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Postcards From Berlin #27: Nuremberg 2008, Day Three
By Jeff Allers
February 24, 2008
German Word of the Month: Türsteher (bouncer)
Editor’s note: This article is part three of Jeff’s Nuremberg coverage. Part 1 and Part 2 are also on BGN; Part 2 has had additional images added since its publication.
After resting in the youth hostel all day Thursday, my father felt well enough again to join me for our final day at the fair. My first appointment was with Fritz Gruber from TM-Spiele/Kosmos. The enormous booth had café-style seating filled with activity. I mentioned to Fritz that it seemed like a “convention within a convention.” After a brief chat, he hooked me up with someone to take the tour of new games. Michael Schmitt, owner of the Spielwiese game café in Berlin where my group meets, joined me at the first game, fresh from his five-hour drive on the Autobahn.
Toledo
This new Martin Wallace game doesn’t have anything to do with trains, Fritz had joked. It is also not as meaty as Brass, nor is it an economic game. Looking at the board, one cannot help but draw comparisons to the road in Caylus. Toledo also involves placing tiles along the road to the castle which provide actions to the players who have workers there. This time, however, player pawns stay on the road from round to round and are simply moved forward through card play. A player may use as many of his cards in a turn as he wishes, as long as they are the same value.
Tiles represent merchants where players can buy steel and jewels, or fencing masters where players can increase their own skills with a blade. The resources are necessary in order to provide the sword maker with the materials needed for various victory-point swords, but learning how to fence is also important, as hostile encounters with opponents are inevitable. Once a player has a sword made, he must move one of his pawns to the castle to deliver it, possibly picking up a painting on the way for bonus points (and taking care not to pack it with the sword). The end of the game is signaled as soon as one player has three of his figures in the castle.
Keltis
Reiner Knizia designed this as the “Lost Cities Board Game.” Players play cards of different colors and values in front of them, either in increasing or decreasing order, then move their game pieces on the corresponding track on the board, picking up bonus tiles and racing to the top for the most points of each track. It looks both simple and elegant, with nice custom pieces and graphic design.
Globalissimo
Günter Burkhardt designed this nice quiz game about the countries of the world. Each country card has that nation’s flag on one side and facts in several categories on the other. Players do not need to know the exact answers to every question, however – even coming close gives a player points. The number of points a player receives is determined by how close her answer is to the correct one. Points are recorded by moving the player’s figure around the world.
Im Reich der Wüstensöhne
This is yet another one of Klaus Teuber’s variations on his successful Entdecker game mechanics. This time, players are using camels to discover desert oases and placing differently ranked figures to collect resources and score points. The starting spaces for the journey this time are two intersecting paths which form four quadrants where the “discovered” tiles are placed.
I then had a meeting with Jan Christoph Steines of Pegasus to discuss its future projects, as the company was not showing anything that hadn’t been previously released in the U.S. One scoop is that Pegasus will hopefully be releasing a reprint of the Kramer racing classic Top Race in Essen this year. In addition, they will also be starting a series of small card games to be produced in tin boxes. Two will be released each year beginning this summer, and the first four are already lined up, including three by very well-known designers (two of these will be reprints of classic games) and one by a lowly Boardgame News columnist who will feel very honored to be in such company…
My next appointment was to show Tobias Stapelfeldt of up-and-coming eggertspiele a prototype. When I arrived at their booth, Bruce Whitehill and his wife Sybille were still discussing with him the cover art and rules booklet to Bruce’s forthcoming German debut, Change Horses.
Change Horses
The game is billed as a horse racing game with a twist – and that it is. The goal of this race is to come in last. There is also bluffing involved, as each player is dealt a horse card secretly at the beginning of the game. Players also receive a number of carrot cards which are used to bid for turn order. Again, going last is preferable. That is because movement is determined by card play, and the last player to play a card has the most influence over the situation (although it is much more difficult to bluff in his situation).
Each movement card depicts two colors. After each player has played a card, all horses with even numbers don’t move, and all those with odd numbers move. There are also opportunities to switch lanes to block horses from advancing (again, that’s a good thing), and finally, to “change horses” by drawing a new horse card from those not dealt to the players and replacing it with the old one.
Neuland
Though I have not played the game yet in its first print run, I caught a glimpse of the new graphics and was impressed. The game, I was told, was exactly the same as the first print run, except that the rulebook was revised in order to clear up past confusion.
Stone Age
My father and I were again joined by Michael Schmitt, and we agreed to try out the new Hans im Glück games. The small booth seemed to be the only one where people were actually playing new releases, so I was eager to sit down and run through a few rounds myself.
