Convention Report: Essen 2007: October 17, 2007 (Press day)

By W. Eric Martin
October 17, 2007

A few nights ago, I went into a game store only to discover a disappointing selection of trivia titles and old-fashioned mass-market games like Monopoly: Bratz Edition and SpongeBob Squarepants Risk. I ran into a few other people, maybe in their late teens or early twenties, and we started talking about games. Naturally I mentioned Boardgame News and the advancements in game design over the past twenty years. Then I gave them the lowdown on the Spiel game convention—the show of shows in Essen, Germany where hundreds of publishers, game designers, and vendors have thousands of games on hand to demonstrate and sell. I mentioned a few titles that I thought might interest those new to modern adult strategy games, and they all seemed eager to attend Spiel themselves.

Then I woke up. When you start talking about Spiel in your dreams, it’s time for the show to start!

Thankfully that day has almost arrived. I’ve spent the last two weeks in Munich, visiting friends and pretending to take a few days vacation. In fact, I spent most of my non-traveling hours updating the BGN Essen Preview, reading rules, and otherwise prepping for Spiel, often to the driving dance beats played at the San Francisco Coffee Company. Don’t let the English name fool you—the café is as German as they come, with delightful café mochas, fresh-squeezed juices, an open door policy for dogs, and a relaxed attitude toward Americans who have their laptops plugged in for hours at a time. Outside the window I had a view across the Odeonsplatz of Feldherrnhalle and part of the Residenz, which housed Bavarian rulers for more than 500 years.

While in Munich, my wife Linda and I were able to spend an evening with the Westpark Gamers at the home of Walter Sorger. We walked into a Liar’s Dice game, which was promptly expanded to include us, making it everyone’s first try with ten people, I think. While everyone at the other end of the table kept losing multiple dice, I kept four for a long time, perhaps thanks to Walter on my left who kept raising me without a second’s hesitation. Moritz Eggert, Walter and I were the final three players, and I bluffed Walter twice in a row at the end to come out on top.

I then taught Kory Heath’s Uptown (BGN preview), which I had carted from the U.S. This was my first go with five players, and while it was as combative as I had expected, due to the increased number of tiles everyone had to play, the game play still wasn’t chaotic as you are usually worried about only a couple of areas on the board at a time and can ignore the rest. The same few spots in the center were claimed at least a half-dozen times as Walter, Moritz, Andrea (Moritz’s wife), and I tried fruitlessly to combine two groups into one. Linda, in the meantime, skirted us all with huge snakey groups on the top and left sides of the board. She didn’t draw the tile she needed quickly enough to merge them, however, and I was able to cut between her groups first. Walter and I tied for the win with two groups and nine removed tiles.

The final game for Linda and me was Master of the Rules, a card game by Susumu Kawasaki that Japon Brand is selling at Spiel. You can find details of how to play in my BGN preview. Our game ended in a four-way tie for first with four of us claiming five rules over the ten rounds; none of us had claimed trios of rules or all five colors, though, and Moritz won the tie-breaker. Most players seemed iffy on the game play, but I think this is one of those card games that requires a few plays before you can see the strategy. The problem, of course, is convincing people to give a game that luxury when so many other games are available.

Speaking of games, let’s get back to Spiel. After a long drive from Munich—which required us to wake up at a frightful hour—Linda and I arrived in Essen and hit the publisher’s room for a first look at some of the new titles.

Duel in the Dark

The first designer I ran into was Friedemann de Pedro, who was showing off Duel in the Dark and a handful of new expansions for the game: Ju88, Railroad Flak, Quad Flak, The Walls Have Ears, and more. On top of all this, de Pedro says that two larger expansions are in the works. The first, Early Nights, involves the Wellington Bomber, requires less preplotting of movement, and use only 20 ground objects, so it plays in much less time. The expected release date of this expansion is Nuremberg 2008. The second expansion is Baby Blitz, set in 1944 and due out sometime in 2008, with the Germans having a longer range attack capability and a Moqsuito Killer, while the British are granted an extra Mosquito (to balance the odds or just give the German player more to shoot down).

Susanne Galonska from IQ Spiele was demonstrating a couple of the company’s games, including Triovision, which should have the same appeal as Set for gamers who like to stare at things for a while before shouting out an answer. On a 4x4 grid, four differently colored pairs of tokens as placed on individual squares. A number of cards are laid out, and players try to spot a pattern on a card that can be created by moving exactly one of the tokens one space. Lots of mental head-twisting going on since you can’t move the board.

