Tag: spiel

Play your Cards Right – Highlights from Essen SPIEL Games Fair 2024

by MonkeyMagic

Over the course of four days in October, thousands of people flock to Essen in Germany to celebrate their love of tabletop gaming, playing and buying (and buying and buying) games from a vast array of new titles making their world debut at the fair each year. As publishers and players begin to prepare for SPIEL 2025, now is a great time to reflect on the games from SPIEL 2024 that have remained hot titles since their introduction there last year.

If I say ‘Tabletop Gaming’ you probably either think of pen and paper RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, or conjure up in your mind the image of a big board in the middle of the table covered in wooden tokens, cardboard counters and plastic figures. There might even be some cards in there too, but you’re certainly less likely to immediately think of a card game. However, the same way board games have evolved a lot since Monopoly and Risk, the world of card games is now much bigger than the standard 52 deck of cards we’re all familiar with. Card games also hold several advantages: they are usually cheaper than bigger boxed games, making it easier to justify adding them to your collection; they are generally smaller and more portable; and because they are often easy to learn and quick to play, it’s often a simpler task to get them to the table in the first place.

One of the many Halls at SPIEL 2024

There is no better place to see a cross-section of modern card games than at SPIEL, the scale of which cannot be overestimated. SPIEL 2024 was no different, with 68,500 square meters of hall space occupied by 923 exhibitors from across the world. Some 204,000 attendees were able to sample over 1,500 new games over the course of the fair.

While many of the headline grabbing titles were more typical board games, the impact of the more humble card game should not be overlooked. The SPIEL 2024 games list on boardgamegeek.com categorised some 384 of the releases as ‘card games’. Now that some time has passed and these SPIEL releases have percolated their way through the gaming community to the shelves, pockets and gaming tables beyond Germany, we can take stock of some of the big hitters from the fair that have made a lasting impact, and that I would recommend you might want to consider picking up yourself.

Flip 7

While these are all new releases, some may seem familiar to you as they play on traditional card game mechanics — Flip 7, for example, feels a little like blackjack. On your turn, you have cards on the table in front of you and will either stick or twist/hit, hoping not to go bust. The important change here is that the goal and the ‘bust’ condition are completely different. The deck consists of twelve ‘12’ cards, eleven ‘11’s and so on down to one ‘1’, plus some special cards. The value of the cards in front of you is your score for the round, but if you ever get two cards with the same value you are out. So while a 12 and an 11 is great for scoring, you have a very high chance of going bust if you take another card. And although a collection of low cards wont score much initially, it increases the chances of you getting to the mythical seven cards in front of you. If you ‘Flip 7’ cards you get an extra 15 bonus points and end the round (and of course, you garner cheers and admiration from the rest of the table for your cojones). There are also special cards, some of which adjust your score, but the more in interesting ones give you an extra ‘life’, force a player to duck out of the round early, or make a player ‘Flip 3’. This latter card is great to play on other players to force them to take three cards in a row (making them likely to go bust), but occasionally it feels like the right thing to do is to really push your luck and play it on yourself.

The designers have self labelled the front of the box ‘The greatest card game of all time!’, and while this is more than a little hyperbolic, it is not totally unjustified. Of all the card games released at SPIEL, this soon became the most played and most purchased among the team here, and has remained so since.

Seers Catalog

If you have ever played the classic card game President (maybe you know it as A✱hole), then you have played a ‘ladder climbing’ game. In these games, one player leads the trick by playing a ‘meld’ of cards made up of a run or set of matching cards, the next player must then beat the played meld by playing a better meld (often of the same number of cards), or pass. The goal of the game is usually to be the first player to get rid of all your cards. Seers Catalog is a great new twist on this mechanic, standing out from the crowd for two reasons. Firstly the presentation, which starts with a nice little pun on Sears Catalog and some linked 1960s style box art with a twist. The card design is also great with lots of references to Werewolves and magical Seers, combined with clean art and a pleasing colour palette. Secondly the gameplay. A small twist is the addition of special power cards that disrupt normal rules and gameplay. More impactful however, the simple ladder climbing mechanic is subverted by the end of round scoring. Ideally, you want to hold on to a high value card in your hand at the point another player ends the round by playing their final cards, but the more cards you have the more your score is reduced, and if you have too many you will score only negative points. This creates a delicious balance between playing your high cards to win tricks and keeping them in your hand for scoring, and of shedding your cards quickly, but not too quickly. Since picking this up at SPIEL it has made it back to the table several times and I think it will likely gaining playtime for a while yet to come.

