Dale Yu: Report From Essen (Part 4) and Report from Great Lakes Games (Part 2)

This is a continuation of my report from Essen – where our protagonist is able to talk a little bit more about the new games that he played at Great Lakes Games.  The first part of the report from Great Lakes Games was posted last week, but there are still plenty more games from Essen to talk about!  Again, a big thanks to everyone who organized and attended Great Lakes Games – without those folks, I wouldn’t have had a chance to play so many of these new Essen games!
Again, so far the watchword of the year is complex.  At least for me, it seems like the majority of the games fall into the more complex side of the spectrum, and I’m a bit surprised that I am enjoying as many of them as I am because I usually tend to the simpler games as of late.  The other thing that I’ve noticed about the games this year is that they are pretty darn good when taken as a group.  Thus far, there isn’t a single game that stands above the rest, though there are a few really good ones (Colonia, Hansa Teutonica, Opera), and there hasn’t been one that has bombed yet in my group – though I still have a few more games to try.

So, time to talk a bit about the other games that I tried last weekend.  These capsule reviews are not meant to be all-inclusive, so I’m likely going to leave some smaller rules out of this report, but there should be enough here for you to get the idea of how a game plays.


Car(d)cassone - This new release from Hans im Gluck is a really good card game, though I’ll admit that it really doesn’t have anything to do with Carcassone other than the title on the box.  It’s a clever set collection game which gives players the option to collect three different types of cards (in four different suits) in order to score points.  The table is laid out with rows for each of the four different colored suits.  In each round, the players receive 4 or 5 cards and have 1 meeple which they can play in any order.  If you choose to play a card, you place it in the row that matches the color of the card.  If you play your meeple, you place it to the right of the row of cards, signifying that you’re going to collect and score all of the cards to the left of the meeple.  So, you might have a lot of green cards, but each time that you play a green card to the green row – making that row better – you give all your opponents a chance to take that row before you get your next chance to play.  Additionally, each player has to play the first card of the round face down so that you generally don’t know every card in the row.  When all of the cards and meeples are played, then the cards are scored.
As I mentioned, there are three types of cards to collect.  There are farmer cards.  They are scored on the turn that you collect them and then discarded from the game.  Each of the cards has a value of 1, 2 or 3, and you score the sum of the value of the farmer cards multiplied by the total number of cards.  So, if you collect a 2, 2 and 1 – you’ll score 15 points (3 x 5).  There are animal cards which are scored on the turn you collect them, but you also keep them to score on later rounds as well.  If you have 1 animal, you score 3 points – and then it goes up 6 (for 2), 9 (for 3), 12 (for 4), 14 (for 5), 16 (for 6), 18 (for 7), 19 (for 8).  They don’t score a lot at first, but since you keep them and add to your totals – they can be pretty lucrative by the end of the game.  Finally, you can collect chest cards.  These cards are only scored at the end of the game.  You can score 5 for a set of 2 chest of different colors, 15 for 3 different colors or 30 for four different colors.
The game moves pretty quickly – with only 6 rounds for a 4 or 5 player game, but that’s a good thing, IMHO.  There is a lot of tension around deciding whether to claim a color now with your meeple or risking making the line better by adding a card to it (and then giving your opponents a chance to take it).  The scoring rules also cause the players to choose between short-term and long-term scoring.  The farmer cards generally score a great deal, but only for one turn; the animal cards can add up quickly, and can score in multiple rounds.  Finally, I think that every game that I’ve played so far has been decided by the endgame bonus points provided by the chests.  Other than the art and meeples, there isn’t much else here that you’ll find in Carcassone – but the branding makes sense as it likely will lead to increased sales as folks will recognize the Carcassone name.  I, for one, am happy for that association because it led me to consider this gem of a card game.


