Postcards From Berlin #26: Nuremberg 2008, Day Two

By Jeff Allers
February 22, 2008

German Word of the Month: Neuheiten (new releases)

Editor’s note: This is the second of Jeff’s Nuremberg 2008 columns; the third will run within the next few days.

After a late night, my father was feeling ill and stayed in the room to rest while I went on the convention center alone. My first appointment was with Claudia Wieczorek, designer for Selecta Spielzeug, another game publisher known for beautiful wooden bits and nice children’s game mechanisms.

Coco Razzi

My favorite of Selecta’s new releases was this children’s game in which players transport their magnetic fruits from one end of the board to the other. In addition to moving their fruit carts, which carry one fruit each, they may also move the position of one or two palm trees. The trees are connected by a wooden pole, and a magnetic monkey which hangs from the pole can be moved back and forth above the board. If he moves directly above one of the loaded carts, the monkey’s magnet attracts the magnetic fruit from the cart. The player who has the most fruit (transported and stolen) at the end of the game wins.

There is one little catch, however. Each player also has coconuts that are worth negative points if stolen by an opponent. Since the fruit in a cart is kept face-down, it is a slight risk to use the monkey to steal from opponents.

Quatana

Claudia also showed me a new line of abstract games with retro-looking colors targeted mainly at youths. Quatana includes an 8x8 board with pawns in four colors and a number of wooden chips. Two to four players take turns placing a pawn. Whenever a player forms a square with four of her pawns, she receives a chip. After the last pawn has been played, the player with the most chips wins. This could be a real brain-burner, as players also score for “tilted” squares.

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I headed over to the large Schmidt Spiele booth where fellow Berlin designer and Schmidt developer Thorsten Gimmler met me at the front counter. As we began our procession through a large number of new releases, a 3-D plastic children’s game caught my attention. A motorized train circles a small track while lids over its box cars open and close. Players try to drop marbles down little chutes into the open boxcars for points. Thorsten said that they were going for that “Loopin’ Louie factor” – a children’s game that adults have fun playing.

Finito!

He proudly took me on a tour of Schmidt’s new Easy Play line of medium-sized-box fillers, which he worked hard to develop. “These are my babies,” he said. The first was Finito! by another veteran Berlin designer, Hartmut Kommerell. Each player takes a board with spaces numbered 1-20 as well as a set of chips numbered 1-12, which each player then mixes, face-down. Players flip over three of their chips to reveal the numbers; a 20-sided die is rolled, then each player decides which of his chips to place on the number matching the die roll. After all twelve chips have been placed, die rolls are used to move one chip at a time until one of the players has all of her chips in order from 1-12 and wins the game.

Big Points

In the second game in the series, from Brigitte and Wolfgang Ditt, players first make a path with wooden discs in five colors with a few white and black discs mixed in. Then five pawns in the same five colors are placed at one end of the path, while a staircase is placed at the other.

Each turn, a player may move one of the pawns to the next disc on the path matching that pawn’s color. Then he takes either the disc before that pawn or the one after it (if another pawn is on the disc, he takes the next one instead). The pawn that is moved to the staircase first is moved to the top stair and all discs collected in its color are worth 4 points. The second pawn to finish is worth 3 points, etc. Because of this, a player cannot usually collect the same color of the pawn she is advancing.
There are also two special discs: the white discs are each worth one point for every different color a player has collected, and the black discs can be used at any time to take an additional turn (but only one may be used per turn).

Burgenland (Castle Land)

In the only two-player game in the series, dice are used to move a figure around a circular track. The spaces on the track allow a player to build castle walls and towers in one of three colors, or take special dice which can be used to have more movement options.

The wall and tower tiles have point values on them, and there are special spaces on the track which score the castle in a specific color. When this happens, the player with the most points in that color scores as many points as the difference between her points and her opponent’s points in that color.

The game also has a small press-your-luck element, as a player may work on only one color of castle each turn. If he must move the figure out of that color, he loses the highest scoring castle piece from the end of his castle.

Drachen Wurf (Dragon Dice)

Players use dice to win tiles in different colors, either from the common reserve in the middle or from other players’ holding areas. Once dragons are secured, players score for sets of the same color or sets of the same background landscape. The opportunity for “take-that"-type play – something very uncommon in German games – is softened by the introduction of dragon eggs, which are awarded to a player when one of his dragons is stolen. I think that the eggs can then be used to modify future die rolls.

