Game Previews

Detailed descriptions and pretty pictures of upcoming games. BGN editor W. Eric Martin writes most of the previews, although Italian correspondent Andrea "Liga" Ligabue also contributes. When possible, the preview author includes a first impression or review of the game based upon plays of a prototype or preproduction copy.

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Game Preview: Caligula

By Andrea “Liga” Ligabue
October 20, 2009

Designer: Pierluca Zizzi
Publishers: Post Scriptum / ElfinWerks
Distributor: Heidelberger Spieleverlag

Players: 2-5
Ages: 14+
Playing time: 60 minutes
Release date: October 2009
Languages: Italian, English, German, French and Spanish
Link: (Spanish)

Caligula is a real original design from Pierluca Zizzi that will bring players back in the old Roman Empire, year 41 AD. Players are trying to get prestige influencing the Emperor or moving a Coniura to assassinate him and put on the throne their candidates.

Every turn 10 Civitas cards, from 5 different decks are revealed and in turn players put one of their 6 SPQR tokens (valued from -1 to 4) on the cards. Civitas cards are all different and each one has space for one ore more tokens.  Each turn also the 6 Sequentia cards are put on the table showing the order the 10 Civitas cards are to be resolved. One Sequentia card actually changes the turn order and another one let draw Pugio or Coniura cards.

Once all players have placed all the SPQR tokens the Resolution Phase will start. The six Sequentia cards are resolved, from left to right, pointing out which Civitas card has to be resolved.

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Game Preview: Assyria

By W. Eric Martin
October 20, 2009

Designer: Emanuele Ornella
Publisher: Ystari Games
Other publishers: Rio Grande Games

Players: 2-4
Ages: 12+
Playing time: 45-90 minutes
Release date: Spiel 09 / November 2009 (for RGG)
Links:

The birthplace of civilization – the cradle of land lying between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers – is a constant source of inspiration to game designers, who are trying to give birth to their own ideas. With Assyria, Emanuele Ornella returns players to this land, with each of them leading a tribe in the Mesopotmian Valley. “Tribes are struggling to survive in an environment with little food, while at the same time they’re trying to build a great place to live. At this time, ziggaruts were the pyramids of these populations, looking similar to Aztec pyramids in that they’re built in different levels. Their use is not well know, but it’s believed they were needed for observing stars and storing food.”

The game takes place over three reigns, with a flood occuring in between each reign. The reigns are divided into several rounds, with players first choosing food cards (which possibly rearranges the turn order), then expanding his villages on the board will trying to feed villages both old and new. Says Ornella, “It is not always possible to have all of your villages survive, so you have a difficult choice: Which villages will die?”

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Game Preview: Ystari Box

By W. Eric Martin
October 18, 2009

Designers: Cyril Demaegd, William Attia, Sébastien Pauchon, Dominique Ehrhard
Publisher: Ystari Games / Rio Grande Games

Release date: October 2009
Price: Approx. €19
Links:

The Ystari Box will include new material for many of the publisher’s most recent releases, namely Amyitis, Caylus Magna Carta, Metropolys, Sylla and Yspahan. (The Rio Grande version of the expansion will include Mykerinos: The Nile, a tiny expansion that was released in 2007 and previously distributed at U.S. game conventions.) Says Ystari’s Cyril Demaegd, “Nowadays most games disappear almost as fast as they appeared on the market, just because most of them are not ‘games’ but ‘products’. With these expansions, we can send a clear message: Our ‘old’ games are still in our heart, and we don’t just consider them as ‘throwaway products,’ so maybe the Ystari Box will be a good occasion for people to replay our older games and have fun! That’s my wish...”

William Attia’s Caylus Magna Carta: The Favors makes up the largest expansion in the box as it includes both components for a fifth player (12 cards and purple wood bits) as well as a gameboard and cards that import the favors from Caylus to CMC, but in a new way. The new cards are prestige buildings that bear the familiar fleur-de-lys, and if you construct one of these buildings or activate a Joust card (with each player now having a Joust card in her set of building cards), you receive a favor. Players also receive a favor, instead of gold, when they offer the most lots during the Castle phase.