Before we move away from classic card game mechanics, we need to mention the most well used mechanic there is – trick taking. One player leads with a card and the others then take in turns to play another single card to the trick, following or trumping the suit, highest card wins. There are numerous new twists on the trick taking game every year, and SPIEL 2024 was no different. Notable titles that we enjoyed included Bottle Imp, Fischen, Panda Spin, and Power Vacuum.

Agent Avenue

Card games often lend themselves well to team games of two vs two players, and a beautiful example of that is Agent Avenue. The theme is of anthropomorphic animals spying on each in other in 1950s suburbia, and the artwork is gorgeous. In the two player version you pick two cards to offer your opponent, one face up one face down. They pick one, you get the other. The cards either move your pawns round a circular track on the small central board until one wins by catching the other, or tick you towards sets of three cards that spell instant victory or instant defeat. The agony of which cards to put on the table face up or face down is nothing compared to the “I can clearly not choose the win in front of me” mental gymnastics you will do when choosing which card to pick. One might be terrible, but does that mean the face down one is even worse, or is it a double bluff and the face down card is actually amazing? While the game is great fun at two, it is even better with four. In your team of two, one of you must first decide, without discussing specifics with your partner (the other team are right there listening!) who will play a card face up, with the second player then forced to react with a suitable face down card from the limited selection in their hand. In the months since picking this up I don’t think I have ever sat down and played only one game of this, it’s just so compelling!.

Ito

Card games also have the ability to take a single deck and scale up to a multi-player party game. Ito does just that, accommodating up to 8 players co-operating together. First you will draw a category card, something like “Things you want to take a picture of” or “Best ever holiday”, then each player is secretly given a random card numbered between 1 and 100. On your turn you place your card face down on the table and try to give a clue to help put the card in the correct rank order relative to the cards the other players put down. For example, if the category was “Important life events” and you drew 91 you might say “Getting married” or if you drew 5 you might say “Brushing my teeth this morning”. Once all the cards are on the table the players discuss how to rank them based on the appropriate clue, and once agreed flip them over to see if you placed them in the right order. It’s a simple premise, but as you can see from the example questions, it usually generates some interesting discussion at worst, and some hilarious moments at best. It is so easy to teach, requires almost no table space, and a round can be played in just a few minutes. The perfect pocket game to take to the pub. One of the perks of SPIEL was picking this up early several months before it came to retail — unsurprisingly it sold out at the fair.

Castle Combo

Another card game that was so popular at SPIEL that it sold out was Castle Combo. A game about making combos in your castle, of course! More specifically, you are each building a 3 by 3 grid of cards, taking it in turn to choose and pay for a card from a common market of 6 on the table. Once you all have your 9 card ‘castle’ you calculate your score and declare a winner. Each card has a mediaeval character on it, but more importantly also has some kind of scoring mechanic. These are widely varied but might be: score 5 points if this card is on the top row, or score 2 points for every blue card beside this one, or score 6 for every card suit you don’t have in your castle at the end of the game. Some cards will also give benefits when you place them such as money to spend buying cards in future turns, or keys which are used to manipulate the common card market (and are worth points if unspent at the end of the game). The game rattles along at a satisfying pace with very little down time, and as the name implies there are plenty of ways to find combinations of cards that power each other up for maximum points. This game taps into that intrinsic joy of building combos such that even when you don’t win you usually feel like you achieved something.

Hopefully this snapshot of some of the hottest card games from SPIEL 2024 illustrates that games that come in small boxes can have as much impact as their bigger box cousins. Big games may grab the spotlight, but as SPIEL 2025 draws closer, we won’t forget to look for those surefire hits in smaller packages.

Board Game Hotness from the SPIEL Games Fair 2023: Nature Calls

by MonkeyMagic

As we move into 2024, it’s the ideal time to look back on what the past year has brought us, and if we want to get a snapshot of what the freshness in boardgames is each year then there is no better place to look than at SPIEL, the annual board game convention in Essen, Germany. It is arguably the biggest in the world, and this year it welcomed 193,000 visitors to see some 1,750 games spread across the vastness of 62,500 square metres of hall space.

