As a subject moves to the old edge, the player who owned it should now place a Glados standee on it. Any test subjects in the test chamber receive a horrible death. However, the killings take place after the player with the most test subjects receives their reward according to the tile. Developed by Cryptozoic Entertainment based on the Portal series, the strategy game is all about cakes. Equipment The sheer charm of pairing this premise with such a well-established fantasy world piqued my interest ahead of launch. When I randomly saw it show up at a local store with zero warning, I was surprised – there was seemingly no anticipation or build-up to its release. Having now experienced several games of The Yawning Portal, both solo and with a full group of four, I realise that it’s probably a good thing the game is as subtly charming as it is, because there isn’t really a whole lot of excitement to it. Image: GamesHub How to play The Yawning Portal PLAY SOLO OR COMPETE AGAINST FRIENDS & FAMILY: Work the tavern alone or compete against the rest of the staff. The modular gameboard is adaptable for 1-4 players In quite a curious departure from the adventuring fare typical of all things bearing the Dungeons & Dragons brand, Avalon Hill’s new board game, Dungeons & Dragons: The Yawning Portal, has players taking on the quiet role of tavern staff, trying to fulfil the desires of hungry and thirsty patrons.

After a long day adventuring, why not take the initiative and sit yourself down for a critically important roll at one of Waterdeep’s most famous establishments – The Yawning Portal. It’s pretty easy to learn and I think you can grasp the basics of it with in a few minutes. Learning how and when to best mix up the board to move things in your favour needs more thought and probably a good degree of adaptability in-game Final Thoughts Includes 5 gameboard pieces, 48 food tokens, 68 Hero cards, 9 Objective cards, 16 Action tiles, 9 Enchant Food Potion tokens, 30 blue sapphire gem tokens, 30 green emerald gem tokens, 30 red ruby gem tokens, 30 yellow topaz gem tokens, 20 white diamond gem tokens, 4 player reference cards, and game guide. The Yawning Portal is a breezy game, and there’s certainly value and a place for titles like this amongst your collection. But the consensus from myself and my playgroup was that the cost is a significant barrier for just how light the experience is.As I’ve said, scoring points is essentially done through a pattern matching game, but the main core mechanism you’ll be using to take turns is action selection. Each player has four tiles that correspond to one of the four different types of food. Red is your classic Smoked Ham, green is Vegetable Platter, yellow is Tankard of Ale and blue is a delicious looking plate of Quippers and Chips. With this knowledge, the game’s layer of strategy comes to the fore. If your opponents are heavily investing in acquiring gems of particular colour, it becomes in your interest to limit the number of face-down cards that match that colour, and so reducing the overall multiplier for each gem. Now, it is time to recycle the activated test chamber. You can flip the tiles and move them to any of the three rows on the new edge on the game board. It is important to make sure that all rows maintain three test chambers at the very least. Otherwise, you can place the tile on any row of your choice.

Those cards you can collect – these do lots of cool things. They can award you cake. They can incinerate test subjects. They can activate conveyor belts that move all your test subjects further in or away. They can generate Companion Cubes to distract your opponents. They can also be used to fire your portal gun. In this game, the left edge of the board is considered to be the new edge, while the left one is the old edge. Each player keeps their test subjects on the new edge of the board. You can place them in this manner: one in the top row, one on the bottom row, and two in the middle. Whilst we will do everything we can to meet the delivery times above, there may be factors outside of our control and we cannot guarantee delivery within this time frame. Not a single-person game, the Portal Board Game requires 2 to 4 players. In this board and puzzle game, each player gets eight pieces of cake of their color. The players make their moves by placing their cake pieces onto the game board. Players navigate their test subjects through test chambers to collect cakes from the other side of the board. The game comes with cards that have special actions printed on them. The players move according to the instructions on the card. Simply put, the game requires you to remove your opponent’s test subjects and gain the most cakes. The person with the most cake pieces on the board at the end of the game wins.The Portal Board Game comes with a lot of hard-to-understand rules, meaning you might need a lot of practice to finally master the cake acquisition game. However, here are a few tips and strategies that can prove to be extremely helpful in understanding how you should go about with the game. They kind of came to us with this idea," Miguel told Polygon. "'We want to make a Portal board game. What do you guys think?' So we have connections with the company. One of Cryptozoic's execs even has a replica Portal gun in his office. Basically, here's the deal. You want to move your little guys into the dangerous chambers to claim majority control and all the rewards. Then, when those rewards get sent into the lab – you want to protect them. Your test subjects can carry cake, so you will probably want to keep moving your acquired cake away from those dangerous rooms. But players can carry anybody's cake, so maybe you'd rather run another player's cake towards incineration.

In the early part of the game, I’d say there’s a limited amount of value you can get from that – you’re more likely to be maximizing the multiplier for your own gems. But people’s strategies will become clearer, and the tile actions to remove cards, the hero abilities to change the board up, and the canny swaps to trigger a Perfect Match Bonus can all be crucial. In the first game I played, I ended up with the final turn and managed to simultaneously remove a red card from the table and play a perfectly matched blue to have a big final shift on the scores. There are only two portals in the game. Every time a player fires their portal gun they can change the placement of the portals. As these portals are treated as adjacent spaces, they become crucial to movement – they can make all the difference when you're trying to protect your cake or reach a chamber before the majority gets counted. There are three rows of five tiles, and each tile represents a chamber in a laboratory. At the far right end of this map, things are going to happen. Chambers are going to activate and then be destroyed. At the near end of the map, new chambers are going to come into being. The laboratory is forever moving, and forever changing. At the end of January, Portal Games announced their publishing plan for 2021. The football fanatic in me was drawn to one game in particular: Eleven: Football Manager Board Game. Each tile is double sided, and when you’ve taken the action that’s showing, you flip it over to reveal a different set of actions.As for the portal tokens, players should keep them on the top and bottom rows of the old edge on the board. Then, there are Aperture cards that players use for optional action. How to Play- Breaking Down the Game Rules It’s fun, and I think that’s always a positive thing to be able to say about something that you’re going to spend 30 odd minutes doing. On one hand I like that it’s basic and uncomplicated but with that, I don’t think it massively stands out. Next up, the players play from their test chambers. They can select either one of the four test subjects from a single test chamber to play their move. In case the player chooses to move only a single test subject, they get to an Aperture card. The artwork is beautiful, the components are great – with the exception of the map tiles. They're too thin, too fiddly. But man – seeing the whole laboratory move and change, that's just wonderful.

Every turn, after a player makes a move, they must activate a test chamber at the far end of the lab. The player who has the most test subjects in that room gets the rewards printed on the tile. Maybe another test subject. Maybe another card. Maybe – hopefully – some cake. These rewards are distributed at the near end of the lab, where the newest rooms appear, and then the activated room is destroyed – taking with it all the test subjects and any old cake that might be lying in there.Helpfully the actions on the reverse are shown with small icons at the bottom so you’ll always know what’s next. A DIFFERENT WAY TO PLAY D&D: Whether you’re a D&D expert or curious newcomer, the Dungeons & Dragons: The Yawning Portal board game is a fresh D&D experience that brings the whole family to the table. I love that the game takes the approach of making you feel like one of the cold bastards running this experiment. And I love the fact that, apart from anything else, this is a solid area control game with a real puzzle feel and a nasty streak a mile wide.