• Tobago – Bruce Allen has created a fun deduction-style game that contains no deduction. On an island with different types of terrain and landmarks, players play cards that reduce the possible locations of a treasure until only one spot remains. (Cards have pictograms noting things like “adjacent to a palm tree,” “not within two spaces of a mountain,” and “in the largest lake.") Once a player reaches that spot with his land-cruiser, that player and everyone else who has contributed to isolating the treasure gets a share of the loot, with those who contribute more getting more shares and those who contribute later in the discovery process getting first dibs. This scoring method encourages players to cooperate in a treasure hunt, even if they’re nowhere near the treasure; cursed treasures create an incentive not to go it alone as you risk taking nothing home despite all your work.

In September 2009, designer Bruno Faidutti described Tobago as “the first serious contender” for the 2010 Spiel des Jahres, and I can see where he’s coming from as the game has enough luck to allow players to come back from early deficits and enough skill that players who care to do so can play better than casual folks.

On a turn one player rolls four dice that have three symbols on them – circles, triangles, Xes – then arranges these dice in some manner. Each player marks that dice formation on her individual board, possibly overlapping the edge of the board and not using some dice. At the end of the game, for each symbol you score points equal to the number of groups that contain at least five of that symbol multiplied by the total number of spaces that contain that symbol. The game is mostly solitaire, but you can examine other players’ boards to avoid making a dice combo that will boost them more than you. My top score is 138.

• At the Gates of Loyang – This would make a great game on SpielByWeb. In person, I’m less sure of its appeal as some turns go on and on and on. Unlike Agricola and Le Havre, two previous Uwe Rosenberg designs in which players take a single atomistic action on each of their turns, in Loyang you can string together complex molecules that connect in any number of ways, thereby encouraging you to sit and ponder in order to squeeze out an extra coin or two, which might boost you up the next rung of the scoring ladder. In general I enjoy the design, but I feel like it needs (a) a time limit for a player’s turn and (b) no takebacks to prevent dithering. Your play style might vary, of course.

• Beer & Pretzels – On Friday morning at Spiel, I visited Ted Alspach in his Bézier Games booth to chat about this-and-that, and while there I started demoing Beer & Pretzels, a ten-minute game in which you throw coasters bearing images of pretzels into a central location, scoring for those pretzels completely uncovered once all players have finished, with an exposed beer doubling your score for the round. After a number of rounds equal to the number of players, whoever has the most money wins.

This game was built for weekends at Spiel as it’s quick-playing with visual appeal that will catch the attention of passers-by. What’s more, the game immediately draws players in emotionally as after the first turn or two, someone will cover one of their coasters and they’ll yell “Hey!” and vow revenge. Ten minutes later, they’re done, gloating about their comeback or promising to pay someone back later. I loved demoing games when I worked retail in the early 1990s in San Francisco for precisely this kind of reaction: People being transformed from disinterested parties to players and caring about what happens to them. Sometimes you’ll have to search a while to find the right design for someone, but you can usually find something that puts the itch in them.

• Gonzaga – In a December 2008 article by Liga on BGN, representatives from dV Giochi described Gonzaga as having “the ‘gateway game’ feeling of masterpieces like Ticket to Ride.” While that’s a fair comparison, I’d offer a more encompassing one, saying that Gonzaga is akin to Amun-Re’s Ticket to Power Grid of All Seasons: You’ve got a connection bonus, role selection, hidden bonuses and a map with inactive regions that shakes up the strategy from one game to the next. All in all, Gonzaga is a good design that I appreciate more with each play as I can see how to make better moves, but it’s not as intuitive as Ticket to Ride. In that game you create chains of links over marked paths which allow you to clearly see all the possible connections; in Gonzaga you must visualize how the the multihex pieces will fit together on the board, which plays are legal each turn, and which back-up spaces you might claim should someone block your path. Players averse to spatial reasoning will blanch.

(Disclosure: I received review copies of Beer & Pretzels and Gonzaga.)

Kris: I have an interest in King Philip’s War because I grew up in Rhode Island, and I am one of the many descendents of Roger Williams, the founder of Providence and of the colony of Rhode Island--and who was still an important figure at the time of the war. What made you take an interest in such an obscure war?

John: I knew nothing about the conflict until I read a Military History Article about the subject in 2004. I was fascinated that something so monumental was so unknown. I looked for games on the topic and found none.  That same week I began work on KING PHILIP’S WAR.  As an aside, I feel sorry for the Rhode Islanders. Of all the colonies involved, it seemed they got the shortest end of the stick. Philip’s beef was originally with Plymouth. His relations with the Rhode Islanders was relatively good, but his geographic proximity in Rhode Island meant that it was inevitable that the war would spill over into these more neutral settlements

John: On a scale of 1-10, I’d rate it a 4. My plan was not to wow everyone with my complex thought process, but create a fast playing, noncomplex game that introduces aspects of history that are less well known by the general public.

Kris: The most common wargame sub-genres are the old hex map and combat results table game, and the card-driven game that has become very popular over the last few years. King Philip’s War follows neither of these models. What factors influenced your design choices?

John: Interesting that. I initially used the map drawn from the Military History article as a model, and its location of a handful of settlements as well. Since I could never recreate the intricate path system that no one ever truly mapped through the blanket of New England forest, I originally used a dot matrix overlay.  Each dot led to eight other dots. It made for interesting chess like play but was not aesthetically pleasing.  I then researched the more well-known settlements (but did not name them on the map until recently).  Few Indian villages were identified and fewer still named.  I placed an equal number of villages as settlements, and for flavor and movement options added an equal number of neutral spaces or neutral villages where at a later date English Allied Indians might appear.  It evolved into a point to point system.

I tried making it a CDG at first but did not feel that there were enough variety in the key events to make that work.  Adam Starkweather, developer of the game, suggested at our first meeting an events die for the few crucial events that needed to be represented.  We diddled with the specific events until we arrived at what is now symbolized on the die.  It speeds game play and adds an additional layer of suspense.

Kris: What events are simulated with the event die?

John: The following is an excerpt from the current playtest rules. These may change, as I am already considering swapping the guide for a supply shortage symbol. However this is a good representation of what players will see.

Ambush
The defender’s die roll is ignored for this combat. 

Spy
Following damage removal, the attacking player places a spy with any enemy leader. The spy prohibits its evasion die roll and reduces its combat effectiveness by reducing its force by one strength point. The spy stays with the affected leader until the spy has been removed through combat. A spy is removed when the first SP casualty is lost in battle. Spies that are lost are recycled. Only one spy may be placed with any leader. If all three spies are in use, ignore the symbol. 

Reinforcements
Within stacking limitations, the defender must reinforce a battle with the closest one or two SP combat unit (within stacking limits). Proximity is indicated by the hash marks printed on the movement paths. The fewer the hash marks, the closer the unit. In case of a tie the defender chooses the source. If no unit exists within three hash-marks, or if reinforcing would violate stacking, or if the unit would have to move through enemy units, reinforcement is ignored. The reinforcing unit may not have participated in an attack that turn but may come from a space currently containing a Combat Marker. A unit may not be flipped to provide a1 SP reinforcement. If the last unit in a space is drawn from beneath a leader, the leader accompanies the reinforcing unit.

Massacre
If the forces engaged are unequal increase the casualties of the lesser force by one additional strength point. The “massacred player” then raises one a new, full strength unit in the nearest settlement or village, As the crow flies. The reinforcing unit must meet stacking limits and can only take place if a unit is available in the force pool. If forces engaged are equal ignore the symbol.

Panic
If the attacking force is equal or greater than the defending force, the defender abandons the space and moves to the next available space within stacking limitations (even if this mean moving through a friendly-occupied space).  If retreat to an adjacent space is impossible, the defending force remains.  If PANIC is rolled against an undefended village or settlement, or a space containing a village or settlement is abandoned, the village or settlement is automatically destroyed.  If PANIC is rolled against a space containing a fort, at least one defending unit retreats while the fort and any remaining units remain to defend the space.  Presence of any leader negates the effect of PANIC retreat.

Guide
When Guide is rolled the current player claims his faction’s Guide token and retains it until, during the movement phase, it is committed by adding up to two additional movement spaces by one company or war band and/or bypassing any occupied enemy spaces along its line of march.  Once used it is discarded until the Guide symbol is once again rolled

Kris: What role do leaders play in the game?

John: Minimal roles for the most part. I will admit that I could have included many more on both the side of the English and the Indian. In fact, Each of the tribes did have individual sachems (chiefs) represented early on. But additional leaders slowed game play and added complexity that was not necessary. I settled on the key figures of King Philip (Metacomet) of the Wampanoag, Canonchet of the Narragansett, Benjamin Church, and fighting Governor Josiah Winslow.  Since Winslow was added, I also felt that I had to add the governors of the other colonies as well.  Of the four main figures, Philip is the most important.  His tribe and his two related tribes begin the war.  His movement into the various tribal areas allows him to recruit other tribes into the war, and his capture, along with that of Canonchet will end the game. 

Church is next in line in importance. His insight in understanding the Indian way of life and his way of war, helped to turn the tide. Before his ideas were accepted, the English shunned Indian assistance, indeed--anything that smacked of Indian philosophy.  Church is in fact recognized as the father of our Army Rangers. When Church appears, The English may begin to deploy allied Indians.  The presence of Canonchet, Winslow and the remaining governors act as added military wisdom/strength when attached to a company or war band

Kris: Could you describe a typical turn for us?

John: Both the Indian and English player go through a diplomacy phase to obtain additional allies (Philip moves in this phase to encourage neighboring tribes to join in) . Then the Indian player moves three warbands and attacks either colonial companies or settlements. The English player moves three companies next and attacks either villages or war bands. Points are scored for village/settlement destruction and for loss of war bands or companies.  The marker on the turn track is moved.

Kris: In my experience, most designers decide to emphasize certain aspects of a conflict that they consider important, while limiting the detail of other aspects. What aspects of the war does your design emphasize?

John: I emphasized the destructiveness of the war, the abilities of Church and Philip, and the unpredictability of battle.

Kris: When is the earliest that you think King Philip’s War could be published?

John: In the first month on the preorder list it has gained over 200 preorders. I don’t want to jinx its growth, but I can see it reaching its goal by fall of next year--maybe sooner. I plan on introducing it at TOTALCON in February and I’m sure that will garner further interest in New England.

Kris: What is the status of your Civil War game Lincoln’s war?

John: Perry Cocke tells me that he is working on getting it into the next round of titles on the MMP preorder list by the end of the year or soon after.

Kris: What other projects would you like to work on in the future?

John: Well, first I’d like to say I’m happy to see HEARTS AND MINDS:VIETNAM 1965-1975 being released by Worthington Games in January of 2010 and LEAPING LEMMINGS which I coauthored with Rick Young released in March by GMT.  I am currently working on four projects. CALIPHATE, a multiplayer game on the expansion of and contention between Islamic caliphs during the middle ages. KNIGHT’S END, a card game based on the dissolution of the Knights Templar.  The PHILLIPINE INSURRECTION 1889-1902. and HAWAII, the native unification of the islands in the 1700s. Oh, and look for MAORI WARS, soon to be added to the preorder list on the Legion Games website.

