Kris Hall: A Rules Preview of Urban Sprawl

GMT Games is primarily known as a wargame company, but they have occasionally published euro-ish games (Manifest Destiny is one example).  This week they added two non-wargames to their pre-order webpage along with the announcement that one of them would be published in 2010.  The two games are Dominant Species, another game about competing prehistoric species, and Urban Sprawl, a game about city-building from designer Chad Jensen.  The rules for both games are already available online, and so I downloaded the rules to Urban Sprawl, a game on a topic that seemed especially familiar.

In Urban Sprawl, two to four players compete to erect buildings and parks on a mapboard that is divided by streets into city blocks.  The players will have opportunities to manipulate the value of whole rows of buildings as they try to accumulate holdings that will generate the most prestige points.

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Game Review: At the Gates of Loyang

By W. Eric Martin
November 19, 2009

Designer: Uwe Rosenberg
Publisher: Hall Games

Players: 1-4
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 60-120 minutes
Rules Language: English / German
Links:

Version played: Purchased copy
Times played: Five, once solo, twice with 2 and twice with 4

So I’m in round eight of At the Gates of Loyang, just after taking cards in the first pass through the card phase. The other three players are still in, dropping cards slowly one at a time, while I’m starting to write this review. My goal: See how far I can get before it’s my turn in the action phase.

One of the other players in this game, who played in an earlier four-player game today and a two-player game yesterday, has dubbed Loyang “the best game that I never want to play again.” His emotional arc while playing the game went from confusion to liking the game to really liking the game to becoming annoyed to outright dislike. Pal that he is, though, he offered to play a few more times to see whether the game speeds up with experience. Has it?

Unfortunately, no, it hasn’t. What players gain in experience and forethought, they lose from additional depth of what’s possible in the game and how they can best squeeze an extra coin out of the rearrangement of a dozen or more moves during the action phase. Oh, wait, my turn…

Inside the Gates, the Fields

So how does Uwe Rosenberg follow up the incredibly successful and well-received Agricola and Le Havre, both winners of multiple awards? With a title that precedes both of them. Yes, At the Gates of Loyang was designed in early 2005, after Rosenberg was inspired by the harvesting mechanism in the 2004 Splotter Spellen release Antiquity. In that game, once the raw materials from an area have been harvested or collected, the land can’t be used again. (Are they harvesting with bombs? I can’t imagine what else would destroy the land so thoroughly.)

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Cyril Demaegd: Strategic Advice for Assyria

Editor’s note: Ystari Games’ Cyril Demaegd offers advice on the company’s Spiel 09 release, Emanuele Ornella’s Assyria. If you’ve yet to play the game, you can download the rules in three languages – – which will make the following article far more comprehensible!]

Assyria is a subtle game. Even if it’s smooth and easy to understand, it requires a lot of tactical and strategic subtlety, and you’ll frequently have to deal with crucial choices to develop your tribe. By overcoming these difficulties, you’ll be able to compete for first place, and it is the goal of this article to help you choose wisely what to do when you play your first game...and subsequent ones!

As a complement to this article, you’ll find pieces of player-made advice on the net; I particularly recommend Thomas Cauet’s ”A la carte” – here are the Assyria-specific links – as Thomas helped us test the game in the first place.

Turn order: The first choice you’ll have to make in the game pertains to the turn order; to master Assyria, you must be able to juggle skillfully with it. Indeed, opting for first place allows you to position yourself on the board before your opponents and seize the areas which are essential to your strategy. However, if you play first, you generally have access to fewer goods and so, clinging to the first place is a bad idea as your huts are going to be disappearing massively from the board. The last places shouldn’t be neglected either because they allow you to “catch your breath” by yielding more goods. What is more, being the last player in the last turn of a reign allows you to control Assur and score points while spending fewer camels.

