The SPIEL '22 Games Convention
at Essen / Germany

Warm-Up-Day - Sunday - 2nd of October 2022

Another year, another SPIEL and us again reporting from Essen. Today, Frank and I started once again with our traditional picture in front of Messe Essen. It’s the incredible 26th year for our Internet Magazine and the 26th year for our daily reports from SPIEL. Unbelievable, but true!

Although, I still feel to be fit enough for the crazy SPIEL week, I also feel the age every now and then. Writing all night long after a hard convention day has become harder over the years. And I also tend to hold my breath for the pictures, because the COVID years left some marks in my midsection.

Anyway, all that is irrelevant this week! Let’s start our first warm-up with a game that was published shortly after last SPIEL:

Review: Founders of Teotihuacan – Board & Dice (booth 2C130)

I think all of you came in contact with the one or other solo boardgame during the pandemic years. Mostly, these games weren`t pure solo boardgames, but multiplayer boardgames with an adopted rule for the solo player. Sometimes these solo rules tried to introduce an automatic player that more or less “reacted” like a human player, sometimes the rules were changed significantly, so that the gameplay was totally different compared to the multiplayer version. Honestly, I tried a lot of these solo modes (what else could a reviewer do, regarding the strong COVID regulations in the first pandemic period). Sometimes I liked what I played, sometimes I took it as a good variation to learn the rules, and sometimes the solo mode was just boring or even broken.

But I also made the experience that the solo mode was getting better in better over the time. It felt as if more and more energy was put into the solo rules, sometimes even with the help of additional authors. BOARD & DICE is one of the publishers that put great efforts to the solo modes of their games in a early stage. There is often an additional rulebook with precise rules for the solo player.

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Founders of Teotihuacan, designed by BOARD&DICE founder Filip Glowacz, is such an example. The small brother of the award-wining Teotihuacan: City of Goods is set in the same early stage of Mesoamerica. Again we are asked to build up the city with its buildings, temples and a great pyramid in the center. But in contrast to the older title, we now built our own city on personal player boards. Of course, in the solo variant, you are the only one with a city.

The main board only holds all the available components for a round, maintains the possible actions and their strength, and serves as a reference as far as costs and victory points are regarded. There are three sections where you can send your workers, all of them divided into a build and an influence action. A key concept of the action stacks is that you determine the action strength by the number of actions disks (yours or others) on the same stack. Four disks are maximum, and there is always one bonus disk placed, so action strength can be 2-4. This strength determines what component you can choose from the offering, respectively how much it will cost you to take a component that is larger than the action strength. Basically, for each space a component will cover on your board you must have one action strength. For instance, a size 4 component needs 4 action strength (or additional costs for the gap).

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The second key concept of the game is an architect that moves clockwise around your square personal board. Components can only be placed within the two districts closest to your architect. Ok, what components can we find? Buildings and temples contest for inch of ground in the outer sectors of your city, while pyramid tiles are placed in a separated area in the center of the personal board. The function of buildings is to produce resources (immediately after placing the building, and after being activated in one of the influence actions). Those resources are placed directly adjacent to the building until they are used. As a result, they occupy confined space on the board again.

Temples on the other hand are not very useful during the game, but they are necessary to gain victory points. In combination with the temples that are placed in the middle of the board, the temples are the only source of victory points in the final scoring. The basic concept to get those victory points is to place temples of the same colour as temples within reach in the same district.

Three influence actions complete the available building actions. Those influence actions let you either produce new resources with your already placed buildings, or it lets you use worship tiles that are acquired every time you build a new temple. This doesn’t seem to be very interesting, but worship tiles are often a great chance to gain a lot of victory points during the game, at least if you meet the requirements.

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That’s more or less what Founders of Teotihuacan is about. Now, back to the solo mode: As you can conclude from the aforesaid, there is only very little interaction between the players in a multiplayer game. Everyone has their own boards on which the city is built up. The only interaction is the limited number of available components for a round and the height of action disks on each stack that determines the action strength. And this, of course, is perfectly for a solo mode of the game. David Turczi and Blazej Kubacki, both great authors themselves, have designed those solo modes that basically imitate other players by placing action disks on the stacks and taking away from the available components. After only a quick learning turn, this works intuitive and fast. In addition to it, the game demands three tough challenges from the solo player that are randomly determined at the start, and that make the solo game rich in variety and interesting. The game doesn`t feel exactly the same as the multiplayer variant, but I didn’t really miss the other players playing the game (apart from the talking part and the red wine).

To sum it up: Founders of Teotihuacan is a good example for a great solo mode of a multiplayer game. With more than one player I would always prefer the big brother Teotihuacan: City of Goods, but the solo mode is quicker and more varied in this adaption of the game. Let’s see what we can expect from the next big T-game from BOARD & DICE later this week…

So, that`s it for today. Sleep well and see you soon again!

Yours, Ralf

A warm and hearty “WELCOME BACK” from me as well!

Ralf could not have phrased it better in his welcome words. It’s just amazing that we are actually launching our 26th SPIEL report, and it feels somewhat unreal because this means that we have been doing this for 26 years now. While our reporting style and website may be a bit outmoded, we can claim with pride to be the oldest SPIEL report in the internet!

Well, outmoded may sound a bit harsh, and so I actually prefer the term vintage – not only for our website the G@mebox but also for ourselves. The age of 50 waits just round the next corner for Ralf and me, but at the same time I ask myself whether there really is a coming of age when it comes to playing boardgames. Standing at the beginning of SPIEL week, I feel eager and happy like a teenager to be back in the halls and start playing. This feeling does not only bring back fond memories, but it’s also a bit of consolation that gaming and good company offers some counterbalance to the current political situation. Here the SPIEL week will offer a bit of respite, allowing us all to take a break and enjoy our favourite hobby.

But despite all continuity, our hobby is changing as well, and once again I cannot stop wondering on the fact how much innovation and creativity was unleashed by Kickstarter projects in recent years. To be honest, I always feel a bit annoyed when I stumble upon a good Kickstarter project which is presented in the halls of SPIEL, because in former days all games to be seen and played at the show could be purchased right away. Of course this is still true for the majority of games, but looking at the list of new games on Boardgamegeek shows that an increasing percentage of games presented at the SPIEL will only be demo versions of games which aren’t released yet. Instead, the designers want to make the audience aware of their upcoming crowdfunding projects, and here the SPIEL has become a great venue to test the public response to a game and project under development.

But despite my somewhat emotional preference to have a good game available for an instant purchase, I am perfectly happy by the way in which Kickstarter helps to release great games which otherwise would have been stuck in the design stage due to lack of funding. While there is a certain number of washouts and stalling projects, a much bigger part of the games produced through crowdfunding comes with great new ideas and professional design and artwork, and it seems that these games are the best example for the spirit and dedication which can be found in crowdfunding projects.

To illustrate my thoughts outlined above I would like to come back to my review of Cactus Town which I wrote back in 2020. My friend Daniel Schloesser from 2ND GATE GAMES in Barcelona has equipped me with a prototype of Cactus Town back at the SPIEL 19, and even though this prototype had been fully playable and outfitted with nice artwork, the game changed considerably due to the Kickstarter crowdfunding which Daniel and his team started in 2020.

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Covid 19, discussions out the correct use of native American names and terms and the global shipping crisis all resulted in a noticeable delay of the project, but on the positive side the small and compact prototype game could be turned into a fully grown boardgame with gorgeous playing pieces by the funding which could be collected.

Daniel and his team were not just content with the game as it was, but they continued designing and polishing up the game, heeding the feedback they received from playtesters, backers and reviewers in order to come up with a game which does not need to shy away from comparison with games which were produced by big publishing houses with editorial crews and a higher financial leeway. So, one of the biggest changes was that the game now can be played by up to four players, introducing the revengeful Can-Can Dancer as a fourth party to join the conflict of the Outlaws, the Lawmen and the Bounty Hunters. Following her own agenda of winning duels and reaching target buildings, her goals blend perfectly with those of the other three parties, and so one of the biggest flaws of the prototype – the fact that it was limited to three players – was removed in the final version.

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Other elements of finetuning deal with unused programming cards being used to strengthen the players’ results in duels, an ingenious move which makes players think twice whether they should use a card for programming or for extra ammunition. And talking about the programming part, the unnerving procedure of backwards programming now is not used for the standard game, but instead it’s only a variant. In the standard game, the players now use a straightforward programming mechanism, and this change is welcome as well, because the game is challenging enough when it comes to predicting the actions of the other players.

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This are just examples of the finetuning which Cactus Town has received, but the crowdfunding also allowed a great boost on side of the playing pieces and game components. The deluxe version now features beautiful miniatures instead of standees, and many other components have also seen quality upgrades. In addition, even more alternative characters could be made available as expansions through the received funding, and so the game really is an eye-catcher which makes it worthwhile to visit the 2ND Gate GAMES booth here at the SPIEL.

I will be there as well, seeing my friend Daniel for the first time after a three year break. And that’s what the SPIEL is all about – meeting friends and having fun! See you soon!

Monday - 3rd of October 2022

Hey ho, here we are back again from Essen, boardgamer’s world capital for this holy week!

Yesterday, Frank told you some weird story about the age 50 waiting just round the corner for us. What nonsense! Would such old men really play boardgames? Or worse: would men of that age walk around the convention halls and write down all what they have seen in a huge report day over day?

But now it has come to tell you the truth! Strange, but true: today is truly my birthday. So, everybody shout out and sing:

If you are unsure what to say: No, I don’t wish or want anything from you (still the one or other comment in our guestbook would be nice…)

And: it’s not my 50th birthday. It’s 49th, a much nicer number. Probably, that’s why I am still so fit, so full of vim and vigor. And next year, I am sure that the 60 will be the next 50. But that’s still far away, so let’s concentrate on the next warm-up review: a game that was released by Nürnberger Spieleverlag (NSV) this spring.

Review: Exacto – NSV (booth 3D111)

Today I’d like to draw your attention to a very small game, actually a simple children game. You might even ask if that’s really game, because there is so little action in it. You just have to guess distances. More precisely: you have to compare the distance between two holes on one card with the distance of coloured circles on another card.

Honestly, I nearly left out this game, if the small Nürnberger Spieleverlag (NSV) weren’t the publisher of the game. The same company that published the award-winning The Game and the minimalistic The Mind. Missing this game would have been a fault, at least if you have (smaller) children. To be honest, I was fascinated about how some of the children I played the game with constantly guessed the right distance. I really had to go the one or other extra mile to claim victory.

The game contains 15 thick unique cards in the same size as the gamebox, each with two holes. On the one side of the card we find eight coloured circles, on the other side there is only a pencil and a yardstick as a flavour sketch. Every round you take two cards, one face up with the coloured circles and the other face down with only the flavour sketch and the two holes visible.

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The first player has to choose two of the coloured circles on the one card that might fit to the distance of the two holes on the other card, of course without measuring it. Only your eyes are allowed, no other tool like the fingers (smaller children tend to use their fingers, I would tell that still ok for the sake of the fun of the game). After naming the circles it’s time to see if the guess was correct. For this the player takes the face-down card and overlays it on the face-up card on top of the two circles.

If the guess was correct, the card goes to the guessing player as a victory point. The face-up card is flipped and a new face-up card is drawn to start the next turn. If, however, the guess was wrong, the next player in line can make a new guess until the distance was correctly predicted. The game ends when the last card has been taken from the stack of unused cards. That’s after about 15 minutes.

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As said, Exacto is a very simple game. But I was totally surprised how hard it would be to guess the right distance. My first thought was that this would be much too easy for the grown-ups, pure kid’s staff, but I was totally wrong. I was often beaten by young children, and I even played the game several times only with my wife, without any children, because it was so funny. The quality of the cards is extraordinary for such a small game. Additionally, the game has a new box design that gets along without any plastic. A sustainable new line from the NSV publisher. Exacto once again has convinced me that simple game concepts and even children games can fascinate young and old boardgamers likewise. Excellent to play with the children.

That’s it for today. For now, I say goodbye, because I will go back celebrating my birthday…

HAPPY BIRTHDAY RALF!!!

After yesterday’s thoughts about crowdfunding I decided to deepen the topic a bit, writing today about another kickstarted game which my wife Nicole and I have received this year’s spring. In March we purchased the German Deluxe (Kickstarter) edition of Tortuga 2199 by SCHWERKRAFT VERLAG, and since delivery this game has been on our gaming table quite regularly.

Before plunging into the tough and rough lives of space pirates, I would like to point out that this game is another fine example of the positive effects of Kickstarter. The game’s designers Michael Loyko and Denis Plastinin have originally teamed up with US-based publisher GREY FOX GAMES to publish their space buccaneering game, but by using crowdfunding the game actually received a much bigger audience before hitting the market. This resulted in German publisher SCHWERKRAFT doing a German version of Tortuga 2199. This publisher has specialized in doing localized versions of many crowdfunding projects, and so a German deluxe edition with most of the Kickstarter content was able to hit the stores almost at the same time as the original English Kickstarter edition was delivered. Even better, the crowdfunding did not only result in this localization, but many of the components could be upgraded as well, and campaign backers also received a free copy of the separately sold Shipwreck Bay expansion plus some additional cards and spaceships.

When retail versions of kickstarted games are released, I always check for the differences, keeping an eye especially on the question whether exclusive content was created. Actually I am not doing this because of a collector’s urge for completion, but instead I want to know whether the exclusive stuff was additional fluff (“more of everything”) or whether it really enhanced the game in the one or other way. Additional fluff is not what I need, but I shy back from buying a game where the exclusives really add a lot to gameplay. Here Tortuga 2199 is a perfect example for good balancing, because the additional ships and cards (a deck of Captains) are a nice add-on and they certainly were an interesting incentive to win more backers, but they are not having such a big impact on gameplay that it’s imperative to have them. It is nice that these goodies and the expansion were included in my German deluxe version, but the retail edition of Tortuga 2199 plus the Shipwreck Bay expansion is all you need to start your career as a space privateer.

Turning now to the game itself, Tortuga 2199 is one of the few games which successfully brings together deckbuilding and player actions on a gameboard. The gameboard here is made up of modular sectors, and at the beginning all players start with their ships at the central sector of Tortuga fortress. Apart from their ships, each player has a deck of 10 cards, 9 of which are identical to each deck. 5 cards depict a Credit symbol which can be used for purchases, 3 cards show a Maneuver symbol which is used for actions like movement or combat, and one card is an afterburner which allows an extended move of three sectors in one action. The 10th and final card in each player’s deck is a card showing his individual ship, and here a bit of individualism can be found, because each of the Ship cards has a small special ability which is unique to this card. However, these individual abilities are quite balanced, and so it’s not a decisive advantage to play with the one or other ship.

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During their turn, the players play a hand of five cards, either using all or part of the symbols which the cards provide. Unused and used cards all will be discarded together at the end of a turn, with the exception that a player can use two Credit symbols to store an unused card for his next turn. But apart from this storage option, the players should aim at using their hand of cards as efficient as possible, because all excess cards are lost when the turn is over. After discarding, a full new hand of 5 cards is drawn for the player’s next turn, reshuffling the deck and continuing to draw if the deck was depleted.

