I have a library full of games. At its height it contained almost 500 different ones, these days I brought it back to 225 games according to board game geek. Naturally I have several games about beer and once in a post I’d like to tell more about one of them. This time it’s time for another print and play game:
Six sided Stout
A print and play game is a game you can print yourself at home and then play. They go from simple yahtzee scoreblocks, to extensive 3D board games like Smash Monster Rampage (which has apparently been taken offline since they published Terror in Meeple City). Sometimes the print, some scissors and some glue is enough, but mostly you need some dice and in this case also a pen.
Six sided stout is a SOLO game by Patrick Brophy, although you could duel with someone else if you print it twice. You have to reprint the game board part to play again, or seal it and use wipable pens. You can find six sided stout on Board Game Geek, but I think you need an account to be able to print the game.
Six sided stout is a bit easier than the Mushroom Ale, but it’s still quite a puzzle, which solo games tend to be. To play the game you need at least 8 D6s (or six sided dice), although you can make it more colourful by using specific dice for specific ingredients. Just keep in mind you need more dice for the malt than for the other ingredients, because you can roast the malt in this game. You also need a pen, because this again is a roll-and-draw/write-game.
The idea is that you’ll brew a nice stout by making the right connections between the different types of malt (pale, caramel and chocolate) with the hops, yeast and water. The game takes 10 turns/days. Each day you choose to go to the market or roast the malt.
Before you go to the market you have to choose what you want to buy: malt, hops or yeast. The hops and yeast you have to draw into the beer immediately. You have to keep the group of ingredients you bought that day connected and it has to be connected to a former drawn in group as well (of course that doesn’t count for the first time you draw an ingredient in the beer). The yeast has to be next to the water in the middle or connecting to a yeast connected to that water. For the malt you can choose to draw it into yor beer immediately as a pale malt, or roast it first. Four days in the game you can use one of the experts for a chance for a higher amount of ingredients. To buy the ingredients you have to roll two dice; for malt you get the number you rolled, for hops you get the number divided by two for yeast you get the number divided by three. The experts give you an extra die, but you still have to choose two of the dice to calculate what you bought.
Roasting the malt is an alternative to going to the market and takes a whole day as well. Brewers and Maltsters will notice that this part of the game is not entirely accurate technically speaking, but it works for the game. When you roast one time/day, your pale malt becomes caramel malt, a second time it will become chocolate malt. If you can remember my post about Weyermann, you’ll know this is not entirely correct: Caramel malt is wet malt put directly in the roaster, Chocolate malt is dried malt put in the roaster, they are not in a sequence of each other. But back to the game. When you roasted the malt once or twice, you may draw it in your beer immediately of you want to. Be sure not to roast when you still have malt in the last roaster, because it will burn.
The drawing is the most important part of the game, because you score for the ways your drawn ingredients are connected:
1. 1 point for each pale malt, 2 points for each caramel malt and 5 points for eacht chocolate malt in your stout
2. 3 points for each pale malt each hops touch, 2 points for each caramel malt each hops touch and 1 point for each chocolate malt each hops touch
3. Each yeast is the sum of each side it touches water multiplied by each malt it touches.
The game is still a bit new, so I don’t know when your score is high or low, but you can always play more to beat your own scores. In the end the scoring of especially the hops makes it important to put a variety of malts in your beer which makes that part of the brewing of a stout a bit more realistic. It’s not standard to use both caramel ánd chocolate malt in a stout, but it happens. Either way, you can’t make a beer of purely roasted malts, so you will need a lot of pale malts in your beer as well, which you want in this beer, because it scores for the hops.
I miscalculated the yeast here, so my actual score is 75.
I like the game in its simplicity while it still gives you quite a puzzle. You have to think carefully about what you draw where and what you do each day. With only ten days you haven’t got a lot of time to buy your ingredients ánd roast them efficiently as well. There’s also quite the luck factor. If you keep throwing ones you won’t get a lot of hops or malt and you won’t get any yeast at all (which would be a wasted day). Although there won’t be any interaction, it works nice in a duel format as well. Who makes the best choices in the best order?
If you want to try the game, look for it at board game geek, download it here or contact me 🙂
The next game will be a cardboard game again: DICE BREWING.
Now you’ve seen two print-and-play games, what do you think of them?