Convention Report: Essen 2006: October 21, 2006 (Day 3)

By Rick Thornquist
October 21, 2006

This is my report from day three of the Essen 2006 - Saturday, October 21st.

Before I get started, I need to correct two things from yesterday’s report.  Firstly, I mentioned that the board for 24/7 is wood.  It actually isn’t - though it looks like it!  Sunriver is giving away special editions of the game with a wooden board, but the regular edition isn’t wood.  Secondly, in a photo caption I had mistakenly identified designer KC Humphrey as JC Lawrence.  A funny mistake - there are two people in the game world that I know by their initials and I got them mixed up.  Apologies for the errors - I have corrected them.

Now, onto the report!

After madly typing up and posting yesterday’s report, I ran to the convention center.  My plan was to meet up with Moritz Eggert and to have him join me in a game of BatleLore, which I had made an appointment to play.  We met up at the Rio Grande booth and then wandered over to Days of Wonder where we met up with Eric Hautemont.  We sat down at a table and Eric taught us the game.

BattleLore
As many of you know by now by now, at its basic level BattleLore is a fantasy version of Memoir ‘44 (and similar to other games in the Commands and Colors series - Battle Cry and Commands and Colors: Ancients).  There is a board with a hex grid divided into left, center and right flanks.  The board is set up with various bits of terrain along with the player’s miniature armies.  Players then take turns playing cards, moving their armies, and attacking.  Victory conditions usually consist of eliminating a certain number of other player’s units, but the victory conditions can be different with different scenarios.

So how is BattleLore different?  Well, there are a few obvious changes.  First of all, units are not only identified by their miniatures, but also by a banner that one unit in each hex carries.  The banner shows information about the type of unit - units can be weak, medium or strong, they can have different weapons like shorts swords, long swords or bows and units can also be on foot our mounted on a horse.  The banners allows the units to be customized in a huge variety of ways.

There are also some rules for morale.  If a unit has two units beside it, it is said to be supported, which means it ignores one retreat die rolled against it.  Supported units have other advantages as well.

The main addition has to do with the lore cards.  This is a separate deck of action cards that you can draw from and play.  Each one has some kind of magical special ability - like enhancing your attacks or defense, teleporting a unit, or doing any number of cool things.  To use a lore cards you have to pay lore tokens, which you can accumulate during the game.

We played a basic scenario and it did indeed feel like a fantasy version of Memoir ‘44.  However, we missed out on a lot of the advanced features - the war council, where you can customize your lore cards, the story elements, and much more.  Eric and the other Days of Wonder people assured us that after you’ve added the advanced features it really diverges quite a bit from Memoir.  I can see that - looking through the rulebook I can see there is lot more to it than the basic scenario that we played.

I had fun with the game, though my bad dice rolling bordered on the statistically impossible.  To really get a good impression I’ll need to play the game again with some of the advance features.  So far though, it’s looking pretty darn good.

After BattleLore, I had a short meeting and then met up with Moritz for lunch.  There are a few secrets to enjoying Essen and one of them is the presence of a really nice restaurant with table service that is located right beside the cafeteria.  The cafeteria is really crowded and a bit smoky, but the restaurant always has tables available, the air is clean, and the food is very good.  I’m amazed that more people don’t take advantage of it - I think many people just don’t know it exists.  Moritz and I had a very good lunch and then headed back out into the crowds.

The days of Essen are fairly predictable when it comes to the crowds.  There are always tons of people, but Thursday and Friday are always lighter than Saturday and Sunday, when the halls are jammed.  On Thursday and Friday you can walk around the halls at a decent pace, and getting a table to play ranges from being very easy to fairly difficult depending on the booth.  On Saturday and Sunday the crowds swell to massive proportions and moving from place to place involves sloooowly moving in a mob of people (more like a herd).  Getting a table to play is almost an impossibility, unless you are willing to wait like a vulture for a table to finish so you can grab it.

