Larry Levy:  It…Is…Balloon!

I got to play a bunch of Essen games last Saturday and I hope to do the same next week.  Rather than wait for my regular column and try to summarize all of them, I thought I’d dole things out in small portions.  One of the games I played was Giganten der Lüfte and there’s been remarkably little written about it, so I thought I’d start off with a brief review of that game.  Please keep in mind that I’ve only played it once.

GdL is the latest design from Andreas Seyfarth and is published by Queen, who somehow managed to keep all news about this design under wraps until just before the fair.  It’s a dice game with the theme of building dirigibles, with the big payoff being the construction of the ill-fated Hindenburg.  (I have to wonder, does this theme give Germans the same wistful feeling that a game about building the Titanic would give English-speaking gamers?) There have been some great dice games which have appeared in recent years (like Pickomino and To Court the King), but unlike those earlier games, Giganten der Lüfte features different kinds of dice.  There are three kinds:  white dice include the numbers 1, 2, and 3 (each used twice); red dice are averaging dice (2-3-3-4-4-5); and black dice use the numbers 4, 6, and 8 (again, each used twice).  There are three dice of each color provided in the game.

The players’ ultimate objective is to build some blimps.  There’s a bunch of component cards in six categories, each representing things that will assist in this pursuit (like engines, scientists, and money).  Every card shows a minimum total value needed to win it, the dice that can be counted to achieve this total (for example, a card might show two white dice or a red and a black die), and the power that the card gives the player who wins it.

At the beginning of the game, a number of these cards are exposed and organized by category.  Each player begins the game with the ability to roll two white dice.  They also start with some “+1” chips (3 for the first player, 4 for everyone else).

On each player’s turn, they point to one of the cards and get to roll their dice one time to try to equal or exceed the target value.  So, for example, a player on his first turn might select a card that shows one white die and the value “3”.  That means the player can only apply a single white die to get to a value of 3 or more.  The player would roll both of the white dice he’s allowed to roll.  If either one (or both) rolled a 3, he would win the card.  If, instead, the highest number he rolled was a 2, he would have the option of using one of his +1 chips to increase the total to 3 and take the card that way.  However, players are only allowed to spend one +1 chip a turn.  If the player doesn’t win a card (either because his total is too low or because he chose not to spend a +1 chip), then as a consolation, he is given another +1 chip.  No matter how the player fared, another card is added to the display and the next player takes her turn.

The card powers include a variety of things and cards in the same category tend to award similar things.  Some of them allow you to roll more dice.  So if the first card you win shows a white die, on your next turn you could roll three white dice.  If, instead, it showed a red die, you could roll two white and one red die.  In addition to rolling higher values, die color is significant because of the rules for applying dice to cards.  For example, the requirement for a card might be to apply one red die for a total of 3.  If you had nothing but white dice, it wouldn’t matter if you rolled a 3 on them or not; you still couldn’t win the card because you didn’t have a red die to apply to the card.  Another reason it matters is that you can’t roll more than three dice of the same color.

There are other kinds of dice-related cards.  Some give you a guaranteed number on a die.  So one might show a red die with a 4.  Treat this as an additional red die that always rolls a four.  Other cards allow players to convert dice.  So a card might let you convert two white dice to a red die.  If your other cards gave you the capability of rolling three white dice, you would have the option of rolling one white die and one red die instead.

Some cards give you an automatic +1 to a die, usually to a single color.  So a card might have a black +1, meaning that you could add 1 to any black die you roll.  Other cards give you additional +1 chips.  Finally, some cards give victory points, either as their sole benefit or in addition to a power.  So as you can see, there’s a nice variety of card powers that you can acquire.

You accumulate the cards you win, so your abilities grow with each turn, enabling you to go for more valuable cards with higher target totals.  However, you can only display the last card from each category that you’ve won; earlier cards from that category are covered up.  So you usually want to go after different categories and winning a particularly valuable card (like those that give victory points) might stop you from trying for future cards in that category.

