For the initial meld with the pile frozen, what are the rules for picking up the discard pile? If the minimum meld is 120, is the meld plus two naturals needed to pick up the pile, or just two naturals and a wild card and be able to use this as part of my meld. I have always played that in order to pick up the pile I need the meld plus a natural pair in order to pick up a frozen pile, but just lately I’ve seen it where the person was able to pick up the frozen pile with 2 naturals plus wild card while the pile is frozen. Which version is correct?
This is the fourth in a series of InsideGMT articles from Paul Hellyer about his board game Tsar, currently on GMT’s P500. You can view the previous article here.
Tsarist Russia was supposedly ruled by one person, but this didn’t keep Nicholas II’s subjects from debating the faults and merits of their government and hatching ideas for the future of their country. Rivals jockeyed for official appointments and access to the Tsar, and they often grouped themselves into parties, unions, and informal networks to press for their policy preferences.
In Tsar, each player plays one of four Factions based on these historical rivalries: the Dynasty, Autocracy, Pragmatism, and Reform Factions. Each comes with its own set of Characters and scoring objectives. In this article, we’ll look at these Factions, their objectives, and how scoring works in the game.
The Dynasty Faction advances the interests of the Romanov Dynasty and favors conservatism. Most of its Characters are members of the Romanov family, for whom the title “Grand Duke” was reserved. In addition to its other scoring goals, this Faction scores an extra 1 VP per round when at least two Grand Dukes are on the game board. The Autocracy Faction seeks to preserve autocratic principles and favors governance through force and intimidation; it partners with the Dynasty Faction on political questions. The Pragmatism Faction features the game’s most capable Characters and aligns politically with the Reform Faction. The Reform Faction seeks to gradually transform Russia into a democracy, beginning with the Zemstvos movement in Era I and concluding with constitutional monarchy in Era IV. It favors a strategy of governance through popular consent. Aside from politics, all the Factions are interested in different aspects of economic development and all seek credit for military success. You might notice that revolutionary factions are missing from the list. That’s because Tsar is a simulation of government and includes only those factions that had a historical role in the Tsar’s government.
Each Faction’s scoring objectives are conveyed through Scoring Cards, with two examples shown above. You’ll have a different Scoring Card for each Era. Each card sets forth your Primary VP Goal, Secondary VP Goal, and Action Phase Bonus; for the Dynasty Faction, you also get a reminder about the Grand Dukes Bonus. Anyone may view any of these cards at any time.
The Primary and Secondary VP Goals each have three levels. Pragmatism’s Primary VP Goal is to put more Naval Squadrons into play and it begins scoring when there are four Squadrons. It scores at a higher level when there are six Squadrons and at the highest level when there are seven or more. These points aren’t scored immediately when you achieve your goals in the Action Phase—instead, players use their Influence Cubes in the Scoring Phase to trigger scoring. As shown on the Scoring Cards, you can use three cubes to trigger scoring for your Primary Goal or two cubes for your Secondary Goal; in solitaire games, you use four cubes to trigger scoring in both categories simultaneously. The number of times you trigger scoring is limited only by your Influence Cubes, which you gain in each round’s Setup Phase through the placement of your Characters, as well as through bonuses in the Action and Audience Phases that you can earn by pleasing the Tsar. You’ll use these cubes not only for scoring, but also to support your policy preferences in Council Decisions and to get your Characters on the game board and into Offices.
The Action Phase Bonus works differently. This features a one-time achievement, as opposed to the gradual buildups that you pursue for your Primary and Secondary Goals. In Era II, the Pragmatism and Autocracy Factions seek to gain control of the Turkish Straits. On the right, you can see one side of the Turkish Straits Card. This is a Council Decision, so in a multiplayer game, players might be bidding against each other with their Influence Cubes. As soon as you achieve your Action Phase Bonus, you trigger an automatic, one-time payout of VP, and it won’t be scored again.