One of the many Halls at SPIEL 2023

Having all of these titles in one place can often make it easier to spot trends in board game releases, and this year was no exception. Everyone on the team felt the strongest theme that came across this year was ‘nature’. While there have, of course, always been a smattering of games with nature-based themes, most people would probably point to the massive success of Wingspan, released in 2019, as a turning point. Wingspan features almost 200 different real species of birds, all with amazing realistic artwork, in a well designed strategy game that also manages to be very accessible. Four years later it still sits as the No. 25 ranked boardgame of all time, and has sold over 1 million copies. This taught publishers that games do not need to feature high fantasy, space, war, or Renaissance Europe to sell, and that there was potentially an untapped demand for good looking games that feature plants, animals and all things nature. This has never been more evident than at SPIEL 2023, and so with that in mind let us have a look at some of the finest flora and fauna laden titles that were on offer at the fair.

You probably have a copy, don’t you?

There seems no better place to start than with Forest Shuffle. Not only does it epitomise the genre, but it was one of the most popular games in the show for the team. The game is made up of over 150 cards covered in realistic and biologically accurate illustrations of trees, birds, butterflies, mammals, mushrooms and more. On your turn you have one of two options: you can draw two cards from the top of the deck or a common face up discard display, or you can play a card. When you play a card it is placed in front of you to build your tableau. Tree cards, of which you will end up with several, form the core building blocks. Other cards are added to the trees, with certain types of cards occupying certain spaces around them. Birds and butterflies sit above trees, mushrooms and some animals live below, and other animals are placed to the side of the trees to signify that they live in the branches or the nearby forest. All the cards you play will have certain scoring criteria. Some may be worth a fixed number of points, some may score for other identical cards in your tableau, or for having other synergising cards, or collecting diverse sets of related cards. Add up your points at game end and see who is the king of the forest.

Forest Shuffle

The game has many things going for it. One is, of course, the art and the skilful melding of theme and function — as you place trees and creatures there is a logic in where they go that is intuitive and satisfying. There are also plenty of meaningful decisions to make. When playing cards you may have to pay a cost by discarding other cards from your hand, which is always agonising, as you usually feel that you don’t want to throw any of them away. It is also a game in which you need to be aware of what your opponents are doing. Is someone else also trying to collect all the different butterflies, or have the most Linden trees? The end game is triggered immediately when a third “Winter Is Coming” card is drawn from the deck, forcing you to make decisions about whether you should push your luck and hold out to pull off that big combo with the cards you are building in your hand, or to just get some points on the table before the game suddenly stops. There are a number of different strategic approaches to the game you can experiment with too, meaning that you will often feel the desire to shuffle up the cards and start again as soon as the scoring is done. 

While Forest Shuffle is at the quick and accessible end of the spectrum, towards the other end of the gaming complexity scale lies Arborea, in which players take on the role of a Patron Spirit, guiding your villagers to heal and grow the landscape around them by sending them on pilgrimages and building your personal Ecosystem. It would be foolish to try and explain the whole game in the space available here, but the heart of the game is worker placement. A lot of the game involves familiar interlocking elements; moving up different tracks to improve end game scoring, building a landscape of Ecosystem cards in your own landscape also for scoring purposes, investing in certain areas of the main board by giving gifts to improve your rewards when your workers visit that part of the board. While this fits together into a pleasing puzzle of optimisation, there are some unique elements in the game that add further interest. Workers are placed on sliding tiles rather than directly on to action spaces. When these tiles are triggered to move forward any player can choose to have their worker jump off onto one of the paths on either side. The longer you wait the better the path will be, but the longer you will then have to wait to get your worker back again. Workers that have stepped on to a path can then be activated on your turn to move through every step of that path gaining the varied rewards for each step along the way. Of course there are many varied paths to choose from across the board, all with different rewards.

Arborea

Finally, we cannot possibly talk about Arborea without mentioning the distinct art style. It evokes nature, but some kind of 1970s Vaughn Bodē version with vivid purple hued colours and fantastical hippy versions of creatures and landscapes. 

The whole thing all comes together to present an appealing package. None of us really wrapped our heads around it until half way through the first game, but once things start to click it is a satisfying engine with much joy to be derived from pulling the various levers it offers.