+1 chips have another use.  At the end of any of your turns, you can turn in three of them and take an additional turn.  This extra turn works just like a normal one.  You can never have more than six chips at a time, but a player with this total could actually turn them all in and get two additional turns.

In addition to the component cards, there are cards which show completed blimps.  Each of these has the same organization as the components cards, except the payoff for winning them is only a given number of victory points.  Some of the blimp cards are dealt out before the game into four face-up stacks on the central display.  Rather than trying to win a component card on your turn, you can point to the top card of one of these stacks and roll to acquire it.  All blimp cards you win count toward your game end VP total.  In addition, if you take a blimp card, you also earn a wooden blimp token that you can use in a future turn as a +1 to your die total.  This can be used in addition to a +1 chip.  However, there is only one blimp token and if another player takes a blimp, he’ll swipe it from you if you haven’t used it yet.  So you’ll always use your blimp token before spending any +1 chips.

When one of the blimp stacks is exhausted, the players can finally attempt to build the four parts of the Hindenburg.  These are shown on the board, so they’re the same for each game.  These work just like blimps (the player declares that he wants to try for this particular part and rolls for it), but the VP award for each is greater if all four parts are built than if fewer than four are.  Each part can only be built once, so it’s a case of the players combining to build the great airship.

The game ends in one of two ways.  If the fourth part of the Hindenburg is constructed, it ends immediately.  It also ends if after a player builds a blimp, there is no more than one card in each of the four blimp stacks.  The players total up their VPs from their exposed component cards, their blimps, and the parts of the Hindenburg they’ve constructed.  The player with the highest total wins.

Giganten der Lüfte succeeds on many levels, but perhaps the most important is its speed of play.  On your turn, you point to a card, roll your dice just once, and that’s it!  Consequently, there is very little downtime, an unusual and most welcome feature for a dice game.  It’s also nice that Queen limited the game to four players.  Just about all of the recent dice games, including Pickomino, To Court the King, and the Settlers Dice Game, slow to a crawl when played with the maximum number of players.  But GdL plays great with four.  In fact, you wonder if this is actually a dice game that could be played in a reasonable amount of time with five or six and I fully expect an expansion allowing more to play if the game is a hit.  But for now, I applaud Queen for setting a realistic limit on the number of players.

All of the dice games I’ve cited utilize the Yahtzee base mechanic, where dice are rolled, you get to save some (and usually have to save at least one), and then you reroll the rest.  This gives the players of these games a great number of thoughtful tactical decisions.  That element in missing in GdL, but it replaces it with something just as interesting:  limits on the dice you can apply.  You can roll all your dice every turn, but there are strict limits on which of these are used to add up to the target total and this restriction depends on the card you’re pursuing.  This sounds simple enough, but it does provide for some less than straightforward decisions.  For example, say you can roll 3 white dice and 2 red ones.  Would you rather go after a card that lets you use 2 white and 1 red dice to get to a total of 9, or one that lets you apply 1 white and 2 red dice to achieve a target of 11?  The odds for situations like these can be computed, but probably not in your head, so you want to try to get a feel for how likely these requirements are.  I found dealing with these choices to be a very nice challenge.  Add to this the different rewards the cards give, the problem with winning multiple cards from the same category, the desire to maintain a healthy total of +1 chips, and the race to build the Hindenburg, and you’ve got a goodly number of interesting decisions presented in a pleasant and non-threatening package.

The folks on the Geek who’ve incredulously asked how the designer of Puerto Rico, for God’s sake, could come up with a high-luck dice game are missing the point.  Like most good dice games, Giganten der Lüfte is about probability management.  The nice thing is that Seyfarth has come up with a different way to give players this kind of challenge and there really is a reasonable amount to think about.  No, it isn’t Puerto Rico and it doesn’t aspire to be.  It’s just a lot of fun and rewards skill in the way that players choose to develop their dice rolling engines.

