Harvest (Tasty Minstrel Games)

One of my first forays into tiny box games was a game called Harbour from Tasty Minstrel Games (TMG). It is an interesting little economic worker placement game set in the fantasy world of Gullsbottom. I loved the game designer (Scott Almes) and the art of Rob Lundy made this fantasy realm come to life. In 2017, TMG released another game in the realm of Gullsbottom called Harvest. Trey Chambers is the game designer this time around, and Rob Lundy remained on as the artist. The game plays 1 - 4 players, ages 14+. It takes between 30 and 60 minutes to play and retails for $40. In this game, you are farmers living in the community of Fallowsend. It is your goal to have the best farm by use of careful planting, meticulous tending, and special abilities from buildings. Will you have the most successful harvest this season?

Setup and Game Play
Place the Town Board central to all players and organize the crop/seed tokens by type. You have Snap Peas, Scarrots, Phantom Peppers, Rockali, and Plumpkins. (This doesn't look like any farm I've ever been to!) Next, place Farm Boards and Expansions as well as Resource Tokens of Water, Elixir, and Fertilizer near the Town Board. (Yes, there are poop-shaped pieces in this game.) Then, give each play two Farmers in their color, a Farm Board, and two Character Boards, so that they may choose the character they will be this game. (Note: Each character has a generic Wil Plantsomdill side, and this is the recommended character for your first game.) All characters have different starting resources and have special powers, except Wil, whose "power" is that he gives you 15 points at the end of the game. Lastly, you will seed the area (Seed...see what I did there?) with Action Cards (a face-down deck composed of five per player), Building/Field Cards (six face-up for Buildings, and the rest are fields), and Initiative Cards (one to each player), which determine player order and also give a bonus in all rounds but the first. The game play is very simple with four phases each of the five rounds.

1. Action Cards - Reveal one Action Card per player. These cards and the Town Board are the places you can send your Farmers each round.
2. Initiative - Reveal three Initiative Cards. Going in order of current initiative, each player will choose a new Initiative Card and receive its bonus. After everyone has selected their new card, the three cards leftover are shuffled back into the deck. The new turn order has now been established.
3. Farmer Placement - Going in initiative order, you will place farmers one at a time onto a location on the Town Board or an Action Card. This is where the meat of the game occurs and where you will either Expand your Farm, Plow a Field, Build a Building, Plant Seeds, Tend Plants, or Harvest your Crops.
4. Resolution - Reclaim your Farmers. Return the Action Cards to the box. Refill Building supply to six.

The game ends after five rounds. Count up all the stars on your farm and add any bonuses your character gave you. Most stars is the winner!

Review
This game is a lighter, fantasy-themed version of Agricola. The game play is very simple because you only get 10 actions per game (two per round), but because of these limited actions, you must make very good use of each action! Looking through all the moving parts of this game, I find myself very pleased with all the variability of this game and would like to highlight these aspects:

1. Variable Player Power - I love that everyone can have their own unique character with different starting resources and power. Im-Hoe-Tep was a favorite of mine, because I got a free building at the start of each game and my buildings counted as fields too! This encouraged me to go a building-heavy route.
2. Initiative Cards - Having people decide between more of something or being the first player is a constant struggle each turn.
3. Action Cards - Having these be different every game and only seeing one per player per round tightens up the board and makes your decisions meaningful.

Other things I liked about this game were the art and fantasy theme. For someone who owns a lot of board games, I am surprised at how few farming games I own since that seems to be a highly popular theme. I can't say this is my favorite farming game (That would be Fields of Green), but this one is a solid second place and one I would suggest to play or play when asked. There are two things I don't like about this game and both of them are very petty if I'm being honest. The first is I wish the field cards were cardboard and not just card stock. The second is that the box is bigger than its predecessor Harbour. However, I have read recently that there will be a third game in this universe called Embark that will be the same box size as Harvest, so I guess when that comes out, I can complain about Harbour being the wrong size. :) If you are looking for a fun worker placement game with a fantasy-farming theme, check it out!

This game was provided to me for free by Tasty Minstrel Games in exchange for an honest review.

