Columnists, Articles, Etc.

This section showcases longer articles that provide insight into the world of board games, whether from the game designers themselves or from dedicated writer/gamer amalgams. For ease of searching, the articles are divided into currently updated categories, then "no longer updated but still worth reading" categories:

• Game Designer Diaries – Designers tell you how Game X came to be.
• Feature Articles – Long pieces on this or that.
• Columnists – Regular and irregular musings from the BGN bullpen.
• Convention Reports – Coverage of Spiel, NY Toy Fair, Gen Con, Origins and more.
• Postcards from Berlin – Jeff Allers' take on life inside Europe's gaming capital.
• Board 2 Pieces – Ted Alspach's comic on meeple meditations.


• Basic Training
• German Game Authors Revisited
• Interviews by an Optimist
• Misadventures in Gaming
• Musings on...
• Teacher's Corner
• The Game Table
• Variants

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From Pisa to Jerusalem – A Game Designer’s Crusade

By Michele Mura
March 11, 2010

[Editor’s note: As I mentioned in a March 2010 news item, Jerusalem will make its public debut this coming weekend at the PLAY game festival in Modena, Italy, with copies on sale in April 2010 from Red Glove and later from ElfinWerks. (2-4 players, ages 12+, 90 minutes, $55/€40) Here, Mura talks about the origins of the game. —WEM]

The first basic idea of Jerusalem came up some years ago, specifically during 2003. I started the project with a friend of mine, Filippo, because we decided to make a game with four hands and two brains. The first background of the game was about our city: Pisa during the 12th century, when families struggled to build the highest house tower, a symbol of power and wealth.

Since the start of our development the two main mechanisms for interaction in the game were placement and majority. We chose to divide the city into five sectors with different revenues: money, men, and tower points. This last resource was the only way to build new floors for the tower and thus win the game.

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Design Notes for Workshop of the World

By the Ragnar Brothers
March 7, 2010

There is something mysterious and awe-inspiring about canals, something that railways don’t quite match. Having thoroughly enjoyed researching and designing Canal Mania it was exciting to learn that Martin Wallace had started from the canal revolution in his game Brass. This game has been brought to table frequently in various Ragnar groups and is rightly a favorite. However, on first playing we felt a trick had been missed. Instead of taking the canal counters off, why not flip them to the railway side? This simple question was the starting point in the designing of Workshop of the World.

Of course, the very next step was to scale the game to match and eventually exceed that of Canal Mania. All (or nearly all) of those lovely canals had to be incorporated. From the start this felt like it could be a “gateway game,” but with the size of map and the mission to follow canals with railways, the mechanics of play would have to be simple in order to achieve a ninety-minute playing time.

At about the same time, the Esher Gaming Group happened to play Gypsy King by Corné van Moorsel. This is a game in two halves. The second half is a little more powered up, but otherwise there’s not much that happens in the first half that affects the second. Not much that is, except for the driving knowledge that some players are clearly doing better than others – good, old-fashioned “tall poppy” gaming. Amun-Re by Reiner Knizia is similar, but in this there are rather more ripples from the first half that wash into the second. In Workshop of the World we were determined on more.

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Postcards From Berlin #42: Middle Ages

By Jeff Allers
March 7, 2010

German Word of the Month: Lebensabschnitt (phase of life)

Mention the “Middle Ages” while selecting themes for an upcoming game night, and it might give me pause these days. This is not at all due to the fact that it is a much over-used backstory for European board games. Rather, it’s because I had my 40th birthday a few months ago.

I’ve always been a staunch member of the “age is just a number” camp, claiming that the round numbers were no different than any other year, and in theory, this still makes sense to me. But cultural stigma has finally trumped logic this time around, and I’ve found myself in the midst of a mild midlife crisis (which in the German language is, conveniently, called a “midlife crisis").

The moment has spurred an above-average amount of self-reflection that, naturally, does not exclude the gaming hobby and my participation in it. In fact, it seems that the majority of the gamers I know are middle-aged, too, even in a country where strategy games are successfully mass-marketed to families. The teens and younger attendees to my game nights usually have parents who are much more serious about the hobby than they are, and I’m left to conclude that an obsession with boardgames may very well be a result of entering midlife. It’s sobering to think that a 40-year-old placing a large order with a local online boardgame retailer might generate more eye rolls from friends and spouses than buying a Harley Davidson.