This means in order to play games on Saturday and Sunday, I usually have to come up with some alternate plans.  I had met up with Valerie Putman, John Palagyi and Brian Yu earlier in the morning and they mentioned they were going back to their hotel after lunch to play games instead of trying to weather the mobs.  Moritz and I agreed to join them at the hotel, just a few blocks away, and see if we could find any new games to play there.

At the hotel we met up with Valerie and John who were looking to get into a game.  Valerie had acquired a copy of the new Eggertspiele game Space Dealer, which I was keen to try.  We all sat down, went through the rules, and gave it a try.

Space Dealer
I’ll say this right off the bat - I think Space Dealer was a great game.  It’s incredibly innovative, has tons of strategy, lots of interaction, a great theme, and very nice looking components.  I am getting a bit ahead of myself, though…

Space Dealer was designed by Tobias Stapelfeld, who is also responsible for another very good Eggertspiele game - Neuland.  From what I understand, Space Dealer has been in development for four years and the extra time lavished on the game really shows.

In the game, each player has a home planet and a spaceship.  Your home planet has a small power source and a one basic technology card that produced one type of good.  You also start with some additional basic technologies in your hand that you can attach to your power source - these basic technologies can produce a small amount of goods or have weak special abilities.  At a certain point in the game you can pick up advanced technology cards - these advanced technologies can also be implemented and can produce more goods or give you stronger special abilities. 

Goods you produce are put on your spaceship and the idea is that you fly your spaceship to other player’s planets where you can satisfy their demands for certain goods.  If you do this, you get victory points (and the other player usually gets a couple of victory points as well).

Now that sounds fairly standard, but here’s where things get different.  Each player has two sand timers and in order to implement a technology, produce goods, move your spaceship, etc, you have to put a sand timer on it.  When the time runs out, the technology is implemented, the goods are produced, the ship moves, etc.  There are no turns, all players are doing this simultaneously - you choose which action you want to do, stick a sand timer on it, wait for it to complete and then implement it.

The cool thing is that you want to do many actions but you can only do two at once, and you have to be efficient so that when a timer runs out you can get it running as soon as possible on another action.  You’ll need to do the actions that most efficiently implement technologies, produce goods and get them to other player’s planets for maximum profit.  It sounds a little strange but in practice it’s incredibly cool.

Another thing:  the game lasts for exactly 30 minutes.  You can either use a timer - a clock or watch - or even better, you can use an CD that comes with the game that has a soundtrack that goes for exactly 30 minutes (we didn’t have access to CD player, though, so I didn’t hear it - we used a watch).

I do have to mention the rules, which are the only blemish on the game.  They are tough to get through, and it took us a while to understand it all.  The game is quite different and not simple and the sometimes obtuse rules don’t help.  That being said, once we got through them it was fairly clear sailing.

I’ve only scratched the surface of the game - there is a lot to this one.  As said, it’s incredibly innovative, has tons of strategy, lots of interaction, a great theme, and very nice components.  The gameplay is tremendously strategic and fun and the use of the timers is very innovative and they really rack up the tension level of the game.  I thought the game was superb.  Congratulations to
Tobias Stapelfeld and Eggertspiele for such a great game. 

With this game and the highly regarded Imperial, as well as previous games Antike and Neuland, Eggertspiele has now become a major force in gaming.

Moritz and I then headed back to the Messe where he went off exploring.  On the way back I was thinking that the quality of games has been very impressive at this Essen.  When coming here I was expecting some good games, but I’ve been astounded by how many really good ones there are.  Whenever someone asks me what good games I’ve seen, I end up reeling of a very long list of games that I think are either very good or great.  This year there is indeed bumper crop of great games.

Of course there are a few duds - I am still trying to purge my Project Skyline experience from my memory…

Experiment
Back at the show I met up with Patrick Korner and Eric Martin.  They had with them the new game Experiment from SandTimer - a small publisher.  We decided to retire to the press room where we could get a table and be away from the madness of the crowds.

Experiement is a light card game and quite easy to explain.  This is a set collecting game where you are collecting flasks of various colors in order to fulfill goal cards which require certain flasks of certain colors. 

