Patrick Korner: GoF 2007 Review - Eggertspiele

So, another Gathering of Friends has come and gone.  And once again it was the highlight of my gaming year (mind you, between Essen and the GoF, there’s not much else on the calendar...).  A few things to get out the way first:

1) Huge thanks to all who attended, played games with me, chatted with me, laughed with me, and generally made my time in Columbus as much fun as it could possibly have been.  And an especially huge thanks to Kris Gould and his minions who went over and above the call of duty to supply the food table with more food than you could shake a pawn at.  And lest I forget, thanks above all the rest to Alan for having such a great party and seeing fit to invite me to it.

2) The week’s Most Astonishing Moment (tm): Air Canada performing completely as advertised on both the flight there and back.  No lost luggage, no late departures, efficient transfers in Toronto, and sufficient space there and back to let me upgrade to Business and enjoy a little creature comforts en route.  Truly a magnificent achievement.

3) My biggest regret over the 5 days I was there: Missing out yet again on a chance to play a game or two with Mike Siggins.  Mike’s writing is what mine aspires to be on its better days; there are few others who can meld insight, humour and critique into as heady a brew.  Next year, Mike!

My original intent was to try and post ‘live from the floor’ but once again technical difficulties (not to mention my own innate laziness) took over.  So you’ll have to be satisfied with post-event reporting as in previous years; I’ll see about finding a few nuggets of information to set my scribblings apart from the crowd.

So onward.  Instead of trying to read my terrible notes and recreate the days one-by-one, I’m going to focus on one or more publishers each installment and discuss what’s up with them in a little more detail.  Today, I’ll talk about the latest Eggertspiele release as well as a little of what’s coming up from the Peter and the rest of the Hamburg crew.

Guatemala Cafe

Guatemala Cafe, designed by Ingo and Markus Brand, took second place in last year’s Hippodice Competition.  The game’s about coffee plantations in Guatemala (if this was not obvious from the title, then perhaps you need to shut your PC down, go outside and bash your head against a convenient tree for a little while) and comes with the now-patented Mass Of Bits that Eggert afficionadoes have come to expect.  In the little bitty box (which is the same size as Space Dealer but only about half as high), you get:

- Tons of wooden workers, houses and ships (in the five coffee bag colours) as well as road segments (generic)
- 35 chunky wooden coffee bags in five colours
- cardboard money in three denominations
- cardboard plantation markers for each player (five per player)
- two double-sided boards

...and, last but certainly not least, a little bag of honest-to-God coffee beans.  These are, in the game’s own words, for nothing more than “adornment and aroma” and serve no purpose other than to give the game the proper flavour.  And who says Euro games don’t have theme?

The game is played over both boards, which are set up next to each other.  One shows a grid of spaces on which the houses, ships, workers and such are placed; this board has six spaces running diagonally across it for coffee bags as well.  Over the course of the game, players will buy bits from this board for placement on the other board; empty spaces on the ‘supply’ board are replenished with roads (which are then also available for purchase).

The ‘plantation’ board shows spaces for coffee plantations, spread over three different region types: mountains, forests and lowlands.  The mountains, being the furthest from the harbours, are the cheapest to build in (but will require a much longer road to be built if they are to be linked with the harbours below) while the lowlands are the most expensive.

At the start of the game, each player gets all five plantation markers in their colour, along with six randomly-selected coffee bags (the colours of which are kept secret) and 15 centavos (i.e. cash).  In a four-player game, this means that five coffee bags will not be used - this adds a little randomness to the setup and ensures that players can’t try and keep perfect track of how many of each colour are left.

On a player’s turn, the first thing they do is move a big grey pawn who travels around the circumference of the supply board.  The player may move up to three spaces for free; they may also pay 2 to move one extra space (but can never move more than 4 spaces total).  Once the pawn has stopped moving, then the player can do one of two things: a) buy items or b) score.

Buy Items
The player may buy any three items contained within the row or column adjacent to the grey pawn.  Costs depend on where the items are being placed.  Plantations built on mountain sites cost 2, while workers placed in the mountains cost 1.  The comparable costs in the forests are 4 and 2 while the lowlands will set you back 6 and 3, respectively.  Ships go into the harbours and cost whatever the space they are placed on indicates (between 2 and 4).

Workers generally need to be next to a plantation of the same colour to be useful - they aren’t worth any points otherwise.  It’s possible to place a plantation-less worker, but the likelihood of it getting cut off from potential plantation sites is (in a four-player game, especially) quite high.  Workers of the same colour but owned by competing players can’t be next to each other (which makes sense - how else to tell who owns what?).

Road segments are free to buy and go on the pre-printed road spaces that link a row of plantations with a harbour - there are a total of four roads and therefore four harbours (on the multiplayer side of the board, at least).  The 2-player side apparently allows free-form road placement as there are no roads shown - I’ll have to play it 2p and report back on this.