Kris: Thanks for the interview.

Designers: Glenn Drover and Martin Wallace
Publisher: FRED Distribution

Players: 2-6
Ages: 12+
Playing Time: 120 minutes
Rules Language: English
Price: $75
Links:

Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Eight, three times with 2 players, three times with 3, once with 4, and once with 5

If games had pedigrees like race horses, then the new Railways of the World base game and series from FRED Distribution would certainly fit the bill as the best bred train game. With such parents as Age of Steam and Railroad Tycoon, this new train game series has the bloodlines to back it up. But does it deliver?

First off, Railways of the World relies on the same track-laying, goods-delivery, and economic-optimization system in the now classic Age of Steam. Since Age of Steam had a particularly high learning curve, it was hard for casual gamers to jump in and enjoy their first game. Railroad Tycoon from Eagle Games refined the system to make it a bit more accessible: The game was streamlined, with money not quite as tight and a bit more luck added through Tycoon and operation cards, making it appeal to the more casual gamer and families. Part of Age of Steam‘s original appeal was the vast replayability from the myriad official and fan-based maps. Eagle Games wanted to do the same thing for the Railroad Tycoon system, but then Eagle was sold to FRED Distribution. While one expansion for Railroad Tycoon did materialize – Rails of Europe – that seemed to be the end of the line.

Now, though, FRED Distribution has decided to breathe new life into Railroad Tycoon by transforming the game into Railways of the World, changing a few rules, further streamlining the system, and offering something that the original fans wanted: more maps.

Railways of the World is virtually a carbon copy of Railroad Tycoon. Jam-packed in the 8-pound box comes two mounted gameboards (one of the eastern U.S. and another of Mexico), 150 plastic trains in six colors, 125 cubes (to represent goods), and a whole mess of cards, tiles and money. All these bits lead to a game that has huge curbside appeal.

The first time that I saw Railroad Tycoon I was awe-struck by the huge amount of bits and pieces – like Ticket to Ride on steroids. The board was huge, the plastic pieces detailed, and the tracks ready to take you all sorts of places. I thought I was in for a brain burner, but after my first play, I was pleasantly surprised by how approachable and straight-forward the game played.

At the heart of this hex-based train system, you’re trying to earn the most victory points by delivering goods (represented by different colored cubes) to cities of the same color. To get things started, each hex-shaped city on the map is randomly seeded with goods cubes, and depending on the number of players and a particular map in play, a predetermined number of empty city markers are set-aside. Once they have all been placed due to cities being emptied of goods, the turn goes through the final dividend and income phase, then game over. Between the set-up and the end, three phases are repeated: first player auction, three rounds of player actions, and dividends and income. The player actions let you:

• Build up to four tracks or one link (a connection from one city to another)

• Urbanize (develop a neutral colored city on the map and seed it with goods, or remove an empty city marker and add goods to an already emptied city)

• Upgrade your engine (higher engine numbers mean you can deliver goods over more links goods and ultimately make more money or victory points)

• Deliver a good (how you get points)

• Take a railroad operations card (which provides instant or long-term benefits to those who hold particular cards)

Something New

While Railroad Tycoon had a simple ruleset, people had a few minor issues with the game. First, while the size of the board was breathtaking, it was simply too big for most people’s tables. Second, because the gameboard was so big, it came in three pieces, so if you did manage to find a table for it, the board pieces were often shifted and bumped during play, leaving people to recreate routes and remember which cities had which cubes.

While the huge gameboard wasn’t a huge issue, it was a minor annoyance for such an expensive game; I remember playing games of Railroad Tycoon and having to reach across the whole table, hitting the train markers on the victory track. In Railways of the World FRED has kept the core of the map, while removing the victory and income tracks and border treatment and placing them on a separate board, which makes set-up and play much easier. The board in Railways of the World is also now one fold-out piece, which prevents the board from shifting during play. Don’t get me wrong – the board is still big, but it is now more manageable, plus it fits on my table. What’s more, with the edge of the eastern United States going right up to the edge of the board, I foresee a western U.S. map in the future that will create a huge board for a mega-train game. This is a nice touch.

Technically, Railways of the World is simply the game system. Packaged in the same box are two expansions: Railways of the Eastern U.S. and Railways of Mexico. While the first item is the same map as in Railroad Tycoon, the second is a new map. This smaller, two-piece map is designed for 2-4 players while the larger map is for 2-6. One of my major complaints with Railroad Tycoon was that while it was listed for 2 to 6 players, it was really best with 4 to 6. Any fewer than that, and it was too easy for people to turtle in one section of the board with little player interaction. The game was then more of a race to see who could empty the most cities of their goods cubes and have the least amount of debt. The new Railways of Mexico map, with the central mountains of Mexico running down the center of the board, ensures that people will be fighting like true railroad barons to get their goods delivered. It also means that that game will make it to the table more often. In my household, for example, there are only three of game age who could play this game. Railways of the Eastern U.S. would hardly make it to the table, but the Mexico map will surely see the light of day much more often.

Another small rules change is that two railroad baron cards are dealt to each player, allowing them to choose one rather than just receiving one at random. These railroad baron cards, like the tycoon cards, assign secret goals to each player that if met, advance them on the victory point scale at the end of the game. Five of the original tycoon cards made it as railroad baron cards while the other seven are slightly modified with two new cards. In spirit, these cards create pre-set agendas allowing for some speculation during the game. I have seen people just ignore them and others attempt to fulfill these goals. They definitely add more flavor as you think about your potential routes.

Something Borrowed

If Railways of the World lives up to his pedigreed past, it will not be for the game mechanisms but for varied experiences offered by different maps. Although I do not own Age of Steam, one of the things that I like best was the different playing experiences based on the different maps. Railways of the World promises to offer the same thing. In fact, two expansions were already developed: Rails of Europe (to be reissued in 2010 as Railways of Europe) and Railways of England and Wales. Either one can be played with the base components from Railroad Tycoon or Railways of the World. What I really look forward to is even more maps, hopefully more like Railways of Mexico that are designed for smaller playing groups of 2 to 4.

One thing that Railways of the World attempts to do is create an expandable train system that appeals to new gamers as well as experienced ones. Their attempt to do this is with increasingly more difficult rulesets that don’t dramatically alter the base set of rules. In this way, each expansion can be tailored to different markets without altering the core of the game. This is something that many game companies have attempted to do with varying degrees of success.

Something Blue

Overall I was quite happy with the changes that FRED made in Railways of the World, making this train gaming system more widely available, but in the process, there were also a few oversights. That rule change about being able to build tracks on hexes with water is clear in the rules – yet it’s accompanied by the same pictures from the Railroad Tycoon rules that say laying tracks on hexes with water is not permissible. This kind of editing error confuses not only experienced gamers but the same customers FRED is trying to attract to the industry.

Another minor issue is with the use of the railroad baron and railroad operation cards in the expansion for Railways of Mexico. The rules state that if experienced players want a more difficult game, they should add these cards when playing with this map. But many of these cards have specific goals associated specifically with the Railways of the Eastern U.S. map. I played one time by sorting through the cards that had generic goals and playing only with those, but the flavor of those cards seemed lost on the new map.

Despite having more than eight pounds of components in the box, it is a shame that a pawn for the turn marker track isn’t included. The rules state to use one of the new city tiles, but for a game of this caliber and vast appeal, I was disappointed that the new edition of Railways of the World didn’t include such a pawn.

If you love train games, Railways of the World offers exciting new possibilities. You will need this base game for any of the new maps that will eventually be published. If you already own Railroad Tycoon, there isn’t much new aside from a few rule changes (which are easy enough to introduce), minor changes and additions in the railroad baron cards, and a new tighter map for 2 to 4 players (sold separately on the Eagle Games website for those who have Railroad Tycoon). Since I got into gaming after Railroad Tycoon went out of print, I will be hanging onto Railways of the World, especially for when the expansion maps come out geared to smaller gaming groups.

ILSA: Informazione Ludica a Scatola Aperta (that means something like information about games with open box). The web site is totally renewed.

In this number first impressions/reviews of

Vasco da Gama, Dungeon Lords, Carson City, Atlantis, Last train to Wensleydale, Insula, Erosion, Bunny Bunny Moose Moose, Shipyard, Gonzaga, Strada Romana, Day & Night, Luna Llena, Endeavor, Sumeria, Caligula, A la Carte, Pony Express, Tobago, Factory Manager, Hansa Teutonica, Horse Fever, Opera, Thunderstone, At the gates of Loyang, Tricky Trek, Basket Boss, Granny Apples, Pocket Rockets, Modern Society, Aaargh!Tect

by Mauro “MdM” Di Marco, Fabio “fab!o” Cambiaghi, Andrea “Liga” Ligabue, Franco “Ciaci” Sarcinelli, Andrea “Tanis” Chiarvesio, Paola “Paoletta” Mogliotti, Francesco “Prometeo” Pessina

and also Comics from Jacopo Ziliotto!

Download ILSA #7

I’m sorry ILSA is only in Italian at the moment ... but it could be a nice reason to start to learn it!

Download the Number 6
Download the Number 5
Download the Number 4
Download the Number 3
Download the Number 2
Download the Number 1
Download the Number 0

The issue are also viewable online from issuu.com

On to this week’s question!

We have one member of our game group who simply refuses to play many games that the rest of the group likes. The others in the group are willing to compromise and play games they don’t absolutely love if the rest of the group wants to play them, but this one fellow flat-out refuses to play many games. This is very frustrating for the rest of us, but we’ve been gaming together for a very long time and don’t want him to leave the group – we would just like him to agree to play a wider variety of games.

How can we approach this without making him mad or defensive? It’s to the point where when he doesn’t show up, everyone goes, “Oh good! Now we can play x, y, and z!”

The obvious answer is to stop inviting him because the rest of the group doesn’t seem to want him to be there anyway. But if you really want to try to save the situation, find out what kinds of games he doesn’t like, then see whether you can discover why he doesn’t like them. If he can express it, then see whether there’s a way to mitigate his issue. For example, I don’t like most party games because they depend on knowledge of pop culture, but I’m willing to play a party game like Pow Wow that doesn’t.

If he simply doesn’t want to play other games because he wants to control what games are played, then that’s a problem. You have to explain to him that the gaming sessions are for everyone, and everyone is expected to participate as well as they are able. No one should have to continually play games they dislike, but everyone is expected to sometimes play a game that is not their favorite. Tell him that if this is a problem for him, then the group will need to move on without him. I would not let a control-freak ruin my gaming sessions.

I hope this advice works for you – it’s always difficult to lose a player you’ve played with for a long time, but you don’t want to lose the rest of the group over one person.

Let’s Talk about Table Talk

Instead of a “Tip of the Week,” I’m going to discuss table talk while board gaming. This assumes that everyone is familiar with the game being played, and that there’s no need to explain rules or other information about the game.

Back in the day, there was always table talk with multiplayer strategy games like Civilization, 1830, and Age of Renaissance. However, since Eurogames have become so popular, table talk is becoming frowned upon because people feel too much talking slows the game down or isn’t fair because everyone should play their own game – or because it’s just plain irritating.  Table talk when it’s not wanted turns what can be fun into frustration. On the other hand, helplessly watching while one person exploits another player’s action, or when one person runs away with a game because the other players are too intimidated to say anything against the strategy being played is no fun either.

