I attended Board Game Night at Comic Quest on Thursday. There were around 20 people at the event with
five games being played at any one time.
I played two games at the event.
The first game I played was Bohnanza. Bohnanza is card game where the players are
farmers that are planting and growing beans in their fields. Each player starts the game with two fields
to plant beans in and five cards that represent the beans that they currently
own. There are 11 different types of
bean cards. There is a varying number of
each card in the deck. The types of
beans with the fewest bean cards in the deck are more valuable than the types
of beans that have more cards in the deck.
The goal of the game is for the player to collect as much
money as they can by planting and harvesting beans.
A player’s turn goes as follows first the player needs to
plant the front card from their hand in one of their fields. They may plant the next one if they wish to
as well. They then turn two cards from
the draw deck face up. The player may
trade these cards and any cards left in their hand with the rest of the
players. Once this is done all of the
players must plant the beans they have receive from the trades in their fields
even if it requires them to harvest one of their field before they want
to. The player then draws three replacement
cards for their hand. The play then
continues to the next player.
When a player harvests their fields they get the value in
coins based on the beanometer they type of bean the player harvests. The more of a type of bean that is in the
game the more beans they need to harvest in order to get coins. The player then keeps the number of cards
they earned as coins, which are depicted on the backs of the cards. The rest are returned to the discard pile.
The key is that all cards in a player’s hand must be played
in order. They can only be removed from
a player’s hand out of order if the player trades the card to another player.
The game ends when the draw deck has been gone through three
times.
It had been a long while since I had played the game. I have been trying to get it on the table
again for over a year at various times with no success. I started the game with a poor hand of cards
so I started trading immediately for beans that I thought would be useful and
turned in a couple of low yield harvest so I could get the money so I could
build my third bean field quickly. After
I did this I settled in for the long haul trying to maximize each bean field
before I harvested it and trading whenever I could. This turned into a winning strategy for me
and I ended up in winning the game against five other people.
The other game I played was Martian Rails. Martian Rails takes the science fiction and
fantasy elements from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury and other authors and
brings them to the game. There are
canals with water and forest and jungle terrain on the board, cities are called
thing like Barsoom and Hinkston Creek, and you even have loads like
Roddenberries and Thoats.
The unique feature of the Empire Builder family of games is
the free form building of track that it allows.
The player uses special crayons that are included with the game to draw
their track on the board. Between games
the marking from the previous game are erased from the game so that in the next
play of the game the players start with a fresh board.
This session of Martian Rails went beautifully for me. At the start of the game I had to change my
plans three times but I was still able to build the optimum run of track from
Burroughs Landing to Marsport and I fanned out from there to the other major
cities as the game progress leaving out only Hellasport.
I consistently received good cards and only had to discard
my hand one during the game. I ended up
winning the game handily.
My stats for the event:
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