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Before Next Month’s SPIEL, We Take A Look At Current Trends In Boardgaming

by MonkeyMagicSeptember 16, 2019

You may or may not know that the modern boardgaming world is actually a massive industry. One of the best ways to see this demonstrated is at the planet’s biggest boardgame event – SPIEL. This event, held in the city of Essen in Germany, is an annual pilgrimage for both the companies and designers who make games, as well as the many geeks who play them. At last year’s event in October of 2018, 190,000 gamers roamed the 80,000 square metres of the fair to check out 1,150 exhibitors attending from over 50 countries to showcase their latest releases.

With such a large array of new games being released each year, it’s possible to detect trends in the ever evolving hobby. Now that nearly a year has passed since the last SPIEL, the dust has settled and one can step back and get a feel for the titles that have remained standing. By looking at the games released at the fair that have continued to capture the attention of players and find their way to the table we can spot some of the current memes in the gaming hobby that are still going strong as we approach SPIEL 2019 next month.

Asymmetrical Play

While not a new concept, some of the games making a big impact recently have this element as a dominant feature. In asymmetrical games, every player is given a ‘faction’ that has a distinct way of interacting with the game and the other players, often resulting in a unique approach to achieving victory with that faction.

One of the hottest games in this genre would have to be Root. Following a successful international Kickstarter, this game saw its German language premiere in Essen. On first glance Root appears to be a fairly cute kid friendly animal game with some beautiful art from Kyle Ferrin showing animals such as birds, cats mice, rabbits and even a raccoon. However, don’t be fooled, under the hood this is essentially a war game. Each player controls a different faction of woodland folk vying for dominance of the forest. Players build buildings, recruit warriors, and engage in combat to control the various clearing on the board. Each of the four factions in the base game plays completely differently including how they move around the board, what kind of buildings they build, how they get more units on the board, and crucially, how they score points. While you can dive into this game without too much thought, play becomes so much more rewarding when you not only learn the intricacies of your own faction, but also how the other factions tick, allowing you to interfere with their plans while nurturing your own to fruition.

That desire to master all the factions, combined with deep but rewarding gameplay means that there is a lot of play here and Root has really stood the test of time. Since SPIEL in October it has seen a hugely successful Kickstarter for a second expansion with more than 20,000 backers pledging over 1.7 million dollars. It has also won a host of awards including a 2018 Golden Geek Board Game of the Year and 2019 UK Games Expo Best Board Game (Strategic Style).

Another highly asymmetrical game sitting in the all time top 20 on boardgamegeek.com currently is Spirit Island. It already had a strong following from its 2017 release but also saw the German language version premier at the SPIEL. In this reversal of the traditional colonisation theme players are working together to support the indigenous people of an island being invaded by new world explorers. You each take on the role of a spirit and must synergise to beat back the colonists either by directly attacking them, empowering the natives to push them back or simply by instilling so much fear in them that they turn tail and abandon the island themselves. Different spirits will focus on different strategies and they all have a unique play style. This is a fairly deep game that rewards repeated plays as you learn the strategies and try out all the different spirits.

Mind Reading

Working with or against other players using limited communication, often non verbal or even borderline telepathic, seemed to be another theme that came through at the fair, and has shown no sign of dying out yet.

In the co-operative game The Mind the players all try to synchronise their thoughts into one single hive mind. The premise is simple. There is a shuffled deck of 100 cards numbered from 1-100. Each round an increasing number of cards are dealt out to each player. All the team have to do is play those cards on to the table in ascending order. The catch is, you are not able to communicate with each other in any way. You need to go with your gut as to how long to wait before you play your card. Let’s say you have the 42. You will sit and wait for quite a while before putting it on the table to allow a player who is holding any of the 41 cards lower than yours to get them out first. Of course if someone plays, say the 39, you are not going to delay much longer before tabling your 41. Play a card too early and the team loses a life. If the whole team manage to play all their cards then that Level is over and you move up to the next Level, with each player starting the round with one more card than in the last Level. If you ever make it all the way up to the final Level (10 in a three player game) then you have mastered the game. I’m yet to get beyond Level 5.

While The Mind came out earlier in the year the buzz that had already been created meant that it still hot at the SPIEL and both it and the expansion that launched there, Level 13, sold outduring the show.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the exhibition halls another game from the same designer was being premiered. In Fuji the team of players are trying to move their pawns across a series of tiles to all escape the island before being consumed by lava. Each player secretly rolls a set of dice which have different coloured numbers on them. Each tile they want to move to has different dice requirements. You can only successfully move there if you meet those requirements better than your neighbours. The rub is again that you can’t just discuss this. While in Fuji you are allowed some communication, you are not allowed to discuss the specifics of the dice you have, only suggest how strong or weak your collection of dice are for the requirements of a given card. Again in this game you will only succeed if the team all get into the same head space. You can talk about being ‘fairly weak’, ‘quite strong’, ‘very strong’ and so on. Our group felt that both our effectiveness and our enjoyment was enhanced if we adopted the ‘bear scale’ – if I tell my team that my dice are “as strong as an adolescent bear with a hunting knife” on one spot, but as weak as a ‘”baby bear still in nappies” on another, then they have a reasonable idea how I am positioned. This game has probably hit the table more times since the SPIEL than any other game we picked up.