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The Making of Valdora

By Michael Schacht
March 6, 2010

The Beginning

When I redesigned my website years ago, I incorporated an element of Valdora as the game was already “finished” at that time, several years before its actual release. The book in the background of most of the pages of my website was an exciting reference to the coming game, which just a few people recognized.

The development work on Valdora was actually completed back in 2006, and I started to offer the game as a prototype to publishers. I quickly found someone who was eager to release it, and the game was scheduled for the Essener Spieletage 2007.

After Zooloretto became Spiel des Jahres – Germany’s Game of the Year – in that same year with the same publisher, we decided to postpone the project. Too many other things now needed our attention and energy.

So Valdora was delayed, which led me to start work once again on a game that actually was already finished.

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The Unusual Origins of the Card Game Wampum

By Jeffrey D. Allers
March 5, 2010

Since becoming enthralled with the variety of modern board games, I have been inspired in many different ways to create games of my own. Sometimes the first spark comes from an experience or fun activity, and I wonder how the fun could be relived and reproduced for others through a set of game components. At other times, it’s a particular challenge – like climbing a mountain – that gives me a sense of satisfaction for having accomplished something I had never done before. Sometimes I want to take a good game mechanic further, and other times I want to make it more accessible.

Most often, however, it is a theme that grabs me, and I will hunt for years until I find the right mechanics that fit. The inspiration for my upcoming card game, Wampum, however, was something entirely different…

One Fine Day: An Unexpected Challenge

For some time, the youth gaming night I had organized in our neighborhood met in one of the boy’s family’s apartments. I had just become a father of twins, who, together with my wife, needed peace and quiet at home, so we crammed around a small table in a tiny room every week to try out new games from my collection along with whatever prototypes I was currently working on.

As we were testing one of those prototypes one evening, the host’s mother walked in and noticed that I had made quick playing cards using plastic card sleeves (unlike the laminated cards I make for late-stage prototypes). She left for a moment, then returned with a pile of unused sleeves from her other son and said, “Here, you can have these, too.”

“Now I’ll have to use these to make a game for you!” I proclaimed, not being one to miss an opportunity for a unique challenge. “Just tell me your favorite theme.”

She thought for a moment, then concluded decisively, “George Clooney.” My head dropped as I realized what I had gotten myself into.

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Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2010 – Hasbro, Bucephalus, Asmodee

By W. Eric Martin
February 25, 2010

Okay, time to bring an end to this Toy Fair madness. The show has been over for nearly a week, yet I’m still plodding through the vast pile of material that I assembled in a single day’s visit. Even at a show like Toy Fair, when the dedicated booths for game companies fill only two segregated rows on the lower level of the vast Jacob Javits Center and other game publishers are scattered about the convention floor like Hansel’s trail of vanishing bread crumbs in the woods, you can still be overwhelmed by the vast number of games being presented. Hence, these reports, now mercifully drawing to a close as I tackle the biggest beast of the game industry…

Hasbro

Hasbro has a terrible reputation among gamers: They put out too many spin-offs; they’re not innovative; they don’t credit designers; they hog the market and undersell competition; and so on. So why cover Hasbro? First, because the company is part of the game industry and what Hasbro releases does have an effect on the larger market, especially with the 95% of the population that doesn’t consider themselves gamers, yet does play the occasional Hasbro title. Second, because Hasbro does embrace the new on some occasions, as with its introduction of Siftables to the general marketplace.

In case you’re not familiar with the term, Siftables are small, block-sized computers that recognize one another and interact in various ways. Here’s a short video demonstrating how Siftables could be used in a word-formation game:

Siftables word game from Jeevan Kalanithi on Vimeo.

And here’s how Hasbro will present this “SmartLink Technology” – as it’s referred to in the press release – in Q4 2010:

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Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2010 – Playroom, University Games, North Star Games

By W. Eric Martin
February 23, 2010

Every year at Toy Fair you run across game designers and publishers that leave you thinking, “Really? You thought that was a good idea?” Often these folks vanish after a year, having garnered no sales or receiving no encouragement from buyers, but sometimes they surprise you.

The guys with the cricket trivia game, for example – a game that so disinterested the rep that he kept looking around the room while explaining it to me – came to Toy Fair for two years, but they took a pass in 2010 for whatever reason. Maybe next year. Other games that I would be less than enthusiastic to bring to the table include:

• Chinese Revolution, an “innovative” take on Chinese Checkers that I covered in an earlier Toy Fair 2010 report

• XYMYX, an “evolution of chess” in that the players make their moves simultaneously, whether by playing online or through the use of an electronic device that stores a player’s move and reveals it only when both players have moved. Why make this change? As described in the promotional material, “after analyzing the results of over one million chess games, we can conclude that the white piece player has almost a 10% more probabilities [sic] of winning the game.” This game is available for licensing.