Simon Hall of Make a Game, or MAG, was showing Caveman, which is being distributed in the UK by JKLM Games. You control a group of primative tribesmen, and your goal is to either learn the five possible skills, such as controlling fire or building shelter, or building your clan up to eight adults. Do either, and you win. As with many fictional prehistoric scenarios, dinosaurs are involved as well, and you can sic them on the cavemen controlled by other players to keep their population in check.

Pierluca Zizzi had two self-published titles on display, one with artwork from established publisher Angelo Porazzi of Warangel fame. His newest game, Defence for Agarthi, pits 2, 4 or 6 players against one another in teams. One group controls the forces of chaos and wants to overtake the land of Agaarthi, while the other group tries to hold the ground. Special forces enter the game based on the characters played by your opponents, so if they get something good, you’re granted a counter-measure. Zizzi’s other game, Merchants of Oniria, looked like an involved gem-trading game with special roles chosen by each player to determine which actions he can take each round. Your goal is to load three ships with the right colors of gems, but there’s a lot of ground to cover before you’ll get there.

Knut Happel is co-author of Saba: Palast der Königin, which appears to be Goldsieber’s surprise strateg game for the show as the company released nothing more than a title beforehand, despite my repeated requests for more information. Happel says that the game was a real question mark before the show due to production concerns, but everything came out perfectly, so ta-dah! Saba has superficial similarities to Days of Wonder’s Cleopatra in that players are trying to collect materials to construct the arches, columns and fountains of the king’s palace, but the manner of resource collection (for the four types of resources) as well as the scoring is handled completely differently. A couple of the other BGN folk expressed interest in the game, and I expect at least one of them to cover the game in more detail.

Lookout Games

The time had come to leave the press room, and give Lookout Games’ Agricola a try. Uwe Rosenberg is best known for Bohnanza, and while that series has a new title this season in Amigo’s Bohnröschen, Agricola shows off Rosenberg’s talent in a new way. Each player controls a farmer and spouse and is trying to survive as best as possible on a small farm. You start the game with a meager, two-room wood shack and a small area of land and build upwards from there.

To aid your quest for self-sufficiency, you have a hand of seven minor improvement cards and seven occupations. Players also have a board with roughly a dozen actions laid out before them. On a turn, you choose one of the actions: take wood, take clay, take food, plow a field, enlarge your house, build a stable, sow land, and so forth. Minor improvements and occupations typically affect these actions in some way or grant you new abilities. Your goal is to score points by upgrading to a clay or stone hut (preferably a larger one as you want to increase your family as well), harvesting grain and vegetables, herding sheep, boars and cattle, plowing land, and buying nice home furnishings such as an oven or windmill.

For this test game, Lookout’s Hanno Girke had arranged for two English play copies to be on hand, but even with the games in English, all four players had a lot of text to read and the turns went relatively slow as players tried to figure out which order to play everything in, then readjusting when someone else took the action you wanted, as each action can be chosen only once a round (except for exceptions granted by cards you play).

You’re penalized for not advancing in certain areas, so you feel the need to balance your growth efforts, but at the same time, you can score big by specializing. This is possible only if the other players let you, however, and with more experience and familiarity with the cards, that’s unlikely to happen.

Yes, the game does have a lot of German on the cards, but Lookout Games is making an English translation of the rules available on its website as well as a complete directory of the hundreds of special occupation, minor improvement, and major improvement cards that drive the game in new directions with each playing. Your initial investment to play (or *gulp* paste up the cards with English labels) will probably be several hours, but the game was intriguing and should reward the effort. Just don’t worry too much about what others doing for your first few games. Concentrate on your own efforts; try things to see how they work and what you need to do have enough food on hand to avoid begging (which sandbags your score) and keep the farmland growing.

TZAAR

Kris Burm has 1,000 copies of TZAAR on hand, and this new sixth title in the GIPF series sounds (and looks) like a perfect companion to the other games. Players each have 30 pieces in three different types: 6 of one, 9 of another, and 15 of a third. If you run out of any one type on the board, you lose.

The pieces are placed on a hexagonal grid (of course), and players alternate turns, making two moves on each turn. The first move is a forced capture; any of your pieces may capture an adjacent opponent’s piece or an opponent’s piece that’s first in a straight line from one of your pieces as long as your piece has the same strength or higher. Strength is determined by a piece’s height, and that’s where the second move comes in. For your second move, you can capture another piece (and all pieces below it if you take a stack) or you can jump one of your pieces (or stacks) onto another of your pieces (or stacks) to increase its strength. As with YINSH, advancing can be a drawback as making stacks gives you fewer pieces to move, and if you can’t make a forced capture to start your turn, you lose.