As mentioned, Tortuga 2199 quite nicely brings together deckbuilding and actions on the gameboard. So, a player can use his Maneuver symbols for moving his spaceship to adjacent sectors, with the central board sectors being the main sectors of Tortuga, whereas the sectors at the outer brim are unique special locations like a Research Facility, a Mine or a Fortress. However, the Maneuver symbols are also useful when it comes to conquering a Sector. If a player succeeds in playing enough Maneuver symbols to outmatch the sectoral defense strength at his spaceship’s current location, the player is allowed to occupy the sector and claim the sector’s benefits. Apart from winning influence points, occupying one of the central board sectors will provide a small permanent Credit bonus or a defense bonus for ship to ship combat, whereas ownership of the outer sectors will bring a benefit which is unique to its sector, like an additional Maneuver symbol or the possibility to destroy a card from the owner’s deck.

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The destruction of a card is also possible by paying two Maneuver symbols, and this is quite useful because the players have the possibility to spend their Credits to obtain much better cards. In the Tortuga sectors cards can be purchased from the central card market which is available to all players, whereas movement of a spaceship to a sector in the outer brim means that the player can purchase a card from a specific sector deck. Each of the outer sectors has it’s own deck of special cards, and their uses are somewhat aligned to the sector where they can be purchased. So, as can be expected cards form the Fortress give more Maneuver symbols whereas cards from the Mine give more Credits, but there are also special abilities which are unique to the cards of each outer sector. Like in all deckbuilding games, purchasing cards which enhance a player’s deck and support his strategy is quite essential, but there is also an element of timing because other players also might aim to arrive at a specific sector to purchase a powerful card.

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Actually I am quite fond of games like Clank! or Tortuga 2199 because they bring along a nice new approach to traditional action-point-allowance games, but a point on which Tortuga 2199 shines even more is its very high degree of direct player interaction. Interaction is not limited to beating other players when it comes to purchasing a card or occupying a sector, but instead the game features a combat system which is bound to cause a lot of space battles. So, the players also can use their Maneuver symbols for ship-to-ship combat or for taking over a sector which is controlled by an opposing player, and both of these actions will bring the attacker additional influence points when he is successful. However, attacking another player’s ship is not without a risk, because the loser actually will have to destroy a random card which he used in this battle, and so a reckless attack actually may turn to the disadvantage of the attacker. Nonetheless, performing well-timed sector takeovers is an important and recurring element in Tortuga 2199, because the sectoral benefits also will switch to it’s new owner if the attack was successful.

Quite nice is also the fact that there are several ways to win in Tortuga 2199. The first player to obtain 15 or more Influence points will be declared as the winner, and one approach certainly is to rely on using Maneuver symbols for performing attacks, but Maneuver symbols also can be used to hunt down Space Creatures which can be found all over the gameboard. When a hunt is successful, the hunter will earn an Influence point, but he will also gain the Creature card for his deck, giving him nice combinations of symbols and special actions. These benefits can be used when such a card is redrawn in a later turn, or the card can be trashed for an additional bounty of Influence points. However, there is also room for a less aggressive strategy, and so Influence points also can be bought for Credits at the central Tortuga sector. All this opens up a considerable width for fleshing out an individual strategy, thus contributing to a very high replay value of Tortuga 2199.

Talking about replay value and variation, the aforementioned Shipwreck Bay expansion is a must have. This expansion adds two more unique outer brim sectors which can be used for replacing one or two of the four basic game sectors, and furthermore interaction is strengthened even more by the fact that players now can infiltrate other players’ decks by forcing themto take a Malfunction card. This ability is used sparsely in order not to throw gameplay off-balance, but nonetheless it makes the game a bit more nasty. After all, a pirate’s life is not for the faint hearted!

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It’s this packing combination of deckbuilding and interaction which keeps Tortuga 2199 rather high in our list of favourites, and despite a slight kingmaker dilemma which may arise in games with 3 or 4 players we feel that the satisfaction of deckbuilding plus the always present player competition gives the game a high degree of attractiveness. In many other games the players focus on building their own engines, honing them to perfection in order to be the first to reach a certain score. Here you are building an engine as well, but it is directly pitched against those of the competition, and this gives Tortuga 2199 an incredibly high entertainment value!

And so I am once again back to a week of nighttime typing. See you tomorrow - SPIEL is approaching!

Tuesday – 4th of October 2022

Hello everybody! Here comes another warm-up day for us to shorten the time until SPIEL finally opens the doors. With the first official day within sight, the tension is rising. Tomorrow, Frank and I will have our first day at SPIEL with the traditional press conference and the ceremony for the award of the Deutsche Spielepreis. In recent times (yes we talked about getting old) this day was really our first contact with the novelties for SPIEL. All of you know that this has changed dramatically.

Nowadays we find videos, previews and publisher content months before the official publishing. For SPIEL it’s W Eric Martin’s preview list on BGG that provide us with all we have to know about the novelties. This list continually increases in the weeks before SPIEL. Gamers and reviewers likewise scan this list to prepare for SPIEL and to learn more about the games they are interested in.

For Frank and me, this is also a great source for deeper insights into the games we try to prepare. But still it’s a big thrill for us to really see the final product, hold the game in your hands, feel and play it. And that’s precisely what we are trying to do: to report you about the emotions of the game and not to promote a product.

That’s why you don’t hear anything from us about what we are heading for, what our most anticipated games are and what we like or dislike. At least not before we had a chance to speak to the publishers or authors, hold the game in our hand and playing the one or other turn. We hope you appreciate that in a time when influencers do nothing more than held their camera in front of the game and posting meaningless statements.

A hard job indeed, maybe old-fashioned, but we think that the games deserve it!

This said, let’s come to my first real novelty for SPIEL as a I got the German version from Mortum – Medieval Detectives a few last week, and I already played the first mission of the game:

Review: Mortum – Medieval Detectives (Mortum – Agenten des dunklen Zeitalters - Grimspire (booth 2A149)

Agents on cloak-and-dagger ops in an unwelcoming medieval fantasy world. That’s what BGG tells us in a subtitle about the game. I think that’s already a good explanation about a lot of the game. So, we are in set in a medieval world. And we are agents or better a group of three adventurers who are drawn incidentally into three criminal cases. Well, at least it seems to be criminal cases.

Compared to our modern times, the Middle Ages were hard times and people often vanished, were robbed and murdered just because of some pennies, a horse or a golden bracelet. Basically, our task is only to find an informant who has some information for us where our friends might have disappeared in a far-away village.

But, of course, our informant is not at the appointed meeting place. And so, we find ourselves in a lonely encampment near a farmhouse, a pub, a smith and some stables.

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Mortum – Medieval Detectives is a detective game, a genre that’s getting more and more popular. It’s purely card-based and does not need any app on a mobile device like so many other games of this genre. Each turn, a player chooses one of the options of the already revealed card. The card tells which new card is drawn from the deck for the scenario and the active player reads out what’s happening and what possibilities there are to decide for the group of adventures.

Yes, it’s the whole group of adventurers the active player is choosing for, not a single adventurer. As a result, Mortum – Medieval Detectives is actually not really a multiplayer game, but it is much funnier (and often also better) to make decisions in a group than it is for the solo player. And, of course, the active player has the final word….

In contrast to some other games of the genre, Mortum – Medieval Detectives does not impress with its illustrations. To the contrary, most cards are very text-heavy. But why do I still think that the game is something special for this type of games?

One of the reasons are the special action to put an object or a location under surveillance, raid or investigation. All of these actions demand heroes’ abilities and depending on your choice of character (five are at choice at set-up) you have more of the one or other action. Those special actions demand time, that you keep track of on the time track. So, for instance, you decide to put a location on surveillance, marking this action on your hero and on the time track. The two other characters continue to make choices on the available cards and only three hours later (game time not playing time) you will get the result of your surveillance. Sometimes you will see that your special action was pointless, because you already have found the hint of the surveillance before the commissioned hero returns to the group. But often, in the meantime you do some other research and end up with two new information at the same time.

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The next reason why I think that Mortum – Medieval Detectives is something special are the brilliant dialogues and well-written story elements on the cards. Yes, it’s a lot to read, but it’s worth it.

In the end Mortum – Medieval Detectives is very similar to the mechanics of Detective. But that’s not bad, of course. I personally like the medieval setting and the mechanics of those special actions. It’s medium challenging, but the story is interesting, logical and involving.

One of the many novelties for SPIEL, a good start indeed, but still a light entry into those crazy week with all those thousand new games from all over the word.

Stay tuned, tomorrow comes soon (and do some refresh later this evening, as Frank is still typing...)

Hello everyone!

It’s the last pre-SPIEL day, and finally the real SPIEL feeling is kicking in. For last year’s SPIEL it was nice to be back in the halls after the SPIEL.digital in 2020, but there were many people and friends missing, especially those from overseas. This changed for Nicole and me tonight, because we finally had some guests for dinner again, but before telling you about our evening let’s do some sandboxing today!

So, what exactly are sandbox-type games? This actually took me some time to answer, because my first game where this term was mentioned actually made me misinterpret the whole concept. Being fond of CMON’s Zombie-crawler Zombicide, there was a time when I was looking for similar games because I like the cooperative, quite stressful setting for multiplayer gaming groups. For this reason I also took a look at ZPOCALYPSE from GREENBRIER GAMES which was operating on a scenario quite similar to Zombicide: The world is overrun by Zombies, and a few lonely characters are trying to survive in this chaos.

The game was a bit too heavy on the rules’ side for a lightgoing hack-and-shoot session, but in the end it was an acceptable implementation of a Zombie apocalypse game. There were rules for combat, for kitting out and for support activities, but somehow even this degree of detail left a feeling that the game just was not complete. The daytime routine was identical from day to day, and gameplay crawled along without any real goals until the combat phase ended each day. I remember that the game’s designer’s qualified it as a sandbox-type game, inviting players to use the ruleset as a basis for creating their own rules and scenarios, and so I came to the conclusion that this term describes a game which has never really left the development stage. Too many things felt unfinished and open, but if you wanted to explore them, the rules and world ended quickly, leaving gaps of an apocalyptic size.

The bottom line at that time: Game sold and sandbox-type games were placed on my ban-list, qualifying them as unfinished and stuck in the design stage.

However, it was some years later that I stumbled again over this type of games, and this was the first time for me to fully understand the concept. No, a sandbox-type game is NOT about developing your own rules with the bare concept and backbone you get, but instead this term actually is used to describe an open-world game, a game in which the players don’t just try to develop an engine in order to be the first to reach victory conditions, but instead a game which leaves the players a considerable freedom of decisions to do things they would like to do. In a way, a sandbox-type game is meant to feel like a crossroad, you can go in any direction and see where the road will take you, but this doesn’t mean that you can’t change your direction in order to return to one of the other roads.

Actually it was an article in Spielbox magazine which had brought back my curiosity, and this article actually was a review of Western Legends from COLOSSAL GAMES. Instead of facing a Zombie apocalypse, the players now have to take the roles of famous heroes and villains of the Wild West, trying to gain fame and fortune by becoming outlaws, lawmen, miners or cowboys.

Okay, this considerably changed my understanding of the whole concept, and indeed I wanted to give this game a try, because the whole idea of an open world game sounded quite attractive for me. Leaving the well-trodden paths of Eurogames, venturing forth to explore a world within a game – being an old RPG-player this was an interesting new approach to the boardgaming hobby for me, and so Western Legends was bound to hit the table.

So, you will now ask me whether I liked the experience. To be honest, I still felt that the implementation of the sandbox-approach was underperforming, and this was mainly caused by the fact that player actions had a tendency for becoming repetitive. Don’t take me wrong, Western Legends was a much better developed game than Zpocalypse, being self-contained and coming to an acceptable ending. And indeed, the players actually could chose a career to follow in the Wild West, but once you had chosen a path it was not really wise to try many other options. For example, a miner performed well if he kept… well… mining. While it was possible to change your career, this usually meant a setback in regard to the victory conditions, and even though the game invites players to explore the game world, it is not an endless story. Instead, a winner is determined, and for this it was best to stay on the chosen path. Remember the crossroads? I would like to find a game with side roads and interconnections, not one where you just stay on your chosen main road.

Another bottom line: Game sold, but my interest in sandbox-type games was rekindled. I liked the general idea, and so I kept an eye open for a sandbox-type game which actually was able to deliver and fulfil my expectations.

My next contestant arrived in springtime this year. After zombies and cowboys it was now the time for pirates. As an old Pirates! seadog who has played long hours of this all-time evergreen game on the Commodore 64 home computer, I always had wished for a boardgame which actually was similar to this old classic. In a way, even though it was a computer game, Sid Meier’s Pirates! from MICROPROSE has been the predecessor of all types of open world games, because players really had a considerable freedom in this game to fulfil their dreams about a pirate’s life. Plundering ships, razing towns, hunting down the Spanish Treasure Fleet, finding lost family members or courting the Governor’s beautiful daughter – all this was possible in the game. And this was even more astonishing because we are not talking about modern computers with almost unlimited computing power and memory, but instead the game was released in 1987 for a computer with a mere 64 kilobytes main memory. That was a time when programmers were real artists, squeezing the last byte of power out of the system to create some astonishing games.

But let’s go back into the sandbox. In springtime 2022 I acquired Shiver me Timbers, a game which designer Michal Vitkovsky realized through crowdfunding, and here it was the first time that I found the freedom of decision which other games had promised. Indeed Shiver me Timbers includes many elements which I expect of a good pirate-type game: there were sea battles and treasure hunting, you could try a trader’s career or hunt down sea monsters – players were given a considerable list of things you could do. Quite cute was also the design of the players’ ships, being composed of several parts which could be upgraded during the course of the game. You could add more cannons, masts and cargo slots, and so the ship grew during the course of the game as upgrades were acquired.

Designer Michal Vitkovsky also made a notable effort to implement a mechanism for determining an overall winner, giving the players a changing tableau of life goals which they could pursue. The first player who fulfilled a certain number of goals was declared winner, but here also a major drawback could be experienced. Despite all efforts the different life goals were not really balanced, and so some of them simply could be finished quicker than others. In turn, this meant that a player aiming to win was predestined to chose those easier life goals, and this considerably narrowed down the individualism and choice of options. Oh my, you just wanted to set sails and explore this world, but unfortunately playing nice and thematic never was a good way to win!

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Yet another bottom line: Game stored away after a few plays, waiting for an expansion which might set a few things straight. However, I was now positively fixed on the topic of sandbox games, increasing my search to look for a game which fulfilled my wishes.

On Boardgamegeek I stumbled upon a list of sandbox games which had been compiled and added by fellow gamers, and this list certainly was the signpost I needed. Games like Gloom of Kilforth and some other which were mentioned in the comments piqued my interest, but it was Merchants & Marauders which I decided to buy. Shiver Me Timbers had brought back so many fond memories of my days as a C64 pirate that I simply wanted to try another pirate-theme game, and this time the “X” really marked the hidden treasure

Funny enough, the release of Merchants & Marauders by Z-MAN GAMES dates back as much as 2010, and although I had seen the game on store shelves I somehow never gave it a closer look. As it turned out, this was to my own detriment, because Merchants & Marauders finally bought together all the elements which I expect of a great sandbox-type game. While players only can chose between a career as a trader or a pirate, the game leaves considerable room to set sail and explore the Caribbean. Quests are waiting, ships can be upgraded and combat is decided both by broadsides and boarding parties. Even more, the game really shines on two quite important central mechanisms, giving the players a feeling that they are not just exploring a world, but also that the world is constantly changing around them.

