Archive for the 'Essen Spiel 10' Category

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.

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’.

Sobek is a small 2-4 player, Egyptian-themed game where players take cards and lay down sets of 3 in order to score points over 3 rounds.  During the rounds, 3 cards of the same type can be laid down as a set (wheat, cattle ivory, etc.) and you can increase a set already laid down by adding another set of 3 cards of the same type.

It might sound relatively ordinary but there are two game mechanics that caught my attention.  First, cards are taken from a row of 9 – only one of the first 4 cards can be taken by a player but if they take any card other than the first card they must put the others before it into their corruption deck.  The player with the most cards in their corruption deck at the end of a round will lose some points.  Second, the score for your cards is  the number of cards multiplied by the total number of scarabs on each (some have no scarabs) which sounds like a good system.  Plus, there are more scarabs on the less commonly occurring cards (like ivory) whereas the more common cards (like wheat) have fewer scarabs on them – the mathematical part of my mind likes the balance of that. Read the rest of this entry »

In Isla Dorada, the players are a group who have crash landed in Columbia in 1934 in a strange and hostile land.  The group must travel together each collecting treasure and gold along the way as well as trying to fulfil their destiny (well, secret destiny card).

The core gameplay is that the players bid to decide which way to go from each location.  When a player makes a bid, they say which route they will take the group if they win.  The winner of the bidding must pay their bid in cards that match the route (Kamel cards to travel along sand paths, Yak cards to travel along mountain paths, etc.and some other cards such as wild cards) so each player’s cards will limit what they can bid on different routes.  There are a few other items like Bigfoot and the Leviathan that can block routes, rivers that are one-way routes and so on too. Read the rest of this entry »

Norenberc is one of the three games coming from White Goblin at Essen. It caught my attention because it is designed by Andreas Steding who created Hansa Teutonica – a game that didn’t catch my attention enough at Spiel last year but I discovered afterwards that is was very good indeed.

Norenberc is a worker placement game with some new ideas. Players commit to where they will be taking actions each game turn before simultaneously revealing their intentions. This sounds fun (Fresco did something similar) but there’s an extra twist: Each action requires a worker and if any players have workers left to place at the end of a game turn, then another game turn occurs until all players have used their workers. So, if you take lots of actions in one turn, you may have to wait a few more turns before everyone gets your workers back and you can perform actions again. Read the rest of this entry »

I posted about the forthcoming Troyes a week or so ago.  I’ve now read the rules and it looks excellent.  Players each roll dice (based on how many meeple they have in the council buildings) and these create a dice pool.  Players then take turns using the dice to activate different parts of the city to gain resources and money.  Players can use their own dice for free but have to pay other players to use their dice.  This sounds like a fresh addition to worker placement and I’m very keen to play it.  So much so, I’ve pre-ordered it.

Unfortunately for me, Troyes combines together two game design ideas that I’ve been playing with in my own prototypes.  But, hey ho, that’s the way it often goes and I’m really looking forwards to playing Troyes.

Link to pre-order page and rules: http://users.skynet.be/fb514094/News_eng.html

James.

Fifty-seven days to Spiel in Essen and my list of games to check out (ranging from take a look to definitely pre-order) is already up to 44 games.  Two more games definitely stirring my interest are Dakota and Olympus.

Dakota is a game of settlers and natives in the American West.  It caught my attention because players can be settlers or natives in any mix and the the two sides play differently on the same board.  Also, players on the same side may be allied but not a team.  Bruno Faidutti’s write-up was very complimentary and being called the tensest nastiest game just intrigues me more.  The image of the game from Spiel 2009 makes it look quite complex but I’m hoping the 60-90 minutes playing time means it’s not too fiddly as that would limit the people I could play it with.

Olympus is designed by the same guys that created Kingsburg so, for me, that definitely makes it worth a look.  I own the board game of Kingsburg and I played the PC version against the AI a lot so I know it well and like the balance and choices the game offered.  Rather than dice-rolling, Olympus is priest (worker) placement game with difficult choices each turn and no luck involved.  Sounds good, and as it’s from these designers, I’ll definitely check it out.

James.

Update: A review has now been added.

Cadwallon: City of Thieves has been on my radar for a while now – since just before FFG took over the publishing and their usual planned previews have raised its profile a lot more.  Set in a fantasy setting, players allocate action points to move their thieves around the city to steal as much as possible from locations and from each other.  Players can block each other’s paths and even influence the militia men to slow opponents down.  Sounds like it’s a light-to-medium weight game but with enough to it to be good fun and plenty of racing against other players and scope for annoying opponents too.

There are adventure cards which set specific objectives, set-up, rules and events for each game, plus there are mission cards too which deliver bonus money if fulfilled.  So, each game should have its own flavour.

Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of forthcoming games have caught my attention recently:

TROYES is designed by Xavier Georges who created Royal Palace and Carson City – both of which I like a lot, especially the latter. Troyes is a city building game using dice – it sounds like players use a central pool of dice but can also buy them off of each other too.  Players have secret agendas too.  Definitely one I have to try and/or buy.

STRONGHOLD: UNDEAD is an expansion for Stronghold and itsounds like there is an undead army storming the walls of the castle instead of the goblins, orcs and trolls.  One big difference sounds like there is no glory points this time – purely the task of breaking into the stronghold before 8 game turns are up.  The glory points of the original game were an interesting system but people I have played with (and myself) found the amounts of them required to win meant it was very difficult for the invader to win after turn 6 (out of 10).  So, a straight break-in or not  with a new type of army sounds great.

I’m really looking forwards to trying these at Essen and I may even pre-order them.

James.

(Note to publishers out there: I’m much more likely to pre-order and buy a game without trying it first if the rules are available to read beforehand.  Sure, reading a few rules can make me realise a game is not for me, but not having rules to read means I’m much less likely to pre-order it).