The Zemstvos Card is another example of a card that’s closely related to scoring. In Era I, this is Reform’s Primary VP Goal and Pragmatism’s Secondary VP Goal. The first stage is to create Zemstvos in rural areas, the second in towns, and the third in cities. As each of these goals are achieved, markers are placed in the game board’s Government Tracker. Because scoring for this goal is performed in the Scoring Phase, you’ll notice there are no VP icons on the card. You’ll refer to your Scoring Card and the conditions on the game board to calculate points.
Although scoring is tracked individually for each player, you aren’t pursuing the named goals for yourself, but for Russia. The Squadrons that Pragmatism builds are placed on the board, where they belong to the government, which is to say, they belong to the players collectively. Likewise, seizing control of the Straits and advancing the Zemstvos movement affects everyone by changing the course of the country. Although players have their own separate supplies of Influence Cubes, the economic resources they need to achieve their goals are also shared collectively. The Gold, Industrial Cubes, and Transport Points that Pragmatism needs to build those Squadrons come from the game board, not from any personal supply. The Reform Faction would like to use those same resources to expand industry, and the two Factions will compete with each other to persuade the Tsar to approve their respective priorities.
Tsar is a semi-cooperative game. You share not only effects and resources but also objectives. Each of your scoring goals overlaps with one other player, and your partners are marked for you on the Scoring Cards. Notice that you score slightly higher amounts for your Primary Goal as opposed to your Secondary, so while two Factions will share a goal, their interests are not identical. The players will have to decide the degree of cooperation between them, and this cooperation applies not only to achieving goals, but also to scoring them. When you trigger scoring in the Scoring Phase, you trigger it for yourself and your partner. So if the players have completed two stages of the Zemstvos movement, the Reform Faction could use three Influence Cubes to score three points for itself and two points for its partner, the Pragmatism Faction. Alternatively, the Pragmatism Faction could use only two Influence Cubes to trigger the same scoring. So players will need to consider their own gains as well as the gains of their partner. Aside from coordinating their use of Influence, players might also coordinate their control of certain Offices or agree to support a player’s position as the Favorite. Although the partnerships in the game are fixed, the way you handle them is very fluid, and you’re free to switch your cooperation from one potential partner to another. There are also opportunities to impede rivals, such as lowering the Favorite’s Favor level, withdrawing a Character from the Camarilla, removing a Character from an Office, or even allowing a rival Character to be assassinated by revolutionaries.
On the Scoring Cards, you can see another scoring option that’s always available in multiplayer games: using five Influence to score 1 VP for yourself only. This is much less rewarding than the other scoring categories, but you can use it at any time and you don’t have to share it. It adds another layer of flexibility to the game. At the end of the Scoring Phase, each player has to discard down to five Influence Cubes, so hoarding all your Influence is not an option. Typically, players will use Influence to achieve goals early in the game, and then switch to using Influence to trigger scoring later in the game.
If you avoid revolution, the last card you’ll play in each Era will be Final Scoring, which immediately concludes the game. During peacetime, the game engine always seeds this card in the 16th round; in wartime, it will appear when the war ends or in the 16th round, whichever comes first. As shown on the card, players automatically score triple VP for both their primary and secondary goals. Your Gold (which you would want if there’s a revolution) is a penalty in Final Scoring. There’s no Scoring Phase in the final Quarter, but your unused Influence Cubes are the first tiebreaker. The second tiebreaker is Player Order, which begins with the Tsar’s current Favorite.
If you’re playing in legacy style, scores will be reset in the next Era, but there are some carryover effects based on victory rank: the winner becomes the initial Favorite in the next game and gets first dibs in drawing special bonus cards (the Order of St. Vladimir Cards) that reward you for avoiding revolution or penalize you if the regime collapses. In lieu of an Order of St. Vladimir Card, the player in last place gets to retain 10% of their VP score. Going into the next Era, this gives the players somewhat different incentives when it comes to avoiding revolution.
In the next InsideGMT article in this series, we’ll take a closer look at decision mechanics.
I play many board games, this is not one of the obvious ones. I am trying to find the name of a game that I think went out of print.
It is a sci-fi game.
Every player is in charge of a faction.
You are all trying to colonize/exploit the same planet.