Goods: Obviously, goods are essential to your survival. Even if the object of the game isn’t to own as many huts as possible on the board, the worst mistake is to lack foresight! Good players will be able to keep cards between one turn and the next to ensure the tribe’s subsistence. For this you must remember that you choose the order in which you spend your cards; consequently you can play a joker or a plow earlier in the turn to “salvage” double or triple goods. What is more, redundant cards are powerful since they allow you to ensure some huts will survive for two turns. Finally, don’t forget to save a few camels to buy the goods that remain after the harvest or to buy your plow back if you feel the next turn is going to be tricky. The surplus of goods will be particularly useful for those who will play in first place.

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From the Editor: Changes to BGN Memberships

Since I took over as editor of BoardgameNews.com in November 2006 – three years ago today, in fact! – I’ve made many improvements to the site. I want to do much more, but to do that I need to spend more time working on the site and less time working on other things, and to do that I need to earn an income commensurate with all the hours devoted to news posts, game previews, tweets, Gone Cardboard updates, and (most of all) the Spiel and Nuremberg previews.

While in Essen, Germany this past October, I met several people who said that the BGN Spiel 09 preview – a document containing details of hundreds of new games that would require 400+ pages if printed, a document created from months of work and hundreds of emails and phone calls to designers and publishers – was a huge help to them when preparing for the convention, both in pointing out games they wanted to try and saving them money by steering them away from clunkers. I’m thankful that they and others have found the previews that useful and want to continue to provide this service in the future.

Consequently I’m raising the BGN membership rates as of January 1, 2010. Anyone who is a BGN member prior to this date will be able to maintain his or her current rate – $25 annually or $5 monthly – whenever they renew, both in 2010 and beyond. Anyone who signs up after January 1, as well as members who let their membership lapse then resubscribe, will need to pay the new membership rates of $50 annually or $25 monthly.

Thanks for understanding, and I look forward to continuing to provide you with all that you expect from BoardgameNews.com in the years to come…

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Board 2 Pieces November 19, 2009

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Jennifer Schlickbernd: Ask Ms. Meeples – Want Cheese With That Whine?

Please send me questions!! As you can see from previous columns, in no way do I divulge who you are or even where you are unless you include that information in your own signature as part of your question. And if you know me, still send in questions – just use an anonymous email from Gmail or Hotmail if you are more comfortable with that. I’ll continue to write tips, even without questions, but the questions are way more interesting, even if sometimes off-target, as with the following…

...Anyway, I’m torn between supporting my OLGS (only local game store) and buying more games at lower prices. Do I (or should I) have some moral obligation to support it?

From the introduction to my column: “If you have questions about gaming etiquette, you can send them to askmsmeeples@gmail.com and Jennifer will answer them.”

So this question is outside of what I plan to cover with this column. I touch on ethical issues, but I’m not an ethicist per se, and this is somewhat of an ethical issue. It’s also a financial issue, and I’m not a financial person, so I will have to pass on this. This conundrum has been discussed previously on BoardGameGeek.com, so search the forums on that site for ideas on what to do. Moving on…

….There is one person at the meetings who doesn’t show up every meeting but to maybe half of them. The player complains about “Being ganged up on”, “Bad dice rolls”, “Unclear rule explanations”, etc. The complaints are almost a non-stop barrage of “Woe is Me” attitude, whether the player is winning or losing. I have seen a few other gamers openly and pointedly tell the player to quit complaining… to no avail. Complainer just points to the dice and loudly insists you look and agree that nobody else has rolls that bad. Any kind of logical statement, regarding the bell curve affecting everybody the same, just falls on deaf ears and results in more pointing at the bad roll or whatever the complaint is regarding.

I have also seen, during game selection, folks jockey to get into other games that the Complainer is not interested in. It seems everybody is aware of the problem but avoids it as best they can or just tolerates it when they cannot avoid it.

