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Thursday, January 25, 2007

Elfenland

Today we (lab mates) played a board game called the Elfenland, at the lab.

This is a strategy game. A maximum of 6 players can play this game. The board is like a map with paths connecting 20 points. The paths are through different terrains like mountains/plains/desert/forest/river etc. Each point has 6 coins of different colour. Hence there are 20 coins of 6 colours on the board. Each player is assigned a colour and the mission of the game is to collect as many out of the 20 coins of the same colour assigned to you, the player.

There are small squares to represent the mode of transport (like cart/raft/dragon/pig/unicorn etc). Each player has to place the corresponding mode of transport in the path that he likes to take, while collecting the coins. There are cards that act like tickets for each mode of transport. For examples there are card that can be used to travel on cart, cards for traveling on raft or dragon etc.

In each round, the players has to pick say "x" number of squares(mode of transport) and "y" number of cards(like tickets). The player strategically places the squares on path on which he would like to travel. This goes on in a round-robin fashion till every one is done with the placing of squares (only one square can be placed per path. There are 20 destinations. each are connected by sparsely by say "n" (say 50) paths). At the end of the round, the players use their cards to travel along the path using the mode of transport placed on the path and collect the coins from the destination that they hit.

For Eg. Say "dragon" is placed on a path over "desert", the player will have to use "2" dragon cards to travel over the path. If the player need to travel over mountains using unicorn, he should use "1" unicorn card. If he doesn't have the card, he cannot travel on the path. If he has them, he travels to the destination and collects his coin. A player can travel using the mode of transport placed by other players.

We played this game during the lunch time. Good game! I finished up as one of the winners (collected 16 out of my 20 coins).