Convention Preview: Spiel 2008 – Publishers A-C

Down Under

Publisher: Bambus Spieleverlag
Designer: Günter Cornett
Players: 2-4
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 20-30 minutes
Release Date: Released
Links:

While Cornett had a limited-edition version of Down Under at Spiel 07, the "real" published version wasn't available until weeks afterward, thus here's a 2007 release that will effectively debut at Spiel 08. As for the game play, here's a description from Cornett of the two games that can be played with the components included:

Down Under is a colorful tile-laying game for people who enjoy nice design as well as for tacticians. Who will place the cards that complete the longest route through the Australian Bush? Encountering the emu, kangaroo or duck-billed platypus along the way brings extra points, but rabbits are a menace. Against them only the dingo can help.

The second game, Sturt's Stony Desert, recalls the explorer Charles Sturt, who for his exploration of inner Australia carried a boat as he hoped to find a large inland sea. The goal here is to find a way through the desert, which is dry, winding and monochromatic.

Die 3 Gebote (The Three Commandments)
Posted: Sep 4

Publishers: BeWitched Spiele / Rio Grande Games
Designers: Friedemann Friese, Fraser Lamont & Gordon Lamont
Artwork: Fréderic Bertrand
Players: 3-7
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 45 minutes
Release Date: Spiel 08
Price: €24
Links:

Inductive reasoning in games dates to at least 1956 when Robert Abbott created Eleusis, in which players try to deduce a secret rule created by a dealer by playing the proper cards from their hands. A sample rule might be, "After a red card, play an even card, and after a black card, play an odd card." Master game designer Sid Sackson released his own inductive logic game, Patterns II, in his book, A Gamut of Games.

Are there other, more recent examples? I can't think of any at the moment, but after October 2008 I'll be able to point to Die 3 Gebote – designed by the unexpected team of Friedemann Friese, Fraser Lamont and Gordon Lamont – as a new take on inductive reasoning.

"We were having a chat to Friedemann and talking about game design," says Gordon Lamont. "He had been talking about one of his designs for the 'Game of the Afternoon' award at the Gathering of Friends which involved a very definite mechanism which showed when a turn was over."

"In contrast," he continues, "we had a design which we had produced at the request of a vodka company, a party game that's played fast and loose. Part of the rules meant that one person was always in control, and we solved any rules problems with the rule that the pack leader is always right in their decision. This discussion about the contrast in the two designs set off the creative juices, and the design of Die 3 Gebote just flowed from this. However, Die 3 Gebote is not like either of the two games that inspired it!"

Trial and Error

In Die 3 Gebote – to be released as The Three Commandments by Rio Grande Games – players take turns being the High Priestess and watching over the novices (i.e. the other players) while they participate in a religious ceremony. The HP knows the rules that other cult members should follow, but the cult members are left to guessing and to careful observation of their neighbors.

Each player is High Priestess once, and for each HP, depending on the number of players, the novices have a number of rounds to make moves. A move consists of taking one artefact and placing it somewhere on the decorated gameboard; once the player is finished, the High Priestess will tell the player how much karma he's earned, whether positive or negative, for following the rules or doing something taboo.

Where do these rules come from? At the start of her turn, the HP draws four rules and keeps three of them, designating two of them as positive and one as negative. In general, the rules relate to the moving or positioning of artefacts on an illustrated gameboard or to the behavior of the player doing the moving. (The card shown at left divides the positive and negative rules, and the card stands allow the novices to see which type of rules are where.) The trick is that you don't know whether you're scoring points for moving the right artefact, choosing the right location, leaving certain artefacts arranged a certain way, smiling at the High Priestess, touching another artifact, dancing in your seat, taking a drink during your turn, and so on because the HP is monitoring several rules that interact at once.

"Part of the joy of the game is watching people attempt similar moves to other players, but get awarded vastly different points," says Fraser Lamont. "The occasional round might see similar points awarded to copycats, but the cards are such that this would be unusual rather than the norm."

A novice's success each round will depend on some combination of thought, observation and chance, and while players can try to puzzle their way to success, Die 3 Gebote is a performance piece as much as a game, allowing anyone to jump in and participate. Says Fraser Lamont, after the initial bandying about of ideas, "the discussion moved on to designing a game that could be taught to a new player in one sentence. That sentence became, 'Move a pawn from one area to another.' When we first got the prototype ready to go, we grabbed a passerby sat him down and told him only that sentence. He moved his pawn, was awarded 8 points, and it was five minutes before we all stopped laughing. It was clear then that the game worked, so we started ironing out the edges."

