Night of the Sheep

As my fellow GNNers know, I have long harboured aspirations - okay, illusions - of inventing a game of my own that will stand up in the company of the Berger cupboard. Previous abortive efforts have included the somewhat fiddly Henchman and the more-promising-but-somehow-hollow Luddites. And of course I have been privileged to play the Paul Jefferies creation Cargo; although my recollections of it are hazy as I was unwittingly in the grip of appendicitis.

Anyway I haven't yet given up, and having still felt there was mileage in the destructive tower idea was behind Luddites, I changed my thinking to start with the theme first and then build on top of that. Wallace would be proud!

So the new game is The Year of the Sheep. This is not a game-based gag but a genuine 'year', for the game itself is based loosely on the Highland Clearances, when Clans were ejected from their ancestral homes to make way for profitable sheep-farming, generating cash for the aristocracy. It's an appalling chapter in Scottish history, and not one that can really be paid due respect by a game, but then as Joe pointed out when I was moaning about Age of Empires, lots of these games - combat or not - contain tons of implied tragedy.

In the game 2-4 players represent a clan that is fighting the incoming tide of sheep from Admiral Ross on the Isle of Skye. There are I guess elements of Agricola - worker placement, harvesting, feeding - along with the fire-fighting aspect of something like Year of the Dragon, as you strive to keep (and grow) your clan in the face of severe provocation. The game is broken down into three phases, and each player does all three in turn:

1 Growth: crops planted or cattle reared in previous rounds generate extra resource cubes.

2 Actions: Place your septs (workers; you begin with 2) on the spaces of your choice: sowing, harvesting, going to market, fishing, or protesting. The first two are self-explanatory and the market is obviously a way to turn your goods into cash or vice versa. Fishing basically buys you time - it's a way to feed your septs but it doesn't contribute to your success. And Protest does two things: Protesting means you don't pay rent for that round, and a protest card will also bring it's own benefits, detailed individually on the cards.

There are also some special actions that have limited access, but I won't go into too much detail here.

3 Feeding/Pay Rent. At the end of your turn you must feed your septs and an allotted amount of rent to Admiral Ross - unless of course you protested on your turn, in which case he can stick his rent.

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However, after every third or fourth card (depending on how many players there are) in the Protest card deck a Clearance card will spring up; and that means the Admiral will send out the Black Watch to attack your crops and cattle - and possibly your village too - as they are placed precariously close to the castle in the centre of the board, from which the Watch will come hurtling almost as though dropped by a giant unseen hand through the castle roof. The Clearance cards also come with their own individual actions, which are not beneficial.

As the game progresses it gets harder to avoid the Black Watch, and halfway through the deck (when the Year of the Sheep card appears) they start replacing your crops with sheep, charging you more rent, and generally being a pain in the arse. When play ends - there are different ways to finish - players score points for their septs, buildings, fields, and money.

Final scores:

Andrew 86
Sam 77

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I'm sure Andrew will give an honest appraisal but I thought it was a qualified success - or maybe a mitigated failure. I was really pleased with how the protesting system worked, and it felt like the cards and board(s) integrated very well. And the  mechanics seemed to sit well with the theme.

But the things that need to be worked on were also very evident; namely that it was too easy for players to generate everything they needed (we both ended the game with bundles of cash), a few of the cards were a bit lopsided in terms of their effects, and in the latter stages of the game - mainly due to the aforementioned easiness - there was an element of treading water if we had plenty of septs to work with.

I did come away feeling there was some engineering to be done rather than a radical overhaul, and when I make those changes I hope you'll allow me to bring it to 'the table' in the GNN sense of the word. I mean, still a table, obviously. But a table with beer, ill-advised snacks, and the doughty intellect of the GNN group.