Other honourable mentions from the fair requiring you to get into someone else’s head include the ingenious competitive deduction game Cryptid and the team based game Shadows: Amsterdam where you play in real time giving non verbal picture based clues to your team mate.

Unique Games

A new genre of games emerged for the first time in 2018, the unique game, where every single copy of the game differs from the next.

You know that little niche game Magic: The Gathering, the one that has been on the go for 26 years and made Hasbro $2.45 billion in net revenue last year? Well it’s designer, Richard Garfield (featured in Geekscape 519) had a brand new card game to show the world last year, and there was a premier at SPIEL, just days before its full worldwide release. That game was KeyForge. The core gameplay has similarities to Magic: The Gathering, with two players putting creatures on the table that then attack the other players creatures. There are some interesting fundamental changes including the main goal of collecting Aember rather than dealing damage, and the way players pick one of their three ‘suits’ and then play and activate all cards in that suit, and only that suit, for that turn. But what really makes this game stand out are the unique decks. Unlike in Magic there is no deck building, players buy one or more pre-constructed decks which cannot be modified in any way, but every single deck in the world will be completely unique. Using procedural generation to ensure that all decks have an appropriate mix of different card types and a reasonable balance of three of the ‘suits’ (as well as a procedurally generated name) there are more than 104,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible decks. This intriguing concept results in a focus on getting to know the strengths and weaknesses of your own individual deck and the resulting fresh perspective combined with solid central gameplay has kept KeyForge alive, with one expansion out already and a third one set to release in time for SPIEL 2019.

Also showcasing at the fair was another unique game by another high profile designer, Corey Konieczka, famous for titles like Star Wars: Rebellion, Battlestar Galactica and Eldritch Horror. Discover: Lands Unknown is a co-operative game in which players find themselves stranded in the wilderness and must team up to find food, water and tools with a view to their ultimate goal of surviving. Published by the same company as KeyForge similar technology has been used to ensure every copy of this game is also unique. While one game might be set in the desert another might be in the frozen tundra or the jungle. In addition the combination of items and encounters is also unique to each box. Although this game generated a lot of buzz at SPIEL, subsequent reception has been a little lukewarm. While this game itself may not still be getting played in a few years time, more unique games will almost certainly be around the corner and that alone is an exciting prospect.

Roll and Write

Everyone has heard of the great granddaddy of roll and write games Yahtzee, and although it has been around since at least 1956, this genre as a whole has suddenly exploded in the last twelve months, while SPIEL 2018 being a clear indicator of the year that changed.

Like Yahtzee, the central mechanic of a roll and write game involves rolling a set of dice and then taking the results of those dice and writing them down in some way to maximise your score. Looking at That’s Pretty Clever, one of the biggest successes, in more detail is probably a great place to start. This was another title that was available earlier in the year, but really took off at the SPIEL. It now has multiple awards nominations as well as successful mobile OS ports. On your turn your roll six different dice, pick one of them to use on one of five corresponding coloured areas on your score pad and write the result in the appropriate box. Each coloured area works differently either scoring points in some way, or giving you power- ups to use later in the game. You then roll the remaining dice and pick another result, and repeat. Crucially all other players are involved during your turn (and vice versa) as whatever dice you don’t use they get to use for their score pad. The game strikes a great balance with quick and intuitive play but also meaningful choices.

Elsewhere in the halls, a pre-release version of Rolling Ranch was available to play. In this game each player is building a farm – putting up fences and building while placing animals within the enclosures. This time only two dice are rolled and all players use the same results to write on their farm pad. However the combination of numbers and icons on each die means that there are multiple possible ways to use the outcome of the roll and each player makes their own decision. The simultaneous use of the same die roll means that there is no down time with all players active all the time. While fairly simple in terms of choices there are just enough there to hold the interest on repeat plays.

Yet another new roll and write release was Railroad Ink, available in Blue and Red versions. It has a similar shared dice result mechanic with 4 to 6 dice being rolled for everyone to use each turn, all of which show different road or rail sections. The goal is to use the results to build a transport network on the dry wipe grid in front of you, scoring points for connecting exits, entering the middle of the grid and having the longest routes, while losing points for dead ends.

Elsewhere in the same hall was a roll and write game with no rolling. Welcome To… uses what is essentially a roll and write mechanic, complete with disposable player score pads and multiple different scoring options, but replaces the dice with a deck of cards. Again there is a shared pool of results to use from across three cards flipped each round, meaning play is simultaneous. Players are building houses in a suburban neighbourhood, and deciding when to add features like fences and pools. While this game lacks the physical neatness of other games that only have dice, a handful of pens and a scoring pad, it makes up for it by, for me, having both the deepest and most rewarding gameplay as well as the strongest theme of all the roll and write games I played at Essen.

What Next?

