Table of contents for Issue 87 in Tabletop Gaming

Welcome back! This month’s issue is a really beautiful one – we’re taking a special look at art within tabletop gaming. We’re hearing from illustrators, sculpturists, video trailer animators, photographers, dice makers, and more – so read on, to hear the stories behind their creations. We’ll be discussing the hot topic of AI art in a feature from Chris Lowry, and we finally catch up to the present with our Encapsulate feature, which covered the big gaming news of each year. We’re also looking at the upcoming Disney Lorcana set Into the Inklands, which has added a new type of card. If you haven’t got on board with the new trading card game, now is as great a time as any. Plus, of course, our usual plethora of reviews. Find…

“Freelancing is great because you get such diversity in the projects you’re approached with.” Noble Frier says cheerfully. Having worked on the likes of Gloomhaven, as well as Warhammer properties, from full art pages to card art, he’s not exaggerating. “I did a cover for a dragon romance book fairly recently… that was an interesting one! I generally work on fantasy artwork for RPGs, novels and tabletop games, but I also work on horror and sci-fi stuff too. And historical stuff – it’s similar to fantasy but a lot more strict in terms of accuracy.” A look through Noble Frier’s portfolio certainly demonstrates a range of fantasy artwork, from dragon warriors to humanoid attack foxes (AKA Remy, of course), and then the more ‘sensible’ logos and book covers. “I occasionally…

Hello! Can you introduce yourself to our readers? Hello! I’m Aimée Rumsby, a photographer based in Norfolk. I kickstarted my tabletop career in the summer of 2019 and have been in love with the industry ever since. I began as the lead photographer for Zatu Games, a local online games retailer, and have since launched as a freelance photographer. Photography at a games retailer is fascinating, as there is so much opportunity to capture games from incredible developers and document the tabletop industry’s special personality and culture. Why is photography important for the board game industry? Our industry is incredibly lucky to have artists, illustrators and designers who dedicate their time to bringing games to life with their visual talents. Nowadays, the artwork and visuals of a game have a…

This month we’re off to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. With its mainland European, West Asian, and African neighbours loosely encircling this subtropical island, one might expect a degree of cultural assimilation, and of course, games form a part of this. What we’re interested in though, is how such influences became distinctly Cypriot. I like the word Cypriot. It feels somewhat more noble and ancient than simply denoting an individual hailing from Cyprus, and certainly, within the context of gaming, this sentiment holds true: Archeological work in Cyprus has produced the largest dataset of ancient game boards in the world. Between the prehistoric and protohistoric eras of Bronze Age Cyprus, changes were occurring in the way games were played. In a 2016 essay, archeologist Walter Crist notes how earlier Bronze…

Designer: Kasper Lapp | Publisher: Ravensburger If you say a game contains memory as a key component, most people will about-face and become an Olympic sprinter. It’s as hated as roll & move when it comes to board gaming staples. That’s Not a Hat is a memory game. No, no, hold up. This one’s actually something special. The structure is simple. Everyone is dealt a faceup card showing a black and white drawing. It’s something simple, like a melon or a baseball. It’s probably not a hat, but it could be. Then a start player draws a new card off the deck and reveals it to everyone. After a moment, they turn this card facedown, and then pass it either left or right, depending on which way the arrow points…

Designer: Julio E Nazario | Publisher: Indie Boards & Cards Freehand makes a claim on the front of the box that “Anyone can make a masterpiece”. From the outset it seems a straightforward offering. Every player is given a collection of delightful brightly coloured cubes and a pretend pencil. Then a selection of illustrated cards are placed in the centre of the table in a row, based on the number of players. The budding artists will then secretly pick a card from the line-up without saying which one it is, and then use their art and cube skills to create a collage which represents their chosen card. Several players can unknowingly select the same card, so often you have multiple players trying to make the same shape in order to…

Designer: Whitney Loraine | Publisher: Skybound Tabletop There’s only one squirrel native to coastal areas of the Caribbean, and, disappointingly, they’re not oversized rodents with cheeks packed full of coconuts. However, as this tiny game from Skybound Tabletop suggests, they might be pirates. Baffling theme aside, Pirate Tails offers up to five players a compact set-collection experience in under fifteen minutes. As alluded to, players are piratical squirrels, collecting and burying a variety of nuts, as they try to amass the most valuable haul. With only three rounds in the game, players must be careful when deciding on the most lucrative hiding spot to loot, whilst being wary of snatching up too many candy cards. Each turn presents a choice of either three separate decisions or just one: If drawing…