While mushrooms certainly pop up in the artwork for Arborea, these fungi firmly take centre stage in Mycelia, in which the aim is to bring the sacred dewdrops from your forest to the Shrine of Life and receive the support of the Forest Goddess. Pretty self explanatory surely? No? Well, on your player board you have a grid of squares of different terrain types, and drewdrops (blue gems) scattered across it. You need to take actions to move these gems across the squares to the ‘exit’ tile, after which you add them to a cardboard tree stump in the middle of the board. When the Tree is full, it is then spun in a rather superfluous but satisfying manner, ejecting the drops from the bottom along with a die which will direct where each player has to reseed some of the drops onto their board. The first player to clear all the drops from their board is the winner. This feat is achieved via card play and more importantly deck building. This is the heart of the game, recruiting new cards with cute mushroom guys on them, and playing them to move gems or to buy even more cards. The deck building is not overly complex but is still satisfying with a variety of different deck construction strategies available. The game flows smoothly and there is pleasing interplay between the puzzle of creating chains of gem movements and the deck building and card play that allows you to do this. When paired together with the charming presentation of the dew drops, the revolving tree stump, and all the cute mushroom people on the cards, I am now regretting not picking this one up at the fair.

Mycelia

Speaking of presentation, a game that you could not walk past without stopping to look at closer was Redwood, even if just to ask ‘How does that work?’. This game can best be described as a wildlife photography simulator. The large circular board depicts five different outdoor terrain types with trees and flowers printed on them, and movable cardboard animals scattered across the landscape. Each player has a model photographer figure they control. On your turn you do two things, move and take a picture. To move you pick one of the available plastic templates, which are generally curves of differing angles and lengths, place it around the base of your miniature and then move your photographer to their new spot at the end of the template. To take a picture you pick one of the shot templates which vary between long narrow cones and wide curving ones, attach it to the base of your photographer, and then spin it until you have lined up the shot you like. You then reconstruct the shot in your personal display using a card to represent the terrain type you were shooting on, with tokens placed on it for the flowers, trees and animals you covered with your shot template. Each round you will take a new picture this way to add to your collection. You score points along the way for meeting specific objectives and then at the end of the game add on further points for your collected trees, flowers and animals as well as other aspects, such as diversity of different animals or matching adjacent terrain types in your tableau. It is a unique concept executed effectively, although it can suffer a little from the issues any game can have where your score can be determined by millimetre precise calls on if something is over a line (mark it zero!).

Redwood

In Bonsai you are also trying to create a beautiful piece of art, but this time it is by nurturing your own diminutive Japanese tree. Your tree will be made up of hexagonal wood, leaf, flower and fruit tiles. On your turn you choose to either Meditate or Cultivate. If you Meditate then you draw one of the available card and tile combinations. The cards are added to your tableau and among other things can enhance your capacity to store tiles or your ability to place tiles. When you Cultivate you take a number of your stored tiles, as determined by your tableau, and then add them to your tree, obeying specific placement rules. Players take turns to repeat this sequence until the deck runs out, and will then determine who has grown the most stunning bonsai tree. Players may have collected points cards during the game for reaching certain tile targets, for example the first tree with 5 fruit tiles. These points are combined with set end game scoring for each tile type on your tree. All that then remains is to debate if the player who officially won the game actually has the most good looking tree. As should be evident from the description there are definitely decisions to be made, but this is a fairly simple game, generating a lo-fi relaxing experience.

While the above run down includes some of our favourites ranging from brain melting beasts to the relaxing cup of tea companions, there were just too many games to mention that leant heavily into natural world inspired themes. However, brief honourable mentions also need to go to the following SPIEL 2023 releases. The Glade is yet another game in which mushrooms prominently feature, although the main activity involves laying tiles with animal silhouettes on your personal forest board. It is an abstract strategy game with lots of player interaction that makes your head hurt, but in a good way. Planta Nubo is another title that deserves a nod, in which players are planting flowers and trees on their sky island player board, generating green energy and oxygen, and making use of tools and gardenbots. We made the mistake of playing this very late at night on the last day of the fair and trying to learn it from the rulebook as we went. It was well over an hour before we took our first actual turn. While this is more a reflection of our mental capacity at that time, it is another fairly complex, relatively abstract Eurogame with lots of interlocking moving parts, including some satisfying mechanisms in there.

As we draw to a close, what better game to finish off with than one that brings us back full circle to where we started, with Elizabeth Hargrave, the designer who brought us Wingspan and turbo charged the whole nature genre of boardgames. She had a new game at SPIEL in the form of The Fox Experiment. In homage to a real experiment from the 1950s the players are breeding foxes to generate desirable traits. The game not only has a satisfying dice pool building (and rolling of course!) element but even better each new generation of foxes are individually named by the players before being added back into the display for selection the next round. Add on top a tight action selection mechanism and you have a solid mid weight Euro.