• TDC Games, publishers of such fine games as Deluxe Dirty Minds, Sexy Secrets and Man Laws and Woman Rules, had a new card game called Chaos in which players lay down rule cards as players infringe on the rules in their hands. Thus you’ll need to sing when you do this, and make fart noises in your armpit when you do that, and so on.

• Royal Chess is described by the publisher as being “like playing a game of poker and chess at the same time,” but it’s more like playing war than poker. While playing a regular game of chess, each player has a hand of five cards from her own fifty card deck. To move a piece, you must first discard a card that shows that piece; you then refill your hand to five cards. Capture the opponent’s king and queen to win.

Okay, enough with those oddities – let’s look at some of the other game publishers at NY Toy Fair…

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Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2010 – Out of the Box, Summit, Ravensburger, Winning Moves

By W. Eric Martin
February 21, 2010

Despite being at my fourth Toy Fair and attending other conventions as well, I’ve still never gotten the hang of taking photos at these events. And I don’t mean that I take bad photos, although that is sometimes the case – I mean that I flat out forget to take them. I listen to the description of the game; I ask the rep questions about what’s on the cards or gameboard, I take notes about the game play and other details – then I move on to the next item or company, forgetting that a photo shared with you, the reader, would make all of this far more clear and comprehensible. My apologies.

Take, for example, the first item listed for the company below…

Out of the Box Publishing

I’ve already written about Out of the Box Publishing’s 2010 line-up in two news items – one item in Dec. 2009 that covered the company’s five games, and a second item from Jan. 2010 with more details about 10 Days in the Americas. Here’s a brief description of this game for those unfamiliar with the 10 Days... series:

Players have to assemble a valid journey through North, Central and South America and the Caribbean. For a journey to be complete, a player must have ten travel tiles that connect with one another, whether adjacent countries are placed next to one another or two countries are properly connected via an airplane or ship card.

What would have completed this description and clarified what’s unique about 10 Days in the Americas? A photo of the gameboard. What can I not offer you, the reader? A photo of the gameboard. Some day I’ll perhaps train my brain to think visually rather than textually, but that day has yet to arrive.

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Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2010 – LEGO, Goliath, Family Games

By W. Eric Martin
February 20, 2010

After talking about a few games at Toy Fair, a publisher rep suddenly stopped and said, “Who are you again? I know you’re not a retailer because you’re asking too many questions and taking too many notes.”

That’s the mental framework running behind the scenes at Toy Fair. Retail buyers rarely care about the game play of the products they purchase; they care about cost, availability, target market, shipping terms, marketing dollars behind the line, ease of demonstration, and all sorts of other non-factors from the gamer’s point of view. It’s interesting to see this dynamic play out when you ask a rep for an explanation of a game, and he talks mostly about how easily you can sell the item to customers since it will already be familiar to them.

Not that this is the case with the publishers mentioned below, mind you – just an anecdote that came to mind while writing this segment of my 2010 NY Toy Fair coverage…

LEGO

LEGO was my first stop of the morning on the one day that I spent at Toy Fair, not because I expected to be blown away by the games on display but because I was already familiar with all of them – or at least I thought I was. In 2009 LEGO launched its game line in Germany and the UK with ten titles – Monster 4, Lava Dragon, Pirate Code, Minotaurus, Creationary, Ramses Pyramid, Race 3000, Robo Champ, Magikus and Lunar Command – and nine of those ten titles are now scheduled for release in the U.S. as follows:

March 2010

• Monster 4 (2-4 players, ages 7+, 15-25 minutes, $15)
• Lava Dragon (2-4 players, ages 7+, 15-25 minutes, $15)
• Pirate Code (2-4 players, ages 8+, 15-25 minutes, $20)
• Minotaurus (2-4 players, ages 8+, 20-30 minutes, $25)
• Creationary (3-8 players, ages 7+, 30-60 minutes, $35)

August 2010

• Ramses Pyramid (2-4 players, ages 8+, 20-30 minutes, $30)
• Race 3000 (2-4 players, ages 7+, 20-30 minutes, $20)
• Robo Champ (2-3 players, ages 6+, 10-15 minutes, $10)
• Magikus (2-4 players, ages 6+, 10-20 minutes, $10)

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Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2010 – Queen Games, R&R Games

By W. Eric Martin
February 17, 2010

While walking to Toy Fair this year, I passed the huge white tents set up in Bryant Park to house the runway shows of Fashion Week, which – as Project Runway fans know – is a huge event in the fashion industry.

