Archive for the 'Essen Spiel 11' Category

Last Will is a game where players must be the first to spend some money left to them by their uncle.  The first to prove they can enjoy such riches the most (fastest) will then be the sole heir to the rest of the massive inheritance.  In essence, the game is an interesting mix of worker placement with elements of efficiency engine too, but there are lots of things to balance.

Each round consists of several steps.  First, players take turns selecting their place on the actions chart – a player’s position on the chart determines the number of workers (errand boys) they will place (1 or 2), the number of actions they will spend (playing cards and spending money) and the number of cards they will take from the decks (giving them options on how to spend money or other abilities), plus it determines the order of play for that turn too.  This multi-dimensional choice is an excruciatingly interesting decision to make, especially as only one player can select each of the mixture of options.  (It’s a bit like the initial choice of what time to get up in Fresco but even harder to select.) Read the rest of this entry »

There were loads of entries into the Dark Minions competition and I am pleased to announce that the winner is Chris Tucker.  The copy of Z-Man’s Dark Minions is on its way to him.

Thanks to everyone who entered.  Also, thanks to Zev at Z-Man Games who provided the copy of the game for the competition.  The photo shows me and Zev when he gave the prize copy of the game to me at Spiel early on Thursday morning.

A review of the game will be posted soon and you can read my preview of Dark Minions for details in the meantime.

James.

This year, I’m going to cover Spiel in Essen a bit differently than previously.  Rather than try to explain a game (even just my most basic thoughts) in 140 characters via Twitter, which is tricky and can easily not do a game justice, I shall be posting photos of the games I play on Twitter as well.  I shall post the photos to this blog too – hopefully once per day.  Theoretically I could post photos to both Twitter and my blog from my iPhone but the data costs in Europe are very high so I’ll use Twitter as the live feed and post the day’s photos on the blog later.

So, if you want to see what I’m playing as well as read my comments on the latest new releases at Spiel, follow my twitter @Metagames

Each year, I have run a competition to win a copy of one of the latest games released at Spiel in Essen. As always the competition will be open to anyone so you don’t need to be at Spiel itself.

I am very pleased to announce that this year, I shall be doing the same.  However, I am also very excited to announce that I am running the competition in association with Z-Man Games who will be providing a copy of Dark Minions as the prize (which they are releasing at Spiel).

This competition has now closed.  You can still read my preview of Dark Minions for details on the game.

James.

I read the rules to Dark Minion recently and it sounds really promising.  The players are all dark hordes descending upon towns to attack and loot them, which I already liked the sound of, but it contains some interesting game mechanics delivering a mix of meeple allocation, area control and dice.

On their turn, a player rolls 3 dice which they use to either attack towns, respawn minions from the graveyard, or capture towers.  Attacking towns is the core of the game where a player can allocates dice to the towns (a maximum of one dice per town) allowing them to place that many minions next to the town.  When there are enough total minions from all players next to a town to exceed its defense number, the town falls and the player who allocated the most minions gets the tile, the victory points (VPs) and the skulls printed on the tile.  Also, the player who allocated the second most minions gets 2 VPs, and the player triggering the event gets 1 VP.

One aspect I really like the sound of is that the 1’s on the dice are actually +1’s which can be added other dice results.  I like this because rolling low in games usually penalises a player through sheer bad luck but, in this case, rolling +1 allows a player to make other dice stronger.  This sounds like a subtle but clever mechanic to balance up the luck of the roll.  Also, this idea is taken further by the white dice – a player can choose to roll a white dice instead of their usual dice which can add +1 or +2 (or a skull) which is also a nice idea. Read the rest of this entry »

BURDIGALA
I was interested to read that a new (at least to me) publisher is releasing a game by Bruno Cathala at Spiel this year.  The game is Burdigala and plays 2-4 players.

The setting is Bordeaux in 56BC and players are constructing the port town.  The winner is the one with the most prestige points (PPs) which are earned by involvement in building construction, completing a building, merchandise and plot cards,  So, fairly standard sounding stuff so far.  However, the game sounds like it has  some neat game mechanics.

First, each turn players roll 2 dice and use one of the results to move one of their meeple to an unoccupied space on the board which have to one or two building sites next to them.  The player places a cube on the building site and scores a number of points equal to the spaces still left.  If the player places the final cube to complete a building they score PPs equal to the building’s value (and any players next to the district get a plot card which give their owners special abilities).  Not only do I like the sound of the simple but strategic movement system, but I also like how this system encourages players to get building. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been very impressed by GameWorks’ games as they’re always so beautifully produced with real attention to detail.  The box inner for Tikal II not only had specially moulded sections for all game parts but each section was numbered and these matched the numbers in the rules.  Last year they released: Tikal II, Water Lily and Sobek.  This year GameWorks have two new games:

	Tschak   Tshcak is a trick taking game where players go through 3 levels in each of 4 dungeons. The images of the cards released show various adventurers, monsters, spells and so on.  One of the green adventurers looks to be inspired by a certain laser disc videogame adventurer which is cool. The info on the game revealed so far doesn’t give much away but the goal  is to get all the treasures and no monsters.  However, Tschak is designed by Dominique Ehrhard who designed the superb, and superbly simple, Water Lily and Lascaux, so I will definitely give this one a try. Plays 2-4 players in 30-40 minutes.
	Bonbons  This is a memory game to get candy but with a twist because it seems you can also steal back some of the candies other players have won.  I don’t know much more than that. Plays 2-6 players in 10-20 minutes.

I just saw the new games that White Goblin Games will be releasing at Essen in Germany in October.  These are looking really good.  They’ve also just started taking pre-orders too.

	Lost Temple A game based on the excellent Citadels but this time it’s a race game to be the first one to the temple to plunder its treasures. In Citadels, players select a role/character from a fixed set and pass the rest to the next player to make their choice. Figuring out which role each player has probably selected is a big part of the game as some characters foil others and no-one knows who picked which character until everyone has chosen for that round. Not sure how much of this is in Lost Temple but it sounds very interesting as Citadels is a classic. Plays 2-8 players too.
	Panic Station This game really interests me as it’s like the movie The Thing with a single player who has been taken over by an alien amongst lots of uninfected players; however, the infection can spread so the infected players start to increase.  Each player controls an android and a human trying to stop the evil aliens – well, unless they;re already evil aliens. The reason this interests me so much is that I actually have game design notes going back some years with the exact same premise, so I’m very interested to see how this game compares. Plays 4-6
	Read the rest of this entry »