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One of this mechanisms are the goods tokens, and these tokens are used to determine which types of goods are constantly on demand in the different towns and cities. So a trader’s life now was spiced up by the necessity to find sources where to purchase goods, plotting the most efficient sea routes and by arriving early enough to get the best prices. On the other hand, as the game progresses the Caribbean started to bustle with activities, because non-player pirates and warships were starting to appear, cruising around in order to find player ships and possibly attack them. This introduction of NPCs was just brilliant, enhancing not only two-player games but actually giving the players additional targets and some fearsome foes. Despite being on water, I finally had found my sandbox!

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If you should be tempted to try Merchants & Marauders yourself, go for the fully experience and get yourself also a copy of of Merchants & Marauders: Seas of Glory. This expansion includes nearly a dozen different modules which can be added to the game, adding further spice by crew morale, weather conditions, special places, smuggling goods etc. . I have rarely seen an expansion which added so much to an already great game, and for me Merchants & Marauders now is the benchmark against which all other sandbox-type games need to be measured. It will be hard to stand this competition!

On a funny sidenote, my search also has brought me back to one of my oldest favourite games, a game so outmoded that I haven’t played it for years. The game I am talking about is the old 1st edition of Talisman by GAMES WORKSHOP. In a way, this game from 1983 contained much of the freedom which can be expected from a sandbox-type game. Of course I am slightly exaggerating here, because the players mainly decided to move clockwise or counterclockwise on the gameboard, but nonetheless were there quite a few things you could do, especially if you owned the expansions. You could go to the Dungeon in the hope to find a shortcut to victory, you could go to the city for outfitting and learning interesting professions, or you could even enter the Timescape, trying to find all kinds of cool gadgets in a maze of space and time. The game was lightfooted and dice heavy, but still many gamers of my generation remember it as one of their most played childhood games.

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Returning to here and now, Nicole and I finally were having some SPIEL guests tonight. After three years of Covid abstinence our friends Dale and Brian YU from the United States finally have come back to Essen, giving us the possibility to celebrate a wonderful reunion night with dinner and gaming. There were stories to exchange and dice to roll, and we ended up playing a round of Tidal Blades – Heroes of the Reef from DRUID CITY GAMES. Nicole and I have become quite fond of this wonderful strategic diceroller, and you can be sure that I will tell you a bit more about it in the days to come!

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If you must know, it was actually me who carried home victory, but on such a great evening we all felt victorious. What could be better than catching up with good friends?

See you tomorrow! SPIEL is beginning!!!

Wednesday - 5th of October 2022

And here we go! SPIEL reboot is completed!!!

Indeed, when I left home this morning and walked over to the convention halls of MESSE ESSEN, it felt like a great SPIELtime was about to begin. Those of you who have followed my reports for many years will remember that SPIEL often goes along with a period of extraordinary good weather, and today it once again felt like “Groundhog Day”: Clear blue sky, 23 degrees Celsius and hundreds of people bustling inside convention halls to set up their booths – that’s what I call the SPIEL feeling!

making my way into the halls, things felt much different last year when there was no possibility for the press to enter the halls during the setup phase. In addition, there neither was a normal press conference or an DEUTSCHER SPIELE PREIS awards ceremony last year. Instead, there had been an online press conference, and this had felt different from the usual live conference with a possibility to meet and greet friends and colleagues.

Talking about good friends, my good mood increased even more when I directly came upon a group of long term friends. Coming to the booth of CZECH GAMES EDITION, I met Petr Murmak and his team who were busily setting up and decorating their booth. However, one of the benefits of setup day is that there often is time for a small chat, and so I teamed up with Petr, Jana and Peter B. Hoffgaard, the designer of Starship Captains. This definitely is a game which is high on my personal hotness-list, and you can count on me to bring you news on this game during the next few days.

Boy, despite the sun tempting me to return to the balcony at home, it felt good to be back in the holy halls of SPIEL. Everything was buzzing with activity, and setup had progressed well on the last few days. Talking to people here and there, everybody was excited for a SPIEL even more “normal” than last year, and apart from the mandatory duty to wear a face mask on all public convention days there will be no restrictions whatsoever. Personally I am quite happy with this regulation which is being imposed by MERZ VERLAG, because Covid numbers are picking up again in Germany, and so a bit of precaution won’t hurt anyone.

Right on time at 11 AM the Press Conference started, and here I teamed up with Ralf to listen what news the conventionists could give about this year’s SPIEL. However, we first needed to fortify ourselves for the long day in the halls, and so the press breakfast which was served here came as a welcome nourishment.

The biggest news about the show actually had come half a year ago. At that time SPIELWARENMESSE E.G., the conventionists and organizers of the Nürnberg Games Fair which happens in springtime, had bought up MERZ VERLAG. So Mrs. Dominique Metzler of MERZ VERLAG now was accompanied into the press conference by Mr. Florian Hess from SPIELWARENMESSE E.G., and due to this development there had been a lot of speculation in the past whether the SPIEL actually would stay at Essen for the years to come.

Mr. Hess got to this topic right at the beginning of his own speech, and he gave us the reassuring news that a new contract had been signed with MESSE ESSEN so that the SPIEL would stay at Essen for the next few years. Atfter the press conference I asked Mrs. Metzler what time frame was described by this, and she told me that the prolongation had been done for another three years, a usual period when it comes to making convention contracts. So, it’s now certain that you will be able to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the G@mebox in a few years with Ralf and me here at Essen!

Despite the continuity of the location there are also some changes brought along by the takeover of SPIELWARENMESSE E.G., most notable here the release of a special SPIEL 22 app both for Android and IOS mobile phones. This app features interactive hall plans and a possibility to search for publishers and new games, and from my point of view it will be a great help in the next days to navigate the halls. This innovation really was overdue!

Coming to the hard facts of SPIEL, the statistics revealed here showed a clear tendency that SPIEL is nearly back to its pre-Covid status. The number of exhibitors had increased by 75 percent in comparison to last year, reaching a splendid quota of 980 exhibitors coming from 56 countries. More than 1.800 new games (!!!) are reported to be released, but this number must be viewed with some care, because it actually includes a good amount of games which were already announced last year. However, due to the global shipping crisis many games hadn’t made it in time for the show, and so they are presented again this year.

Especially the sales numbers had increased by a considerable 27 percent during the Covid years, but now the general economic situation with shipping problems, lack of resources and the economic effects of the Russian war also is having a first impact on the boardgame market. Sales numbers are slightly going down due to people investing more money to go on holidays abroad, something which was very difficult during the high time of Covid. Furthermore, prices are going up for boardgames, and the top priced game here at the show actually will be an expansion for 3D Settlers of Catan which will be sold for 400 Euros!

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But Mr. Hutter, the representative of the games industry also assured everyone that optimism is still prevailing in the industry. The last years were rather fat years, and now fall and the Christmas season are coming. If the sales numbers will remain in regions comparable to the last two years, good Christmas sales can be expected.

Apart from the facts outlined above, MERZ VERLAG also took the press conference as an opportunity to declare the winner of this year’s Inno.SPIEL, the awards for the most innovative game. Coming as a big surprise, the Japanese micro game publisher BRAIN GAMES was able to claim this prestigious award for their hip hop rap game Hey Yo, a game where a sound device actually gives the rhythm in which the players have to play their cards. While I am not too fond of hectic real time games, the approach seems truly innovative, and indeed the game had found a great fanbase among gamers and hoppers alike.

This ended the press conference for Ralf and me, and so we made our way over to the basement of Hall 1, the place of the New Games Show for all press representatives. And I can promise you, this year you are in for a real treat!

Welcome back to yet another SPIEL! And here we are: arriving at the press conference, hearing about the 1800 novelties, gaping at all the colourful games at the novelties show and talking, looking and wondering how in hell we can give you that feeling. And how we can manage to give you a rough idea about what’s really important, where the true gems are. I will try to begin that task with some classics:

Classic games never get old. Every now and then we find new versions or adaptions of successful games we played some years ago, in the 90s or even in our youth. That’s true for this SPIEL again. So, for example, GAME BREWER came with a new version of The Palaces of Carrera, one of my favourite games ten years ago. The new version has a revised set of rules and was slightly adjusted as far as the scoring is concerned:.

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Very much earlier is another representative of classic games: the one and only Cluedo. That was definitely my favourite game in my youth some time in the eighties. I wanted to play the game so often that the rest of my family eventually got tired of it. Anyway, the new version is richer in variety and has much more escape elements to discover than the original game:

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Another example that good things survive is Carnival Zombie from TAVERNA LUDICA GAMES. I really loved the original game from ALBE PAVO (refer to my introduction during SPIEL 2013. The only annoyance were the rules that were a little bit confusing. This should now be much better, Lutz will check this out after the fair for you:

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And this classic theme continues at ARES GAMES, where I once again met Roberto Di Meglio who introduced me into his novelties. The first game we rived on was The Rich and The Good, an economic game in which players share some hidden information among their neighbours, but can never be sure how the market will react in the long run. It’s an aim to earn money at this market, but the main goal of the game is to donate to charity. Well almost… The poor guy who donates the least at the end of the game, looses the game. And the winner is still the guy with the most money…

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A novelty for this fair is also the second edition of Orconomics, an economic game with backstabbing elements. In the picture you see the Kickstarter version with deluxe components, but Roberto assured me that the normal version would not stay much behind.

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But then we went over to the real highlight for this SPIEL: War of the Ring – The Card Game. I still remember the first time I played War of the Ring. It was like Whoooaa, what’s that feeling? I mean, up to that moment playing boardgames was an entertaining hobby, an amusement with a lot of talking and a lot of beer or wine. But War of the Ring set the bar much higher. At least for me, for it was the first game I totally emersed myself in. Over two hours I was so concentrated that time flied by. So, the expectations are high, and we definitely will tell you more about the game in the next couple of days. But for today, a first picture of the game must be enough (the second picture shows the great map for War of the Ring that people were asking for, so ARES GAMES printed it):

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The novelty show is also the first contact for us with some games we already anticipated a lot. I think a lot of you will also wait for the one or other of these games, so I leave you alone with the pictures:

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At GIANT ROC I stumbled about a game that already has found the way to my house last week. As it was also one of the games I was heading for, I immediately gave the game a first try, so that I can now tell you a little bit more about:

Introduction: Luna Maris – Giant Roc (booth 2B146)

Have you already thought about what will happen when the world is not enough for humankind anymore? When food production must be outsourced to other planets? Did you know that there already exist plans to go the moon for extracting resources like titanium, water, fuel and helium, all of them natural riches available in the Moon?

Luna Maris let us play the first step of space mining on the moon, our natural satellite. Every player takes the role of a coordinator of a space mining company that has to take care of all production processes, has to provide their workers with necessary utilities and last but not least has to get rid of the garbage that would be quite nasty on the moon (hey guys, we want to start better than we did on Mother Earth).

All players share the same lunar complex with ten different rooms like an expedition area, a mining room, a greenhouse and a laboratory. This lunar complex is the main part of the game in which the scientists of the player can perform their actions. Every turn you can visit a new room, but you have to “pay” oxygen to move from one room to the adjacent one. Of course, you can also go two or more steps, but each one costs another oxygen. That’s the first element of the game where planning is required to optimize your actions.

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Most actions must be activated by spending an energy from your supply and then you have to play a card from your hand with a matching symbol of the room you want to use. It is allowed to use rooms with other player’s scientist, and if this other scientist has already activated the room you don’t have to spend the energy anymore. Instead, this player gains a victory point.

But what are all those room activations good for? Well, Luna Maris is a resource management game and so you constantly produce, transport and convert the mentioned resources. Additionally, you can acquire new (and better) hand cards, improve your oxygen and stress level (the last one enables you do spend more oxygen before you get exhausted). You can also do some research to improve some of the rooms for the rest of the game and you can move further on the research tracks of the game that will bring you bonus and victory points in the further course of the game.

Although my first impression was that Luna Maris is a little bit frumpy, I must know tell that I was wrong. There is really a lot going on. The game offers plenty of tactical decisions and you are permanently asked to optimize your actions. Definitely not the normal family game, much more an expert game, but still, I would declare it as medium Euro. Worker placement is part of the game, but it is much more a resource management game with only little interaction between the players. A big surprise for me and a good choice if you like optimization games.

Frank already told you that Hey Yo from OINK GAMES had won the INNO award. And here’s what the tiny game looks like:

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Triggered by a melody, the players have to play cards that represent the melody of a song. And if they are successful in that they win as a team. But the game also includes a second deck of cards to play the game competitive in two teams. For what I saw today this game truly deserves the award, because of the innovative game concept. If the game is also good, I cannot say at the moment, but I will come back to this point too in the next days after I had a try-out.

Speaking about songs lead me to my next find at the novelty show: Hitster from JUMBO. It’s a party game in which players have to guess the correct age of a song to put it in the right order of songs you have heard before. With the help of an app, you scan a card. The app will then play the song and it’s your task to put it in the line before or behind other cards (songs) you or your opponents have heard before. Barely a game, but I think it will be a big fun on your next boardgame session.

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After this short trip to the music business, I came back to the world of true boardgames and had a look at the novelties from BLACKROCK GAMES. As usual the French publisher showed a big variety of new games from smaller companies from France. The biggest game of these is Tribes of Wind from La Boite de Jeu. After the big success It’s a wonderful world I was curious about what their new product. The theme of the game is top up-to-date, as it focuses on decontamination in a post-apocalyptic world. Building up the landscape, forests and the villages again is something we will like in the game, but hopefully never suffer in reality….

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Complices is something totally different, a two player game under stress with a timer and two different filter glasses for the two players. Wearing these glasses, the one player only sees red lasers on the board while the other player only sees the blue ones. Together they then must find a way through a room with security lasers all around. Of course, some lasers are red and others blue, so there is always only one player who sees a laser. A lot of discussion is necessary to lead a pen from one point to another in this room. Seems to be funny and stressful likewise.

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With my head full of new impressions I left the novelty show after that. Before I went home, I had a small walk through the halls where still a lot of working and preparing had to be done. But some publisher also introduced the staff for the following days into their new games, gave some explanations to the press and even the shops seemed to be prepared for the masses:

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That’s it for today. I leave you for the dinner at the Deutsche Spiele Preis award. Sleep well, play games and see you tomorrow in the convention halls or here again in this huge coverage.

Yours, Ralf

After Ralf’s adventures let’s now get back to my own experiences in the New Games Show!

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Looking from above, the New Games Show seemed to have a size comparable to last year, but when going down to the tables Ralf and I quickly discovered that there were many more games on display here than the year before. The tables were crowded with games, and there was a considerable variety of topics which made it impossible to filter out any major trend for this year. Instead, there were quite a few games with totally different themes and playing mechanisms, and of these I would like to give you a first taste right away. And you can be sure, I will try to bring you some more details on a few of these games during the next few days.

