Archive for the 'Amerigo' Category

The Spiel des Jahres nominations were announced this week.  I have added a page for the SdJ with the details of the games as well as links to reviews of the games: SdJ 2014 page.

The winners will be announced on July 14th.

Amerigo is a game by Stefan Feld – a designer who has created some great game such as Bora Bora, Rialto, Trajan, Strasbourg, Die Speicherstadt to name just some that I’ve reviewed.

THE GAME
Like two other Queen Games (Shogun and Wallenstein), Amerigo uses a cube tower – a card tower with couple of card sections inside (like floors in a building) which have various holes in them.  When cubes are dropped into the tower, some come out at the bottom and some are retained inside the tower on the card layers (which may fall out when more cubes are dropped  into the tower later).

Made up of multiple tile sections, the board show grids of land and water spaces and, together, form islands.  During the game, players explore and colonise islands by moving their ships, setting up trading posts and building villages.  Players score Victory Points (VPs) for building villages, gathering goods (and increasing the value of their goods), developments, etc.  The game lasts 5 rounds (each divided into 7 phases) and the player with most VPs at the end of the game wins.

So far, it sounds fairly standard but the core game mechanic – the action system – driving Amerigo is nicely different.  There are 7 different actions that a player can take and each corresponds to a specific colour of cubes: Sail and place trading posts (Blue), Gain cannon (Black), Buy building tiles (Red), Development (Brown), Place building tiles (Green), Improve trade good values (Yellow), and Special (White). Read the rest of this entry »

Now that the dust has settled following Spiel in Essen (due to work, sickness, voting on some awards, and life in general), I am finally able to start writing reviews of the games released this year.  Unlike other years, I didn’t get to play many of the big releases until after Spiel, rather than during it; however, I have played many now (and there’s still a sizeable pile still to play too) and can report there were loads of great games this year.

However, in advance of all the full reviews, I thought I’d post briefly about what I’ve played so far.  Last week, was a busy week with a chance to play a lot of games.  I’ve played Russian Railroads with 2 and 4 players now and it’s an excellent meaty eurogame with some pretty tough decisions, especially as there are lots of possible ways to make points but spreading yourself too thinly across a lot of them is not likely to turn out so well.  S0, you need to have a plan as well as a plan on what to do if progressing the first plan isn’t possible because other players get in the way. Read the rest of this entry »