Orléans with Trade and Intrigue (Tasty Minstrel Games)

Orléans is one of the Top 25 games of all time and might quite possibly be my #1 game of all time, and not just because it is one of the few games where I win against my wife. The game takes place during the medieval ages in the city of Orléans (fitting) and the area of Loire around it. It is a game for 1 to 4 players (with an upcoming expansion to add a 5th player) that retails for $60. There are two expansions for it - Invasion ($50) and Trade and Intrigue ($25), as well as numerous mini-building promos ($6 for each set of three). Today, I would like to tell you about the base game and Trade and Intrigue.

Setup and Game Play
Before the game begins, you have to seed the main board by putting Goods Tiles face up on the Road and Waterway spaces of the map. You also sort the neutral Character Tiles by their profession and place them on their appropriate buildings. Each player then receives a Bag, 5 Coins, 7 Cubes, 1 Merchant Token, 10 Trading Stations, a Player Board, and one set of Followers (composed of a Farmer, Boatman, Craftsman, and Trader). Your Merchant is placed in the city of Orléans on the map, and your cubes are placed on the starting spaces of the buildings with all the neutral Character Tiles. Next, you'll want to put the Beneficial Deeds board out. Lastly, you'll want to shuffle the Hour Glass Tiles, which dictates the event of each of the 18 rounds

At the beginning of each round, you flip over the top Hour Glass Tile, which tells you what the event will be that round. The events are mix of positive and negative, ranging from earning Coins to losing a Character Tile. Each player then reaches into their Bag and draws out a number of Character Tiles equal to their level on the Knight's building track. (Note: The first round you will only draw your initial four tiles.) Each player then arranges their Character Tiles on their Player Boards. After everyone has done this, the tiles are removed and actions are performed based on where the tiles were placed. Most of the actions revolve around recruiting a new Follower and moving up the building track of that Follower. However, you can also travel from Orléans to another city, collect a Good, and possibly build a Trade House. You can automate some of your buildings with a gear so you use fewer Character Tiles to activate them, construct a new building, which gives you the ability to perform actions that other players cannot. Lastly, you can send some of your Followers to the Beneficial Deeds board and receive a small benefit. You then take all your used Followers and new Followers and place them back in your bag to start the next round, until all Hourglass Tiles are exhausted.

Review
Orléans was my first introduction to a bag-building game. For those unfamiliar with this mechanic, it is similar to a deck-building game, except instead of having a deck of cards that you keep adding cards to, you are adding discs to a bag. The biggest difference between Orléans and a traditional deck-building game is the unpredictability of what you draw. With a traditional deck-builder, eventually you will cycle through all your cards, shuffle them, and go again. With Orléans, you keep putting the discs back in the bag, and you never know what you are going to draw. Yes, you can increase the number of discs you draw, but you may have some Followers in your bag that you only draw once or twice in an 18 round campaign. It's beautifully frustrating! This is where thinning your bag out of unnecessary workers is crucial. Not only does using the Beneficial Deeds/Trade/Intrigue board give you a boost, it also pares down your bag where you can control what you draw and optimize your points engine.

What I like best about this game is the many paths to victory. Yes, there are certain things you need to do each game, such as getting more Knights to be able to draw more discs each round, but after that the game is pretty wide-open. Gain more goods and a coin each round by getting more Farmers. Use lots of gears to automate your buildings and perform more actions. Travel every round through France and build all your Trading Houses. I repeat...many different paths to victory. What my wife likes best about this game is that there is very little player interaction (also known as multiplayer solitaire). Very little of what you do affects other players, and that is how my wife likes her games. What I didn't really like about the game was the predictability of the Hour Glass Tiles and the Beneficial Deeds board being too wide open. There are 18 rounds in a game, but only six unique events (three sets of six), so you can roughly count the Hour Glass Tiles and get a good idea of what event is coming up next. Yes, the order is different every game, but it's still a degree of predictability. As for the Beneficial Deeds board, it was nice to retire workers there, but in a 2-player game, you were hard pressed to make real progress on these boards and ever complete a lot of the tracks on that board. The Trade and Intrigue expansion fixed both of these problems.

In Trade and Intrigue, there are 34 Hourglass Tiles, divided into groups of A, B, C, and D. You will take four from each group, and two preassigned ones for a beginning and end and make a unique game experience each time. Within these tiles, you will find some repeats from the base game, but you will also find tiles that restrict which Followers you can hire, allow you to pay coins to hire a Follower, pay money for Goods, pay a tithe of your coins, or even shorten the game from 17 to 18 rounds. With no duplicates in this bunch, you never know what kind of experience you are going to end up having, and it provides new challenges to not only build your engine, but maximize it too!