From a social point of view, one way to deal with this is to have some sort of agreement before starting to play. This suggestion doesn’t really work, however, unless all the players are familiar with each other and their playing styles. If I’ve played Power Grid ten times with my friends and we always discussed moves at the table, coming to another group where such moves can’t be discussed puts me at a disadvantage. Conversely, if I’m used to using a particular strategy in Stone Age that has been very successful because the other players can’t band against it, I’m going to be upset if everyone points out what I’m doing and they all try to stop it.

Personally, I’m in favor of table talk because if a player can win only because of others’ lack of skill/knowledge, it’s not much of a win to me. Board gaming to me should be an interactive experience, something where everyone can learn and get better. An effective, efficient way to do this is to discuss strategies as they are happening and what can be done about them. Yes, this does make a game leader’s position more difficult because she is now competing with the aggregate of players at the table instead of each player individually. Is that really a bad thing though? I guess if as a result of the table talk, someone who was way behind then goes on to win that would not feel fair.  Most of the time what actually happens is that people will grow closer in scoring in the game, meaning that it’s a fight/race to the finish. This seems much more exciting and fun to me than watching someone get ahead early and stay ahead all game.

Please leave comments on either part of this column today. I may discuss table talk more in the next column, particularly if the comments lead to additional inspiration.

Let me get back to the fair for a bit and give a few more general impressions.  First, though the folks running the fair told us that there were even more exhibitors this year than ever before, it didn’t feel any bigger.  In fact, it seemed a bit smaller as there weren’t any overflow booths stuck out in Hall 4 this year (and Hall 9.1 wasn’t used as it has been in some previous years).  Maybe there were just many more exhibitors, each in smaller spaces.  Honestly, it would be hard to tell.  There were definitely a lot more exhibitors there this year that I hadn’t heard of before, especially from the Far East.  In the closing letter from Friedhelm Merz Verlag, the 2009 Spiel fair had 763 vendors from 31 different countries.  Over 152,000 visitors came through the turnstiles this year, and there were more than 600 games that premiered at the fair.  So as you can see, there was a LOT to see (and a lot of people to try to dodge in order to see those things!)

As I sort of mentioned last week, this year seemed to be a bit anomalous in that there wasn’t a single game that seemed to have universal buzz about it.  In my experience, I’ve found that almost every year, there turns out to be a game that all of my contacts talk about.  Some recent examples in years past include Dominion, Agricola, Duck Dealer and King of Siam.  A few years ago (the year I didn’t make it to Essen) – the buzz was so strong about Khronos that I managed to catch a hold of it back home in Ohio and had to pull some major favor strings to get one brought back to me!  And going back even further, I can still remember the huge swell of support for the original release of Oltre Mare – in the 5 inch box – which slowly but steadily got people to the booth to look at it.  Of course, the buzz doesn’t always predict a good game, but usually there is some sort of excitement about a few games each year.  This year seemed a bit different, as I didn’t get the sense that there was the same level of support about any game in particular.  Of course, I could just be out of the loop now and not hearing all the good rumors about the games at the fair, but in the many conversations I’ve had since Essen, I think that most of the folks that I know agree with this sentiment. 

I also noted that there seemed to be a much lower rate of pre-orders (both on offer as well as orders being placed) this year.  Last year seemed to be the apex of this trend for me, and I do recall having at least one half of my baggage weight accounted for by Thursday at lunch time as I had pre-ordered or reserved so many games last year.  This year, it was a complete about face for me as I didn’t preorder a single game.  Is that because I wasn’t as interested in the games this year?  I don’t think so… It’s just that none of the games that I really wanted required pre-orders.  Though, looking back on it, I do think that I was a bit burned last year with so many pre-orders, and a good number of those games didn’t really live up to their expectations. So.. even if there were plenty of things to pre-order, I’m not sure how excited I would have been about those prospects.  Given the fact that there wasn’t really any major release that I missed out on by not placing a pre-order, I think that I’ll continue on the non-pre-ordering route as much as possible in the future.

Another difference that I noticed this year is that there were many more non-gaming booths scattered around the fair.  Hall 5 see med to have a few more wooden toy booths than I remember before.  Also, there was a cookie-cutter stand that managed to get prime real-estate space in Hall 12 right between Cwali and Bambus Spiele.  I can’t remember what was in that space last year, but I’m almost certain that it wasn’t cookie cutters!  On a funny note – I was looking for a gift to bring home for my wife, and as we were rushing by, I thought that I had seen a meeple cookie cutter.  When we went back later in the fair to re-examine it, the “meeple cookie cutter” turned out to be a simple Gingerbread man.  It’s funny how you can make yourself see something else when your mind is so concentrated on games!  (I would have totally gone for it if there were a cookie-cutter in the shape of a meeple or a poppel)

Another interesting development was the change in the Heidelberger booth in Hall 10.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, the Heidelberger booth generally always has a long line snaking into it.  They set up a metal fence around the borders of their booth space and then stack the walls of this cage with discounted games of all sorts.  Usually everything in the booth is something on clearance, and there are plenty of deals to be found.  It’s quite congested, and the path that they leave for buyers is usually wide enough for about 1.5 people – so you end up getting in line and then trudging through single file trying to look at all the bargains as best you can.  This year, there didn’t seem to be as many discounted games; in fact, there were many new games being offered in the booth – which is something that I don’t remember from years past.  The prices they had on the current games were competitive with the other vendors around the fair, but there were certainly many fewer clearout bargains this year.  I wasn’t the only one to notice this as the lines for the Heidelberger booth were much shorter than I can ever remember.  Some of the changes may stem from the fact that Heidelberger is trying to be a bit more prominent in the games distribution arena – they had a fairly large floor space set up in Hall 9 to demonstrate the new games which they were distributing.  It was hard to walk into the hall and not see the three-foot tall head shot of Uwe Rosenberg staring at you!

I also very much liked the new trend of combined booths.  There were a number of booths set up that were shared amongst a number of different publishers.  There was a Games in Italy stand in Hall 5, the “Korean Embassy” in Hall 4 and the “French Connection” in Hall 12.  I bet there there were others throughout the fair, but those are the ones that come to mind now.  I like the way that the individual exhibitors banded together in each of these cases.  Talking to a few folks, such as Cyril from Ystari and Alfredo from Ghenos (in the Italian area), there were some distinct advantages of the combined booths – most notably an increase in demo area available because there was a certain efficiency of space when all the exhibitors could store their games in one place.  Also, it was a nice way to have many people in one area who spoke the same language – which helped with demos because if there was ever a translation issue, it was more easily resolved with so many native speakers concentrated together.  This trend is something that I hope continues in years to come.

Another new booth which I felt was a success was the Geekdo.com (Boardgamegeek.com) booth.  They were able to secure a fairly prominent space in Hall 5 in a very high traffic area – right across from the always packed Galeria Kaufhof booth.  This booth was always abuzz with some sort of activity, and it served as a nice meeting place.  [At this point, let me throw out another one of those official disclaimers – I serve as an admin for BGG, though this is a completely voluntary position] The ability to use the computers to set up a real-time ranking system was nice, and it provided a nice alternative to the Fairplay list.  This isn’t to say that it wasn’t without some kinks – but since this was the first year that the BGG folks were at the fair, I suspect that they’ll have most of these things ironed out if they make it back in 2010.  Additionally, I was “recruited” a few times to conduct interviews or sit in on game demonstrations for the streaming webcast, and I’ve really only heard positive things about the webcam.  Sadly, given the time shift, a lot of the stuff was on between 4am and 8am Eastern time here in the US, but it was still a nice way to get a glimpse of what goes on at the fair.  On behalf of BGG, I’d like to thank all of the publishers, game designers and other journalists who took a bit of time out of their Spiel schedule to sit down with the folks at the booth and do stuff for the webcast.

Finally, I’ll admit that it was it bit painful to see all the new game-supply booths at the fair.  In the past, I can only remember two consistently located meeple/wooden block/wooden cylinder booths in the fair – one in Hall 12 on the back wall behind Kosmos and one in Hall 5 across from the Lookout booth.  However, this year, there were at least two other large booths – one prominently located in Hall 10 – that were filled with wooden bits of all shapes, sizes and colors.  Sadly, given the overburdened bags that I already had, it was simply not possible to bring home any of the bits which would have been quite nice for my own prototypes and playtesting.  Maybe next year?  (Doubtful!)

Thoughts about the competing Ranking systems of games

This year brought the gaming public two different ranking systems at Essen.  Fairplay, the traditional ranking list found in Hall 10, was in its usual place, and this year it crowned Vasco de Gama at the top of its Scout list.  Fairgoers could stop by the booth and fill out a paper ballot to help rank the games they enjoyed the most during the fair.  Geekdo.com was also present, and in their first year, they brought the GeekBuzz system to Essen.  This system used a local computer network to allow folks to rank games and then have the results automatically posted on the toteboard.  Dungeon Lords took the crown here as the most favored game of the show.

I have always tried to make a point of going by the Fairplay booth once or twice a day to try to get a feel for the pulse of the show.  Sometimes there are some games that inexplicably miss the BGN preview, and the only way that I hear about them is by finding them on the Fairplay list and then checking out the games myself.  This year, the trips got a bit longer as I now tried to go past both the Fairplay booth and the Geekdo.com booth each day.

While I’ve always found the polls to be a useful tool, this year they definitely seemed more labile than in the past.  Games would bounce all over the place in the rankings, so it was hard to ever get a good feel for what was going to do well.  In fact, the game that eventually won the Scoutlist at Fairplay, Vasco de Gama, never even made into the Top 10 during the time I was at the show!  I later found out that this was due to a low number of votes for it – the game only met the criteria for ranking near the end of Sunday – by which time I was already flying over Greenland on the way home!

Now that I’ve had a chance to sit back and reflect on the show, I thought it might be useful to compare the two ranking systems.

Which system is better? 

Honestly, I don’t think this is a question you can answer.  Both of the systems give voters a chance to express their opinions about which game at the fair was the best.  The results were different, but that’s probably because the folks that voted at each one were different.  I was just glad to have multiple ranking systems available to me as it gave me additional chances to learn about games that may have slipped under the radar in my preparations for the fair.

Who voted where?

Well, this is obviously speculation as I have nothing to do with the Fairplay booth – but my guess is that the Geekdo.com booth attracted many more English speaking folks (as the majority of Geekdo.com users are English speaking).  Fairplay is better known amongst the Germans as they have been at the fair for a number of years now, and my guess is that there aren’t many people who voted at both booths.  However, it’s fairly clear given the differing results that a different population of gamers voted for each award.

What were the results?

