Larry Levy: The Two Faces of Essen – The Good

Well, I just came back from my first BGG.con and had a great time.  Four days of gaming with over 900 attendees in about a dozen rooms, some of them ballroom size.  Aldie, Derk, and the admins sure throw one hell of a party.

It was wonderful to meet some folks I’ve been chatting with for years and put some faces to the familiar avatars.  It was also a great opportunity to try out some of the latest games from Essen.  Many people have commented that there isn’t a runaway hit from the show and I agree with that.  I do think that we’ve been a bit spoiled by the last two Essens, which were terrific; it seems to me that a fair without a megahit isn’t that unusual an occurrence.  But I’ve noticed another, more interesting trend, at least for the games I’ve played so far.  For me, the vast majority have been either really good or really bad, with very few games falling in between.  That truly is unusual.

Here are my first impressions of the Essen games I’ve had the chance to try out.  I’ll split it into two articles and since you’re all probably more interested in the good games, I’ll feature the ones I liked in this one.

Just to be complete, Essen games I’ve talked about earlier that fall into the Really Good category are Automobile, Endeavor, Steam, Peloponnes, Last Train to Wensleydale, and BasketBoss.  Here are the ones I tried for the first time last week.

At the Gates of Loyang: Loyang definitely belongs with the Essen hits, but I do have some concerns about it.  One of them is the duration; my four-player game took over two hours and that time could increase considerably with three.  Of course, both Agricola and Le Havre can run long as well, but I don’t think Loyang has quite the same depth as those two.

A bigger concern, though, might be the potential for low player interaction.  I pretty much played my whole game with my eyes focused solely on my own situation.  The four-player game even subtly encourages that:  since you can only affect one of your three opponents at a time, it’s easy to just play in your own sandbox and hope the other players do the same.

The card selection procedure was a disappointment, at least in this one game.  The idea is that you must select one card from your hand and one from the table, so there’s a tense game of deciding which cards to discard and which to keep.  But in practice, there was usually only one card in my hand that I really wanted to have.  So I just discarded the other cards one by one, in the hope that someone else would discard a card that would help me.  Of course, everyone else was discarding crappy cards as well (the players usually want similar kinds of cards at each stage of the game), so this hope was usually not realized.  The point, though, is that this didn’t feel like a particularly skillful or angst-filled process.  I realize, of course, that this could all change once the players gain more experience with the game, but for now, this part of the design fell kind of flat for me.

That leaves the Helpers as the principal way of interacting with your opponents.  But to be honest, there’s enough to think about without having to deal with these fairly involved, text-heavy cards.  Again, once players get enough experience, these cards will undoubtedly see more play, but people weren’t exactly jumping on the Helper cards in our game (at least not until the end, when there were some very specific needs).

Don’t get me wrong—even though this was a mostly solitaire exercise, I thoroughly enjoyed the reasoning necessary to earn the money that inches you up the Prosperity track.  I also found myself thinking about this after the game was over, which is always a good sign.  However, I suspect the game’s sweet spot will be for two players and that’s an unlikely number in my group.  So while I’d like to explore this game some more, it may not happen.

Dungeon Lords: I hope people don’t get their expectations misplaced about this one.  Based on the theme and the designer’s earlier titles, you might think this will be a light-hearted romp, but you’d be wrong.  It’s very much a gamer’s game, with a ton of stuff to think about.  Among Chvatil’s titles, its complexity is far closer to Through the Ages than it is to Galaxy Trucker or Space Alert.  I think that’s great, but I just hope that fans of those other two games accept this design for what it is.

There’s a lot of skills to master in this game and you shouldn’t expect to figure it all out at once.  First, you need to get used to the order selection system and utilize it to get the items you need.  Just keeping your food and gold supply at healthy levels will take a while.  Then there’s drafting monsters, traps, and imps, expanding your dungeon, and building lucrative rooms.  And, oh yeah, you might want to keep your evil reputation down if you don’t want to attract the nastiest adventurers to your dungeon.  Finally, you need to put these all together along with some good technique to minimize the damage to your turf.