Serendipity

Thorsten also explained this beautiful tile-laying game from Drei Magier Spiele since Schmidt is handling German distribution. The components of the game are a number of colorful hex-shaped tiles that are mixed randomly and placed face-down on the table next to each other. Each player “owns” a color and attempts to score the most points by creating the largest connected areas of his color. There are also “serendips” that serve as jokers for any color or allow players to swap two tiles. Players flip over tiles during their turns; if the tile is in an opponent’s color, it is turned face-down again, adding a memory element to the game. The colorful flower tiles make the board beautiful to look at and will certainly appeal to casual gamers.

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Later, I passed a small booth at the entrance to the board game building and noticed Americans Michael Larson and Luke Hooper showing their laser game Khet to prospective European distributors. I had heard much about this team of professor and former student and enjoyed seeing their project in person for the first time. They were also demonstrating their newest expansion for the game, including beam splitter pieces that send the laser in two directions at once and the tower that adds a second smaller board above the original. Hopefully the base game and all future expansions will be available in mainland Europe sometime soon.

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As I walked into the Amigo booth, I suddenly felt as though I were in an airport terminal. The entrance near the front counter was lined with young ladies dressed in blue skirts and blazers with bright red handkerchiefs, ready to take visitors on a tour of the publisher’s new releases. The very cheery Judith was assigned to me and explained a few of them in her thick Bavarian accent.

Dino Detektive

The first was a pleasant-looking family game involving the search and reassembly of dinosaur bones. From what I remember, the mechanics were very intuitive and fit nicely with the theme, and the cartoony artwork was definitely aimed at a younger audience.

Six

We moved on to this very quick filler. In fact, it lasts only six minutes! Each player has an identical deck of number cards and draws four to place face-up in front of him. When a player takes his turn, he rolls three dice, then two dice, then one die, each time announcing the total of the dice to the other players. Anyone other than the active player who has that number showing places that card in his score pile. Then all players draw one card each and place it face-up in front of themselves; if a player already has four cards in front of him, he covers up one card. Only the top cards can be scored by matching die rolls, of course. The active player then passes the dice clockwise.

Before players start to roll the dice, however, a sand timer is started and covered by a cardboard cylinder. At the beginning of a player’s turn, if he thinks the timer has run out, he may reveal it. If he is correct, the player before him receives a penalty. If he is wrong, he receives a penalty and the game continues. If I remember correctly, the timer is two minutes long, so three of these timer-guessing rounds are played.

At the end of the game, the points from cards won are totaled, and the player with the most wins. The higher-numbered cards are worth more points, so there is a bit of speculation involved in deciding which face-up cards to cover up.

Horus

This game is produced by Mayfair Games and distributed by Amigo in Germany. It’s a tile-laying area-majority game about building along the Nile in ancient Egypt. There are a number of different colors of landscape tiles as well as river tiles, three of which are placed in a row in the middle to start the game. Several of each landscape type are stacked next to the playing area and the rest are placed in a cloth bag. Each player gets a number of claiming tokens and a starting hand of cards, each of which serves two purposes and depicts a landscape type and a number.

On a player’s turn, she first draws a tile from the bag and adds it to the previously placed tiles. Then she plays one of her hand cards and places a second tile from the reserve that matches the landscape depicted on her card. Eventually this creates chains of connected tiles of the same landscape. Finally, she may also place a claiming token on one of the tiles of a landscape chain as long as the number of tiles in that chain match the number on her card.

For instance, I could play a brown landscape card with the number 3. I could then add a brown landscape tile to the board, enlarging a chain of brown landscape tiles so that there were exactly three tiles in that chain. Finally, I could then place one of my tokens on one of the three tiles, matching the number of the card I played.

At the end of each turn, the player then draws a new card for her hand. Play continues with players adding land tiles or river tiles, expanding the board and placement options. A landscape chain cannot, however, be larger than six tiles as there are no cards higher than that number. At the end of the game, the player with the most markers in each chain receives as many points as the number of tiles in that chain.

From the explanation, Horus appears to be a very straightforward design and the graphics are nicely done, although the tiles are fairly small, especially considering the size of the game box.

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I then made my way to Phalanx Games, one of my most-awaited appointments of the convention. In my limited experience as a game designer, Uli Blennemann of the German office has always been surprisingly quick with helpful feedback whenever I’ve sent him a prototype, and he and Henning Kröpke have been working with Bernd Eisenstein and me for the past two years to refine one of our prototypes. It was exciting to finally present them with what we feel is the final version. Then we looked at two new releases from Phalanx.

