Convention Report: Essen 2008: October 25, 2008 – Day 4
By W. Eric Martin
October 26, 2008
Spiel 08 is over, so let’s start the final summary report with one bit of news from the closing moments of the show:
• FRED Distribution will release a new version of Richard Borg’s Battle Cry, which has a working title of – wait for it – Richard Borg’s Battle Cry. Borg mentioned that some elements of the game will be updated, but the release will remain the same game and not be a sequel. No helicopters will be included, and marshmallow guns have also been nixed.
• The final standings for the Fairplay list of games rated at Spiel 08 remains largely the same as on Saturday:
- Dominion
- Machu Picchu
- Comuni
- Diamonds Club
- Snow Tails
- Pandemic
- Ice Flow
- Im Schutze der Burg
- Age of Empires III
- Uruk
• The fourth edition of Emiliano Sciarra’s Bang! from daVinci, which will be distributed in the U.S. by Alliance before the end of 2008, will be followed by a new edition of Dodge City that includes the components needed to add an eighth player to the game (as in the previous edition) along with the currently out-of-print expansion High Noon.
• Despite not being listed in the Spiel directory, Bucephalus Games was present at Spiel 08 with samples of its upcoming line, including Playbook Football (which had an elaborate wooden board and rotating wood scoring dials), Rorschach (a party game in which players associate rorschach-style designs with questions while trying to guess what other players will choose) and The Suicide Bomber Card Game. These titles are due out by the end of November, with several more games in the pipeline. For each wave of its releases, Bucephalus will create a low-cost demo kit for retailers that contains a sample pack of components for most titles.
• Czech Board Games had removed GanXtaZ, pronounced “gangstas,” from its list of Czech-produced board games that would be available at Spiel, but the title was indeed on hand. In this party game for 4-12 people, players are born into one of three neighborhoods, which are ranked from least seedy to most. Players move through the neighborhood, surviving encounters with gangs and potential hits in order to earn money and move to a better area. To earn money, however, you have to make deals with your boss, an unsavory fellow who might double-cross you. Players show their trust or lack of it in a modified roshambo, exhibiting either an outstretched hand or single finger to their opponent. Yes, the finger has been transformed into a game mechanism.
That’s it for now from the rainy Ruhr region. Once I return to the U.S. and have time to properly download my brain, both neural and paper-based, I’ll post more detailed reports on the games shown and played at Spiel 08.
Posted by W. Eric Martin on Oct 26, 2008 at 05:00 PM in Columnists, Articles, Etc., Convention Reports, Convention Report: Spiel 2008 / 5541
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The same ‘final’ table is shown on http://fairplay-online.blogspot.com/ but the spreadsheet downloadable from there, which lists all 171 games with at least 2 votes, has Im Schutze der Burg two places higher. The top-10 are games are those with at least 45 votes each. I understand there has to be a cut-off, but the particular number seems arbitrary. Had it been 30, Tinners Trail and Ghost Stories would have been 2nd and 3rd. Had it been 50, Snow Tails and Ice Flow would not have appeared. A breakdown by voter nationality: now that would be interesting. Posted by John Mitchell on Oct 27, 2008 at 03:08 PM | #
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