Tuesday 5th April - Flandern 1302

Flandern 1302
Originally uploaded by coljen.

Billygames bursts back into life after a couple of weeks inactivity. Due to a combination of circumstances we were only 3 to try Flandern 1302 a reletivily new game from Wolfgang Panning. Here as usual is a brief description from BGG.
This game is about the struggle for power and influence in cities by the competing guilds of the age. Players represent one city colour & have a set of tiles in 3 shapes in your colour and a set of cards for each city plus 4 action cards. You play a card and place a tile either from your set or from the church or neutral sets. The starting player also first draws a card from a central deck which effectively gives them an extra move. Tiles of the same colour cannot touch and the church tiles allow cities to expand.

When a city is completed, it is scored. The colour with the most tiles gets the 1st score, the second colour gets half that, the next gets 4 points and the fourth colour gets 2 pts. Therefore it is possible for the nuetral colour to score more points than players. The score is a total of the tiles in the city, plus one for each church, plus one for each cathedral place.

As nobody had played this before it took us a while to read through the rules, but it soon fell into place. I must say that I am quite partial to tile laying games. Renier Knizia has a few that I like a lot, Samurai, Tigris & Euphrates to name a couple. After we had played the first couple of turns it started to fall into place. Playing the card that allows you to take all your cards back into hand can be very useful if played at the right time. And you only have 3 influence cards in your starting hand, it pays to use these wisely as well. You can get more influence cards from the deck of gold cards, but you can’t rely on getting them. Using the church and neutral (grey) tiles can be critical too. Either to increase the points score of a city that you are confident of winning or denying space for an opponent to get one of their tiles into the city. In fact the grey guild did fairly well in our game, beating Steve to third place!
I enjoyed our first playing of Flandern 1302, and would certainly play again. The picture is just over half way through the game with two cities left to score.