With all these games going strong almost a year down the line there is no sign of the associated mechanisms losing their buzz. In fact Root, Spirit Island, The Mind, That’s Pretty Clever and Welcome To.. all have expansions in the pipeline. We will see many of these at SPIEL 2019 in just over a month, but what will be more interesting to look out for in Essen will be the discovery of the next step in ongoing evolution of boardgames.

Geekscape Tabletop: ‘Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures’

by MonkeyMagicAugust 11, 2014

I suppose that here at Geekscape not that many eyebrows would be raised if someone said they were thinking about dropping $110* on a Star Wars model. After all, she is a beauty isn’t she?

[*That’s UK prices, in the US you can pick it up for a mere $61]

While the Tantive IV would look great decorating your shelf, this is not just an ornament, it’s part of a board game, or if you are being pedantic, a miniatures battle game – the Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game. I think that Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures is a great game for any gamer, but especially the geek gamer. While the Star Wars connection is one obvious reason (and they also make a very similar Star Trek version for those who swing more that way) I will try to give you a few more.

The Basics

Let’s start by explaining what the game is: it’s Star Wars dog fighting. Is that good enough? OK. It is a game of two sides, Alliance vs Empire of course, designed to be played by two players but that can easily accommodate more with a few extra ships and team play. Each of you controls one or more ships flying around in space trying to achieve your mission goals. These can be as simple as a TIE Fighter vs X-Wing fight to the death or a more sophisticated scenario involving escorting shuttles, scanning probes and so on.

The rules are pretty simple which makes it an easy game to pick up, and I think it’s worth me going through them briefly. At the start of each turn the players all secretly and simultaneously select how far their ships are going to move and in which direction by using little dials that belong to each ship. Each type of ship a different choices – TIE Interceptors for example are obviously quicker and more manoeuvrable than Y-Wings. Players then reveal the dials one at a time and move their ships, in order of pilot skill. After a ship moves it can take one of a small number of actions that vary depending on ship type. For example they can Target Lock in order to increase their chance of attacks hitting and have an opportunity to fire any missiles they might have, or they might Evade reducing the chances of being hit if fired upon.

Once all the ships have moved, it’s shootin’ time. The most skilled pilots go first and pick a target. Simple range and line of sight is determined with a natty little ruler shaped like a laser blast – red on one side and green on the other. The attacking player rolls a number of special attack dice and sees how many hits they score. The defending player rolls the defence dice and tries to cancel out any hits. Players may spend those tokens I mentioned that you can take as actions. Each hit damages the ship, reducing shields first and then causing hull damage. Once your hull is depleted the ship explodes in space. Feel free to hum the sad Binary Sunset music mockingly at your opponent. After all ships that are able to fire the round is over and you start again setting your manoeuvre dials. And that is basically it. Simple yet elegant. I think this is a great game for both the first time casual player or the hardcore seasoned gamer, and here’s why.

Simple but meaningful choices

As I hope I have shown, the rules are easy and your choices fairly simple each turn. Do you fly at the enemy head on with all your forces, or do you divide your strength by splitting up to flank them , do you go for their strongest ship first to take it out early, or do you try and pick off the weaker ones quickly first? Do you pull a difficult manoeuvre to get into (or out of) a crucial spot but then take a Stress token limiting your options later? And after your move you will have another choice to make. This will probably be one of 3 or 4 possible actions for each ship, and these again can be crucial decisions. Maybe your ship has the option to do a Barrel Roll [best Peppy voice please], Evade or Focus. The benefits of each choice will dependent on what your opponent does and whether you plan to be opening fire or trying to duck and cover. The options are never complex but the choices can be agonising and the consequences weighty.

Variable ship characteristics

As illustrated above each ship has unique characteristics. The X-Wing is has 3 attack dice [red number] and only 2 defence [green number] meaning it has more firepower than the TIE [2 attack] but is not as evasive [3 defense]. However when the tie is hit it will explode in a ball of flames after taking only 3 damage [yellow], whereas the X-Wing has 2 shields [blue] to take out before it receives real damage. As mentioned before they also have different abilities, for example TIEs can do a barrel roll and X-Wings can target lock. As a result it really feels like you are flying very different ships and you therefore adjust your play style accordingly.

Squad Customisation

Not only is each ship different but they all cost a different number of points. This is further modified by the skill of the pilot, as more skilled pilots move last (usually an advantage) and shoot first (always an advantage). Better pilots are also more likely to have special abilities that can modify the game, changing die results, adding or removing tokens, adjusting combat rolls and so on. As an example of cost Luke in his X-Wing costs 28 points whereas a lowly Academy Pilot in their TIE is only 12. Finally you can further customise a ship by adding upgrade cards like missiles, pilot skills and R2 units. When picking your roster you set a number of squad points each; 50, 100, 200 or whatever, and build two squads. If you enjoy this kind of thing you can spend ages fine tuning a squad. If you don’t it’s pretty easy to do off the cuff, or you can find pre-made squad suggestions in the box or online. And while the box says 2 players, bigger squads mean you can play with more players. I have had many enjoyable 3-5 player team games, with each player controlling one or more ships.

