Boardgame News

Convention Report: The Gathering of Friends 2006: April 14, 2006 (Day 8)

By Rick Thornquist
April 14, 2006

This is the report from day eight of the Gathering of Friends 2006. After this there’s only two days left! Today’s report features two very nice prototypes, the upcoming Cleopatra game from Days of Wonder, as well as Dave Arnott’s Game Show. Here we go!

There are many game designers here at the Gathering and most of them have brought along a prototype or two. Some of these prototypes have already found publishers and are going through a fine tuning process, others are in search of a publisher. There are many publishers here including some directly from Germany. It’s very common to see at least a few prototypes in play at any given time of day.

Playing prototypes can be quite fun. It’s great to see something new that few have played before and the games can be quite good. Often you are getting a sneak peek into a game that will be coming out at an upcoming Essen or Nuremberg game convention.

Normally we are not allowed to talk about the prototypes we play, but the designers of two of them that I played today were kind enough to let me talk about them.

Weasel’s Plunder
My first prototype of the day was Weasel’s Plunder, a game by Valerie Putman (you may know Valerie as one of our columnists on Boardgame News). This is a quite unique design that Valerie calls a tactile deduction game.

The major components of Weasel’s Plunder are some flat wooden pieces of different shapes. There are circles and pieces in the shapes of fish, stars, trees, etc. Each shape comes in three different colors.

Each player chooses three of the pieces from a bag and puts them behind his player screen. Then, each player takes one of these pieces and puts them in a special bag. The object of the game is to figure out which pieces are in this special bag. Of course, each player already knows one of them, now they have to figure out the others!

In our three player game, all the remaining pieces were put in two bags. These were then give to two players and they had some time, counted by a sand timer, to feel inside the bag to figure out what was in there. There’s no peeking, though, you have to do it all by feel! When the timer runs out you can take two pieces out, keep them, and put the two pieces you already have back into the bag.

The bags keep rotating among the players. The idea is to use the information from feeling inside the bag plus the ones you take out to deduce the pieces in the special bag.

The game is very original - I can’t say I’ve played anything like it. It’s also quite simple to learn and I found very interesting and fun to play. Hopefully this one will find a publisher - I think it would be a great game for Zoch.

Battle Beyond Space
Here’s another very good prototype - Battle Beyond Space, designed by Frank Branham. This game has been around for a while and was supposed to be published a few years ago by Quest Machine - unfortunately, they decided to leave the boardgame business. It’s a space battle game where players each get a pile of spaceships, set them up on a board divided into hexagons, and start shooting.

Each player gets 18 fighters divided into three squadrons along with two capital ships. There are nine turns in the game and in each turn a player plays a card which shows how far one squadron can move and how much they can turn. It also shows how far one of their capital ships can move.

The player moves the fighters in one squadron and shoot any ships in range. Combat is simple, if another ship is in range of your fighter, it gets shot. Fighters only have one damage point and are shot down with a single shot. Capital ships have two damage points before they are shot down. You then turn your squadron and move your capital ship. Play goes from player to player - moving ships and taking shots. At the end of the game, ships you have shot down are worth victory points and whoever has the most wins.

The game is very simple to learn and play and I found it to be a tremendous amount of fun. I’ve been looking for years for a big space battle game that is quick and fun - and this is it. I had a great time playing it. Hopefully this one will find a publisher - it’s just too good to stay unpublished.

I got some work done in the afternoon and after a quick game of Um Krone und Kragen, it was time to head out for dinner. These big dinners with lots of people are a fixture at the Gathering and though I love them, I usually try to limit them as they can go on for a long time and cut into my gaming game, which is precious.

This dinner, though, was a special one which included lots of old friends and I wouldn’t miss it. We went to a Mongolian barbeque place - the food was quite good. We all caught up, chatted about the games business, recounted gaming moments from earlier in the week, and enjoyed each other’s company.

Making the night out even better was a stop of Graeter’s Ice Cream on the way back to the hotel. Yum!