In my game, I had good success being aggressive, particularly when it came to acquiring dice of the next higher category.  Adding red dice is quite important in the early game, as is gaining black ones later on.  Since the penalty for failure isn’t that great (lost turns don’t seem nearly as bad here as in other dice games and you also get that extra +1 chip), I think this may be the way to go.  But you need to have at least a vague strategy of how you’re going to add on the different colored dice you’ll be needing to get the high ticket items you’ll be going after late in the game.

There are many nice design touches in the game.  There are excess blimp cards provided, so each game plays a little differently.  The component deck is stacked so that the later cards are the more powerful ones that are harder to achieve, but provide better rewards, like black dice.  This gives the games the proper progression, as the focus shifts from white to red to black dice as the game goes on.  The blimp token is also a good idea.  Once a player wins one, there’s some pressure on the other players to go after the blimps, lest she get the chance to use a free +1 on her next turn.  This pushes the players’ attention to the blimps, which can end the game, without mandating that they do so.  It’s a fine game accelerating device.

Best of all, this is perhaps the most forgiving dice game I’ve ever seen.  There are +1 chips in case you just miss (along with chances to get more of them).  If you do crap out, you get another chip, so no turn is a total loss.  Chips can also be used to take an additional turn, so with enough of them, you can have two (or even three) cracks at a critical card.  And you get to set your target each turn, so you can tailor your strategy to your tolerance for risk-taking.  This guarantees that players will have many fewer frustrating turns than in most other dice games.  I’m sure these elements were carefully included to make the game more appealing to families.  But while board and card games which are more forgiving tend to be of less interest to gamers (since we like our challenges), dice games with this quality are probably more interesting to us, since they minimize the luck level introduced by the dice.  It seems to be a win-win situation and is a very nice feature of the game.

I think Giganten der Lüfte will be a great family game for the European market.  It’s a bit rules heavy, but the concepts are simple, there are decisions to be made (none of them too taxing), it plays fast, and besides, everyone likes to roll dice.  It’s pretty early for these kinds of predictions, but I thoroughly expect it to be nominated for an SdJ next year and should turn out to be one of the leading contenders for the award.  American families are used to simpler fare, so it may not have quite the same success in the States, but if marketed properly, I think it could still do very well.  I have no idea what Rio Grande’s plans are, but at the very least, I’d expect to find it in stores that feature Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne.  I think it fits in very well with those great gateway games, giving families the choice of a dice game, a card game, or a tile-laying game.  Perhaps GdL’s most successful application will be with mixed groups of gamers and non-gamers.  I think both will be able to enjoy it at the same time and there’s enough luck to keep the experienced folks from dominating the winner’s column.

My admiration for Andreas Seyfarth’s design abilities continues to grow.  I honestly feel he is the logical successor to the great Karl-Heinz Schmiel.  Like KHS, Seyfarth’s games are universally excellent and no two of them are at all alike.  Since 2002, he’s even maintained a pace of about a game a year, similar to what Schmiel did in his heyday.  And since just about everything else he’s done has won awards, it’ll be interesting to see how this design is met.

The components are up to Queen’s usual fine standard.  There’s nothing knock-out gorgeous about it, but the cards, counters, and dice are well constructed, the iconography is colorful and clear, and the boards are usefully designed.  The dice are also easy to read from across the table, making it easy to follow your opponents’ progress, a nice feature considering the game has the same low player interaction most dice games have.  The boards are illustrated with engineering drawings, appropriate to the subject matter and the turn-of-the-century time period.  Really, my only complaint is that the boards, like most small German game boards, don’t really lay flat, but that doesn’t impede the playing of the game at all.

Obviously, I want to play this some more to see what kind of legs it has, but for now, I give this one a solid thumbs up.  It’s fast, it’s fun, and it gives you something to think about.  Families should love it and gamers looking for a relaxing game with a bit of meat should as well.  I don’t know how Queen managed to keep this so quiet for so long, but since they missed out on the usual pre-Essen buzz, it’s good to see that Giganten der Lüfte didn’t turn out to be full of hot air.

Comments: