First Impressions

Quick reviews of games, often after only one or two playings. These brain flashings should give you some idea of what the game is like and how it might go down at your table.

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First Impression: Parade: Alice in Wonderland

By W. Eric Martin
October 10, 2009

Designer: Naoki Homma
Publisher: Grimpeur
Distributor: Japon Brand

Players: 2-6
Ages: 10+
Playing time: 30 minutes
Release date: Released
Price: €12 at Spiel / €14 otherwise
Links:

Version played: Comped production copy
Times played: Five, three times with 2 players and twice with 3

It’s time to take part in a parade – a card parade! Players start with a hand of five cards from a deck of 66 cards, with the cards coming in six colors numbered 0-10. Six cards on the table form the starting “parade” with one end designated the head of the parade.

Each turn, you add a card to the tail of the parade. The number on that card tells you how many of the preceding spots are safe; for each card not in the safe zone, you must take it if it’s the same color as the card you just played or if it bears a number less than or equal to the number on the card just played. At the start of the game, for example, if I play a Blue 7, I take no cards since the preceding seven cards are safe and only six cards are in the parade. If I play a Blue 4, then the four preceding cards are safe and I must take one or both of the first two cards if they are either blue or valued 0-4.

Any cards that you take are laid out in stacks in front of you. You finish a turn by refilling your hand to five cards. When either the deck runs out or a player collects cards of all six colors, each player takes one more turn without drawing a card. Then all players secretly choose two of their hand cards to add to their collections while throwing away the remaining two cards.

Whoever has more of a color than anyone else – or is tied for the most cards in a color – scores only one point per card, while everyone else scores points equal to the face value of their cards of that color. (With only two players, you must have at least two more cards of a color than the opponent in order to score only one point per cards.) Whoever ends up with the lowest score wins!

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First Impression: Age of Steam Expansion: Alabama Railways

By John McGuckin
October 7, 2009

Designer: Ted Alspach
Publisher: Bézier Games

Players: 2
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 8 turns (~45 minutes)
Release date: October 2009
Language: English
Price: $85 as part of the Bézier 2009 preorder set, deadline Oct. 10, 2009
Links:

Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Once

My son and I recently had the chance to preview Ted Alspach’s upcoming Alabama Railways expansion for Age of Steam. (It’s an expansion for Steam, as well, but we played only the Age of Steam version). Alabama Railways is a two-player expansion that uses the basic Age of Steam rules with a few modifications. The most significant rule variations are:

1. Locomotive and Urbanization are the only available actions.

2. The starting cities are brown, i.e. not a goods color, so new cities will have to be built to deliver goods to. (Only New Cities A, B, C and D are used.)

3. Goods that are delivered produce one less income than the number of links delivered through. (The theme of the map is that Alabama railroads sprang up quickly, but the rural areas they served could not afford to pay full price for their goods).

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First Impression: Those Pesky Humans

By Carlos Couto
September 23, 2009

Designers: Clay Gardner & James Mathe
Publisher: Minion Games

Players: 2-4
Ages: 13+
Playing time: 120 minutes
Rules language: English
Price: $20
Links:

Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Twice, once with 2 players and once with 3

Those Pesky Humans is a dungeon-crawler in which one player takes on the role of the minions – led by the fearful Ogre – and is trying to exterminate the humans’ presence in its dungeon. The other players, naturally, are those humans who are bothering the Ogre and friends; they need to enter the dungeon, locate the three gems hidden there, then get out alive, thumbing their collective noses at the Ogre as they skedaddle.

As a print-and-play game, the quality of the components in Those Pesky Humans will depend on what you have around the house, but the graphics themselves are very good, and the artwork for the player avatars and minions by Chuck Whelon is well conceived, with a cartoonish touch that brings some humor to the game. The cards and dungeon tiles are equally well designed, matching the level of the rest of the materials.

Game play in Those Pesky Humans is simple: The Ogre player draws ten of the 16 dungeon tiles and builds a maze with them, picking out ten chests filled with treasure/traps/minions to distribute in the rooms on these tiles. Each human player receives an action deck, which contains cards that grant additional or changed abilities or affect the roll of the dice.