Designer: Mathias Wigge | Publisher: Feuerland Spiele There was marginal ‘will they, won’t they?’ about whether Feuerland would release an expansion for Ark Nova, their wildly popular venture about creating a conservation zoo. It was more a matter of when it would hit the shelves. Now here it is. First impressions are Marine Worlds is in a slimmer box than perhaps expected. That’s actually quite considerate, considering the hippo-sized proportions of the original. However, another first impression creates concern. There’s a lot of chat early on in the rulebook about replacement cards and components. Will this be an attempt to complicate or rewrite a perfectly solid game? Reassuringly, no. The replacements are mainly there to accommodate the new icons introduced through the marine creatures, or, in the case of action…

Designer: Tobias Hall | Publisher: All or None Games While some aren’t keen on the phrase gateway game, I find it a useful tool in the reviewing kit. It describes games with more depth than a family game that are more universally appealing than some drier light euros. This is where Hidden Ark finds itself. It has eye-catching table appeal, from the gorgeous box to the lovely board and tiles. The environmental theme of saving fish from extinction is original and non-geeky enough to draw a more casual audience. So far, so gateway. Hidden Ark is a tableau-building pick-up-and-deliver game with a racing element. On your turn, you’ll gain a bonus token and then take one of four actions (if you didn’t take it on your previous turn). These are…

Designer: Bruno Faidutti and Serge Laget | Publisher: Grand Gamers Guild In The Artemis Odyssey, venture to undiscovered galaxies, inhabit mysterious faraway planets, form a high-yielding faction and reap their resources. The game is played over several rounds which are made up of two phases – the planning phase and the action phase. In the planning phase, players take turns to place action cards face-down onto the shared planning board in any order, then in the action phase, the cards are revealed from left to right and their effects are played out. Each player has their own deck of action cards with several variations on five main actions – produce resources from the bank (depending on which planets you currently inhabit), build an asset (a starship, colony, factory, or terraformer,…

Designer: Paul Denne | Publisher: Dire Wolf There is no board gaming theme that polyominoes cannot conquer. From the coziness of a warm quilt in Patchwork, to the elegantly stretched felines in the Isle of Cats, to drafting up maps in Cartographers to building the whole cities in My City, whichever way you use the polyomino pieces, you are bound to have a good time. So why not journey to the Wild West? In Wild Tiled West, players will be drafting polyomino tiles to build up their city to score victory points to win the game. They will also be wrangling cows, paying for things with whole gold nuggets and shooting bandits, as you would in the cartoonised Wild West. The number of victory points players earn depends on which…

Designer: Wolfgang Kramer, Richard Ulrich, Jens Christopher Ulrich | Publisher: WizKids What do you get if you put a botanist, two jesters, and a builder in some lovely parklands? Probably a winning score in this classic tile-laying auction game. Playing as a member of the Italian nobility, your goal is to hire the best creative minds of the era and set them to work earning you more prestige than your opponents. The game plays out over seven rounds, each containing an auction phase and an action phase. In the auction phase, players try their luck at outfoxing their opponents, inducing them to bid high while trying to buy the perfect upgrade for their own palazzi at the best price. Once that’s done, players spend their turn setting up their board…

Designer: Adam Poots | Publisher: Kingdom Death Kingdom Death: Monster is the death-metal double album of board games. It’s dark, doomy and daringly over the top. You could probably mosh to it if you really tried. But this lavish boss-battler is also great fun – provided you have the patience for assembling dozens of often very tricky miniatures. And that you are open to grimdark vibes that make Warhammer feel like Mary Poppins. It has also just received a sequel of sorts in the form of the Gambler’s Chest expansion – which comes to retail (via the KDM website) several months after being made available to backers of a 2016 Kickstarter, which raised an eye-watering £9.5 million. Did I say expansion? Gambler’s Chest is more a second coming – a…