In many ways, Fashion Week is akin to New York Toy Fair: designers spend months or years moving from concept to prototype to preproduction to finished product, while the potential buyer will frequently spend no more than two minutes deciding whether the product should be shooed aside or blessed with an order. The designer or fashion house will kowtow to expected market trends or emerge with a unique twist on existing products or try to anticipate where the market is headed or work from an individual perspective that stands apart from the rest of the industry – which is precisely what game players observe in their industry, although we’d never agree on who’s kowtowing and who’s standing apart. (Fashion buyers feel the same way, of course.)

With that in mind, here’s an early look at the spring and fall line of two fashionable gaming houses:

Queen Games

Queen Games is now distributing its own titles in English instead of having them distributed by Rio Grande Games. Thus, Rajive Gupta, the head of Queen Games, was attending New York Toy Fair for the first time to introduce the company’s existing and upcoming titles to U.S. distributors and retailers. Asked for an impression of how the show was going, Gupta said, “Ask me again next year when I have something to compare it to.” The games on display were:

• New York, which has the same game play as Dirk Henn’s Spiel des Jahres-winning Alhambra, but with the Spanish architecture being replaced by the skyscrapers of Manhattan. As in the original game, players collect four types of currencies and use those funds to purchase tiles that they assemble into their own mini-metropolis, connecting the paved street edges on the tiles to create a coherent network of roads. The building tiles come in six colors, and players score for their holdings three times during the game, earning points for having the most of a color as well as for their longest road.

Aside from the theme change and the associated new artwork, the gameboard is now larger with spots for both face-down and face-up tiles and a scoretrack that circles the edge of the board instead of zigzagging back and forth. (Thank goodness!) Note that this game is listed in a number of places as Alhambra: New York, but the Alhambra name doesn’t appear on the box front, as seen below. (2-6 players, ages 8+, 45-60 minutes, $50)

• New York: The Card Game, aka Alhambra: Das Kartenspiel, which is effectively New York/Alhambra but with cards instead of tiles and no street/wall building. Players still use four currencies to buy colored property, being able to take another turn immediately when paying the exact price, but the property cards are piled in front of their owners by color rather than being arranged in some manner. The game lasts only two scoring rounds. (2-6 players, ages 8+, 45-60 minutes, $25)

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Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2010 – Mayfair, ThinkFun, More

By W. Eric Martin
February 16, 2010

So my first encounter with games during this year’s trek to New York Toy Fair came when I stopped in Rite-Aid to buy a small spiral notebook as I had forgotten to bring one of the many that I already own. (I also forgot my camera, a print-out of my appointments, a snack, and many other things. Taking a page from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, however, I did bring a change of socks, a boon to any traveler who plans to walk ten hours. With socks in reserve for the train ride home, everything else seems manageable.)

The game in question turned out to be barely a game at all: Rite-Aid Pharmacy’s The Game of Life Collect & Win contest. True to Life‘s storied game play, Collect & Win requires you to open random ticket packs randomly, then place the random image segments on a grid to complete some random product sold at Rite-Aid.

Well.

Hardly an auspicious start, but thankfully things picked up from there. Here’s the first of umpty-um reports on the publishers and games on display at Toy Fair 2010:

Mayfair Games

Let’s start with the most mainstream Eurogame company, Mayfair Games, which continues to find new markets for Settlers of Catan in the U.S., making it the most well-known, obscure game in the country.

In June 2010, Mayfair and designer Klaus Teuber will branch the Catan line in new directions with Settlers of America, part of the Catan Histories series. The essence of the game is that players initially populate the East Coast of the U.S. with their depots and use the resources they generate to build railroad tracks to the west, building new depots along the way. As you build, goods are made available to you from your personal display, and these goods must be delivered to depots owned by the other players. Thus, you need to both build and deliver in order to win. Yes, Mayfair has crossed the streams of its two main product lines to deliver what might be referred to as “The Catan Train Game.”

One other interesting aspect of the game is that – somewhat in the manner of The Settlers of the Stone Age – as a player builds west she may build a depot in a hex that has no resource number. When this happens, she takes a number chip from one of the existing hexes in the east to place on this hex, with the old hex having its production value degraded, mimicking deforestation or land going fallow.

