Scott Tepper: Essen 2007…the Remains
An oversight made in my Essen column two weeks ago needs to be corrected. I inadvertently left out one of the games we were demoing at the Rio Grande Games booth—and quite the omission it was. It could only be a result of being sleep deprived that I did not include Darjeeling in the list of games we were showing.
In Darjeeling, you are a shipper of tea. In contrast to most games, the first thing you do on your turn is collect victory points, if you have any to collect, from the display of wooden boats. The number of points you take is equal to the number of your colored cubes times a multiplier which reflects how long your boat(s) have been at sea. Then you move your worker around a variable “board” made up of tiles that contain one, two or three halves of differently colored cartons. If you can, (and more importantly, choose to) make complete cartons from the tiles you have collected, you can discard them to place cubes on the highest scoring multiplier on the “sea”, simultaneously reducing the values of all the other boats. Finally, you can score a bonus depending on the type (color) of tea you ship according to a clever little device with barrels rolling down an inclined plane. The longer it has been since a kind of tea has been shipped, the greater your bonus will be. The game moves along briskly, and you have some nice choices of whether to try for shipping small quantities of tea more often, scoring only small amounts of points more frequently, or aiming for larger quantities of one kind of tea, which will be a greater target for your opponents to try to reduce on the sea multiplier.
I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that Darjeeling is going to be a strong contender for the 2008 Spiel des Jahres nomination. It has everything the SDJ judges seem to be looking for: the rules can be taught quickly (in about 5-6 minutes), it plays in an hour or less, the game can be grasped by children but it is engaging enough for adults to play without the kids, the theme and mechanisms do not duplicate previous SDJ winners, and the production value is nice.
I also left a couple of other items out of my report last week. (Where was my head?) At the Rio Grande Games booth we had both the Mykerinos and Zooloretto expansions for sale.
After teaching Cuba about 20 times, I finally got to play a full game last week, and I really enjoyed it. Some people are making the comment that it’s similar to Puerto Rico. I don’t think it’s anything like Puerto Rico. Okay, you are producing things and there are buildings and ships. But that’s like saying ET is like Aliens because there are extra-terrestrials in both. In Puerto Rico, you choose actions that trigger things for everyone. In Cuba, the actions you choose don’t trigger a secondary action for anyone else.
The Parliament component of Cuba is a great tool for insuring that every game is going to play differently. In addition, even though your choice of five basic actions are relatively simple, they can cause some interesting ripples that affect not only your opponents, but your future choices as well. The way you place your building can make a huge difference in how your plantation functions. A single coin spent or held can make a difference in several points all throughout the game. Cuba is the rare game for me that I want to play over and over again.
Before I close up the comments on Essen 2007, I wanted to give you just a little more of an inside look as to what it’s like to be a demoer at Essen. I’ve already told you about some of the prep work. I get copies of the rules usually a couple of weeks before the show, but I don’t get copies of the games. Sometimes you can figure out a game without the game components in front of you. Part of this depends on the type of rulebook it is.
For example, last year, one of the new Rio Grande titles was Augsburg 1520. That one was a nightmare for me before the show because the rules refer to tiles that have writing on them, but you don’t know what that writing is. As I recall, we didn’t receive copies of Augsburg until the first day of the show. So that first day, I was hoping that I wouldn’t be asked to teach that game. I think I was able to squeek by that first day without having to teach it once. Of course I brought the game back to the hotel in the evening, spread it out on one of the tables in the dining table, and worked through a few rounds of the game on my own until I felt comfortable enough to teach it. But for me, it’s an awful feeling to have the responsiblility to teach a game that you don’t feel like you know very well.
This year, I don’t think we had any games that you really needed the components in front of you to figure out how the game worked. In the past, sometimes I was given just a simple text file of a game without any illustrations, and that doesn’t make the job any easier. This leads to, at least for me, one of the downsides of demoing at Essen for me. Because some of the games didn’t arrive until right before the show—or even the day of the show—I ended up bringing games back to the hotel the night before and also the first day of the show. So you’re not only working from 10a-7p, but then you’re studying through the night.
