Kris Hall: My Origins 2009

I wasn’t anticipating much from Origins this year.  Each year the vendor area seems to shrink; this year Fantasy Flight Games made a minimal appearance with none of the interesting prototypes that they bring to Gencon.  And there seemed to be fewer hot new games to try out--or so it seemed to the three Appalachian Gamers who drove to Columbus for a one-day Origins visit. 

But the con was a pleasant surprise.  I managed to play a demo game or two, and found myself playing some unanticipated prototypes, and even bought a couple of games to round out my collection (this last item is the real shocker; I am notoriously reluctant to buy un-discounted games).

FRED DISTRIBUTION

I stopped by the Fred booth to say hello to Keith Blume and look at the Railways of England and Wales board that he had on display.  I was one of the playtesters of REW, and I was happy to see that the final board is as pretty and big as other members of the Railroad Tycoon family tree.  The big innovation in REW is that there is a set of advanced rules which introduce railroad stocks into the game--making it a cousin of Chicago Express or the 18xx series of games.  Keith confirmed that REW will be available to the public in a couple of weeks.  He also mentioned that the first Railways of the World basic game will have a mapboard of the eastern United States that can be mated with a later western US map to create a mega-big railroad game. And the plastic trains in the new Railways of the World game have deliberately been given colors different from the trains in the original Railroad Tycoon so that owners of both games will have enough sets of different-colored pieces to play twelve-player games.

Keith also confirmed that he hopes to publish Glenn Drover’s semi-sequel to Age of Empires III sometime in 2010.  At the moment, I believe this game is called History.

STEAM

I played a demo copy of Martin Wallace’s Steam, another member of the huge Wallace railroad game clan.  As many others have already noted, Steam is a fine re-imagining of Age of Steam. My friend Tom Hancock was more taken with Steam than I was; I am beginning to tire of plain-vanilla cube shuttling, and am more enthusiastic when other mechanisms are added (like the stock market rules in Railways of England and Wales).  Nevertheless, those who don’t yet own a Wallace train game might consider acquiring Steam. 

PROTOTYPES

The first prototype I played was a new game designed by Richard “Arkham Horror” Launius.” I had to sign a blood pact of secrecy about this prototype, but my first-born might not have to be sacrificed if I merely mention that it is probably coming from Jolly Roger games in 2010, and that it has a zany theme.

The second prototype I played was Campaign Manager 2008.  This is an election card game from Christian Leonhard and Jason Matthews, the folks who brought us 1960: the Making of the President.  These gentlemen have done a couple of smart things with this game.  For one thing, it is purely a card game, and one that plays fairly quickly.  This will make it accessible to many non-gamers.  They have also trimmed the game by limiting the competition to only those states that seemed to be battleground states in 2008; I forget the exact number of states in the game but it was more than twenty and less than thirty.

Each player begins the game by taking his deck of cards and selecting fifteen of them to build his deck for that particular game.  This deck-building mechanism will help give the game a lot of replayability.  Then players take turns either drawing a card or playing a card to influence control of the four states that are in play at that moment.  Once a player has captured a state for good, it is removed and the winner gets to choose a new state to put into play.

Each state has two tracks with voter spaces that can be claimed by each player: an economic issue track which favors the Democrats (more of the spaces are already theirs), and a foreign policy track that favors the Republicans (more of these spaces tend to be Republican Red).  There is also an issue track which records which of these two issues is most important to the voters of each state.  Naturally, many of the cards can be used to capture voters on one of the two tracks, or to change which of the two issues is most important.  Once a player has captured all the voters on one track, he has won the state--as long as that issue is the one that is most important to voters in that state.

Campaign Manager 2008 is fun and fast-playing.  In my game against Tom Hancock, I pulled ahead early only to see Tom cut my lead time and again.  I believe the contest was decided by the battle over the last of the big states in the game.  It was quite a nail-biter.

If I have a quibble with the game, it is merely that there is little on the cards besides the photographic artwork that seems to anchor the game in the 2008 election.  Change the pictures on the cards to George W. Bush and Al Gore, and you could have a Campaign Manager 2000 game without having to change much of the text on the cards at all. 

At least, that was my impression after one play. I’ll know better after I buy the game and play it a few more times.  And I strongly suspect that this will be a game I’ll be buying.

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