Convention Report: UK Games Expo 2008 – Confucius & Games for Spiel 08

By W. Eric Martin
June 12, 2008

As noted in earlier reports, Alan Paull and Surprised Stare Games debuted his latest game, Confucius, at the Expo. The game was well-received, but an unexpected shortage in blue junks led to Paull and other SSGers scrambling to find the right components from any supplier possible. In the end, says Charlie Paull, they put together 22 copies for sale and those were gone before lunch on the first day: a strong sign of the game’s potential, but a situation that must be heartbreaking for a publisher since direct sales at a con are essential for covering costs and getting the word out.

"We had a successful launch,” says Alan Paull, “but we’re very disappointed that we only had a limited number of copies available. We apologise to everyone who had expected to be able to pick up a copy of the game at the Expo or immediately afterwards. We will provide more information to BoardgameNews about the delivery date as soon as we have it.”

I wasn’t aware of the shortfall until the end of the show, so I missed out on getting a copy. Curse my procrastination! I did play a demo copy once at the Expo, so here’s a first impression of the game in a boring rules-laden fashion as I haven’t played enough to integrate everything yet:

Confucius is a rich stew of subsystems in which you try to influence members of different ministries, send ships out to discover foreign lands, hire armies to conquer neighboring territories, and train students who will be under your thumb in the government. There’s a lot going on at once, and managing your money and license supply on top of everything else makes the game a tough challenge.

Tax Income
Draw two income cards. The cards contain combinations of money and licenses in ratios of 3/1, 2/2 and 1/3.

Commercial Income
You can throw away cards worth up to 4 cash, and draw X+1 cards where X is how much cash you threw away.

Buy Gift and Give Gift
Driving everything else in the game is a gift-giving system in which you can give an opponent an item ("Oh, a new rice cooker – thanks!") and that opponent now faces certain obligations to you depending on the actions you take. What’s more, the number of actions you can take each turn depends on the gifts that you’ve given and received, and that aspect – combined with the nature of the obligations themselves – turns niceness into a weapon.

The gifts cost 1-6, and by giving someone a more expensive gift than they’ve given you, you absolve yourself of any obligation to them. Naturally you can’t give someone a less valuable gift in response to an offering; that’s a slap in the face that wouldn’t be possible in the manners-driven time of Confucius.

Bribe Official/Secure Official

The three ministries are filled with officials turn by turn that each have a bribe cost on them. Pay the cost in cash, and you get to put a marker on one, which gives you a discount in future bribes or the following two sets of linked actions. To lock an official under your control, you need to pay again; otherwise, you could have the official replaced by another one. This happened only once in our game, but the spanking cost that player a few points that were thrown toward the interloper, so the threat is there.

Once every official in a ministry has a bribe on it, you score that ministry, with the player having the most presence scoring a certain number of points and the secondmost player scoring a few less. To determine majorities, you look at the number of markers; if majorities aren’t clear right away, you start bumping people out, and they have to throw their vote toward anyone who has given them a gift. Payback, and all that. If someone has mutual gifts from different players, he has to go with the one who gave the biggest gift. (Gifts also prevent you from bribing in a ministry if your gift giver already matches your presence there. No showing him up by bringing in an ice cream cake!)

Once all three ministries are scored, the game ends, which is how our game ended in the eighth round.

Buy Junks/Start a Voyage

Junks are bought with cash on a pyramidal price range and stored in your player box. When you start a voyage, you pay licenses – one per junk – to send them out across the water, and once you have five junks in a voyage, you claim a scoring marker for a distant land and the junks are removed, setting you up for future journeys. You also receive an Emperor Rewards card, which gives you some fantastic bonus or action that will undoubtedly devastate someone’s plans later in the game. Good times.

Once all five of these chits are claimed, the game ends at the close of that round.

Recruit an Army/Invade a Foreign Land

Three foreign lands await the soft clad shoes of your army. By paying licenses, you can place an army in the prep box; by paying money, you can claim a spot on a foreign land. Lands are resolved once filled or at the end of rounds four, six and eight. If a land isn’t filled, then no one scores anything (except for the spot that includes an Emperor Reward – hey, you tried to be cruel). If a land is filled, you score points equal to your location in the land.

Nominate Student and Force Imperial Examination

Each ministry starts with three officials and adds one at the end of each turn, but you can also bypass the bribes by nominating a student. Once a student has been nominated by two players (or someone selects the Force Imperial Examination box), you promote the student at the end of the round. Every player must place at least one money card for a nominee, and if you’ve gifted someone, they’ll have to throw the money your way. The winning nominee claims “ownership” of the student in whatever ministry he ends up in.

Imperial Favour

One player starts the game as Emperor’s pet, and he places one of his action cubes in this box. He’ll take the final action of this round, and this cube can be used as if it were two, to double up on an action previously chosen. This player will then choose who will be Emperor’s pet in the next round, letting himself choose the player order.