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First Impression: Color Scheme

By W. Eric Martin
August 18, 2009

Designer: Fabian Klotz
Publisher: Educational Insights

Players: 2
Ages: 6+
Playing Time: 15 minutes
Rules Language: English
Links:

Version played: Preproduction copy
Times played: Three

Despite being a solved game, Connect 4 has been in print continually for decades. Most people don’t memorize how to navigate the bushy branches of a game decision tree, after all, so folks can play casually and not know that a first play in the outer two columns of either side should be an auto loss – because it won’t be. Hasbro has tried to milk that connectible cash cow in any number of new ways, from 2000’s Connect 4 Flip to the more recent Connect-O-Round and Connect 4x4, and now Educational Insights wants to get in on the act with Color Scheme.

True to the company name, EI has added a drop of educational material to the game. Instead of each player having a single color of tokens to drop in the grid, the tiles in Color Scheme are two-color dominos, with the colors being red, blue and yellow. The grid has two layers, and when tiles overlap in the grid, they create the secondary colors of green, orange and purple. (Players cannot have red overlap red, for example.)

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First Impression: Arthur Saves the Planet

By W. Eric Martin
August 18, 2009

Designer: Mike Siggins
Publisher: FRED Distribution

Players: 2-5
Ages: 6+
Playing Time: 40 minutes
Rules Language: English
Price: $15
Links:

Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Once, with three players

I have neither seen the Arthur television show nor read the books from which the show was developed. Before playing I wasn’t even sure what Arthur was supposed to be as his species identification is somewhat nebulous. Is he a mouse? A gopher? Certainly a rodent of some kind given the perky ears and melon head meant to soften his inherently rodenty ickiness.

Turns out, my niece informed me, that Arthur is an aardvark, which makes no sense at all. I might as well draw a jack-in-the-box and call it a tricycle: “Wheels are tough to draw, so I just made it a box. My handlebars kept coming out uneven, so I drew a face instead.”

Anyway, Arthur Saves the Planet is yet another children’s game in which environmental lessons are driven home through game play. In this case, you have numerous challenges related to different locations in Arthur’s city of Rattown: Fish are dying in Puffer’s Pond; we left the lights on downtown, thereby wasting energy; we’re polluting the soil on Wanda’s farm; and the international situation is desperate, as usual. To solve these crises, you need to collect character cards that depict the colors shown on the challenge. This earns you points, with double the pointage if you hold the bonus card for the location.

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First Impression: Letter Roll

By W. Eric Martin
June 5, 2009

Designer: Tushar Gheewala
Publisher: Out of the Box Publishing
Players: 2-8
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 20-30 minutes
Rules Language: English
Price: $25
Links:

Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Two half games, once with four and once with three

Word games can be a tough sell when you’re trying to satisfy a group of random players. One or two braniacs can kill the game for everyone else, and anyone who’s less than comfortable with this genre might be squirming in her seat waiting for the pain to end. Scrabble suffers from this problem, which is exacerbated by players who memorize lists of obscure two- and three-letter words. Boggle largely keeps this problem in check thanks to a time limit and a common pool of letters for all players.

Letter Roll, a title that resembles Milton Bradley’s Wordsters, runs headlong into this quandary, despite players having a one- or two-minute time limit in which to write down words. The game includes seven 20-sided letter dice: two white dice with more commonly used letters, three blue with less common letters, and two brown with the least commonly used letters. On a turn, a player rolls four dice of her choice, then the player to her left removes one of them from play. All players then race to write down words that include the three letters showing on the dice; the letters can be in any order and need not be adjacent. Once time is up, players cross out answers they have in common and score one point for each word that remains. The player with the most points after a certain number of rounds wins.

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First Impression: Bill of Rights / The Ten Commandments

By W. Eric Martin
June 4, 2009

Designers: Mike Selinker, Dan Tibbles & Teeuwynn Woodruff
Publisher: Bucephalus Games
Players: 3-8
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 20-40 minutes
Rules Language: English
Price: $30
Links:

Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Bill of Rights, once with 5 players / The Ten Commandments, none

When you finish a game and ask the other players whether they’d play again to help you get a different perspective on it, to assist you in writing reviews like these, and all four other players say “No” – well, that says a lot about the game.