It is not Terra Forming Mars though the planet might be Mars. (There are fewer cards and more plastic pieces)
I think every player had their own rectangular play mat that represented their stakes/claims on the planet.
Trading resources was a critical part of the game. (The dynamic player influenced market is one of the biggest things I remember)
It might be considered more of a worker placement game.
My memory is getting less clear about details after this point
Play took place mostly on your own mat. The "central board" was more a market where players exchanges resources and bought "units" (mostly excavators or androids?).
I think the game initially came out in the 90s or earlier then got a reprint in the 2010s.
The set I played was newly opened in the 2010ish and had bright plastic pieces.
In the question Magic: The Gathering – Are there behavioral rules for sanctioned MTG games? one of the ‘serious violations’ listed is "influencing match outcomes", and a suggested method is ‘using randomness to decide the outcome of the match’. Interestingly, (and probably because of the problem I’m about to point out) this has since been removed from this document’s latest version.
I understand the reason it’s there: if players were allowed to flip a coin to decide who wins and fix the match beforehand, that would be problematic: it could run into gambling laws.
But in the interest of completeness, I’d still like to ask a historical question: Given the rules of the day, could it be possible that this ‘behavior violation’ could come up during the normal course of play if a player decided that using randomness was the best course of action, and did so?
For example, consider a situation in which a player could ‘bluff’ having a counter-card in a combat. Gregory, playing green, attacks with a 2/2 bear into Bob’s 3/3 zombie. Normally, this would be a mistake, but Gregory has several unidentified cards in his hand.
Greg should (to play optimally) bluff some percentage of the time in this situation (the exact amount is some complex game theory I won’t get into in this post). So he could covertly roll a d20 to decide, and do the same thing if he actually does have the buff in hand, but not use the result. (Or use any other method or source of randomness.) He could use the primary colour of the shirt of the player sitting across and to the side of him. Or any other thing that would be really hard to prove. If it is not allowed, then how would one even catch a player using such a covert random method?1
Let’s say that the outcome of this play happens to decide the outcome of the match. If Greg loses his creature, he falls behind and can’t overcome Bob. But the same holds for Bob. If Greg gets in the two damage, that just so happens to be the two points he needs later on in the game. (If Bob was already at two life or below, he would obviously have to block).
1: The reason to do so would be because people are bad at generating true randomness. Using a proxy prevents your opponents from reading a pattern and catching the bluff more often than by pure guess. A pair of sunglasses is also highly recommended.
I know using the CSW2019 is known (0.572% (or 1 in 175)), but that has many strange words in it. This is regarding the first word of the game covering the center square of course. How many of the 3,199,724 racks are there with no playable word? I’m thinking the overall probability (out of 16,007,560,800) is near 1.000% or 1 in a 100.
I’ve been playing Checkers on CardGames.io, and I’ve noticed some players make perfect moves instantly, almost as if they’re using a bot or AI to assist them.
I understand that AI solvers for Checkers (like Chinook or web-based tools) require you to input the current board state before they return the optimal move. But this takes time — so how are these players seemingly:
Reading the board state immediately
Sending it to a solver
And executing the move without any delay
How could a player be getting AI solver moves so quickly?
For example, are they using browser extensions, scripts, or something else to automate the reading of the board and feeding it to an engine? How technically difficult would it be to pull off without the site detecting it?
We’ve learned over the years that a card game from Grandpa Beck’s Games is sure to be a good time around the table. 3-2-1 Countdown is a card shedding game released in early 2025 that we’re just now getting a chance to play. Will this retro rocket themed game be a crowd pleaser or will this be a failure to launch?
Countdown
3-2-1 Countdown is for two to eight players and is played over the course of 5 rounds. Each round, players are trying to shed the twelve cards from their hand or at least have the lowest valued hand when the round comes to an end. In higher player count games, you’ll only have ten cards in your hand, but the objective remains the same.
On your turn, you’ll simply discard a card or cards of all the same value to one discard pile, then draw the top card of the other discard pile. If you don’t like the card laying at the top, feel free to draw blind from the top of the deck in the center of the table. Having multiple copies of the same card is a great thing because it means that you can discard all of them at one time, inching your hand of cards closer to empty.
