Convention Report: Spiel 2009: October 22, 2009 – Day 1

By W. Eric Martin
October 22, 2009

As usual, I was already exhausted before Spiel even opened due to long days and late nights putting together the Spiel preview, uncomfortable airline seating that keeps tall people awake for eight hours, and a late dinner and chat session that pushed the sleep meter even further down. That aside, let’s focus on the positive: the new titles at Spiel 09 and what’s coming down the pike for 2010:

• First, the games played: This list is short as I spent much of my time talking and asking questions of designers, etc., but I did play Havana, Tobago and Psycho Pet today.

  Havana sounds like a light card game – collect resources, build buildings, score – yet our initial three-player game felt a bit like roaming in the dark. You can’t well anticipate who will play which role when, and you need a grasp of the “I know that you know” double-think to better plan for what to do. In brief, you play one new role each turn after the first, and the two roles in play create a two-digit number; the order of the numbers determines who goes first, with the lower numbers having weaker powers. The powers give you money, resources and workers, with those components being required to build buildings. Seems fine.

  Tobago is a treasure hunt, with the players laying down clue cards to narrow where the treasure might be. Once a single location remains for any of the four types of treasure, you divvy up treasure cards among those who contributed to finding it. Since those involved late in the discovery process get an earlier pick of the treasure, you have an incentive to narrow a treasure’s location, even if you can’t pick up the treasure yourself. Fun and thinky at the same time. There’s a bit of weirdness during play as the game suggests marking possible treasure locations only after narrowing the field to 10-15 possible locations, which means that you have to recall that black is still up for grabs – but not, say, within two spaces of a palm tree or not in the forest – despite black not being visible on the board. I want an online version to take care of this tedious task for me.

  Psycho Pet has you collecting therapy points through a push-your-luck mechanism, but since you need a lot of points to cure all but the healthiest of animals, you must spend points marking bonuses that will pay off under certain conditions, such as a cat being in the cards turned up at the start of a round. Problem is, the number of these spots is limited, and even with only four out of six possible players, one person became locked out of these bonuses and could only crawl along each round, clearly out of the running in a game destined to last much longer. We were likely undervaluing action cards and their abilities, but we seemed to be making less progress toward the finish line than we imagined we would and decided to move on to something else.

  Oh, I also looked at Priests of Ra, the new Reiner Knizia title from Rio Grande, and after a quick read of the rules, we put it back and headed to Tobago. The game play is Priests of Ra is identical to the original except for two small changes: The game doesn’t include god tiles, so your only options on a turn are invoke Ra or draw a tile, and some of the tiles are double-sided, and you decide which side will be face-up and auctioned when you pull such a tile. The real difference is in the tiles you collect and the scoring system, and while I admit that such changes could be significant in terms of the choices you’ll make during the game, given the short amount of time available at Spiel, I thought it best to move on to something less familiar.

• As I tweeted yesterday, Matagot’s miniatures for the Cathala/Maublanc game Cyclades did not arrive in time, so the publisher is taking addresses from buyers and promising to mail out the miniatures once they arrive, most likely in November 2009. On the positive side, Hicham says that he frequently hears players say that they don’t want the plastic figures used by Matagot, as with the moai in the 2008 release Giants, so those folks will be happy to find wooden bits in the box.

• Speaking of items not yet available, Karl-Heinz Schmiel’s A La Carte is being released in a new, attractive version from Heidelberger Spieleverlag, but copies aren’t due until Friday. Schmiel was wearing chef’s whites today while demonstrating the game on advance copies.

• Stefan Feld’s Macao, on the other hand, arrived just before the show opened at 10 a.m. after being a no-show on the final set-up day. The game has the usual alea attractiveness and will make its way to the U.S. in due time from Rio Grande Games, which is also still to release the previous alea titles, Alea Iacta Est and Treasure Chest.

• Peter Burley’s Take it Higher!, co-designed with Reiner Knizia, arrived at Spiel unexpectedly, but not Burley himself due to family issues. Take it Higher! fits the mold of Burley’s other Take it... games, with players laying down tiles bingo-style while trying to create solid lines of color. In Take it Higher!, the tiles are octagonal and laid into a plus-shaped grid. In addition to the colored lines that run along both diagonals as well as horizontally and vertically, the center of the tiles is either silver or gold, and you score bonus points for creating a solid center line, no matter what happens to the colors on those tiles. In addition, when you complete a colored line, you place a rocket ship of the appropriate color on one of the tiles. These ships are on numbered circles, and you receive bonus points for the highest empty space that has no rocket ships lower than it. I tried this out in 2008, and the game is a good twist on Burley’s previous releases.