The German demoers did this similarly, but they brought the games with them to a restaurant and played through them together. I would have liked to do that with them, but my German isn’t good enough, and I felt I could work through the games more quickly on my own. Hopefully next year, my German will be better so I’ll feel more comfortable being more social. So that’s what the prepping is like. Now for the show itself.
On Thursday, in the hour before the doors open to the public, there’s always a fun electricity in the air. Vendors are doing their last minute fixes to their booths. I think I was taping Race For The Galaxy posters to the walls of the booth. When you walk by the doors to the halls you can see a crowd of people just waiting to get in. When the doors finally do open, it’s like a floodgate opening and the people just flow into the halls. Some of them are walking at such a brisk pace it’s just short of a run. My guess is that they’re heading off to the booths that have limited print runs.
Because the Rio Grande booth is usually offering several new games, and we have a lot of tables, people flock to our booth pretty quickly. From the time the doors open until the end of the day, our tables are constantly full. This is different from shows in the States where we often have to try to bring people into the booth to find additional players so someone who’s there alone can have an opponent to play against. In fact, it’s not unusual to be teaching a game to a full table of people and have additional people standing close by to hear the rules.
Even though I’ve been doing this now for three or four years, my voice still is not used to the strain of talking straight through for ten hours. By the end of the first day, my voice sounded a little husky. By the end of the second day, I started losing my voice, and my throat was sore. I try, in the evenings, to do as little talking as possible, and I have learned to bring Halls Soothers with me to every show, and this does help. By Saturday, the third day of the show, my voice was very hoarse, but at least my throat wasn’t sore. For the first time at any show, I start playing around with the level of my voice, and I realize that if I don’t push so hard, it’s not so straining on my vocal cords. I tend to project my voice so that everyone at the table can hear me, but when I started speaking more softly, people would simply lean into the table a little more to hear me. They didn’t seem to mind at all.
During the days of the show, I didn’t get very many breaks. This was mostly due to my choice. Even though we had sandwiches delivered to our office daily, I don’t think I got to eat one until the hall closed each day. I was able to occasionally stop for water, and I think, one of the days, I was able to scarf down one of the power bars I brought with me when I took a quick bathroom break one of the days. But honestly, I lose all track of time when I’m demoing. It was usually one game after another. At some point I’d check my cell phone to see that I’d been going for five or six hours straight. For me, time does fly when I’m having fun.
I want to take a moment to talk about the people who came to the booth. One of the neatest things about Essen is that people truly do come from all over the world to see the show. We had people from all over Europe—Italy, France, Switzerland, Belgium—but there were also visitors from other continents as well: Austrialia, Japan, Canada, the US. The eagerness of all these people to learn to play games is immeasurable.
Four young men, I believe they were from China, sat down to learn Amyitis. One of them, it appeared, did not speak English. So I would explain a key element of the game, and then one of the men would translate what I said into Chinese. It was so…neat that these people came to Essen, not speaking German or English, and yet seemed to be having the time of their lives.
Something else that was striking to me was the age range of the people who attended Essen. Not only did many couples come to the booth to learn how to play a game, but whole families would sit down at a table to learn something new. And when I say a whole family, I mean grandma, too! At one point, I was teaching Darjeeling to a family from France and Grandma was right in there learning and playing. Can you remember the last time you were at a game show in the US and Grandma or Grampa sat down and learned a game with the grandkids?
Going to Essen constantly rejuvenates me. When I go there I see what the gaming industry of the US could be. You find couples, where the guy doesn’t have to drag his girlfriend or wife along, but rather both parties seemingly equally interested in learning and playing. You see 7- and 8-year-old kids sitting down with their 12- and 15-year-old siblings for a game of the difficulty level of Puerto Rico. No one is bored. No one is fidgety. And they’re all having fun.