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Game Preview VI: Opera

By Hans van Tol
November 18, 2009

Designer: Hans van Tol
Publisher: The Game Master

Players: 2-4
Ages: 12+
Playing time: 90-150 minutes
Release date: October 2009
Languages: English, German and Dutch
Price: €40
Links:

[Editor’s note: Part 1 of this series covered the inspiration for Opera, part II detailed a sidetrack in the realm of family games, part III examined an overload of strategic possibilities, part IV started pulling everything together, and part V brought us into the final testing phase. Hans van Tol submitted this write-up on November 1, but I’ve been busy.]

The SPIEL Effect
One week after Essen I am getting a little bit organized. What a fair, with all the chaos, noise, excitement and inspiration that SPIEL always brings to all of us! Each year it is a great experience to find almost ten halls filled with 150,000 people who just want to play games. When I was sitting in the bus on the way back to Holland it occurred to me: SPIEL’09 was over and I have to wait for almost 12 months before SPIEL’10 will be there. Such a long time! But this year (my sixth) I was very satisfied with the result. No nightmares for me anymore about what could have gone wrong. We did all we could to make it a SPIEL to never forget. I will just give you a short report before I go back to the last and decisive phase of development of the Opera board game.

Novelty Show
The novelty show – the press day on Wednesday – with the two opera singers was a great success. Many journalists, TV cameras, etc. followed the great performance of the Cantarte couple on the first day.

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Dale Yu: Report From Essen (Part 4) and Report from Great Lakes Games (Part 2)

This is a continuation of my report from Essen – where our protagonist is able to talk a little bit more about the new games that he played at Great Lakes Games.  The first part of the report from Great Lakes Games was posted last week, but there are still plenty more games from Essen to talk about!  Again, a big thanks to everyone who organized and attended Great Lakes Games – without those folks, I wouldn’t have had a chance to play so many of these new Essen games!
Again, so far the watchword of the year is complex.  At least for me, it seems like the majority of the games fall into the more complex side of the spectrum, and I’m a bit surprised that I am enjoying as many of them as I am because I usually tend to the simpler games as of late.  The other thing that I’ve noticed about the games this year is that they are pretty darn good when taken as a group.  Thus far, there isn’t a single game that stands above the rest, though there are a few really good ones (Colonia, Hansa Teutonica, Opera), and there hasn’t been one that has bombed yet in my group – though I still have a few more games to try.

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Work Side-by-Side with Lara Croft

Jeux sur un Plateau has posted info on Tomb Raider: Underworld, a new cooperative game from Tilsit in which 1-4 players try to advance Lara up particular tracks on the game board in order to improve her attributes, such as fighting and acrobatics, and uncover whatever archeological-type things she’s trying to uncover. JSP’s short take on the game, due out in November 2009 for €32, is that the game is far easier to win than Ghost Stories or Lord of the Rings with relatively simple game play that should appeal to younger audiences.

Somewhat random anecdote: A friend of mine illustrated a few cards for the Tomb Raider CCG that Precedence Publishing released a decade ago. What advice did the art director have to offer regarding the proper look for Lara Croft? “Just when you think you’ve made her breasts big enough, make them a tiny bit bigger.” Plus c’est change…

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So You Think You Can Play Crazy Dancing?

French publisher Cocktail Games is the home of whacked-out games that will have everyone else at the table saying, “Seriously? You want me to do what?” Crazy Dancing – which releases November 19 in Europe, according to Jeux sur un Plateau – is the latest entry into this small but lovable contingent of games. Players must divide into three teams, with two teams having a dance-off each round while the other team determines the winner. When your team is on the dance floor, you assemble a timeline of dance moves bit by bit, pairing a move by the top half of your body with a move by the lower half. Your team must then perform this dance and win the hearts of the jury. Alcohol not included.

Crazy Dancing, by Nicolas Thiou & Xavier Duthillieux, is for 6-24 players, ages 8 and up with a retail price of €10. You can watch the game’s designers in action on Daily Motion.

