Archive for the 'On the Radar' Category

The game’s full name is ‘Artus and the Knights of the Round Table’ and the reason this game has caught my attention is that it is by the same designers who created El Grande which is one of my favourite games (as wel as many others like Tikal I, Tikal II and Asara).

During the game, players play cards from their hand (they each have identical decks) to move their Knights (usually clockwise) around the table.  Each chair has a number next to it ranging from -15 to +10.  When a knight moves, the player scores points equal to the number of the chair they leave.  If a knight moves to a chair already occupied by a knight then that knight gets displaced to the first empty chair anti-clockwise.  Players also have cards that move the princes, make a prince into a new king, and trigger scoring situations (i.e. score all your knights on the carpet chairs, etc.)

The gameplay sounds clean, simple and tactical, but the extra twist is that when the King moves (or a prince becomes the new King) the whole table is rotated so the King is at the crown position which can shift the numbers (and, therefore, the potential for scoring) a lot. Read the rest of this entry »

Principato is a forthcoming game that is another game that looks to offer interesting game play but focused on a central core mechanic so isn’t too complex.  During the game, players generate resources (food and money) for their city and use them to increase their military strength (recruiting militia and condotierre forces as well as building catapults).  Players score victory points based on their comparative military strengths during the game (after each of the 3 game years plus 2 at random) plus bonus VPs for secret objectives and building cultural items.  However, militia and condotierre forces only add to your total strength if they are allocated resources too (food and gold respectively) – and count against your strength without these resources.  So, you need to balance how you use your resources.

The main game mechanic is the action card system which looks nice and simple but with some tough choices.  When activated, the action cards let you gather resources, convert resources into items like more banks, catapults, militia, etc. Players get 2 actions each turn which can be used to activate a card in their hand, swap a card in their hand with one of the cards on display, or take a favour cube (which counts as gold or food).  When played, some action cards let the player swap the card with one on display too.  Also, the oldest card on display is discarded each turn and a new one added.  So, there’s an interesting element of drafting.

Principato looks like it will be simple, fast and force players to make tough choices.  Players can not attack or trade with each other so the player interaction seems to come from denying them cards.  I’m looking forwards to trying this one.

View Eggertspiele’s Principato page and rules.

Neuroshima Hex on iPhone is a quick-playing well-executed game on iPhone  So, it’s great to see that the same developer (Big Daddy’s Creations) is releasing a puzzle version of the game in March 2011.

Neuroshima Hex Puzzle will contain 100 different puzzles to solve.  I think it sounds like a great idea as it’ll add a new way to play and I do like a good puzzle game especially if it uses a board game.  The iPhone Carcassonne solitaire mode was like a puzzle-mode and worked really well.  So, I’m looking forwards to this.  See the official site for more details.

If you’ve read this blog for a while, you may have noticed that I like interesting game mechanics, especially those that are simple, make you agonise over your decisions and allow you to annoy other players too.  From reading the rules, Pergamon sounds like it has such a game mechanic at its heart.

In the game’s excavation of artefacts for displaying at the museum, one of the core mechanics is to select how much funding you will request.  Each player must ask for different amounts and all players only know the rough total of funding that will be available.  When all players have made their request, the actual funds available are revealed and the players that asked for the least funding will get their cash first.  Players that asked for the larger amounts could end up receiving nothing at all if all the funds have been given out by the time it’s their turn to be paid.  However, asking for larger amounts of funding means you get to dig up the more valuable artefacts.  This reminds of my favourite part of Fresco where you choose what time your artists will get out of bed as each player must pick a unique time and the time sets turn order, your purchase costs and more.

Pergamon has some other clever mechanics too like placing tiles (that show two halves of different artefacts) together to make a whole artefact, and making existing museum displays less valuable by adding even better displays.  As a result, Pergamon is definitely a game I’m looking forwards to.

View Eggertspiele’s Pergamon page and rules.

I like Scotland Yard and think it’s a great game for both new and experienced players so Letters From Whitechapel is very intriguing as it sounds like Scotland Yard with more meat.

One player is Jack the Ripper who needs to perform a series of murders and the other players are the police trying to catch him before he has completed his grizzly activities and escaped.  As with Scotland Yard, Jack moves invisibly on the board so the police need to find his trail and get ahead of Jack.  The core element of the game is trying to read the other opponent(s) and predict where they will go next.