There are also two new boards, one being a new Beneficial Deeds board and the other being an Intrigue board. With the former, it basically tightens up the number of spaces in a 2-player game and provides more/better rewards than the base game. The real game changer is the Intrigue board. If you didn't like the multiplayer solitaire aspect of this game, this board fixes it! Now when you send Followers here, instead of getting something, you take or destroy something of your opponents. There are actions like arson, where you can remove one of their Trading Stations, tax collector where players pay you coins, or hangman where you get money and they lose a Follower (yup, you were the one who hanged their Follower). It adds a nasty and take that element to the game, which my wife will never play, but I appreciate it being included, because it gives options for different groups and different playing styles.

The last changes to this expansion are "more of the same" and "something new." The more of the same is the new buildings included in this game, which I always appreciate because it gives me more variety to choose from each game. I own all the mini-promos, so I have a lot of buildings and this helps adds to the replay value of the game. The new aspect is called Orders. There is a deck of 23 Order cards that you shuffle and deal five face-up. On these cards is the name of a town, some goods, and a point value. On your last action, if your Merchant is in that town, and you have those goods, you may turn them in to complete the order and score points at the end of the game. This is a module of the expansion I don't play with often (or ever when teaching the game), but it feels like it adds some theme to the Merchant traveling around the map. Before, it was just a necessary thing to do to collect goods and score points. Now, your Trading Stations are actually thematically tied in and also help your goods provide more points than they would by themselves at the end of the game.

Before Trade and Intrigue, Orléans was already my favorite game in my collection. Afterwards, it just solidified my decision. This was the expansion I was hoping for with Invasion. It has everything I look for in game expansions - "more of the same," added replay value, and new twists to keep the game fresh and help me discover new paths to victory. I will never play Orléans again without the Trade and Intrigue expansion. Highly recommended!

Orléans was purchased on my own, but Trade and Intrigue was provided to me for free by Tasty Minstrel Games.

Report from Calabria (Ignatius Press)

The Carthusian Monks are a religious order that are devoted to silence, prayer, and simplicity. Due to this isolation from the world and a solitary devotion to God, they tend not to allow visitors, except on rare occasions. With that said, they recently allowed a visitor to their community in Calabria, Italy. He was an American priest, who chose to remain anonymous, follow their daily regimen, and write a book about it. This book is called Report from Calabria: A Season with the Carthusian Monks, and I'd like to tell you a little bit about it today.

The book is written in the format of journaling/letters home to his family and friends. The first letter begins by telling us a little bit about who the Carthusian Monks are, his initial impressions of the community, and the three "products" that these monks produce - 1. Divine Worship, 2. Prayer for Oneself and Others, and 3. Contemplative Union with God. He concludes the first letter by giving an outline or schedule of a typical day in the life of a Carthusian Monks. Their day starts at 11:30 PM with prayer and ends at 7:30 PM after prayer. Much of their day is spent praying in solitude in their cell, except Sundays or Solemnities. Apart from few meals (usually in silence or in their cell), there is some manual prayer but the bulk of their day is prayer. The second letter tells about the food. He describes it as simple, but delicious and a generous portion. However, they only receive one meal per day. Another letter tells us that presently that there are only six monks present at the community of Serra San Bruno. Some have died. Some have left the community. Others have gone on to set up communities in different countries. Other letters tell about the struggle of the language barrier, miracles, and the strange visitors that come visit this community.

The book concludes by giving us two appendices, one with writings of St. Bruno and the other about the popes and their support of the Carthusian Monks. Overall, I found this book to be an interesting read. It gave me some insight on a religious order that I knew very little about and will probably never experience. I appreciated the author's writing of this book and putting it on a very simple level showing the actual day to day grit and grind of this lifestyle. He didn't try to glamorize it or make it seem like something everyone could or should do, but instead showed us a lifestyle that few are called to and appreciate those who are called to such a lifestyle. Apart from the writing style, what really made this book standout was all the photographs that complemented the text. If you would like to learn more about the Carthusian Monks, I highly recommend you pick up a copy of this book.

This book was provided to me for free by Ignatius Press.