Danger Planet session. 4-player Sunda to Sahul, 4-player Siesta.
Players were Karl, Jason, Mike, myself. New players to the game were: Karl, Jason, Mike, myself. Karl then Mike had the first turn.
We spent 10 minutes going over the rules and setting up the game.
This is a puzzle tile-laying game with a colonizing theme.
The tiles are actual puzzle pieces representing a combination of land and water. These tiles must be played so that the land and water line up to make islands.
Players divide all the tiles amongst themselves face-up.
The turn sequence is: take a tile, place a tile, place a totem token on a node. Each player gets to execute the turn sequence twice. Tiles may be replaced if they're not playable at no expense. A node is a point at which land tiles meet.
There's nothing more to the basic game. Each token on a node scores a point. Tokens score two points on each node in a complete island.
The first advanced rule concerns lakes. A person who completes the final node in a lake gets to put a token in the lake. A lake score five points. A lakes in a complete island scores ten points.
We actually didn't get past these two rules before starting the game. This was enough to get us going.
We actually played two games. First with Karl and myself, then with four players.
This was a turn-based game, and we found out why a real-time game would be appealing -- it takes so darn long for other players to take their turns!
It was painful, as well, to be searching for just the right piece to score a node, when that piece didn't exist (or was already in play, or was in possession of another player!)
Overall, this was a fun game. Watching the emerging patterns is fun, and it is a true puzzler to get the pieces to fit favorably.
The game comes with a nice scoring track, but it's not needed at all because scores are tallied at the end of the game only. We did admire that the tiles are made of actual wood rather than pressed board!
I'm eager to try the additional advanced rules in real-time.
Caption: Sunda to Sahul end-game.
Game lasted 60 then 90 minutes. Final scores were:
Click here to learn more about Sunda to Sahul at BoardGameGeek.com.
Players were Karl, Jason, Mike, myself. New players to the game were: Jason, Mike. I had the first turn.
We spent 6 minutes going over the rules and setting up the game.
I tried starting in the corner again, to make things interesting.
That was a mistake, because I oriented the pieces unfavorably for expansion. Everyone played well, jumping on siestas. It was a hard choice to grow one's own score or prevent other's siestas.
Caption: Siesta end-game.
Game lasted 39 minutes. Final scores were:
Click here to buy Siesta at FunAgain.com.
Click here to learn more about Siesta at BoardGameGeek.com.