The Fox Experiment

So, now that we have digested the releases of 2023 and are into 2024 it is time to start looking at what will show up in Essen this October. What hot new titles and boardgaming trends will emerge this year? If you are not lucky enough to be there in person then check back here this time next year for our thoughts and analysis on SPIEL 2024.

These Are The Hottest Boardgame Releases from the Essen SPIEL Games Fair

by MonkeyMagic

It is hard not to notice that geek culture has been making its way into the mainstream more and more in recent years, and this holds true of boardgames also. But if you want to deep dive into the heart of the hobby there are few better places to start than at SPIEL; it’s here that lockdown favourite Codenames was unveiled back in 2015, and more recently that the highest ranked release of 2021, Ark Nova made its debut. For those who have not heard of it before, SPIEL is the name of the world’s largest boardgame convention, held in Essen, Germany, every October. 2022 saw 147,000 attendees flock from all over the word to play a selection of over 1,800 games over the course of the four days of the fair. We were there, and while we only scratched the surface, we did our best to seek out the hot release, and get a feel for the latest trends on the tabletop. Now that we move into 2023 and have had a couple of months to put some of the most promising titles through their paces a few times, we are ready to bring you our highlights from the SPIEL 2022 releases.

Usual Suspects 

As is often the case, much of the pre SPIEL hype was focused around a cohort of new Euro games. You will find a variety of definitions of a Euro game out there on the interwebs. For my money these are games that typically have a fairly high strategy / low luck ratio, play in a couple of hours, will usually feature some wooden pieces, have low to middling levels of direct player interaction and have multiple possible paths to victory. 

One highly anticipated Euro we got a chance to play a few rounds of was the new release from Uwe Rosenberg, of Agricola fame. This was Atiwa, in which you are trying to develop a small community in rural Ghana, with a strong focus on conservation. Central to this are the local fruit bats, with many of your actions focused around building habitats for the bats and encouraging the growth of fruit trees to attract and feed them, all while feeding and housing the local people without allowing pollution to blight your card tableau. At its heart this is a satisfying worker placement game with some nice decisions to be made about what kind of strategy you focus on. One of the central mechanics sees you removing pieces from tracks on your player board when placing them on your card tableau. In doing so you uncover production icons underneath. The more trees you plant, the more fruit pieces you receive each round. The more fruit you have lifted from the track the more bats you will attract, and so on. Conversely when you spend these resources they go back on to your tracks and reduce the output of the engine you had built. This is where a lot of the balancing comes in as you try to create a satisfying feedback loop without running into problems with food supply or population overcrowding. Sadly the setup the publisher had for the fair did not allow us to play the full game, but everyone enjoyed the time we did get with it.

Atiwa – Lookout Games 

Oak was another Euro that drew a lot of interest. It is a truly good looking game with a strong and unique theme. Each player is the leader of an ancient druidic order. Play focuses around placing your druids (workers). This is mostly to the central main board, and often in combination with cards from your hand that alter the outcome. Alternatively you can commit druids to paths on the branches of the eponymous Oak where they can advance to get powerful payouts. The core game plays as a fairly conventional but engaging mid weight Euro with lots of options to make combos and forge different paths to victory. However the twist it brings to this familiar tale is with the ability to upgrade your druids. When you unlock an upgrade there are six different options, each of which bestows a unique power on that druid when they are placed in future actions. The icing on the cake (stone on the henge?) is that each upgrade is indicated by a unique piece of miniature kit which is placed onto the wooden druid meeple. This might be a cape, a satchel, a raven, or for the mega upgraded ‘Ancient’ a hood with a set of antlers on them. It is a great touch which is both a neat gimmick and a fully functional integrated part of the game play.

Oak – Game Brewer

There were of course a number of other Euro games sparking interest this year, with Tiletum, Woodcraft and Hamlet: The Village Building Game all being popular examples, but as is always the case, we were in search of games that did something a little different.

The Games Is Afoot

One of the themes that could not be missed at the SPIEL this year was that of deduction, with several of the most sought after (and sold out) games asking the players to put their little grey cells to good use.