Stone Age is a game about placing workers, Pillars of the Earth-style, in different areas on the board in order to procure resources, buildings or cards, or perform other actions. All of these elements, of course, can be combined in different ways to produce victory points, which makes many strategies viable.
A round consists of players placing one or more of her meeples onto an area of the board.
Each area has only a certain amount of available spots, and once they’ve all been filled, no other player can place there. Once all players have placed all of their meeples, each player carries out the actions of her meeples.
There are areas for providing the resources in the game such as food, wood, bricks, stone and gold. To receive a resource, a player rolls as many dice as the number of meeples he has there. Each resource has a factor and the total of the dice rolled is divided by that factor to calculate the amount of that resource to be awarded. Wood, for example, has a factor of 3. If I have 4 workers there, and I roll a 2, 2, 4, and 5, I receive 13/3=4 wood.
Houses can also be built by a meeple. These are basically victory point tiles of differing amounts that can be purchased by various combinations of resources.
Cards can also be reserved by a meeple and purchased with resources. These provide one instant reward (usually a resource) for the player who buys the card, but sometimes they offer benefits to all players. The second function of the cards are to provide end-game victory points either through set collection or multipliers of other things a player has collected.
There are also special spaces for Axe counters. When a meeple is placed there, that player takes one of the tiles and it can later be used to increase a die when rolling for resources.
Players can increase the number of their meeples at a special hut I referred to as the “love shack” (cue the B-52’s, please). One player each round can place two meeples there in order to add an additional meeple to his workforce.
And finally, there is a single space where one can place a meeple in order to increase that player’s “regular harvest.” Normally, every player must pay one food chip for every one of his meeples at the end of each round. The harvest points, however, decrease the number of required chips and make it less necessary to use valuable workers to hunt for food.
At the end of the game, players add their points from their buildings, sets collected from their cards, and multipliers on their cards (which may provide a certain amount of points for each meeple you have or each point on the harvest track, etc.).
It’s a typical Hans im Glück game with lots of things going on. The trick is to find the right combination of elements and multipliers to maximize one’s score. There is certainly room for longer-term strategies, but the opportunism encouraged by the placement mechanism means that flexibility and tactics are probably also a key to success in this game.
Die Hängende Gärten
At the beginning of the game, each player receives a base card divided into six squares. Each round, players take turns choosing from a set of face-up cards and adding them to their base cards. These cards, however, have different types of gardens pictured on them along with empty spaces. The cards must always be placed so that garden spaces are directly over the empty spaces of previously placed cards. Cards with many empty spaces, therefore, are often preferred since they broaden the base of what can later be “planted.”
The goal is to connect spaces of the same garden types in order to win victory point cards from the central board before opponents can do so. When a player has a certain number of connected gardens of one type, he may take the appropriate card. Little wooden temples can also be built onto the gardens, which can never be covered by future cards.
My father and I wanted to try to see a little more of the other toy booths at the fair, but were distracted by a couple of interesting two-player abstracts from Australian publisher Dr. Wood, distributed in Germany by Pro Ludo.
The first game involved placing cogs in two player colors onto a triangular board of pegs. Each player starts with one cog in a corner of the board. The third corner has the “victory cog” in a third color. Players take turns, alternately placing cogs onto the board and then spinning his starting cog. A player may also take one of his cogs already placed and move it to another location. This is especially important when a player’s starting cog cannot spin because his opponent has blocked one of the cogs in his chain. A player wins when he connects to the winning cog in a way that spins the victory cog. A player also wins, however, if he successfully prevents his opponent from being able to spin his starting cog after completing his turn.
Rail/Road
The other game is a Go variant (although the designer claimed not to know that ancient game) in which one player has track pieces and the other has road pieces. Each player must connect his pieces to form continuous tracks or roads in order to capture the most territory on the board and win the game.
My father and I bid Michael and the game building farewell and went to one of the main toy halls to check out the Lego booth, which was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the famous interlocking brick. There was a marked difference in the atmosphere in the other building. Most of the booths were completely enclosed, with large reception desks guarding small entrances to the displays. It reminded me of what Michel Matschoss had said about the way the game publishers used to be. We spotted the Lego booth and began to walk in when we were accosted by an official who barked at us for not showing him our credentials. Once we showed him our press passes, however, we were able to take the guided tour, a procession past some of the most amazing Lego landscapes, with mechanized cars, boats and planes that rivaled the miniatures in the model railroading hall. At the end of the tour, the displays opened up to a long full bar and plenty of café seating, where people in suits were having serious discussions with open laptops and briefcases covering almost every table.
