Convention Report: Essen 2007: October 20, 2007 (Day 3)

By W. Eric Martin
October 23, 2007

Editor’s note: My final report was delayed due to illness. Hope you enjoy it.

My final day at Spiel started later than the 9am press time as I had to pack and check out of the hotel. Luckily I still got to hit a few booths before the hordes crashed in and raised the volume by 40-something decibels.

Mondainai

Designer Harald Enoksson was in a sparsely decorated booth that featured little more than 100 copies of his first two games: Seigo and StreetSmart. Seigo’s subtitle is Conquer the Japanese Language, and Enoksson describes the game as Civilization-like in how your holdings develop. As you collect the right Hiragana characters, you’ll acquire new skills, such as a cannon to take down enemy forces. The Venn diagram intersection of Civilization fans who want to tackle a four-hour game about learning Japanese must be tiny, but my friend Brian is one of those people and had asked for a copy. If he ever gets it played, I’ll ask him for a report!

Enoksson’s other game is StreetSmart, which creates city life in a highly abstracted form, with consumers spending money in neighborhoods or slums (which creates new buildings of the same type and color, which may or may not be the active player’s), gangsters who convert neighborhoods to slums, policemen who revitalize an area, smokers who burn down shops, and much more. The movement system was lifted from RoboRally, as Enoksson admitted, although he’s tweaked it for his game to move characters 1-3 spaces in the cardinal directions. Lots of variety is possible as the game includes numerous expansions which introduce garbagemen, electricity access, and more.

Rôle et Stratégie

Rôle et Stratégie promised two titles for Spiel, but its website included information about only one (Tavern Battle) , so I stopped by for an explanation of Tavern Heroes. The set-up is one you’ve heard before—a king wants to find a successor and has asked the knights of the land to compete for this honor, specifically by fighting dragons.

The knights, however, have a more realistic head on their shoulders than the king and prefer to spend their time drinking. But as the number of drinks consumed increases, their bravery (or foolhardiness) increases as well, and they start daring each other to go take on the dragon. A number of weapons, armor, and special adventure items are on display at the pub where they’re drinking, and soon they’re boasting about how little they need to defeat some puny scale-wearer. “I’d go fight the dragon without a helmet,” says one, turning over the helmet card. “I’d go without a lance,” says another, turning over the lance card.

This process continues until one knight makes a ridiculous proposal and all the others say, “Go right ahead.” This nitwit goes off to fight the dragon, and his drinking that evening affects his ability to fight (with the fighting represented by die-rolling in various ways), and everyone else bets on the outcome of the encounter.

After eight rounds, with a different dragon in each round, the player who has best battled and bet wins the game.

1602 Editions

Following a game that involves fights against eight dragons, let’s turn to a game that’s actually called 8 Dragons. New French publisher 1602 Editions was staked out in the Messe Gallery with its small card game, and your goal in 8 Dragons is to collect complete dragons.

You do this by drawing two cards at a time from a display and revealing them: If they’re different colors and different parts of the dragon (head, body, tail), you place the cards back; if they’re different shapes and the same color, you add them to your hand and the next player goes; if they’re the same shape and difference colors, you keep them and go again. You can hold only four cards in your hand, and each dragon is four cards long, which means you can’t store up lots of cards. If your hand size goes over four, you choose which cards to return to the board.

GameHeads

Players in the GameHeads booth were having a lot of fun, and who wouldn’t when you’re hunting down other players or simply watching the hunt. Cop & Killer is for 4-10 players and is played over a series of rounds. In each round, players take on a secret identity: cop, killer, killer’s target, or bystander. To determine the identities, players each take a secret role tile and pass them under the table as often as they wish until everyone is satisfied with who they are. These tiles are all unique shapes, so you’ll know which role you’re passing to your neighbor and they’ll know who you are as well—although you can keep trading to throw them off.

Your first goal of the game is to reveal the identity of other players: The cop wants to find the killer; the killer his target; and everyone else wants to know who’s who as they’ll take sides during the round. This is done by actions on the gameboard, which can have cop-intensive actions or killer-intensive actions depending on what’s happened in the round. Once the identities are revealed, the cop or killer may get to take a shot at their target, which is done by shooting an old-style suction cup gun at a stand-up target. Players score points based on the number of coins they’ve collected in the round and the color of those coins (cop or killer).

Warfrog Games

Martin Wallace said that while Valley Games has sold all of its copies of Mordred, the title will be available through Funagain.com shortly. Valley Games will have 300 copies of Brass for sale, and each of these copies will come with one of the promotional Warfrog figures that Wallace had produced for Spiel. So those who couldn’t attend the convention still get a shot at obtaining the freebie…

Ming Dynastie

Ming Dynastie was one of the new titles from Hans im Glück, and designer Robert Watson led me through the game while overseeing others who were learning. Each player represents a family during the Ming Dynasty that’s trying to gain as much influence as possible in each of six Chinese provinces. Each of the provinces is divided into three smaller regions.