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One of the first games to catch my eye was Eleven, a soccer themed game from Polish publisher PORTAL GAMES. A game in which the player take the role of soccer club managers certainly sounds like a fresh theme, and I am even more curious about this game because it claims to include not only the management part, but there will also be simulations of the match days. This is something I will definitely take a closer look at!

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The next game actually will hit one of my soft spots. I have been an avid fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings for all my life, and my wife Nicole and I love playing the War of the Ring from ARES GAMES on long winter weekends. Now the Italian publisher is back here at Essen with War of the Ring: The Card Game, and the name alone sets a high standard for what to be expected about this game. Bearing the same name as the best Lord of the Rings boardgame ever released certainly is both a promise and a burden, and we will see if the game can deliver!

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Looking cute and unusual at the same time is 12 Rivers from Chinese publisher BGANTIONS, coming with an angled 3 dimensional board on which the players have to build dams and fetch resources from the river. This game certainly is an eye catcher, making me curious to see what the game is about.

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A rather solid and proposing choice of new games can be expected from KOSMOS this year. While KOSMOS’ games portfolio is not nearly as big as the portfolios of ASMODEE or PEGASUS, they always have a very good sense for high quality games, and this seems to be true once again for their current choice of games. Most prominent among these novelties is Terra Nova, a more streamlined and slightly downsized version of FEUERLAND’s all-time smash-hit Terra Mystica. All major parts of its predecessor are can be found in Terra Nova as well, but the game promises to have a much lower entrance hurdle and to be more friendly for groups of occasional gamers. If KOSMOS really succeeded in this effort, great playing fun will be waiting in this gamebox.

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So, the successful cooperative cardgame Die Crew now will be followed up by Inside Job, a game which operates on a similar mechanism but in which one player has to take the role of a spy who tries to undermine the group’s efforts. This adds a totally new twist to the approach of cooperative trick-taking, and it sounds like fans of Die Crew will have found a worthy follower.

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Even Andor fans will not be forgotten by KOSMOS this year, and so the new standalone game Die Legenden von Andor – Die ewige Kälte will bring back our favourite heroes and send them on a new mission, with new mechanisms and including even some characters from the Andor Junior game. So children who have entered the saga on junior level now can advance to the real game without loosing contact to some of their beloved characters.

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Talking about the big publishers, expectations are really high in regard of Endless Winter: Paleoamericans. The game was funded with a successful crowdfunding campaign in 2020 and is soon to be delivered to the backers. The preordered Kickstarter deluxe versions are already fetching high prices at Ebay and Boardgamegeek, and now the retail version will be available for purchase here at the SPIEL. It’s a bit unusual that retail comes first, and so SPIEL visitors can be happy to have an opportunity to play this highly expected game at the booth of PEGASUS.

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Quite nice to see is the fact that some older classics have been revamped to renew their market presence. One of them is Cleopatra and the Society of Architects, and even though the old DAYS OF WONDER version already contained a quite nice 3-dimensional setup, the new game by MOJITO really is a class of its own.

Next on this list is Scotland Yard – Sherlock Holmes Edition. Now hackney carriages are going through the streets of London where buses used to drive, and instead of Mr. X the detective team is now hunting Sherlock’s archenemy Moriarty. I still remember playing Scotland Yard with my parents in my youth – it was one of the rare games which my parents actually liked to play. This new version is actually slightly more than a Victorian age reskin, but there are some minor changes like the introduction of detective characters with specific skills. So, Sherlock Holmes can ask the Police to start a manhunt, forcing the Moriarty player to declare in which quarter of the city he is located. Mysterious Irene Adler on the other hand knows influential people in the city administration, and so she is able to obtain a ban against Moriarty using a specific mode of transportation in his next turn. While the core of the game still is old Scotland Yard, I am actually tempted to get this new version, not just for the sake of childhood memories, but because my wife and I are fond of the Sherlock TV series with Benedict Cumberbatch. Sometimes old classics deserve to be played again!

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Yet another new version is Agricola 15, the 15th anniversary special edition of Uwe Rosenberg’s classic Agricola which is distributed by ASMODEE. Many expansions and goodies have been added since the initial release of the game, and now the new anniversary edition is filled to the brink with all these extras. If you ever wanted to get into Agricola, there probably never will be a better time for it!

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I have already mentioned above that Starship Captains from CGE certainly is a game which I will examine on one of the following days. The cute artwork reminds me of Galaxy Trucker, although it’s not quite the same anarchic look of the truckers. However, people in yellow, blue and red uniforms are a clear sign that somebody from the CGE crew is quite fond of Star Trek, and I am sure you are interested to see how it is to take the position of a newly appointed Starship Captain with a dedicated crew of absolute rookies.

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And talking about Galaxy Trucker, don’t miss the new expansion launched here at the SPIEL, bringing back many elements of the first edition expansions. However, just like the basic game these expansions have been reworked to harmonize even better with the standard rules, and ever since its release I have grown to like the new edition better than the old one.

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My last find actually stands in direct connection with yesterday’s gaming night with my wife and the Yu brothers. Tidal Blades: Banner Festival by LUCKY DUCK GAMES is not an expansion of Tidal Blades- Heroes of the Reef, but instead it’s a new stand alone game in the Tidal Baldes universe. Now, this is certainly another game which I need to check, because my wife and I have grown rather fond of the whole setting.

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Did I say last find? Okay, here is one more. A passing view of Tribes of the Wind by French publisher LA BOITE DE JEU made me stop in midstep, getting closer to give the game a look. Somehow the artwork and the setting strongly reminded me of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, one of my favourite animated films by Hayao Myazaki. Indeed both the film and the game share a post-apocalyptic setting where mankind is trying to defend the last patches of nature, and both the graphics and the theme have put this game onto my list. Boy, I love the New Games Show, you always find things which you don’t expect! (and seeing that Ralf is curious about the same game makes this even more interesting.)

Now finally on the way out, there were two nicely decorated booths which were the perfect transition to my activities for this evening. Once again MERZ VERLAG has invited Ralf and me to the awards ceremony for Deutscher Spiele Preis, and as it is custom this year’s winners proudly presented their games right at the entrance of the New Games Show. The award for the best children’s game went to Mit Quacks & Co. nach Quedlinburg by SCHMIDT, a spinoff game of Die Quackselber von Quedlinburg which has been designed especially for children. And, being no surprise at all after last year’s long queues at the booth of FEUERLAND, the main award went to Arche Nova by Mathias Wigge Sometimes you don’t need to be a prophet to predict which games will perform well in the next awards.

Turning home to deliver some games, type a bit of this report and to get dressed for the evening, I took a final stroll through the halls, taking especially notice of the backward halls 4 and 5. There you will find a lot of small publishers with an incredible variety of interesting looking games, and if you should visit the SPIEL make sure that you will get to these halls. That’s where you will find many a hidden gem!!!

Okay, it’s 11:56 PM here at Essen while I am typing this line, and today’s good weather ended abruptly. It’s raining quite strongly outside, and we will see how the weather will develop in the next few days. However, I was lucky and got to the awards ceremony (and back home) without any soaking, and so I reentered the convention area at about 7.30 PM. After a three-year Covid break, it was just great to be back to the awards ceremony and the dinner. There were many familiar faces there, and Ralf and I once again shared a table with photographer Henk Rollemann and reviewer Erwin Broens from the Netherlands. It was just the same as 2019, and it nearly felt the same as three years ago. The only one whom I missed direly was my friend Dagmar DeCassan from Austria, but she was reported to have an accident while entering the halls, and so she unfortunately could be with us.

Leaning back, enjoying some nice talks and a cool beer, the evening progressed rapidly and with some nice events. Most emotional was speech from Dominique Metzler from MERZ VERLAG, recounting many stories ever since the first SPIEL and giving some reasons why the Merz family has decided to sell the event to SPIELWARENMESSE E.G.. However, Ms. Metzler pointed out that she feels that she has found a strong partner here and that the future of the SPIEL looks bright due to this change of ownership.

The final act before the dinner was the awarding of this year’s winners of Deutscher Spiele Preis, and after this Ralf and I finally got some nourishment, strengthening ourselves for a night of typing.

This one is to all of you! Cheers!

Thursday - 6th of October 2022

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Lights on, Camera ready, Micro open...

"Full SPIEL ahead!"

Folks, here is Essen, the boardgaming capital of Germany !

Hello everybody, and welcome back for the first day of SPIEL 22. Incredibly enough, after tonight’s rainfall the summer weather was back once more, and so it felt kinda strange to walk into the crowded halls with the sun mocking outside. But no excuses, there are some games to play, and it actually felt rather great to be back in the halls!

Thanks to my press pass I could enter just a few minutes earlier, and it was the usual quiet before the storm. Some last arrangements were made at the booths, but everything was set and waiting for the crowds to come. And they came indeed!

Two of my initial observations actually lasted all day long. For one, despite a high number of people pouring in, the fair didn’t feel so thickly crowded than in earlier years. I don’t know whether this is due to less visitors, because the tables at most booths were well crowded, but instead I got the feeling that a slightly more spacious layout of the aisles greatly helped to distribute the people quicker than usual. This was nice, because it meant much more freedom of movement without always resorting to the courtyard.

My other observation was that the people’s compliance regarding the duty to wear a face mask was extraordinary high. Here in Germany the Covid regulations require people only to wear a face mask in public transport, but on almost all instances even this basic protection has fallen away. Some people actually claim to have won back some kind of freedom because they were annoyed by the masks, but here at the fair it seemed that people had no problems whatsoever to comply with these rules. Despite rising Covid numbers this provided at least a satisfactory degree of protection, and so I stayed in the halls for longer periods than last year. But now let’s drop all this for the rest of the week - it’s time for games!

One of the niceties of modern SPIEL is that many publishers now offer preorders, and for this year I have decided to rely as much as possible on the possibility to preorder, being able to secure a copy of most of the games on my want list. So, instead of rushing around in order to get some of the most wanted games, I actually could start the fair right away by taking a look at new games, sometimes even sitting down to play them. This considerably reduced my personal stress level for a SPIEL Thursday morning, and I hope that even more publishers will offer preorders in the years to come.

Review: Orichalque
CATCH UP GAMES (booth 3O106)

Orichalcum? Wasn’t this the mysterious metal used by the Atlanteans? I remember reading about this mysterious ore in a Blake & Mortimer comic book in my youth, and since I always had a soft spot for stories about Atlantis I decided to take a closer look at Orichalque, a new game by designers Bruno Cathala and Johannes Groupy. In this game the players take the roles of Atlantean Lords, having fled from their sinking continent in search of a new home for their people.

Setting foot ashore newly discovered islands, the players set up a new colony with just two buildings – a combination of Training Camps for Hoplite Warriors and one Orichalque Mine which the players can chose. These first two buildings will provide them with a basic resource income to be used in the game, but of course they will try to increase their income to get more room for actions.

Talking about the player actions, each round every player choses an action card from an open display which had been refilled for the new round. These actions cards show a combination of an action and a landscape tile, and these tiles will go to the player who takes the card. The player then will use the landscape to cover 1, 2 or 3 spaces of his own island board, thus discovering new areas beginning from his starting buildings. The actions on the other hand range from production of Orichalcum and Hoplites to building and combat, and so the players always face the choice which combination of landscape tile and action will fit them best.

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Four different types of landscapes exist, and if a player has taken a card with a building action he may construct a new building on one of his discovered landscapes, provided the building matches the landscape type. These buildings will offer a range of nice extras, going from additional income of Hoplites and Orichalcum to the possibility to take additional actions, improved chances when fighting creatures etc.

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Creatures? What creatures? Well, if a player takes a landscape tile showing a volcano, an ancient mythological creature will have its lair there, and so the player may be forced to send out Hoplites to defeat menaces like a Minotaur, a Gorgon or a Cyclops. Combat is decided by dice, but the player has a considerable influence on his luck, because the number of Hoplites he spends will correspond to the number of dice which are rolled. And when defeated, these creatures will provide nice benefits.

To score victory points the players aim to create larger areas of the same type of landscape. If a consecutive area consists of at least 3 parts of the same landscape, the player is entitles to take the Titan which matches the landscape type. This Titan will provide him with a victory point and a one-time special ability, but the loyalty of the Titans is fleeting and so the Titan will always change to the next player who completes a consecutive area of at least three parts of the same landscape. So the four Titans will change from player to player during the course of the game,

A more sustainable way to generate victory points is the forging of Medallions using Orichalcum, but these are expensive because the Orichalcum also can be used to trigger extra actions which will speed up a player’s individual progress. Finally, a victory point also is gained by the construction of a Temple, and these special buildings actually must cover an area which consists of all four landscape types. The game is won by the first player who succeeds I betting 5 victory points.

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Orichalque is a pretty straightforward game which may seem a bit limited on first sight. However, the game doesn’t want to be a big empire building game, but instead it’s meant as a quick game of building and discovering. The player constantly are looking forward to increase their own income and the efficiency of their turns, and there are lots of ways to do this by adding new buildings or by getting the help of the Titans. The Titans also are the source of direct player interaction in this game, because their lack of loyalty will make them move from player to player during the course of the game. So there actually is a reason to keep an eye on the situation on the other players’ island boards, because it’s better to use a Titan’s ability before it will go for the next player. An interesting festure are also the volcanoes and the creatures living there. The volcanoes count as a wild when it comes to observing the terrain requirements for a building, and the creatures also mean a nice opportunity to gain benefits if they are slain. However, they are also a blocker for victory, and so a player only can win if he has no creatures left on his island. In these aspects it’s rather useful to weight the benefits and problems associated with taking a volcano tile, but there are situations when this cnannot be avoided due to the particular choice of tiles revealed for the current round. Coming with quite nice artwork which is usual for French designers, Orichalque develops into an interesting contest which player will care best for the future of his people, and to my mind the game offers quite a lot of interesting choices to be made within a rather tolerable playing time. A great find to begin this first SPIEL day!

Continuing on my way to get a first overview, I actually remembered that I had seen an interesting looking game yesterday in the New Games Show. So, I made up my mind to spend some time in the halls with the smaller publishers this morning, and so I went over to halls 4, 5 and 6.

Introduction: 12 Rivers
BGNATIONS (booth 6G121)

The game 12 Rivers certainly is an eye-catcher with its inclined 3-dimnsional river board. However, I am always a bit wary when games shine with such an unusal design, because it often turned out that the playing mechanics cannot keep up with the artistic impression.

The booth of BGNATIONS was indeed quite well frequented, with people crowding around to get a chance to play this game. I was able to get an introduction to the rules, and so I found out a bit more what 12 Rivers actually is about.

The players are trying to collect pearls of different colours, and after all players have taken their actions for the current round, a dam at the top end of the gameboard will be opened, making all pearls which have been placed there roll down the river streams toward a lake. However, the players were able to construct minor dams using their playing pieces, and this entitles a player to take a pearl when it is stopped by his dam, packing the pearl on his trusty alpaca and then removing the dam piece to allow the river to flow again.