After two and a half games, I’ve pretty much gotten to that level of expertise.  But there’s still more.  There’s a fairly complicated end game scoring system which basically determines the winner.  I’ll be honest with you, I really don’t consider that too much when I’m playing—there’s just too much else for me to think about.  Maybe just a little bit during the last couple of turns, to see where I should be concentrating my efforts.  Obviously, as I get more comfortable with the system, I’ll be able to take the endgame bonuses into consideration while I’m playing.  But that’s the point, there’s a lot of game here.  And as Chvatil usually does, he gives us even more that can be added (in the form of some nasty events) once the players begin to master the base system.

I like the game a lot.  It’s challenging, cleverly designed, has a different feel, and features a wonderful theme.  With all the different kinds of monsters, traps, and adventurers, replayability shouldn’t be a problem.  And there seems to be a lot of different paths to victory (for example, going evil if you think you can beat the paladin and get his extra VPs is a perfectly reasonable approach).  Based on the ratings so far, I think the early adopters knew the sort of game they were getting.  I hope that trend continues.

Factory Manager: I assume by now that you all know this has nothing to do with Power Grid; it’s just branding.  Like PG, efficiency is rewarded and there’s a business theme, but that’s about all they have in common.

In Factory Manager, you buy tiles to improve your factory, with the goals of increasing your production and your storage capabilities (your profit is based on the lesser of these two), minimizing your energy use, and reducing the number of workers required to man the machines.  You do this for five turns and most money wins.  Workers are particularly key, because they serve several roles.  The heart of the game is the innovative selection mechanic for choosing the factory tiles.  You bid available workers (those not manning machines) for turn order.  Each player in turn order then selects tiles that can be purchased that turn (only the least powerful tiles in each category can be chosen); one tile must be chosen for each worker that is still available after your bid.  Then, again in turn order, the players buy the tiles they want from the ones chosen, with the maximum number of tiles you can buy equal to your available workers.  So the player who gets first crack at the new tiles can only make the crappiest ones available (and probably can buy the fewest, since he used workers to win the bid for turn order).  The players who go towards the end have better tiles they can select and can probably buy more of them, but they know that the players going before them will probably snap up the choicest machines (assuming they can afford them).  Deciding which tiles to make available is an unusual and non-trivial problem, where anticipating your opponents’ needs and selections is key.

I really like the planning required to play this well.  Just maximizing your factory’s profits is an interesting problem in itself, but the real skill is doing so within the confines of the selection procedure.  All of my playings of the prototype were with three players and the game plays very well with that number, as it’s easy to track your opponents needs.  I’m sure it works well with four as well, particularly once you get a game or two under your belt.  Five would probably be very difficult and there’s a note in the rules (from Friedemann himself!) urging the players to avoid this number of players until they get more experience.  Naturally, every game of Factory Manager I saw being played at the con had five players!  I wonder how many of those folks were permanently turned off of the game as a result.  Sometimes, we gamers are our own worst enemy.

Hansa Teutonica: I had read the rules and looked at the board for this prior to the con and wasn’t too impressed, even though Andreas Steding, the designer, has a good track record (which includes Kogge and Power & Weakness).  But the buzz was so good that I had to check it out and I’m glad I did.  The game has the appearance of a multi-player abstract and mechanically, that’s probably a good description.  But what really lifts it from a genre I don’t much care for is that it plays very fast and that there’s a ton of different strategic options.  I feel like I could play this half a dozen times and try something different every time.

The board shows 27 cities on a generic landscape, with the routes connecting them made up of 2 to 4 spaces.  Each player gets two actions a turn at the start, although this number can increase over the course of the game.  The actions include placing pieces on the board, moving pieces already placed (two or more at a time), kicking out opponent’s pieces (although this can wind up helping both of you), establishing routes (after you occupy all the spaces between two cities), and reclaiming used pieces.  The principal way of scoring is by establishing routes, which, our rules guru Rick Thornquist informed us, should only be called “popping” the routes (which is a good term, since the pieces get discarded after the route is claimed).  When you pop a route, you usually claim one of the two end cities; the next time someone pops a route next to that city, you’ll score a point.  Alternatively, some of the cities allow you to improve one of your capabilities (like increasing the number of actions you can take a turn); rather than claim the city, you can pick up that ability.  Endgame scoring includes points for claimed cities and increased abilities, among other things.