First impression, by W. Eric Martin

Version played: Prototype
Times played: Twice

This game's a hard one to judge because the playing style differs from most everything else I've played. You're trying to watch other players to see what they're doing and how those actions affect the score, and the surprise that results from the first time something crazy happens – a player inadvertently sneezes, drops a piece, sings, etc. and scores a ton of points – is memorable.

Being the High Priestess is a fun role because players look to you with eager anticipation after making their move: "Did I do well? Was that what you wanted to see?" The HP is punished if no player scores for four moves in a row; she had some say over the rule cards, after all, and setting up impossible challenges should cause you to lose standing in the cult. You're still tempted to make the rule set difficult, though, because the HP scores the same karma as the novice who scored the most. Construct an easy rule set, and you'll just be on par with everyone else; put together a puzzler, and you and an especially astute novice might rise above the pack.

I almost like the concept of the game more than the game itself because the high concept idea is clever and worthy of kudos on its own, no matter how the game plays out with flesh-and-blood players.

Kamisado
Updated: Sep 1

Publisher: Burley Games
Designer: Peter Burley
Players: 2
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 15-60 minutes
Release Date: October 2008
Price: €24
Links:

Kamisado is a gloriously colorful two-player abstract game that feels just as colorful during play. Each player controls eight colored towers that start on the backline of an 8x8 grid, which is composed of colored squares that match the colors of the towers. On the first turn, a player moves any tower any number of spaces either straight ahead or diagonally forward. Whichever color space he stops on determines which piece the opponent must move; similarly, the opponent's move will determine which color piece you'll move. Pieces can't move sideways or backwards, so they're constantly advancing toward the other player's starting line. Land one of your pieces in that row, and you win.

Game review, by W. Eric Martin

Version played: Production copy
Times played: 13

To summarize Kamisado, here's a 25-word description of the game: Each turn you move your piece that matches the color onto which the opponent moved, trying to move any piece into the opponent's back row.

What's your first move?
That's the gist of the game, and the first strength of Kamisado is that you can teach it to someone in 30 seconds and start playing immediately. The first downside to Kamisado is that you will probably lose your first few games in less than 30 seconds as well. Looking at the board above, suppose the black player advances the pink tower to the orange square; the gold player then counters by moving straight onto the pink square to set up a strike into the opponent's home row. Unfortunately, by landing on pink, black can now move the pink tower along the orange diagonal and win. Three moves and done.

This situation may seem silly, an example of completely shoddy play by mental incompetents, but I'll confess that my opponent and I made such moves repeatedly in our initial games, allowing takebacks of such "obvious" blunders in order to learn how the game works and avoid starting from scratch every sixty seconds. In this way, Kamisado is more like Chess than any other perfect information game that I've played in recent years. Each of the games in Kris Burm's GIPF series, for example, has a multi-step goal, so one mistake doesn't doom your chances of winning. With Kamisado, when you mess up, you're finished. Thus, you quickly learn to look both backward and forward with each move you make: where can you advance in the future, and where can your opponent move right now.

Your next discovery might be the need to balance your advances with the opponent's moves. To win, you need to place a piece in the opponent's starting row, so the more colored towers that you force the opponent to move, the more openings you create in that back line – but by allowing the opponent to move those towers, you're giving her the means to assault your back line.

Recognizing this, you start to look for opportunities to pin an opponent's piece and force it in certain directions, whether to clear a path to the back or to have it land on a color favorable to your goals. Pinning a piece isn't simple, though, since you don't have a choice of which pieces to move, only where to move the piece that the opponent tells you to move. As with Chess, you have a cloud of potential moves that would help you enact a particular strategy and as the game progresses you want to find the right stepping points in that cloud to lead to a clear path toward victory.


Look at the pic above, for example. The gold player has just moved the yellow tower – you know this is the most recent move because the black player's purple tower has not yet moved from the back line – and the yellow and orange towers have pinned in the opponent's brown tower. When a tower is trapped, if that piece is forced to move, then it takes a null move (staying in the same square) and the other player moves the tower that matches the square on which this tower stands. Thus if the gold player can land a tower on brown, then he'll be able to scoot his yellow tower into the back line – but no matter which color the black player's purple tower lands on, gold will be able to either move onto a brown square or win the game immediately.