In each round there is a semi blind auction to see who gets to choose cards first.  There is a display of flasks - two face up and two face down (the face down ones being better, but you might also get cards which cause bad things to happen).  Whoever bids the most gets to look at the face-down cards.  The second player then chooses first, then the first player (yes, a bit weird, but the first player got to look at the face-down cards) and then the rest of the players.  Goal cards are then fulfilled, if possible.  Each goal card is worth a certain number of points and after a certain number of rounds whoever has fulfilled the most points of goal cards wins.

The game is simple, plays fast and works fine.  The thing is that it isn’t very original - it’s a very standard set collecting game.  I found it was a pretty decent light card game but not much more than that.

After Experiment, I bid goodbye to Eric and Patrick and headed to Hall 4 to get some pictures.  Hall 4 is one of the smaller halls that has the smaller publishers, but it was still very busy.  Richard Breese’s R&D Games was there and seemed to always have a line-up of people whenever I passed by it.  The Czech Board Games booth was there as well and was always jammed (I finally picked up their games today - on the other days I wasn’t able to get close to the booth because of the mob of people in it!).  There were a number of other familiar publishers as well.  This hall also included most of the used game dealers - by this point, their stock looked pretty well picked over.

After getting my pictures it was time to do some shopping.  There were a number of games I hadn’t played yet that had gotten good buzz so I decided to just spring for them.  I found a dealer with good prices and grabbed Taluva, Die Säulen der Erde, Kampf um Rom (which I had played in prototype form), and the Ravensburger game Die Baumeister von Arkadia.  I was lucky to find a copy of Die Säulen der Erde - it’s been floating to the top of the Fairplay poll and getting tons of good buzz, consequently most of the dealers were out of stock (though I’m sure they’ll get more in tomorrow).

After my shopping spree, the show was about to close.  I met up with Moritz again at the Rio Grande booth and together we manhandled my huge stack of games back to the hotel.  I grabbed Die Baumeister von Arkadia and we headed to the Savoy hotel to meet up with some other gamers.

At the Savoy we met up with Patrick Korner and Moritz and I convinced him to join us in a game of Die Baumeister von Arkadia, which Patrick had played before.  He taught us the game and we gave it a go.

Die Baumeister von Arkadia
Ravensburger’s games over the past few years haven’t impressed me too much, but when I heard about this one, designed by Rüdiger Dorn, I thought the game looked interesting.  That turned out to be true - I found Die Baumeister von Arkadia to be quite a good game.

First off, there are a lot of components in this one.  Second off, you’ll need to allocate ten minutes or so after you get the box opened to get everything punched out, assembled, and squared away.

Setting up the game reveals a gridded board that has a number of Torres-like towers in three batches at the side.  There are also a number of buildings of different shapes, some seal tokens (not the animal), some player screens, some little flags and a pile of other components.

The gameplay consists of using cards to play the buildings on the board.  When a building is place, a seal of a certain color is put on it.  Instead of playing buildings on your turn you can place some of your people - tiny little plastic men - around one of the buildings (you don’t have to completely surround it, you can place as many guys as you want to, up to what you have in your stock).

The idea is when a building is completely surrounded by people or by other buildings, the building scores.  The player that played the last piece to surround it gets the seal on it and any other players with people adjacent to it gets one seal per person.  The player that played the last piece then takes a Torres piece from the stock at the side of the board and puts it in an area in the middle of the board.

Each player may also score during their turn.  They can only do this four times during the game.  They take the seals they’ve collected and each seal is worth a certain number of points depending on the color of the Torres towers in the middle of the board (I’m glossing over a bit here, it’s a bit lengthy to explain completely).  They trade in their seals and get victory points.

The last round is signaled when the players dip into the last batch of Torres towers.  There is one final round and then players cash in their remaining seals.  Whoever has the most victory points wins.