TZAAR sounds as elegant and clean as the other GIPF titles, and Kris Burm’s enthusiasm is infectious. When talking about the opening set-up of a demonstration game, for example, he said that even after 200 games, he can’t immediately say whether a starting position is good or bad, unlike DVONN, where the starting position strongly influences the ending one. That he’s played TZAAR 200 times is an amazing statement, and I wonder how many other designers could make the same claims about their creations.

Repos Production

The Belgian guys in sombreros have four offerings for this Spiel, although I didn’t see Bonne Question on hand and speak un peu de francais, so I’d take a pass on that one anyway. Mexican Hold’Em Poker, a deck of 52 cards that the change the rules for poker, will be released in an English version by Asmodée Editions, which previously released Repos’ Ca$h’n Gun$. Mexico has a funny appeal for Belgians due to its associations with movies and myths, and to recreate that same feeling in the English version, the title will be Belgian Hold’Em Poker.

Speaking of Ca$h’n Gun$, Repos has both Ca$h’n Gun$ Live and the Yakuzas expansion on hand at Spiel. CnG Live is for 8-20 players and brings a live-action feel to the game as players move around a predefined area ready to bring their weapons (shotgun, double guns, grenades, etc.) to bear at the sound of the referee’s whistle. Get hit by a shotgun blast, and you fall backward a step, throwing out your arms to represent the spray of the blast; anyone you touch is also taken down by the shot. With a grenade in hand, you get to wipe out everyone within reach whenever you’re taken down—but that could include your teammates if you’re not careful. Repos’ Thomas Provoost compared CnG Live to a flash mob and said that he’s run the game through unsuspecting outdoor cafés, something I can’t imagine happening in the U.S without serious legal repercussions. Just look at the Aqua Teen Hunger Force stupidity in Boston…

Finally, there’s the Yakuzas expansion, which expands the game up to nine players and three teams. The Yakuza team are armed with tantos (which can strike only adjacent players—unless they withdraw, in which case the next guy over gets slashed, whether teammate or not) and shuriken (which you throw at the stand-up figure of players on the table). Provoost noted that players in Ca$h’n Gun$ rarely withdraw, so Yakuzas also contains object cards which make the game, in his words, “more violent.” Maybe you get to fight one more round after your death, wreaking vengence on your killer, or you reveal a poisoned weapon that deals two wounds instead of one. The objects remove much of the game’s safety net as three wounds and your demise are suddenly much closer.

Parys

After dinner, four of us had a chance to play Sébastien Pauchon’s Parys, which will be Ystari Games’ next release, most likely in the first half of 2008. I’ll save details of the game for a preview in a few months when the artwork is finished and details finalized, but here’s the short description: a somewhat abstract auction game with a geographical component that constrains the bidding and relates to the secret goals you’re trying to achieve.

Parys feels more abstract and refined than other Ystari releases; it’s less busy in terms of possible actions, although players still have many choices to make during the game. After a couple of my moves, I could imediately see how poor they were as my opponents took the bidding in directions I hadn’t expected, benefitting them far more than me.

Jamaica

The final game of the evening was a six-player game of Jamaica, the second title from Sébastien Pauchon, Bruno Cathala and Malcolm Braff that is being released by the Swiss insurance company ASSURA. While Animalia, the first such title, was tied into the company’s pet insurance products—or at least was a bonus for customers purchasing such products—Jamaica has nothing to do with holiday insurance, pirate insurance, or any other kind of insurance. Instead, it’s a promotional game to celebrate the company’s 30th anniversary.

Jamaica is a family game through and through, as it involves the luck of the dice and huge swings of fortune based on happenings that are only somewhat under your control. You have a hand of three cards, and each card has two actions on it, sometimes the same action twice: take gold, take food, take gunpowder, move forward, and move backward. The start player for the round rolls two dice and decides which order to place them in. Each player then chooses one card and places it face down on the table. In turn order the cards are revealed, and players take their actions: I gain five gold and move ahead three spaces; you move ahead five spaces, then move back three; and so on. The numbers are the same; the actions are dependent on the cards.

Your goal is to end up with the most points. Scoring is carried out three ways: (1) based on your position in the race—the game ends when someone crosses the finish line, and the farther you are around Jamaica, the more points you score; (2) each gold you have is worth a point, (3) most treasures are worth positive or negative points.

The food, gold and gunpowder come into play as you travel around the island. You have to pay gold and food as taxes, and if you land on the same space as someone else, you must fight them, with the winner taking something from the cabin hold of the loser.

As with Animalia, the Jamaica artwork is beautiful and should really be seen by a wider audience. Animalia has now been reissued by Hurrican Games, so perhaps there’s hope for Jamaica as well down the road.