Fairplay

(taken from http://fairplay-online.blogspot.com/)

1. Vasco di Gama, What’s your Game, Score 1,38, 34 Votes
2. Machtspiele, eggertspiele, Score 1,81, 58 Votes
3. Macao, alea, Score 1,88, 106 Votes
4. Magister Navis, Lookout Games, Score 1,92, 48 Votes
5. Dungeon Lords, Czech Games Edition, Score 1,94, 48 Votes
6. Vor den Toren von Loyang, Hall Games, Score 1,94, 51 Votes
7. Egizia, Hans im Glück, Score 2,00, 91 Votes
8. Funkenschlag-Fabrikmanager, 2F-Spiele, Score 2,04, 72 Votes
9. Hansa Teutonica, Argentum, Score 2,05, 43 Votes
10. Carson City, HUCH! & friends, Score 2,06, 97 Votes

Geekbuzz

(taken from http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geekbuzz/overview )

1. Dungeon Lords, 4.1 Stars, 109 Votes
2. Power Grid – Factory Manager (Funkenschlag-Fabrikmanager), 4.0 Stars, 120 Votes
3. Agricola: Farmers of the Moor, 4.0 Stars, 61 Votes
4. Endeavor (Magister Navis), 4.0 Stars, 71 Votes
5. Arena – Roma II, 4.0 Stars, 22 Votes
6. Vasco de Gama, 3.9 Stars, 46 Votes
7. Carson City, 3.9 Stars, 107 Votes
8. Ghost Stories: White Moon, 3.9 Stars, 37 Votes
9. Stronghold, 3.9 Stars, 55 Votes
10. A Brief History of the World, 3.9 Stars, 32 Votes

So, as you can see, there is a lot of variation between the two polls.  Only 5 games were on the Top 10 of both lists.  The winner of each list did no better than fifth on the other.  If you’re the sort of person who wants to try to compare the scores, both were scored on a 5 point scale, but the Fairplay scale uses a score of 1 as the best score while the BGG scale uses a 5 as the highest score.

What do the results tell me?

Honestly, I don’t know.  I will admit that the wide variation of results seemed a bit surprising – and it kind of supports my belief that there wasn’t a consensus “Game of the Show” this year as there has been in years past.  Furthermore, looking at the spread of the raw scores – especially on the Geekbuzz rankings – it’s no surprise that the games were jumping all over the place.  A single “5” or “1” vote would be enough the move the averages to drop a game multiple ranks in the order. 

Having actually looked at the raw number of votes though does make me a bit suspicious of the validity of the rankings though.  For a fair that claims to have an average of 38,000 visitors a day, the fact that only 34 people felt strongly enough about Vasco de Gama to vote for it makes me question whether it’s really the people’s choice for the Game of the Show.  Likewise, though the BGG vote totals are a bit higher on average, 109 votes is still a drop in the bucket when compared to even the number of different people that would simply walk by the Geekdo.com booth in a single hour.

The vote totals (at least on the Fairplay) side appear to be consistent though.  The winner last year, Dominion, managed to get 147 votes —which happened to be the most of any game at Spiel ’08.  You can see the full results at:  http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p3vSRS-GKaqxXx96Ah83KAQ And Tribune won the Spiel ’07 Fairplay Scout List with only 51 votes.  The largest vote getter that year was Cuba with 103 votes total.  http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p3vSRS-GKaqx93ZwOzR15SA

What isn’t clear from either of the Geekdo or Fairplay information currently available to me is: How many people voted in total for each poll… Even though I did serve as a TA in a statistics course in college, I’m not sure that I have enough expertise in the area to do a statistical analysis to see whether or not the results of these polls are significant.  Maybe I can talk Valerie into looking into this with more depth as statistical analysis is something that she does on a professional basis for her work…

Did the rankings affect what I looked at or what I brought home?

Well, this year, not really – though I’ll admit to not bringing back many of the games on the list… On the Fairplay list, only three of the games made it into the suitcase this year (Dungeon Lords, Loyang and Hansa Teutonica)!  And considering the GeekBuzz list, amazingly, only two of the Top 10 Games is currently in my possession (Roma II and Dungeon Lords)!

Does this mean that I’m not going to check out the games that everyone else liked?  Not really.  There are a lot of games that I specifically didn’t bring back home because I already have confirmed that someone was going to do a domestic version.  In those cases, it doesn’t make much sense to use up precious luggage space and weight for something that I can easily obtain back home.  By not bringing it home from Essen, it does mean that I won’t have the game for quite some time (as I generally don’t buy games for a pretty good stretch after Essen), but those are the choices you’ve got to make sometimes!

So, taking into consideration the games that I know will be done in English (or have already been done) – Macao, Endeavor, Egizia, Fabrikmanager, Carson City, Agricola: Farmers of the Moor, Carson City – my totals come up somewhat… There are still some holes in the Top 10 lists that I currently am not planning to look at – but I’m going to be hard pressed to find all the time that I need to play the games that I picked up this year already!  As another data point, look at the 2008 Playfair list again:

1. DOMINION von Donald X. Vaccarino (Hans im Glück) 2+
2. MACHU PICCHU von Walther „Mac“ Gerdts (PD) 2
3. COMUNI von Acchittocca (Tenki/Huch & friends) 2−
4. DIAMANTS CLUB von Rüdiger Dorn (Ravensburger) 2−
5. SNOW TAILS von Fraser und Gordon Lamont (Fragor) 2−
6. PANDEMIE von Matt Leacock (Pegasus) 2−
7. IM SCHUTZE DER BURG von Inka und Markus Brand (Eggert) 2−
8. ICE FLOW von Dean Conrad und John Streets (LG) 2−
9. AGE OF EMPIRES III von Glenn Drover (Pro Ludo) 2−
10. URUK von Hanno und Wilfried Kuhn (DDD) 2−

Of these games, I took home or already owned 8 (all but Im Schutze der Burg/Castle for All Seasons and Ice Flow).  So, time will tell whether the Playfair list (and the Geekbuzz list) will remain a viable source of information to consider when trying to find the new games! 

The Annual Pre-Essen Travelogue

Well, before I leave the Essen trip for another year, let me just post a few pictures about the wonderful travel we had in Germany prior to the fair.  Though the highlight of each October trip is certainly the games at the Spiel fair, Valerie and I have made it a point to travel for a few days prior to the event to learn a little bit more about the country (and it’s a really good way to get all that jet-lag out of your system so that you’re ready to go all day for the fair when Wednesday rolls around!)

This year, due to the fact we were able to use frequent flyer miles to fly over there, we were able to easily set up a trip with different entry and exit points from Germany.  We flew into Munich and spent a few days exploring the city and the surrounding Bavarian countryside (and a short jaunt into Austria).  We did get a twin railpass which turned out to be a great way for us to travel around fairly inexpensively.  The German rail system is a breeze to use, and they are well set up to help travelers who do not speak a lot of German.  Almost every one we talked to from DB was able to speak English, and in the larger HBFs, there was often a customer service counter that was strictly for English speakers.  While we won’t always need to use the rail system so much (especially if we do our traveling in areas closer to Essen), this year it turned out to be a necessity.  And, it was a fairly good deal seeing as our 5-day pass cost only about 30 EUR more than the price of two second class tickets from Munich to Essen (which we would have needed to take no matter what!)

On our first day in Germany, we just stayed around town in Munich.  We had a nice walk down to the Hans im Glück office and got a chance to see where our German Dominion colleagues worked.  It was actually a nice cozy office tucked into a quiet street.  Even though the gaming industry is much larger in Germany, a passerby would likely not even notice that the offices of a prominent gaming company was housed there on the Birnauer Strasse.  Anyways, it was a nice visit.  We got a chance to play the new Cardcassone with Moritz Brunnhofer which was a blast.  Then Moritz surprised us by showing us the tins of Dominion-mints as well as the German versions of the huge cards that were going to be used as booth decorations!  Finally, I spent a few minutes being a fanboy and checking out the shelf of awards.  All of the trophies from the SdJ, DSP and other awards were all crowded together on a single shelf.  I wish I had brought my camera there because it was a pretty impressive sight to see!  Well, actually, I had brought my camera with me, but when I tried to take the picture of the award shelf – that’s when I realized that my camera had conked out!

The next day, we used our rail pass to take a daytrip into Salzburg.  Though our rail pass was only for Germany, apparently the Munich-Salzburg line is included in the pass.  I have always enjoyed Salzburg, and despite the rainy/snowy weather, we still had a good time seeing the usual sights.  After doing the “standard” stuff in the city such as the Mozartplatz and the cathedral, we then took a cable car ride up the mountain which is nearby to the city.  It had been snowing there for a few days, and the mountaintop was simply covered in snow!  We couldn’t see much more than 20 feet in front of us due to the snow and the fog – but it was still an experience not to be forgotten!  I should also make mention now that we really enjoyed the Salzburg Citypass program.  For 22 (or maybe it was 24) euros, you could buy a card for a day which allowed you to use all of the local public transport for free, and it gave you free admission to about 30 tourist attractions.  For folks visiting the town for a single day, it was a really nice way to organize our sightseeing.  By the end of the day, we had ridden the bus/tram all over the city, and taken advantage of about 8 or 9 things on the list. 

My attempt at capturing the beauty of the dome of the Salzburg cathedral

The old fortress of Salzburg taken from the city below.

A picture from ground level of the mountain we were about to take a cable car to the top of!

Due to the weather, there wasn’t much of a view!

Well, the picnic tables were still set up… And yes – it’s as cold as it looks!

This building here housed the restaurant/bar at the top of the mountain that catered to tourists.  Amazingly, despite the weather, it was still open for business!

Finally, what trip to Salzburg would be complete without a visit to the Hellbrunn castle and its trick fountains.  Of course, when it’s raining as much as it was that day, the water doesn’t really seem to be a bother!

Here’s the walkway out of one of the buildings which was guaranteed to get the visitors wet!

The next day was quite an adventure as we had a chance to drive around the Bavarian countryside and see some places that were not quite convenient to the German rail system.  We took in a few palaces such as Neuschwanstein and Linderhof.  We were also able to get to the abbey in Ettal and see the wonderful baroque church there.  I would like to take another opportunity to thank Tom Werneck for allowing us the use of his car and giving us the chance to have a fantastic day in Bavaria.  The day of sightseeing was wonderful, and the nice traditional Bavarian dinner at a restaurant that was seriously in the middle of nowhere was excellent as well.

The exterior of the abbey in Ettal

I told you it was Baroque, right?

The colors were much more vibrant in person.

A sign that even the Pope can sell out – A “Pope beer” which is brewed in Ettal

A lucky shot of me and Neuschwanstein.  It was so foggy that day
that oftentimes you couldn’t even see the castles!

The final day of our sightseeing was spent putzing around town and then making a spur-of-the-moment trip out to Oberammergau.  My folks had been out there in 2000 for the most recent version of the Passion Play, and I kind of wanted to see the town to put an image to their verbal descriptions of it.  Valerie was interested in seeing the woodworking shops that the town is also known for.  All in all, it was a good start to the trip to see such wonderful things.

Finally, as some of you may have read a few weeks ago, I set out on the trip to Germany with a list of things I’d like to see or do while there.  After looking back at the list – it looks like I was able to accomplish 19 of the items and only missed out on 12.  Let’s go over the list again and see how I did!
12 Things I still managed not to accomplish

1. Drink a beer in an authentic Munich beer garden – yes, I know that I’ve already missed Oktoberfest – and yes, I know that Cincinnati has the only authentic Hofbrauhaus in the US – but I still want to get a big stein of beer and consume it around people in lederhosen and dirndls.

