one game to play and that is Viticulture with a nice bottle of wine, because of the theme. We really like the tight worker placement and strategy of two-player Viticulture. There are so few options for mistakes when deciding what order to place your workers in, and I feel the whole game is very heads up to determine what is going to be your opponent's next move. We have got the upgraded metal coins which really dial the experience up to 11 for us, and we like to play with the Rhine Valley visitors cards to give a slightly different spice to gameplay. If we were feeling so inclined, we could try out the Viticulture World expansion and get ourselves lost in a co-operative tug of war.

After all that brain power I would imagine we would finish with a game of Rhino Hero or The Fuzzies. Both are simple dexterity games that we both really enjoy, likely because we are equally bad at them. Probably worse after wine…