That’s it for press day. Tomorrow the fair opens, and I plan to spend most of my time talking with publishers and only a bit of it playing. Play I can do later; direct access to publishers—this is the time to do it…

Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version
	Surfing on man-made waves in the English Garden in Munich
	You know you’re in Europe when the game table has a wine glass for each player
	“How much interest can I earn on a deposit of 12 talers?”
	Friedemann de Pedro and Duel in the Dark
	Gordon and Fraser Lamont, with Antler Island
	Designer Martyn F with Emma Games’ first release, Wadi
	Jussi Autio of Tuneola, showing off Oil Field, the company’s first release
	Simon Hall and Caveman
	Pierluca Zizza and Defence for Agarthi
	Knut Happel and Saba
	So many things to consider in Agricola...
	Lookout Games’ Hanno Girke points something out to Mik Svellov and Martin Forgottoaskhislastname
	Kris Burm and his latest creation, TZAAR
	Thomas and Cedric from Repos Production, living up to their desire for “more violence”
	Brian and Dale Yu gave Parys a try
	Believe it or not, the blue boat that’s dead last in the race nearly won due to a huge pile of gold

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Comments:

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Thanks for the update! Posted by Lorna Wong on Oct 17, 2007 at 08:11 PM | #

Your description of Agricola made me think of the game Harvest Moon from Nintendo. I’ll have to watch out for more on that one, thanks for the info! Posted by Jim Clapperton on Oct 17, 2007 at 08:50 PM | #

Wow...Saba looks great.  Here’s hoping there’s some decent gameplay behind it. Posted by Jon Theys on Oct 17, 2007 at 08:52 PM | #

Parys, huh?  Sounds like Ystari is running short of “ys” titles. I assume this is a retheming of Pauchon’s Oklahoma.  I guess we’re still not sure how they’ll be working gold mines into the design! Posted by Larry Levy on Oct 17, 2007 at 08:56 PM | #

Whoo hoo! Updates :) Thanks! Posted by Melissa Rogerson on Oct 17, 2007 at 09:07 PM | #

Another GIPF game!  Another GIPF game!  Another GIPF game! <dances in a circle> Posted by Ava Jarvis on Oct 17, 2007 at 09:51 PM | #

Jim, I’m sure you’ll hear much more about Agricola in the days ahead. Despite the amount of German, I bought a copy, as did many of the other English speakers I ran into. Much of the text is “game German” (Spieler, Holz, Schaff, and so on) and once you nail down which term is which, it will be easier to play the game without having to look up everything. Hunt down Melissa Rogerson’s glossary for assistance. And as for an English edition, the price would be in the neighborhood of $60, which might seem expensive, but that’s the price given that the game sells for €42, which equals $60 given the awful Euro/dollar exchange rate. That’s a big pricetag to swallow for most publishers. (Lookout is charging €35 at Spiel, by the way.) Larry, I’m unsure how gold mines would fit into the design of Parys, so either they’ve been completely transformed or stripped out. And apparently this is a future or otherworld Parys. Why else would they conduct bidding for land ownership in such a bizarre fashion? Posted by W. Eric Martin on Oct 18, 2007 at 01:05 AM | #

Friedemann de Pedro move over, I want to see Midgard! Posted by Lee Fisher on Oct 18, 2007 at 08:32 AM | #

Nice photos of the press room - I miss being there!  From the view out the windows it looks like the weather isn’t too bad. Agricola looks pretty sweet.  Can’t wait to hear more. Posted by Chris Brooks on Oct 18, 2007 at 04:55 PM | #

That surfing picture was VERY cool.  I gotta try that sometime. I also like the picture with everyone gathered around the wine and of course, the one of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.  They had the Winter Olympics there in 1924, I believe and I believe you can still pay for runs on the bobsled course in the winter? Great update Eric and felt it was wicked cool you gave us a flavor of the surrounding geography and culture. Posted by Ryan Bretsch on Oct 18, 2007 at 07:13 PM | #

Ryan, the Winer Olympics were held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1936, and the two small towns were combined into one at that time in order to suppose the game. The stadium is tiny, with perhaps six rows of seats around the landing area of the ski jump. Yes, you can still do skiing and jumping in the winter. Posted by W. Eric Martin on Oct 18, 2007 at 07:34 PM | #

Parys (if this title does not change) is indeed the retheming of Oklahoma. Kris Burm has probably created his best game of the Gipf series, by far better integrated than Tamsk and Punct, in my opinion. Posted by Nicolas Maréchal on Oct 24, 2007 at 03:26 PM | #

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