This is definitely a gamer game and it plays quite well.  There is a fair amount of strategy when it comes to which buildings to place and where to place your guys, as well as when to score.  You have to watch carefully what the other players are doing, as their play can greatly affect what you do.  There seems to be various strategic paths you can take - Patrick said his first game played completely different from this one.  I very much liked the game and was very happy that I picked it up.  Kudos to Ravensburger for getting back on track with a very nice game (though I’m still a ways from forgiving them for putting out some of the junk that they have done in recent years).

Im Bann der Pyramide
My last game of the night was the light card game Im Bann der Pyramide, designed by Wolfgang Kramer and published by Adlung.

In this game you are moving your archeologist through a pyramid to get to the royal chamber.  A row of numbered cards is laid out on the table with the royal chamber at one end.  The players start at the other end, before the first card, and have to move from card to card.  Whoever gets to the royal chamber card first wins the game.

Your turn consists of either drawing cards, trading in cards, or playing cards in front of you.  Most of the cards are numbered and have one of four different symbols - a ladder, torch, rope, or a pick-axe.  Here’s the rub - there is a card on the table that indicates one of the symbols and you can only play cards in front of you with that symbol.  You can also play special power cards which do different things. 

When the sum of the cards in front of you meets or exceeds the number of the card in front of your archeologist, you can move to that next card (if you match the number exactly you get an extra turn).  To get to the final royal chamber card your sum has to exactly match the number on the royal chamber card.  As said, whoever gets there first wins.

This is a very light family type card game.  The card play and draw is pretty lucky and the strategies are pretty obvious.  There is a fair amount of ‘take that’ as well as players can use special power cards to screw with other players.  In the end, it’s a pleasant card game, but not much more than that.

And with that game finished, it was time to head back to the hotel.  Tomorrow I’m heading out after the show so it was time for packing.  Thank goodness I brought some huge suitcases this time because I really need them - the stack of games I have is enormous.

After packing it as time for some shut-eye.  Tomorrow is the last day of the show - stay tuned!

Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version
	Pictures from around the fair - The Saturday crowds
	More Saturday crowds - The Rio Grande booth
	More Saturday crowds - going into Hall 4
	Hall 4 - the Spiel des Jahres booth
	Stein-Thompson Games / GiftTRAP Enterprises
	Sphinx Family
	MeeplePeople.com / R&D Games
	Surprised Stare Games
	Czech Board Games
	Japon Brand
	Golden Laurel Entertainment
	Singlish Mopping
	SandTimer
	Sunriver Games
	Some personalities from around the fair - Designer Andreas Steding
	Publisher / Designer Cyril Demaegd
	Designer William Atttia
	Games Played - BattleLore with Eric Hautemont of Days of Wonder and Moritz Eggert
	Battle Lore
	BattleLore Close-Up
	BattleLore Cards Close-Up
	Space Dealer with Moritz Eggert, John Palagyi and Valerie Putman
	Space Dealer - One player’s cards
	Experiment with Eric Martin and Patrick Korner
	Experiment
	Die Baumeister von Arkadia with Patrick Korner and Moritz Eggert
	Die Baumeister von Arkadia
	Die Baumeister von Arkadia Close-Up
	Im Bann der Pyramide with Patrick Korner and Moritz Eggert
	Im Bann der Pyramide

© 2006 Rick Thornquist

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Comments:

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Thornquist!  You’re finding too many great games!  Do you think I’m made of money? Jeez, Space Dealer wasn’t even on my radar!  I guess we’ll find out if science fiction really is poison in Europe! Glad to hear that Dorn didn’t disappoint with Arkadia.  But you didn’t mention if he found a way to get his “walking mechanic” into the game! It does indeed sound like a great show and it’s wonderful reading your reports about it.  Now you only have one more job.  Get those damn Czech games played!  This time, the WORLD truly wants to know! Posted by Larry Levy on Oct 22, 2006 at 09:57 AM | #

Larry - > Get those damn Czech games played!  This time, the WORLD truly wants to know! I’m working on it! :) - Rick Posted by Rick Thornquist on Oct 23, 2006 at 09:41 AM | #

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