There’s lots more, but those are the basics.  The really nice thing is the different number of possible strategies.  There’s five different abilities you can increase and each leads to a different approach to the play.  You can also claim cities next to the spots that increase the abilities and pick up points when your opponents improve (or grab those routes yourself and double dip by scoring points while you improve).  There’s also other ways of scoring points, some of them quite lucrative.  Your first few moves will probably set much of your strategy, which means that different players will have different parts of the board that interest them.  But you’ll need to play a little defense as well.  It all makes for a very satisfying experience that should only last about an hour.  The reaction has been almost universally positive, which is good, because this isn’t a cheap game.  But I saw quite a few folks carting around copies at the con, so for many, the gameplay made it more than worth their while.  Nothing like people voting with their wallets.

Homesteaders: This was my most pleasant surprise of the convention.  A first-time designer (Alex Rockwell, well known on the Geek for his incisive strategy articles) and a brand new publisher (Tasty Minstrel Games) meant that that the game could be anything from good to terrible, but happily this was one of the best games I played last week.

Homesteaders is a stripped down optimization game with all the player interaction coming from auctions.  The items you’re trying to acquire are western-themed buildings, which are grouped in four categories.  The game’s main innovation is that the objects being auctioned aren’t the buildings themselves, but the right to purchase a building of a certain category.  Thus, you may want to win a particular auction, but if an opponent insists on outbidding you, you can switch to another auction and usually find a reasonable alternative to build.

The game uses Evo-style auctions and each turn there’s one fewer of them than there are players.  (Evo-style auctions are held simultaneously and you bid for exactly one of the items.  If someone bids over you, you either bid over them, top the current high bid at another auction, or pass.  Amun-Re and Vegas Showdown are two other games that use different implementations of Evo-style bidding.) The auctions work well here and play out quite quickly.  Players who pass get an item as a consolation prize and the more they’ve passed earlier, the better the item is—this is another good idea.  Winning an auction just gives you the right to build a type of building; you still have to pay the cost of construction, which is a specific combination of resources (there are six(!) resources in the game).  Buildings have normal income (which might be money, resources, or VPs), as well as worker income, which can only be earned if one of your workers is allocated to that building at the beginning of your turn.  You have a limited number of workers, which can be acquired by spending resources or through winning certain auctions.

The game has a very nice way of acquiring resources that you don’t earn as income.  Throughout the game, you can obtain trade chits, which you can use to buy or sell resources from the bank at any time.  Thus, if you have enough money, you can buy any resource you need, but only if you have a trade chit.  This gives the game a very fluid feel, while still constraining the players from grabbing everything they need.

The auctions and the trading are nice, but a game like this rises or falls due to the quality of the buildings.  Thankfully, Rockwell has provided a varied and interesting set of buildings.  Essentially, they represent a multi-dimensional tech tree and even after one game, it was apparent that a large number of strategies were possible.  Picking out the best set of buildings, while fighting your fellow players for the rights to build them and producing an appropriate set of resources, is a difficult and very enjoyable challenge.

I can’t be sure how well the game will hold up to repeated playings, even though I suspect replayability will be good, thanks to strategy space.  But my first impression of the title was certainly positive.  The components are a mixed bag, but really not too bad for a tiny publisher.  There have been a few collating issues, but it looks like Tasty Minstrel is dealing with them.  With good publisher support, I can recommend Homesteaders to Euro fans who like a good thinky challenge.  Congratulations to Alex for a fine first effort!