   Well, we never made it to the Hofbrauhaus.  No excuse here – just too many other places to eat and drink.  Every restaurant that we tried in Munich and Bavaria was wonderful, so I’m not at all sad to have missed out on this one

2. Figure out how to get a pre-paid “Handy” to use when I’m over there - it’s hard to get used to being unconnected while there

   As it turned out, this wasn’t as big a deal as I thought it would be.  I honestly didn’t really need a cell phone while we were traveling before the fair, and I still had my handy-dandy Verizon phone card to call the wife and kids back home (still with 33 minutes left on it for next year!) At the fair itself, I did enough circulating that I ended up running into whomever was looking for me – or was able to pick up a message at either the BGG or RGG booth where I was often found.

3. Find a dirndl for my wife – you know, in case she wants to be St. Pauli Girl for Halloween

Wow – they were more expensive than I thought!  Even at the post-Oktoberfest sales in Munich, the price of an average dirndl was still around 100 EUR.  And that doesn’t include the blouse or shoes!  In any event, it turned out to be far to expensive to consider for something that she’s not really going to wear all that often.  Also, there would have been some issues trying to figure out what size to get as the German size system isn’t exactly the same as what we have at home.  We also did make a stop in a traditional Trachten store while we were in Oberammergau, and the stuff there was beautiful… and expensive – I think the one outfit that I really liked would have run about 400 EUR.
4. Try to see an 1860 Munich match – yes I know that it’s 2nd Bundesliga – but they just signed an American striker, Kenny Cooper, who I’d like to see in action

On that Saturday night, it was cold, mildly snowing and frankly, we were quite tired after a long day to Salzburg.  Sometimes it’s just not possible to fit everything into a trip that you want to!  But hopefully Kenny is getting good quality time in as it looks like he’s going to be playing a larger role on the World Cup side with the recent injuries to Davies.
5. See more local sports – on the last trip to Germany, we were able to see a women’s field hockey match between the German and Dutch national teams.  Quite a nice experience! 

Nothing doing here.  Didn’t even see anything that we could have tried to catch.  Probably just the wrong time of year.  Though, as a possible mitigating fact, I did manage to watch an entire Team Handball match on D:SF one night in the hotel.  And though I think that I’m pretty openminded about different sports, I just couldn’t get into this sport. 
6. Get a nice Bundesliga shirt for myself – not sure yet which team, but I can rule out FC Koln (got one last year) and Bayern Munich (I won’t buy a Yankees jersey either)

I managed to forget to do this for me.  Too much time looking at games, I guess.  It was so cold when we were walking around Munich that I almost crumbled and bought a knock-off Bayern Munich scarf to use for warmth purposes… But, common sense kicked in just in time and I decided to just be cold for a little bit longer!
7. Get Bundesliga shirts for my kids.  I suppose I could get them a Bayern shirt – they generally root for anyone who is winning…

This is actually a half-victory for me.  I didn’t get the kids Bundesliga shirts.  I did manage to get them shirts for the local team of Essen, but they’re a third-division side.  So, shirts? yes.  Top division football?  Not so much.
8. Look for more Christmas decorations, esp. “Erzgebirge” style woodcarvings – does anyone know of any good shops with this in Munich or Essen?

We looked all over for this stuff, but no luck.  When we went to Oberammergau, I thought that the woodworking shops there might have something, but all of those craftsmen had very similar styles which was nothing like what I was looking for… Oh well, something to look for next year!
9. Rent a bicycle to tour Munich or Essen for a day

Too cold, rainy or snowy to consider getting out on a bike. 
10. Have to vote for my favorite games at the Playfair stand

I kind of forgot that as either a member of the press or someone there on an exhibitor badge, I’m apparently ineligible to vote for the Playfair award.  Sigh.
11. Have to vote for my favorite games with the new GeekBuzz system (Booth 5-22)

The computers were always quite crowded when I was at the BGG booth, and I got pressed into service on a number of occasions to run interviews or sit in on game demos during the streaming webcasts.  As a result, I never made it to the terminal to log my votes!
12. Play a game with Donald X. – That’s right, I’ve been working with him for almost two years yet we’ve never actually played a game together! 

Epic fail on my part.  I actually spent a fair amount of time with Donald between hanging out and the award receptions… We had a good chance to chat and catch up, as well as take care of some Dominion business, but never enough time to play a game.  Not even rock-paper-scissors. 

19 things I did manage to accomplish

1. See the “impressive” Hans im Gluck main office

As mentioned above, we had a delightful afternoon spent with Moritz in the HiG office.  Hopefully this won’t be my last trip there!
2. Go to Castle Neuschwanstein - yes, touristy - but something I’ve always wanted to see on my own

It was as nice as I had imagined, even with the awful weather.  And, as I commented to Valerie, I’d guess that 20% of the Japanese people in the entire country are probably located within 20km of Castle Neuschwanstein at any given time :p
3. Try local foods in each different city we’re in – one of the biggest food surprises of the last trip was eating Himmel und Ääd (literally Heaven and Earth) which is mashed potatoes with stewed apples and fried blood pudding. 

As always, we ate everything in sight!  We had a nice evening where Tom W. and his wife took us out to dinner at a nice traditional restaurant.  We ate roast goose and pork that was quite tasty.
4. Eat “second breakfast” every day that we’re in Bavaria - Weisswurst and pretzels sounds awesome

Well, weisswurst itself is actually quite bland.  In fact, I’d almost go as far to say that it has no flavor at all!  But, it is an excellent delivery device for the really really tasty honey mustard sauce that seems to always be served with it.  And the pretzels are as good as I remember.
5. Try russ and/or radler (wheat beer mixed with lemonade) – Heck, I love me a good shandy, so why wouldn’t I like this?

Radler was a nice refreshing drink which I enjoyed all through Bavaria, and it has the advantage that it only has half the alcohol content (being that it is half lemonade), so I didn’t get too sloppy after a nice relaxing meal!
6. Make it through Salzburg without succumbing to Mozart overload

Hah.  Didn’t even make it into either of the Mozart museums nor his purported birthplace.  But as I mentioned above, thanks to the Salzburg Citypass, we got a really good view of the city at an affordable price
7. See if I am able to by ordering in a restaurant only using German – I’ve been practicing all year! 

This seemed to work out OK.  The only problem is that once I started using German, the servers sometimes wouldn’t revert to English when I got stuck!  We’ll see if my continued work with the Rosetta Stone course helps my speaking for next year.
8. Try not to lose more than 15 Euros in change over the course of the trip – list most Americans, I don’t pay much attention to coinage because our local coins aren’t that valuable.  Having coins slip out of your pocket in Germany is a much most costly proposition

By the end of the trip, I was actually accustomed again to paying for things in change, though there was still a time that I found out that I had 27 EUR in change in my wallet!  I think the giveaway was that my wallet was so heavy that is was nearly pulling down my jeans…
9. Eat as many different types of Lebkuchen that I can find…

Well, I at least had the one Lebkuchen that I always have.  Jay Tummelson has a thing for the boxed Lebkuchen that are sold at Schlecker (a local German drug store).  As usual, he had boxes of these at his stand on the set-up day, and I managed to sneak in one or two (or maybe more)
10. Go an entire week without mistakenly getting into the first class train car

This was easy to do now.  Though, I should re-iterate that the German Rail Pass from DB was a breeze to use, and it’s something that I’d definitely look into again if my travel plans require multiple train rides.
11. Remember to pack my luggage scale so I can get everything back home

The new digital luggage scale was a life saver.  It seemed to be accurate to within 100 grams, and I managed to get my bags packed with about 300 grams to spare total between them.
12. Spend at least an hour browsing the game/toy section at a local department store - the selection at a mainstream store is simply amazing.  Some of the department stores seem to stock as many boardgames as the local Toys’R’Us!

We spent a bit of time looking though the toy/game departments at Toys R’ Us, Galerie Kaufhof as well as Müller.  I’d never been in a Müller before, and it’s an interesting take on a discount store that’s been smushed together with a department store.  I think this is the first year that I didn’t manage to buy any games at all outside of the fair though!
13. Be mistaken for my brother at least once a day - but hopefully win the annual battle of who gets mistaken for the other more often

To be honest, we stopped keeping track of the score as we’re getting a bit tired of the game.  But it still happened about 2 or 3 times a day between us.  Sigh
14. Have my annual argument with John Bohrer about why the Steelers aren’t as good as they look – though this is the first year that I can remember where the Bengals have actually managed to beat the Steelers prior to the Essen trip!  Who Dey!

It was a very peaceful week between the division rivals.  John seemed to be very busy early in the week (as usual), and I never caught up with him after Thursday.
15. Watch the annual “worry-fest” at the Warfrog booth as they await the shipment of their games on late Wednesday afternoon!  Actually, I hope that this doesn’t happen because I imagine that it really is nerve wracking having to wait for your product to arrive in time for the fair.

Gladly, there were no issues about getting the games in on time this year (at least from what I heard).
16. Listen to Scott Tepper teach one game in English, German and French – this should only take about 30 minutes as he might use all three languages in a single rules explanation!

Got all 3 languages as soon as he said “Hi/Guten Tag/Bonjour” to me!
17. See if I can get Friedemann to eat breakfast one day without using any mustard

The breakfast at the hotel was nice… and there wasn’t a single bottle of Senf to be found anywhere!
18. Try to keep a running blog of things I do in Essen so that it’s easier to write up my report! 

Umm… See the article/recap from last week.  I essentially took my list making and turned it into the column…
19. Take my annual lump of salt from Hanno (at Lookout Games) and Uwe Rosenberg about the sad state of my fantasy football team in our Gamers league.  My team would be much better if it weren’t me in charge of picking the lineup each week

Yeah.  Lost again.  I’m now 2-5 in that league where the majority of the other managers are Germans.  So much for having an advantage because I watch the games every week.  Sigh. 

Ten final random musings (both game-related and non-game-related) from Essen

1. Flat rate taxi to DUS – Most years, my entire group makes the trip home from Essen at the same time, and generally everyone in my group has bags as chock full of stuff as mine.  We’ve generally decided on taking a taxi back to the airport because none of us want to have to figure out how to make it on and off the trains with 3 or 4 bags each.  Additionally, for the past two years, the Hauptbahnhof in Essen has been undergoing major renovations, and the thought of having to manually carry or drag my bags up the stairs to get to the S-bahn tracks is not something I’ve wanted to do.  Anyways, in the past, it was always a bit uncertain as to how much the ride to the airport would cost.  Surprisingly, this year there now appears to be a flat rate of 39 EUR to get from downtown Essen to the airport.  When this is split over 2 (or possibly 3) travelers, it’s really not too bad of a deal, especially when you add in the convenience of not having to lug your bags all over the place.  The discovery of this flat rate definitely makes the trip home a bit less stressful to consider (and makes it easier to keep “just enough” of the European currency to get home).

