29.03.07 Attention coffee lovers! Or rather: watch out! The enclosed coffee in Guatemala Café is not meant for consumption. So if you bought the game for this purpose, you might be disappointed. But how should you know that tiny undersized but lovely smelling coffee beans are supplied with the game; didn’ t we go out to the shop to buy the game for its kindling instead, did we not? Why? Because Eggertspiele must have closed a very secret and profitable contract with the local forester, when we look at the game components: wooden figurines, wooden sticks, wooden sheds, ships and coffee bags; the game box is brimful of wood, a box of bricks is nothing compared with it. And when it comes to game boards, on its production was not cut on costs either: there are two of them, both printed on two sides for varying participating players and variants.
On the first board, the production board, that is made of a grid of 9 by 9, the workers, ships and sheds are placed. A general token, the buyer, moves along the edge of the board, one to three spaces of the active players choice - an additional fourth space has to be paid for.
After this the player chooses one to three objects from the row that the token is in and places them on the joining plantation board as he sees fit, paying accordingly to their position on the plantation board: mountain, woods, or plains. Empty spaces on the production board are filled with road sticks that, if chosen in a future turn, can be placed without cost on the plantation board. On this board the workers are placed next to the sheds, earning points in a score, possibly multiplied if there are one or more ships of a matching colour in the harbour, and there is a connection by road to it.
Scores are declared on the production board, after the buyer token has moved and has sight at one of the six coloured coffee bags; the score is instead of a normal buying/placement turn. First, the player takes his 8 money, the only way to earn money during the game; after this the matching colour shed and adjacent workers are scored for all players, not only the active player. The coffee bag is placed at the last open space of the score track - at first on position 50 of the track, in a next score on 49, and so on. The empty space on the production board is refilled with a coffee bag of the active players choice, taken from his own supply.
This continues until a players scoring token meets or runs over any of the coffee bags, or if a placed coffee bag hits a scoring token; after this last score the player who has proceeded farthest on the scoring track has won. A score can be blocked by any other player, starting with the player on the left who is asked if he wants to block the scoring; if he does, he places a coffee bag of the same colour on the production board; the active player now still may buy one to three items from the row the coffee bag is placed in and place them on the plantation board. This happens if any other player may find that the active player will get relatively too many points by scoring from his shed and possible ships.
But: are we doing something wrong? Are we being too unkind to each other? Because in our game we kept on blocking, and it lasted until the end of the game when finally two players managed to score ten to fifteen points; the row of placed coffee bags at that time already was on the ‘35’ space of the score track. After that it was a matter of time; anyone could have won if only the right coloured coffee bag could be reached by the buyer token, as no player had any bags left to block a scoring.
At first it seems that the production board is a rather cumbersome way to collect items, but the added value lies within the tactical possibilities of the buyer token that must not be underestimated. The consideration to move only a limited amount of spaces thereby placing the token in an unfavorable position for the next player has a high ‘pool level’. And there are more considerations to make: take the workers first, and after that the completing shed that starts the scoring? And where to build: near to the coast, which is more expensive but easier to connect the harbour with a road, or build with less costs in the mountains, with less necessity to declare a score, due to a plain lack of funds but with a high probability that the coast never will be reached, not to mention the possibility that the ships might be gone in previous scorings or are docked in other harbours by the time we need them? Is there, to put it shortly, a way to score the winning smasher?
All these considerations make Guatemala Café an exciting but also frustrating game: we have plentiful plans, but the possibilities to execute them are often much less thanks to the valued but our plans traversing fellow players - we have it all drawn out, but there is so little of it that we can execute! So, whether Guatemala Café is a must have, or, after repeated play, turns out to be a disappointment, is after this first acquintance therefore no foregone conclusion.
Guatemala Café, Inka & Markus Brand, Eggertspiele, 2007 - 2 to 4 players, 10 years and up, 60 to 75 minutesxxtop

19.02.07 Spring is in the air, time to get the garden out of its winter sleep. You have just moved and want to impress the neighbourhood by winning the annual garden competition. In this game you start out with a blank board representing your garden. The garden is divided into three sections: full sun, half-shade and shade. During the twelve rounds of the game, you try to fill your garden with an abundance of colourful flowers. However at the end of the game the jury will only reward victory  points for flowers and colours that are to their taste. During the game  the jury will reveal some of their taste. There are two ways to get flowers for your garden. You can buy them from the general nursery. In the first part of the game flowers can be bought as seeds, this is a lot cheaper than when you have to buy them later in the game when they are flourishing. However in the first rounds of the game very little is known about the taste of the judges, which makes it difficult to know which flowers will earn you points at the end of the game. It is also possible to introduce yourself to the neighbours and to perform chores in and around their house, like babysitting and lawn mowing for either money or favours. In rounds five, eight and eleven the neighbours will give flowers to those who have done the most chores for favours. This is the second way to get flowers. However it is not a bed of roses all the time, every garden suffers from weeds at some point. Weeds exponentially grow from your garden to the neighbour’s garden and back again, it is necessary to keep them under control. Weeding a weed costs one action and a player can only perform two actions per turn, a nasty job like weeding is therefore often skipped by players. Except buying flowers, doing chores and weeding, a player can also buy a judge a cup of coffee to schmooze with them and figure out their taste. After twelve rounds points are rewarded for each flower and colour that corresponds to the taste of the jury; for every weed in your garden a point is subtracted from your score. ‘Garden Competition’ is a surprising and friendly game. The theme of the game, gardening, appears clearly.  It is a pity however, that the semi-professional producer Toccata Games charges 40 Canadian Dollar for sending on top of the already substantial game price. Marijn Vis
Garden Competition, Ken Stevens, Toccata Games, 2004 - 2 to 5 players, 10 years and up, 90 minutesxxtop