I’ve already panned a couple of titles from Bucephalus Games – Roman Taxi ( ) and Rorschach ( ) – and Bill of Rights is the latest release to see the flat side of my hammer, which is a shame as the concept of the game is a winner. Players have been charged with rewriting the Bill of Rights, that is, the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution which entail some of the country’s most cherished (if poorly worded) rights. Each player takes on a different randomly chosen role such as economic conservative, warmonger or revolutionary and will champion bills that support that point of view. That’s the idea anyway, but the reality didn’t rise to meet that concept.

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First Impression: Roman Taxi

By W. Eric Martin
May 14, 2009

Designers: Stephen McLaughlin, Jeremy Holcomb, Karl Huber & Dan Tibbles
Publisher: Bucephalus Games
Players: 2-5
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 45-60 minutes
Rules Language: English
Price: $30
Links:

Version played: Comped production copy
Times played: Three, all with two players

My opponent for all three games of Roman Taxi dismissed the design with a cutting non-review review: “It’s a game.” As in, the contents of the box meet all the qualifications of a game, and someone looking at these contents won’t mistake them for anything other than a game, but that’s as far as he’ll go. “It’s a game” is the verbal equivalent of a bored hand shooing away a non-existent bug, a teenager waving off a parent, a spouse shooing an unwanted partner. “How’d you like that movie?” “It’s a movie.” “What did you think of dinner?” “It was food.” You don’t want to watch it, eat it or – in this case – play it ever again.

Veni, Vidi, Ludo

The theme of Roman Taxi can be deduced from the title: You’re in Rome, and you’re driving a taxi. You must pick up Roman citizens and move them from point A to point B in order to earn money. More accurately, you move them from point A-T to point A-T, with each passenger having a specific starting and ending destination, as well as a fare he will pay and a time he will allow you to make the delivery. Cross that time threshold, and he’ll pay only half the fare initially promised. Take twice as much time as he allows, and he’ll get out and walk, leaving you one sad cabbie.

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First Impression: Hab & Gut

By W. Eric Martin
March 9, 2009

Designer: Carlo A. Rossi
Publisher: Winning Moves Germany
Players: 3-5
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 45 minutes
Rules Language: German
Price: €25
Links:

Version played: Production copy
Times played: Three, twice with 3 and once with 5

One fulcrum in game design pits control against interaction. The more players who participate in a multi-player game, the less control any one of those players has, with the benefit being that players interact with more people as they try to maneuver their way to the winners’ circle. In Dirk Henn’s Showmanager, for example, you have no hope of floating a card for a turn on the actor’s market when you play with more than three people. If you want a particular card, you need to buy it as soon as it appears or else you’re out of luck. This doesn’t make the five- and six-player game bad, mind you, as much of the enjoyment from Showmanager comes from the anguish that others feel as they debate whether to waste precious dollars clearing the board and gambling on what will turn up. More players equals more anguish and more enjoyment – even while being squeezed by more opponents for the cards you desperately need.

Leo Colovini’s games tend to highlight the two sides of this divide. Familienbande, Masons, Alexandros, Cartagena, Clans, Go West!: in these designs and others, playing with the minimum number of players – two – gives you maximum control over your fate, which is essential for your success as most of them feature shared scoring, in which one event will lead to scoring rounds for all players. Take 50% of the turns, and you’re mostly responsible for your fate, barring the effect of random factors such as cards and dice. Seat more players around the table, however, and the unpredictable actions of others will dilute your impact on the game and increase the importance of chance on your success or failure.

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First Impression: Powerboats

By Greg J. Schloesser
January 30, 2009

Designer: Corné van Moorsel
Publisher: Cwali
Players: 2-6
Ages: 9+
Playing Time: 60 minutes
Rules Language: English, Dutch, French and German
Links:

Gamers will play games that involve racing just about anything: cars, motorcycles, bicycles, streetcars, Easter Island statues, people, kangaroos, snow sleds, and even worms. One would figure that we have just about had our fill of race games. Not quite. This year saw the release of several new race games, including Powerboats from designer Corné van Moorsel.

As you can surmise from the name, Powerboats deals with racing fast boats. Fortunately, more than the type of object being raced is different, as the game does involve a clever system of adding and removing dice to regulate movement. Is that alone enough to make the game substantially different from the dozens of other games in the genre, thereby making it worthwhile to keep? Sadly, I don’t think so.