Ship Collection

In the starter box you get one X-Wing and two TIE Fighters with a bunch of different pilot and upgrade cards. This alone is enough for plenty of game, with a few different scenarios adding variety if you want a rest from last-man-standing type play. But we are geeks and cannot stop there. The damn company keep releasing more ships and how can we resist? For about $10 each you can get A-wings, B-wings, Y-wings, TIE interceptors, TIE bombers and the TIE Advanced. Each ship plays a little differently and has different pilot and upgrade cards in the box, with the latter often usable on many of your other ships. And there are bigger (of course more expensive) ships like the Falcon, Slave I and an Imperial Shuttle. And recently even bigger ships with the Tantive IV and a Rebel Transport. Many of the new ships add minor or major new rules and mechanics to the game. There are now even extended canon ships like TIE defenders and Z-95s. I am up to 14 ships at the moment and having a bit of a rest. For now.

(IMAGE: SEBASTIAN BLANCO
sebastianblanco.zenfolio.com) – DEATH STAR ATTACK

Conclusion

For $27 you get a simple and fairly elegant game with amazing models. You have a rules set that is easy enough that my 5 year old son can play the game and squad build with a little help, and yet create deep enough play to satisfy the tactical needs of many of the more hard core gamers in my group. You can keep it light and drop it on the table for a quick casual game or you can spend hours honing your squad to compete in national tournaments.

Bottom line is, at the end of the day it’s just fun. And did I mention it’s Star Wars?

Essen Recap: The BoardGame Geek Convention – Part II

by MonkeyMagicMarch 27, 2014

So you join us fresh from Essen Part I. If you have not been there first this may not make much sense.

FRIDAY

Day two of the fair started with another early morning tactical table grab. This time we went for Kohle & Kolonie. It looked like a heavy game we could sink our teeth into. All about coal mining. As soon as the rules started we knew it was going to be our kind of game. We only played a partial game but got a good feel for it. It is a complex and heavy game. Not in so much as the rules are very complex, but the interplay of mechanics makes it a nice challenge to see just how to best play. Reminded me a little of a classic by the name of Brass. I didn’t buy a copy immediately due to fear it might hurt my head just a little too much. Went top of my shortlist though.

We managed to get a couple of other quick games in before it was time to head over and demo for Portal Games. Two of us were on shift at once demoing the previously mentioned Theseus as well as their other new release Legacy: The Testament of Duke de Crecy. The latter is a fun family building card game where you all try and develop the most well renowned family by facilitating your family members having children, marrying of these children to different characters, buying property, holding social functions and so on. It is an enjoyable game with a strong narrative. When teaching I saw a number of players making little stories as they went. “We are poor so have to marry the shoemaker”, “the bakers daughter is very fertile and so we have an extra child”, “his wife dies in childbirth, no problem, he will get married again”. The character art also works well. It was always interesting to watch all the guys crane across to get a better look every time the attractive and mysterious “Pirates Daughter” was placed on the table. There would always be some disappointment when one of the other players took her as a bride.

It was a fairly intense but still enjoyable 4 hours of demoing running up until the doors closed for the day.

... in a big ass hall — … in a big ass hall

As it was Friday night we decided to go out for dinner. One of the traditional locations is The Mexican, no idea what it is actually called. After a couple of games of Donburiko we were ready to go. When we arrived it wasn’t looking good. It was very busy and we were 8 people. More importantly cocktail happy hour was about to end. We managed to shoehorn ourselves onto an undersized table some friends were leaving and maximised our cocktail order about 3 mins before half price cocktails was over. This meant two pint of cocktail per person. Excellent. Cocktails arrived and we placed our food order. Then disaster struck, the kitchen was too busy to take any more orders. We had about a litre of cocktail to drink each and no food. We could not leave, but it was almost 10pm, we needed food. In the end we managed to get two sharing platters between the 8 of us. There were some hungry tums after that.

As the evening went on the conversation deteriorated. After the great story of the friend who ordered a thousand chicken nuggets at McDonalds, we moved onto to the popular dinner table topic of “Most Embarrassing Shit”. This was not about the turd whose shape and consistency one was most ashamed of, but the most embarrassing circumstances in which one had laid a devil cigar. Favourites included the one that plopped out of the bottom of the bus while everyone was loading their luggage at the station, the chap out in the forest who knocked on the door of a nearby house to find it was a show home and so peeled the cellophane off the pan but discovered that there was no water plumbed in to dispose of his good work and had to simply re-wrap the toilet with a gift inside, and the turd that wouldn’t come in the airplane toilet so had to be sucked back into the gentleman’s body in time for landing after which his friends had to leave him at the airport to allow him the time needed to get the task completed. Next one of the larger gents in our group managed to convince pretty much all of us that he could beat two of the more lithe chaps in a 25m sprint. Sadly this was subsequently proved to be incorrect in a sprint across the wet central town square of Essen.

