Langfinger was one of my favourite games (initial review) at Spiel 09 – simple, cute, fun and small. 

Further plays reveals that there are definitely tactics to the game.  The placing of your cubes which will determine you actions and their order  offers some interesting decisions and quite a lot of trying to work out what the other players will be up to too.  Mentally crossing your fingers that they won’t take the spot you want adds a nice excitement.

Also, the fencing of items (which is how you convert most goods into points) is really key as it can be a complete bottleneck.  Having lots of hot stolen goods is (literally) pointless if you can not fence them.  In fact, I started to consider which fence my opponents would want to use so I could use that one and make it harder for them to fence too.  If you can’t fence goods (and especially if you just need a few points to reach 20 to end the game), grabbing the chests for instant points (no fence required) is also a good tactic although they aren’t usually worth as much as fenced goods.

Langfinger may be simple but it is elegant.  I’m not sure how much more depth it has but it does have some and doesn’t need much more for the light game that it is.  I’m really looking forwards to playing it with the full 5 players as it will be a really big scramble for the different cards.  The game scales depending upon the number of players and with 5 there aren’t even enough new cards for every player to get 2 new  ones each turn.  It should be very entertaining.

James.

[Played with 2 players and with 3 players]