Turing Machine was a perfect example. Each player competes to solve a logic puzzle using less questions than their opponents. The solution to the puzzle is a three digit number, one blue, one yellow and one purple, with each number having a value between 1 and 5. Each game will have a different set of available questions on the table for players to choose from, and these questions can all be asked in different ways. For example the question might be “The blue number compared to 3 is…” and a player could use this card to ask if the blue number is greater than, equal to, or less than, 3. Or the the question card might allow a player to ask of any coloured number, if it is the smallest of the three numbers. Players will use their powers of logic to build up information until they feel ready to make a guess at the final answer. Guess right first and you win, guess wrong and you are out! One of the nicest features of the game is the way you ask these questions. There is a selection of old school computer style punch cards on the table and players will choose three of these depending on what colours and values they want to ask about. These are then stacked together like misaligned Swiss cheese and will leave only a single hole passing through all three. You then lay these on top of the key cards for each question and will see a tick or a cross to give them the ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answer to the exact question you just asked. How they built this kind of blows one’s mind. There are a vast array of puzzles of various difficulties available. Each key card has a matrix of almost 150 ticks and crosses on them. There is something satisfying about the way that all the combinations of fenestrated punch cards and complex key cards match up in every case to give the correct answers to solve that puzzle. A couple of criticisms we did have was that we found that most of the players in our group reached the correct answer at pretty much the same time, often with a similar choice of questions, and also that there is not really much player interaction. Ultimately this felt to us like it might be more satisfying played as a single player game, in which case it could be a nice one-a-day kind of logic puzzle experience.

Turing Machine – HUCH

Elsewhere in Hall 3 was another competitive game of logic and deduction, Tiwanaku. However, despite these similarities, this is a very different game. Players move their pawns around a square gridded board. To begin with this board is completely blank, but it is actually secretly divided into different coloured regions, ranging in size between 1 and 5 contiguous squares of the same colour. Also, upon each tile will be planted a specific crop. For example, within a 3 tile region there will be a 1 crop, a 2 crop and a 3 crop. Importantly, a crop will never be found in the 8 tiles surrounding a crop of the same size. As you can see, these strict rules allow players to make calculations about the locations of other tiles and crops as the board is gradually revealed. The more information you have the better you are able to score points as you move around the board. While the ultimate ‘solution’ for each game is predetermined, there is no printed map to consult. Similarly to Turing Machine, the game has a very satisfying physical mechanism to allow you to effectively ask questions. There is a cardboard wheel into which a different disc is inserted for each game. When you are ready to ask a question about the colour of the tile you are on, or the crop to be planted there, you dial in the coordinates of your location, and slide open a little window to find the answer. For my mileage I enjoyed Tiwanaku more than Turing Machine, it just felt there was more of a game to be played. It also has a simple but beautiful aesthetic, and if you plump for the luxury version there are some nice chunky wooden pieces for all the square tiles and round crop tokens.

Tiwanaku- Sit Down!

Time… Enough

Gardeners is a game that not only requires deduction, but also features what seemed to be another common theme this year: real time play. Players co-operate to try and appease a fickle and capricious king, who has a very specific idea of how he wants his magnificent garden arranged, and also sees fit to disseminate his different directives separately to the different gardeners. Players arrange tiles in a 6×6 grid, each of which is a specific colour and depicts different garden features, such as trees, flowers, benches, fountains and paths. Each player also holds a certain Constraint tile which must be obeyed. Maybe one player knows that each bench must face a tree, and another that all red trees and flowers must be at the edge of the garden. For the garden to be complete all the Constraints must be met, once this is achieved one of the players draws a new constraint and play continues. The game itself takes place simultaneously and in real time. And in total silence. Each of you will be placing tiles to try and deduce, and then meet, the Constraints of other players, while removing tiles that don’t meet yours. The goal is to fulfil as many Constraint cards as possible before the timer runs out. This experience is an interesting mix of a frantic race against time and a puzzle solving experience. 

Gardeners – Sit Down!