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First Impression: Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear! – Russia 1941-42

By Jim Forsythe
January 7, 2009

Designer: Uwe Eickert
Publisher: Academy Games / Phalanx Games
Players: 2-4
Rules Language: English / German
Link:

For 28 years, I’d held on to my childhood copy of Squad Leader, Avalon Hill’s highly successful tactical squad level combat game.  But when my kids started selling stuff on eBay and donating half the proceeds to a charity as part of a home-school service project, I decided it was finally time to part ways with the favorite game from my childhood. With a nostalgic tear in my eye, I watched my daughter pack it up and ship it off, never to be seen again.

Conflict of Heroes was one of several games that helped me finally part ways with the love of my youth. It’s extremely similar to Squad Leader in many ways: modular hex boards that can be combined for larger battles, counters representing infantry squads and individual tanks, and programmed instruction. (Each scenario adds a few more rules than the previous one, so you can get playing quickly and add complexity later.) However, Conflict of Heroes feels so much more streamlined and elegant in comparison due to the fundamental underlying mechanism of the game. Like many of the advances in gaming made in the last decade, Conflict of Heroes tries to get as much of the mechanisms of the game out of the way of the gameplay itself.

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First Impression: Domination

By W. Eric Martin
January 6, 2008

Publisher: Patch Products
Players: 2-4
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 30-40 minutes
Rules Language: English & French
Link:

Times played: Two, once with 2 players and once with 3
Version played: Production copy

Despite not being updated since 2006, The Games Journal has an impressive archives with dozens of still relevant articles and reviews, including one article from 2000 by master game designer Wolfgang Kramer (Tikal, El Grande, Expedition) called ”What Makes a Game Good?”

Several comments by Kramer in that articles identify all that’s wrong with Domination – a 2005 release from Patch Products – such as his opening comment on originality: “Any new game must be original. It has to possess elements that have never – or at least not in this particular combination – been part of a game before.”

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First Impression: Pacardy

By W. Eric Martin
January 3, 2009

Publisher: Patch Products
Players: 2-6
Ages: 8+
Rules Language: English & Spanish
Links:

Times played: Once with three players
Version played: Production copy

Pacardy is what sinners play in Hell. Those damned souls – whether blasphemers, adulterers, murderers or what have you – must deal out the cursed cards again and again, certain that at some point the game will end and they can get back to being flogged or having their nostrils used as pencil sharpeners, but as you, dear reader, surely know, the true torment of Hell is not the punishment, but the false hope that you can someday escape it. Alas, there is no escape from Pacardy other than deception, a sin which might doom you to the flames, too.

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First Impression: Cube Checkers

By W. Eric Martin
December 6, 2008

Publisher: DCP, Limited
Designer: Robert Burroughs
Players: 2
Ages: 6+
Playing Time: 10 minutes-eternity
Rules Language: English
Link:

Version played: Production copy
Times played: Thrice

Long-time gamers are wary of “new” versions of classic games. We’ve all seen variations on chess, checkers, backgammon, and other familiar games that offer little more than a chance for someone to capitalize on their own cleverness in titling and promoting a game that we already own. With that warning in mind, let’s take a look at Cube Checkers, which promises “a new dimension in checkers.” Sounds promising, right? I mean, who doesn’t want a new dimension?

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First Impression: Tosti!

By W. Eric Martin
December 1, 2008

Publisher: Splln
Designers: Rens & Martijn Althuizen
Players: 2-4
Ages: 4+
Playing Time: 10 minutes
Rules Language: Dutch, English, German, French and Spanish

Version played: Production copy
Times played: Twice, once with 3 and once with 2

Anyone who has overnighted in France knows the pleasure of a croque monsieur, the toasted ham-and-cheese sandwich that evokes far more pleasure than a plain ol’ American grilled cheese.

Less well known than the croque monsieur is the Dutch tosti, which is essentially the same thing as a croque monsieur – just moved north a few degrees on the globe – although it can be adorned with vegetables and other garnishings. When my wife and I lived in Utrecht in 1996, we became very familiar with the comfort-food value of the (inexpensive) tosti, lunching on them whenever we traveled around the country so that we could spend our guilders on better things.