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Cover of Boze Igrzysko = Awesomeness

If I ever publish games, I will hire whoever designed this cover for Phalanx Games Polska’s Boze Igrzysko, the Polish version of Martin Wallace’s God’s Playground, which Wallace’s Treefrog Games released at Spiel 09 in October. It’s like an inviting history book, a call to find out what awaits inside this richly red box. (Maybe someone from Poland can clue us in as to the symbolism used here?)

As previously noted on BGN, Boze Igrzysko has been rejiggered by Phalanx to include rules for 3-4 players (instead of only three, as is the case with God’s Playground), but wil be released only in Poland with rules in Polish. I can manage to trip my way through German, French and other Indo-European languages, but the consonant-rich minefield of Polish is another matter, so maybe someone else should pick this up for re-release…

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Board 2 Pieces November 17, 2009

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Gone Cardboard: Two New, Two Newish Titles from FRED in 2010

FRED Distribution has announced four titles for release in early 2010, two of them new editions of games that have been released previously and two brand new titles. To start with the familiar faces, Railways of Europe is a new printing of Rails of Europe, which appeared in 2008 in a limited printing. FRED’s Keith Blume notes that the game play of Railways of Europe is identical to the earlier release, with only the name being changed.

Reiner Knizia’s En Garde first appeared in 1993 from Abacusspiele, then was reissued in 2007 by Ferti in two editions, one with a 3D gameboard and a travel version with a flat gameboard. Pierô’s graphics from the Ferti travel edition will be used in FRED Distribution’s version of En Garde, which is the first title in Gryphon Games’ two-player line. Two pewter fencers will be included in the game, along with the gameboard, cards and scoring stones. En Garde plays in 20-30 minutes and will retail for $30.

Cornucopia, by Carlo A. Rossi and Lorenzo Tarabini, will be #10 in the Gryphon Games bookshelf series. Here’s a description from the publisher:

In Cornucopia, your goal is to fill your basket with a bountiful collection of fruits and vegetables, while at the same time correctly predicting how long it will take you to fill your basket.

You can try to assemble a basket with only one type of fruit or vegetable, which is difficult to do; or you can try to collect the entire range of harvest products. In either case, you want to complete your harvest as efficiently as possible to earn the most coins.

Players can bet and win more coins by correctly predicting the outcome (success or failure) of their opponents’ efforts to assemble their harvest, so players stay involved and engaged in the game even when it is not their turn!

Cornucopia is for 2-5 players, ages 8 and up, with a playing time of 45-60 minutes and a price of $26.

The second new title is Swat, and that title is all the info I have at the moment. Swat, Cornucopia and En Garde are all due to be released in February 2010, with Railways of Europe scheduled for early 2010. These games have been added to Gone Cardboard.

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Tom Rosen: In With The New - Q1 & Q2

Out with the old, in the with the new - it’s a way of life for many in the board game hobby.  I love to revisit old classics from time to time, but nothing beats exploring a new game, learning the rules and working your way through that first play as you see how the game comes together and the mechanics interact.  As I discussed last month, many games lose their appeal after you’ve played them a few times because the sense of adventure is gone and the spark of interest that unfamiliarity breeds is extinguished.  In that spirit of constantly trying new games and exploring their rule sets, I decided to mentally revisit all of the new and new-to-me games that I played during the first half of 2009 and share my thoughts on them with you.  I’ll save the games from the second half of 2009 for a follow-up column at the end of year.  These are meant to be a cross between mini-reviews and tangential commentary on topics that the games bring to mind.  Hopefully these will spur your interest in a game or two, whether it’s one that I enjoyed or didn’t enjoy personally, perhaps these comments will provide a kernel of information to pique your interest to further investigate and try out a few new-to-you games.

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Gone Cardboard: Bucephalus Games, Zombies, Poo and More

I’m back in business after a week’s sabbatical and have done a general update of Gone Cardboard, which lists newly released and upcoming titles from North American publishers. A few of the changes on the list:

• Due to the unexpected closure of a production facility, among other things, Bucephalus Games has pushed back the release date of several titles and removed a baker’s half-dozen more from its schedule. Save Santa will now be targeted for a Q4 2010 release date instead of appearing in 2009. Hope Santa can hold out until then.