Opera - My brother and I had a nice chance to sit down and learn Opera from the designer while we were at Essen.  Opera is a beautifully done game – the artwork is fantastic and really does make you get into the whole Opera theme.  In this game, you are the owner of a multi-city opera company, and you try to build opera houses in six great European cities and then try to have the most famous operas playing in your houses.  As with most of the other games that I like from this year’s Essen crop – it is a fairly complex game.
At the start of each of the nine rounds of the game, you set up your budget – which determines how many action points you have for that round.  To do this, you spend your money – and you gain one budget level for each coin you spend (to a maximum level of 10).  The budget track works in a similar manner to Tinner’s Trail where the player who is highest on the chart has the initiative and can choose from the six different actions – which in turn will take him down some levels on the budget chart.  Some of the actions can be taken by multiple players – such as building opera buildings or hiring composers to create operas for your opera houses.  Of course, if other players share in these actions, they will also have to pay out of their budget for it.  Other actions can only be done by one player – such as placing a maestro which will double the scoring in one of the cities on the board or using the critic to change the relative fame levels of the six composers in the game.
Though there are nine rounds in the game, there are only three scoring rounds – after rounds 3, 6 and 9.  In the scoring rounds, only the operas in the main hall of each city’s opera house will be scored – so you have plenty of time to build up your opera houses and get the halls filled with the operas that you want.  Of course, at the end of each round, you earn money based on the total number of operas that you have playing in all of your cities – so you can’t just concentrate on your main halls.  The three main scoring rounds are fairly straightforward – the six composers in the game are placed on a fame scale with the most popular composer being worth 6 points and the least popular composer being worth 1 point.  Additionally, there is one composer in each scoring round who gets a 1 point bonus – and these bonus composers are known from the start of the game so you can plan accordingly.  Anyways, in the main scoring rounds, you look at your main hall in each city and score the points for each opera there based on the fame of the composer.  The majority of the scoring happens in these rounds, though you can score points in three other ways during the regular game turns.  Each time you build a part of an opera house, you score one point per hall built.  Also, you can use the Signora to sell an opera that you had acquired earlier for money or victory points (both based on the current fame level of the composer).  Finally, you can choose an action to score ALL the operas that you have in a particular city – not just the one in your main hall as in the regular scoring rounds.  But, if you choose this, you must then give up your most valuable opera to whichever player is in last place – and everyone else gets the chance to score their operas in that city as well.
Opera is a fairly complex game where you have to be able to adapt to the flow of the game.  Getting initative on the budget track is fairly important as each of the six actions can only be used once in each round – so if you want something to happen, or if you want the actions to happen in a particular order – it’s really helpful to be at the top of the chart so that you can choose the action that you want.  For instance, you might want to go first in a round so that you can choose the Signora which allows you to sell operas off for money (or VPs) – so that you have enough money to spend later in the round on new operas OR you might want to be able to choose the Maestro in order to ensure that you get double income from the city where you have the fullest opera house.
The game moves along quickly, and it’s easy to follow the flow of the round as each of the nine rounds follow the same pattern.  A 4-player game will likely clock in between 60 and 90 minutes if everyone knows the rules to the game.  Though I haven’t played enough to be sure, the one thing that I’d want to keep an eye out for is if this is the sort of game where the “rich get richer”.  By this, I mean – players that have more operas are generally able to earn more income per turn which then allows them to gain the initiative in the budget track which then allows them to control the flow of the next round.  Of course, there are things that the other players can do – such as change the relative fame of the composers – but I’m not sure if this is enough to affect the position of the leader.  But to be clear, this isn’t a problem that I’ve seen in my two games thus far, it’s just something that I’ve been able to theorize about.  I’ve definitely enjoyed Opera thus far, and I’m awaiting my next game of it.  The theme runs strong throughout the game, but it should – when I met with the designer, he told me that he started work on this game with the theme and essentially made the game mechanics fit the theme. 


Strada Romana - This is another nice game from Games In Italy – and though I didn’t really manage to meet up with the designer, Walter Obert – I did get a nice demo of the game at the booth and was able to bring a copy home to play further.  Strada Romana is a fairly abstract affair where players move merchant carts on the road between Rome and the port and pick up goods and wares (in six different colors) along the way.  The majority of the scoring comes from making pairs of goods and wares in matching colors, but you can also score some points by correctly guessing which carts will reach their destination first.
My first game was a bit disjointed as I didn’t remember all the rules from my demo.  This was compounded by the fact that the rules aren’t really organized optimally.  There are a few important rules which are only found in the captions of some of the example illustrations – and this layout made things hard to find when trying to reference the rules in the middle of the game.  Our difficulty with the rules would have been made easier if we had had Internet access at the time we were playing as many of the rules questions have already been cheerfully answered by the designer online (at BGG and other locations) – and I will say that every rule that was questions has had its answer in the rulebook – just not necessarily where you’d expect it to be found!
So, in the game, there are five wagons on each side of the board heading towards each other.  The road is generally 2 spaces wide, though it does come to a traffic-jam inducing one space wide near the center.  On most turns, you move one or more wagons towards their goal.  At the end of the turn, you can pick up a ware and/or a good based on where your wagons ended their movement.  You also have to option to spend coins to take a few special actions.  Instead of moving wagons, you could also pass your turn in order to gain a coin – and at some points in the game, you are forced to do this as the wagons can get so jammed up that only a special move costing 4 coins will allow you to move anything on the board.  The other option that you have on your turn (instead of moving wagons) is choosing from the wagon tiles – there is one tile for each of the wagons in the game.  The game ends when four of the wagons make their way to the opposite side of the board, and the players that hold the tiles for the wagons that finish in the first four get bonus points (and all the other tiles are then worth negative points).
So, you go through the game moving wagons and collecting wooden bits.  When the game ends, you then do the final scoring – where the majority of the points come from.  First, everyone gets bonus points for having the wagon tiles.  Then, you match up all the wooden bits, making sets out of matching colored bits.  You then multiply (the number of different colors that you have sets in) by (the highest number of sets you have in any one color).  This convoluted scoring system forces you to both focus on one particular color while still striving for breadth during the game.
The game is certainly abstract, and it could be a bit dry for some.  However, I didn’t really mind the abstract-ness that much – I enjoyed the dual puzzle aspects provided by the game.  First, you have to work on getting the wagons to go where you want.  You can only pick up a good or a ware from the section of the board where a wagon ended its move.  Furthermore, once the wagons start to meet at the bottleneck in the middle of the board, it can take some inventive use of the special actions to get the wagons to move in the direction and the order that you want.  Second, I liked the way the scoring system forced you to try to pick up the different colored wooden bits.  The need to pick up a particular colored good had to be balanced against the need to get particular wagons to finish first.  Additionally, there was a bit of room for defensive play as you could go and pick up a piece to prevent your opponents from grabbing.  In the end, Strada Romana is an enjoyable 30-45 minute game.  The big question for me will be whether or not the rest of my group will like it – and be willing to play a more abstract game – as this is a genre that they haven’t been too keen on in the past.




