Convention Report: Essen 2007: October 18, 2007, Part 2 (Day 1)

By W. Eric Martin
October 19, 2007

The flow of unexpected companies continued throughout the day—admittedly I was looking for them in order to cover those holes in the 2008 Essen Preview, so perhaps they stood out more to me than other companies. Here’s a sampling of their wares:

Czech publisher Dino Toys had a Carcassonne-style tile-laying game called Cabo da Roca in which players construct a seascape and port locations turn by turn. As ports appear, players can start buying ships to sail around the sea and trade goods from one town to another. Different types of ships are available, with a pirate ship naturally being one of them, and players try to accumulate the most gold possible through trade and settlement. The authors are listed only as BB Team, and the promotional flyer says only “created by Czech inventors,” which seems somewhat odd.

Motiva’s offerings seemed to fall in the crack between games and toys, such as with Desert Dice (pictured below) in which you use a magnetic tool to drag dice through sand towards your goal. Dice games were present in abundance, such as 6 Richtige: Each player starts with four dice in one or two colors (out of six). Your goal is to acquire a die of each color. Players take turns rolling a single die; the first player puts the die in the center of the board; the next player claims this die if he rolls higher or else his die goes in the center as well. Eventually someone claims the dice and the center empties. You have light decisions about which die to roll, but once you do roll, your chances are in fate’s hands.

Tony Brown and his Quinamid were part of the Essen Preview, but this was my first chance to see the game in person—not to mention the person in person. The wooden gameboards are nicely constructed, and the game play was appealing upon first play, but it’s often hard to judge an abstract after only one game. If you can try the game yourself, do so and let us all know what you think.

French publisher Isimat, which is owned by Laurent and Nadège Morelle, had six titles on hand, all of which were first appearances for Laurent’s creations. Mission Scorpio and Jet Set Casino were aimed at the oldest players (12+ and 10+ respectively), so I focused on them.

Mission Scorpio is a space-themed game set in the future, with players trying to construct rockets to earn points; construct multiple rockets of the same type and you score more. The game includes a role-choosing mechanism along the lines of Citadels which allows players to select a special power for the turn.

Jet Set Casino has players trying to reach a huge number of casinos across Europe. You need to collect the right city and transportation cards in order to move around the continent, and you get them through card draws and trades with opponents. Traveling to a city requires you to give up the transportation card, so you need to plan ahead to avoid stranding yourself for lots of rounds.

In the weeks before Spiel, I can’t imagine that publishers sleep too well as one story I heard again and again was a tale of manufacturing woe and uncertainty. Goldsieber released no details about Saba prior to Spiel, for example, as the game pieces fit together like a puzzle and the company wasn’t sure whether the manufacturing process would pan out in time for the convention. Out of its long list of titles announced as Essen releases, Rio Grande Games had only a half-dozen or so new titles, all of them co-productions with other publishers: Darjeeling, Hamburgum, Cuba, Amyitis, Power Grid card deck, and the comprehensive Zooloretto expansion.

Valley Games was in perhaps the worst situation as the company knew Thursday morning that Container was on a truck in Frankfurt and due to arrive at some point. The Valley Games booth had empty shelves waiting between Die Macher and the freshly printed Hannibal, but the games still hadn’t showed by opening hour. Or by 11. Or by noon. Finally in the afternoon the containers of Container arrived, and every table in the booth was instantly filled with gamers eager to try Franz Benno-Delonge’s final publication.

Peter Burley was selling copies of Take it to the Limit, now in its second edition, and he also had an enticingly colored prototype for Kamisado, which will be his 2008 release. Kamisado is played on an 8x8 grid, with eight different colors appearing on eight tiles each. Players have eight differently-colored pieces that start in their back row, and the goal is to move one of your pieces to the opponent’s starting line. Players take turns moving pieces forward (either straight or diagonally), but the piece you move must match the color of the square on which the opponent landed in his previous turn.

When you reach the opponent’s home row with a piece, you score one point, players reset their pieces in the home row according to certain rules, and the piece that reached the opposite side is upgraded to a Sumo dragon tower. This tower can move fewer spaces, but it can also push an opponent’s piece, thereby forcing the opponent into a null play and effectively allowing you to choose the color of the piece that you’ll move next.

Kamisado seems like a frightfully clever game with lots of opportunities for traps and tricks. You might move a piece to the next-to-late row, for example, but you’ll never move it home if the opponent doesn’t land on that piece’s color, so you need to force that to happen, which will itself require some set-up in your moves.

After ten hours at the Messe, dinner, and several games of Gipsy King, I really should have gone to sleep—or at least started working on the convention write-up. Instead I insisted on teaching Galaxy Trucker to three new players. Their degrees of enjoyment varied widely about the game, but perhaps that’s because I romped to victory with 69 cosmic credits thanks to giant, well-constructed ships and advance looks at the round’s encounters, something I encouraged everyone else to do, but only one person took my advice, so the pirates shot through spaceship bits left and right. A fun, fun, fun game…

Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version
	Richard Breese (right) teaching Key Harvest
	Tony Brown and Quinamid
	Desert Dice, one of the dice-related games from Motiva. The black dice are magnetized, and you manuever a magnetized stick underneath the board in order to grab a black die, then pull one die of each color towards your home area. Given that I have three cats, this sand-filled game will not be found in chez Martin.
	Thomas Ewert, co-designer of Container, signing a copy. Not pictured: Miss Canada Aleisa Fieldberg, crown nicely in place, filling baggies with plastic containers as the games arrived in the late afternoon to a desperate and fevered crowd
	Designer and owner Laurent Morelle in front of the six games presented by Isimat, a new French publisher that had constructed nearly all of the elements of its booth (tables, chairs, shelves, etc.) out of recyclable cardboard sheets
	Booth for 3DeepArt, which had a German-language observation game in which you look through a stereoscope at some image, then answer questions based on what you saw
	Peter Burley of Burley Games with the prototype for Kamisado, his 2008 release

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