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Rick Thornquist: The Gathering of Friends / Nuremberg Games - Part III

This is the third and final part of my report on the Nuremberg games from the Gathering of Friends. In this part I also talk about a few other things from the Gathering.

Guatemala Café
The first game up for bids is Guatemala Café, the newest offering from Eggertspiele. Over the past few years Eggertspiele has won me over with very good games like Global Powers, Neuland, Imperial, and the great Space Dealer. Now I consider any new game from them a must-see. It looks like with Guatemala Café they may have another good one on their hands.

Guatemala Café is a big box boardgame about planting and harvesting coffee. Like other Eggertspiele games they have a lot of bits crammed in the box – you get big piles of chunky wooden pieces in addition to two boards.

One board is a market where you buy your factories, workers, roads and ships. The other board is a plantation where you build these things.

On your turn you can grab three things from the market and build them on the plantation board. The factories allow you to produce certain types of coffee (there are five different types) and the workers get allocated to these factories in order to get victory points when the factories score. The roads and the ships, if built in the right place, can multiply your score.

Instead of building things from the market, you can score one type of coffee. Note that all players will score that type of coffee, not just you! Play continues with players building and scoring. At the end, the player with the most points wins.

That is a very quick description – there’s quite a bit to this game that I haven’t mentioned. It is a bit on the heavier side, with a decent amount of rules. They aren’t onerous, though, I got the hang of it pretty quickly. The game is fairly quick – most games should be less than an hour.

On first play I thought the game played very well and had some good strategy. I’ll need a few more games to really decide what I think of it but for now, Guatemala Café looks good. I’ll be picking up a copy.

Wikinger
Wikinger was in play quite a bit during the Gathering and this was the one game that seemed to get the most polarized reactions. Some didn’t seem to like it at all. The detractors may not have liked the mechanical nature of the game with the theme seemingly being shunted aside in the desire for better gameplay. Others, like me, thought it was an interesting game with good strategy.

Anyway, the game is about, of course, Vikings. The idea is that players collect tiles representing ships, islands, and different kinds of craftsmen, etc, that they play on a small player board. The way the tiles are acquired is kind of neat – there is a wheel on the board with numbers on the edges and tiles are placed around the wheel. The number next to the tile indicates the tile’s price. Periodically the wheel spins, making the tiles cheaper. It’s quite an innovative mechanism and I quite liked it.

Playing the tiles onto the player board is the tough part. You have put the ships, islands and craftsmen in the right place to maximize your income and victory points. You also have to think about what you are going to acquire in future turns and plan for it. There are a number of scoring intervals during the game and your score depending on which tiles you got and how they were placed. Whoever has the most points at the end wins.

As I said, the game is quite mechanical. However, I thought the mechanics made a good game with good strategy. Some may cringe at the mechanics running roughshod over the theme, but I thought the gameplay more than made up for it. I quite liked the game and am very much looking forward to playing it again.

Sakkara
Over the past few years, the once great reputation of the Kosmos two-player series has really gone into the toilet. The label that was once the bastion of such great games as Lost Cities and Hera and Zeus had since become the dumping ground for dreck like Gone Fishing! and everybody’s favorite whipping boy, Crocodile Pool Party. It’s come to the point that I get the heebie-jeebies whenever I see a new Kosmos two-player game. Fortunately for me, the newest game in the series, Sakkara, is actually pretty good.

Sakkara comes with a small, square, gridded board. A pile of tiles start out on the board and each tile shows a symbol. Each player starts with a dobber somewhere on the board.

The gameplay is fairly straightforward. On his turn, a player moves his dobber and grabs a tile. There are also some special actions you can do by using certain groups of the tiles that you’ve collected. The object is to collect three particular sets of tiles. When a player has the third set he wins the game.

It’s not the most unique game in the world, but it does work pretty well. As there are many possibilities of which tile to take and which special actions to use, the number of options can be a bit overwhelming (this aspect reminded me of Ur – a similar game). Further play would probably fix this as you got used to the special actions.

I thought the game was pretty good and I would play it again. It’s abstract, it’s a bit of thinker, but it works well. For the Kosmos two-player series, this game is definitely a step in the right direction.

Age of Discovery
Next up is the newest game from Phalanx – Age of Discovery (to be brought to North America by Mayfair Games). This one will come in the Phalanx mid-size box – the same as Bison.

Oh, and don’t let the name fool you; it appears that this game isn’t related to any of the ‘Age of’ computer games or the games from Eagle.

In Age of Discovery, players acquire ship cards for two purposes – to fulfill contracts (to get money) and to send out on expeditions (to get victory points). Each player gets two actions on his turn and these can be any one of the following – grab a bit of money, buy ships, get a new contract, or send ships out for contracts or expeditions.

This is one of those games where you are using the same resource, the ships, for both money and victory points. At the beginning of the game you really need cash so fulfilling contracts is the order of the day. Towards the middle and end of the game it’s time to go for the victory points on the expeditions. Another wrinkle is that you can reuse ships that are allocated to contracts but when they go out for expeditions, they are there for the rest of the game. Juggling how to use the ships and when is the major part of the strategy of the game.

There is an interim scoring, where the scoring is usually pretty low, and a final scoring, where the points really count. Whoever has the most points at the end wins.

This is another one of those middle-weight 45-minute games that we’ve been seeing so much of lately. I actually thought this one was quite good – the gameplay is straightforward, there is good interaction, and there are quite a few strategic possibilities. I’m very much looking forward to picking this one up.

Other Games
The only other new game that I played was Caylus Magna Carta, which I talked about in a previous column. With William Attia at the Gathering, the game got quite a bit of play and most people seemed to like it.

Along with the usual slew of new Nuremberg games, there were quite a few prototypes at the Gathering. It felt to me that there were even more than last year - and there were quite a few of them then! The general buzz was that the quality of the prototypes was very, very good - I played a number of them and was quite impressed. If they get published, I think you can look forward to some great new games in the next few years.

Friedemann Friese brought a couple of prototypes with him, and the buzz was very strong about all of them. I got to play one of them and it was ridiculously fun (and during that game I caught a publisher whispering in Friedemann’s ear - hopefully that means the game will get published). Though some designers have a recognizable style, Friedemann’s games are constantly different and surprising - I’ve always been impressed with his ability to come up with innovative ideas.

And that’s about it! It was another fabulous Gathering filled with great games and wonderful people. I’m already looking forward to next year!

Rick Thornquist: The Gathering of Friends / Nuremberg Games - Part III

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