Coral Islands & Bohemian Villages

In between real life things and some Mincraft sessions, and spending too much time on those little app games that keep asking for a dollar here or $2.99 there, we got some actual board game play into the mix. 

First, I brought over Coral Islands, which turned to be 3 different games in one box: Coral, Islands (flip over the little game mat and use different cards), and a solo game I intend to try some day.  This is a dice-stacking game that comes with about 80 dice.  You make vertical stacks of up to 3 dice, one at a time, and try to match the patterns on the cards.  Match a pattern, take a card, and it sounded almost too simple to be worth the hassle of working through the specific setup situation.  But after there are a few dice on the mat, it's obvious that it's not as simple as it looked.

First, a die can only be placed on a die of lower value (or an adjacent empty space), except for ones which can be placed on any number.  And you get fish tokens for not getting a match on your turn, or for getting a card that shows fish tokens, and you can use those tokens to change the value of a die by one up or down per token.  On our first game, nobody got the 3-point "staircase of 3" pattern.  Another pattern required two adjacent opponent dice on the second layer, then three of yours around it like an arrow, which was easier said than done.

We ended up staring at the stacks and working out moves together.  Overall, it was a bit much for Anne who has shaky hands, but I was happy to help with moves and rotating the game mat slowly to see what was where.  But we did not play a second game.  I will try the solitaire version.

I also looks like they have a good range of expansions.

Next up was Bohemian Villages, we I already blogged about, roughly a year back.  Again, it had a friendly feel to it, and there were enough choices of where to put the dice, and we took turns stealing the bishop and cashing in the little bags of wheat.  It's nice that the different buildings have different scoring dynamics, but also annoying at the same time.  Sure, there are little cheat sheet reference cards, but having to keep looking up numbers on the card is not the most fun.  Another game or two and we'd be back up to full speed, but we were getting headaches, so we packed it up for the night.

She ended up winning this one also, but when I was up in the middle of the night I realized we had forgotten to score my Town Hall (the village was 100% occupied at the end of the game) and the markets (I had 4, she had 1), so I should have been 6 points ahead.