I’ve glossed over a lot of details, but with a 24 page rulebook – downloadable from the Confucius page on the Surprised Stare website – that’s to be expected.

Confucius is dense, with a lot of learning moments when you realize that you should have done X last round to prepare for Y this round. You’re constantly juggling cash and licenses, trying to manage them effectively as the card counts ebb and flow. (You’re limited to a hand of four cards at the end of each round, so no stockpiling!) Sending junks on a voyage in sets other than five makes no sense, which you sometimes realize only after you’ve done other actions that make this impossible until a future round.

The gifts and their obligations put a friendly smile on the handcuffs with which you’ll encumber other players. One player in our game said he resented being nobbled the whole time, claiming that he couldn’t manage to break through to five actions based on how the gifts went around, but I think that’s sour grapes. The training wheels are definitely on during the first game, and it’s impossible to foresee how events will play out when you have no experience. You’re trying to read what other players are doing, but they don’t have a clue either, so you’re second guessing on a cloud of smoke at that point. You plow forward and see what works, adjusting as possible to surrounding events. You can attempt to guess which level of gift someone might give you (because potential gifts are all face-up), then prepare a larger gift to ward off the threat. Of course I can make all these claims about “adjusting” and “managing gifts” because I won the game…

All in all, Confucius is a fascinating deep game, with lots of variety inherent due to the numerous officials, foreign lands and voyage chits, not to mention the shifting interaction that must take place with differing numbers of players. Ideally the blue junks will come sailing in to Surprised Stare before too long so that this game can become available to all those waiting to kill – or at least nobble – with kindness.

More games to look forward to in the months ahead…

Kamisado

Peter Burley was selling a new version of his classic Take it Easy, one that matches the graphics of his 2006 self-published sequel Take it to the Limit. The new Take it Easy includes rules in English, French and Dutch, and Burley is distributing the game himself to those parts of the world. The game now looks snazzier than the old FX Schmid version, and since I owned the son but not the father, I picked up a copy.

It’s good, but not surprising, to see this game still rolling along decades after Burley created it, and if you had to pick ten games from the last thirty years that will endure another century, I can’t imagine this not being on your list.

Burley also gave me a preview of Kamisado, a colorful two-player abstract game that he plans to have at Spiel 08. The board is an 8x8 grid, which is composed of colored diagonal rows, and each player controls eight colored towers that start on the backline on a square of the same color.

On the first turn, a player moves any tower any number of spaces either forward or diagonal. Whatever color space he stops on determines which piece the opponent must move; similarly, the opponent’s move will determine which color piece you’ll move. Land one of your pieces on the opponent’s starting line, and you win. You can also play series of games, and in that case, landing on the back row promotes that piece to a sumo, which can push non-sumos in future rounds; this push counts as the opponent’s turn, and you move again immediately, using the colored piece that matches the space on which the pushed piece landed.

An ingeniously simple abstract game that has a lot of lookahead potential for those who want it. The board set-up in future rounds varies depending on the layout at the end of the current round, so while the first game can (possibly) follow certain paths, the game really opens up from there. The tower pieces in the prototype are big and chunky with a decorative dragon top, and Burley says that the published game should have the same look. He may not produce games quickly, but he obviously has an eye on making sure that each game with his name on it is as good as he can make it.

The World Cup Game

Shaun Derrick has two more expansions planned to round out his coverage of every World Cup tournament. Expansion #4, which should be out in August and available at Spiel 08, will include the tournaments from 1974, 1978, 1982 and 1994. (I worked in a game store back in 1994, and a co-worker kept clueless me constantly updated on the progress of each team. We’d have Magic games in his apartment after work, so that he could watch the match and drink while playing games. Those were the days...)

Expansion #5, which will include 1954, 1970, 1998 and possibly something else, will finish the series and likely appear early in 2009.

Carpe Astra

Jackson Pope from Reiver Games was testing this game – originally designed by Ted Cheatham, but now bearing a co-design credit by Pope due to his extensive work – multiple times throughout the weekend. I tried the game once with two, then again with four, but it’s hard to say much about it as our four-player game, which included a respected designer with a half-dozen credits to his name and a game fan with deep knowledge, was followed by a half-hour deconstruction period in which we threw dozens of suggestions at Pope for practically every aspect of the game. One of my early comments to Pope: “I don’t feel like I’m seizing any stars,” riffing on the game’s name.

Hard to know what will result from our gab fest, but Pope could barely concentrate in a game later that evening as his head was spinning with possibilities. The next morning, he said that he was dreaming about the game all night and still deep in thought. I like the core of the game – dude placement and multiple temporary goals – but there are a lot of paths that could be followed, so we’ll have to see how that plays out once Spiel 08 rolls around.

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