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Game Preview: Imperial 2030

By W. Eric Martin
October 14, 2009

Designer: Mac Gerdts
Publishers: PD-Verlag / Rio Grande Games / Heidelberger Spieleverlag

Players: 2-6
Ages: 12+
Playing time: 120-180 minutes
Release date: October 2009
Languages: German & English
Price: €40 (see below)
Links:

Imperial 2030 is a new take on Mac Gerdts’ Imperial, which was released in 2006 and set in Europe during the age of imperialism. In Imperial, players invest in control of different European powers and buy fleets, armies and factories in order to spread their influence – although they can make a play for other countries, too. After all, your goal isn’t control of a country, but rather personal glory through the display of power.

In this new game, players are now in the year 2030, with a redrawn map that covers the globe. “As we can see at the moment, a new multipolar world is developing, with the new great powers of China, India and Brazil playing a growing role in world politics,” says Gerdts. “This sparked the idea of giving Imperial a setting on a world map of the future. And the financial crisis of 2008 has shown that the topic of internationally operating financial investors, seeking the biggest return on their investments and thus being able to ruin the finances of whole countries, still remains highly possible!”

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Game Preview: Krakow 1325 AD: Three-Player Expansion

By W. Eric Martin
October 11, 2009

Designer: Peter Struijf
Publisher: Geode Games

Players: 3!
Release date: Spiel 09
Languages: English and Dutch / German
Price: €5 / €12 (see below)
Link:

Krakow 1325AD, which debuted at Spiel 08 from new designer/publisher Peter Struijf, is a four-player only game which is played in partnerships with secret identities. You work together with the player opposite you to claim presence on the board and score for your team, but at the same time you’re aiming to complete Intrigues that will boost your secret identity ahead of everyone else when the masks come off at game’s end – which means that sometimes you’ll slip the knife into your partner, apologizing all the while, to give your group a boost.

So why introduce three-player rules to a four-player only partnership game? Because Krakow 1325AD isn’t Bridge and doesn’t have decades of existence to draw on in terms of finding four players ready to go at it. Aside from that, says Struijf, “some players wanted the opportunity to play ‘for themselves,’ without dependency on the support of a partner. The partnership in the four-player game can be frustrating, especially if you have different views on the risks worth taking (e.g., by playing strong Intrigue cards which can be blocked) or your partner plays heavily against your secret identity. So there was a cry to ‘free me from my partner!’”

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Game Preview: Vasco da Gama

by Paolo Mori and Andrea “Liga” Ligabue
October 2, 2009

Designers: Paolo Mori
Publisher: What’s Your Game? / Rio Grande Games

Players: 2-4
Ages: 12+
Playing time: 90 minutes
Release date: October 2009
Languages: English & Italian (with German, French & Dutch as downloads)
Price: €35 (€30 preorder)
Links:

This is an unconventional preview as it was written with four hands (and hopefully almost two brains) as I was helped by designer Paolo Mori, whose first published design, UR was also released by What’s Your Game. During this preview, I’ll keep my words italicized so that gamers who want to overlook my usual rambling speech can hop to the material that might be more appealing to them. Paolo is a probing gamer and will try to explain the main elements of the game in an objective way so that you can make up your own mind about the game.

As each turn consists of a planning phase, an action resolution phase, and a navigation phase, I think that the best way to explain the game is to give an overview of each of these moments of the game, starting with…

The Planning Phase

Planning is the core of the game, and it relies on the mechanism that the entire game was built around. In brief, twenty actions tokens – numbered 1-20 – are available on the board. In clockwise order, players take one of these tokens and place it, together with a token of their own color, on an action area of the board, setting up that action for that particular moment during the action resolution phase. For example, if I take the “16” token and place it in the Court, I’m stating that I want to perform a Court action – whether it’s taking gold or exploiting the power of a special character – during the 16th part of that turn.

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Game Preview: Cyclades

By W. Eric Martin
September 27, 2009

Designers: Bruno Cathala & Ludovic Maublanc
Publisher: Editions du Matagot

Players: 2-5
Ages: 13+
Playing time: 60-90 minutes
Release date: October 2009
Langauges: English, French, German, Dutch, Russian & Greek
Link:

Matagot released its first giant-sized game in 2006, and the run on that mountainous pile of Khronos was amazing to watch. Since then, Matagot has released one giant-sized game annually, with Cyclades from Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc being the 2009 release designed to stretch your Ikea bag to the utmost.

