Fast Flowing Friese Fun

I forgot to take photographs of the first of our Tuesday games this week, which was Macao. This is a very nice game with an unusual mechanic entailing the use of a number of coloured dice, a lot of coloured blocks and a compass rose.

The blocks are used as action points in buying goods, moving ships and purchasing cards representing offices and buildings.

It is a game I recognised immediately as one I had played at a Con a couple of years ago, really enjoyed and tried unsuccessfully to recall the name of in the intervening time.

It took me a while to get used to it again. In particular the need for advanced planning. Crabro won I think, but the scores were very close after I did manage to put together some useful moves towards the end of the game. This is definitely one I would like in my own collection.

After lunch we turned to another recent bargain purchase: Maori. This proved to be more of a filler. A very light but attractive little game of tile placement. We played a couple of games and tried one of the varients, using the rather tighter placement rules and the reverse of the player boards.

We finished the day with another new purchase but one we had also played at the same con that introduced us to Macao: Fast Flowing Forest Fellers. I remembered it as not going down very well (except with me) so I was delighted that Crabro was not one of those who had given it the thumbs down.

This is another game by the man with green hair and obsession with the letter "F": Friedmann Friese. This is not a Power Grid (Funkenschlag for the F conscious) variant but a light-hearted race game with plenty of opportunity to confound the plans of your fellow lumberjacks.

The course is strewn with logs (nice chunky wooden pieces) and a variety of map boards can be put together into courses of varying complexity. The wooden pieces come in various colours, and more unusually two sexes. Using individual sets of cards for each piece shuffled into a personal deck the players attempt to get their lumberjacks (in our case three, in two colours - a male and female in one colour and a further male) down the river to exit off the bottom of the boards. Once a piece is off the board its cards become "wildcards" useable for the remaining lumberjacks.

Where this game takes off is in the opportunity to shove other pieces (including the logs) into currents (depicted by arrows on the board) which eddy in different directions including back up-river.

I won the first of our games and appeared to have the second one sewn up when I had a run of less-than-useful low cards and was overtaken at the last to make it one all.

This is very light but if played in the right spirit and with a "fast-flowing" pace it is a great deal of fun. I think our group will enjoy it and I'm pretty sure that the Goldstone Gamers would enjoy it too.