Of course it’s most useful to construct a dam high up on the mountain if a player wants to make sure that he gets a certain pearl. However, going high on the mountain in playing terms means that the players clan member (playing piece) took quite an additional effort to get there. For these reasons the playing piece will be placed at the end of the turn order track when the next round starts, and so a player will not be able to go very often to build a dam on the topmost locations, because the other players will have earlier turns and possibilities to go to attractive places too.

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Actions also must be used to take villagers from an open display, and these villagers have different preferences of pear colours and amounts. If all demands of a villager are met, the player can score the villager when the game ends. In addition, there is also a possibility to take scoring cards for specific combinations of pearls on the players’ alpacas, but here the storing space is limited, and so the players must time this quite well, otherwise they will have problems getting enough pearls to their villagers.

Taken together, 12 Rivers comes with a solid playing mechanism which qualifies the game as a light family game. There are some tactical decisions to be taken, but the game definitely shines most for its unusual outfit and the nice artwork.

My first official meeting of the show was a bit later at the booth of ARTIPIA GAMES from Greece. I know Konstantinos Kokkinis and his crew right from their first days here at the SPIEL, and I am always curious what kinds of new ideas they will bring along. Especially after their absence last year I was happy to see that they have come again, and so I teamed up with game developer Nikos Chrondropoulos in order to take a look at their new word game WordCraft.

Introduction: WordCraft
ARTIPIA GAMES (booth 1C119)

Word games are legion on the games market, and so I was curious to see how WordCraft would actually fit the ARTIPIA’s game portfolio of innovative and unusal games. Nikos had reassured me that I would be surprised about this game, and so I opened my mind and accepted Nikos’ challenge. What I found, was not only an unusual experience, but actually the best word game which I have played in years, if not the best one I ever played.

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So, what exactly makes WordCraft so extraordinary? While the game has a theme of alchemists brewing potions, this theme is not the point where this game shows its quality. Instead, I think it’s an unprecendented and unexpected combination of a word game with strategic elements which makes this game so unique.

Every round of play a certain number of letter-cards is revealed, and the players take turns building word with these letters. The place cubes of their colour on the letters they have used, but these cubes do not block the letters in any fashion. All players still are allowed all available letters to build their words, and after a player has found a word the word is noted so that no other player may use the same word (or a derivative form of it) again.

Certain tasks can be fulfilled by the players while finding the words. So, they may be challenged to find words of a certain length, words with a specific combination of letter card colours or words which begin and end on letter letter card colours. If a player is able to find a word matching one or more of these challenge cards, he also places a cube from his stock on this card, so keeping track how many times he has completed the challenge during the three rounds of play.

A round of play ends when one player has used up his stock of cubes (or is below 3 cubes). In this case all remaining players still take a turn, and then it comes to a scoring. The challenge cards will be scored at the end of the game after the third round, but what is scored now are the individual letter cards. For each letter it is checked whether a player has a majority of cubes on the card, and if this should be the case the player will score the victory points associated with this letter. In case of a tie, all participating players will score the points, and naturally it’s the rare letters which will trigger a higher yield of victory points when a player succeeds in scoring them.

It is this scoring mechanism based on majorities which gives WordCraft an incredible attractiveness. Instead of Scrabble where players try to construct valuable words with rare letters, it is the clever placement of cubes which decides about a player’s victory here in WordCraft. So, it’s usually not the big, long words which will come to bear, but building small words which allow a placement of cubes which changes one or more majorities distinguishes a true word master in this game.

The rules are explained in a nutshell, but this combination of word building and scoring conditions is absolutely extraordinary, entertaining and challenging. Nikos was right, this game took me fully by surprise, and I was glad that I had come to test it. Sometimes a game doesn’t need a big board and fancy miniatures, but a brilliant idea is all it takes to design a wonderful game. Well done Christian Giove, this game is a true masterpiece.

But talking about big boardgames, ARTIPIA also has something big coming rather soon! On November 8th they are going to start the Kickstarter campaign for Ceres, their new strategy game which is scheduled for release next year. In this game the players the director’s chair of interplanetary mining corporations seated on the Marsian moon of Ceres. From there they send out drones to claim different asterioids out in the Belt, but of course there are lots of preliminary steps with must be taken.

The game is run on a variant of classic worker placement, but very nice is the fact that the players actually can boost and change their actions by scientific research. So, during the course of the game they will develop different kinds of research cards, and this may result in clever combinations which then all can be triggered by placement of just one activation pawn.

Another great aspect of Ceres is the wheel depicting the Asteroid Belt. When the players send their probes here, the three rings of the Belt will move with different speeds, so that there are always different constellations through wich the players must navigate their probes. This requires the players to think ahead and take the shifting constellations into account, thus giving the game some additional elements which make the players leave the traditional worker placement procedure of place-and-take. All in all Ceres sounds like a promising project, and it will be interesting to see how the game fares once the campaign starts.

Stopover: Ivion: The Hound & the Hare
LUMINARY GAMES (booth 4G116)

Talking about kickstarted games, the crew of presenters at the booth of LUMINARY GAMES was on rather low spirits. Their whole pallet of games and equipment had gone amiss and didn’t make it to the show. While I have hear that some publishers still had games stuck in customs, it seems that LUMINARY GAMES was totally out of luck, and so the unlucky crew had do some last minute booth setup by purchasing some chairs and tables. Luckily, they had one demo copy of Ivion:The Hound & The Hare in their personal luggage, and so they could at least demo the game to the visitors here at the show.

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The newly established series of Ivion games is settled around one-on-one duels of fantasy characters, with each character coming with his own deck of cards, defining its combat styles, strengths and weaknesses. The games aren’t based on pure cardplay, but instead the duels will include maneuvers on a gameboard with nicely done character miniatures. The character decks contain many kinds of nasty surprises, with some of the cards allowing the placement of different kinds of traps or special power places in the arena, so that some rather intense duels are due to happen.

I played a quick introductory game of Ivion: The Hound & the Hare, a game where a righteous knight encounters an illusionist. I quickly discovered that the subtitle couldn’t have been chosen in a more fitting way, because I made a gallant effort with my knight to get into close quarters with my quarry. However, the illusionist threw all kinds of enchantments at my knight and easily avoided a direct confrontation, and so I quickly learned that a good knowledge of your cards is essential here.

I rather like the approach of this series, especially due to the fact that there is an inbuild deckbuilding mechanic and also a possibility to have characters from different packs duel each other. However, my next game of Ivion probably will be months away, since the game unfortunately has not made it to the SPIEL.

A company where all planned releases have made it to the SPIEL is PORTAL GAMES from Poland. The head of PORTAL, my friend Ignacy Trezwiczek, will only visit the SPIEL on Saturday due to some other urgent business, and for this reason we had scheduled my annual presentation of the new PORTAL GAMES with Joanna Wareluk, the press representative of PORTAL.

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However, before taking a look at Eleven, PORTAL’s biggest release here at the SPIEL 22, Joanna actually gave me a sneak preview of a game which was under development. The new adventure type game Thorgal was based on the comic books of the same name, centered on the adventures of Viking warrior Thorgal and his friends.

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Coming with a total of 10 missions, the whole prototype looked rather promising, featuring a system of combat and exploration actions based and strategic placement of Tetris-shaped blocks. Each player leads his own character, but the game is cooperative so that the players have to think together how to solve the different missions and challenges confronting their characters.

Another nice extra in the game will be a paragraph book. The players will be instructed to read certain paragraphs by performing actions on the gameboad, and having acquired the full rights to use all material from the Thorgal comic books this paragraph book will be fully illustrated to enhance the visual effect. A quite interesting project!

But now, let’s go for PORTAL’s biggest release of the year, the soccer-themed management game Eleven

Review: Eleven: Football Manager Board Game
PORTAL GAMES (booth 3O118)

A boardgame about managing a football club? Wow, that’s what I call a fresh theme! But let’s start with a quote from football legend Gary Lineker: “Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win.”

As a German, I can say that there is indeed much truth to this quote, and once you have come to grips with the rules for offside and some other football eccentrics, the game certainly is not too complex. However, will this be the same in a boardgame about football? A game which challenges you to take the role of a club manager and to bring your club to the top of the league scoreboard? I still remember playing the first football manager simulation games on my Commodore 64 home computer, but despite the fact that this was almost 40 years ago (gosh, am I really that old now?) there was a considerable engine in these games which offered lots of choices and decisions to be taken. In addition, these games derived a lot of fun from the fact that each match was shown in a small animated clip, so that you could actually see the performance of your team on the pitch. Today the graphics look archaic, but it was the sophisticated playing engine which kept players like me enthralled for many gaming nights.

But now PORTAL GAMES is coming to the SPIEL with a football manager boardgame, and game designer Thomas Jansen has accepted the challenge to bring the world of football to the gaming table. His game Eleven brings together all important elements of a manager’s work: buying and selling players, developing rookie players, recruiting staff for various tasks, winning sponsors, enhancing the stadium and dealing with fans and the club’s supervisory board. All this makes up the daily life of a manager, but Eleven wouldn’t be complete if there was no match day, and so at regular intervals during the game the players will send their teams to the pitch in order to win matches and score league points.

I was especially curious to see how the dynamics and action of a football match could be translated and downsized to fit into a management boardgame, but before looking at the match day let’s first examine the game’s backbone, the management part. Here Eleven is run on a quite sophisticated engine which leaves many essential decisions and choices for the players, and in fact the depth and variety of possibilities reminded me a bit of an older PORTAL game. In Pret-A-Porter Ignacy Trzewiczek had succeeded to include all essential elements of fashion design and marketing, and with Eleven Thomas Jansen has made a comparable effort to give us a hearty management game with substantial freedom of decisions.

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In order to keep the game within a moderate playing time, Eleven plays over a duration of six weeks. On the weekdays the players can perform a limited number of management actions, while on the weekend the match day will take place during which all player teams compete in the league. As can be guessed, recruiting and training the right players will be most essential task of the players to win matches with their teams, but this central task needs to be accompanied by other supporting actions in order to ensure a team’s success. At the basis it all comes down to money, so the club’s income needs to be increased by closing sponsoring contracts and by adding lucrative options like a fanshop or additional stands to the club’s stadium. The money earned this way can be spent to recruit players, either experienced athletes with all attributes visible right away, or rookies which will develop and reveal strengths and weaknesses when they are trained. However, the operation of a football team also requires many more assistants and auxiliary staff, so the players can also recruit various types of trainers, doctors, analysts etc.

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Depending on how the game develops, this auxiliary staff can make a heavy impact on a team’s performance and a player’s strategy. For example, good trainers allow a player to recruit and train more rookies, thus creating an attractive economic alternative to the recruitment of expensive football stars. A doctor on the other hand is rather useful when a player has a tendency to get injuries on the pitch, because it’s not really useful if a highly skilled athlete is not able to play for several weeks due to some unnerving injury.

While some of the auxiliary staff provide their benefits for free, others require a player to spend resources or even use one of their weekday actions. There are four types of resources in Eleven, and these are money, fan base, fitness and operation. Each player’s club has income scales for all these resources, and the income always will be collected by the beginning of the week, thus setting the limits for a player’s range of actions for the upcoming week. The income scales can be manipulated in many different ways, for example by building expansions to a club’s stadium or by closing contracts with sponsors, but in addition the members of a club’s supervisory board also will have an impact on the scales. These supervisors are drafted at the beginning of the game, causing each player to begin with a different start setup. However, these people wouldn’t be supervisors if they didn’t meddle with a club’s management affairs, and so each player’s week begins with a meeting of the supervisory board in which a random agenda card is revealed. Depending on the individual preferences of the board members, a player will face a board decision (an event) which may be beneficial or detrimental, and this decision either can be accepted or the player can try to change it by spending fan base resources. A quite interesting approach, especially since the outcome of this process is not fully randomized, but instead players actually can try to influence the behavior of their management board by chosing like-minded supervisors during the drafting process. The impact of this will not be visible during your first game, but when you become accustomed with Eleven and its mechanics you will discover certain patterns in the agenda cards which may be used to enhance a player’s general strategy.

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Talking about strategy, it should be mentioned here that each of the four resource types is used for different purposes. While money is pretty straightforward, fitness for example is used to activate players for the match day. Operation resources on the other hand can be used for performing bonus actions, while fan base resources allow re-rolls (for example during the board meeting) or they may be placed in the stadium to create additional income and possibly give the home team a match bonus if the stadium is sold out.

So, after all this management stuff, let’s now move on to match day! Compared to a real football league, the league in Eleven is rather a scoreboard than a real league ranking. If a team wins a match it goes up in the league table, and in the end the players will be awarded victory points depending how far their teams were able to rise on the table. However, there will not be matches against all teams or even against the teams of the other players. Instead, the players will pitch their teams against six other clubs which had been assigned in a semi random way, with the difficulty level increasing when the first three weeks have passed. Before the match day the players only will have some rudimentary knowledge about tactics, strengths and weaknesses of their upcoming opponents which is provided by their scouts, and so it will be the main task of the players to build up a team which will perform well on the pitch.

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Building a team really means that a formation of 10 field players has to be positioned in defense, midfield, forward and wing positions on a club’s match board, and for each of the positions either generic nameless support players or real players which were acquired during the course of the game can be used. When real players are used, these are restricted to certain positions like forward or defense, but these players are much stronger and have quite a variety of special functions and effects. In essence, it seems quite impossible to construct a team of 10 real players during the limited time frame of Eleven, and so the creation of a successful team highly depends on good combinations of real players and supporting players.

As indicated, there are lots of special effects which may be triggered by the players and the auxiliary stuff either before or after a match, and all these may have an influence on the final match result. But looking now at the match itself, you may on first sight be a bit underimpressed by the fact that the general result of the match is determined by more or less simple calculations. So, once a team formation has been chosen, the team card of the opposing team will be revealed to show that team’s formation and stats, and then the attack and defense strengths of all players in each of the 5 pitch zones will be compared. If a team’s defense strength in a zone is outmatched by the attack strength of the opposing team in that zone, a goal is scored. Then the comparison is made again for the same zone with reversed roles, possibly resulting in a counter goal. If a goal would be scored, the defending team checks whether their goalkeeper has any saves left, and if the goalie’s skill level is high enough a save can be used to negate the goal. This finally closes the process for the zone and the comparison exercise is continued for all remaining zones to determine the general result of the match.

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While this simple comparison exercise may seem a bit dry, I have already mentioned that the special functions of the players and the auxiliary staff should not be underestimated, and these abilities now may be used to influence an unfavorable general result. Additional goals may be added this way, but there is also further spice because the skills and abilities may also lead to injuries or player suspensions due to foulplay, and so quite a few elements of a real football match are present in Eleven as well.

However, all this cannot gloss over the fact that the football matches remain a pure matter of calculations. I have pondered quite a while whether this solution actually is an anticlimax when compared with the dynamics and fun of a real football match, but when making up my mind I had to remind myself that designer Thomas Jansen actually had to find a resolution procedure for the matches which does not devalue all the management decisions which have been taken by the players. In a way, this is the same for all football manager computer games, because these games also used an algorithm to resolve the matches. The difference here is the fact that the “algorithm” in Eleven is fully visible, because it has to be operated manually by the players and not by a computer’s subroutines. Keeping this requirement in mind, I think that Thomas actually did a quite good job with his resolution procedure for the match days, and indeed the results which are determined are well and closely linked to the players’ management decisions.