As this point Settlers of America will be available only in English from Mayfair Games. (3-4 players, ages 10+, 60-90 minutes, approx. $55)

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Chris Kovac: 2010 Canadian Toy and Hobby Fair

As another January ends, it means a trip for me to the Canadian Toy and Hobby Fair. This year brought a few changes for the show, such as moving from downtown Toronto to near the airport (to accommodate out-of-town participants), tying the show to the much larger Toronto Gift Show (CGTA), and unfortunately moving the media day to Monday, meaning I miss getting my juice and cookies.

Ideally in the long run, the change in location will help the show, which has been shrinking for the last couple of years. The show had about 50 booths but since most of these distribute or manufacture toys rather than board games, hunting for games was much easier than at larger shows. Buried among the dolls, plastic models (flying helicopters seem to be all the rage right now) and plush toys this year, I found seven games which might be of interest to gamers. Please note some of these games might have already been released, but they are new to me and are most probably being distributed for the first time in Canada. The games are:

1. The Lazy Bowler, from Dory Dan

This was a beautifully crafted prototype for a five-pin, mechanical miniature bowling game, complete with pin setting and ball return. The Lazy Bowler was built by Dory Dan, a rather nice gentleman from Gander, Newfoundland, who has a successful business making musical spoons (over 100,000 sold). Whether this coffee table-sized design is viable as a commercial game is up to you dear reader to decide, but it is sure pretty to look at. If anybody is interested in producing or developing the game, please contact the game developer.

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Designer Diary: Designing Party Games – Caption If You Can!

By Phil Harding

PART I

Introduction, or: Design a party game? Me? Really?

One of my first articles on BoardGameGeek was about the early stages of the design process, and the age-old conundrum of what comes first: theme or mechanism? Dominic Crapuchettes of North Star Games replied, and mentioned a third starting point which I hadn’t considered. Some designs begin not with a theme or a mechanism, but with an activity. That is, the designer has a particular social activity in mind, and his or her aim is to facilitate that experience for the players through the game. I didn’t think much more about this at the time as I was not hugely into party games, but I thought it was a great insight and it has rattled around in my head these past two or three years.

Fast forward to mid-2009, and I am facing a serious bout of designer’s block! I have a notepad full of design ideas which keep hitting brick walls, and running into each other. When I decided to take up game design as a proper hobby in 2007, interesting ideas were pretty easy to come by it seemed, but now everything I started turned into a mish-mash of the same few just-okay mechanics. As a self-publisher it is also very easy to let production constraints dictate the design process.

So I decided to blow out the cobwebs and remove all constraints on the type of game I was trying to design, even if this meant forgetting about designing a strategy game. I started thinking about other types of play that I had never really considered using in my designs. Dexterity, trivia, acting… nothing was off limits! One game to come out of this time was my just-released party game, Caption If You Can!, which this article will focus on. (The other was the soon-to-be-released dexterity game, Flicochet) I found designing Caption If You Can! extremely different from anything I had done before. It was challenging and exciting in completely new ways.

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Will M. Baker: Ten-for-Ten

Partly inspired by many lists on this site last year, my friend Eli and I decided that for 2009 we would select ten games to play together ten times each. This resolution followed hot on the heels of having played about thirty different games once each, and Eli commenting that it felt a bit like speed-dating, never being given the opportunity to really get to know a game. So our objective (other than reaching the requisite number of plays) was to build familiarity with the game so that we were well past needing to learn the rules and could just dive in to the fun.

We were fairly fluid in our game selection. We didn’t pick all ten games right away, and some games originally on the list were eventually pushed aside by other games we wanted to play more.

Games that got booted from the list:

• Knights (6 plays) – This game works well with two players, but it began to wear on me. There’s no sense of coming into the game with a particular strategy, and the dice-rolling, though fun, can become a bit monotonous.

• Hey! That’s My Fish! (5 plays) – A great game that always presents interesting choices, but it’s a bit of a brain burner, and we found ourselves not wanting to get too abstract.

• Aquadukt (5 plays) – A lot of fun with two players. The roll of the die keeps the tile placement varied, as does the placement of mountains. But, alas, Eli played this game quite a bit while away on a trip and returned burned out on it.

• Torres (4 plays) – An incredible game, with mind-bending choices on every turn. It fell off our Ten-for-Ten list because of its static beginning and brain-burning choices that left us exhausted.

• Stone Age (4 plays) – A heavy contender for the list, but we found it emotionally similar to Agricola, so we went with the latter. I’m looking forward to more plays of this title.