2. Skipping the games which I know are going to be done in German – I’ve always threatened in the past to try to stay away from the games that I knew were going to be done in English, but this year is the first time that I really kept to that promise.  I am fairly certain that there are a lot of games that folks were surprised that I wasn’t bringing home from Essen – but frankly, it just doesn’t seem to make sense to use the limited weight in my bags (and risk the damage to them in transit) for games that may already be available at home.  Another advantage is that my family will likely have a much larger bunch of games to consider giving me for Christmas…

3. Pizza menus – OK, this is a funny story told to me by Sean Brown (from FRED).  While they were out in town, they ran across a pizza restaurant which had an interesting menu.  Their pizzas came in three sizes: klein, groβ, and ”U.S.” For those of you that know Sean, I’ll let you guess what size pizza he ended up ordering…

4. Banana Beer – The annual trip to Germany always presents an opportunity to try many different beers as I travel through the country.  While we were shopping in the grocery department of the Kaufhof in downtown Essen, I noticed a new type of beer which I hadn’t ever seen before – a Banana-weizen.  That’s right, a hefeweizen with serious banana overtones.  It was the most banana-y tasting thing I’ve had that wasn’t actually a banana.  Was it good?  I’m honestly not sure.  It was definitely different. And it was definitely more banana-y as it got warmer, which I think improved the beer.

5. Reading the rules before Essen can be a life saver – As I noted all week, there are just too many games on offer now to try to get to everything.  Many of the games that debut at the fair had their rules available prior to Essen.  I took advantage of this and printed up a number of rulesets to read on the plane ride over.  Though it’s obviously never the same to learn a game from reading the rules as opposed to a demo, it’s stil better than nothing!  Reading the rules can often give you a general feel for a game, so you can focus on games that seem to suit you or so you can ask more detailed questions about the parts of the game that were a bit confusing on the read through.

6. Meeples from Lookout – Well, I managed to miss out on the Resourc-eeples offered this year – but I’m quite impressed with the level of support (and high level of creativity) that Lookout Games has put into supporting Agricola.  True, it would have taken 2 years to collect all the bits (as well as a few bucks), but the full game with the animeeples and resourceeples and all the expansion cards is a beautiful sight to behold.  (Disclaimer – I did do some volunteer development work on Agricola)

7. Cost of Living (Tights) – Things are just more expensive in Europe.  Hotels tend to be a bit pricier on average, and the cost of going out to eat also seems to be higher on average than back home. But, the thing this year that blew me away came from the hosiery department of the local Galeria Kaufhof – a department I only walked through as it was on the way to the escalator to the toy floor… Anyways, I couldn’t believe that there was an entire display of women’s tights (to be worn with boots, natch) that were 29 EUR or 34 EUR.  That’s right, 45-55 dollars for a pair of thick pantyhose.  Ouch – the price you have to pay to be fashionable, I guess….  (And I certainly enjoyed getting a chance to see it every day!)

8. I really wish that I lived in a city with public transport – Another trip to Germany has shown me how great the concept of an integrated public transport system is.  Living in the Midwest, there is really no public transport to speak of.  The local bus system is OK, but the closest stop to my house is over a mile away.  The train system (Amtrak) does run through Cincinnati, but there is only one line – which leaves for Chicago twice a week – so it’s not very viable.  After using the many different levels of transport this week including ICE train, RailJet, Regional Express train, S-Bahn, U-Bahn, buses, and trams – it’s been a great way to move about the country while keeping my carbon footprint much smaller than if I had driven myself all over the place. And… I didn’t have to spend any time looking for parking!
   
9. Strange signs on the autobahn – So, the Germans are known for their efficiency, and they’re certainly known for having a great roadway system.  But, man, can it be confusing for a non-German driver to get around without getting lost!  Now, this is probably an American-o-centric approach (and so I’ll admit that the problem may reside with me and not the German road signage system), but the signs are not set up well for those not familiar with the area.  First, the numbering of the autobahn exits is not easily seen.  Therefore, without a GPS device telling you when to exit, it can be very easy to miss your exit.  Furthermore, all of the autobahns have no directional notation on the signs.  For instance, the signs don’t tell you A99 North or A99 South – instead they simply point you to the next city/town/village along the way.  The problem with this is that if you don’t know all the cities and towns in Germany, it’s quite a challenge at times to figure out which way you need to go on the Autobahn – especially when you current speed of 140 kmh doesn’t really give you a lot of time to try to pull out the road atlas to figure it out!
   
10. the BGN Essen Preview rocks – and finally, I’d like to take a second to say thanks to Eric for putting together an awesome Essen preview.  I know that it takes him months to get it all together, and the size of the overall document is mind-boggling.  Though I didn’t print it out, if I did, the preview would have taken up over 400 pages!  While no document could ever be comprehensive in its approach to the Spiel fair, this is the closest thing that I’ve found – in any language.  Having a single resource to rely upon for information on the games really makes it easy to zone in on the games that I want to see – especially when there isn’t enough time to get to everything!  Thanks Eric!
    

Well, sorry there isn’t more actual information on the games themselves – but I simply haven’t had time to get to many of them yet!  I will be at game conventions for two out of the next three weekends though, so I’d expect that I’ll get at least one play in of almost every game I brought home from Essen in that time period!  So, even though the titles of the columns to come in the future won’t be labeled “Essen”, I’ll be talking about all the new games between now and the holidays!

Until your next appointement,
The Gaming Doctor

However back to Sunday.

Of course being in this ginourmous area with more games than you could poke a stick at was a great thing.  If you are a boardgamegeek, you really should think about going once.

Games aside a definite highlight was catching up with friends from the other side of the planet (and lets face it most of you are on the other side of the planet from Australia), meeting people face to face for the first time who you had only previously known via their avatars, comments and/or on-line Tigris & Euphrates playing and also for me meeting the people that Melissa had met last year.

I would like to send a quick hello to some of the people I met (apologies for mistakes in missing or misspelling names to to bad note taking or memory), the Lamont families, both the brothers the other Fraser and Gordon and their lovely wives, Uwe R, BasL and his mate the backup Bas, Eric Martin, Friedemann Friese, Klemenz, Andrea Meyer, Bruce Allen, Leo, Jason, James, Kylie, Steve, Ageet, Chris, Jeremiah, Bob, Joe, Richard and many many more,

It was also great to catch up with people I had met previously including (same caveats as above) Moritz, Hanno, Ann, Yvonne, Zev, Derk, Aldie, Michelle, Lincoln, Niike, Doug, Shelley, Jeff, Eric B, Cyrille, Tanja, Phil Davies, Umberto, Stefanie (x2), Petra, Dieter, Jon and many more.  Some of these people we had seen within the last year, but in some cases it had been five years.

We have been on the road since leaving Essen, so I have only browsed a few reports so far, but I keep seeing names of people and thinking “Drats, I wish I had caught up with them!” - Yoki, Gilad, Birgit and Derek are four names that immediately jump to mind.

In the afternoon, I made the first run from Essen back to our flat in Wuppertal.  I loaded the car up with boxes of games and drove back, unladed them and back to the Messe.  This was so that we would have a chance of fitting the whole familly, our clothes and our extra games in the car on the Monday.

Leaving the Spiel I found that K-k-k-ken (our SatNav) knew about an autobahn, or series of them really, that went from right next to the Spiel to within about two kilometres of our flat, which was much better than the route he had taken us to Essen.  On the way back, I tricked him by driving most of that two kilometres before telling to head to P1 at the Essen Messe and hey presto he took me on the good route, which avoided about 10k of Essen local roads.  I thought it was a win, even if nobody else is interested :-)

Arriving back at the Spiel I found that at the end of day 6 I was still finding things that I had never seen before such as the mini doughnut stand.  Why oh why could I have not found that before?  They were delicious!  There were also games that I hadn’t seen before and games I had heard about but never actually found.

That evening a bunch of us met up at a pizza place where we found the Pizza Milano, ham, salami and onion on a pizza that was about the size of a large truck tire.  Yummo!

There were certainly games purchased, games played and beers drunk on that last day, but details we have to wait until next time.

The object of the game is to find out which of the Great Old Ones Necron is trying to summon and banish it (by having the right combination of three items) before he manages to finish the spell. Necrons’ progress is marked by a track around the game board and his counter is advanced by some events, some monster die roll results and nearly all monster duplicate effects. There are six Great Old Ones in the game and five start face down - the players must turn each face-up by using a “Necronomicon” icon in turn until they reach the final one before they can win. These Great Old Ones can also cast baleful effects onto the game board through certain event cards. To win the players must also find open portals - by using another of the in-game items that allows a player to look at a portal - and seal it with a different item: get any of these wrong by sealing a non-portal space or not sealing a real portal and it’s bye-bye game. Players can also loose by taking too much sanity damage. The final piece of the jigsaw is the Witch himself who moves randomly around the game board and offers benefits to players at the same location: he protects from monster damage and makes item use more powerful.

What I’m hoping you’ll have picked up from that brief rundown of the rules is that although there are a relatively few rules to the game, there are a lot of different situational aspects of the game to manage. And it’s a good job too: when I first looked at the game with it’s paltry 12 event cards and 26 monsters I thought this was going to fall seriously short on variation, one of the keys to making a successful co-op game. But as it turns out I was wrong: the simple mechanics interact with each other to produce a great deal of variability in the game situation, more than enough to keep the game going over repeat plays. There’s just so many balls to keep in the air that a single, identifiable “correct” course of action is rarely obvious. The phases of the round fall in such a way, for example, that you banish monsters before you pick up items: so, if you go to a location in the hope of picking up an item to banish a monster next turn you’re almost certainly loosing the opportunity to pick up something that might be useful now such as a set of magic glasses to check the portal at your current location. It’s kind of hard to describe to be honest, but there’s a lot of these sorts of interactions going on. This is probably the cleverest feature of the design, and badly needed too because too often the stripped-down approach to mechanics that Euro designs favour leave co-op games in this paradigm looking more like logic puzzles with solutions than a game which requires a continually evolving strategy to cope with a changing situation. In co-ops, that sort of mechanical stagnation is an absolute killer to replayability as well as encouraging the ever-present alpha-dog “bossy player” problem that ruins so many of these sorts of games.

Witch of Salem has another trick up its sleeve to aim at alpha-dog players though. When a player looks at a portal tile, he’s not supposed to communicate the information about what’s underneath to his fellow players. If not everyone is in possession of the full information regarding the game state then no-one can find a “correct” play, right? It’s a clever idea but unfortunately in reality the mechanic plays out in a very clunky manner. In practice players can’t help but to give big clues as to what they found under tiles by their very actions, or by unintentionally dropping hints as part of the normal group discussions that are the bread and butter of co-op play. We found ourselves continually stopping to wonder what, exactly, we were allowed to say to each other regard the hidden portals and what we weren’t.