When we got back to the hotel it was late and we were not at our mental pinnacle. Two of us tried to master the fairly hefty Cornish Smuggler. We struggled through what was probably a very reasonable rulebook and played a few rounds. After a spell I realised I had backed myself into an untenable position with no way to sell the goods I had smuggled across half of Cornwall and no money left to make a different play. With our brains aching we decided to call it quits while we still could. Despite this the two of us decided to play Lost Legacy in the room. It is based on a game we know very well called Love Letter that plays in about 2 minutes. Reading through the rules it all sounded good, although the fact I fell asleep briefly and dropped my card as my companion drew his first card was a bad omen. Then, after scrutinising them for a while he declared that he could not legally play either card. Soundly beaten by the fatal alcohol+fatigue+Essen combo we gave up.

SATURDAY

The must play table dash this morning was Amerigo, designed by Stefan Feld, the man responsible for the classic that is In the Year of the Dragon. It had some clever mechanics and we all enjoyed it as a good solid effort, but nobody was totally wowed.

We had another good day getting in quite a few reasonable titles. Just after a game of L’Aéropostale we saw our 3rd chair-destruction-by-overweight-gamer. Comedy value was added by the fact that despite not actually being that massive they did a great beached whale number on the floor, I think more due to low IQ than high BMI. They need to get stronger chairs next year. Or scales at the door.

The highlight of Saturday at the fair was SOS Titanic. A co-operative game where you try and evacuate the passengers off the Titanic onto the lifeboats before it sinks. It has a Solitaire/Patience mechanic at it’s centre with each passenger represnted by a card that you have to line up on the deck of the Titanic. It has some really nice touches that make decisions tough but avoids the one player dictator problem some co-ops can have. It is also beautifully presented with a ring bound book representing the Titanic that sinks as you flip the pages with the progress of the game.

Back at the ranch we played Northern Pacific. A game we have had to class as Broken AND Genius at the same time. There is a map with a rail network across America and the train will make it’s way from one side of the board to the other without ever doubling back. On your turn you can do one of two things – place one of your cubes in a city the train has not yet been to, or chose which city the train goes to next from its current location. Every time it reaches a city with a cube in it each player gets their cube back and one more from the supply. The player with the most cubes when the train has completed its E to W journey wins. Unless no one has more cubes than they started with in which case the game wins! Crucially each city will accommodate one less cube than there are players. Consequently someone will always be left out. So if players 1, 2, and 3 load up a city that the train can go to next, player 4 will move the train to one of it’s other possible destinations, meaning all the other players have made a cube loss. So when player 1 places in A, player 2 might decide to join them or might decide place in city B. Player 3 must decide whether to join in the fun in A or B. Or maybe they will speculate on C, the common location the train could go to next after A or B. And so on. On the one hand it feels like there is no game and there will be a solvable “best move” each turn, on the other each situation seems different and one player can suddenly change the landscape completely with a single cube placement. Despite the concern that we were the ones being played, I have tabled this three times and it has been played 4-5 times in a row each time. The fact in plays in 10-15 minutes helps this, but it is very addictive.

We then had a game of what we call Wobbly Ship, officially know as Riff Raff. Why describe it when a video speaks a thousand words.

Finally we played the catchily titled Geistesblitz 5 vor 12. Place a selection of 8 wooden items on the table – a ghost, a mirror, an owl and so on. Flip a card. First player to grab the item from the card that matches one of those on the table, same item and same colour, wins the card. Get it wrong and you lose a card. Simple. But…

– If there is no exact match then you must grab the item which has neither it’s colour nor it’s likeness on the card.
And then add the advanced rules
– If there is a ghost with a clock grab nothing but shout the time on the clock
– If there is an item reflected in a mirror grab that item regardless of colour
– If there is an owl on the card shout the correct item rather than grabbing it
– If there is a mirror and an owl shout the colour of the item in the mirror
Stand back while your brain melts.

Need sleep.

SUNDAY

As we entered the final day I still had a certain emptiness. While there had been some excellent filler and party type games I was still looking for my Game Of The Show. A classic 90-120 minute medium to heavy weight game that I might continue to play for years to come. Each Essen should have at least one.

Our last great hope was Nations. We had been too slow to get a table Saturday morning so got in extra early and sprinted right there. Having secured a table we were then lucky enough to be taught by one of the game designers.

This is an epic 40-60 mins per player civ game, a bit like Civilization the computer game. You build up your empire by buying different cards from a common board and placing them on your own board. There are the key commodities of grain, stone and money, which have different uses. There are also tracks for books (knowledge), military strength and stability. Each track has its own rewards and opens up various options. How much you have of any of these variables is determined by the cards you buy for your board and in some cases which cards you deploy workers to. And of course there are VPs, both earned during game and at end game scoring.

Initially it sounds pretty simple; the rules are pretty elegant, if a bit solitaire. But it’s not. Other player actions are crucial. You are frequently in direct competition on the three tracks, with absolute score on any track often much less important than position relative to other players. Also you frequently really want 2 or 3 cards from the common pool and will agonise over which one might still be there by the time it gets round to your turn again. One player’s move can often have a huge impact on your plans.