Your family is led by a prince who starts in one of the smaller regions, and to move your prince from region to region, you need to draft the right travel cards. In each of six rounds, players take turns placing five family members in areas that represent each of the six provinces; they then take turns drafting travel cards, and they can draft only those cards adjacent to the provinces where they have family members. Players can optionally draft joker cards as well.

Once drafting is over, players take turns using the travel cards to move their princes, moving family members from the province drafting area to a region within that province where the prince stands.

Your goal is to collect six different colors of tokens (matching the provinces) and the sooner you’re able to do this, the more points you’ll score. Unmatched tokens will still score at the end of the game, as will sets of five in the final round.

daVinci Games

DaVinci Games—or DV Games, as the company is known in Germany—had three new games at Spiel: Borneo, F.A.T.A.L., and Bang! The Bullet. Paolo Mori’s Borneo was available only as a limited-edition release, and it sold out before midday Saturday. The international version, which will include a small board, follows in a few months.

Silvano Sorrentino described F.A.T.A.L. as a Bang!-like game due to its high level of interaction and fluidity. Players are enchanters who belong to a particular family, and each family has a particular enemy. If you wipe out your enemy, you win the game instantly, but most players will keep their family identity hidden initially—your strength is reduced, but you’re less likely to be attacked by your enemy. During the game, you cast spells, which can grant you additional life points (aka cards) and also create other effects.

Sorrentino was quite excited about Gonzaga, which will be released by daVinci in the first half of 2008, but the game is still under development, so details will have to wait until at least the BGN Nuremberg 2008 Preview.

Ystari Games

In addition to its Caylus Premium Edition, Ystari Games had a special ultra-limited version of the game with model railroad-scale buildings. This version was set up for playing, but most people I saw were content to snap up copies of CPE, Amyitis, or the Mykerinos expansion and split.

Cyril Demaegd gave me the okay to talk more about Sébastien Pauchon’s Parys, which will be Ystari’s spring 2008 release, so here’s more about the game. Keep in mind that Parys is still being developed, so I won’t detail everything about the game and the details I do cover might change.

In Parys, a game for 2-4 players, players try to claim territory in an alternative-world version of the city in order to achieve hidden victory conditions. Many of the points you score come from achieving these conditions, which relate to areas claimed on the gameboard. The gameboard is divided into five colored regions, with each region subdivided into smaller areas. Some areas are adjacent to each other or connected by bridges, while other areas are separated by walls and rivers. Tokens labeled with 3, M, and A are randomly placed on some of the areas.

Each player has a set of buildings numbered 1-13, and the buildings come in three heights. On a player’s turn, he chooses one of his buildings and places it face-up in an unclaimed area. The next player in clockwise order can raise the bid—by taking a building with a higher number from his supply and placing it in an adjacent area—or he can pass for the round. The bidding continues until all but one player passes; this player turns his winning bid (i.e. building) upside-down, removing it from play and claiming this area, while all the other face-up buildings are returned to their owners. The player who won starts a new round of bidding on any area.

As you can tell from the description, Parys is an auction game with a geographical element. You have to raise the bid if you want to win a round, but you might not necessarily want to claim the area where you’d have to place the bid. Winning a bid will let you lead the next round, however, and if there’s an unclaimed area surrounded by claimed ones, you can grab it for a low bid with no competition. The game ends when any player runs out of buildings, so if you can continue to control the bidding, you can end the game on your terms.

If you win an area with a token, you must claim that token: a 3 token is worth three points; an M token works like a road in Settlers, and whoever has the most M tokens will receive a bonus of five points; an A token is worth -1 point, and whoever took the last A token must also take a card worth an additional -2 points. In addition to the hidden victory conditions, five points are awarded to the player who wins the majority in each region, with ties broken by the player with the higher buildings.

I played Parys only once, so take these comments in that spirit: Parys felt more abstract and less “busy” than earlier Ystari releases. While there’s still activity and competition on the board, I felt more like I was competing with the other players off the board than on it. As is true of most auction games, you have to suss out what they’d spend to win an area, along with which victory conditions they’re trying to achieve.

Strangely, the bidding in Parys reminded me of Ra; if you don’t plan well, you’ll be stuck with low numbers that give you little control over how the bidding will proceed in a round, and if you do win, you have to start the subsequent round in a way that won’t benefit others too much (assuming you know what they’re trying to achieve) because you have little hope of regaining the top bid.

