Dale Yu: Report from BGG.Con / Essen Part Five

Man, I am really tired of traveling – having been gone five of the last six weekends – I am really enjoying being back home for an extended period of time.  The final leg of my world tour brought me to Dallas, Texas for BGG.con.  It has been a few years since I had been able to make it to the con, but this year the stars aligned to allow me to make it.  And, like most things in Texas, this convention was BIG.

BGG.con was held in the DFW Westin Hotel, and the convention space sprawled over almost every square foot of public space.  The largest ballroom was dedicated to open gaming (and a few vendor stalls on the periphery), and this room was a constant hubbub of activity.  I’d guess that there was room for about 400-500 gamers in this room.  In addition to this, there were about 8 to 10 smaller rooms that were reserved for the con which were spaces for other scheduled events or to provide some quieter areas for games.  The Hot Games room also provided a place to find some of the hottest Essen releases – the games were constantly set up and were not allowed to leave the room – so if you really wanted to play one of the Hot Games, you always knew where to find one copy of it.

The other strength of BGG.con (IMHO) is the BGG library.  Boardgamegeek owns thousands of games, and they are all available to be checked out for play during the convention.  The breadth of the library is amazing having both plenty of old classics as well as lots of new releases from the past few years.  Even the new releases from this year’s Essen were available to be borrowed.  The library is nicely organized in alphabetical order, and the bar codes attached to the games made it easy for the staff to track the locations of the games (or at least tell you if they were in the library or not).

I didn’t get a chance to play that many games during the weekend – as this convention turned out to be a lot of socializing with a lot of old friends that I don’t see very often as well as with new friends made at the convention this year.  I had a blast helping coordinate the Chicago Express and Alhambra tournaments for Queen Games on Thursday.  I’d like to thank all the players who participated in the tournaments as well as Rajive Gupta from Queen for providing all the necessary support for the events.  I’d also like to shout out some thanks to all the BGG Admins and convention staff that made it possible for everyone else (including me) to have such a great time.

Now it’s time to continue discussing the new games from Essen that I’ve played thus far – though only one game is on the docket this week due to some serious holiday time pressure…


Shipyard - This one may be the most complex game (component wise) of anything I picked up at Essen.  In this game, you are the owner of a shipyard, and you work on building boats.  These boats will then score you victory points based on the components used in construction as well as for the people that you’ve used to man the boat.  The component list is truly prodigious and there are about six thousand little cardboard chits included in the box for all the different ship bits and people.  OK, there might be a bit of hyperbole in the previous sentence – but not that much!  Let’s just say it took me about 45 minutes to fully punch and organize all the counters in this game.  Due to all of these counters, set up can be a bit hairy as well – I’d estimate that you’ll need 10 to 15 minutes to get all the chits separated and placed on the appropriate spots on the board before any given game.  Some have argued that this is slightly sped up if the chits are all organized in separate baggies or mini Glad-ware containers, but IMHO, all that organization has only added the same amount of time to the cleanup of the previous game, so it’s still not much of a gain overall.

Anyways, back to the game.  There are 8 different actions that you can choose in the game, and they are chosen on a rondel of sorts.  Each player has a pawn which they place on a marker to signify which action they are using.  The action that they just left moves to the front of the line – and in this manner, the train of action chits makes a slow circle around the rondel.  Each of these actions allows you to do something different – such as construct ship pieces in your shipyard, to collect equipment for your ships, to hire captains and other officers for your ship.  Other actions allow you to get pick up chits which give you advantages each time you later go to gain equipment or to hire people.  Of course, as you would have likely guessed, you eventually need to do each of these things at least once in order to get enough stuff for a fully constructed ship.  (Heck, I’d say that you might end up needing to do most of them at least twice in order to get it done!)

The trick of the game (and the rondel) is that oftentimes the action that you want to take is currently being occupied by someone else’s pawn – and therefore, you can’t take it at that time.  So, you have to constantly adapt your plan to the actions available to you when it’s your turn.  The game does allow you to be creative by letting you spend six coins to take any action in the game (except for the one you happen to be standing on) – so, if you really need to build ship pieces, you might be able to take a different action and gain some coins, and then you can spend 6 coins to take the action that you really wanted to take in the first place.  Don’t get me wrong, six coins is a pretty considerable sum in this game, but it’s a nice outlet to make sure that players don’t get constantly shut out of the actions that they want or need to take.

Once you build a ship, you take it for a test cruise.  However, before you do this, you have to have spent actions discoving harbor pieces for your boat to sail on – and each of these pieces have different bonus scoring markers on them.  Pretty much each thing that you put on the boat has a chance to score points for you during the test cruise (some things might score multiple times depending on the bonus scoring markers that you have in your harbor).

So, what’s left to explain?  Actually, I’ve really only explained about 20% of the game as there are so many possible actions and choices with each action.  But, the last major thing that you need to know now is that each player will eventually score two bonus markers at the end of the game – one each in two different classes.  You start the game with three or four bonus tiles of each type, and you have to discard down to one of each around the midpoint of the game.  One of these types scores bonus points for the things that you’ve added to your ship (such as cannons or propellers or a particular type of person) while the other rewards you for things that you collect on the ship tiles (such as life preservers or lanterns).  The bonus points available between the tiles is widely variable, though obviously, the ones which seem more difficult to meet are worth more points.  Are the bonus cards balanced?  Who knows – there are simply too many of them in the game for me to evaluate with my limited number of plays thus far.  However, any possible difference is balanced out somewhat by the fact that each player gets four of each at the start of the game and has enough time to choose between them.  I would think that on average, the opportunity for bonus points would even out given this setup.

This game comes in right at the upper limit of the complexity scale for me.  My first learning game took about 3 hours (including a great rules explanation from Stephen Shaw) – and I’d guess that games in the future will still clock in at the 120-150 minute mark.  There are so many possible choices to make each turn, that I think that more experienced players will perhaps take more time than a newbie because they are better able to consider the multitude of choices in front of them each turn. Long term, I’m not sure if this will be my cup of tea, but for now, I’m still interested in trying it again (or a few more times) as I really like the use of the rondel for the action choices.  Additionally, there are so many possible paths available to the players with the many different pieces that you couldn’t possibly explore this game fully in one or two plays.


Well, it’s going to be a bit short this week as I’ve still got to clean up the kitchen for all the guests that are arriving tomorrow.  I should have a chance to finish up the new Essen games in the coming weeks.  I hope everyone has a happy Thanksgiving!

Until your next appointment,
The Gaming Doctor

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