Only at this point is it clear that black's move of the brown tower onto yellow was a fatal error, which leads to 's second strength: You can almost feel yourself getting better at the game the more that you play. Once you've played the game a few times, you can start to spot dangerous situations and potential traps, whether or not the opponent is aware of them. Multiple times I recognized at the end of a move that I had given my opponent the opportunity to win a few turns later; sometimes he picked up on those opportunities and other times the game continued without him realizing that he had missed out. I didn't draw his attention to those situations, but I did learn to avoid putting myself into them in future games. At last I think I did – only more games would prove the point.

All of the above talks only of the basic game, the game played in a single round with a player winning once she reaches the opponent's back row. You can also play a series of games with the winning piece receiving a sumo ring, and players relining up their pieces in the home row and playing again. A sumo piece can move only five spaces and can push a non-sumo piece directly in front of it one space backward, with that player moving again immediately with the piece that matches the color onto which the pushed tower was moved. Create three sumos or land a sumo in the back row, and you've won the standard match. In the long match or marathon match, you can create double and triple sumos that move less distance, but push more towers.

Once you enter the standard match, with the pieces no longer starting on the squares that match their color, you start learning the game again. The opening moves of the first game are no longer possible, so you need to study the board afresh. In my half-dozen games with sumos, the pushing aspect hasn't played a large role, but the restricted movement has. The opponent can put the sumo into play without it reaching the back row, risking a future shove for a current safe move.

Thirteen games in, I feel like I'm just starting to discover how Kamisado works and how to make somewhat clever moves. Moreover, the game is fun, which is its third strength. I like trying to set traps and trick the opponent into making the moves I want her to make. Since she controls half of my actions – specifically the choice of which piece I'm going to move – I need to figure out how to take that advantage away from her throught the choices I can make.

While the graphic design of the game is generally good, with nicely-shaped towers that combine with the sumo rings to simultaneously display the current score and the pieces' potential movement, the box design is lacking as the rings float in a pocket of space above the board and below the lid. Open the box, and the rings will slide all over the place. You can stick the rings between the plastic insert and the box, but then you have to disassemble everything in order to play – a minor irritant in an otherwise thoroughly satisfying design. Burley may not be a prolific designer, but I can imagine Kamisado turning into a classic on par with his Take it Easy! in the years to come, showcasing the value of quality over quantity.

22 Pommes
Posted: Sep 23

Publisher: Cocktail Games
Designer: Juan Carlos Pérez Pulido
Artwork: Chhuy-Ing Ia
Players: 2
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 5-10 minutes
Release Date: February 2009
Link:

22 Pommes will remind you of Corné van Moorsel's Floriado and Simon Hall's Pick & Pack – assuming you've played those games, of course. Players shuffle 12 red apple chips, 12 green apple chips and a grower chip face down, then arrange them face-up in a 5x5 grid. Players alternate turns, and on a turn, you must remove an apple chip from the row or column in which the grower stands, then move the grower to that now-empty spot. Each apple chip has 1-5 apples on it. Be the first to collect exactly 11 green and 11 red apples, and you win; force your opponent to top 11 apples in either color, and you win. Do anything else, and you'll be stuck swilling fermented apple sauce for comfort.

The rules include three variants: a different starting setup, a dog that blocks one chip each turn, and a set of chips that have a variable number of apples to force players to mix up their strategies.

First impression, by W. Eric Martin

Version played: Prototype
Times played: Nine

While I've won roughly two-thirds of my 400+ games of Floriado, the secrets to 22 Pommes have been more elusive, leaving me with an 0-9 record to date. The obvious first strategy – race to get 11 apples of each color first – quickly became a "grab all the low numbers first so the opponent will go over 11" strategy after my opponent beat me twice – yet that strategy, simple as it may sound, hasn't panned out.

Whether starting or going second, I've been pulped, which is especially odd because the game is so simple that you'd think it's solvable. On a player's first turn, she has eight choices; on the opponent's first turn, he has seven, and the number will only hold steady or drop from there. Put a computer on the table next to you, and you might be able to grind out a winning strategy for a particular starting configuration. Me, I'll just muddle through a few dozen more playings and hope that something will eventually click.

Full disclosure: Cocktail Games hired me to edit the English rules for 22 Pommes.

