Game Preview: Ystari Box

By W. Eric Martin
October 18, 2009

Designers: Cyril Demaegd, William Attia, Sébastien Pauchon, Dominique Ehrhard
Publisher: Ystari Games / Rio Grande Games

Release date: October 2009
Price: Approx. €19
Links:

The Ystari Box will include new material for many of the publisher’s most recent releases, namely Amyitis, Caylus Magna Carta, Metropolys, Sylla and Yspahan. (The Rio Grande version of the expansion will include Mykerinos: The Nile, a tiny expansion that was released in 2007 and previously distributed at U.S. game conventions.) Says Ystari’s Cyril Demaegd, “Nowadays most games disappear almost as fast as they appeared on the market, just because most of them are not ‘games’ but ‘products’. With these expansions, we can send a clear message: Our ‘old’ games are still in our heart, and we don’t just consider them as ‘throwaway products,’ so maybe the Ystari Box will be a good occasion for people to replay our older games and have fun! That’s my wish...”

William Attia’s Caylus Magna Carta: The Favors makes up the largest expansion in the box as it includes both components for a fifth player (12 cards and purple wood bits) as well as a gameboard and cards that import the favors from Caylus to CMC, but in a new way. The new cards are prestige buildings that bear the familiar fleur-de-lys, and if you construct one of these buildings or activate a Joust card (with each player now having a Joust card in her set of building cards), you receive a favor. Players also receive a favor, instead of gold, when they offer the most lots during the Castle phase.

The favors allow you to obtain resource cards (which can be spent like cubes of the same color), advance along the prestige track (scoring points at game’s end based on how far you travel), or take a special power, such as moving the Provost for free, paying one cube less when building, or earning both effects when you activate one of your own buildings.

Cyril Demaegd’s Amyitis: The Palace will see the re-introduction of The Palace of Nebuchadnezzar. Two new characters are added to the game – Courtiers and Nobles – and recruiting these characters at their respective costs moves you up the palace track. The setup phase each round is now followed by a palace phase in which players choose special powers, such as becoming first player or gaining a free recruitment, based on their order on the palace track. Says Demaegd, “We had this idea from the beginning and it was included in the original game, but we removed it because we thought the game was complex enough. Of course, [the Palace] is not quite the same now, but the idea is the same.…”

Dominique Ehrhard’s Sylla: caveant consules includes a dozen cards that fill out the game in small ways. Two new characters are added to each player’s character set: the Gladiator, who earns you prestige and counts as a Leisure token, and the Philosopher, who doubles the power of another character. The Forum Romanum is a new project, and the Earthquake and Military Defeat are new events that can strike down your characters.

Yspahan: The Souks and the Metropolys expansion are among the smallest in the box. For Metropolys, you have four new goal cards that replace the District goals in the base game. Players now score nine points if they control three buildings in the district depicted on their card. Demaegd says that these cards will also be available for download from the Ystari website.

As for Yspahan, this 18-card expansion replaces the cards in the base game, and while a few of them are repeats from the original set of cards, most of them are new, with powers such as trading goods for points, gold or camels, using a set of dice on the Tower at the end of the turn, and earning points for placing goods in each neighborhood.

Demaegd says that the expansions came about for different reasons, the favors in CMC being a logical extension of the card game, the cards in Yspahan and Metropolys being variations on the original – glimpses of another world, if you will – and the mix in Sylla coming from Demaegd prodding Ehrhard: “We had this expansion box planned, so I asked Dominique to produce a few new ideas because I thought there was still some ideas to explore.”

I asked Demaegd whether he imagined that these expansions would take away from the original games by presenting them as incomplete or not as good as they could be. Previously, say, Amyitis was complete unto intself, a finished item presented as one unit. Now players will be confronted with two versions of the game, with some likely to prefer one version over another. “I see your point, but I don’t totally agree,” he said. “In fact, the development of a game can just be endless, and it would probably be endless without deadlines like Essen. So our goal when we produce a game is to deliver something which is perfectly playable and perfectly tuned – but of course that doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to work on the game any more, simply because my guideline is the famous Kramer quote ‘Work on your game and when you think it’s perfect, then keep on working!’ When we published Amyitis, I was really happy because we pushed the development and tuning as far as possible. (We always do, but it’s particularly difficult for complex games.) But it doesn’t mean the game is ‘finished’. It just means ‘perfect like this for my taste at this moment’. Also, it doesn’t mean that with the expansion Amyitis is ‘finished’; it’s just ‘a different way to play the game’.”

The new/old palace board for Amyitis


“For me,” continued Demaegd, “the perfect expansion is something that’ll twist the dynamic of the existing game without changing the central ideas, such as the El Grande expansions. In a sense, every game can be tweaked, you’re right (except maybe for pure abstracts) but the ‘best version’ is just a matter of taste. Do I prefer ‘classical’ El Grande or King & Intrigant? Honestly, I don’t know. It depends on my mood, or on the weather, but one thing is sure – without El Grande, there would be no King & Intrigant, so the only important thing is to publish good games because a good basis is obviously more important than a good variant. The idea of an expansion is not to ‘finish’ a game, but to propose something different (at least that’s my own philosophy about expansions). Nowadays, video games tends to be released unfinished – nearly unplayable before some patches are released – but, for god’s sake, it’s not the case for most board games!”

In terms of testing the base game, Demaegd mentioned the public’s reception of Bombay in early 2009, specifically comments by some that the ideal strategy in the game is passing every turn, netting 18 points and snagging the win. “Nowadays, there’s a lot of people who tend to judge things fast and say, ‘They should have done this that way’ or ‘This thing is broken,’ then propose their own version. I’ve got no problem with people who like to tweak games – after all, they bought the game so they can even burn it ;) – but I don’t like fast judgements. We test our games A LOT (hundreds of games), just to ensure everything is balanced, and I don’t think someone who played it once or twice can judge the balance with the same accuracy as me. (If so, I should just quit this job ;) These people didn’t realize their score was really low as everyone should normally score above 20 and the winner should score more than 30 easily. They thought the game needed a tweak, and that’s the kind of tweaking I don’t like because it is based on false conclusions.”

As for gamers choosing one version over another, Demaegd says it makes no difference to him. “The best version is the version you like the most. For each game in the Ystari Box, the ‘standalone’ game is perfectly playable, and the expansion adds some possibilities thay may, or may not, be suitable for you. People should just play and have fun rather than discussing what’s official and what’s not. Is it so important? I don’t think so. Life is short, so just enjoy the ride!”

The French website Tric Trac has run a preview for each expansion, often with multiple images: Caylus Magna Carta, Amyitis, Sylla and Metropolys.

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