So here’s the actual list, in the order that we achieved the tenth play, along with our average (mean) ratings. Unless otherwise noted, all games were two-player and without expansions.

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Mary Dimercurio Prasad: BGG.CON 2009 Highlights

This was the fifth year for BGG.CON, the BoardGameGeek convention, held once again in the Westin Dallas Fort Worth Airport hotel on November 19-22. Aldie and Derk plan to add an extra day in 2010! This year’s attendance was around 925, up quite a bit from last year’s attendance of 700. In 2010, they plan to open up registration to 950, which will probably max out the current space. BGG.CON has pretty much taken over all the hotel conference areas – there were many side rooms of open gaming and even some Rock Band in the lecture hall on a giant screen!

A game of At the Gates of Loyang in one of the smaller open gaming rooms


Free Stuff!

The swag bag had some small treasures, including a metal miniature that may be used in place of one that comes with World of Warcraft: The Board Game. There were several different models, and since one isn’t really that useful, some trading has been going on in the BGG.CON forums.

Each attendee was given a blue ticket and a yellow ticket. The blue ticket was for the BGG.CON prize giveaway drawings on Saturday night, including stacks of games from their sponsors and a Crokinole board by the Hilinski brothers. This year there was a little hitch when one (freakishly tall) geek tried to claim the Crokinole board after just having won a stack of games. The crowd started to get ugly. It turned out that he was holding tickets for friends who had left for food. The final ruling was that a person must be present to win, so another ticket was drawn. Lesson to be learned: Attend the drawing in person or you may get nada.

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Designer Diary: Thunderstone

by Mike Elliott
December 3, 2009

Editor’s note: If you haven’t played Thunderstone, you might consider reading the rules before tackling this article in order to understand all the game mechanisms to which Elliott refers.

Most people who know me know me as a trading card game designer. I have been doing trading card games for about 15 years now. I worked on Magic: The Gathering for about ten years back when I was with Wizards of the Coast, working on design and development for about 30 Magic sets. In addition to working on other designer’s games, I have had about a dozen of my trading card game designs published in the U.S. and Japan and a couple of them (Duel Masters and Battle Spirits) are still going quite strong in Japan.

The trading card game industry is a very interesting and complicated market. Between the U.S. and Japan, over 400 trading card games have been published since Richard Garfield created the category back in 1993. While I have not played every single one of these, I have probably read the rules and analyzed the cards on most of them. I also had a short stint with Wizkids/Topps where I got to study a lot of Jordan Weisman’s games and I worked on a number of miniatures games, including a couple of hybrid minis/trading card games. Most trading card games borrow mechanics from other games. I keep track of various mechanics and what trading card games they are used in and I am constantly updating my list. When I do a new trading card game, I often look for mechanics that are under-represented and try to use those as a starting point, adding new material on top. Sometimes I start with a mechanic and work to alter it slightly. Duel Masters, which is my most successful TCG from a market standpoint, started with the premise of “What if you took the prizes from Pokemon and made it so the losing player got them instead of the player scoring the knockout?” That got combined with “What if you attacked the player, but had the cards be your life instead of having a separate numeric life total?” These and various other questions and mechanics tweaks resulted in a new game system. This sort of “Chinese menu” approach happens all the time in trading card games and many of the games end up with very similar mechanics and play styles.

That brings us to November of 2008 when I first saw Dominion. I had met designer Donald X back in 1997, and he played a couple of his spec games with me that year. He did not have Dominion back then in 1997, but all of his games were above average and one of them was exceptionally good. (Sadly not published yet but that might change with his success.) I still have a copy of the stickers that Donald X made as part of a homemade Magic set, which included a number of cards that were fairly innovative for the time. The stickers are actually a collector’s item these days, and a number of the concepts in them are seen on real cards. He came back a few more times over the years, but I got to play with him only one more time in that period.

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Postcards From Berlin #41: An After-Essen Mint

By Jeff Allers
November 26, 2009

German Word of the Month: Nachspeise (dessert)

“If you can’t make it to Essen, then make Essen come to you.” That has been my motto and motivation the past three years for the “After-Essen Party” in Berlin, and Michael of the Spielwiese has gladly hosted the event, as it always falls on the “birthday” of his café, which he opened the Tuesday after Essen four years ago. Every year, we invite gamers – both local and visiting – as well as Berlin designers to bring and teach their new releases. For the inaugural event, we even had Boardgame News editor Eric Martin and his wife Linda as special guests; this time we were treated to Boardgame News writers Brad Keen, Fraser McHarg and Melissa Rogerson. Fraser and Melissa even brought along their “gamer” daughters.