• Bucephalus has licensed Reiner Knizia’s Merchants (aka Handelsfürsten) to Catalyst Game Labs, but that company hasn’t announced a release date for the title. Catalyst has said, however, that it will release Ergo and Poo: The Card Game by the end of December 2009. In Ergo you use the rules of logic to prove that you exist while trying to deny the existence of other players. (Wouldn’t Solipsism have been a better title?) In Poo, you’re a monkey flinging poo. Been there, done that.

• As noted in a recent news item, Wiz-War is back on the production schedule for a 2011 release, but the publisher has asked Jolly not to reveal its identity, so you’re left to speculate which company might want exclusive computer rights while also needing two years to bring the game to market.

  

• Steve Jackson Games will add a zombie game to its line-up in 2010, Zombie Dice. Here’s a brief description from the publisher: ”Zombie Dice is fast and easy for any zombie fan to learn, even non-gamers. The 13 custom dice are your victims. Push your luck to eat their brains, but stop rolling before the shotgun blasts end your turn!” Zombie Dice, for 3-8 players with a playing time of 10-20 minutes and a price of $13.13, is scheduled for March 2010, with Cthulhu Dice being released at the same time. In that title, which features a dozen tentacle-laden dice and a $5 pricetag, players try to swipe sanity from everyone else.

• FRED Distribution is distributing a handful of Spiel 09 releases in North America, with Tuonela’s Modern Society available now. Titles due to be available in December 2009 are Carson City (QWG), Day & Night (Mystics.nl), Luna Llena (Gen X Games), Opera (The Game Master) and Power $truggle (eggertspiele). (Note that Modern Society and Carson City are actually co-productions with FRED Distribution, as noted by the Gryphon/Eagle logo on the boxes.)

I still need updates for a number of games showing October 2009 release dates and other such anachronistic info and will provide them when I get the info.

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Tom Jolly: New Wiz-War in 2011

In August 2008, game designer Tom Jolly announced that he was cancelling a contract with Chessex – which had let Jolly’s Wiz-War languish out-of-print for years – and signing with a “much prompter company,” which could be anyone really. At the time he wrote, ”WW will be out in less than 2 years once the contract is signed...”

Apparently it took a long time to find a pen as Jolly didn’t sign the contract until mid-2009, and the clock for Wiz-War‘s release didn’t start until the ink dried. Here’s his update on the situation from WizWar.com:

Well, the contract with The Company Who Shall Not Be Named is all signed as of a few months ago (I’m slow in the “delivering news” department). So now it’s just “wait for publication” in 2011. As for expansions, I have no idea how much of anything they’re going to incorporate from the basic game and the 3 expansion sets (one never published). They’ve got an awful lot of material to choose from, but publication is far enough off that they haven’t started pinging me yet for comments and suggestions.

I expect they will either 1. Make the expansions or 2. Make it CCG based. They haven’t suggested #2 to me, it just seems like a natural possibility.

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Media Watch: Randomness: Blight or Bane?

From Greg Costikyan’s presentation at the 2009 Game Developers Conference in Austin, Texas:

Our sense of fiero or accomplishment at winning a game depends on the feeling that we have, in some sense, mastered it, and either that we out-played our opponents, or at least, in a soloplay game, overcame the challenges it posed by dint of hard work and skill. If, instead, we feel that we just got lucky—or, worse, that someone else won even though we were obviously the smarter player, because they just got lucky—we’re likely to think less of the game.

But clearly many, many games have some random elements, and some are highly luck-dependent, and yet people continue to play them. What really is the role of randomness in games, and how can designers work to harness it to beneficial effect?

Follow to link to read his presentation. The summarized version: It depends.