First, Jack places tokens representing his targets on the special murder sites but some of them are bluffs.  Next, the police place their men but some of these are bluffs.  The targets are then revealed (bluffs are removed) and Jack can choose to strike immediately or wait; if he waits, the targets wander the streets but Jack gets to reveal police tokens to find and remove police bluffs.  However, Jack can only wait so long and must strike soon.  As soon as he murders a victim, the clock is running – he starts at the murder location and must make it back to his hideout before dawn (15 turns) and without getting caught by the police who start moving as soon as the murder is announced.  An extra twist is that Jack returns to the same hideout after each murder so the police can start to deducting this location as the game progresses. Read the rest of this entry »

The Boss is a gangster-themed game.  Players place cubes on city cards and the player with the most cubes on each city card at the end of each round gains a reward; however, what reward will be gained each city’s winner is only revealed during the round.  The rewards are revealed because each city has a fixed set of possible rewards and players take turns placing cards next to each city which show which rewards are not the one that will be gained by the city’s winning player.  So, the game’s a sort of are control game but the reward to be won is a process of elimination.  Some of the rewards are actually bad things like one of your men (cubes) is killed or out of the game for a turn.

It sounds relatively simple but quite inventive and with a deductive element.  Sounds like calculating when to strike and take control of a city will be important.  I’m hoping it has enough meat to it but the game mechanic appeals to me that I will definitely give it a try.

James.

Boardgame News posted a piece about ‘Mord Im Arosa’, a new game from Zoch.  Players are trying to be the least suspected person during a murder in a hotel.  However, the gameplay is rather zany and different to anything I’ve seen before.  During the game, players drop cubes into a 8-storey card hotel and listen to where they come to rest.   Two of the cubes show on which floors the murders took place and the rest are evidence of the player’s locations when the murders occurred.

The players predict which cubes they will find on a specific level, lift up the storeys above it and look to see which cubes are actually at that level.  If they are right, matching cubes get placed on the evidence board (which are now fixed) and then drop the cubes into the tower again.  If you guess wring then you have to add more of your cubes into the tower.  When the game ends, the closer the player’s cubes are to the murder locations, the more points they score and it is the player with the fewest points (because they’re the least connected to the murder) who wins.

It sounds totally fresh, completely mad and I’m really hoping it’s the fun, light and crazy game it sounds and not just random weirdness.

James.

Queen Games have released a lot of games I enjoy with great components so I’m always interested in any of their new games.  Fresco was good but, recently, their releases have included quite a lot of slightly updated versions of their existing games with a small tweak or addition here and there but not enough to make it a new game.

So, it’s great to see a new game hinted at on their web site called Castelli.  Until recently, there was only the cover art on their site but they have just added a picture of the game itself which looks very intriguing.  With less than 10 days to Spiel, Queen Games are leaving it quite late to release info on it if it’ll be released at the show, but I shall definitely check it out if it’s there.

James.

Valley Games usually has one or two games that intrigue me each Spiel (Container, Municpium, Master Builder) and this year it’s Crows.  Crows is a tile placement game where you try to entice as many crows to the tile which has has your shiny object on it.  Players know how the Crows will move at the end of each round, as they follow a set of rules, so placing the tiles and your shiny object strategically is they key to scoring points.  It seems like attracting crows away from opponents’ shiny objects will be half the battle (and fun).  Plus, there are a few special actions that can be earned and used too.  The games sounds cute and a little bit different plus, for some reason, I like the idea of the crow meeple pieces.  I’m not expecting too much from it and hope it will be one of the lighter games I enjoy from Spiel this year.

With so many new games coming out each year at Spiel, we often give them nicknames to make it easier to remember which one is which.  The game Powerboats is like Formula De but with boats, so got nicknamed as ‘Formula Boat’.  Battlestar Galactica is co-operative with a potential traitor like Shadows Over Camelot so gets called ‘Cylons Over Camelot’.  And Claustrophobia got called Dungeon Hulk (as it’s Space Hulk in a Dungeon).  As there is tile-placement in Crows I’m already calling it ‘Crowcassonne’.

The original Tikal is a classic game of archaeological discover where players send their explorers into the jungle to find tombs and collect treasure.  Each player had an amount of action points each round that they could spend on a variety of activities, and the board consisted of hex tiles that would be revealed and placed by the players.

The news that Tikal II was being released was quite unusual as there are few direct board games sequels and Tikal is some years old (winning the Spiel des Jahres in 1999).  The images of Tikal II that were released looked very nice indeed.  Cool looking little flags and this time the action is set in a single temple.  Until now, the gameplay was a mystery but the rules have just been released.

In Tikal II, players reveal the insides of a temple by placing rooms (hex tiles).  Each room has a few doors on some of its sides (all of the same colour) and a player can move their explorer through these doors if they have the matching colour key.  Read the rest of this entry »