{"id":10426,"date":"2024-10-09T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-09T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10426"},"modified":"2024-10-08T22:47:42","modified_gmt":"2024-10-09T02:47:42","slug":"applejack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2024\/10\/09\/applejack\/","title":{"rendered":"Applejack."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Applejack<\/a> comes from Uwe Rosenberg, known for his heavy worker placement games and his light tile-laying games, although I think it\u2019s been a few years since he had a real \u2018hit\u2019 \u2013 probably 2020\u2019s tile-layer New York Zoo. Applejack came out in 2023 and it\u2019s a perfectly fine game that suffers from an overwrought final scoring mechanic, so while I think it\u2019s good enough to recommend, it\u2019s not one I\u2019ll come back to very often.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Applejack, players will draft hexagonal tiles to fill out their meadow to attract the most bees and grow the most apples of seven different varieties. Each tile has up to four apples on it, possibly some flowers, and honey pots with numbers from 2 to 10 on at least one of the six edges. There\u2019s a central board with a spiral track, and as the round-marker die moves, it will offer you your choices of the tiles in the bucket ahead of it and the bucket behind it (located around the outside of the board). You can place the tile anywhere on your personal board; if you line up an edge with a honey pot next to another edge with a honey pot, either on another tile or on the outer frame of your board, you get coins (honey) equal to the lower of those two values. That matters because you have to pay coins for the tile you draft, with the cost equal to the value of its honey pot(s). If you can\u2019t pay, you must flip the tile over and place it face-down, with no apples, flowers, or honey pots showing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The general goal is to place tiles to create chains of apple varieties; as the round marker moves, it will score the different varieties one or two at a time, giving each player coins equal to the number of tiles in the longest chain of that variety minus<\/em> the current round number. Flowers score one coin apiece at the end of the first round, two apiece at the end of the second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About halfway through round three, all players will have filled their boards and the game ends. You then score each apple variety again, subtracting three for the current round number, and double<\/em> that number \u2013 effectively scoring them twice. Then there\u2019s a bonus for the number of apple varieties you scored in that last harvest, starting with 4 coins for 4 varieties up to 35 points if you scored all 7. And flowers score again, but this time it\u2019s back to just one coin per flower. Whoever has the most coins wins.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The actual game play, meaning the tile selection and placement, is good. I\u2019d even argue that it\u2019s all good until the final scoring, and then it gets annoying. It\u2019s a lot of arithmetic, and it takes a while, but that also means that it\u2019s hard to do the mental math during the game to fully anticipate how it\u2019ll play out. Building the chains is fun, as is the challenge near the end of the game when you only have a couple of spaces left for tiles and have to choose which varieties\u2019 chains to sacrifice and which to expand. I understand the philosophical decision to double the chains\u2019 scoring at the end, because otherwise you\u2019d end with players potentially gaining fewer points in the end game than they did in the second scoring, but it makes the process clunkier than it needs to be. Maybe Rosenberg tried it without subtracting the round number and it didn\u2019t work; that seems like a more obvious way to score, at least. And I think the flowers are just kind of there \u2013 the points are nice but they\u2019re so small in relation to the rest of the scoring that you\u2019re not likely to pay much attention to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a lot of words on what\u2019s wrong with Applejack, but I\u2019m being a little harsh \u2013 it\u2019s really a solid game other than the scoring, and it\u2019s possible that 1) the scoring won\u2019t bug you like it did me or 2) you\u2019ll just house-rule it and score it differently. I will say that among Rosenberg\u2019s tile-laying games, though, this is below Patchwork<\/a>, Sagani (also known as Nova Luna<\/a> and Framework), and New York Zoo<\/a> for me, so if you\u2019re interested in this mechanic you might want to check those out first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Applejack comes from Uwe Rosenberg, known for his heavy worker placement games and his light tile-laying games, although I think it\u2019s been a few years since he had a real \u2018hit\u2019 \u2013 probably 2020\u2019s tile-layer New York Zoo. Applejack came out in 2023 and it\u2019s a perfectly fine game that suffers from an overwrought final […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[60,768],"class_list":["post-10426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-boardgames","tag-tile-laying-games","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10426"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10427,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10426\/revisions\/10427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}