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Matt Thrower: The Tyranny of Choice

My little girl, age three, seems to be neither more or less interested in playing structured games than any other three year old. She likes to get my “grown up” game off the shelf and play with the pieces though - recently a couple of cavalry pieces from Battles of the Third Age became horsies and a board of Helms’ Deep became a fair. But I digress. Recently I played two games with her in consecutive days that made me think, very hard, about an aspect of game design which has become so sacrosanct as to be almost a religious commandment: the need for a game of any length to present the players with “meaningful choice” in order to be a good design.

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Valerie Putman:  More Essen game impressions—the ones that got away

I need to write up my impressions of the games I played from Essen that I didn’t buy while they are still fresh in my mind, since I don’t have the game handy to look at as a reminder.  Here are the games that I didn’t buy and whether or not I regret it.

Shipyard Regret, regret, regret!  I assumed that since Jay already had this done and available at his booth at the convention that I’d be able to pick this up easily (or ask for it for Christmas from Amazon.com).  I’m hoping that there will still only be a slight delay before I get my hands on this one.  Are there a million bits?  Yes.  Can it be fiddly?  Yes.  Do the mechanisms sometimes feel a little forced?  Yes, there is no reason why walking in circles around a green circle gets you captains and shiphands and propellers, but walking in circles around a brown circle gets you sails, guns, cranes, and steam chimney thingys.  But it works.  It all works. 

I particularly like the mechanism used to determine which of a selection of actions you can choose in a turn.  You can’t choose the action you chose last turn—and in fact that tile moves out from under your pawn to the front of a line of tiles that work their way around a track.  You also can’t choose an action that another player’s pawn is standing on (though you can always spend $6 to take a 2nd action on your turn and there is no restriction on which action you take for the bonus one).  When you choose an action, you gain $1 for every pawn between you and the front of the line and an additional $1 for every 3 empty spaces on the track between that tile and the next one in line.  If you can’t visualize it, just know that you have to carefully time when you try to take different actions and you can be rewarded for choosing actions that are chosen less often. 

In other words, have a strategy, but be flexible.  Another way that the game rewards this mind set is by giving you 6 random goal cards for end game scoring bonuses.  You will only score 2 of them at the end of the game and about halfway through the game you need to discard 4 of them (locking in which 2 you will score).  In the first half of my game, I had my eye on which 2 I would go for and played my game accordingly, but if other players were inadvertently blocking my path, I had other options before I was committed to particular goals.  The game is meaty and thinky and good, good, good.

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Matt Carlson: Is it a game for kids, or just a toy?

As a quick check of my last few posts demonstrates, I’ve been on a quest to find some games to play with my up and coming three year old son.  In an interest to find games that I would also enjoy, I have tended to err on the older side of the age bracket.  Unfortunately, that has usually resulted in games that were fun to fiddle around with, but weren’t quite played “as written”.  After my last few posting on kids games, I was given the opportunity to check out a few more titles that were on the younger side of things.  While they were all quite a hit with my son, and we continue to play with them on a regular basis, I find that they tend to lack enough “game” qualities to escape the moniker of “toy”.

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Andrea “Liga” Ligabue: Liga version 2.0 released

Dear gamers

after more than 20 years with long curly hairs last year I shaved like a sheep, but my virtual identity on the net take more than 12 months to be updated. Now, thanks to the effort of the illustrator Jacopo Ziliotto, Liga vs 2.0 is on-line. The same gamer, the same interviews, the same articles but a different face ... my face!

good play and sorry for the OT
Liga

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Kris Hall: More Worker Placement

My one tiny contribution to gaming culture is the phrase worker placement, and ever since I coined the term I’ve taken a silly almost-proprietary interest in the worker-placement sub-genre.  And so I am happy to see that some Essen games heading our way are worker placement games.

