Archive for the 'Asara' Category

REVIEWS
The Spiel des Jahres nominees were revealed last week.  Below is a list of the nominees with easy links to reviews of most of them.

Spiel des Jahres
Asara
Qwirkle
Forbidden Island

Kennerspiel des Jahres nominees
Strasbourg
7 Wonders
Lancaster

Luna was also on the list of recommended titles.

THOUGHTS
As far as my thoughts go, Read the rest of this entry »

Asara piqued my interest because it’s by Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling – the designing partnership that created games like Tikal, Torres and the more recent Tikal II.  Over 4 rounds, players build towers to score victory points (VPs) based on their colours, height and quantity and most VPs wins.  Now this all sounds like standard stuff but Asara has some clever game mechanics that makes it very entertaining.

Each round players receive 20 cash and some worker cards (which come in 5 different colours).  Then, players take turns performing one action each until all players have used all of their cards.  To take an action, a player must place 1 of their worker cards face-up onto one of the limited set of spaces for worker cards next to the selected action.  However, if a worker card has already been placed on that action’s spaces then any new cards for that action must be of the same colour as the card already played.  If a player can not (or doesn’t want to) play a matching colour card, they can place any 2 cards face-down instead. Read the rest of this entry »