In Cyclades, players control one of the five major pre-Grecian cities – Sparta, Athens, Corinth, Thebes and Argos – and they’re using their wealth, troops and relationship with the Gods to bring them prestige among their peers. To win, you must be the first to own two Metropolises, and you can obtain them through building, through intellectual development or through battle.

In addition to having five gold pieces (GP), each player starts the game with two fleets and control of two islands on a gameboard that’s specific to the number of players. Each turn, you lay out mythological creatures (with 1-3 available from a deck of 18), determine the order of the Gods, collect revenue, make an offering to one of the five Gods, then perform actions. These last two steps are the most involved. First, players make offerings to the Gods through an Evo-style bidding system, with each player making some bid in turn order. If you are outbid, then you must immediately make a new offering to a different God. In the end, only one player can make an offering to Poseidon, Areas, Zeus and Athena, while any number of players can appeal to Apollo. (He’s not choosy.)

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Game Preview: Savannah Tails

By W. Eric Martin
September 24, 2009

Designers: Gordon and Fraser Lamont
Publisher: Fragor Games

Players: 2-5
Ages: 8+
Playing time: 25-30 minutes
Release date: October 2009
Price: €23
Links:

Snow Tails, the 2008 release from Fragor Games, brought designers Gordon and Fraser Lamont their biggest accolades to date, with a new edition of the game quickly appearing from Asmodee Editions. For their 2009 release, the Lamont brothers are taking another crack at the race game genre with Savanah Tails. Says Gordon Lamont, “What better time to release a race game than the year after everyone released a race game!”

In Savannah Tails the players are ostriches on the run – or as the Lamonts put it: “The game is for 2-5 adventurous flightless birds.” That’s you, gawky, so hop to the starting line!

As with Snow Tails, the racecourse is composed of separate track tiles, allowing you to customize tracks as you desire. Each of the 25 tiles has an easy and a difficult side, with the easy sides having few or no animal impediments and the difficult sides having all the animals not found on the easy sides. (A baobab tree is on each tile to help determine which player is in the lead.) The tracks have four colored lanes and criss-crossing lines that show where a player changes lanes should she decide to do so.

Says Gordon, “At one point in the Snow Tails design we had to simplify part of the corner design as it made the game too complex. Paradoxically, the part we removed worked extremely well by itself. We have used it to create a simple, standalone race game.  So, initially the design [for Savannah Tails] was inspired by the original Snow Tails design and owes some development to it. However, the game play is completely different.”

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Game Preview: Martinique

By W. Eric Martin
September 22, 2009

Designer: Emanuele Ornella
Publisher: QWG Games
Distributor: Iello / HUCH & friends / IntraFin / Boosterbox

Players: 2
Ages: 10+
Playing time: 30 minutes
Release date: September 2009
Languages: English, Dutch & French (QWG) / German (Huch)
Links:

Note: I published this preview in July 2009, but then the release date was pushed back a few months. Martinique has now arrived at QWG and will be available soon in Europe, so I thought I’d post this again with a revised description and new images.

Much to my regret, Martinique is not about me and my life as a genetically-modified race-car driver who stymies the competition at every turn – especially the mysterious Purple Dragster – while trying to solve the mystery of his lost love and her missing eyebrows. No, Martinique is a deduction game and a pirate game. Asked about the title and setting, designer Emanuele Ornella says, “The most famous pirates were in the Caribbean seas, and since Puerto Rico and Cartagena were already used, why not Martinique? That was my working title, and then QWG liked it and decided to keep it.”

Each player in Martinique has a crew of four pirates at his disposal (as one must in a pirate game). Your goal is to search the island of Martinique and find the Lost Treasure buried somewhere on its area, a treasure so astounding that it cries out for capital letters to emphasize its greatness. “Finding the Lost Treasure is not easy,” says Ornella, “and there’s no guarantee that players will find it..”