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boARD 2 Pieces November 12, 2009

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Dale Yu: Report from Essen / Great Lakes Games

This week’s essay is a joint column – being the third portion of my Essen report (the first and second pieces having not much report on gameplay) as well as the first part of my report on Great Lakes Games (GLG) – a wonderful regional event held each November in tropical northern Indiana.  Great Lakes Games is a favorite event on my gaming calendar each year for two reasons:  1) I’ve been going to this con since its inception seven years ago, and I have many great friends that I enjoy seeing every year; and 2) the con is held a few weeks after Essen which gives me a perfect opportunity to spend an entire weekend playing all the new games that I have just brought back!  As in years past, I managed to play a good proportion of my new games – and while I’m still not ready to declare anything as “Best in Show” – I am ready to give my one-word review of the 2009 Essen Crop:  Complex!

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From the Editor: Taking a Breather

I’m still trying to get back on track with my home life and other responsibilities post-Essen, so I’m taking a week-long hiatus with no news updates, Twitter postings, etc. I might check email during this time, but other than emergencies, I won’t respond until next week.

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BOARD 2 Pieces November 10, 2009

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Fraser McHarg: Spiel 09 - Sunday Pt 2 of 2 with some bonus Monday

Time for my final Essen post, we are now back from our criss crossing of Germany.  Get a map of Germany and draw lines Essen - Berlin, Berlin - Munich, Munich - Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe - Leipzig and Leiipzig - Wuppertal and it covers a fair percentage and also explains how we have chalked up over 8000km since mid August.

Anyway, since we are back in Wuppertal I have access to my Essen notes…

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Gone Cardboard: Memoir ‘44: The Vercors Campaign, Coming from Days of Wonder

In December 2009, Days of Wonder will release The Vercors Campaign, a small expansion for Memoir ‘44. The Vercors Campaign, designed by Jacques “jdrommel” David, consists of five new scenarios; as the DoW press release notes, “They highlight the heroic Maquisards of the French Resistance and their battle against overwhelming SS forces on the Vercors Plateau in the summer of 1944.” As in previous campaigns for Memoir ‘44, the outcome of each scenario affects the starting circumstances of the next one.

To play The Vercors Campaign, you need the Memoir ‘44 base game, the Terrain Pack, and Campaign Book, Vol. 1 (as it includes the rules for how to run campaigns).

While supplies last, The Vercors Campaign will be available for free at participating game stores in North America and Europe and through the Days of Wonder online store with the purchase of any other Memoir ‘44 item. In addition, The Vercors Campaign will be included with preorders from DoW for the Sword of Stalingrad expansion, which is now expected to ship on Dec. 1, 2009.

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Andrea “Liga” Ligabue: Cosa Bolle in Pentola ? #38 - Guglielmo Duccoli

Dear gamers, here again with my interviews to Italian designers. This time I’m going to catch a new Italian designer that really hits hard with his first title: Gonzaga, from dV GIOCHI, is really a great game that perfectly fits in the borderline between gamers games and family games. Also the first title for the new dV GIOCHI (restyled daVinci Games).

Gugliemo was almost unknown also in Italy before Gonzaga but if these are the preambles I’m really hunging-up for the sequels ...

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Game Review: PQ-17: Arctic Naval Operations 1941-43

By Francis “Private K.” Lalumiere
November 8, 2009

Designer: Chris Janiec
Publisher: GMT Games

Players: 2
Rules Language: English
Price: $69
Links:

Zip up your parka, wear a wool scarf, and wrap your hands with whatever you can find – welcome to the Arctic. It’s 1941, the Allied war effort depends on your supplies, and the Germans want you at the bottom of the icy waters, so try to make it to the Russian coast with your convoy in one piece.

As a naval operations game, PQ-17 has got it all: convoys, escorts, aircraft, submarines, reconnaissance, suspense, combat (on the sea as well as above and below…), time constraints, weather surprises, ice threats, fuel problems and night turns! All rolled into a tight package that, while requiring a sizeable chunk of time to digest its many intricacies, provides a satisfying simulation and promises to raise wargamers’ pulses everywhere from Reykjavik to Murmansk.

PQ-17 is a block game with a twist: Each block on the map represents a force (that can comprise merchant ships as well as warships and submarines) whose exact makeup remains confidential until the enemy has properly identified said block. Until then…

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