I’ve seen a lot of comments on this game regarding the level of inherent chaos. In addition to random card draws from two decks, there’s a capricious dice that can really screw you if you’re very unlucky by depriving you of a item you need to banish a certain monster. Personally I think this sort of chaos is entirely necessary in a co-op game to stop it descending into the aforementioned logic puzzle, and besides which I think the level of randomness in this game is largely controllable through skilled play. Card counting on the monster deck will leave you able to focus on the critters whose duplicate has not yet appeared, and sensible item collection mitigates the effects of the dice. What can make a huge difference are the “shadows” of great old ones that can go and haunt the University location. These are extremely baleful and their appearance is controlled by the event deck: if you’re unlucky enough to get an early shadow, or get a new one right after banishing an existing shadow then it can pretty much cripple the game. But these sorts of issues aren’t massively common and the game is pretty short anyway: most games will end within 60 minutes, so the odd game thrown to the rabid dogs of randomness doesn’t really rankle very much. The game plays from 2-4 and scales pretty well: if you play the game as written, it’s actually quite a bit harder with just two because there’s three different kinds of artefacts and each player can only carry one. But this is easily solved in a 2-player session by having each player play two characters. I also found you can make a pleasing solo game by controlling two characters and leaving aside the rule disallowing communication of portal status: the two-artifact thing makes an excellent compensation in terms of keeping the difficulty stable.

And by all accounts, the game is difficult to beat. Some people seem to have found it rather too difficult and viewed this as a problem because the learning curve is so steep they are discouraged from further plays rather than inspired to the challenge. Personally I haven’t found it to be quite so impossible - I’ve beaten it a couple of times, and I’m pretty sure we weren’t playing any rules wrong (there aren’t that many to get wrong). It seemed to me to be pitched at a satisfying difficulty level for the genre, and indeed the presence in the rulebook of some suggestions for making the game harder would indicate that good players should be able to keep up a sensible sort of win rate and might want an extra challenge.

So far, so good. Where the game starts to fall down somewhat is the theme. It’s not badly done, certainly and some of it works very well. The artwork is very good and adds greatly to the atmosphere and the game traces an overall narrative arc that you can follow if you so wish. But the devil here is in the detail. Why, for example, can you character not revisit a location until they’ve popped back to the University? Why, for that matter, do they have to move every turn? Why can’t a character with portal knowledge communicate the information to his fellows? The theme isn’t helped by the slightly silly and generic items in the game: in particular I found I couldn’t deal with a pair of “magic glasses” without mentally imagining Joseph Smith and the golden plates of Mormonism, which totally ruined whatever tension the game was generating at the time.

However what’s worse is what I can only describe as an overall blandness about the game experience. I find myself pleasingly immersed in the game while playing, and as I said the events of the game could certainly translate into a passable story, but there’s simply very little memorable that comes out of it, or indeed anything uniquely compelling about the mechanics or the play experience. It’s fun enough, but there are no great moments that will make your group collectively panic horribly and inspire some awesome creative solution, or some seat-of-the-pants risk-taking decision that everyone will be talking about for weeks to come. This criticism may be unfair of me: it may come from a semi-inevitable subconscious comparison to Arkham Horror in generates those sorts of moments by the dozen. But I kind of feel it’s important in a co-op game to make up for the lack of red-blooded completion.

This brings us nicely on to a paragraph about comparisons with other games. I keep hearing people suggesting, hoping perhaps, that this game is Arkham Horror “light”. It isn’t, and even if the whole concept of ”Arkham Horror light” wasn’t a contradiction in terms (which it is) the two games are wholly different and share only a loose theme and a co-operative approach. Arkham is a pseudo-RPG on a board, while this is simply a Lovecraft-themed mechanical Euro. A better comparison, and one which I’ve also heard a lot, is with Ghost Stories. Both are short, simple, Euro-esque co-operative games with a relatively high chaos factor and a horror theme. At first glance you might think that Ghost Stories has the edge here with it’s greater variability of set-up and tighter thematic integration. But I actually prefer Witch of Salem. I found that Ghost Stories was ultimately torpedoed by a definite threat gradient of the different ghosts in the game which encouraged rote, “correct strategy” responses and let the alpha-dog out of his box again. I was also annoyed by the fact that you could effectively win or loose the game before you’d even moved a pawn, depending on what incarnation was waiting for you at the bottom of the ghost deck. Neither is a problem in Witch of Salem, making it a more attractive game to play from my point of view.

I quite like Witch of Salem. It seems as though the designer and I shared some common criticisms of the co-op genre and for the most part I’m pleased with the solutions that he implemented and the game very much seems to pander to my prejudices regarding the co-up genre. But part of what I value in this game is most certainly the fact that it fills a niche in my gaming life that was hitherto void: it’s the first quick-playing co-op I’ve found that I haven’t grown bored of after more than a couple of plays. Those of you who enjoy the whole co-op thing more than I do, or who aren’t as worried about games being spoiled by bossy players may find that you already have a game or two around that will fill this role for you, in which case I’m not sure there’s anything particularly noteworthy about Witch of Salem that should make you rush out and buy it. For everyone else - particularly for anyone that’s ever agreed with one of my articles about the evils of co-operative gaming - you may find sharing a board with the Witch of Salem a more attractive experience than you might imagine. 

Designers: Mark & Matthew Anticole
Publisher: Eye-Level Entertainment

Players: 2-5
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Rules Language: English
Links:

Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Four, three times with 3 players and once with 5

Shimmer is a floor wax!
No, new Shimmer is a dessert topping!
It’s a floor wax!
No, it’s a dessert topping!
Hey, hey, hey, calm down. It’s both a floor wax AND a dessert topping!

The new game Flat Acting, by Mark and Matthew Anticole, promises to do for board games what Shimmer does for aerosole products. On one level it is a family game of strategy that fits in the genre of Eurogames. On another level, it is a story-telling game that relies heavily on its theme to encourage players to creatively explain some pretty weird hijinks on a movie set.

In the world of Flat Acting, four different genres of movies are somehow competing for dominance in the same movie. Each player controls one genre – romance, western, detective, or spooky – and attempts to play his appropriate actors on the board in a fairly straightforward battle for majority control of areas. In addition, there is a fifth, neutral set of playing pieces, the crew, who are just taking up space. (I’ll bet that’s how some actors feel in real life.) The “set” suffers from a similar multiple personality disorder, having various locations (garden, western town, house/office, cemetery) which any of these actors might appear on. This basic game could work well enough as a typical thinly themed Euro, but the designers take it a step further. Anytime a player introduces an actor onto the set, he must explain what’s going on in the story. Why? Because. It’s just a rule, and if you forget, you get penalized.

On your turn, you draw a card, which might show the two red (romance) 3-point actors. This means you must place a 3-point romance actor in a space that can support it, or else move an appropriate piece already on the board through a door to an adjacent area that can support it. Note that you might be representing gray (spooky), so since you drew a romance actor, you must play it defensively. The game continues this way – draw a card, and place or move an appropriate actor – until a player draws a card that can’t be acted upon. Suppose you need to add or move a 4-point detective movie actor, they’re both on the board, and all the adjacent rooms don’t have capacity for a 4-point actor. At that point the game ends immediately (and often abruptly). Score it up and see who wins.

There are a couple of wrinkles. Most notably, ties are really unfriendly in the manner of games like Raj. In a 10-point area, if spooky and western both have 4 points and detective has 2 points, the leaders cancel out and all 10 points go to detective. This obviously enables some strategic play that can enable a low-valued actor to upstage some stars. The other wrinkle is that in a four-player game where the blue “crew” pieces are unclaimed, those pieces are removed when it comes time to score. So if a room has 5 points of crew, 2 of western and 1 of romance, then the crew is removed and the points go to western.

To add a little more chaos and “take that,” there are also purple cards which players collect and can use to upset the proceedings: swapping actors, removing them from the board, or otherwise rearranging things.

Now that’s the floor wax. The dessert topping plays off the “wacky” theme. When you draw and place that gumshoe actor in the graveyard, you need to explain it: “The detective goes into the graveyard and spots a walking zombie. He notes the zombie has an uncanny resemblance to his client’s missing boyfriend.”

What do you do with that story tidbit? Well, nothing. It’s just that if you forget to say something – anything – another player can yell “Cut” and change your move. In practice, there’s a question as to when it’s permissible to say “Cut” and in varying games we either determined it was okay when it was “obvious” the player forgot (go figure that out) or when he took his hand off the piece. No rules help you on this. Now whether this enhances the game or not depends on the people playing, how creative they are, and how much they’ve had to drink. With not very creative people, the rule can slow the game down for no good reason. “Uhhhh… the detective.... uhhhh..... he’s in the graveyard and he.... uhh… walks around.” With more creative people, the rule slows the game down, but hopefully generates some entertainment and laughter. I played with three different groups of people. Some liked the storytelling rule; most didn’t, and in no case did I ever find the results to be all that entertaining. You place the ingenue girl on the western street and… most of the time there just isn’t anything all that clever to say about it. It’s triply more difficult to try to string it together into a funny narrative. There’s nothing that prevents you from dispensing with the storytelling part of the game and just playing the strategy game.

So how is that strategy game? Despite some promising mechanics, the game lives down to its name. Flat. The game as described by the rules seems promising: Play pieces, often not your own, then shuffle them around in a war of dominance. Superficially, the game would seem to resemble Stefan Dorra’s Kreta, an excellent game which also involves area control, moving pieces, and limits on how much can be placed in a given area. However, Flat Acting tends to grind down. Most damaging is the fact that you must play the card you draw. In theory, there is lots of opportunity for defensive play, as you must determine how to place your opponents’ pieces in a way that does the least good for them. In practice, you are playing your own pieces only 1 out of 5 times and playing other pieces 4 out of 5 times. The defensive moves you can choose from are often of limited interest. Players who don’t get to place good pieces of their own wind up frustrated. Realistically, you might have only 4-5 significant beneficial moves in a game. The mobility of the pieces, which makes a game like Kreta so dynamic, has very limited effect here. Often, moving a piece will not have a strong effect. As the board fills, the more powerful pieces get locked in because of the limitations within a room.

The game does have a sort of story arc, but not one that makes the game engaging. In the beginning of the game, when the board is wide open, you’ll find that your moves seem inconsequential. Most of the times you’re placing an opponent’s piece, so if you draw a 4 or a 5 you’ll try to stick it in a room where it can do the least benefit. Later on, the consequence of moves becomes clearer, but the moves are often scripted, with obviously bad and obviously good choices. Then the game ends. In each game I’ve played, the leaders were fairly self evident, but there was no sense that they played a better game. “Oh, Tom won. Yeah, I tried stopping him, but the cards never showed up. Tom, what’s your secret?” Tom shrugs.

I played one last time without bothering with the story-telling element, and I found that the game improved for me slightly. When players aren’t burdened with adding a storyline to each move, the game at least moves at a clip that makes it less vexing. This gives some greater feeling of control if only because less time is spent waiting for a meaningful move.

The producers have put some care into the components, and the overall production has a solid feel. The actors are on sturdy cardboard that fits into stands and create a colorful look on the board. The board pieces themselves are solid and all the art is clean. The box and boards have that super-glossy look which is common with games manufactured in China. It’s not to everyone’s taste, but it’s not chintzy. The art is a bit cartoony and juvenile, full of more cheerful whimsy than real wit. In practice, the presentation was not super friendly to game play. The two-dimensional pieces frequently needed to be rotated and checked as one player or another cannot read what’s on it, depending on the facing. It was just a minor nuisance. The cards are on a reasonably strong stock, but have no flex to them, and so are difficult to shuffle.