So why bother with all this buying and placing and buying and placing?  Well, to score points, of course.  Which brings me to…

Scoring
Once a player has moved the pawn as usual, they can choose to try and score instead of buying items.  To do this, they take the coffee bag from the row / column the pawn is at and place it on the last open space on the victory point track (the track goes to 50).  The player receives 8 centavos from the bank and then scores - all plantations for all players that match the colour of the chosen bag will score.  Scoring is simple: one point per worker attached to a plantation.  If the plantation is linked via road to a harbour with at least one ship of the matching colour in it, then the points are multiplied.  A single ship is a x2 multiplier, while two and three ships are x3 and x4 multipliers, respectively.  A ship, once used in scoring, is removed from the game (always the lowest-cost ship should there be more than one in the harbour).

The empty coffee bag space on the board is then replaced by one of the player’s own coffee bags.

One tweak to scoring: It’s possible to block other players.  If, when scoring is triggered, another player replaces the chosen bag with an identically-coloured bag from their own supply, the scoring is cancelled this round.  The chosen bag still goes on the victory point track and the active player still gets their 8 centavos, but no scoring takes place.  Instead, as consolation, the player gets to carry out a ‘buy items’ turn.

The game continues until a player’s scoring marker reaches or passes the last open space on the victory point track (recall that the coffee bags start getting added to the track at 50 and gradually start inching backwards).  This means that in a 4-player game, it’s not unusual for the winning score to be closer to 35 than 50.

Impressions
I like the game.  It’s different from anything else I own (which is getting to be an ever more difficult thing to say about new games).  It’s engaging and certainly well-appointed bits-wise, especially for the price (which, at least check, comes in at just under 29 Euros at adam-spielt.  Serious heft to the box thanks to all that wood!

The four-player game is an interesting mix of the tactical and the strategic.  Of immediate concern on one’s turn is moving the pawn to best effect right now (i.e. getting to buy what you really want / scoring the colour you really want to), but there are longer-range things to think about as well.  Where should I leave the pawn?  What will the next players in line likely want to do?  Is there value in entering an informal alliance with another player by sharing a road (and thereby hopefully splitting the road-building duties)?  How many plantations should I start up and where should I place them?  Some interesting thought exercises which allow the game to be played in a much more thoughtful manner than the ‘play it by ear’ approach the game initially seems to involve.

Is the game the greatest thing ever?  Of course not.  Honestly, I didn’t get quite the same spark from this game as I did from Imperial or Antike, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad game.  I’d rate it a 7 after two plays and look forward to exploring the 2p game as well as trying different multiplayer strategies.

Cuba

Cuba is the Eggertspiele game currently planned for release at Essen this year.  I can’t say too much about it as I played a prototype version of the game and therefore can expect a certain amount of change between what I played and the finished product, but I will offer a few general thoughts:

Cuba is an economic game with a production / trading / shipping engine that feels somewhat reminiscent of Puerto Rico but with some added twists.  For example, production and building effects are handled completely differently.  There’s a ‘parliament’ area that affects game rules round to round.  And a few other interesting bits that add flavour to the game.

I played the game once with 3 players and thought it was quite good.  A little hard to grok at first, but then I felt that way about Puerto Rico the first time I played as well.  I definitely got the sense of “too many needs, not enough actions” which is part of what a well-designed economic game needs.  If you can always do what you want, then the tension just isn’t there.  The fact that this game forces you to pay attention to Parliament each turn (which has the effect of limiting your choices for the round) is what demands that players plan carefully.  I’ll be very interested in seeing if any further development occurs between now and October - there were a few rough edges left in the design, but I’m sure the Eggert gang will have planed them down to satiny smoothness by then.

Upcoming Game

Sadly, I can say even less about what ended up being one of my favourite games at the Gathering, as its release status is still uncertain.  I loved the game enough to beg a copy of the prototype board off the publisher so that I can cobble my own copy together - which is the first time I’ve ever done that.  I’d love to spill, but Peter has kindly asked me to refrain so I’ll leave it at this:

This game needs to be published.  Soon.

Other Bits

The release calendar for Eggertspiele is starting to fill up.  I’m told by little birdies that a reprint of Neuland might be on the horizon, but that nothing is set in stone.  Much depends on finding an amenable US publishing partner to defray the production cost, and negotiations are not yet completed.  Add to that another smaller game, reprints of Antike, Imperial and Space Dealer to keep up with demand, and you have a smaller publisher rapidly growing to medium size.  Eggertspiele has had tremendous success the past couple of years and I haven’t seen anything that makes me think that growth won’t continue into this year as well.

Next time: My thoughts on Zooloretto and Wikinger.

pk

© 2007 Patrick Korner

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Don’t forget to cover the fun times with Jetzt Schlägt’s 13! Posted by W. Eric Martin on Apr 26, 2007 at 09:07 PM | #

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