In general, the game play in Parys hit me just right, with the small amount of hidden information balanced by the openness of everything else. You’re playing the players, not the game. I’m never entranced by themes in games, so the minimal theme made no difference from my point of view. Again, this was a prototype copy still being developed, so perhaps there will be a bit more je ne sais quoi in the published version to entice the theme hounds.

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That’s a wrap for the day-to-day reporting. Since Spiel ‘07 was my first as editor of BGN, I spent a lot of time introducing myself, putting names to faces, and speaking with people off the record to get a better feel for the industry and how BGN can serve it.

As you might have noticed in these reports, I didn’t spend much time on the alea game, the Kosmos ones, the Eggertspiele releases, and so on. Those will be covered by tons of people, both on BGN and on other sites, either for the German-language editions out now or the English-language ones which will appear later; I didn’t feel the need to spend my precious Spiel time playing them when I’ll have plenty of opportunities in the future. I wanted to focus on the lesser-known titles, those that might be lost (deservedly or otherwise) in the wave of games hitting the market this October.

If you have comments or suggestions for future convention reports, leave a note on this post or write me privately at wericmartin@gmail.com. I intend to hit BGG.con next month, assuming I’m not burned out from travel, and I hope to meet some of you in Texas!

Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version
	Harald Enoksson explaining StreetSmart, which includes characters for the consumer, policeman, gangster, and bacterium
	Role et Strategie’s Christophe Finas and the madness that is Tavern Heroes
	New French publisher 1602 Editions shows off its first title, 8 Dragons
	The killer from Cop & Killer takes a shot on a Spiel-only scoring device
	Gisela Winter-Sucker and Mrs. BGN take a moment to talk about Hartz, a parody of the German social system that would make no sense to Americaners—even without considering the extensive German text
	Robert Watson (right) in the SAZ booth explaining his Ming Dynastie to a quartet of Germans; the game sounds as Euro as possible, with abstract actions, small doses of randomness, and quiet interaction between players
	Special massive edition of Caylus, limited to a production run of one

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Comments:

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Thanks for the great reports, Eric.  Hope you’re feeling better. Posted by Larry Levy on Oct 23, 2007 at 05:52 PM | #

Eric, you did a great job! I will echo Larry’s sentiments - I hope that you are already feeling better or will heal very quickly. Posted by David Reed on Oct 23, 2007 at 09:19 PM | #

Yeah, you gotta hurry up and get well for BGG.con!  There you can play all the games you missed....;-) I confess I was interested in the Kana game, but mostly because I’d like to learn Japanese, and what could be more fun than playing a game to learn it?!?! Posted by Sean Brown on Oct 23, 2007 at 10:08 PM | #

Am I going to be the first one to say ....."Wow… Massive Caylus looks amazing...better than 3d Catan..”. Posted by Robert Ramirez on Oct 23, 2007 at 10:20 PM | #

I have a specific game company question, and I guess this is as good a place to pose it as anywhere else I can think of… Did AZA SPIELE do anything new this year?  I have liked all of their games; Golfprofi, Turfmaster and even Motorchamp.  They don’t get much attention from Essen reporters.  I am curious if they had anything new at show this year? Oh, and I think I know the answer to this, but I’ll ask.  Did Historien Spiel Galerie (Jean du Poel) exhibit? Thanks much - I enjoyed your coverage. Kevin Posted by Kevin_Whitmore on Oct 24, 2007 at 01:09 AM | #

Kevin, Historien Spiel Galerie had no booth listed. Last year Jean du Poel was in the Spieleautoren section in Hall 5; maybe I overlooked him this year, but when I passed by this area on Saturday, I didn’t see him (or many other people) there. I didn’t see anything new at AZA when I passed by, but I forgot to actually stop in and say “hi” as I was headed elsewhere at the time and didn’t get back to them—something I realize now about a few other companies. For all my preparation, I still felt blind-sided by all the companies I wasn’t prepared for, but now I can do a better job for Spiel ‘08. (Yes, I’m already thinking about it, just as publishers certainly are.) Next year I aim to (1) arrive early on the press day, (2) stay all four days, and (3) sleep more so that I don’t get sick. Posted by W. Eric Martin on Oct 24, 2007 at 02:26 AM | #

Thanks for the great report Eric. I have been looking around for a mule with a “Doug Garret’s Bitch” t-shirt, but I didn’t see you. Better luck next year! Posted by Surya Van Lierde on Oct 24, 2007 at 02:44 AM | #

Surya, Michael Green was actually the guy who won a mule, and I even picked up a special bonus for him. Now I just have to find a box and post station and mail the games out to him! Posted by W. Eric Martin on Oct 24, 2007 at 02:54 AM | #

I know, but I mean I was actually at Essen, looking for someone who looked like a mule ;) Posted by Surya Van Lierde on Oct 24, 2007 at 03:06 AM | #

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