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Game Preview: Age of Steam/Steam: 1867 Georgia Reconstruction

By Josh Pechter
September 14, 2009

Designer: Ted Alspach
Publisher: Bézier Games
Players: 2
Ages: 12+
Playing Time: About 30-45 minutes
Rules Language: English
Links:

Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Three

My fiancée and I are really into train games lately. We’ve enjoyed Chicago Express, Stephenson’s Rocket, and Union Pacific. Unfortunately, many train games don’t play well with two, so we usually only get the train games out on the weekends when we have company over. I’ve been trying to get her to play Martin Wallace’s Steam (Mayfair Games, 2009) for some time now, but because it requires at least three, I just haven’t found a good opportunity to play it. This is why I was pretty excited when my 1867 Georgia Reconstruction map arrived.

The map is an expansion to both Age of Steam and Steam that is designed exclusively for two players. Pictured on the map is a representation of post-Civil War Georgia in the midst of rebuilding its infrastructure. You play the part of a wealthy industrialist who must win government contracts through bribes. The map uses most of the same rules as Steam with a few minor changes, but provides one very interesting change to picking turn order: sealed bidding. Turn order in this expansion is determined by using sealed bids as bribes for government officials. Each player starts the game with 20 cubes to be used for bids. Whether you win or lose, the cubes you bid are lost each time and the pool of cubes can run low very quickly. Goods that you deliver during the game can be added to your bidding pool, so it is possible to replenish your supply and win an important bid in the late rounds of the game. The game rules say that if both players run out of cubes, they should roll dice to determine turn order. I didn’t like this element of luck being interjected into the game, but if you budget your cubes carefully then it will rarely happen. Overall, the bidding is a very neat addition to the game that fits thematically with the historical period of the map.

The map easily fits over the existing map on the Steam board, but doesn’t cover it completely. Printed on a heavyweight paper, this map is not the mounted loveliness of the double-sided map included in Steam, but is still quite functional. And while a taste in artwork is entirely subjective, this map was quite obviously made with function over beauty in mind. The map looks very flat, with boring colors and none of the topographical feel of the original Steam maps. I found myself disappointed with the quality of the map, but people who are used to other third-party Age of Steam/Steam maps, independently-produced 18XX games, and Winsome train games will likely have no issues with the quality of this map.

Overall, 1867 Georgia Reconstruction is a tight map that reminds me of the cramped feelings of Small World. The closeness creates more interaction than I’ve seen in most three-player games of Steam. It’s a short game with plenty of tough decisions that’s great for a quick train game and acts as a great introduction to the rules of Steam for a new player.

Game Preview: Pony Express

By W. Eric Martin
August 26, 2009

Designers: Bruno Faidutti & Antoine Bauza
Publisher: Funforge

Players: 3-5
Ages: 8+
Playing time: 45 minutes
Release date: Spiel 09
Languages: French and English
Links: (Faidutti – French/English) (Bauza – French)

On the Pony Express page on his website, Bruno Faidutti says that he designed a western-themed game with poker dice at about the same time that Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc designed Dice Town. “I’ve always liked poker dice, and I used to play a lot of Liars’ Dice with them,” says Faidutti, who has posted rules for this game on his website. “I think they look much nicer than any other kind of dice, and there’s something nice and weird in the idea of using dice to represent cards.”

After much fiddling with the dice, including a passing thought of using them in Boomtown, Faidutti struck upon the basic idea for Pony Express: make poker hands with the dice and shoot those same dice at opponents. “I don’t usually start a design from components,” he says. “The only other examples I can see were Kheops, which started from the idea of triangular tiles to build a pyramid, and Iglu-Iglu, which started from the idea of face down ice-tiles and a shrinking board. But in these three cases – Pony Express, Kheops and Iglu-Iglu – the original component and the theme come together.”

Coming together doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is perfect, however. Movement in the game was slow, with too many complications over how to bluff with poker hands and how to call those bluffs. The game was overworked, with tons of details that players had to fight through. After putting the game aside for a while, Faidutti showed it to Bauza, another fan of racing games, and helped make the game “more dynamic, more varied, faster paced,” according to Faidutti. Bauza “added some really nice and more simple ideas, such as the shooting at Indians.”

While Dice Town has similarities to Yahtzee, in that players want to roll certain combinations on the dice in order to score points, Pony Express is a racing game in which players want to cover ground quickly between St. Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento, California, the endpoints of the famed Pony Express – a mail system that connected mid-America with the pioneers of the West Coast, but only for 16 months as the rise of the telegraph made such delivery obsolete.