Designer: Kosch | Publisher: Lookout Games Forest Shuffle is one of those games that draws you in just by a glimpse of the box. If you like striking artwork along with real-world nature theming, this will appeal to you. Players plant trees and inhabit them with forest-dwellers. They could be birds or butterflies perching on upper branches, fungi and burrowers settling at the base, or animals and insects scurrying around the main body of your trees. Plant your forest and watch your fauna and flora flourish. (Try saying that after a few mulled wines) The game is just a single deck of cards full of trees, animals, plants, and insects, each with different costs, points values, effects and bonuses. Gather cards in your hand and use them as currency to…

Designer: Oz Mills | Publisher: Free League I’m a big fan of the Tales from the Loop (and Things From The Flood) series by Free League. Chunky hardbacks with a refined layout and plenty of white space, full of gorgeous semi-real paintings of alien/robotics roaming a 1990s Sweden. That said, it’s always gratifying to see yourself reflected in the media you consume: many years ago I watched 28 Days Later in the cinema in London; walking home through my deserted home city afterwards was much more creepy than if the film had been set in New York. They Grow Up So Fast achieves a similar huge step toward personal relevance by being set in rural Norfolk. For all of you reading this UK-based magazine, immediately there are relatable elements to…

TABLETOP: What do Mind MGMT, The Terminator RPG, Cranky Chinchillas, Star Realms, Set a Watch, and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – The Adventure Game have in common? With different designers, distinctly different art styles, and a range of tabletop flavours, the instinct might be to suggest there is no connection. However, if you looked at their crowdfunding or retail pages, and clicked play on their trailer… you’ll be familiar with the artistry of Ori Kagan, of Kagan Productions. With a mission to tell the story of the games, and a talent for animation, we caught up with Kagan about the role his production company plays in the industry by creating tabletop trailers, and where it all started. “You could say my journey as a filmmaker started when I was a…

Designer: Alexander Peshkov, Ekaterina Pluzhnikovan | Publisher: Alley Cat Games There’s nothing new about Escape Rooms any more. Nor about condensing the same puzzle solving and desire to escape into a tabletop format. So when Unfold appeared, I was admittedly sceptical – if it’s been done once, it’s been done a hundred times. But Unfold started to creep its hooks into me early by doing things a little bit differently. Instead of a box, or an envelope, it’s a self contained unfolding adventure. When pitching to friends to play it, I said it was an Escape Room meets a Pop Up Book, but Mazescape, for those familiar with it, is probably more accurate. Each puzzle solved sees you unfold the next bit of the compact and neatly folded contraption, to…

Designer: Blake Propach, Morteza Rohaninejad | Publisher: Good Games Publishing It’s a one-deck shoot-out and the guns are magic. In Trickdraw, players are racing to assemble 10 victory points, while also keeping themselves safe in case they end up in a showdown at the end of the game. The rules are simple, on your turn you draw a card, then play a card, either faceup or facedown, that’s about it. Facedown cards are each worth a single point, faceup cards have effects, allowing you to gain bonus points, take extra actions or flip over other cards on the table, changing the landscape of the race every turn. Over the course of a dozen or so turns, you have several options to try and win. Maybe you’ll build an engine to…

Designer: Ray Wehrs | Publisher: Calliope Games Four Corners is an abstract game of matching corners and forming patterns. It’s actually available in two versions: “Galaxy”, which is planet themed; and “Kaleidoscope”, which uses spectral patterns and neon colours. Both are colourful and attractive, but since the games are mechanically identical this review covers the pair. The game takes up a surprisingly large amount of table space, with a four piece plastic “Tip-Pivot” board that clicks solidly together - although it does creak a little alarmingly on separation. It’s built to allow tiles to be easily placed and picked up, with gaps underneath each tile corner. It’s more functional than fantastic, but it’s undeniable that picking up tiles repeatedly would be a chore without it. Players hold a hand of…

Designer: Reiner Knizia | Publisher: CMON Classic Art has quickly become known as “No, not that game, it’s a different one” to me. For reasons beyond my understanding, Dr Knizia’s older game Glenn’s Gallery has been dragged from the dust, given a shower, a shave and a fancy new haircut, and become Classic Art. The problem with that is that Knizia is known for his other game, Modern Art. They are not the same game. The number of times someone’s said “Oh, do you mean Modern Art?” is just annoying at this point. It’s a game about making predictions. You make your predictions with a limited amount of knowledge, and that’s where the fun of the game lives. Between you and the other players, you’ll play cards from your hand…