Macao: Another big-box Alea, another Feld design.  And you know what, I have no problem with that.  For some reason, no one points out that all of Dirk Henn’s games over the last six or seven years have been produced by Queen.  It’s just not that big a deal.  Besides, with one piratey exception, all of Feld’s Alea games have been excellent.  So if they’re all going to be as good as Macao, I say bring on the Feld titles!

As you may have already gathered, I like this game quite a bit.  The first thing that everyone notices is the dice mechanic and I can think of few over the past several years which have garnered such universal admiration.  Each turn, dice in six different colors are rolled and each player decides which two they want to use.  These selections are used to place cubes around each player’s seven-sided polygon (with the numbers 1 through 6, plus one blank spot, on the sides).  If, for example, you pick the red die and it shows a 3, then you place 3 red cubes next to the side showing 3.  After doing this for both of their chosen dice, each player rotates their polygon one position and takes the cubes which are now next to the blank side.  The upshot is that you can decide between getting a small number of cubes quickly or a large number further down the road.  Of course, the colors of the dice and some other considerations affect these decisions as well.  It is indeed an innovative and very clever mechanic.  Mastering its subtleties is a big part of playing Macao.

The key rule is that you can’t save cubes from turn to turn, so you have to plan to have the right combination of cubes available to you.  Cubes can be spent in a number of ways.  You draft cards (in turn order) each turn, which gives you the right to build them.  Each card has a specific combination of cubes necessary to build it.  Arranging to have the right cubes to build juicy cards is a worthwhile pursuit, particularly since having your queue of reserved cards back up is a Very Bad Idea (you lose points for every unbuilt card at the end of the game).  Each card has an ability, which let you do lots of cool things and give you some nice combinations.  You can also spend cubes to advance your turn order, so that you can draft better cards and, what’s sometimes more important, ones you actually have a shot at building.  There’s also a bunch of tiles on the board that can be bought for cubes, most of which are one of eight different kinds of commodities.  Finally, you can spend cubes to move your ship to the cities that demand these commodities, turning them in for Victory Points (with the first player to provide that commodity getting the most VPs).

These elements all work very well and give you plenty to think about.  Like Notre Dame and Year of the Dragon (the other recent Feld Aleas), you’re fighting the system and trying to avoid penalty points for not being efficient with your actions.  I don’t think Macao is nearly as unforgiving as Dragon is, particularly once you get more familiar with the cube selection mechanic.  This gives the game a somewhat lighter feel, which, even though I love Dragon, is a welcome development, particularly since there’s still plenty of decisions to be made.  The player interaction is pretty good, as you butt heads with the card drafting, the turn order battles, the tile purchases, and the race to get to the cities first.  I also expect that replayability shouldn’t be a problem, as you only use a little more than half the cards each game and the way the dice fall affects the play of the game a great deal.  The game only lasts about 90 minutes, so it moves quickly enough, even though you’ll have to juggle quite a few cards during the middle game.

The only warning I’d give to prospective buyers is that, like some Alea games, there is only a passing nod to the theme.  There’s a little bit of thematic veneer, but most of the mechanics have no real attachment to real world activities.  Year of the Dragon isn’t a hugely thematic game, for example, but it handles its Oriental trappings much better than Macao does.  This doesn’t bother me in the least, as the activities don’t feel abstract and the decisions are all interesting, but if you need a strong theme to identify with, you might want to try this before you buy.  Alea’s occasional disdain for theme can be annoying, but maybe in this case they decided that since it would be so hard to give the central dice mechanic a thematic meaning, it didn’t make sense to try too hard with the rest of the game.  Regardless of this, I think Macao follows in the long line of distinguished and fascinating Alea titles and is one I expect to be playing years from now.

(Just as a weird aside, I can’t think of another game that uses a regular septagon as a key component.  But in a strange case of parallelism, Homesteaders’ graphic artist chose to use a 7-sided sheriff’s star as their symbol for victory points—as opposed to the more typical 5 or 6-sided star.  The star is also featured on the cover of the game.)