Speaking more generally for the whole game, Eleven is a well implemented simulation of managing a football club, even though it has some shortfalls in terms of league play and direct player interaction. However, and this is both laudable and criticizable, some of these shortfalls actually are tackled by expansions which were introduced in the Gamefound campaign which was run to boost the funding of Eleven. So, the supporters of Eleven on Gamefound actually get exclusive extras like an advanced rules booklet which contains rules for player vs. player matches and a more sophisticated transfer market, or a board extension and additional markers for the league table in order to allow for an epic league mode. While I support the idea of exclusive extras to offer incentives for crowdfunding campaigns, I was sorely missing some of these extras in the retail version of Eleven because they weren’t just additional fluff to add flavor, but they probably would have complemented the general football experience. Here some better balancing between the retail and crowdfunding editions of Eleven would have been better, because all this exclusive stuff cannot even be added by purchasing the expansions which are available in retail.

Leaving this general remark aside, Eleven is rather good for what it is: a simulation of football MANAGEMENT. Eleven does not need to shy away from comparisons with other management-type games, because there is a considerable freedom of action for the players. Tough decisions need to be taken, and as usual players are lacking all necessary types of resources, including time due to the restricted number of actions each week. Operating your football club within these restrains is a real challenge, and so be sure to get accustomed to all elements, their functions and their co-relations in order to fully enjoy this game. Kudos to designer Thomas Jansen, he has made a great job!

With this review I would like to call it a day, but there is still one more tradition which needs to be observed. A good SPIEL report needs a nice prize draw, and this year is no exception!

SPIEL 22 G@mebox Prize-Draw!

With Cactus Town finally being available, my friend Daniel Schloesser from 2ND GATE GAMES has once again sponsored a complete Kickstarter all-in deluxe packages of CACTUS TOWN! Miniatures, all expansions, player boards, deluxe dice and tokens – everything needed to make Cactus Town a great experience comes in one big box, and here is your chance to get a copy delivered from the SPIEL 22 right to your home! To enter the prize draw, just leave a comment in our...

SPIEL Guestbook!

Welcome back on the show, the official opening of the SPIEL 2022 convention. I think you all agree that this is one of the biggest shows on Earth for boardgamers. The masks are the only restrictions left from the COVID pandemic, it feels much better than last year, nearly like the time before this nasty virus started going around.

At least one good thing the pandemic has reached: the gangways in the convention halls are a little bit broader than before and more of the open-air grounds are accessible for the visitors. As a result, the fair feels less crowded, but maybe that will change the other days…we will see.

Speaking about the pandemic directly leads us to my first stop for today: the booth of LUDICREATIONS. I would say that digging deep into a huge monster’s stomach isn’t worth striving for. Even if there are valuable crystals in that stomach. Maybe that’s one of the reason why So, you’ve been eaten was delayed. The more secular reasons are – of course – the supply chain issues, a problem nearly every publisher was confronted with. But now, it’s here, so let`s see how it feels like to be in a stomach:

Overview: So, you’ve been eaten – LudiCreations (booth 4D111)

So, You’ve Been Eaten is an asymmetrical game in which one player takes the role of a beast and the other player the role of a miner. Miners who are digging deeper and deeper to find valuable crystal and thus become rich and famous. But from HDR’s Moria we all know that digging deep also means to wake old forces, and in this game it means waken the monster that tries to eat you up. I even would tell that quite logical, because we are not digging in any cave, but in the monster’s stomach.

The game itself is a card game in which you roll some dice. Every round the miner player roll the dice and place them on the available action spaces on the board. Six actions are available, but only three of them can be accessed right from the start. As there are also three dice to be rolled, you can either assign these dice to perform exactly these three actions after setup or you can use one or more of them to make the stronger actions accessible for the future. The number on each dice determines what exactly you can do when you choose an action, respectively how “strong” the action will be or better how far you can reach with this action.

Most of the actions let you “interact” with an outlay of seven stomach cards that you either want to destroy, because dangerous bacteria threatens the player, or that you want to use, because here you can find the eight crystals or gems you are digging for. You can also use an action to rearrange the cards, because only the nearest card is a danger of you and attacks after your turn with the indicated Bacteria.

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The monster player on the other hand plays totally different. The main goal is to kill the miner by going to the top on one of the four different stomach values of the miner. As said, the attacking is carried out automatically after the miner’s turn by the closest card. The monster player tries to influence which stomach value will be increased by filling up the digestive tract of the stomach cards with the help of new cards from his hand. The monster also has some special abilities that it can use to further weaken the miner by removing immune response cards from the miner. For this he needs energy that he can take from crystals on the digestive track. Useful, but dangerous too, because the miner can try to get those crystals in her next turn. Compared to the miner player, the choices of the beast player seem to be limited and more simple, I will check this out in the next days.

An interesting detail of So, You’ve Been Eaten is that the number of players is stated as 0-2. Now, 1 and 2 players are self-explaining, but what the hell means the zero? Does that mean that the game plays itself without any human doing anything? Of course not, but almost. The zero mode means that you, as the player, only carries out what the game tells you. No own choices like in a solo mode, but there is an automatic random answer for everything what the miner and for everything what the beast will do. Good for learning and nice to see that this works. But for me only a nice add-on, because I prefer to make my own decisions.

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From my first impression, I think that So, You’ve been Eaten probably is not the game everybody will love from the beginning. However, it seems to have some very interesting choices for the miner player. I am not sure whether there is enough variety for the beast player over a full game duration. But hey, there is a solo mode in which you play the miner and the beast plays automatically or vice versa. I know that not all of you will love these solo boardgames, but since this nasty Covid thing has started I personally began to love this type of games. As usual I will tell you more about my thoughts about the game after some more plays. Well, at least if I will not have been eaten….

Mmmh, I am still writing. So, you can see that I was not eaten. But it is definitely better to leave this place, you never know for sure. I decided to go for something abstract after this near-death experience. No blood, no monster, no stress. This thought lead me to SIT DOWN! soon after where I was attracted by Tiwanaku, a game in which mighty Inca people find new land and try to cultivate it regarding the strong wishes of their gods.

Introduction: Tiwanaku – SitDown! (booth 3O120)

Exploring unknown lands is no unusual theme for boardgames. In Tiwanaku our tribe arrives in valley that has been untouched by mankind. Now it is our task to divine what mother Pachamama wants to plant in every section of this valley. Only then we will be successful in settling down in this new beautiful landscape.

Ok, the landscape is easily set up on the table in form of a game board with square terrain fields. A scenario card tells us where to place the starting terrain tiles of four different types. More terrain tiles are placed aside on a diversity board, the number of each type of landscape given again by the scenario. And then it is time for us to decide where to place these tiles. But how in hell can we guess what the goodness has in mind?

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There is only one solution for every field of the landscape. The help for us is a mythical Pachamama wheel in which we insert the scenario disk right after set-up. Let’s see how that works:

First part of our turn is to move our meeple orthogonally to an unoccupied space on the board. Movement rules forbid us to cross enemy meeples, so blocking your opponents is part of the game. Then the most exciting part of the game begins: if you have no plan which landscape belongs to the terrain you just moved on you simply discover and “ask” the Pachamama wheel. After the matching coordinates are triggered, it will tell you which terrain is the correct one (and you score depending on the position of your pawns on the diversity board).

But there is a strong rule that Pachamama has introduced and you can deduce some first correct tiles right from the set-up. Later you can deduce from the evolving landscape, following strictly a given rule of diversity and a rule of separation. So, instead of discovering the new tile, you can also divine it by the correct deduction. Of course, this method will bring you more victory points, but it is also risky, because a wrong divination will result in a loss.

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Tiwanaku truly is a new approach to design a deduction game. The wheel in which you insert the scenario disks seems to be a unique way of solving the riddle and the simple but effective deduction rules are perfect to ensure long-time playability. The game feels to me more collaborative than it is. Each player has their own goals, but I guess it is hard not to discuss what Pachamama might have planned for a specific field. Anyone told me that Tiwanaku is more or less an advanced version of the old computer game minesweeper. I might acquire a liking for that thought in a most positive way…

Another game aroused my interest at the booth of SIT DOWN! A game about taking pictures of wild animals and composing a picture that scores most points at the end of the game. The interesting thing is that you walk around the landscape in a most innovative way to find the best positions for your shots. Here in Essen they had a prototype version of the game for playtesting. But the game is right now on Kickstarter, so you might want to check this out, because it looks awesome. It’s name is Redwood and here is the photo:

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I needed a coffee after this and had to go from one end of the fair to the other. Although the coffee makers considerably improved in the last years, I still didn’t want to take the very first one but I wanted a very special one far away where I had been. That’s an opportunity to let you take part in my journey through the convention halls. As you can see, there was not that crush of people in the halls like in the years before the pandemic. I think that’s a result of the broader gangways and the generous open air spaces.

Click on image to enlarge!

Click on image to enlarge!

Click on image to enlarge!

Yeah, that was definitely the drink I was in need of. In the last picture you already have found my next stop for the day, BOARD & DICE that I accompany right from their first attendance in Essen about 10 years ago. Their games always were something special for me, but with the T-series the quality improved even more.

Introduction: Terracotta Army Board & Dice (booth 2C130)

First I thought that would be the new T-game? Obviously, it is beginning with the T-letter. But then: you can easily pronounce the name of the game. Not Teotihuacan, not Tawantisuyu, not Tekhenu. Just: Terracotta Army. Also I think that Terracotta Army is more a medium game than an expert game. That does not mean that it is a worse game. To the contrary, I often have problems finding gamers who were willing to sit down to go through complex rules and to calculate every move you make back and forth.

Terracotta Army has those elements too, but at a slighter extent. Clay is the central resource of the game as the army is formed out of it. As most of you will know, the Terracotta Army was a burial object of the Quin Shi Huang, the first great emperor of China who lived about 200 years before Christ. More than clay-bearing 8000 soldiers, chariots and horses were given to his mausoleum. The game comes with a little bit smaller number of terracotta miniatures, and of course they are not clayey. But they look great, and they are the one central element of the game.

We players are asked to build the terracotta figures and place them in the mausoleum. Of course, not anywhere, we all want to establish our reputation, so our figures should be placed near the emperor and should also fulfil certain mythical conditions, e.g. being in the same line with other mighty figures or next to chariots etc. So, you see, the mausoleum is the puzzle part of the game. Or the calculating part, because the position of your figures determines the reputation points you need to win the game. Once set, the figure remains where it is. Well almost: Terracotta Army wouldn’t be a Board & Dice game, when there wouldn’t be a possibility to change this again. Advisories you can buy can give you such a advantage. But they are expensive and so you better think twice before you regret your choice.

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You see, money and clay are some good things to have in the game. The first one to modify facts, the last one to build the figures. That leads us to the next central element of the game: the wheel of choices. Similar to Tekhenu you place pawns on free spaces on the edge of a three-part resource wheel. The wheel tells you what you can take and do, beginning with the innermost wheel to the outermost part of the wheel. Next to getting new clay and money you can be enabled to form and place new figures (the necessary resources assumed) and to get the one or other bonus. It is essential to choose the position of your pawns wisely to get the optimum out of your possibilities. To improve these, you can rotate a part of the wheel before you choose positions. Of course this costs some money again..

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Terracotta Army seems to be a good mixture of mechanisms we know from the one or other T-game. From first impression it should be easier than most of the titles of the series, and it should also be a quicker game, because there are less options to score. The look of the game is fantastic, so I am sure it will be a hit at my next boardgame evening. And I am also quite sure that it has enough tactical options to give all players a great gaming experience. The only thing I want to avoid is to be buried with my army at the end of the game too….

The game is designed by Przemsyslaw Fornal & Adam Kwapinski. I have never heard of Przesmsyslaw before, but I learnt an interesting detail about Adam at my press meeting here at BOARD & DICE. He is not only a good designer, but he is also an expert in helping other authors to finalize their games. I am not sure whether this applies for Terracotta Army, but I know for sure that he wants to let us take part on his thoughts. Today I received a sneak peek of something that might explain everything you have to know for designing a good game. If I would not have to write all night long, I would like to grow deeper in this sneak peek immediately, for instance to learn if there is a universal characteristic of a good game. If nothing goes wrong, we all will be able to read more about this project next year and call the book our own. Who knows, maybe that will be the end of the boardgame industry, because after that everybody designs their own boardgames….

Until then, we still have to hope for the designers and the publishers. Filip Głowacz is such a designer and he already has done his homework. Books of Time will be his next game. It will be released next summer. Instead of the traditional deckbuilding mechanism, we have here an enhanced mechanism, called bookbuilding. Every turn we add a new page from the market to one of our three books. That not only determines our sequences of available actions, it also influences our scoring, especially in the final period. What you can see in the pictures, is still a prototype, but the game is already far developed. One of the biggest task was to balance it to different player numbers, but no there are only minor changes to be made.

Click on image to enlarge!

Click on image to enlarge!

And finally, I also found the real new T-game: Tiletum, designed again by Daniele Tascini and Simone Luciani. I provide you with some pictures of this so highly anticipated game too and, of course, I will tell you more about it after some heavy playtesting:

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Click on image to enlarge!

A highly anticipated game is a good bridge to the next game I would like to introduce, the new game from Vladimir Suchý and Ross Arnold:

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Overview: Woodcraft – Delicious Games (booth 5G124)

Such a cute game! That’s a phrase you might hear when you present Woodcraft to a person who does not know the game. All components of Woodcraft, beginning with the elf on the box and ending in the small tool tokens let you expect a funny easy or medium family game. But beware: it’s Vladimir Suchý who has a hand in the game. A quick scan through the rules tells you the truth: Twenty pages of rules are definitely not typical for a family game.

And of course, it’s not. My first Suchý game was Shipyard and I still remember my first round with Lutz who was deeply impressed by the depth of play. Probably this game convinced him to play more and more (complex) games with me and to begin reviewing them.

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In Woodcraft every player gets their personal wood workshop in which you gather and process wood. At the start of the game you cannot make much out of the lumber you receive. You first have to buy the right material, before you will be able to create complex household items as furniture and musical instruments.

And of course, you must have wood that comes in three different qualities in form of different coloured dice. The number on each die determines the amount of wood. During the game you will be able to change this wood, glue two dice or cut them in two halves, before you process it to the final product. Each product determines a specific amount of wood in the right quality.

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Of course, you must not do all this woodcraft alone, you can employ helpers to speed up your processing. There is a lot to do in the game. A game for experienced players, maybe even an expert game. An interesting mechanism of the game is also the action wheel board from which players choose what to do in their turn. At start up all seven action tiles lie in the same quadrant. Then, whenever a tile is chosen, it is placed in the space farthest ahead in the next quadrant. Depending on the position there will be bonusses, but only as long as the medium wheel, the saw, has to be rotated.

As you can imagine there were a huge crowd at Delicious Games and it was impossible for me to find a free table. Apart from that, I think I need to find a quieter place to concentrate for this new challenge from Vladimir Suchý and Ross Arnold.

For today, I will leave you with that. Sleep well and see you tomorrow again!