Robot Master
Updated: Sep 5

Publisher: Cocktail Games
Designer: Reiner Knizia
Artwork: Patrick Cerf
Players: 2 (see below)
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 15 minutes
Release Date: End of November 2008 (but available at Spiel)
Price: €10
Links:

A game of strategical placement as players have a deck of 36 robots with six cards each of values 0 to 5, and they want to maximize the value of their rows or columns of robots on a 5x5 grid.

First impression, by W. Eric Martin

Version played: Preproduction copy
Times played: Four, with two players

The short description of this game tells you almost everything you need to know. Game play is simple and short. You're playing the odds on which cards the opponent holds and whether they'll be forced to fill in a row that will benefit you.

The trick, of course, is that you don't care about most of your rows – all you care about is the lowest-scoring one. Flip this thought on its head, though, and you realize that stuffing one of an opponent's row is all you need to come out on top. Go ahead, get your triples! They won't help if I can keep one of the rows to singles or a low pair.

The listed playing time of 15 minutes is ten minutes too long, based on my experience, but maybe some folks like to do pretend mind-reading more than I do. Robot Master isn't a game you'll play all evening, but if you're looking for something to spring on non-gamers in bars and cafés, this would be a good contender to Pico. The box is fatter, but the explanation and game play are more straight-forward.

Full disclosure: Cocktail Games hired me to edit the English rules for Robot Master.

La Soupe à Gertrude
Updated: Sep 17

Publisher: Cocktail Games
Designer: Jean Marc Courtil
Artwork: Arnu West
Players: 2-4
Ages: 6+
Playing Time: 10-20 minutes
Release Date: End of October 2008 (but available at Spiel)
Price: €10
Link:

Jean Marc Courtil is debuting as a game designer in 2008 with two titles: Bobby Sitter from Asyncron Games, and this one, a new entry in Cocktail Games' Jeu de Poche (Pocket Game) series. La Soupe à Gertrude is a bidding game in which players want to collect vegetables for their soup; be the first to hold three different types of veggies and you win.

Game review, by W. Eric Martin

Version played: Preproduction copy
Times played: Seven, five times with two players and twice with four

With three and four players, Gertrude's Soup uses a closed economy system similar to Reiner Knizia's Traumfabrik, but players might not start with equal funds since the money cards are dealt out randomly. That's each player's first worry, and while the game equalizes money to some degree as player's win auctions and pass around coins (and other cards worth money), the game doesn't last long enough to really balance the scales. Of course, the short playtime works in both directions, encouraging players not to worry too much about balance as the game is more of a lark than a finely honed mind-crusher.

With two players, the auction system changes so that the winning bidder pays the other player only the single most valuable card used to pay for the bid, with the other cards being removed from the game. This payoff system creates interesting dilemmas for both players as you essentially learn what each player holds after a couple of turns thanks to the requirement to reveal any cards won in auctions. Thus, if I know an opponent holds high-valued money cards, I can force him to push the bid up dramatically by placing the bid that he wants to. If he holds only 4s and 5s, for example, I can bid 5 to push him up to 8 and possibly make him spend more than he wants – or win the cards for myself, which might not be a bad option either.

The two player system also allows you to remove certain vegetables from the game depending on how the bids turn out. If I pay a 5 bid with a "3 coin" card and a tomato (worth 2 coins), that tomato is removed from the game. (Ideally I'll be holding the other tomato card when I make such a move!)

So far I've preferred the game with two players rather than four. Whether this was coincidental or a result of first-timers in a new game, in both four-player games, the player who won had purchased his own lot of cards on that final turn. In other words, knowing what that lot held allowed that player to bid everything on winning those cards and ending the game. The other players were stuck in the position of having to counter that aggressive bid by offering nearly everything they held and hoping they weren't taking home the goat behind door #3 instead of valuable veggies. Perhaps with additional plays this concern would vanish as you become adept at tracking who holds which cards, but if you can set yourself up with a single veggie and a wad of cash, you might do well to sit quietly until your turn rolls around, hope for the double veggie or veggie/mouse draw, and bet the farm to win.

With two players, we seemed to avoid that "alpha strike" approach to winning and instead had more time to worry about the ebb and flow of our purse, trying to figure out when the other player was bluffing and what an average lot should cost. The luck factor in the draw is still present, but the direct back-and-forth seemed to provide more opportunities for countering the opponent.

