Convention Report: Essen 2008: October 24, 2008 – Day 2

By W. Eric Martin
October 24, 2008

Time to continue the quick hits from the Spiel convention:

• The Kingsburg expansion, the title of which is still in the works, should be released in early 2009, and it consists of five expansions that can be used singly or in combination, such as 24 governor tiles – with players choosing one of three to keep throughout the game, with a special power associated with each – and tokens to be used during the winter battles. Instead of having a random number of troops assigned to you, each player will have a set of six tiles numbered 0-4 (with two 1s). You choose one of these tiles for each round, and the remaining tile at the end of the game gives VPs equal to the number on it. Kingsburg has been extremely well-received and will even appear in a Russian-language edition before the end of 2008.

• Silvio Negri Clementi also talked a bit about Ventura, of which he is the co-designer with Alberto Menoncin. The short description is Risk crossed with Settlers of Catan. Players have their own town and build up kingdoms on hexagonal tiles, taking resources and money from those tiles in order to hire and maintain troops and armies that can be used to attack others. Take control of an enemy town or be the first to score 30 VP from fighting armies and other activities and you win.

• Theta has released yet another title with bizarre components, namely due to the feel of the material, which is somewhat like the ships in Valley Games’ Container. The game is called Letters and the components are squares or rectangles of various sizes. You take turns under time constraints placing letter tiles on the grid and creating words when possible, with the words formed Boggle-style by snaking back-and-forth across the letter layout.

• Jussi Autio from Tuonela was showing a number of different designs including the somewhat GemBlo-ey title Anomolies of Love in which players add chain-shaped tiles to a grid and try to create matches between eight different qualities: memory, dreams, musical taste, and so forth. Each tile has a broken heart on it, and if you can place that heart adjacent to one owned by another player, you have proven to be a cad and will likely bounce their tile from the game, costing them points.

Enough time in the press room – back to the show…

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