Another real time game which is definitely not played in silence is Ready Set Bet. The concept is simple, a day at the horse races. In fact it is so simple it is a wonder nobody has thought of it before. There are 9 horses running, in 4 different colours. The centre piece is a large table where players place a limited number of betting chips on different possible race outcomes. Each horse has spaces for Win, Place (first or second) or Show (first second or third). In addition there are other options such as ‘a Blue horse wins’ or ‘the Black horse will place ahead of the Blue horses’. The race itself is run by rolling dice and moving different horses depending on the results, with some clever mechanisms that prevent the number 7 horse from winning every race, and also allows for outsiders to suddenly make a break for the finish line. The real magic is the fact that the race takes place in real time. Players take it in turn to ‘run’ the race, frantically rolling the dice and moving the corresponding horses, ideally all while calling out a running commentary in your best horse racing voice. Meanwhile the other players place their bets, right up until just before the horses enter the final furlong. If you place too late all the highest paying spots on the board will be gone, if you go to early you may have dropped all your cash on a horse that started well, but never makes it over the line. Perhaps one of the indicators of how much fun we had playing this in the hotel, was the fact we became so raucous that we had to stop after a few races because the table behind us kept asking us to keep it down!

Ready Set Bet – AEG

There were a couple of other real time releases that deserve a quick mention. Sync or Swim is a cooperative game where players have a very limited time to quickly place coloured number cards down in slots in front of them with specific rules, while also passing cards to their teammates to allow them to do the same thing. Kites was also a co-operative game that required players to simultaneously play cards from their hands, but in this case the time pressure comes from using those cards to flip corresponding coloured sand timers at just the right moment to stop any of them from running out, trying to keep them all running until all the players have managed to get rid of all their cards. This was a game I foolishly delayed picking up at SPIEL, and am now still waiting for it to come in stock with retailers.

Sync or Swim – Bezier Games

Three Games to Rule Them All

It is at this point that the few months between attending the show and writing this report pays dividends. In this intervening period it has been possible to see which games have risen to the top. The three following titles are the most played and most purchased releases from SPIEL 2022 within our group, in addition to also drawing a fair bit of attention in the wider gaming community. The other advantage of a little time is that you might actually be able to pick a copy of one of them yourself if you fancy. All three were released at SPIEL ahead of retail and all three sold out there before the end of the show, two on the first day. Two became available in retail in late December, and the other will hopefully be out imminently.

Let’s start with Cat in the Box, or to give it the full title Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition. The original version was published in Japanese only in a small print run last year. Cat in the Box is a trick taking game. One player leads the hand by playing a card, other players must follow by playing a card of the same colour if they have one, or another colour if not. One colour is ‘trumps’ and beats all other colours when played. Winner of the trick leads the next one. The aim of the game is to win points by predicting how many tricks you will get in each hand. Cat in the Box preserves almost all these conventions, but adds one crucial twist. Where Schrodinger’s cat in the box was neither dead nor alive until the box was opened, these cats (or the cards) have no colour until they are played. All the players have a hand of numbered cards with no colour. Only when you play a card must you declare what colour it is. Crucially this information is tracked on a central board and if you are forced to play a card that cannot exist then a Paradox is created, the hand ends and you score negative points. Such a paradox can occur for a couple of reasons, firstly there will be five cards of some numbers in each round, and there are only four possible colours. Secondly you might choose to strategically declare you have no more cards of a given colour. This might allow you to play the trump colour when others cannot and pick up extra tricks, but it comes with a risk. This game is genius. The concept is simple and clever, but importantly it also translates to a truly great game. Of the seven of us in our core SPIEL group, all seven have purchased a copy of this!

Cat in the Box – Bezier Games

The next most purchased game by our group at SPIEL was Challengers! This is again a game with a simple concept which sounds like it should not work when explained, but actually really does. Each round is played head to head between two players, each facing off to try and capture the flag. You take it in turns to play cards from your deck to try and match the power of the card in front of your opponent who is currently holding the flag, if you match or beat them you then capture the flag. It is then their turn to try and do the same, rinse and repeat. Crucially though, once you shuffle your deck, you have no control over which card you play, flip the top card of your deck, then the one after, and so on. No choices. So where is the game? Well the choices are actually between the matches when you deck build. You will draw a handful of cards and add one or two to your deck, also choosing if you want to cull any of the older cards out of your deck. Then shuffle your deck and hit the next match. The game works so well for a number of reasons. There is a central conflicting mechanic at the heart of each battle; the flag passes back and forwards between players until one is eliminated, either because their deck is empty, or because they have run out of slots to place their exhausted cards on at the side of the play mat. So in deck construction you are constantly balancing between risking the former loss condition by having too small a deck, and risking the latter by having too large a deck. As identical cards stack together to use only one ‘slot’ this also affects your choices. When deck building there are lots of options to build combos and synergies as most of the upgraded cards you acquire will have some kind of special power on them. Another strong point is that the game plays up to eight players, with multiple 2 player games all running at the same time. There is a set order of rotation for each player count to mix up who you play against. It is genuinely exciting to see what kind of deck your new opponent has built, and to find out how your own newly finessed deck will fare against them. This tension and discovery more than offsets the fact that you will, certain card powers excepted, make no actual choices for the short duration of the actual match. A great game, roll on the inevitable expansions. 