In the end, though, no matter what the player count, Gertrude's Soup will frequently end before you have time to implement whatever strategy you have in mind. You're either saving for an endgame that never comes or holding on to a few dear coins and trying to rebuild your stash before – oh, wait, the game's over. Given that knowledge, you have to be comfortable just freestyling your approach to the game and seeing what happens.

Full disclosure: Cocktail Games hired me to edit the English rules for Gertrude's Soup.

Powerboats
Updated: Sep 18

Publisher: Cwali
Designer: Corné van Moorsel
Artwork: Christof Tisch
Players: 2-6
Ages: 9+
Playing Time: 60 minutes
Release Date: Spiel 08
Languages: Dutch, English, German & French
Price: €29
Links:

As previously anticipated, Corné van Moorsel has announced a multi-player version of No Limit – his two-player boat racing game on Mastermoves.eu – as his Spiel 08 game release. Powerboats challenges 2-6 players to hightail their boats around three buoys and cross the finish line before anyone else.

The movement of each player's speedboat is based on the results of three-sided dice (numbered 1-3) created specifically for this game. On a turn, you can add one die to your collection of movement dice in order to accelerate, remove one die to slow down, or keep the same number of dice. For each die you have, you then either keep it for the movement points already showing (based on the previous roll) or roll it. After optionally rotating your boat 60º to change the direction you're headed, you must move your boat a number of spaces equal to the sum of the dice, ideally not crashing on any of the two dozen or so islands scattered about the lake. Round a buoy in the wrong direction, and you'll spend a long time correcting course.

Players score points based on their final position in the race, with the number of points up for grabs increasing with each race; the player with the most points after three races wins.

First impression of sorts, by W. Eric Martin

Version played: Online
Times played: 399

I haven't played the board game version of Powerboats, but after several hundred games of the two-player version online, I'm excited to see how the game plays with more than two.

Van Moorsel already made one such conversion in 2007 with Gipsy King, which had also been available only as a two-player online game; in that game he expanded the turn order system to accommodate the additional players and enlarged the playing surface to allow more time for strategies to develop. He seems to have made similar adjustments for the board game version of Powerboats, with players speeding across a larger lake and the start and finish lines having been merged to create a Robo Rally-esque feel to the risks players take when they pour on the gas.


The movement system of Powerboats is a good mix of risk management with optimization. Each turn that you start with n dice, you can roll anywhere from (n-1) to (n+1) on the subsequent turn, and given that you can freeze whichever dice you like from turn to turn, you have more control than you initially think over how quickly your boat will move – although dice being roll-y things that don't always do what you want, you need to keep Plans B and C in mind for those moments when you lose control and go speeding in a direction you hadn't intended in order to avoid crashing.

With additional plays, you learn how to anticipate an opponent's movement and cut her off when she's about to make a turn beat her through a narrow path between islands. While players can slow their speedboat a bit each turn, sometimes ambition and recklessness will spur you on and have you hoping for the best as you prepare to enter a turn. While I still haven't grokked van Moorsel's StreetSoccer after a dozen plays, Powerboats won me over early and is still a fun challenge. Putting more players on the water should up the difficulty and fun. The only risk is that losing the computer behind the game will cause the game to play more slowly since people have to count out their possible landing spaces instead of having them automatically highlighted. We'll see how that worry pans out...

Crash by Crash
Updated: Oct 19

Publisher: Czech Board Games
Designers: Ivan Dostál and Monika Dilli
Players: 2 or 4
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Release Date: October 2008
Languages: English, German or Czech
Price: €19
Links:

In Crash by Crash, players compete, either head-to-head or in teams of two, to both blast the opponent from the bumper car field and end up on the highest scoring positions of the gameboard. The playing area is created each game from 25 different tiles, with a bell being placed on any space marked with a star. Any time a player hits a star with one of their cars, play stops for a scoring round with each car scoring 0-3 points depending on the color of the space on which it sits.

• Place a car on the gameboard. Initially you start with only four bumper cars of your color on the board. If you add a regular car, you bump the car adjacent to it 1-3 spaces depending on how many batteries you spend; if you add a magnetic car, then you attract any vehicles exactly two spaces away. Knock an opponent off the board, and you earn two points. Adding two cars in one turn knocks four points off your score.
  
