Convention Report: UK Games Expo 2008 – Awards, Tinners’ Trail, and Treefrog

By W. Eric Martin
June 4, 2008

By the standards of Spiel, the UK Games Expo is a tiny event featuring only a few dozen publishers and vendors. That said, one aspect of Spiel was recreated numerous times by the participants: just-in-time delivery of new games.

Wattsalpoag’s Kris Gould, the only American publisher on hand, said that he first laid eyes on Fruit Fair after arriving at the Expo. The Ragnar Brothers had to airship 150 copies of Monastery to have them for sale while the remaining copies were stuck on a lorry somewhere. Surprised Stare received a nasty surprise when the supplier of the blue ships in Confucius couldn’t come up with them in time; Alan Paull scrambled to find as many ships as possible, but the 22 copies he and his crew did assemble were sold out by lunchtime on the first day of the show. (JKLM wasn’t so lucky as Huang Di and Athene, both expected to debut, will now appear in July.)

The Best New Board Game Is...

Ice Flow, which won the award for Best New Boardgame, almost didn’t make it, showing up at Ludoum’s warehouse only on May 29th, two days before the Expo opened. The judging panel for the boardgame award consisted of three groups:

• The general public, who played and voted for whatever they wanted.
• An amateur panel of enthusiastic gamers, pulled together by Expo organizer Richard Denning.
• An expert panel consisting of Counter editor Stuart Dagger, former Sumo editor Mike Siggins, Reiver Games publisher Jackson Pope, and yours truly.

Among the expert panel Ice Flow also scored well, barely nudging out Monastery and Confucius, while being edged out in return by Tinner’s Trail, Martin Wallace’s first release in his Treefrog line of games. For those curious about Ice Flow, check out my review, which is based on four playings during the show. As you can probably guess, “four playings” translates to “I like it quite a bit.”

Tinners’ Trail and the Future of Treefrog

As I noted in April 2008, Martin Wallace has abandoned the once-a-year game release pattern of Warfrog to adopt a more prolific schedule for the Treefrog Line. Has he been stockpiling games over the past years, holding them back for a future time? Possibly, although the four games on tap for the next twelve months mostly came into being after Spiel 07, a feat possible only because he is now a full-time designer/publisher. More details on those upcoming games after a first impression…

Tinners’ Trail, the first Treefrog title, was demoed continuously through the weekend, and Wallace sold out of copies on hand by the end of the show. Even with a brief playing time of 45-60 minutes – far shorter than the Wallace standard – the game has a lot of meat on it and plays harder than you would expect for a short game.

Over four rounds, players compete to control mines in 19th century Cornwall, extract tin and copper from the mines, and convert those raw materials into victory points along the lines of Princes of Florence. To start, the gameboard is seeded with preset quantities of tin and copper cubes, then dice are rolled for each of these regions to add some number of tin, copper and water.

On a turn, players can take one of several actions: build a mine, develop a region, extract goods, sell pasties. Each of these actions has a time cost, and players move along a time track in the manner of Thebes, with players taking turns based on how much time they have left in the round. Building a mine isn’t an automatic action; you choose one of the regions – whether stocked with goods or untouched – and an auction ensues to see who purchases the mine for how much. The winner spends the time (and money) for that mine, and someone building on virgin territory then rolls the dice to see what the ground holds.

Players also spend money (and time) to extract tin and copper from their mines, with the cost for each cube being the number of water cubes in that mine. The available developments – which vary each round – extract water from one or more mines, give you additional digging capacity within a mine, or expose more raw materials, so using them manipulates your extraction costs and capacity at the expense of time. Drain your well dry, and everything comes out of the mine for free – until the next turn, that is, since each extraction adds more water to a mine. (Cornwall is surrounded by water, after all.)

The sales price of tin and copper are randomly determined each round, and you’re forced to sell all goods extracted in a round; while you can wait until later rounds to hope for higher prices on raw materials, the conversion rate of money to VPs drops as the game progresses. Converting all your pounds to VPs, however, will stunt growth in future rounds, so determining how much to hold on to each round is a learned skill.

What’s more, space on the VP track is limited, so you could be forced to take a lower-scoring space depending on how you manage the turn order. Turn order also comes into play at the start of each round since the number and type of developments on hand are limited. Adits, which are pipes between mines, are very good, but there’s only one per round, so you have to be at the front of the line to grab it. (The time cost for an adit is also higher than anything else, so if you do grab it, you’re likely going to miss out on other items.)

The randomness of what appears in each mine, as well as the selling price of the goods, should provide a lot of variety for the game. Some folks were talking about each mine being flooded out and struggling to raise any profits out of the ground, while our game had a mix of wet and dry mines with water levels that ebbed and flowed as we developed and mined.

