Kulkmann's G@mebox - www.boardgame.de

DEMO

[IMAGE]

Authors:
Eva Maria Tobies &
Hendrik Nicola Jenzowsky

Publisher:
Jenzowsky Spieleverlag
2007

No. of Players:
2 - 4

Awards:
none

EVALUATION

[IMAGE]
[IMAGE]
[IMAGE]
[IMAGE]
[IMAGE]


G@mebox author Ralf Togler writes about the game:

The newly founded publisher JENZOWSKY is another example of the new trend of authors which become their own publishers. The founders of the JENZOWSKY had invented their first game, but they were unable to find someone to publish the game. So they took their game, made some investigations and finally published the game themselves. And I think they did their work very well. Demo now is their second game and it surely can keep up with many other games coming from such small publishers. And the theme of the game is innovative indeed!

[IMAGE]

Demo is a card game that has some elements of a board game as well. In the game, the players adopt the role of organisers of demonstrations. These organisers are not really interested in the theme of the demo, but their one and only aim is to get a high reputation by organising the most attractive events. So, they constantly set up new demonstrations and try to attract a lot of visitors, call reporters with a positive attitude towards the theme of the demo and end the demo in the right moment, before vandalism takes over. Of course, there are always some stupid reporters who don't think the theme of the demo to be right and who only write about those vandalisms. But it is heard that sometimes hints from opponents should be responsible for those reporters to come to a demo.

All these elements like visitors, reporters and a lot of other events influence the popularity of a demo, and they are introduced to the game by cards. Before the game starts, 12 demo cards are split equally between the players. In his turn, a player can call a new demo into existence, play event cards and try to break up one of his own demos. It is possible to support more than one demo at the same time, so there is always an alternative if the theme of a demo does not fit to the event cards on the hand of the player. Event cards can be placed on the player's own demos or on demos of an opponent. As an example, this makes it possible to send a negative reporter to a competitive demo and thus weaken the opponent. However, if a demo becomes too big to control there may be dangerous riots, so a player should keep a constant watch on his running demonstrations in order to dissolve them before violence takes over.

[IMAGE]

To break up a demo, the player has to roll a dice against the stress points of a demo. These stress points are the sum of stress points on the demo and event cards, the number of visitors and riots and the influence of positive and negative reporters. So it is the more difficult to stop the bigger a demo becomes. However, Police cards can help to break the demo by reducing the stress points again.

Every successfully completed demo is added to the player's victory points. Demos that are still on the table at the end of the game can only cause a deduction of victory points, so it is a good advice to break the demos timely.

[IMAGE]

Demo is a nice game with a fresh, unusual design. The cards are a mixture of cartoons and photos that are partly edited with a graphics editor. This design fits the background of the game and matches anxious and agitated atmosphere of some demonstrations. Unlike some successful games from the big publishers, the theme of Demo does not seem to be easily exchangeable. Quite the opposite, it is one of the most interesting background themes which I have seen in the last years, and it certainly gives the game a high degree of uniqueness. The game play is fast and always gives the player a variety of possible turns, but it is not very complex. In the long run it is better to play with three or four players, because the interesting possibilities to weaken the opponents by playing negative event cards are limited significantly in a two player game. If JENZOWSKY succeeds in finding good contracts to distribute their games, I am quite sure that we will hear more of them in the next years.


[Gamebox Index]

Google Custom Search

Impressum / Contact Info / Disclaimer

Kulkmann@aol.com

Copyright © 2012 Frank Schulte-Kulkmann, Essen, Germany