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First Impression: Sneaks

By W. Eric Martin
November 29, 2008

Publisher: SimplyFun
Designer: Alvin Madden
Players: 2-8
Ages: 6+
Playing Time: 20-30 minutes
Rules Language: English
Links:

Version played: Production copy
Times played: Twice, both with three players

Playing Sneaks is like working on an assembly line minus the fun. You put down a widget, pick up another one, put down a widget, pick up another one, repeat until lunch break. Working at Burger King provided me with more enjoyment as I could subvert The Man by doling out more French fries than I was supposed to. Take that, you pretender to the throne!

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First Impression: Borneo

By W. Eric Martin
November 24, 2008

Publisher: daVinci Editrice
Designer: Paolo Mori
Players: 3-5
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 30-45 minutes
Rules Language: Italian, English & German
Links:

Version played: Published board game
Times played: Twice, once with 3 and once with 5

In honor of meh‘s inclusion in the Collins English Dictionary, I hereby present this overview of Paolo Mori’s Borneo.

Borneo A-bornin’

Borneo came to light in 2006 when it won that year’s Gioco Inedito, the best unpublished game contest held at Lucca Comics & Games‘ annual convention with the prize being publication through contest co-sponsor daVinci Games. At Spiel 07, daVinci released Borneo as a limited edition card game, with the hundred or so copies disappearing well before the end of the four day convention.

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First Impression: Tyrants of Rome

By W. Eric Martin
September 30, 2008

Publisher: Lost Battalion Games
Designers: Neil Zimmerer & James M. Day
Players: 2-6
Ages: 12+
Rules Language: English
Price: $35
Links:

Version played: Published copy
Times played: Three, all with two players

“I am not happy. This game is no fun.” – Seung Chan Hong

That was the response of my foreign exchange student near the end of our first game of Tyrants of Rome. Obliging fellow that he is, however, he did play the game twice more with me to see what adaptions we might make based on the experience of the first game. (Threatening him with a night in the backyard might have persuaded him as well.) Those changes made later games less interactive and even less interesting – hardly the result you want after a learning game.

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First Impression: Wizard’s Gambit

By W. Eric Martin
May 8, 2008

Publisher: Gryphon Forge Games
Designers: Eric Drever & Matthew Stipes
Players: 2-5
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 45-60 minutes
Rules Language: English

Game Played: Production copy
Number of Plays: Thrice, once each with 2, 3 and 5 players

Ryan Bretsch must be affecting my mind. In comments on BGN and elsewhere, Bretsch, a mainstream game fan, has cried out for publishers to stop using geeky subject matter. “No more elves or trolls or generic fantasy worlds or obscure foreign cities or Renaissance art fests or all those other things that game publishers do repeatedly,” he demands. While I normally roll my eyes at such requests – since many people dig fantasy worlds and topics shunned by mainstream games – I found myself unexpectedly sighing while reading the ad copy on the back of Wizard’s Gambit:

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First Impression: 4th Corner

By W. Eric Martin
May 6, 2008

Publisher: Strategic Space
Designer: Mark Salzwedel
Players: 2-8
Playing Time: 10-120 minutes
Price: $14.95
Rules Language: English

Version: Production copy
Times Played: Twice with two players

“Leaves room for improvement” – that was the diplomatic response of my playing partner, quoting a teaching colleague of his that knows how to deliver bad news to inept students. My more unvarnished response?

“Hell to the no.”

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First Impression: Dubious!

By W. Eric Martin
December 28, 2007

Publisher: Robot Martini Games
Designer: Peer Sylvester
Players: 3-5
Playing Time: 15-30 minutes
Price: $6
Rules Language: English

Version: Production copy
Times Played: Twice, once with 3 players and once with 5

Dubious! is a small party game from a company that specializes in small: Robot Martini Games, which typically produces short print runs of inexpensive card games that can be played in less than 30 minutes. Designer Peer Sylvester had two other games published in 2007—the wargame King of Siam from Histogame and On Q, an abstract game from HiKu Spiele—and Dubious! is about as distant from those titles in spirit and game play as anything you could imagine.

