Recent posts have been a bit sporadic recently due to my preparations to go to Spiel in Essen.  However, I have time to post one more review today before I leave for Essen tomorrow.

After today’s review, I shall be sending tweets from Essen (@MetaGames) with thoughts on the games that I play.  Full reviews will start once I get back next week.  Also, remember that one random follower of my Twitter will win one of my favourite new games (check out the site for details on how to earn more entries into the draw, if you haven’t already.)

I started this blog just before last year’s Spiel so it’s exactly one year old.  During that year, I’ve posted 65 board game reviews, 9 iPhone board game reviews as well as other posts about my thoughts on other games and other items too.  It’s certainly been a busy year – let alone all the actual real-life work.  Thank you to all of you for following this blog.  I’m looking forwards to bringing you more reviews over the next year as well as being able to finally reveal what I’ve been working on for the last couple of months too.

Thanks,

James.

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.

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 »

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 »