We decided to move on to Mattel, but this time we were not allowed in by the “toy bouncers.” Instead, we needed to register at the front desk, where a receptionist phoned a public relations employee, who arrived to escort us to the games section. Aside from a new quiz game with an interesting mechanism to even the playing field and a couple of cute plastic children’s dexterity games, there were no new releases from the international giant. As she began to escort us to the door, however, we dared to beg a tour of some of the other toys, Matchbox and Hot Wheels in particular. She cheerily obliged and we were treated to a show, as two cars were released down a long track, colliding with every sort of apparatus that set off chain reactions and sent other cars into jumps and loops all over the room. It was like being in the middle of a domino competition. Then the cell phone of our PR person rang, and we were whisked away. I half-expected to be frisked by the toy-bouncers on the way out.
Leaving the convention center behind, my father and I made our way to the main train station, weaved our way through police in riot gear and singing soccer fans on their way home after a tie game, and boarded the train for Berlin. Sitting next to us was a young man who had just finished a cross-country skiing excursion in the Alps. We talked a bit, and when he heard that I was a game enthusiast, he took out his laptop and showed me one of the projects he had worked on in his Industrial Design studies. It was a concept for placing electronic game boards on city trams. If only we had one on this train now, I thought to myself…
| Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version | |
 | Globalissimo, from Kosmos and Burkhardt |
 | Im Reich der Wüstensöhne, from Kosmos and Teuber |
 | Change Horses, from eggertspiele and Whitehill |
 | Rail/Road, from Dr. Wood |
Posted by Jeff Allers on Feb 24, 2008 at 02:00 AM in Special Features, Postcards from Berlin / 1909
Comments:
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I had been hoping that the new edition of Neuland would include a fix for the lock-up problem. With that resolved I think it would be a very good game. Posted by Dan Blum on Feb 24, 2008 at 11:12 AM | #
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As far as I know Tobias & Peter fixed this. Every player gets at the start of the game a food- and a wood-marker that can be used anytime… Furthermore there is a wheelbarrow that can be used to reduce transportation-costs (no addition action-points for long distance). Posted by Klemens Franz on Feb 25, 2008 at 04:11 PM | #
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That’s good to know, but they should not tell people it is exactly the same as the first printing in that case. Posted by Dan Blum on Feb 25, 2008 at 04:13 PM | #
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When I asked the representative who showed me Neuland if there were any changes to the game play, he said it was mainly the new art and a much better-written rules booklet.
Keep in mind that Nuremberg is an industry convention, and the people that publishers show the games to are usually not gamers, but rather distributors and sellers. They aren’t interested in the details that we would want to know, and therefore the people who often explain the games aren’t aware of these details either. I’m sure Peter or Tobias would have gladly spoken about the finer points of the new edition, but I really did not have time to double-check due to the shear volume of games I was trying to cover. Posted by Jeff Allers on Feb 25, 2008 at 04:25 PM | #
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Thanks for the great report, Jeff. Have you been to Essen? If so, how would you say the two shows compare from the perspective of a designer who wants to show prototypes? Greg Posted by Greg Daigle on Feb 25, 2008 at 08:00 PM | #
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This was my first convention--ever! I’ve never been to Essen, as I always have work or family commitments that time of year, so I can’t compare.
The best place to show prototypes to German publishers is in Goettingen usually the beginning of June. That’s where the publishers are specifically looking for new game ideas, and they aren’t distracted by needing to sell games or make deals. Besides, you can only get into the Nuremburg convention if you have a press pass or are a member of the SAZ (Spielautorenzunft/Game Designer’s Association)--or if you are a publisher/exhibitor, of course. Nowadays with the internet, it’s fairly easy to send an email to publishers with a brief description of the game, the complete rules (and componant list), and a photo of the prototype. Most publishers respond in a timely manner. But it does help to make some face-to-face contacts, as well. Posted by Jeff Allers on Feb 25, 2008 at 08:11 PM | #
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Thanks for the fast response, Jeff! Those are some late hours you’re keeping! Posted by Greg Daigle on Feb 25, 2008 at 08:22 PM | #
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Greg, apparently Jeff is too modest to mention previous columns that he wrote on Goettingen, both in 2006 (http://www.boardgamenews.com/index.php/boardgamenews/comments/postcards_from_berlin_5_where_designs_are_discovered/) and 2007 (http://www.boardgamenews.com/index.php/boardgamenews/comments/postcards_from_berlin_16_return_to_goettingen/) with lots of pictures in the second report. Postcards #5 and 16 for those keeping score at home. Eric Posted by W. Eric Martin on Feb 25, 2008 at 11:29 PM | #
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Too modest...and too tired to think of it. Thanks, Eric. Yeah, I’m in the process of changing jobs and moving, and I’ve been working late trying to “finish strong.” We’ll be in the U.S., then move back to a different part of Berlin. Posted by Jeff Allers on Feb 26, 2008 at 04:18 AM | #
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