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Game Preview: Letter of Marque

By W. Eric Martin
August 25, 2009

Designer: Bruno Faidutti
Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games / Heidelberger Spieleverlag / Edge Entertainment

Players: 3-6
Ages: 13+
Playing time: 30-45 minutes
Release date: Q4 2009
Links:

When my wife Linda and I first started writing on a freelance basis, we labored over every article that we wrote: printing out the first draft, then going over it with red pen, then printing a new draft and having the spouse make comments, suggest subhead titles and debate endings, then printing it out again for a final edit before turning it in.

After a decade of freelance writing, we now typically write an article in one go with only minor tweaking afterwards. We haven’t gotten sloppier about our work habits – instead we’ve internalized the writing process so that we do the initial writing and editing in our heads, allowing us to skip those laborious early stages. We notice this internalization particularly in terms of word length as we can usually write to 500 or 1,000 words without having to count words along the way. Given all the experience behind us, we’ve shaped the piece mentally with the right number of quotes and examples to have the article emerge at the right length.

Um, We’re Talking about Games, Right?

Bruno Faidutti has been designing games for twice as long as I’ve been a profesional writer, and that same editing process is going on inside him, too. One of his first attempts at game design in the 1980s was a pirate bluffing game set in the South China Sea. “Each player had merchant junks crossing the sea and pirate ships attacking the opponents’ junks,” says Faidutti. “The point was mostly in deciding which ships will carry the most precious cargo and in outguessing opponents. This game never worked correctly, probably because there was too much maneuvering for a very simple goal.”

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Game Preview: The BoardGameGeek Game

By W. Eric Martin
August 10, 2009

Designer: Richard Breese
Publisher: R&D Games

Players: 3-6
Ages: 8+
Playing time: 60-75 minutes
Release date: October 2009
Languages: English & German
Price: €35 (€40 for both R&D titles)
Link:

Richard Breese releases a new game once every two years or so through his R&D Games, and his title for 2009 is unlike any he’s released previously. For one thing, the game includes dice. For another, it has a marketing tie-in in that the game will celebrate the tenth anniversay of BoardGameGeek.com (BGG), the go-to site for game information, in both game play and artwork.

The BoardGameGeek Game, as this title will be called, started life as Retail Therapy, a shopping game in which players tried to collect certain items in various shops. While players seemed to enjoy the game, they also suggested that shopping would never be a favored theme, so despite Breese’s own satisfaction with the theme, he started to consider other possibilities. “My friend and professional game developer Rüdiger Beyer, who is married to Barbara Dauenhauer who does my translations, had, in character, the inspiration to suggest that the game should simply be about boardgamers shopping for board games!” says Breese. “They were visiting me in Stratford upon Avon at the time, and the idea of using the local area as the setting arose from these discussions.”

Knowing that BGG would celebrate its tenth anniversary on January 22, 2010, Breese thought to marry a game about shopping for games with the website that provides tons of info for doing just that. The Geek’s creators Scott Alden and Derk Solko were happy to get involved, so Breese then started contacting publishers and designers. “This year will be my nineteenth trip to Essen, so it was fairly easy to contact the people I knew,” he says. “There were over thirty companies who were happy to let me use their images. I also contacted one or two of the graphic artists for specific permissions. Everyone was happy to be involved, which I think is a testament to the Geek in particular. There were a couple of companies that I did not get a reply from, but that may just be that I didn’t have the appropriate contact details. In the end I didn’t actually want any more contributions as I was running out of room. When you see the full board you will notice that shop 6, which I did last, got rather full!” (Click on the thumbnail image at the top of this listing for a composite image of a portion of the gameboard and BGG’s mascot, Ernie.)

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Game Preview: Burger Joint

By W. Eric Martin
July 31, 2009

Publisher: Rio Grande Games
Designer: Joe Huber
Players: 2
Ages: 12+
Playing Time: 30-45 minutes
Price: $24.95
Release Date: August 2009
Links:

As with many other teenagers, my first job was in a burger joint. I worked there for six months or so in order to buy my first car, a used Mercury Bobcat. My strongest memories from the job are the pickle smell that wafted from my hands no matter how many times I washed them and the mounds of free food that every employee gave to every other employee when the bosses weren’t looking. ("You wanted three patties on that burger, right?")