At last. Game of the Show. Several copies were bought and I felt satisfied. So far it has stood the test of time. Mission accomplished I felt free to wander the halls aimlessly. We then stumbled across a free table. It was a slightly odd setup being a shop booth, rather than a publisher booth, but it had a single gaming table tacked on to the edge. And what was laid out but Coal Baron. Or in German “Glück Auf”. Sounds a bit like “F**k Off”, which is enough to be mildy entertaining to our childish brains. More importatntly it was one of the few remaining games on my list to try. As icing on the cake a charming and pretty young lady was waiting to teach us.

It’s a game about mining. Expand your mine, mine your coal, obtain orders for different kinds of coal, fulfil you orders. After we had got over our excitement at the little lift in the middle of each player board that actually slides up and down, accessing different levels, we got stuck in. What a great game. Simple, intuitive, and fast paced but with plenty of interaction and tough choices. My number two big box game of the show. What a day!

As time was ruuning out it was important to complete the Essen experience by visiting the visiting the Geek section. Yes, even as a bunch of geeks travelling across Europe to a boardgame convention, there is a subsection even we find too Geek. The cosplayers and LARPers. In one part of the hall you can find massive arrays of weapons for sale, both foam and metal, stunning armour, booths selling mead for the drinking, pixie ears and so on. And some pretty intense costumes.

Skaven I believe [image - JPWatts] — Skaven I believe [image – JPWatts]

And so we played a couple more games before we exited the hall for the last time and made our way to the car for the long drive back to Paris.

Once again our journey took us through godforsaken Belgium where we bookended our weeks awful diet with another MacD’s. It did however bring us a sweet reward from the petrol station were we found some neat little limited edition Lego cars to bring home for the children. As we struggled to stay awake in the dark we had plenty of time for post match analysis of this year’s Essen.

It is always hard to judge the games in the bigger scheme of things until they have had time to settle in to their place in the wider pantheon of boardgames. Some years produce classics that still have a place many gamers all time top 10’s. For example 2007 gave us In the Year of the Dragon and 2008 Tinners’ Trail both of which still have a warm place in many of our hearts. Will Nations be viewed through rose tinted spectacles in the brave new world of 2019? Over all the impression was that, yes, this had been a good year for games. From fillers like Donburiko and Pick-a-Polar Bear to the bigger boxes of Nations and Coal Baron. We both felt satisfied that our games booty would get some good mileage in the future. The experience in the fair each day had also been good. The new halls worked fine and, with the exception of awkwardly placed toilets, the layout seemed to work. We also felt as though, unlike some previous years, we spent very little time wandering around unable to get a table when we wanted to. The group size worked out well too. Eight is a good number as two groups of 4 is the ideal split (a lot of games will not take 5 or more players). Although we got into a habit of sticking in the same 4s for the whole show, this was partly due to taste in games and beer-game priorities, and we did manage to mix it up a bit. Maybe most importantly the company was good and there was a lot of laughing. We laughed while playing games, laughed with good games, laughed at bad games, laughed between games and laughed at plenty of really bad chat. And there were some really embarrassing shit stories. Probably the only thing missing was sleep.

Within a few days of getting back I had already booked us 4 rooms for 2014…

I had to fit the left hand tower of 25 games in my suitacse

Essen Recap: The BoardGame Geek Convention – Part I

by MonkeyMagicMarch 24, 2014

Essen. You know, probably the biggest gathering of geeks in the whole world? Every October in the industrial town of Essen in Germany? No?

For boardgamegeeks, this is it. Over a period of four days 156,000 visitors come to see 828 exhibitors across 48,000 square metres of exhibition space. Officially titled Internationale
Spieltage SPIEL’13, it is generally just referred to as Essen.

This was my 7th year and I thought I would share the experience.

WEDNESDAY

So we had a crew of eight of us going this year. Seven from sunny Glasgow in Scotland plus Colin from gay Paris. I flew over to Paris early with the family as Colin and I planned to road trip from there to Germany. The rest of the gang flew into Amsterdam and drove their way in too.

First order of business – sort out the suitcase. Inevitably many games will be purchased and it is crucial to maximise suitcase size and minimise the unnecessary clutter that you put in it. A few years ago I inadvertently did such a good job that I forgot all my clothes other than spare underwear (thankfully), and the clothes I was wearing of course.

Crucial equipment – small quantity of clothing, lots of bubble wrap, baggies for game bits, luggage scales, and loads of snacks including compulsory mallow and Monster Munch. Oh, and a print out of my list and map. The list is the collection of games I am interested in playing, collated by hours spent pouring over the 552 games that have made it to the Boardgamegeek Essen 2013 list. And a map of the halls, all the better to find them with.

Having dropped my family at the airport we were off – road trip. Our 5 days of shitty food started with a McDonalds as we made it through the travesty that is Belgium; hideous roads. For some reason we thought it would be an appropraite homage to German music to relive our industrial music past en route. Ministry, Lard, Sheep on Drugs, Front 242, Revolting Cocks, Warlock Pinchers and so on..

We made pretty good time and decided to head straight to the fair. Officially it doesn’t open until Thursday but as we were demoing for Portal Publishing we knew we could get in during the setup day.