Spielwiese owner Michael Schmitt and Jeff Allers – ready to party


Berlin designers in attendance included Peer Sylvester, Günter Cornett (who released Peer’s Filipino Fruit Market), young designer Tizian Blumenthal (whose Tokugawa was published by Cornett in 2008), Andrea Meyer (with the self-published Climate Poker), Hartmut Kommerell (of Finito fame), Mario Coopmann (developer for Schmidt Spiele and designer of Robotics), and Bernd Eisenstein, enjoying the successful launch of Irongames through its first release, Peloponnes.

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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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The Making of Opera VI

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 I 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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Convention Report: Spiel 2009: October 22, 2009 – Day 1

By W. Eric Martin
October 22, 2009

As usual, I was already exhausted before Spiel even opened due to long days and late nights putting together the Spiel preview, uncomfortable airline seating that keeps tall people awake for eight hours, and a late dinner and chat session that pushed the sleep meter even further down. That aside, let’s focus on the positive: the new titles at Spiel 09 and what’s coming down the pike for 2010:

• First, the games played: This list is short as I spent much of my time talking and asking questions of designers, etc., but I did play Havana, Tobago and Psycho Pet today.

  Havana sounds like a light card game – collect resources, build buildings, score – yet our initial three-player game felt a bit like roaming in the dark. You can’t well anticipate who will play which role when, and you need a grasp of the “I know that you know” double-think to better plan for what to do. In brief, you play one new role each turn after the first, and the two roles in play create a two-digit number; the order of the numbers determines who goes first, with the lower numbers having weaker powers. The powers give you money, resources and workers, with those components being required to build buildings. Seems fine.

  Tobago is a treasure hunt, with the players laying down clue cards to narrow where the treasure might be. Once a single location remains for any of the four types of treasure, you divvy up treasure cards among those who contributed to finding it. Since those involved late in the discovery process get an earlier pick of the treasure, you have an incentive to narrow a treasure’s location, even if you can’t pick up the treasure yourself. Fun and thinky at the same time. There’s a bit of weirdness during play as the game suggests marking possible treasure locations only after narrowing the field to 10-15 possible locations, which means that you have to recall that black is still up for grabs – but not, say, within two spaces of a palm tree or not in the forest – despite black not being visible on the board. I want an online version to take care of this tedious task for me.

  Psycho Pet has you collecting therapy points through a push-your-luck mechanism, but since you need a lot of points to cure all but the healthiest of animals, you must spend points marking bonuses that will pay off under certain conditions, such as a cat being in the cards turned up at the start of a round. Problem is, the number of these spots is limited, and even with only four out of six possible players, one person became locked out of these bonuses and could only crawl along each round, clearly out of the running in a game destined to last much longer. We were likely undervaluing action cards and their abilities, but we seemed to be making less progress toward the finish line than we imagined we would and decided to move on to something else.

  Oh, I also looked at Priests of Ra, the new Reiner Knizia title from Rio Grande, and after a quick read of the rules, we put it back and headed to Tobago. The game play is Priests of Ra is identical to the original except for two small changes: The game doesn’t include god tiles, so your only options on a turn are invoke Ra or draw a tile, and some of the tiles are double-sided, and you decide which side will be face-up and auctioned when you pull such a tile. The real difference is in the tiles you collect and the scoring system, and while I admit that such changes could be significant in terms of the choices you’ll make during the game, given the short amount of time available at Spiel, I thought it best to move on to something less familiar.

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Game Preview: Dominion: Seaside

By Donald X. Vaccarino
October 20, 2009

Designer: Donald X. Vaccarino
Publishers: Rio Grande Games / Hans im Glück / Filosofia Games

Players: 2-4
Release date: October 2009
Languages: English / German / French
Links:

It’s time once again for me to tell you about a Dominion expansion. I am not sure if this counts as a preview or not since some people will have the game in their hands by the time this appears. Still, some people won’t, and that’s the important thing. This preview has three prominent features.

First, there’s What You Get. For all I know images of all of the cards will have appeared at BGG by the time you can read this, but still, I will go over what-all is in the box, pointing out some stuff and showing off some cards.

Second, I offer you Anatomy of an Attack. It’s just an essay about making Dominion attack cards. I dunno, I felt like an essay about a random Dominion-related game design issue would be a way to fill up space. And it was! I nailed that one.