While I have no desire to ever again play patty cake, Burger Joint the game sounds much more appealing. According to designer Joe Huber, ”Burger Joint is an economic board game where players collect resources and must balance increased (or improved) production with victory point development. The two players must share the available resources each turn through a drafting mechanism. But while each player needs every resource, the specific needs are different for each player.”

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Game Preview: Martinique

By W. Eric Martin
July 13, 2009

Designer: Emanuele Ornella
Publisher: QWG Games
Distributor: Iello

Players: 2
Ages: 10+
Playing time: 30 minutes
Release date: October 2009
Link:

Much to my regret, Martinique is not about me and my life as a genetically-modified race-car driver who stymies the competition at every turn – especially the mysterious Purple Dragster – while trying to solve the mystery of his lost love and her missing eyebrows. No, Martinique is a deduction game and a pirate game. Asked about the title and setting, designer Emanuele Ornella says, “The most famous pirates were in the Caribbean seas, and since Puerto Rico and Cartagena were already used, why not Martinique? That was my working title, and then QWG liked it and decided to keep it.”

Although Martinique is a two-player game, each player has a crew of pirates at his disposal (as one must in a pirate game). Your goal is to find the island’s Lost Treasure, a treasure so astounding that it cries out for capital letters to emphasize its greatness.

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Game Preview: Masters of Venice

By W. Eric Martin
March 27, 2009

Designer: Frank DiLorenzo
Publisher: R&R Games
Players: 2-5
Ages: 15+
Playing Time: 60-150 minutes
Release Date: April 2009
Language: English
Price: $35
Link:

In my initial write-up of Masters of Venice, I mentioned that an involved strategy game seemed like an odd release for R&R Games, given the company’s recent track record of titles like Time’s Up! Deluxe, Disorder and Igor: The Monster Making Game. At the 2009 New York Toy Fair, an R&R representative mentioned older strategy titles that R&R had released, such as Overthrone, but being familiar with those titles won’t prepare anyone for the complexities that await them in this game.

To some degree, Masters of Venice is an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink game. Goods delivery, stock and market manipulation, bidding, worker placement, role selection – it’s all included, whether for good or ill. One player even mentioned that the game rivalled Die Macher in its sprawling, interlocking nature, an assessment that does have merit.

Your goal in Masters of Venice is to end up with the most victory points (VPs). That’s an easy goal to grasp, but getting there will take some work. The game lasts 16 rounds, which is broken into four equal quarters of a bidding round followed by three action rounds. Players secretly bid for turn order and the right to choose characters, each of which has a special power; the lowest bidder will automatically become the gondolieri, which isn’t necessarily a punishment as your poor standing in turn order is balanced somewhat by secret rumor tokens that you collect and the one-time ability to cut in line during an action round.

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Game Preview: Waterloo

By W. Eric Martin
March 23, 2009

Designer: Martin Wallace
Publisher: Warfrog Games (Treefrog Line)
Players: 2
Playing Time: 180-240 minutes
Release Date: Apil 2009
Price: $60 / £30 / €40
Links:

Martin Wallace has a reputation for writing rules that can be somewhat opaque, so what does it mean when the rules for Waterloo include the following note: “This is by far the most complicated rule book that I have had to write, even more involved than Brass.” You’ve been warned.

To be fair, Wallace’s rules are often only as complicated as his games; the rules seem unclear only because the game doesn’t gel in a new player’s mind until the first playing is nearly finished. After the Flood, for example, has a menu of possibilities, but until you see the effects of certain actions – whether within the same turn or in later turns – you might not understand why one action makes more sense than another or why it’s important to do X before Y instead of after. In my first game of After the Flood, I pretty much threw away my army on the first turn as I didn’t grasp what I could do when and how the other players might roll out their forces. Live and learn…

Waterloo, the fourth title in Wallace’s Treefrog Line, will give me and others plenty of opportunity to perfect their military maneuvering skills. Waterloo stands apart from other Treefrog (and Warfrog) titles in that it’s for two players only and an unabashed wargame. Asked about this, Wallace says, “The initial reason for publishing a two-player wargame was to avoid producing too many games that would directly compete with each other. One of the aims of the Treefrog Line is to create a set of games that will appeal to different sections of the hobby. I’m also allowed to indulge myself in designing games that would not otherwise see the light of day. There is little money in two player wargames, and Warfrog would never take the risk of producing one in a run of 3 to 4,000 units.”