Drawing a new card after discarding can give you a chance of doubling or tripling another card value in your hand, making a future turn even more lucrative. Players are dropping cards and looking for chances to gain lower cards or cards that have synergy with the cards they have in their hand.
Ready to Blast Off
A round of 3-2-1 Countdown will end in one of two ways. If a player is able to discard a final card or cards on their turn, they say “Blast Off” and the round is over. For shedding all their cards, this player gets three points for emptying their hand. All other players share their numerical card totals as they share their hand of remaining cards. The player with the lowest card total gets two points and the next lowest gets one point.
A player can choose to end a round before someone has the opportunity to empty their hand. If a player has five or less points in their hand, they can place their cards face up in front of them, saying “Countdown”. This will end the round, but could be a risky move. If another player has a lower point total in their hand, they will grab the three victory points while the player who initiated this receives nothing. If the player who said “Countdown” did have the lowest total, they receive an additional bonus point, scoring four points. In either case, the next two players with the lowest point totals receive two and one point respectively.
The players that finish outside of the three lowest values don’t receive points, but there’s always next round. Most of our games, we play the full five rounds before totaling the players scores. In a game with six or seven players, we’ll sometimes play three or four rounds for a quicker game.
Mission Control
3-2-1 Countdown has great artwork from Apryl Stott that’s reminiscent of mid-1900’s science fiction. The rocket and color pallet of the game is excellent and works well as you race to shed your cards. I really enjoy the variety of rockets that appear on the eleven different cards in the game (zero to ten).
The card breakdown is weighted to the middle of the deck with the five cards showing up the most frequently. This is important to understand as you make decisions on whether or not to pick up specific numbers after discarding on your turn. Players often shoot immediately for low numbered cards in their first couple games. The problem is that the lower and higher cards in the deck are less plentiful, giving you less card matches in your hand.
While it seems counter intuitive, picking up that six or seven card makes a lot of sense. Chances are that you’ll have a couple of these cards in your hand already. Discarding a pile of cards feels so satisfying as you work to catch the other players off guard.
This game definitely flew under our radar this year. I originally didn’t dig too deep into 3-2-1 Countdown because of the shear number of card games that have shown up in our house over the past year. We had a chance to check the game out at Origins Game Fair in June and we knew this would be a hit for our family and friends.
I’m a little sad that we waited six months to check out this great card shedding game. The game is quick to teach and moves really fast after you get through your first round. I like that players who don’t finish in the top three of the round are locked out of earning points. While scores are pretty low numerically, the games we’ve played have been tight and competitive.
I’m positive that this is one of my top three games that Grandpa Beck’s publishes. It’s going to be tough to take the place of the incredible trick-taking classic Skull King and the ultra mean Cover Your A$$ets. 3-2-1 Countdown is a game that can hit the table after dinner or at the beginning or end of any game night. This is an easy suggestion for anyone who’s looking to introduce a new card game that the whole family can jump into.
The opponent decides to use the activated ability of Nevinyrral's Disk. When the artifact is tapped to use it, I respond by casting a Stifle, which counters the Disk’s ability, avoiding the total destruction that would result.
My question, however, is the following:
Nevinyrral’s Disk is normally placed in the graveyard after being used;
but its activation was countered;
therefore, does the Disk remain on the Battlefield, or is it placed in the graveyard from the game in any case,as indicated by the card text, even after its ability was countered ?
In the Fourth and Fifth edition printings of Verduran Enchantress, her triggered ability that allows her controller to draw a card after successfully casting an enchantment was written as an activated ability:
{0}: Draw a card when you successfully cast an enchantment. Use this effect only once for each enchantment cast.
While this is nearly identical in terms of game effect, the difference in something being an activated ability versus a triggered ability can matter for other cards like Strict Proctor.
Is there an easy way to tell just from this card that the updated Oracle text has turned this into a triggered ability? If not, how do I explain it to another player, especially a beginner, who has the outdated wording of this card?