Now would probably be a good time to explain how Essen works. I have never been to any other geek cons for comparison but I suspect some of it is pretty similar and some of it not. The central premise is that game publishers bring their new games and we play them. That simple. Each publisher has a booth, size obviously dependent on budget; from sharing half a table with another publisher to having a collection of 20 or so tables like so (shown in the quiet before the doors opened)…

Us geeks then roam around the halls, we jump onto a table with a game that interests us when a seat comes up, we get taught how to play the game by the booth staff, and then we play. And that is Essen. Pretty much anyway, there are of course a lot of stalls that are essentially board games shops. And a small minority of stalls that differ from these two standard models.

So where were we? Wednesday. The fair is not open yet but you can go in. On previous years this has been slightly pointless. All the publishers are busy setting up and are not ready to teach, and nobody is supposed to sell anything. We were keen this year for two reasons. One, the halls had moved. For the last six years it had been the same halls that were in use, and generally the publishers were in the same place. So you get to know your way around; where to find your favourite publishers, how to shortcut between hall 9 and hall 2, where the hotdog stands are, where the toilets are. Crucial survival information. This year, due to refurbishments, everything had moved so a chance for re-orientation a day early was very welcome. Secondly we wanted to pick up some of our pre-orders to play that night. So we completed aforesaid missions and cruised around a bit.

We even managed to get a couple of games in. Luchador! Mexican Wrestling Dice, which was a fun light wrestling game, but ultimately a bit disappointing, and Donburiko which is officially ‘Genius’. At times in our group we opt for a simple binary rating system ‘Genius’ or ‘Broken’. Sometimes a game will start of as Genius but get a verdict of Broken before the end of our first play. Or move from Genius to Broken and back to Genius. You get the idea. Donburiko was consistently Genius. One of the nice chaps from Japon games taught us this. The game designer in fact (a common Essen bonus). It’s simple mechanic – add a card to a row (the numbers of rows equals the number of players) or pick up a row. However for a small fee you can play cards face down. Numbered cards in each row are totalled. If you manage to pick up a pile worth 6 you end the round early and everyone else still in gets nothing. Under 6 and you score your total, over 6 and you are ‘bust’ and must pay the bank a fee. There are minus cards and “make all minus cards positive” cards. When you see a pile with one hidden card you have to decide; was it the perfect 6 the other player was setting up for themselves and so you must take it, or is it a trap and you will be bust. I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me! This has had quite a bit of play since the fair and remains universally popular.

So we took our loot and headed off to find the other 6 gentlemen travellers from our party. They had not been idle while we were working hard and we found them enjoying German food and beverages in the pub. Having reconvened it was time to participate in the other important Essen pastime. Playing boardgames. But in the hotel, and with beer.

The traditional structure of a day in Essen, for me anyway, is as follows. Get up around 7:30 am. With difficulty. Get ready. Go to the bakery round the corner from the hotel and buy an Apfelberliner, a Franzbroetchen and a cup of tea. Drive to the halls. Enter before the doors open with an exhibitor pass earned by demoing. Grab a table for one of your must-play games. Play. Find another table. Play. Grab some low quality fast food for lunch, probably a hotdog. Play. Repeat until the doors close, punctuated by wandering round the halls and maybe buying some stuff. Go back to the hotel, decide whether to have dodgy hotel pizza for dinner to maximise gaming time, or to go out for dinner. Drink beer. Play the games people have bought. Drink beer. Play. Drink beer. Play. Admit defeat at around 5am and go to bed. Start again in two and a half hours.

Theseus [image - Scorn The Great] — Theseus [image – Maciej Mutwil: Portal Games]

This year we had offered to demo for Portal Publishing, run by Ignacy Trzewiczek. A bunch of us basically work their stall teaching their new games and in exchange get passes to get into the halls early, as well as usually have a good time in the process. We weren’t demoing until Friday but had picked up a copy of Theseus to learn so thought it wise to make a start. We were slightly hampered by one of the four of us having spent the afternoon in the pub, and feared he would crash and burn. But after a pizza he perked up and it all came good. Thesues is a tactical game with factions moving around a space station trying to kill each other and collect data. You choose from Marines, Scientists, Aliens and Greys. The movemens of your units through the rooms is strictly defined. They move a number of rooms equal to the number of units in the room it starts in. Each room has different special actions and more importantly each faction plays cards into all the rooms, often setting up traps. I have played this game quite a few times now and it continues to reveal new facets. The more you play the better you can see the strategic choices in the game and the strengths and weaknesses of different factions. While the ‘mancala’ movement seems chaotic and uncontrollable at first, you start to see how you can plan several moves ahead, and even better force you opponent to move to certain locations to mess them up.

We played a couple of Japon brand games next, before finishing the night with a game of Coup. This is a game from a previous Essen where players have hidden identity cards that allow them to take different actions. Mainly focused around taking money from the bank or other players, and then saving up to kill other players. It is all about bluffing, or less politely, lying. You can claim to have any card you like, possibly changing your claim from one turn to the next. But others can call you on it. If they are right you lose a life, if they are wrong then they are the ones who lose a life. All the lying, cheating and backstabbing suits our group nicely. This year they added the Reformation expansion. This adds factions that you can change, or be forced to change, between. Catholics and Protestants. Perfect for us chaps from the sectarian city of Glasgow. Genius.