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Game Preview: 22 Pommes

By W. Eric Martin
March 21, 2009

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

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.

Game Preview: Revolution!

By W. Eric Martin
March 6, 2009

Designer: Philip duBarry
Publisher: Steve Jackson Games
Players: 3-4
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 60 minutes
Release Date: April 2009
Price: $40
Links:

Revolution! is something of a departure for Steve Jackson Games as the title fits squarely in the Eurogame camp, with the players’ actions being driven by blind bidding and area control. Your goal is to end up with the most support – something which generally involves having the most support in the seven parts of town, although points are available in other ways, too. Each round, the three-to-four players secretly bid for control of different characters; three types of currencies are used for bidding, with Force outranking Blackmail and Blackmail outranking Gold. Each character provides a unique set of benefits: support (i.e. points), gold, influence markers, blackmail, and so forth.

Philip duBarry says that he’s been designing games since he was a child, but ”Revolution happens to be my first game other people have actually enjoyed playing. I got the main idea from reading a Patrick O’Brien novel about revolutionary activity in early 1800s Peru and Chile. I really got into all the political intrigue. I soon started trying to figure out how to make a game where you could do some of that (blackmailing and bribing, etc.). I drew a few rectangles to represent the various people to be influenced (General, Admiral, Viceroy, etc.) and a map of the city where they lived. Then I was stuck. Finally, I figured out a way to use various forms of currency to influence them and also win more points and more currency. After this everything began to fall into place.”

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Game Preview/Review: Memoir ‘44: Campaign Book, Volume 1

By W. Eric Martin
February 24, 2009

Designer: Richard Borg, with Malcolm Green, Jacques David and Don Clarke
Publisher: Days of Wonder
Players: 2
Ages: 8
Playing Time: Varies
Release Date: February 2009
Price: $30
Links:

I’m sure most people are familiar with the parable of the blind men and the elephant. In one version of the story, Buddha leads a group of blind men into an enclosure with an elephant and allows each of them to touch a different part of the creature. “What is an elephant like?” asks Buddha. “What is its nature?” The man who examined only the leg compares an a elephant to a tree, while the one who touched only the ear compares an elephant to a palm tree, and so forth. Nature is deceptive, we learn, as we often experience only part of our surroundings and thereby acquire an incomplete picture of the world, an observation that should always be at the forefront of one’s mind before issuing blanket statements about this or that.

The elephant parable comes to mind as I set out to review Memoir ‘44: Campaign Book, Volume 1 because while I’ve played eight times – that is, completed eight scenarios – I’ve barely scratched the surface of what the book contains. I’m holding a ropy tail and trying to describe the entire beast in detail…

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Game Preview: Qwirkle Cubes

By W. Eric Martin
February 15, 2009

Designer: Susan McKinley Ross
Publisher: MindWare
Players: 2-4
Ages: 6+
Playing Time: 45 minutes
Release Date: March 2009
Link:

I’ve made no secret of my enjoyment of Qwirkle, starting with a review in March 2007, expanding on those thoughts with a Game of the Year post that April, and continuing to push it to the table since that time. After 110+ plays, I still enjoy Qwirkle and want to play more as it’s easy to explain, plays quickly, offers interesting hand-management challenges, and has gone over well with everyone that I’ve taught the game to, both gamers and non-gamers alike.

Qwirkle has found plenty of love from other gamers as well, so it’s no surprise that a sequel of sorts is appearing from MindWare. Says designer Susan McKinley Ross, “I’d been thinking about different ways of playing Qwirkle, but I didn’t really start making prototypes until MindWare approached me about a sequel. Most of the time I design toys, not games, and I often design variations of my toys, so it was natural that I’d want to play with the Qwirkle theme.”