Sultan

This lighter game comes from Brazilians Andre Zatz and Sergio Halaban, the designing team behind Kosmos’ Hart an der Grenze. Players are suitors of the Sultan’s daughter, each trying to win her hand by presenting the Sultan with the most impressive collection of jewels. I won’t go into detail on the rules, since they were already covered aptly in the BGN Nuremberg preview.

The Golden Age

Leo Colovini teamed with Guisppe Bau to produce this big-box game about the Netherlands and their guilds at the peak of their wealth. Although I can’t remember enough to explain the game in detail, I commented to Henning during his explanation that this seemed to be more thematic than Colovini’s recent designs. The simple elegance in the rules is still there, however, and I look forward to playing this in the near future.

Henning also informed me that Phalanx will probably not produce games in the smaller, Sultan-sized box in the near future, opting instead to return to the meatier big-box games it had been known for in the past. That’s certainly good news for gamers.

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Another meeting I was very much looking forward to was with Michel Matschoss, the head of Winning Moves Germany. Aside from being very enthusiastic about our forthcoming project together (my prototype was titled American Pie), Michel was more than happy to indulge my journalistic curiosity by answering questions about the beginnings of Winning Moves and his experiences in the board game business.

Before Winning Moves was founded, Michel worked for 3M and was at the Nuremberg Toy Fair in the 1970s when Twixt was first released. It was there that he first met Alex Randolph, who became a friend and later offered him the job of starting the German branch of the new publishing company. “I had an office without heating and a desk loaned to me by 3M and a telephone, and I didn’t know who to call first!” Michel recollected. Still, it was an adventurous time that he remembers fondly. Another highlight was co-designing 1982 Spiel des Jahres winner Sagaland with Randolph.

It was also interesting to learn from Michel that the board game building had quite a different look back then. Most of the publisher booths were much more closed to the aisles, and visitors needed to show their credentials to officials at the entrance of each booth in order to see their new products. “Everyone was afraid of getting their ideas stolen,” Michel laughed. Everyone except the 3M booth, which Michel recalled was colored bright yellow with “Twixt” displayed prominently. That sense of paranoia has since faded, as most publishers now allow easy access to their new releases.

And, speaking of new releases, Winning Moves has a few.

Cartagena: Die Goldinsel

The third game in this series is designed by Rüdiger Dorn, and the mechanics are quite different than the first two games from Leo Colovini. This one involves the search for the Golden Island.

Players use cards to move their pirates around the harbor town. Each space in the town provides players with different actions that can help them in their quest. When a player is outfitted for his voyage, he may then set sail and travel to the various islands on the board, using the same cards. Each island has a randomly placed chip worth an amount of points. Players may place numbered markers on the islands to claim the treasure at game’s end. In order to even be considered for winning the game, however, a player must have a marker on the Golden Island.

The Golden Island is determined at the beginning of the game. A deck of island cards are shuffled and one of the cards is removed from the deck without looking at it, representing the Golden Island for the game. Players use different actions to acquire island cards or look at other player’s cards in order to deduce where that island is. Because of the number of islands, however, it is impossible to know its exact location. So players must blanket a number of islands with their markers, and be careful not to waste them on islands with high-point chips and risk missing the Golden Island completely.

The game looks to be a nice family game addition to Winning Moves’ smaller square box line.

Blokus 3-D

This is yet another addition to the popular Blokus series. This one has already been previously released as the game Rumis, with only the production changing to fit in better with the silver plastic look of the other games.

Vineta

This game involves the fall of the mythic “Atlantis of the Baltic Sea.” Several cardboard pieces representing the city districts are placed together onto the gameboard, which represents the sea. Meeples in different colors are placed in the districts. Each player is randomly dealt a people tile depicting one of the colors and a city district tile showing one of the districts in addition to a point total.

As the city districts sink into the sea one-by-one during the course of the game, district sections and meeples are removed from the board. When only one district remains, players score points for the surviving meeples in their secret colors and the player who has the matching city district tile also scores the points on that tile. Since the districts form rings, the outer districts score more points, as it is more difficult to keep them from being destroyed.

During the game, players use cards to move the meeples to neighboring districts and vote on the next district to be destroyed. Bluffing, of course, is involved as players don’t want to reveal their meeple color too early in the game. The added dimension of trying to secretly preserve one of the city districts, however, makes it harder to keep track of the other player’s motives.

