In the end, the player with the best kingdom—and not the richest player—becomes the sovereign of the island. Roads, however, don't have to join up, though there is often a benefit in income or points (depending upon the scoring tiles drawn) in doing so. This was the second successive year the design team of Andreas Pelikan and Alexander Pfister won the Kennerspiel, following the 2015 Kennerspiel des Jahres won for the game Broom Service. All photos on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.

Stories is a game with a remarkably dedicated following, an adventurous business model and a game-play design that pushes the barriers of the hobby. There are 16 victory point criteria ranging from points awarded for the most ships within your tableau to the points being awarded for how big your biggest lake is. Nonetheless, while the whole is exactly the value of the sum of its parts, it manages to be an extremely likeable game. During a round, each player receives income (five money, plus one more for each whisky that can be reached from road from their starting castle tile), draws three tiles randomly from the included cloth bag and then places them, hidden, behind their player screen.The journeyman markers act as some sort of connector between and to the landscape built by the players. With two, a player is always guaranteed at least one tile per round; with five, the “charity” before each round becomes more necessary (and more helpful). Isle of Skye takes the relatively tame strategic decisions of Carcassonne and kicks them to the curve.

Some of these tiles award you for the number of sheep, cows boats,, buildings or whisky on your settlement, whilst others reward you for completing roads or terrain areas. Isle of Skye is a game that takes the tile laying and terrain matching aspects of Carcasonne and fuses it with a clever auction system to create an elegant, relaxed and and fun little number for two to five players. If there were an Oscar for board games, the various Spiel des Jahres accolades would be our golden statue.

Each game is different and leads to different tactics and strategies, but having enough money is useful no matter what else is going on.

Man, this is a review of tangents and digressions, but I’m going to take one more detour before we get to the main thrust.I’ve read forum posts questioning the “catch-up” mechanism in the game–starting with the third round, players get money for each person ahead of them on the score track. It is incredibly hard to see the tunnels, even harder to actually use them for anything, and anyone who’s played Carcassonne is going to have their head explode when they read the rulebook and try to understand how connected mountains (think Cities in Carcassonne) are defined in this expansion. It is this to and fro of wealth which makes it a slightly more interesting game than a simple tile laying game.

But if the money scoring condition is on the table, players might be more frugal, trying to earn the points it provides. If we don’t have a game you are looking for it please contact us and we will do our best to help you.

Nevertheless, players need more time to play the game with this expansion, since it immensely increases the game length.