Ralf

Friday - 7th of October 2022

Welcome back for a day full of playing. As usual during the convention week, I typed until late night and woke early with my head full of impressions, talks and the continuous background noise of the convention halls. Today it was 5 o’clock when I woke. Since I stopped hammering on my computer at about 1 am, I come to the conclusion that I only slept for about 4 hours. Not really a lot, but I have heard that Napoleon had never slept much longer, so perhaps that’s not so unusual how it feels.

Anyway, I needed a large cup of coffee to survive the day. You can imagine that I wasn’t in the mood of a complex and long game after that night, a short fight against another player was more to my taste. Mage Noir ranks high on BGG and is such a game in which you just concentrate on the fight against another player, so let’s see if I put up a good show:

Playtest: Mage Noir
Double Combo Games (booth 4E107)

As said, in Mage Noir two players fight against each other. Of course, they are not fighting physically for this is a card game we are talking about. The game is about the old fight of two sorcerers or mage in this game.

Yes, we had a lot of games with this theme over the last years: Summoner Wars, Epic, Tash Kalar and even Mindbug could be named in this genre. But all play differently and all of them has their own mechanics.

In Mage Noir each player has a unique deck. Each mage has some specialization characteristics. The one mage’s main source is wind that he uses to cast powerful storm attacks, while another one’s specialization is fire that will result in mighty fire attacks. This is represented by the deck of cards for every player. Five cards from that deck are taken into your hand at set-up. At the start of each turn, you draw a new card, and then you can play as many cards from your hand as you wish. At least, if you have enough mana….

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Every card of the game has costs in form of mana from the six existing elements. And to play the card the player must pay this mana from his personal supply. But where does this supply come from? We start with no mana at all. But every turn, a player must also take three mana cards from the general supply and add these cards equally (beginning with the smaller stack) to two stacks of mana cards that are placed between the players. The player can take any mana from the general supply he wants. As a result, if you play a wind mage, you will have a lot of spells that demand wind mana to be casted. That’s why you would like to add wind mana to the two stacks.

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After distributing the mana, you choose one of the mana piles between the players and take all the cards for your personal supply. Most of the cards you play have immediately effects. Best is an attack against your opponent, because the game is won, if your opponent has no more life points.

After that it’s time to cast a spell against your opponents by paying the necessary mana cards. The result of the spell is given on the card. All cards have also keywords like “Wind” or “Fire”. The reason for this is that some cards demand a precondition, before the spell can be cast. For this, you first must play another card with the keyword as a component. That prepares the spell, but on the other hand you cannot use the special action of the card. But spells that demand components are much more powerful, so it is a good choice to prepare the spells.

Over the gameplay your mage will get stronger, but not – like in many other games – by adding new cards to your deck. Instead, we are getting more and more mana in our turns, because every mana we spent for casting a spell directly returns to the piles among the players and not to the general supply. As a result, you will be able to cast stronger spells and more spells in your turn

Some cards allow to become one of the mighty Mage Noirs. Admittedly, becoming Mage Noir has also some negative effects (like losing half of your life points or decreasing your hand card limit), but your spells are getting substantially stronger. b>Mage Noir turned out to be a quick two player fighting game. The general supply of mana that is distributed among the two mana piles among the players was something refreshing new for me. The artwork on the cards is beautiful although to my taste the illustrations could take more room on the cards. After some turns, the game got really fast. I blasted away my enemy in about 20 minutes (after learning the rules). The core game has four different sets of mages, but there are already several expansions with new powers and new mages. I like these quick fighting games and I will try to convince my son to battle the one or other match in the next couple of weeks, that’s for sure.

A victory in the morning is a good start of the day. I was confident and - despite of my tiredness – I was now ready for another day at SPIEL. On my way to the next appointment, I came across the booth of RATHSKELLERS, a specialist in designing board game tables. I still have no idea how to convince my wife to get rid of our dining table and installing such a minimalistic work /dining and play room table like you find in the next picture. The price is not really a bargain, but gaming is our one and only hobby, isn’t it?

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Of course, I was only kidding. I am sure that I never will convince my wife to get such a table. So, let’s go on for another sorcery I found at the booth of Lucky Duck Games:

Introduction: Flamecraft
Lucky Duck Games (booth 5D115)

Flamecraft is one of the games you might love right from the beginning. The look of the game is fantastic, especially if you have the one or other Kickstarter special, but even without those additional things you will love what you find in the gamebox.

The story of the game is fabulous too. We are Flamekeepers who are experts of dragons. That is quite helpful in a city of ambitious shopkeepers who are engaging artisan dragons to delight the costumers with the famous flamecraft of the dragons.

Every turn a player visits one of the available shops where she can either gather or enchant the shop.

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Gathering firstly means that you take resources that the shop and the dragon that are inside the shop produces. Then you can add a new dragon to the shop by playing it from your handcards (a free, matching space for the dragon assumed). Some of the places provide you with additional bonusses, for instance a coin (that’s a wild resource) or a fancy dragon that will give you an immediate bonus or a bonus depending on your other achievements at the end of the game). Finally, you can fire with one of the artesian dragons to get their specific bonus.

An Enchant works differently: For this you choose one of the face-up enchantment cards that are placed in the middle of the board and that matches the shop’s specialization. You then must pay the resources that are shown on the enchantment for gaining rewards. Sometimes the optional firing action is even more interesting, because with this action you fire with all dragons at the shop in any order you like. This even allows you smaller chain reactions.

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Three dragons can be placed in every shop. Once it is full, there is only the enchantment action left. But whenever you put the last dragon in shop a new shop will open and this will be more powerful than the three shops of the set-up.

Flamecraft is a cute and charming game. It’s not only the illustrations or the long, huge game mat, the whole gameplay seems to be made for something big. As a result, I won’t be surprised if Flamecraft is winning the one or other award in the next year.

But now, enough with all that sorcery. Let’s do some landforming! Here at Lucky Duck Games they already had a few copies of Oros, a tile-laying and tile-colliding game of transforming, eruption and mountain-making game. Lucky, if you have done the crowdfunding, because you will receive the copy soon. We other had to wait for the retail version until the beginning of next year, but here are some pictures of the game:

Click on image to enlarge!

Click on image to enlarge!

I was in need of another coffee after all of that exhausting sorcery. That was the chance to leave the noisy halls and to get some fresh air. As I already told you, the outdoor area was much bigger than in recent years and you had a lot of room there as you can see in the picture. The sun was also shining, nearly a sin to be inside the halls all day long.

Stopover: Worcrow Adventures
Corvus Belli (booth 6E110)

But the duty is calling and soon after I finished my coffee I was back in the halls to clear my way to my next appointment. I shortly stopped at my friends of CORVUS BELLI to see how work is in process for their app campaigned dungeon crawler Worcrow Adventures.

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As you can see, the game is already far developed, players at two tables tried the prototype and I also will be sent this prototype to have a better understanding of how the game is played. Kickstarter will start one week after Essen, so if you are interested you might want to check the crowdfunding platform (or you wait until I have the prototype for playtesting reasons).

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Fighting, sorcery, landforming, everything is extremely exiting today. I had to find something more peaceful for the afternoon. Why not sending druids to the forests, or more precisely to the Arch-Oak, a mighty and majestic tree whose wood once was taken to form humans and animals.

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Introduction: Oak
Game Brewer (booth 5A121)

Similar to Woodcraft that we spoke of yesterday, Oak seems to be a light family game on first impression. But that’s wrong again as your druids will get more and more powerful over the course of the game and a lot of things are going on. There are many available options where you can send your druids to gather resources, learn new spells and erect shrine and monoliths.

You can even send your druids into the Arch-Oak itself, a holy place to be. But places are limited and time is short. That’s why everything we want to do deserves another thought. In the end, Oak is much more a though worker placement game than a family game.

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An interesting detail: Oak is designed by a new Belgian designer. A brave step from GAME BREWER to spend this guy such a beautiful artwork for his detbut. For that’s what it is. And not only the artwork is phantastic. You can feel that a lot of effort was spent in every detail of the game. For example, have a look at the small, yellow upgrades on the red druids in the picture. Each of these upgrades has a different effect. To mark the druids’ abilities, a small component is added to the druid’s figure. On the board this is really impressive, especially the deer’s antler for the captain is just gorgeous.

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The game was played a lot here at the booth of Game Brewer, so it’s quite a success. As said, there are a lot of options that makes the game rich in variety but also much more complex that it seems to be. I hopte to give the game some tries after Essen. But if it is nearly as balanced and optimized as the artwork let me hope, I think we have a great game in front of us.

I will leave you with two more pictures of the upcoming Kickstarter campaign Delta from Game Brewer (again the campaign will start right after Essen). A huge steampunk adventure game in which hand management plays a major role:

Click on image to enlarge!

Click on image to enlarge!

As usual, I wish you a good night. Hopefully, mine will be a little bit longer than yesterday. Tomorrow I will finally take my pictures from HORRIBLE GUILD (I forget that yesterday), we will visit CRANIO CREATIONS and we will have a lot of fun with some smaller card games.

Bye, Bye! Ralf

SPIEL 22 – Day 2

Hello everyone! Today it’s time for me to meet some friends, seeing some of them for the first time in three years. Even though the SPIEL was back in halls in 2021, many international publishers didn’t make it last year because to the shaky Covid conditions and regulations, and so this year many of my friends actually are back at the show. However, before going inside the halls, my wife Nicole had assigned me a morning task. Unfortunately we can’t eat games, and so I had to do the food shopping for the weekend. However, there are worse tasks to do on such a beautiful morning, and so I took my bike and went off to Rüttenscheider Straße, the shopping mall of our neighborhood. On the way there I passed Messe Essen, and although the SPIEL opening time was still about an hour away there were already people gathering outside the main entrance.

Rüttenscheid was crowded as always, and in addition I saw lots of gamers walking towards the convention area. How to distinguish these people from the Esseners? Well, it’s actually the big suitcases which they are drawing after them. It’s not a view you normally get here in our neighborhood, but during SPIEL time you often see people with a big trunk – it’s a necessity if you want to visit SPIEL without an interruption to carry the games you have bought back to your hotel. As for myself, I proceeded with my shopping shopping list, but not without enjoying the fresh air and the early fall morning light which can be felt even while out for shopping.

But having finished my tasks, I got official leave from the boss, and so Nicole allowed me to dive back into the halls. The first person I visited was Konstantinos Kokkinis from ARTIPIA GAMES, a long standing friend of mine. I had missing him while visiting the booth yesterday, but today we were able to come together to share a few words. Actually Konstantinos already had read my introduction to WordCraft which I had published for yesterday’s report, and it always surprises me to see that even publishers find the time to read about my exploits here at the show. However, it seems like this report has become a tradition for many readers after all these years, and for me it’s a pleasant motivation to know that so many of you have been following my writings for two decades or more.

Talking another stroll through the small publisher’s halls, the first game I came upon was a small pirate-themed cardgame which caught my eye simply by its artwork, and so I stopped to get a quick explanation of the game.

Stopover: Guns or Treasure
CASTILLO GAMES (booth 5I124)

Actually I am always quite fond of thematic cardgames, because it’s sometimes quite astonishing how much fun and interaction can be found in a well-designed game. As indicated, I stopped for Guns or Treasure because of it’s artwork, but what I discovered actually was a rather cute game with an interesting approach to boarding and plundering.

During a turn, a player always receives a hand of three cards, and while all of these cards show the same generic backside with ships’ masts and stern, it is the frontsides which show the bow and the card attribute and value. The players put out their cards to build ships with them, using one card as bow (with its attribute and value visible), whereas other cards will be used with their backsides to display the stern. However, the cards are designed in a way that a ship does not necessarily consist of two cards, but it is actually possibly to build longer ships.

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After a few rounds of shipbuilding the plundering phase begins, and in turn the players now chose one of their ships and another players ship to go into battle. The neat twist here is that only the bow card of each ship is visible, but the other cards and their attributes are only revealed when the battle has begun. Now the players will compare the values of cannon-type cards which they have placed on their ships, and the player with the greater firepower will win the battle and take both his ship and the losing ship to his victory point pile. However, only treasure-type ship cards will count with their treasure value for victory points, and so it’s one of the main tasks of the players to guess on which ships their opponents might have hidden their treasure-type cards.

Guns or Treasure is a quite entertaining game of guessing and counter guessing, and despite its rather easy-going approach there are nice possibilities for bluffing and laying traps. Should a player reveal a high value treasure card on the bow, packing the rest of the ship with guns? Or should a small gun be placed at the bow, hiding lots of treasure on this seemingly helpless pinnace? Quite nasty are also the bomb-type cards: BOOM! Here goes the gunpowder storage, and the whole ship with it.

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An additional layer of action can be added by using the different Captain cards, with each captain having a special ability. These can spice up the game even further, and so Guns or Treasure turned out to be my first nice find of the day!

My biggest surprise for the SPIEL 22 actually was not a game, but two days ago I was actually contacted by my friend Cedrick Caumont from Belgium. He was one of the Belgians with Sombreros, an owner of REPOS PRODUCTION, but two years ago REPOS PRODUCTION had been bought by ASMODEE. I had been sad to hear this last year, because I didn’t expect to see Cedrick coming back to the SPIEL soon. However, I was quite wrong on this, and Cedrick had contacted me to let me know that he was back this year with his new company CAPTAIN GAMES.

For me, this was a great reunion with an old friend, and for me things turned out to be even better, because Cedrick wasn’t just back at the SPIEL, he had also a rather promising new game which he could show me!

Introduction: 13 Words
CAPTAIN GAMES (booth 1C141)

Celebrating our reunion with lots of tasty Belgian chocolate, I sat down with Cedrick and his partners Lumturije Krasniqi and François Romain to have a go at 13 Words, a cooperative word game where players have to guess associations between different words.

A random player takes the first go to become the Captain, and the Captain reveals a word card which gives one word for which he must secretly choose an associated word from the 12 word cards which have been placed on the table. Once the Captain has chosen, the other players have to guess which word the captain might have chosen, and they use small wheels to indicate their guesses. When everybody is done, the Captain reveals his choice, and every player who has guessed correctly scores a point, whereas the Captain only gets a point if at least one player has guessed correctly.

Click on image to enlarge!

For the next round of riddling the next player at the table becomes Captain, and he now turns over the matching word card which had been chosen by the last Captain to reveal a new word which must be matched now. In this fashion the game continues, leaving less and less cards on the table until the last revealed card leaves only a choice of two cards to match. After that round it’s game over, and the players now add up their combined scores to see how well they have done.

Of course the word combinations are not as easy as game and board, but it’s still astonishing to see that it’s possible to guess the Captain’s choice even if none of the words on the table is closely related. What is more, the game with its joint scoring approach is incredibly fun, especially when words are revealed and the players discuss whether the choice of the Captain was really the best available match. However, the Captain is always right, and so the four of us had a hilarious in the back cabin of the booth.

If I am not totally wrong, this small game is going to be a smash-hit party game, and I was even more astonished to learn that Cedrick and his friends had another ace in the sleeve, because their next game was already fully developed, and it’s addictiveness and entertainment value was as high as that of 13 Words.