How to Play
Before the game begins, each player receives a set of three answer cards: Yes, No and Maybe; The Yes card has a value of 2, the Maybe card 1, and the No card zero. One player receives the Guess card, and this card travels clockwise during the game. In each round, the Guesser turns over three topic cards, then invents a question that invites the other players to compare these topics. Sample topic cards include an astronaut, sushi, an unexploded bomb, and a camel; sample questions (from the rules) are “Which would you eat?” and “Which would you take on a date?”

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First Impression: Master of Rules

By W. Eric Martin
October 12, 2007

Publisher: Kawasaki Factory
Distributor: Japon Brand
Designer: Susumu Kawasaki
Players: 3-5
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Release Date: October 2007

Game Played: Late prototype
Number of Plays: Once with 5 players

The title “Master of Rules” might bring Fluxx to mind, but for those tepid souls who have yet to discover the glories of that game, you’ll be glad to know that Master of the Rules goes in a completely different direction with how it handles rules.

To start getting into the game, we first need to tackle the terminology. Master of Rules lasts 2-4 rounds depending on the number of players, with each player starting one meld in the round. A meld consists of two tricks, which isn’t the best term as Master of Rules isn’t a trick-taking game.

Each player has a hand of four number cards (which are valued 1-9 in five colors) and three rule cards (more on them below). In the first trick, in clockwise order, each player plays either a number card or a rule card; the rule card can’t duplicate one played previously in the meld. In the second trick, each player must play a card of the other type. In other words, after going around the table clockwise, each player will have a number card and rule card in front of himself on the table.

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First Impression: Glik

By W. Eric Martin
October 10, 2007

Publisher: Portal Publishing
Designer: Adam Kaluza
Players: 2-4
Release Date: October 2007 (revised edition)

Glik, an abstract strategy game, was previously released in Poland, but Portal Publishing is releasing a new edition with much improved graphics and components at Spiel 07. The game can be likened to a multi-player Ricochet Robot or Lunar Lockout, in which each player wants to maneuver his seven pieces from a starting point into contact with his destination field.

On a turn, a player can place neutral blockers on the board, introduce a colored piece on his start space, or move one of his pieces already on the board. Pieces move until they hit a barrier, and your goal is to have all of your pieces touching the destination field or other pieces that have made it home. You have five action points to use each turn, and each of the actions listed costs one point, which gives you freedom to block others from an easy route home or set up a path for yourself.

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First Impression: Festival

By W. Eric Martin
October 3, 2007

Publisher: Grimpeur
Distributor: Japon Brand
Designers: Shinsuke Yamagami & TCD
Players: 4-5
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Price: €18
Release Date: Released

Game Played: Published copy
Number of Plays: Twice with 4 players

It’s difficult to describe how precious and adorable the artwork is in Festival. Each of the 60 cards features a unique drawing—pastel, decorative, flowing—of a different character, and though the artwork is superfluous to the game play, you appreciate being able to enjoy all the fabulous drawings while waiting for your turn to come around.

As for the game play, Festival is a set collection game for four or five players. The deck consists of 60 cards, which are divided equally into five, differently-colored professions: Tamer, Clown, Dancer, Gladiator, and Minstrel. Within each profession, the cards are numbered 1-9, with two 1s, 8s and 9s and one of each other number. The 9s have two stars on them, while every other card has only one star.

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First Impression: League of Six

By W. Eric Martin
September 27, 2007

Publisher: Czech Games Edition
Designer: Vladimir Suchy
Players: 3-5
Ages: 12+
Playing Time: 60-90 minutes
Release Date: October 2007

Game Played: Pre-production copy
Number of Plays: Twice, once each with 3 and 4 players

If you had to classify League of Six, that would be a tough job—because you probably haven’t played the game. I have, though, and League of Six strikes me as a great example of an efficiency game, a term I use for games like Caylus and Notre Dame to describe a player’s need to squeeze out an advantage on each move. Efficiency games require players to make dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of little decisions over the course of the game, and the player who has accrued small advantages over his or her opponents will usually end up with the larger pile of points or money and win the game.

The title, League of Six, refers to six wealthy towns in Upper Lusatia that worked together in the 15th century to improve their commercial interests and keep order in a region beset by Hussite attacks. You enter the game in the modest role of a tax collector, traveling from town to town to collect and deliver goods to the court of Sigismund.

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