Designer: Tamas Olah | Publisher: Apeiron Games A hau: Rulers of Yucatan seems to bridge a gap between new and old in terms of eurogames. There’s a familiar feeling, a Michael Menzel-esque map-board, and the expected array of tokens, meeples, and resources. But, there’s also the notably bolder, more modern use of unnecessarily three-dimensional pyramids, and detailed, respectful booklets on how the game’s contents reflect aspects of Maya civilisation. Nonetheless, I’d argue that Ahau places itself most firmly amongst the games of the past - and, in this case, that’s no bad thing. The pursuit of power and unity across the Yucatan peninsula requires points. Points are acquirable in a multitude of ways; be it by constructing pyramids and buildings, controlling cities, or summoning gods. And, like many eurogames, this is…

Designer: Ondřej Bystroň, Petr Čáslava, Pavel Jarosch | Publisher: Czech Games Edition The premise of Kutná Hora might not strike you as particularly innovative or dazzling. It’s the 14th Century, you’re mining silver and developing a town in a Czech valley, and you’re trying to score the most points while you do it. So far, so by-the books Euro game. This game spices things up a little with some pretty neat things. Firstly there’s a surprising amount of indirect interaction between players, but the thing which really sets it apart from its peers, is the dynamic economy used in the game. Each player has an identical deck of six cards, and each card has an action at either end. During each round, you’ll play two cards on your first turn,…

Designer: Min & Elwen | Publisher: Czech Games Edition When Lost Ruins of Arnak landed a couple of years ago it grabbed our attention, not only because of its novel mix of deck-building and worker placement, but also because it’s a ton of fun. Getting it added to play online on Board Game Arena was a master stroke, but it also highlighted the curse of making a popular game. People are fickle and get bored easily. CGE kept things fresh with the Expedition Leaders expansion, and once again are treating us like dignitaries at a Ferrero Rocher tasting party with a campaign expansion for the base game. As far as campaign games go, it’s a pretty light touch. There are six chapters to work through by yourself or with…

Designer: Phil Walker-Harding | Publisher: Space Cowboys Learning magic is a slow process, or at least that’s how it feels in Spellbook. Under the fantasy trappings of this box you’ll find a somewhat miserly game of combo building and resource management. Players race to score victory points through a process of learning spells and feeding resources to their familiar. Each turn represents a day and you’ll perform up to 3 actions, choosing one from each phase of the day. In front of each player are seven spells and with each one learned you’ll earn a new action to choose in one of the day phases. Learn all 7 spells or completely fill up your stored resources and the game ends. As play gets underway, the game drops any pretence of…

Designer: Yukio Shimami, Yuso Taya, Shou Aoyama | Publisher: Japanime Games Japanime Games has brought us a mixture of well known Japanese intellectual properties to Western tables over the last few years, such as Naruto and Cowboy Beebop. It has also opened the door to lesser well known themes too. CHAINsomnia brings a familiar Japanese cartoon style to a tile laying dungeon crawler, bringing both existing and newer mechanics to the table with the aim of trying to rescue children from the clutches of a daemon. At first CHAINsomnia seems to offer a standard dungeon fare, in that you’ll control several different characters in their quest to explore, defeat and potentially escape the nightmare that they’ve been trapped in. What makes it stand out is how there’s a direct connection…

Designer: Yuo | Publisher: Moaideas Game Design City Explorer: Kyoto is a small box Japanese card game; a rich world of minimalist gaming that still hasn’t made much of a splash in the UK. There are some fantastic, tiny titles like Hatsuden and Koi Koi that it’s frankly a crime we don’t see more of over here. Attempting to bridge that gap, City Explorer is an export by the Taiwanese game company Moaideas. Setup is simple, setting out rows and columns of cards, the exact number of which varies based on player count. Each round two cards are turned face up, slowly increasing the total amount of information available to all players. On your turn you can either turn over cards and take a look, returning them back in face…

Designer: Joseph R. Lewis | Publisher: The Merry Mushmen If you prefer your RPG experience to be more about actual adventure and less about spending 15 years going up three levels, then tear your eyes away from that spreadsheet, and cast them over this module for Level 1 Old School Essentials characters. Or D&D 5E rules, as it was originally published for that, before being adapted and expanded (around 30 pages more material) by The Merry Mushmen. As this is aimed at Level 1 characters, the idea is to have the players’ characters come from the small town of Ragged Hollow. They don’t have to, but it helps if at least one of them either came from the town or lives there but has been away for a couple of…