  
• Play a card. Cards come in three flavors: blue cards that affect car placement, which must be played as your first action with the placement coming afterward; yellow cards that affect scoring, which must also be played first with your second action being used to cause a scoring round; and gray cards, which are simply played as an action.
  
  
  
• Move the operator. The operator of the bumper car ride has no allegiance, so you can use him to push people around, as can your opponent. The operator moves two squares for free and four scores for a cost of two points.
  
  
• Exchange two cards. You can discard two – not one, not three, but two – cards from your hand and draw two new ones.

First impression, by W. Eric Martin

Version played: Playtest copy
Times played: Four, all with two players

My first two plays of Crash by Crash were somewhat bungled as the rules I received didn't state that only four cars for each player start on the board, with seven more in reserve waiting to be airpdropped on the playing area. Instead, we started with a car on practically every tile, which hobbled our action possibilities since we couldn't take action one for several turns. In fact, knocking off an opponent's car seemed like a weak move in this circumstance since the player could then use it as a weapon against you.


Playing with the correct placement rules, as well as clarifications in the FAQ posted on the CBG website, not surprisingly revealed a much more interesting game. As with Leo Colovini games like Alexandros and Go West!, both players score when a bell is hit, so you're constantly trying to bump opponents off the high-scoring cells and claim them for yourself.

Initially, the game was strangely non-intuitive as it was tough to work through all the implications of a car placement. This difficulty diminished in the next game as both players had a clearer move of what a good move might look like. You can get into tit-for-tat placements in which players face off on a peninsula: I place a car and shoot you off the edge; next turn, you can return the favor and return the board to almost the same position. The asymmetry of the board makes these series of actions less enticing, although determined players can be boring and repetitive.

One intuitive action that hasn't gone away is the attempt to move pieces on the board directly. In a game about bumper cars, it's odd that the cars don't move on their own – instead moving only when pushed by the operator or hit by teleporting car – but that's part of the challenge, I suppose. If you could simply drive onto a bell, the game would be simpler, in addition to losing the tension of allowing two car placements for a cost of four points. That double placement can swing the momentum to your favor, but is it worth the cost?


The cards provide useful twists on existing actions, allowing you to push two cars at once on a placement or move away from the car you hit. The alternate scoring card – which turns the 0-valued spaces into 2s and the 3-valued spaces into 1s – is a strong one, and the threat of seeing one played should encourage you to continually bump the opponent from the board as car disparity can lead to runaway scorings.

The removal of the tile with the bell after a scoring seems to be an attempt to prevent runaway games by disallowing a player to lock in points on that tile, but given the layout of the board, a player can set up strongholds elsewhere and try to ride those points to victory. Both of my latter games saw one player take the lead in the first third of play, then hold on to that lead throughout the game, with the final scorings being rushed as the leader had enough of a margin that those last points didn't matter. Rather than suspect a runaway leader problem, however, I would suspect that the players didn't know what they were doing. Multiple times throughout our games we would place a new car on the board, then pull it back once we saw how the resulting collision would look – and I'm normally pretty good at spatial games. Having that competence challenged is a good thing from my point of view.

Galaxy Trucker: The Big Expansion
Updated: Oct 17

Publisher: Czech Games Edition
Designer: Vlaada Chvatil
Players: 2-5
Ages: 12+
Playing Time: 60-90 minutes
Release Date: Spiel 08
Languages: Czech/English/German
Price: €30
Links:

One of the best mixes of fun and game play at Spiel 07 was Galaxy Trucker from Vlaada Chvatil and Czech Games Edition. Spiel 08 will see a new truckload of interstellar destruction with Galaxy Trucker: The Big Expansion. As is often the case with expansions, The Big Expansion includes a number of mix-and-match components:

• Pieces and rules for five-player games.


• An updated version of Rough Road Ahead – this set of cards, previously released in a downloadable format on the Czech Games website, will be overhauled with artwork to match the original game and expanded by eight cards suggested by players themselves.

Two cards from Rough Road Ahead that have received a facelift

• Additional adventure cards, including two previously available only at Spiel 07.



• A special deck of adventure cards that players individually insert into the deck themselves to surprise their fellow drivers.



• A new alien species, each of which comes with a unique special power chosen by the allien tender (i.e. you) after selecting the critter.



• New ship building components, including life support for the new ET, stasis chambers for hibernating astronauts, cannon engines, battery holds, and more.



• New ship classes, such as the Class IIA pictured below.