Koplopers and Dwarsliggers - Koplopers & Dwarslingers is a nice pick up and deliver game set in Holland.  The game itself is fairly abstract, but the gameplay is tight and engaging.  The game itself is an action point allocation game – each player gets 5 points each round to use.  You have to spend points to build trains (you can have up to three), and you also spend points to move those trains around or reverse direction of one of your trains.  No action points are used for picking up or delivering passengers, but once you do that, that particular train cannot do anything else during the current round.  Additionally, you can spend points to play obstruction cards – you have 3 cards at any time – and this places a roadblock at one of the cities on the board and no trains can enter/leave/drop off/pick up at that city until the obstruction is removed.
The big strategic decision in the game (that I’ve found thus far) is deciding how many trains you want on the board.  It costs 3 action points to build a new train, so it will take most of a round for you to introduce a new train on the board.  If you have multiple trains, you then have higher capacity to hold passengers, and you also are present in multiple areas on the board – but there is a tradeoff in that but there is a tradeoff in that you must do an action with all of your trains in each round – so you are generally forced to split up your action points each round.
Furthermore, when you have multiple trains, you have the ability to join them together if they ever meet at a station.  When you join them, they carry passengers together and, more importantly, they move together.  Therefore, you get to move more passengers per action point with a joined train.  The key is figuring out whether it’s worth it to spend all the points early on to generate extra trains and then to use them wisely together later in the game to make up for that expense.
The game moves along quickly – with only 20 or 25 rounds total in the game.  However, the way the board is set up, the number of passenger tokens is just about right as most of them have been picked up by the end of my games, and each player has only a few left undelivered by the end of the game.  My only complaint about the passenger chits is that with the relatively tight number of them, the start of all of my games thus far have focused on everyone trying to pick up as many passenger chits as they can hold.  By the end of the game, there simply aren’t that many passengers left to pick up – so if you don’t get them at the start of the game, you might not be able to pick anyone up in the endgame – even if you have the train capacity to hold them.  There is an expert variant which I think subtracts points for undelivered passengers, and this might stop the rush on picking up passengers from the start – however, I haven’t played this version yet (nor am I sure if these are the right rules – I’m writing this column from memory while I’m on the plane ride home from San Fran).
I’m not sure yet if there is a US distribution source for the game, but I have thoroughly enjoyed my games thus far.  I like having a train game that focuses solely on the pickup and deliver aspect and I can rest that part of my brain which has to worry about buying stocks and figuring out who controls a company.  That is not to say that the game is easy – there are certainly some brain burning moments as you have to figure out how to best move your trains around the board or have to decide whether to join or split your trains.  The game tends to move quickly, and though there’s nothing to do when it’s not your turn, the downtime doesn’t seem to be too bad.  At this point, this one looks to be a permanent keeper in the collection.


Mosaix - Well, when I left Essen, I considered this a possible “hit of the show”, if only because it was really hard to find at the sales stands.  Mosaix has thus far lived up to its potential, as almost everyone that I’ve played the game with has loved it.  The idea is simple.  Each player has a wipe-off board which has a 7x7 grid on it.  On each round, one player rolls the 4 dice (each identical with 2 crosses, 2 triangles and 2 circles on the faces) and then arranges them so that the dice are connected orthogonally.  All players then write the symbols (in the same orientation as on the dice) on their board.  If the pattern goes off the grid, you don’t have to use all the symbols – you will, however, have fewer symbols on your board than your opponents. 
Players take turns rolling the dice and organizing them – but all players write down the symbols each turn.  The game continues until the end of a round when a player’s board is full, or when a player cannot place any more symbols (i.e. has empty spots, but only in the interior of the board).  Scoring is a bit tricky at first – you consider each shape individually.  You look at all your circles, and you only consider groups of 5 or more circles that are orthogonally contiguous.  Your score for circles is (the number of groups of 5 or more) multiplied by (the number of circles in those groups).  This method is repeated for the other two shapes, and the sum of the three shapes is your final score.  It’s probably easiest to use an illustration instead – so check out this picture. 