There seems to be a good deal of game smarts that went into the design of the game. It has many superficial aspects that reflect knowledge picked up from playing a variety of Euros. Flat Acting attempts to bring tried and true mechanics into a breezy game that is suitable for the family. Perhaps, for the family brought up on The Game of Life and Uno, Flat Acting will go down easily enough so that most won’t care about the lack of control. However, if you’re looking for a real “game,” you’re likely to find that Flat Acting isn’t your genre.

Designer: Alauna Sallis
Publisher: Marina Games
Players: 2-6
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Rules Language: English
Links:

Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Four times, twice with 3 players and twice with 2

By now everyone should know the great blunders in life as taught to us by Vizzini in The Princess Bride: “Never get involved in a land war in Asia,” and “never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line.” To that list I might have added “never forget to zip your fly before a job interview,” “never taunt someone who was held back one or more grades,” and “never agree to review a family game from a small publisher that has an exclamation mark in the title.”

The truth of these statements seemed self evident to me, and until I played Rummino! recently I would have sworn by all of them – but the real truth is that Rummino!, a family game from a small publisher boasting said exclamation mark, doesn’t exactly suck.

Rummino! has tiles with five suits of pinochle card values on them (9-A), which players add to the board to sets of a given rank or to ordered runs in a suit (straight flushes). On one turn, a player may play as many of a suit or a rank as he chooses anywhere on the board, provided each tile is placed legally. Scoring is fairly simple, as players score for the lengths of any rows or columns they added to that round, with bonuses given out for completing sets or runs. Two blank wild cards are included in the game, presumably put there to ramp up the luck factor for that genuine family game feel.

The components of the game are passable overall as the tiles have a significant heft to them. The colors are mostly easy to distinguish, so while the pink and the red are fairly close in low light, the suit icons on the tiles help someone like me with partial color blindness tell them apart. The game comes with a sturdy tile drawing bag, which is a nice touch – but then it doesn’t include tile racks, which would have been an even nicer touch; the tiles are fairly thin and are wont to fall over and expose themselves to your opponents at the slightest touch or table bump. This happened a lot.

My experience playing Rummino! wasn’t nearly as excrutiating as I thought it might be, and while I wouldn’t suggest it over a known favorite, I can imagine playing it again someday. My friends had a similar mixed reaction to it. I played Rummino! with both gamers and non-gamers, and it definitely went over better with the non-gamers, who I have to assume are the target audience. (One non-gamer friend said he really enjoyed it and would happily take my copy when I was done reviewing it.)

One of my gamer friends complained about not being able to discard bad tiles and suggested that a game starting off with a perfect 6x5 grid was a degenerate situation that would break the game. He’s right, of course. Though it must be said that for the game to really play out that way would be nearly inconceivable…

One of the consistent elements of Spiel – one aspect that makes the show what it is – is the search for the unexpected wonder, for the game that pulls your mind in a new direction. Every time you encounter someone new in the halls, you ask, “What’s the best thing you’ve played?” When people asked me this on Thursday and Friday, I had little to say since I had played few games, instead spending time talking to designers and publishers. Tobago had struck me the right way – a feeling confirmed by two subsequent plays – and Tikal II had everything that you’d want in a Kramer/Kiesling design other than being published and available (the game is due out in 2010 from GameWorks), but neither of these games seemed like a good answer.

Thankfully I found the answer Saturday afternoon while helping to demo games at the BoardGameGeek booth, that magical game being Aargh!Tect, a Walter Obert design that I had somehow not heard of despite writing a Spiel preview that ran to several hundred pages. As often happens at Spiel, we played with somewhat dicey rules as Scott Alden, aka Aldie, had played once or seen people playing or watched mimes interpreting the rules or received a telegraph that summarized the rules. We knew some percentage of the game play anyway and winged it for the rest, using our gamer-fu to fill in the holes. Thus I might be wrong on the specifics of game play, but I don’t care because I had so much fun playing the game. (English rules will supposedly be available on the Heidelberger Spieleverlag website by mid-November 2009.)

Players are split into teams of two, with one player being the architect and holding a blueprint for the structure to be built, and the other player being the laborer. The game includes two sets of five wooden pieces and one cardboard platform, with two teams playing simultaneously to complete their own individual blueprint. (Please remember that I’m freestyling the rules.)

Your vocabulary is limited due to your neanderthal brain, so you have only six commands to communicate with your worker, but each word means two things. Say “Ugungu!” once, and the worker should pick up one of the building materials; say it twice, and the person should put it down. To communicate which piece to pick up, you have to add some body movements: swiveling your hips for the green piece, stomping your feet for the white one, and so on. So you stomp and “Ugungu!” to have the worker pick up the white piece, then keep stomping and “Ugungu! Ugungu!” to have him put it down, then stomp and “Kaghingu!” to have him move it to the left, and so on.

Unfortunately, your worker is also kind of a dope, what with being a neanderthal and all, so he might not catch all the nuances of your “Manungu"s and other frantic motions. Thus, you’re armed with a giant inflatable club with pointy inflatable spikes. If your worker does everything right, you rap him once on the head to praise and encourage him. If you screws up, though, you hit him twice. This is genius as after the first hit, the worker tenses a bit waiting to see whether another blow is coming. Is the architect pleased or furious? From the architect’s side, you get a kick out of bopping someone in praise. I saw many brothers and sisters whacking each other with glee whenever I walked through Hall 9 at Spiel, Aargh!Tect serving as this fantastic conduit for their interaction.

Once a team completes its building, the players keep it to score points worth the value of the card, with some cards being more valuable – and more difficult – than others. I don’t know when the game ends or how you decide who wins, but such details seem beside the point given how much fun the game itself is. You feel like a complete idiot dancing around and waving and screaming this nonsense, yet you’re dying with laughter at the same time. I’ve seen comments from a few folks about the game being too silly, and it’s like, geez, climb out of your grave and have some fun, Grandpa!

So there you have it: the best game that I played at Spiel 09, a stupid bit of nonsense that was fun and surprising and different. My only regret is that my luggage was already filled with tons of other games that don’t require you to hit people with inflatable clubs, so I didn’t buy a copy at the show. No matter – I’ve since ordered a copy and look forward to beating my wife soon. The red one, woman! Move it forward!

39. A method of playing a game by opposed players; said game comprising two sets of distinguishable playing pieces, each set having movable pieces with no mirrored surfaces, of which one is a key piece, and pieces with at least one mirrored surface, a game board consisting of a first end, a second end, and a plurality of rows and columns, intersecting to form a plurality of spaces, the method comprising the steps of:

• placing each player’s set of playing pieces on the game in a pre-determined starting configuration; and

• alternating turns, each turn comprising moving, either a translation or a rotation, a piece followed by activation of a laser, said alternating moves continuing until one player illuminates the opposing player’s key piece;

• wherein moving a piece consists of a movement one space in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal direction to an unoccupied adjacent space.

For those not familiar with Kill Doctor Lucky, 3-7 players are trying to off an old man in his mansion – man, that sounds vicious when you think about it – but to avoid being arrested, they can’t do the deed unless they’re alone in the room with him and out of eyesight of the other players. Even in these situations, your attacks against the codger can fail due to card play by others.

This game has been added to Gone Cardboard.

Designer: Justin De Witt
Publisher: Fireside Games
Players: 1-6
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 60 minutes
Rules Language: English
Price: $35
Links:

Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Six, once solitaire, once with 2 players, twice with 4 players, twice with 6 players.

With the sudden spurt of cooperative board games, it is no wonder they are under scrutiny. The popularity of the titles creating this surge – Shadows Over Camelot, Pandemic, Ghost Stories – could lead to an early grave for the genre without serious innovation, particularly since many argue that the games lack competitiveness or that one player can play for the whole field.  Castle Panic tries to bring a new competitive/cooperative feel to the genre, while being simple enough to introduce newcomers to the game.

Castle Panic is a simple cooperative-ish game where players work together on a team to protect their six starting castles from attacking monsters and bosses. The game uses a very simple, card-driven battle system where each attack card hits monsters on certain parts of the board. Players play with their hand face up and can trade designated amounts of cards each round. If any of the original six castles remain at the end, the players have won.

What sets Castle Panic apart from other cooperative games is the idea of the “Master Slayer” – the title for the individual who has collected the most points by delivering the final blows to the attacking monsters if the players’ team wins. The promise of this accolade encourages players to act in their own interests instead of letting one player run the show. If players play with the goal of becoming the Master Slayer, the game takes on more of a Cutthroat Caverns feel in which players must work together for anyone to win, but there is always paranoia as to whether people are out to help just themselves.

This simple change also makes the game noticeably harder because the overlord player chooses the position of the monsters, thereby allowing him to attack weak points. (In the base game, the monsters are placed around the castle by dice roll.) The overlord does not have many options or really even tough choices, but the constant back-and-forth keeps the overlord well entertained.

One of the best things about Castle Panic is the ability to play it straight out of the box. Tokens are pre-punched and rules are simple to follow with guides on the board and order of play cards for each player. The components are of a very high quality, except for the cards. It perplexes me why the cards are so flimsy when everything else is so nice, but that’s a minor gripe in an otherwise fantastic setup.

Overall Castle Panic is a well thought out game, with various levels of complexity making it perfect for those new to the cooperative genre. It may not be the gamers’ game of the year, but with the Overlord style of play and ways to vary to the difficulty, there is enough substance to keep them well entertained.

Dominion (Stupormundi) by Donald X. Vaccarino, wins the Best of Show: Cardgame Category.

AGE – The Amazing Goal Era (RCS Quoti) by L. Delpiano, M. Pirovano, N. Speroni and P. Sciascia wins the Best of Show: Collectable/Miniatures Category.

Non Perdere il Senno (Janus Design) di B. Baugh and F. Hicks wins the Best of Show: RolePlay Games Category.

The member of the jury are: Luca Giuliano (president), Fabrizio Poli, Duccio Vitale, Paolo Fasce and Paola “Paoletta” Mogliotti

Here the list of the nominated Games and the winners of the side awards:

- Ad Astra (NG International) by B. Faidutti and S. Laget.
- Caligula (Post Scriptum) by P. Zizzi.
- Stone Age (Stupor Mun) by M. Tummelhofer.

Col/Minniatures Games

- AGE – The Amazing Goal Era (RCS Quoti) by L. Delpiano, M. Pirovano, N. Speroni e P. Sciascia.
- Flames of War (Battlefront Miniatures) by P. Yates.
- Wings of War WWII Miniatures (NG International) by A. Angiolino and P. Paglia.

Card Games

- Dominion (Stupor Mun) by D. X. Vaccarino.
- Semenza (S) by U. Rosenberg.
- Tokyo Train (Oliphante) by W. Obert.

Ro Games

- Traveller - Viaggiatori tra le Stelle (Wild Boar) by G Hanrahan.
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay – Revised Edition (Nexus Games) by C. Pramas.
- Non Perdere il Senno (Janus Design) by B. Baugh and F. Hicks.

Side Awards

Best Editorial Project

- Age of Conan (NG International) by M. Maggi, F. Nepitello and R. di Meglio

Best Mechanic

- Agricola (S) by Uwe Rosemberg

Best Family Game

- Super Farmer (Red Glove) by Karol Borsuk

Career Award

- Beatrice Parisi