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Game Preview: alea iacta est

By Jeffrey D. Allers
February 13, 2009

Designers: Bernd Eisenstein & Jeffrey D. Allers
Publishers: alea / Rio Grande Games
Players: 2-5
Ages: 9+
Playing Time: 45-60 minutes
Release Date: March 2009 (in Europe)

Back in 2006, I heard about a game design competition, perhaps on About.com, for two-player games using components that were common in every household, such as playing cards, dice, pawns, poker chips, and so forth. Each year, the site also has a theme for its competition, and that year it was “dice games.” Since I had been designing games with Bernd Eisenstein, I thought it would be fun to challenge him to a “contest within the contest” to see what each of us could come up with. Because the designs were two-player games, we could easily playtest our ideas. I came up with two different games, and Bernd came up with a cool take on Tug-o-War using dice and pawns.

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Game Preview: Bombay

By W. Eric Martin
February 9, 2009

Designer: Cyril Demaegd
Publisher: Ystari Games
Distributor: Asmodee
Artist: Stéphane Poinsot
Players: 2-5
Release date: March 2009
Price: €40

When TricTrac.net announced Cyril Demaegd’s Bombay in January 2009, the game was described as being Ystari’s simplest title yet, something that will work for both the general public and experienced gamers. Says Demaegd, ”Bombay is quite simple and the reason for this is simple, too. Amyitis took two years to develop (of course not full time) and at the end of the process I was really exhausted and I swore to myself that for the next one, I’d try something simpler for once!”

“During a test session with William Attia for an upcoming game,” continues Demaegd, “we discussed a bit about different ways to transport goods and sell them, and I suddenly had the idea of the ‘mini stock-markets’ which are the core of Bombay. So the next weekend I tried to create something really simple around this idea. That’s how I made the first prototype. Of course we tested a lot and a few things changed all along the process, but I really wanted to avoid big complications this time.”

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Game Preview: Keltis x3: Erweiterung, Kartenspiel, BMM

By W. Eric Martin
February 3, 2009

Designer: Reiner Knizia
Publisher: Kosmos
Players: 2-4
Ages: Varies
Playing Time: Varies
Release Date: February 2009 for Die Erweiterung and BMM; March 2009 for Das Kartenspiel

Gamers have come to expect the Spiel des Jahres winner to unleash a torrent of expansions and spin-offs onto the market. The 2003 winner Alhambra has seen five expansions and two somewhat related games bearing the Alhambra name; 2004’s Ticket to Ride has had a half-dozen standalone games and supplemental items; designer Michael Schacht has spun off more than a dozen items, from standalone games to single cardboard tiles, for the 2007 winner Zooloretto.

Despite multiple standalone games and more than a dozen expansions, Klaus-Jürgen Wrede’s Carcassonne from 2001 qualifies as only the secondmost riffed-on SdJ winner. No, the prize for empire building goes to Klaus Teuber’s The Settlers of Catan, which is still being transformed in new directions by Teuber and publisher Kosmos more than a decade after the game’s 1995 SdJ win.

Given that history from Kosmos, it’s only natural that the company’s 2008 winner, Reiner Knizia’s Keltis, will have three related items shown at the Nuremberg Toy Fair in early February 2009. “[Kosmos] mastered the extension to perfection,” says Knizia, “so now it’s custom to do something. After the winning was announced, I had a long conversation with the people at Kosmos because we wanted to do something, but what?”

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Game Preview/Review: Roll Through the Ages

By W. Eric Martin
January 14, 2009

Designer: Matt Leacock
Publisher: FRED Distribution (Gryphon Games)
Players: 1-4
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 30-45 minutes
Release Date: January 2009
Links:

Roll Through the Ages shares a name with Vlaada Chvatil’s Through the Ages – first released by Czech Board Games at Spiel 06, and subsequently released by FRED Distribution in 2008, with a German version coming from Pegasus Spiele in early 2009 – but any similarity between the games lies in theme rather than game play. Through the Ages is a complex card game that takes hours to complete as players move from the dawn of civilization to modern times, while Roll Through the Ages wraps up monument-building, city growth and cultural advancement in a half hour or less.

The short description of Roll Through the Ages is Civilization crossed with a dice game – but that hardly tells you how to play the game. Each player has her own pegboard, a solid chunk of wood in which her supply of food and five types of goods – wood, stone, pottery, cloth, spearheads – are tracked with color-coded pegs. Each player also has an individual score sheet on which she can track her progress.

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