It’s a quick little game that takes about 15 minutes to play.  I’ve got two sets which I suppose I could combine, but I don’t think that this is such a good idea because I think that you wouldn’t have enough control as not be rolling the dice often enough – as generally you can come up with something good on your turn when you roll and arrange the dice, while you just try to survive the dice that your opponents leave you with.  There is definitely some skill in the gameplay though as evidenced by the fact that in my 6 games thus far, the same two people have always won.  It is definitely a keeper for me, and it continues the tradition that I have of finding a small under 7-euro game each year that becomes a permanent addition to the game collection.  The only downside I can find of the game thus far is that it comes in a metal tin that the TSA really doesn’t like.  Every time that I’ve had this in my carry-on luggage, I’ve had my bag opened to make sure that nothing nefarious is hidden within the tin.


Climb! - Well, if Mosaix is the pseudo-hit of Essen 2009 fore me, Climb! Deserves an honorary mention.  Of course, since I didn’t pick up the game at Essen (nor was it new this year), it’s probably not actually eligible – as I mentioned before, I had managed to miss this one (again) at the Ferti booth.  Luckily for me, Jeph Stahl was happy to sell me his used copy at Great Lakes Games – and I finally got a chance to play it… And, I can say that it’s a lot of fun, and I’m sad that I’ve missed this for almost two years now. 
Climb! Is a simple dexterity game where you use your fingers to climb up a “mountain” which is made of cards.  The cards have different shaped and sized holes in them (no more than 4 holes in the 3 inch x 3 inch square card), and each opening has a color around it which tells you what finger(s) you can legally use to climb up the mountain.  A course is initially made up of 10 cards which are set up by the players.  On your turn, you start by placing one of your fingers in the start zone, and then put other fingers down in the holes in the cards to start your way up.  At each step on the way, you score points based on how many fingers you had down at once (1 pt for 2 fingers, 3 pts for 3 fingers, 6 pts for 4 fingers and 10 pts for all five fingers).  Your turn continues until you: a) finish the course, b) put a finger in the wrong hole, c) move one of the cards or d) somehow lose contact with the table.  As you move up, you may only use a hole once, so you generally have to keep moving upwards towards the summit. 
The scoring can be a bit fiddly, as someone has to remain vigilant to record the scores at each step of the way.  But, once all the players are used to it – it’s not too bad.  In our games, we have developed a convention where the climber has to say “Score” out loud so that the scorekeeper knows when to record the score.  While this is going on, the other players can help out by watching to see if any of the cards move.  Whenever your turn ends, you score all the points you have accumulated thus far – which means that you don’t have to make it all the way to the top to score a lot of points as the game rewards style over climbing success. 
I know that it doesn’t sound like that much fun, but trust me, this game is a gas.  At Great Lakes Games, when we broke it out, we suddenly had a crowd of 5 or 6 people at all times watching alone.  Watching a climber try to crunch up his or her fingers to try to make a 4-finger play always caused much laughter (or derision) from the peanut gallery.  And, almost everyone who watched the game wanted to try it out – and it’s definitely much more difficult that it looks!  The only bad thing about the game (that I can find thus far) is that it’s not readily available in the US – but it does appear that it is distributed in Canada through the French speaking stores.


Mini Heckmeck - If Mosaix is the pseudo-hit of Essen ’09 and Climb! Is #2, Mini-Heckmeck would be #2a.  There is nothing different (other than size) than the older Heckmeck (aka Pickomino) – but this game comes in a tiny 1.5 inch round metal tin which you can easily tuck in your pocket or purse.  While we were traveling in San Francisco this weekend, this little gem was a lifesaver with the kids.  My kids have grown to love Heckmeck, and it’s turned out to be a pretty good addition practice tool as well.  The boys have definitely learned to add the dice up quickly, but they still have a bit of work to do on the risk assessment side of the game.  It’s funny how often the kids will go for it when they only have one die left to roll and only one possible valid number to roll.  Of course, the kids have been successful far more often than the expected value, and this might be influencing how often they go for it, but they seem to be getting the basics of the probability and are getting much better at the game. 


Well, that should wrap it up for now.  I’m leaving for BGG.con later tonight, so I should hopefully get to the rest of the Essen games after the weekend!  And, as much as I like travel, I’m actually looking forward to being able to spend a weekend at home soon…

Until your next appointment,
The Gaming Doctor

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