Convention Report: Spiel 2008 – Kimaloé and Colors

By W. Eric Martin
November 18, 2008

Is anyone still interested in Spiel reports? I’ve been somewhat distracted since returning from Germany, but as no one else has reported on these games, it’s time to translate some of my notes into print, starting with a new game from two-thirds of the crew behind Animalia and Jamaica.

Sébastien Pauchon and Malcolm Braff are the main forces behind GameWorks, a Swiss design company that creates custom games for clients. The two games listed in the opening paragraph were both commissioned by an insurance company, for example. GameWorks’ newest release – with Dominique Ehrhard on board as co-designer – is Kimaloé, which was designed for Terre des Hommes, a Swiss non-governmental organization that focuses on children’s rights. The game will be released on November 20, 2008 to coincide with Universal Children’s Day, and the game will be distributed by Asmodee.

While the game is themed around the rights that all children should have – as is shown on the cards, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to balance on the head of another child, and so forth – Kimaloé does not come across as preachy. The issues are present in the game should the players care to discuss them, as teachers might do with students, but players can also focus solely on the game play and blank out the message.

The central hexagonal gameboard is surrounded on five sides by smaller gameboards that depict a child and some number of children’s rights; rights come in three colors (blue, pink, yellow), and each color has three different images. The sixth side of the gameboard is a scoreboard. The first player to reach 20 points wins, but the tricky aspect of the game is that each player has two pawns – one large, and one small – and these pawns can never be more than three spaces apart, which is a clever and subtle integration of the theme as the child can never wander too far from the parent. Thus, you must advance both pawns on roughly equal terms in order to keep advancing.

On a turn, you move 1-3 spaces depending on a die roll, then play any number of cards that you want on the matching spaces of the adjacent gameboard. Each player has her own deck of 27 cards, with three copies of each of the nine images that are worth 1, 2 or 3 points. When you play a card, your color identifies who claimed that space and everyone can see how many points are on your cards. When a board is full, the player who has the highest sum moves her large token a number of spaces equal to the points she played on that board. The player with the next highest total moves his small token a number of spaces equal to the points he played. (Third- and fourth-place players might move as well. The details are fuzzy after three weeks.) If you can’t move a pawn due to the distance restriction, then you lose those points. That gameboard is then replaced with a new one, and each player returns the played cards to his discard pile.

The central gameboard includes a bonus icon on three of its sides, one of each color, that allow you to play cards of the depicted color on any child’s gameboard; land on the side showing the yellow card, for example, and you can play cards of any color on that child’s gameboard and yellow cards on any other gameboard. Land on the event cards icon, and you draw an event card that might have an immediate effect or a power that you can use at a later time, such as dividing points between your two pawns or moving to a location of your choice. Another spot on the central gameboard allows you to refill your hand to seven cards at the end of your turn; your only other refill option, if I recall correctly, is to forgo playing cards in order to draw three. The final spot on the central gameboard is next to the scoreboard, and it allows you to apply three points total to one or both pawns.

To give you some control over movement, your playing piece carries a token on it, and you can dump the token to move your piece one space forward or backward around the central gameboard. If you land on the token on a later turn, you can load it back into your piece for use in the future.

I played a three-player game with Pauchon and Braff and was amazed to discover that Kimaloé straddles the family game / strategy game as successfully as Jamaica – you can play light-heartedly turn by turn with little focus on what others are doing, or you can work the board by tracking what’s been played and who’s doing what where. If a player isn’t careful with his card play, you can give him a ton of points that he can’t use, thereby wasting his effort. As in any good trick-taking game, you want to both manage your hand and suss out the intentions of other players in order to land a prized second-place spot and push Junior up the ladder.

Instead of Mathieu Leysenne, artwork this time is by Denis Kormann. While I didn’t see the rules for the game, Pauchon promised that they would look awful. Why, you ask? After winning the Essener Feder ("Golden Feather") award for best rulebook in 2008 for Jamaica, Pauchon and Braff noticed that the award had room for only three more listings, so the immediate conclusion was that whoever wins it in 2011 keeps it forever. Thus, they vowed to lay low for two years, then blow everyone’s mind with an awesome rulebook and win the trophy for good. We’ll see how their plan pays off in three years…

British publisher MAG, or Make-a-Game, debuted at Spiel 07 with Caveman a light, non-historically accurate family game in which dinosaurs snacked on cavemen and players tried to kep their youngsters alive long enough for them to reach adulthood.

For Spiel 08, the four designers behind Caveman – Magdalene Vrijland, Matthew Hall, Simon Hall and Terry Shaw – released the perfect information game Colors, the look of which stands in vivid contrast to its prior release. In Colors your goal is to capture four of the opponent’s pieces of the same color or any seven/eight pieces. (Again, the time delay, my memory...)

You start the game with one piece of each color in your home base. On a turn, you have four action points to spend, with the possible actions being to move a piece one space (with backwards movement being prohibited) or to introduce a new piece from your reserve into your home base. You can move different pieces during your turn, and you don’t have to maintain color parity as you add new pieces. At the end of your turn, you must fill your home base if you haven’t done so already.

To capture, you must move a piece so that it becomes the third vertex of a triangle, with all three colors being represented in that triangle. You then capture any of the opponent’s pieces in that triangle, with a double capture being relatively rare – except when you’re playing your first game against one of the people who designed the game:

The ability to apply all four movement points to a single piece gives you great potential to cover a lot of ground and devastate an unprepared opponent. After having this happen to you once, you start watching for traps and threats that you can create as well as protective structures that can prevent the opponent from hitting you without retaliation. In game play, Colors reminded me of EinStein würfelt nicht!, Ingo Althöfer’s simple die-based movement-and-capture game. Both titles have few pieces and rules that take no more than a paragraph to explain, yet once you start playing, you see opportunities for clever moves – and once an experienced player shows how weak a certain move actually is, you spot what you think is an even better one.

It’s hard to know after only two plays how a game like Colors will stand up, but the first look was promising.

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