Third, there’s The Throne Room Variations. As usual most of the questions people have are about Throne Room. I have no regrets. I do have answers though. Where there’s no confusion, I will just marvel at what you get out of Throning the different cards.

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The Making of Opera V

By Hans van Tol
October 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 and part IV started pulling everything together.]

Finally! I am so happy to have the first copy of the game in my hands. This morning at nine o’clock I was called by the driver. He brought the first four pallets of Opera to our regional warehouse in Capelle aan den IJssel. Thank god! Everything is exactly as it was supposed to be. The colour of the cover is perfect – deep red, almost a bit brownish, which gives it a classic and luxurious look. When opening the box, the rules look good. And there’s the exciting fragrance of glue and the fresh paint of the print of the game. Punched out all the materials, nothing wrong. Checked the colours of the wooden materials. All fine! Yes. Now the game is resting on the sideboard… This weekend I will be playing my first game with the final version of the Opera board game, perhaps even tonight!

Prototype V: the Final Phase

Here is prototype number five – the European map is back! And the game is near to completion.

Prototype V, December 2008


This prototype was made in December by our graphic designer Arenea Kunkeler. In this set-up, the game is not cut in pieces (as in the last prototype) but reunited in one gameboard. Okay, so what is new on the gameboard? And what has been changed since the last prototype?

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Mali Powstancy II – Time Ticks, Card Tricks, Game Mechanics

By Filip Milunski
October 17, 2009

Designer: Filip Milunski
Publisher: Egmont Polska

Players: 2-4
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Release Date: October 2009
Languages: English, German and Polish
Links:

Editor’s note: Mali Powstancy will be available at the Portal Publishing booth (4-312) at Spiel 09. Part I covered the inspiration for this game.

Mechanics are the backbone of every board game. Although a game’s theme and its flow give a game its character, its heart and soul, for the designer the mechanics themselves are the real focus of work. And although depending on one’s approach they can appear before or after the theme – like the chicken and the egg – that doesn’t change the fact that mechanics are the core of the game. Today I would like to tell you how the mechanics of Little Insurgents, the English name for Mali Powstancy, came to be.

From the start, I knew that the central mechanism of the game would be a race. The initial idea was that every player would control a small group of scouts, whose task would be delivering orders of the insurrection leaders between locations. This meant…

A Race Against Time

...and against scouts from other teams. From the beginning, I knew that players should feel time pressure during the game, and that time pressure – not scarce resources or random events – should create the tension and excitement in the game.

The first step was to represent the passage of time via game mechanics. Here I didn’t agonize a long time, and I didn’t come up with a new solution. I used a track like in the game Fury of Dracula. Every turn the first space of this track gets a new order card describing where the order must be picked up and where it must be delivered. At the end of each turn, all the order cards on the track move one space to the right. The track has only a few spaces: If a card falls off the end of the track, then the scouts didn’t deliver the order fast enough. This perfectly represented the passage of time.

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The Making of Opera IV

By Hans van Tol
October 17, 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, and part III examined an overload of strategic possibilities.]

On October 15, 2009, the first games of Opera were produced, so after many years of development, Opera is ready – finally!! Although I had planned the production months ago, it is still just a few days before Spiel that the game will arrive there. I hope everything is as it should be when I have the first game in my hands tomorrow morning…

Prototype IV

Okay, right, the creation of Opera. How did we get here? In the last prototype a lot of things were already there: the budget table, the composers, a lot of characters, a lot of buildings, the episodes. Still though, some quite important steps had to be made. In prototype IV, some very important changes and additions were made. Maybe you will notice a few…

Prototype IV from September 2008

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The Making of Opera III

By Hans van Tol
October 15, 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, and part II detailed a sidetrack in the realm of family games.]

I know it is ridiculous, but I have promised Eric that I would be sending in a part every day until the moment I have to pack my things for Essen. A promise is a promise, so besides taking all the other preparations, designing new games in between, and making sure our opera singers will show up at the Novelty Show in great costumes and with their voices warmed up for the performance, I will be writing my report on the creation of Opera.

Mozart and Salieri

In the last part I showed you this nice detail at the bottom of the board of prototype II. Who are these guys, Mozart and Salieri? Where did they come from, and did they survive the (sometimes) destructive path of creation and development?

Mozart and Salieri are the two main characters in the movie Amadeus, which I saw in my younger days. Mozart was the good guy, of course, and Salieri was the “bad guy,” but also a secret admirer of the fabulous work of the very talented composer.

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