Dirk Henn was probably the first designer that I followed as Alhambra was one of the first euro board games I played and then I found I really liked his next games, such as Eketorp, Colonia, Shogun and Timbuktu.

Over recent years, I’ve been disappointed that his games have been re-themes or re-releases of his previous designs; however, this year sees the release of a completely new game called Neptun which looks like a simple eurogame but with interesting game mechanics and a Roman merchant theme.

The game lasts 3 game rounds and each game round consists of 5 rounds of acquiring contracts followed by 5 rounds of fulfilling contracts.

Acquire Contracts
Cards are laid out in a grid with one row for each type of card (city cards, goods cards and oar cards) and one more column than the number of players.  On their turn, a player takes 1 column of cards (one card of each type); however, there’s a neat game mechanic here to make things trickier.

A player can take any 1 of the face-up columns of cards (if there are any), or they can choose to reveal the next face-down column.  However, revealing a column means they can no longer take any previous column – so their choice is now to take the newly revealed column, or reveal the next and take that, and so on.  This adds an element of push-your-luck, plus the more columns you reveal the more information you give to other players. Read the rest of this entry »

Not be confused with Krok Nik Douil’s game also called Mammut, this Mammut is a game by Queen Games.  Players try to gather tiles which all score in different ways.  This sounds very normal but the way the tiles are gathered is a very interesting mechanic delivering a funny and humorously evil game.

The game is played over several rounds – scoring occurs after each round and the player with the most victory points (VPs) wins.  Each round 31 double-sided tiles are mixed up in a bag and then dumped onto the table and spread out.  The tiles show fur, claws, axes, meat, fire and animals.  Some tiles have question marks on them and these will only get turned over to reveal their actual value when scoring starts.

On your turn, you can either (a) take some (or all) of the tiles in the centre (if any remain), or (b) you can take all of another player’s tiles but you must put one of them back in the middle.  Read the rest of this entry »