Power Struggle: There are continued whispers that the Eurogame model is dead.  But then a game like this one comes out and I realize that our game production model, while not without flaws, still works just fine.  Here’s a fairly involved gamer’s game by a total unknown with an unusual theme.  The only way it could ever be produced is by one of the indie publishers like Eggertspiele, and that’s exactly what happened.  Moreover, it’s a very nicely produced title, which is important for a game with this many moving parts.

Power Struggle is a game about business bureaucracies, but instead of wallowing in what most would consider a dull topic, it pokes fun at it, which gives the game a nicely flippant feel.  The rules are pretty involved (and perhaps not laid out in the optimal fashion), so learning the game will take a while.  But after a couple of turns, the penny drops and the game starts to move quickly.  The end can come quite suddenly, so the design really doesn’t outlast its welcome.

The object of the game is to be the first to earn four victory points.  There are five different tracks that you can advance on for accomplishing different things in the game and each one has a threshold that earns you a VP when you cross it.  You can also earn a VP by beating your archenemy (one of your opponents) on three specified tracks.  The archenemies are determined randomly and secretly at the beginning of the game, so each player may have slightly different goals for the game.

The main battleground are the six divisions of the generic business we all work for.  Each division has a number of departments and each player can place their managers in some of these departments (along with employees, who help you do your dirty work).  If you have the most managers in a department, you get that department’s special privilege.  Each of these privileges is a nice power, but there’s an even nicer one associated with it.  Those are the powers that another player gets to use if they bribe you for your privilege.  Given that, you may wonder why you’d accept such a bribe, but there are several reasons:  you obviously increase your cash; if you refuse a bribe, the offering player gets to remove one of your employees; and if you accept a bribe, you get to advance on the Corruption track (the offering player advances whether you accept or not), which is one of the five VP tracks.  This is a carefully thought out mechanic and it works very well, giving the game a very fluid and cynical feel.

On your turn, you can take exactly one of seven different actions.  These include one of four different ways of manipulating your managers and employees, as well as trying to bribe an opponent, using one of your privileges, or using your cash to advance on one of the VP tracks.  This means the actions all interleave nicely and the game moves along at a brisk pace.

There’s a good deal more to the game, but those are the basics.  Despite nothing that’s remarkably innovative, Power Struggle doesn’t feel at all like anything else I’ve played, which is always a major draw for me.  Player interaction is constant and you can definitely play dirty tricks on your opponents, but it never feels all that nasty.  They walked a fine line here, but I think they got it just right.  I thought that players would really be blasting their archenemies, but that isn’t how it worked out in my game, since once you gain a level on a VP track, you can’t lose it.  The archenemy concept is one of many parts of the game that work very well.

I had a blast in my one game and can’t wait to play it again.  This is another title with a high price tag, so I can understand those who might hesitate to purchase it, but if you’re looking for something fresh, I can certainly recommend Power Struggle.  Kudos to the first-time designers (the mysteriously labeled “Bauldric & Friends"), as well as to Eggertspiele for identifying and developing this gem.

Finally, to close out this article that deals with my positive BGG.con gaming experiences, let me point out a much older design to the abstract game lovers reading this.  Richard Breese showed me a 20 year old title called Chikara that was really quite good (and this from someone who doesn’t really like abstracts).  It’s played with wooden sticks (think Settlers roads) of the two player colors on the lines of a 9 x 12 board.  You play or move one stick per turn, which has to be placed adjacent to at least one of your sticks.  An enclosed area is called a stronghold.  If one of my sticks touches one of your sticks, each of us loses all the sticks that make up its group (like a falling set of dominoes) until a stronghold is reached.  The other big rule is that any sticks that you’ve placed inside a stronghold on previous turns can be played in addition to your usual one play.  So you’re building a time bomb that you can spring on your opponent at the right time.  The winner is the first player to place a stick on the far end of the board.  This is a virtually unknown game (Breese estimates that there’s maybe half a dozen copies still around), but it’s surprisingly deep and well worth playing.

Those were the good games I got to play last week and happily there were quite a few of them.  Next, I’ll focus on the games that I wish I hadn’t played.

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