A true symbol of fantasy, the Dragon is a fearsome creature of mythology, and a focus of many a book, film, RPG and more. Usually though, the dragon is angry, using fire to terrorise, and a hoarder of gold. Our next interview flipped that on its head though, with the impossibly cute dragons of Flamecraft, the game that took Kickstarter by storm. Suddenly, dragons are artisans, making you coffee, bread, and more. We spoke to Sandara Tang, the illustrator behind our favourite bundles of cute. “I didn’t know anything about board games – other than things like Monopoly and Scrabble,” Tang admits of their experience before Cardboard Alchemy. “So when Manny [Vega, the game designer behind the likes of Flamecraft] contacted me about making a board game, I was surprised…

Wargames don’t seem to get their artistic due. Not only are they creating phenomenal terrain and scenery (often from random bits picked up around the home) but they’re also offering us miniatures – tiny sculptures, the good ones highly accurate, using a number of different mediums. Bad Squiddo, created by Annie Norman, began in the niche industry of providing miniatures for wargames, and made a name for themselves by offering realistic femme miniatures… and guinea pigs. We caught up with Norman about both Bad Squiddo, and the process of creating tiny sculptures for the market. BAD SQUIDDO HISTORY “I set up Bad Squiddo Games in 2015 to create more options for people who wanted femme miniatures.” She confirms of its origins. “We’ve grown considerably over the last nine years and…

THE ORIGIN STORY All sets of dice start off as one set of plain masters – the original set that is the foundation for all future ones. These can be designed digitally using software like Blender or Dicemaker, and once created, each number is carefully lined up. Any logo designs are likely go through multiple versions to make sure it’s simple enough to read when only a centimetre across. If you have any unique shaped dice like diamonds or gemstones then this process doesn’t stop here – these will have to have been designed and tested multiple times before the final masters can be made. The designs are then 3D printed and left to sit in UV light or sunlight for a couple of days to make sure they’re fully…

Designer: Asger Harding Granerud, Daniel Skjold Pedersen | Publisher: Queen Games Copenhagen: Roll & Write is a game about exterior house paint, set in the eponymous birthplace of quantum mechanics. To clarify, this is a game tasking players with building the colourful waterfront facades of the beautifully photogenic Nyhavn district of Copenhagen, and not tackling quantum mechanics. Indeed, this is a very simple game, one which takes the core idea of Copenhagen (curiously released the same year) and condenses it into a quick and portable roll-and-write. Where its larger sibling utilises bright and cheerful polyomino tiles - perfect for conjuring an abstract simulacrum of Nyhavn’s canal-side beauty - Copenhagen: Roll & Write asks for a touch more imaginative input from its players. This is still essentially a tile-laying game; die-rolls…

Designer: Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Shawn Stankewich | Publisher: Flatout Games I often think that evolution was having a laugh with penguins. Why? Well, a penguin is a flightless bird, not a mammal or amphibian, that swims underwater and looks like Danny Devito in Batman Returns. The collective noun for them on water is a raft, and on land it’s a waddle of penguins. In Deep Dive, you have a waddle of three who have to dive to increasingly dangerous depths in search of food to bring back to the surface. The more food you collect in sets of three, organised by colour, the more points you score. Setting up is very straightforward as it’s just sets of tiles, turned face down, in various shades of blue that represent five…

Designer: Paul Waite | Publisher: Wise Wizard Games It is a bold move when a new release is launched with its own theme song. Presumptuous, even. Yet Wise Wizard Games have every right to be confident about Robot Quest Arena, their latest deck-builder outing. Admittedly, the fam and I were not overly enthusiastic about trying this one. The concern being it seemed too much like the BBC’s Robot Wars programme, which we’d never really enjoyed. While both share the same hardware – customising robots for battle – Robot Quest Arena upgrades the idea with more colour, panache and wit. Having spent weeks struggling to get it to the table, it won us over in a couple of rounds. Interactions take place on a gridded board, the ‘arena’, which features a…