• Funforge’s Pony Express from Bruno Faidutti and Antoine Bauza is on the boat to the U.S. and should be available in November/December 2009.

• Newcomer publisher Jofasa had a small display for its pricey and stylish metal meeples. Johan and Sabina talked about their design process, mentioning that the first batches on their milling machine took 90 minutes for eight meeples. By using a larger machine once they had the design down, they were able to reduce the production time to 15 minutes per eight meeples. One goal they have in the future is being able to produce small quantities of games – say, ten or twenty copies – for a designer who wants to produce a specialized micro-edition.

• Hard Furry Pets, from Raven Distribution, lives up to its title, with players being either moralizers or womanizers – anthropomorphic womanizers, mind you, but womanizers just the same. The goal of the latter group is to collect women’s underwear by using skills like romance and strength, while the moralizers try to chastise the women and keep them out of harm’s way. Check out the YouTube trailer if either collecting or protecting women’s underwear is your thing at the game table.

• Hurrican has a new edition of Bruno Cathala’s Mow, which debuted in 2008. The game is now for 2-10 players instead of 2-5 and includes a separate deck that is shuffled into the main deck when you have more than five players. In an effort to create some kind of record, Hurrican has included rules to the game in sixty languages, including Serbian, Thai, Georgian, Welsh, Lithuanian and Kurdish.

• As for games due for release in 2010, Czech Games Edition has two titles: the Space Alert expansion inadvertently leaked in the days prior to Spiel 09 and Sneaks & Snitches, originally scheduled as a Spiel 09 release. Sneaks & Snitches is pretty much finished, but one of CGE’s partners wanted more time before releasing the game, so all of the editions were moved back in order to produce everything at one time.

• The Space Alert expansion has three components that can be mixed and matched. First is a 48-card set of new enemies, with some enemies having new powers such as phasing. An on-board invader with phasing can be hit only every other round, and in the rounds when it’s phasing, it can take other actions, such as moving around the ship. Some external enemies will generate internal threats when they get close enough to the ship. Others are able to jump trajectories when approaching the ship, while the Overlord is so massive that it’s approaching along all three trajectories at once. Prepare the cannons!

  Second is a deck of double-action cards that replaces the action deck in the basic game. A double action might let you press the “A” button twice in one turn, or take an action in a location as well as move. Since you’re getting more done in less time, a new set of scenarios will be included that have more enemies and a longer timeline. Finally, the expansion will have skill cards that players can use to effectively create a character for themselves RPG-style. You’ll keep the same character from one scenario to another, and as you succeed, you’ll gain new skills.

  With these titles and others, Czech Games Edition plans to move away from its Essen-only policy and instead release games throughout the year.

• Kris Burm has a new game in the works for Belgian publisher SMART, but it’s not another title in Project GIPF. Instead it’s a physical game reminiscent of Pirate Billiards as players flip marbles across a board with numerous indentations. Place four of your pieces in a triangle, and you remove the central one from the gameboard a la YINSH. Remove three of your own pieces, and you win.

• Finally, Sébastien Pauchon and Malcolm Braff at GameWorks gave me a chance to try Tikal II, which I believe is only from Wolfgang Kramer, not Kramer and Kiesling. (I’ll double-check this detail.) Unlike Priests of Ra, Tikal II feels like the original game in spirit, while not being a mirror image of it. Players are now exploring one of the temples in the jungle, but instead of an action point system, each turn consists of only two actions: Use your campsite to choose an action tile surrouding the board, then move your search guide through the building. Instead of spending points to go through openings in the jungle, you now need different tools to go through openings between rooms, and if you have the right tools, you can go practically anywhere.

  Part of the game play involves collecting treasures, and instead of collecting sets, you’re trying for diversity. As with the fights over temples in Tikal, you want to dominate special rooms to win more points than other players. Even though the action point system – the bane of many players in terms of causing fried brains – has been eliminated and you have only two actions each turn, you’re still frequently stewing over what to do because everything builds on the earlier turns, and you need to decide what to spend and how that will hamper your movement and when to lay out new tiles and which tile to place and how to place it and so on. GameWorks aims to release Tikal II in 2010.

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