And so to bed.

THURSDAY

The official Day 1 of the fair. Our reconnaissance had paid off and we used our passes to get in early and run straight to our chosen game – A Study in Emerald. This was selected as not only were we keen to try it, but we also knew copies were in limited supply so it might sell out. It was this years release from ‘celebrity’ designer Martin Wallace who has a fairly solid back catalogue. Thematically it’s a strange mix of Sherlock Holmes meets Cthulhu. It was fun to play but a slightly unusual hidden factions mechanic left us a little uncertain. No purchase was made. We moved on to have our first freeform cruise of the fair.

Did I tell you it is massive. 156,000 people. Comic-Con 130,000. Comikaze 45,000. E3 48,200. In Germany boardgaming is a very popular family pastime. The majority of attendees are Germans, teenagers, old folk, families with young children, just pretty regular folk. For Germans anyway. There is of course a strong Geek contingent. Boardgame obsessives like myself who travel to the Mecca of gaming from literally all over the world. While we will roam all over, you will find us disproportionately crowding round the smaller publishers at the back of the halls. So it gets busy. Walking about can be tough, and it always helps to know the shortcuts through the courtyards, especially to the toilets.

Lots of tiny people... — Lots of tiny people…

Having said that we did pretty well and never spent to long waiting for a table. Flicking through the rules for the end game conditions to work out which table will finish next sometimes helps here.

Later on Thursday we experienced a classic cultural stereotype at one of the French publisher stalls. We saw a couple of free tables for a game we wanted to check out. Having dashed over and secured it we looked for someone to explain the game. Should be no problem, there were loads of guys in staff T-shirts around. We approached one and politely asked. Sorry, no. He had been working all morning and was going to eat some lunch. Actually no, not just him, all the staff, about 8 of them had decided to simultaneously down tools and stop doing any work on their stall while everything stopped for lunch. Only the French.

Our group of 8 was split into 4 and 4 for most of the fair, very few games play 8. As 4 of us sat playing we got a text in from the others guys. “Game of the show Suburban Dispute, Hall 2 D105”. Wow! We had been looking for a great game so made haste there after we had finished up. The artwork looked cheesy but the man dressed as an Italian Gangster style seemed nice. The concept sounded like it could be fun – try to annoy your neighbours while you amass wealth and develop your home. The rules seemed a little simple at first but things were obvioulsy just about to get interesting. Except they weren’t. Half way through the second round I realised. C***s! We had been conned. On your turn draw a card, it tells you some “amusing” and unpleasant thing you can do to your neighbour, pick another player (who is usually unaffected by the fact that you “tipped over their bins” or defiled them in some other unspeakable way), roll the dice. If you succeed gain the points stated on the card. That’s it. Probably the worst game I have ever played in my entire life. The kind of game you might make at nursery school. If you were a bit special.

Ultimately we managed to play 10 games during the day on Thursday. The best being a light filler called Pick-a-Polar Bear (or Dog or Pig). You lay out a grid of cards and then in a massive free-for-all everyone simultaneously picks cards off the table to add to their hand in sequence. Each card must be the same or one different from the one below. For example sunglasses on or off, one hand or two, big or small. A great fun 20 minute game.

And so we retired for dinner. Dodgy take away fish that night I think. We got a couple more big games in at the hotel before playing One Night Werewolf. Some of you will have played the classic party game Werewolf, this is similar but works for less players, needs no moderator, and is arguably funnier.

There are a selection of role cards, one is assigned to each player and they secretly look at the them, two are left unknown face down in the middle of the table. The 10 min timer is started, or even better the free phone app with a dedicated soundtrack. You are all villagers, but up to two of you are secretly werewolves. Each is faction is trying to kill the other. A couple of villagers have a special ability. Either to secretly look at another player’s card [Seer], or to secretly swap cards with another player, taking over their role [Thief]. Once the secret shenanigans are over everyone opens their eyes and discusses which player should be killed – werewolves try to get a villager voted and vice versa. Claims and accusations fly around the table. “I am the Seer and I saw Nick’s card and he is a villager”. “You cant be because I am the Seer and I saw Colin was a villager, so you must both be werewolves.” “No, you must be a werewolf”. “Then what about the Thief, who was the Theif”…. “So maybe the Thief card is in the middle of the table this round.” “Or maybe the Thief stole a card from a werewolf but does not want to admit it as they are now on the werewolf team.”. So many entertaining logic and false logic arguments to be had. But before you get your head clear the timer runs out and you all point at someone. Whoevere gets the most votes is killed. See if they were a werewolf or a villager and see who won. One of the guys managed to break the game to hilarious effect by refusing to believe anything anybody said as he swore blind someone (ie a Thief or a Seer) had touched his card. Eventually a werewolf “admitted” to it, convincing him to kill his fellow villagers. Doh. Of course, nobody had moved his card.

And on that note it was time for some sleep.

Look for further adventures in Part II on Wednesday. Tune in for coal mining, most embarassing shit, fat men breaking chairs, game of the show, coal mining again, and more …..