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It was time for a coffee break, so I headed to the café on the upper floor where I had a spontaneous chat with Sébastien Pauchon (on the right in the pic) and GameWorks partner Malcolm Braff. He had a copy of Jamaica at the table and said that the game will have a limited distribution in Europe, although its availability in the U.S. is still uncertain. He said he has received positive feedback from those who have enjoyed it as a family or “gateway” game.

Pauchon also said that his new release from Ytsari, Metropolys, may be his last game for a major publisher for awhile, as he and Malcolm are quite busy designing promotional games for companies, with two new orders for the summer and fall. This type of game design certainly puts them under more pressure, they confided. “We sold Jamaica before we even produced it,” Malcolm said. Nevertheless, Sébastien hinted they are contemplating self-publishing for the mass market. “But that takes even more time,” he said with a sigh.

Batavia

Though Queen Games was showing the first two games of its new children’s series, I was mostly interested in this new big-box strategy game, which is apparently a reworking of Moderne Zeiten, a game I have only read about.

Batavia is set in the East Indies during the golden age of trade with the European powers. It appears that England, the Netherlands, Sweden, France and Denmark have taken the place of the industries, as players now try to take the most influence over each. Instead of a stock market crash, however, there is war, signaled when one nation’s cards in play ("shares") reach a nifty wooden cannon on the nations track. Players move their figures along a path of tiles and each has a type of good (taking the place of MZ’s cities, I presume) and one of the countries pictured. There are also little crates in each player color with which players can mark their goods on the board to score points for majorities in each good. The usual Queen production is present in the beautiful illustrations, colorful flag cards and counters for each country, and unique wooden bits.

As I was checking out the game, a young illustrator, Christoph Clasen, dropped in to interview with Susanne Giger of Queen Games. I snapped a few photos as he flipped through his portfolio. I saw quite a few people walking from booth to booth with portfolios during the show and wondered if there were any future Franz Vohlwinkels among them.

Suleika

Next, I dropped by Zoch, where Bernhard Schmid, designer of HABA’s new game Faedelzoo, was demonstrating. The first was this game, produced to Zoch’s usual gorgeous standards. Each player is given some coins and a set of printed fabric “carpets” which are rectangular in shape and cover two spaces on the game board.

Each turn, the player rolls a movement die and must move a common figure in a straight line on the board. He may also rotate the figure 90 degrees before moving it. If he lands on another player’s carpet, he must pay that player as many coins as the size of that carpet, which may be made up of several carpets connected orthogonally. Then he may place one of his carpets on a space adjoining the figure and may cover the carpets of one or two opponents. At the end of the game, players are paid once more for the sizes of their carpets, and the player with the most money wins.

Fladderadatsch

This game about photographing animals brings back a recurring theme in Zoch’s children’s games: animal do-do. This time, it’s in the form of little magnetic chips that hide beneath tiles. The tiles make up the path that is traversed by the photographer figure, who is naturally also equipped with magnetic shoes. If the figure lands on the wrong tile, you hear a “click” and the poo, path tile and photographer are suddenly stuck together. The player then has the opportunity to place the chip under a different tile, so there is a changing memory element. And there is something in the game about photographing the animals, but the magnetic poop mechanism brought up so many images of the soiled Berlin streets I am forced to navigate, that I can’t remember exactly how it worked.

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In the evening, I was looking for a place to get a quick bite, when I again bumped into Corné van Moorsel and his friends. We found a nice German-style restaurant and joined a lone Chinese man who was there to promote his model-building company. We all enjoyed the multi-cultural experience, as Jun Liang Fung showed us cellphone videos of his wife and son in knee-deep snow and formulated wonderful sentences like, “The work is very happy – just like children.” He also admitted that German beer was far superior to anything in Shanghai.

Another Dutch game designer joined us this time: Arthur Tebbe, creator of Des Gold des Pharao among other titles. I had brought along a copy of Big Points and so, in true gamer fashion, we tried to work off our hearty meal by playing three games in under an hour. It is part of Schmidt’s “Easy Play” line, after all – something like the gaming equivalent of the 15-minute workout. Sorry to say, the only big points scored were by my Dutch opponents.

To be continued…

Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version
	The Schmidt train game
	Finito!, from Schmidt and Kommerell
	Serendipity, from Drei Magier Spiele and Etter
	Khet, from Innovention with Michael Larson and Luke Hooper
	Six, from Amigo and Prinz
	Vineta, from Winning Moves and the design team of Gibrin, Miyaji and Onça
	Batavia, from Queen and Glimne and Rejchtman
	Illustrator Christoph Clasen shows his work
	Fladderadatsch, from Zoch and Zeimet

© 2008 Jeff Allers

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