Challengers! – Z-Man Games

My personal favourite, and the game which has seen the most plays among the team since SPIEL, is War of the Ring: The Card Game. There were a very limited number of copies at the fair, and we only managed to snag two. As of writing it still has not made it retail, making this a real SPIEL exclusive at present. As the name implies, the game casts you in the role of characters from the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Two players are on the side of Shadow, while the other two players are the Free Peoples. Each faction has a unique deck of 30 cards. Play focuses on large format Battleground and Path cards in the centre of the table, with the default position being that one if each is contested every round. As expected the Battlefields focus on the classic military clashes such as Helm’s Deep, Isengard and Minas Tirith. The Paths on the other hand relate to the journey of the Fellowship and include locations all the way from Bag End to the Crack of Doom. Players take it in turn to play a card to one of these locations, or to their reserve for a future round. The cards are mostly Armies and Characters, although there are some one time Events, as well as Items that can attach to certain characters. Once all players are satisfied that they have played enough cards then the round ends and each Path and Battlefield cards goes to the team who won the contest there, earning victory points. New hand cards are drawn and a new Path and Battlefield added to the table, starting the next round. Play continues until 9 Paths have been resolved, or before if one team gains a 10 point lead for an instant win. 

War of the Ring The Card Game – Ares

The core gameplay is simple but there are so many ways in which the game mechanics make for an engaging and tense experience. Some of this comes down to the unique powers many of the cards have. While some will simply contribute a certain amount of strength to a Battlefield or a Path, many have unique abilities which come into effect when they enter play, or simply by having them in your reserve. Really though, much of the joy comes from agonising decisions. Every time you play a card you must discard another card from your hand to do so. These cards have a chance of coming back into your hand later, but you never know quite when . This leads to real dilemmas about which cards to keep and which to let go of. There is also a very satisfying ebb and flow of the game with the Free People starting stronger but the Shadow players building momentum as the game goes on. There are great opportunities for team work as you figure out which of you is best placed to contribute to which battle in any given round. Deciding when to go all in, spending lots of valuable cards, and when to concede a battle is yet another example of the satisfying predicaments the game presents you with. Finally there is a really satisfying learning curve. The four decks are all unique, and play slightly differently. There is nothing so complex as to make the early games futile, but you do feel truly rewarded as you become more familiar with the contents of not only your deck, but that of your ally, and your two opponents. I am confident this will be hitting the table repeatedly over the coming months and beyond.

Finally a special mention to the Spiel Des Jahres Kid’s game of the year Magic Mountain or Zauberberg!  This had us on a knife edge with tension building throughout as we rolled balls down the beautifully crafted mountain trying to save the princess from the evil witches.  Think Plinko but with theme and a modicum of strategy.  Yes this is a kids game but this game was unashamedly enjoyed by a us, a large group of adults. 

Zauberberg – Amigo

So here ends my selected highlights from SPIEL 2022, and while with so many new releases we have only scratched the surface, I like to think that between the preshow research, a bit of a nose for the the unusual, and the 100+ games the team played, we have identified some of the classics that will will endure going forward. Having said that, our hotel rooms are booked, and the clock is already ticking down to SPIEL 2023….

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

by MonkeyMagic

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.

Root

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).

Spirit Island

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.

The Mind

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.

Fuji

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.

KeyForge

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.

Discover: Lands Unknown

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.

That’s Pretty Clever

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.

Rolling Ranch

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.

Welcome To…

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.

Essen Recap: The BoardGame Geek Convention – Part II

by MonkeyMagic

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.

Geistesblitz 5 vor 12
Geistesblitz 5 vor 12

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.

Nations
Nations

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.

The rubber armoury
The rubber armoury

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

Essen Recap: The BoardGame Geek Convention – Part I

by MonkeyMagic

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.

Essen survival kit
Essen survival kit

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)…

Before the storm
Before the storm

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.

Pick-a-Polar Bear
Pick-a-Polar Bear

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.

One Night Werewolf [image – akidelic]
One Night Werewolf [image – akidelic]

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 …..