Designer: Ryan Laukat | Publisher: Red Raven Games The first thing you discover playing this is that the title is a lie. The gods are now AWAKE (I met four of them!) and interfering with human affairs as is their wont. It’s 1937, eight years after the events of Sleeping Gods, (which you don’t need to have played to enjoy this), pilot Claire Smith is flying her passengers to Honolulu when disaster strikes again. A tutorial comic portrays their abduction through a portal and subsequent brush with a pterodactyl (no, really). Landing in this strange world, they soon meet one of the gods who explains the need to find totems to escape the world. So much, so familiar, but this time around the totems will initially be dormant. We will…

Designer: Maxim Istomin | Publisher: CrowD Games When Azul put proper abstract games right back on the map back in 2017, it was a breath of fresh air. It was tactile and gorgeous, won a slew of awards, and triggered several more successes under the same brand. But it remains the only abstract strategy game in the Board Game Geek Top 100 today. While I don’t think Portals is going to trouble the BGG top tier, I have had a lot of fun playing it of late. The game has a similarly gorgeous look thanks to a bag of beautifully tactile stones every bit as lovely as those in Azul. It also boasts a similar mechanism of placing them randomly onto coasters (sorry, I mean ‘circles of elements’) for players…

Designer: Karina Borysenko, Raphael Martines, Carleigh Magee | Publisher: One Up Parties and Games It was Miss Scarlett, in the boudoir, with a bottle of Eau de Parfum. No, I haven’t been finishing off a bottle of Christmas brandy, Castle Break really does give off Cluedo vibes. However, instead of solving a contrived murder mystery you are in a castle, taking part in a competition to free the dragon in the central tower. Quite why there’s a dragon in there and why it’s a good idea to let it out is anyone’s guess. So, to complete this noble, if foolhardy, aim you need to complete quests around the castle. These are rewarded with coins and when you have six they can be used to pay for three keys. You then…

Designer: Peter Prinz | Publisher: Funtails In any closed ecosystem, the number of non-zero-sum (i.e. mutually beneficial) relationships tends to increase until the ecosystem reaches peak biodiversity or there’s an extinction event. Guess which is happening today? In Comet, you take the role of animals in the distant past, racing to lead other creatures to safety before a comet strikes the planet and vaporises everything. You do this by guiding them to a cavern where they can shelter – only, when the game starts, they’re not even born yet. First, you have to hatch them in nests across the board, and only then can you start to move them through varied terrain in order to find refuge. Once you get your first animals to safety, you unlock special abilities you…

Designer: Fabio Lopiano & Mandela Fernandez-Grandon | Publisher: Osprey Games Mansa Musa was the richest man that ever lived. Sankoré: Pride of Mansa Musa, is an extravagant eurogame that explores his legacy. Set during his rule over the Mali Empire during the early 14th century, Sankoré focuses on his ambition to make his empire the centre of scholarship in the Muslim world. Mansa Musa’s wealth and influence, built on the trade of gold and salt across North Africa, was channelled into the University of Sankoré in Timbuktu. By the end of his reign had amassed the largest collection of books in Africa since the Great Library of Alexandria. Each player manages a school at the university, competing to be the most prestigious. Play involves developing a tableau of classes through…

Designer: Robert Pestrin | Publisher: Ares Life is pretty tough in northeastern Brazil – at least if you’re a cangaceiro, a gun-toting outlaw from the turn of the 20th Century. Gangs of bandits drawn from the country’s downtrodden and dirt-poor peasantry take up arms and set out to loot and plunder those with money to spare. Players must navigate the desert, avoiding or fighting the authorities, seeking wealth, notoriety and survival to a fulfilling retirement. Cangaceiros may be set in Brazil, but the vibe is pretty euroey. Each turn players pick three action cards from an initial deck of seven, then take it in turns to play those cards and take the associated actions one at a time. Cards are split, and can also be used for their upper attack…

Designer: Tamzin Henderson, Matt Henderson | Publisher: Loke Battle Mats Escorting a talking keg of wine to a royal wine tasting competition sounds like the plot from a Terry Pratchett novel, but that’s the basic story here in this adventure for a party of 5E characters, levels 3-5. Although it’s all written and references the core 5E manuals, the NPCs could be adapted to your preferred RPG system. Anyway, back to the story, which starts in the rustic village of Cullfield near Daryl’s (that’s the name of the sentient keg) winery. There’s a bag of gold up for grabs if the party could just escort Daryl, who is carrying the prize-winning wine inside himself, all the way to Eaglescar, the provincial capital, where the competition is being held. Trying to…