It gives me hope.
Posted by Scott Tepper on Nov 5, 2007 at 01:00 AM in Columnists, Scott Tepper / 1427
Comments:
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I’d have thought Darjeeling a bit too complicated for SDJ, and it can’t win because Abacus just won. Posted by Mike Siggins on Nov 5, 2007 at 04:53 AM | #
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You mention, Scott, the problems of having to demo a game you haven’t had the chance to learn properly. I can tell you that it is even worse when it is a game that has your name on the box! Many years ago Games Workshop decided it would take the plunge and publish its own boardgames. They had also gained the rights from the BBC to publish a game based on the popular “Dr.Who” TV series but they didn’t have a game.
They then remembered an unpublished card game of mine loosely based on D&D that they had played and enjoyed. So they asked if they could publish it but change it to Dr.Who adventures. I agreed - and since they assured me that the game would be more or less the same as my original agreed to demonstrate this awaited game at the London “Games Day” - an extremely popular event.
- Derek Posted by Derek Carver on Nov 5, 2007 at 06:22 AM | #
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Scott, I just emailed your last 5 paragraphs to my family and friends. They always wonder about my weird hobby, and it is very cool to see evidence that “normal” people in other countries can be just as enthusiastic about games as I am. Posted by Luke Hedgren on Nov 5, 2007 at 08:42 AM | #
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Mike, While I agree with you that Darjeeling might have a difficult time winning the 2008 SDJ because Abacus just won this last year, what I meant by my statement is that I think it will be nominated. Now after teaching it 15-20 times I don’t think it’s complicated at all. I need to teach it to my nephews and nieces and see how they do with it. Then I’ll report back. Posted by Scott Tepper on Nov 5, 2007 at 09:18 AM | #
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Derek, Ugh! That is a nightmare. <laugh!> I’ll have to remember that story when I beat myself after realizing a day or two after a show (or sometimes during) for getting a rule wrong. Posted by Scott Tepper on Nov 5, 2007 at 09:19 AM | #
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Luke, I’m so glad to help! Because you brought this up, I have to tell you a side story. When I started taking German lessons, I revealed my involvement in boardgames to my tutor. He’s from Berlin, but has been here in the US for the last 8 or so years. When I told him about about Spiel and Essen, he was a little surprised. He had seen Settlers in stores, but he himself wasn’t much of a game player. He couldn’t believe that Germany was the center of the game world and hosted a trade show that drew over 150,000 people from all over the world. I also have been conversing with a German via the internet to help me with my German. When I said that I had been to Essen for Spiel, he automatically assumed that it was some sort of sports show, not boardgames. He was surprised as well that Germany is such a focus for the boardgame industry. So not everyone in Germany is into games. It’s kind of funny, because I’ve always thought of Essen as the boardgame Mecca. I just assumed that EVERYONE there played boardgames. <laugh> Posted by Scott Tepper on Nov 5, 2007 at 09:28 AM | #
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Regarding losing your voice, you may benefit from thinking about *how* you’re speaking, not just how loud. If you’ve ever spent time in a chorus, or taken voice lessons, or performed as an actor, you’ve probably been told to sing/speak from your diaphragm. You might tire out your abs, but it’s the best way to project while not tiring out your throat as much. Mostly, it’s important to control your speaking instead of simply speaking as you do normally, without paying any attention to how you’re doing it. Posted by Michael Leuchtenburg on Nov 5, 2007 at 12:13 PM | #
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Hi Scott, I was in Germany for five months and only found a handful of Germans that had heard of Settlers. And no one wanted to play during the summer because the weather was so nice. I work for a German company and have surprised many German colleagues with the “fact” that Germany is the epicenter of gaming. So, while there must be Germans that play (based on games offered at many stores), the participation is much less than 100%! Good column as usual!
Happy Gaming,
Posted by Scott Russell on Nov 5, 2007 at 05:52 PM | #
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