Cleopatra and the Society of Architects
At the GAMA Trade Show, I got a chance to try the upcoming Days of Wonder game Cleopatra and the Society of Architects. At the time I thought it more of a family game than a gamer game. I got a chance to play it again here at the Gathering. Here is a description of the game, if you missed it in my GAMA report:

Cleopatra is a building game where the idea is to get resource cards to build various structures in a temple. The resource cards are artisans, wood, marble, lapis and other things. Some of the resource cards are also special cards that allow you to do things like steal stuff from other players, etc. The structures available to build are columns, walls, sphinxes, obelisks, etc, and these are all rendered as quite big plastic pieces.

On your turn you can either draft resource cards or you can build. When you build, you give up the resources for the item you wan to build and then put the structure on board. When you build something you get some money, depending on what it is and other factors (proximity to certain other pieces, etc).

When you use some of the better resources or special cards you are required to take corruption points. You collect them during the game and put them in a cardboard pyramid in front of you. You’d better not take too many because the player with the most corruption at the end of the game automatically loses! If you’ve taken a lot of corruption there are ways of getting rid of it, though.

At the end of the game, the player with the most money wins (unless that player had the most corruption, then the player with the next most money wins).

After my second playing, my impression is pretty much the same as it was at GAMA. There is a bit of strategy in there, but it really does feel more like a family game. The luck of the card draw pretty much dictates your strategy and bad card draws can really hinder you. There is one part of the game, placing mosaics, where the game can grind to a halt as a player tries find the optimal place to place the mosaic. The production is outstanding, but I can’t see myself play the game very much.

Game Show
After Cleopatra it was time for the Game Show. The Game Show is another fixture at the Gathering - it’s big tournament which usually has around 100 contestants divided into teams of four. This year it was Dave Arnott who put on the show, ably assisted by Dale Yu and Dan Blum.

The game show was sort of a team trivia game. Dave would announce a topic ("Games by Rio Grande") and each team had 45 seconds to write down as many answers as they could. Then Dave would start calling out team names one at a time. When your team name was called you had to come up with an answer. Dave whistled through the teams and would go through all of them multiple times. If you didn’t have an answer when he called on your or you answered something that was already said, you were out.

We played multiple rounds. At the end of that there was a playoff round where the top four teams came to the front of the room and faced off on the final topic.

These game shows are always raucous fun and this one was no exception. There’s lots of yelling, joking and laughing. Dave did a very good job of steering the game along through the chaos and got us back on track even after a fire alarm made us evacuate the hotel for ten minutes or so. Good job Dave!

My team was the Brokeback Bambinos and consisted of me, Christine Simundson, Rodney Somerstein, and Larry Chong. The first round, “Countries of the World” we were the first team knocked out due to my ineptitude (I suggested we say Argentina and it had already been said). We resolved to have a better system for answering the questions and from then on we did very well. In the last round before the final we rocked and won the round - the best of around 30 teams.

We were one of the top four teams in the playoff round. The topic was “Games by Reiner Knizia”. The round started and one team dropped out and then another dropped. We were one of the two teams left when I flubbed it and said Ra, a game that had already been said. No matter, second out of 30 teams is good enough for me!

We all had a great time with the Game Show - big thanks to Dave Arnott for putting it together.

And with that, it was time for bed. Stay tuned for more games tomorrow!

Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version
	My games played today… Battle Beyond Space with Alfonzo Smith, Greg Schloesser and designer Frank Branham
	Battle Beyond Space
	Battle Beyond Space close-up
	Cleopatra with Henning Kropke and Patrick Korner
	Cleopatra
	The Game Show gamemasters - scorekeeper Dale Yu, quiz master Dave Arnott and scorekeeper Dan Blum
	The Game Show participants
	Game Show Team B - The Brokeback Bambinos - Larry Chong, Christine Simundson, Rick Thornquist, Rodney Somerstein
	Some pictures from around the Gathering… Mauer Bauer
	Skaal
	Mission: Red Planet
	Nexus Ops
	Jambo
	Dominic Crapuchettes’s shows his ace in the hole while playing Nottingham
	Mark Noseworthy sulks because no one will play games with him