Variability in Tinners’ Trail will also come with the mine auctions and successful manipulation of the time track and your money supply. If people don’t have the time to spare, not to mention the pounds, they can’t bid on mines; in one round, another player and I kept dinging up the price of a new mine, but once he won, he realized that he had left himself short of funds to extract the goods. Selling pasties gets you £1 per turn, but that’s a slow way to put money in the bank. In another auction, the winner of the bid got to see his success trumped when the second-place bidder bought an identical mine for less immediately afterward due to a lack of competition. In other games, I heard of mines selling for £2-3, which seems like a bargain compared to the prices we paid; group think and experience will play a big role in how each game develops.

All in all, Tinners’ Trail is a great launch for the Treefrog Line, providing the level of game play that you’d expect from Wallace with great chunky bits. Once I play a few more times, I’ll provide a more complete review. As for future Treefrog titles, all of which will be 1,500 copy signed-and-numbered limited editions with wood bits, you can look forward to:

• After the Flood – a three-player game due out in September or October 2008 that’s set in Sumeria, with players using regional resources to trade for goods not produced in the area while also building short-lived empires for long-lasting victory points.

  “Certain mechanisms were created with three players in mind,” says Wallace. “You score an empire, then remove it, so you can try to maximize points on your turn without leaving yourself in a position to get hit on following turns.” This design sidesteps the problem of a third player winning a game due to fights to the death by players 1 and 2, but that bug becomes a feature in another part of the game. Competition among the players for goods and army strength is relative rather than linear; having twice as many dudes collecting resources won’t net you twice the number of goods, so getting into an arms race with one opponent might hurt the two of you together and advantage the third player who can spend resources on better things.

  Controlling different cities gives you different bonuses, with the bonus being based on the history of the city itself: Sippar lets you trade more, Babylon counts for additional armies, and so forth. Combat in the game is dice-based to avoid deterministic battles in which you can guarantee victory simply by piling up more troops, although size does have its advantages.

• “Unnamed rail game” – the second title Wallace aims to have ready for Spiel 08 is a simplified type of 18xx game in which players bid for shares in six railroads over five rounds, with one share available each round.

  The winner of a share gets to decide what that railroad does, netting the income earned that round for himself rather than having it go to the player who controls the most shares overall, but the amount of money he has to spend is based on his bid, so winning low won’t differ much from not winning at all. Notes Wallace, “You must build as much as possible each turn.” This puts the onus on the next share holder to throw his own money into the railroad in order to build. Players gain the same amount of money each round, and all money earned is converted into victory points, so scoring well in one round won’t boost your chances of winning more shares later.

  The share payout at the end of the game is affected by how diverse a railroad’s network is, so you’re balancing short- and long-term growth with your actions. How much do you want to profit now if you’re giving someone else a big payout down the road?

• Waterloo – a two-player game for early 2009 with the French and British fighting once again. The action system is a clever creation: You know the range of possible actions that you can take on a turn, but the opponent knows exactly how many actions you have, and that knowledge strips the certainty from your preparation. Can you get your infantry back in a defensive position before the opponent thunders through with his cavalry? If you don’t think you can, you might develop timidly, which gives the opponent a better shot of taking valuable terrain.

  Damage in the game is represented by black cubes, and you can distribute the cubes throughout your lines during the game to represent the movement of troops back and forth from the front lines. Shifting all the damage to the back seems like a no-brainer, but if cavalry does break through your front line, your troops are toast. Morale is checked only in face-to-face combat, and it’s handled by a die roll compared with the level of damage within an area.

  Control of areas like La Haye Sainte is critical. Just as Wellington tried to funnel French attacks through gaps in ridges in order to cut off their support, you can do the same, fighting for highland to prevent being pinched. The French win if they take Mont St. Jean, the British if they take Rosonne; if neither occurs, then you’re looking for damage done to the armies.

• “Unnamed business game” – a 3-5 player game for the next UK Games Expo in May 2009 that bears a modern setting when compared to most of Wallace’s releases. Players are competing in the U.S. auto industry in the early 20th century, purchasing factories that turn out low-, medium- and high-valued vehicles, starting with the 1893 Duryea and moving up the timeline from there.

  Each player knows a portion of the market demand each round and must make his purchasing and manufacturing decisions based on that. You can fund distributors across the country, but if you don’t supply them with vehicles to sell, they go bankrupt, taking your investment with them. Special action spaces are available along the lines of Age of Steam with the actions provided by Ford, Durant, Kettering, and others related to their actual business history.

  As newer models make their way onto the market, they sell first compared with older models. What’s more, the cost of older factories keeps bumping upward as time passes, encouraging you to keep pace with technology – a development that has other benefits as well. Alternatively, you can drop the prices on your cars to try to scoop other players.

  To get money, you need to issue shares; shares issued in later rounds give you more money to work with, but you lose development time. Whoever manages the best return for their ten shares over this 120-150 minute game will win.

Look for coverage of other new and impending releases seen at the UK Games Expo in a future post.

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