In Sides the players play in teams, with the team alternating between riddlers and hint-givers. Once again a word must be guessed, but the hint-givers may only give one hint word per turn, and the hint word always must begin with a letter either at the beginning or at the end of a row of letter cards which is revealed at the beginning of the round. This sounds easier than it is, especially since the words to riddle are well chosen and not too easy to describe. However, once again the game did its trick astonishingly well, causing not only interesting discussions between Lumturije and me as team members, but also outbursts of laughter once the solution was found. With these two games the future of CAPTAIN GAMES looks incredibly bright, and for me it’s always astonishing to see that Cedrick has an infallible nose to discover great games.

After this wonderful gaming session I actually was recognized as new mate on board, and I received my very own line-crossing ceremony to proudly wear my new insignia. Blowing off some steam to celebrate my initiation, I was sent out by Cedrick into the Seven Seas of SPIEL on a cruise to tug in more players to test his great new games! Yohoo!!

While cruising the halls, I was actually lucky to find an empty seat the booth of ARES GAMES, and this was an opportunity which I didn’t want to miss, because here a game was presented which was on top of my wanted list!

Review: War of the Ring: The Card Game
ARES GAMES (booth 3F101)

One of the most anticipated releases at this year’s SPIEL certainly is War of the Ring: The Card Game from Italian Publishing House ARES GAMES. For more than 10 years ARES has received lots of praise for their highly acclaimed War of the Ring, a game which gamers and Tolkien-fans alike describe as being the best game adaption of The Lord of the Rings which was ever published. For years now the design crew of ARES is developing the third and final expansion for War of the Ring, and hopes are high that this highly expected game finally will hit the shelves in 2023.

This long development period illustrates the care and attention with which the ARES crew treats their flagship game, keeping new add-ons under development until everything is fully harmonized to fit with the basic game. However, they are also setting a benchmark with this, because a game named War of the Ring: The Card Game now will be met with the expectation that its quality and attractiveness will be on the same level as the older boardgame. This is a high standard where the ARES crew can’t really afford not to deliver a proper product, and being a seasoned War of the Ring player I was curious to see whether the new game really could keep up with my expectations.

From my perspective, the biggest challenge for this game would be to replicate the two-tier approach to victory which has made War of the Ring so unique. On the one hand the journey of the Fellowship of the Ring and their quest to Mount Doom needed to be included, and on the other side the military campaign of Sauron’s forces trying to conquer Middle Earth also needed to play a role. Just like Tolkien did in his books, it was the blending of these two different storylines which had made the boardgame so successful, and so it’s no wonder that this approach can be found in War of the Ring: The Card Game as well.

The game plays for a maximum of 9 rounds, and at the end of each round the two sides (The Free Peoples and the Forces of Shadow) try to collect Location cards - Path and Battleground cards which were revealed for the current round. The Path cards are depicting locations which were visited by the Fellowship of the Ring, and so winning a Path cards means that the Fellowship either is progressing well or that they are slowly corrupted. The Battleground cards on the other hand show locations like Minas Tirith or Dol Guldor, places of strategic importance where mighty armies were gathering.

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At the end of a round, a Location card always will be won by the player who was able to gain a military advantage on that location, and for this reason the players take turns to add Faction cards from their hand to the different locations. The defender on a location always gets a small defensive bonus in this comparison, but whereas it’s always the Free People which are considered to be defending Path cards, the Battleground cards differ from round to round, with good and evil locations being revealed alternately.

The Faction cards available to the players show characters, armies, items and events, but not every card can be played to every location. Following closely on the story, Faction symbols need to be observed when placing cards, and so Dol Guldur can only be attacked by Elves and Wizard Faction cards, but not by the Riders of Rohan. Here the Shadow side has an advantage, because there are only 4 Shadow Factions, whereas the Free Peoples have to manage 6 different Faction cards. This makes it slightly hard to match cards and locations. Furthermore, the Free Peoples have a tendency for card shortages, because they draw less cards than the Shadow side. Well done so far, because the limitation of resources (dice) and the fragmentation of their forces always is a big restraint form the Free Peoples in the boardgame.

When it comes to playing Faction cards, the toughest challenge for the players will be the necessity to cycle cards. “Cycling” means that a player needs to pay for playing a card by discarding another card from his hand, and so these cards will only reappear if a player’s deck runs out of cards so that the cycled discards will be re-shuffled. Both sides have decks which consist of 60 Faction cards each, and it’s soothing and mean at the same time that each card has its use, being either military power to attack or defend, or nice special abilities which can greatly boost a player’s options. So cycling means that a useful card may come back only much later, and so the players must carefully decide the timing when to play their cards.

Even more nasty is the fact that all Faction cards which were played to attack a Location card are eliminated from the game after the battle phase at the end of the round. These cards are lost for good, whereas the defending side only loses cards which were necessary to cancel out all attack symbols. Here the Shadow side is facing more attrition for its aggressiveness, because the Shadow factions always are the attacker for Path cards, and they are considered to be attacker for every second Battleground card as well. In a way, this stands for Sauron’s recklessness, another element which could also be found in the boardgame.

Looking at the battlephase at the end of the round, the general structuring and sequence of this phase actually reminded me quite strongly of some other cardgames where player with asymmetric decks align cards to battle over locations, booty or comparable target cards. A this point a comparison to Invaders from WHITE GOBLIN GAMES is inevitable, because Invaders shows some major similiarities with War of the Ring: The Card Game both in the battle structure and in the asymmetrical player setup. Here it’s the Mankind player who is facing a high degree of attrition due to the overwhelming forces of the Invaders, and the determination of a battle outcome by comparing the combined strength values of all cards played by each side certainly is almost the same in War of the Ring: The Card Game.

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However, there are more than enough creative ideas to be found in War of the Ring: The Card Game, and it’s especially the card powers and the nasty difference between cycling and card elimination which gives the players a tough challenge. The card powers have been designed very cleverly to supplement each other with lots of interesting combos, and many of these combos actually are closely linked to the story of The Lord of the Rings. Military power of characters played on Battlefield cards often depends on the presence of a matching army, there are possibilities to search for specific cards, items may provide characters with nice bonuses and abilities, and some cards may even stay in the reserve of a player’s deployment area, providing permanent benefits until they are sent to fight for a Location card.

As you can see, players will not be able to discern the full flavor of War of the Ring: The Card Game during they first game. They will first have to discover the game and get a grip on the cards which will appear during play. Only then they will be able to use their decks to their full potential, and this is also an aspect which War of the Ring: The Card Game shares with other asymmetric cardgames. However, once the initial hurdle is taken, the players will discover a versatility and atmospheric density which is unusual for a mere cardgame. On the one hand there are the many elements from the War of the Ring boardgame which have successfully been rededicated to function in War of the Ring: The Card Game as well. Even an option for sudden victory has been implemented, because a lead of 10 or more points by the end of a round means that the One Ring was either destroyed or captured. It’s the collection of these small ideas which makes the players feel like coming home to Middle Earth, and there is even the possibility to play with a cast of up to four players so that old teammates will get a chance to play together once again.

However, there is also a high degree of replayability to be found here, since the mechanism of cycling and elimination ensures that almost no two games will play alike. Furthermore, the Path cards of the Fellowship of the Ring may considerably change from game to game, because there will always be nine stages for the journey, but for each stage one out of three Path cards with different effects and capabilities is drawn. So, a lot variation is pre-programmed already by the setup.

Coming back to the initial question whether War of the Ring: The Card Game can stand the comparison with the older boardgame, I think that designer Ian Brody and the ARES crew did a quite good job in creating this spin-off. It’s a somewhat different approach, but many elements in this cardgame are working together as well as they are in the boardgame. I am quite happy how War of the Ring: The Card Game turned out to be, and it’s certainly a very good alternative game where there is not enough time for a full and epic War of the Ring.

I was actually rather happy to have pre-ordered a copy of this great game, because it was actually one of the few games which sold out yesterday after about half a day. ARES GAMES has already initiated a re-print, but of course this is going to take a while.

Bycatch: Last Aurora: Frozen Steel
PENDRAGON GAME STUDIO (ARES booth 3F101)

Coming as an unexpected bycatch, I actually found a new expansion for Last Aurora from PENDRAGON GAME STUDIO for sale here at the ARES booth. Coming in a small and inconspicuous cardbox, Last Aurora: Frozen Steel contains a nice assortment of add-ons for the basic game. So, the players now can play with starting crews with asymmetrical special abilities, there are new enemies and exploration cards, combat cards which allow direct combat between the player convoys and a deck of story cards which introduces a story to go along with the game. All in all, this expansion seems to be not just more of everything, but it will enhance the playing experience and the options available for the players. Not bad for a small set of 110 cards.

Today friends of mine were waiting almost on every corner, and a bit later I met Mandy, a good friend and fellow gamer. Mandy was out on a hunt for good games, asking me for directions where to find my most recommended games. Boy, this is always a special question for me, especially due to the fact that I am looking at so many different game types. Knowing a bit about Mandy’s game preferences, I directed her to check out Orichalque which I played yesterday, and I recommended her to take a look at Wild Serengeti from KOBOLD VERLAG. While I have not yet played the game, I have read the rules and my overall impression was that this placement and scoring game could match Mandy’s taste.

However, I still had some more games which I wanted to see today, and so we parted and I continued my way to hall 4 where I wanted to meet another friend.

Stopover: Etariya
MOAIDEAS GAME DESIGN (booth 4D103)

It has been quite a while since I last met David Liu, but I am always looking forward to visit his booth at the SPIEL, because he usually brings along some interesting games from Taiwan. This year my curiosity has been raised by Etariya, and abstract two-player area control game where the players battle as Light and Shadow for predominance over the tribes of Etariya.

Seven different tribes exist in the game, and each tribe has its own set of seven clan playing pieces. All these playing pieces are put into a bag at the beginning of the game, and each player draws his first placement group of three disks to start with. During his turn, a player will have to place all three of his disks on the gameboard, following the restriction that disks of the same clan (colour) must be placed adjacent to each other. Otherwise, the players are free where they want to place a disk, but they will have to choose carefully because the underlying colour of each space on the gameboard highly matters.

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Before the beginning, the spaces on the gameboard were covered with several overlay sheets, making some spaces dark whereas the others stay in normal colour. It is the colour of a space – dark or light – which defines ownership of a clan disk when it is placed on the gameboard, and a player will have won control over a clan if four of the seven disks of a clan actually have been placed on his spaces. So, this is a game of majorities, and there is also a second level to it, because a player needs to control four of the seven clans to win the game.

As you can see, there is much more to Etariya than just drawing and placing disks. Players must keep a keen eye for opportunities to fence in other clan colours, or where it may be possible to force the other player to place clan disks onto spaces which do not belong to him. A bit of advance planning is possible because it is always known which three disks a player will have to play next. This is due to the fact that a player draws three new disks once he has finished placement and ends his turn. There is even an advanced variant where the players can choose from three sets of three disks to play for their turn, but this is even more demanding because the best placement options for nine disks now must be taken into consideration.

Designer Sky Huang has created an abstract game which meets all expectations for players who want to experience a keen duel of wits and thinking. Like classic placement games, this game has a rather pure and pleasant feeling with a twinkle of unexpected depths which you want to explore, and I think that there will be quite a few tight duels between my wife Nicole and me.

On a sidenote, David told me that he had an idea to use the fantastic world developed for Etariya as a background setting for other games, and indeed half of the rulebook actually gives the players more details on the land and its inhabitants. I think this kind of world-building is a great idea, giving a publisher’s game portfolio some cohesion and recognition value, and it’s also an approach which DRUID CITY GAMES is following with their Tidal Blades series. So, David will be busy in the months to come, delivering his successfully crowdfunded game Jiangnan before the end of the year (last chance for a late pledge is still open a few days), and afterwards starting a new campaign for a second game on the island of Etariya.

For my last meeting of the day I first crossed the Galeria and then took a shortcut through one of the outdoor areas. Out here the sun was mocking me, and I had an idea to turn the last meeting into something special.

Stopover: CZECH GAMES EDITION
(booth 1D139)

At the booth of CZECH GAMES EDITION my friend Jana was already waiting for me. This was the 8th SPIEL for Jana and me taking a closer look at the new games coming from CGE, and so we launched right into business. However, we actually started with a look a bit into the future, because on Jana’s desk a yet unknown expansion box for Lost Ruins of Arnak was prominently placed. Indeed Jana told me that there will be a new expansion for Arnak next year, filled to the brim with new stuff like research tracks and cards, but also featuring two new Leader characters – a Journalist and a Mechanic with her monkey sidekick. Following the modern trend that gamers like to feel a bit more of immersion, this expansion will also include a story-driven campaign for two players, and so we can happily expect a return to Arnak next year!

One of the big CGE releases this year is Deal with the Devil by Matus Kotry. This is quite unusual not only to its thematic backdrop of the Devil competing with human rulers to build a city and win souls, but also in terms of the fixed player number of four players. This is due to the player roles staying secret during the game, and furthermore the players have asymmetric powers and abilities which have been finetuned to this specific player number.

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The game starts as a kingdom building game with the players enlarging their cities by erecting new buildings and using their powers. However, due to the presence of the Devil souls are a highly sought-after commodity in this game, and the mortal players literally give parts of their souls to gain benefits from the Devil. Since the roles are secret, all trading is made through a mobile phone app, and so nobody knows with who he is trading.

Quite important is the fact that the players need to show some humbleness, because otherwise the attention and suspicion of the other players might lead to these players ganging up on the alledged leader. Furthermore, the second half of the game sees the arrival of the Holy Inquisition and a Witch Hunt, and both of these events also may lead to some tough situations for players boasting with their wealth by enhancing their city too quickly. This sounds like an unusual game indeed!

After last year’s successful relaunch of Vlaada Chvatil’s evergreen game Galaxy Trucker, the new Galaxy Trucker: Keep on Trucking! expansion brings back a few elements of the older expansions, but once again these have undergone a major overhaul. Cyan specialist aliens, new technologies like ship plating or boosters, new ship designs and Rough Roads cards all are known to seasoned truckers, but there are always some new parts and twists to be found in here. So, you now have the possibility to add a catapult tile to your ship (a what?), firing boxes of goods on all kinds of threats. New tiles for the Transgalactic Trek also add more variety, and so a few surprises will be waiting in this box!

But while lots of new games certainly are great for entertainment, sometimes all you need is nice company and a nice cup of Cappucino. With the sun waiting outside, Jana and I decided that we could continue our meeting with a coffee out in the sun, and so we left the halls to enjoy a bit of the late afternoon sun. We didn’t have the possibility for a nice chat for quite some time, and so we took the opportunity to exchange a few stories right in the middle of all the SPIEL mayhem.

It’s all like I told you – the SPIEL is mainly about meeting friends and having fun!!!

See you tomorrow!

Saturday - 8th of October 2022

Hey ho, here we are again. Today with a little bit more sleep for me than on the other days before. Five and a half hours are not really a lot of sleep, but much better than the four hours in the night before. But it`s not only me who sleeps restless these days. In parallel to the SPIEL convention, we have a little feast here in Kettwig, a suburban area of Essen, where I am living. My wife has her own booth at this feast, and it’s the first time for her to sell her products face to face on a market.

So, if you are spending the night in the south of Essen, you are welcome at the feast named Rocktober, and you can say hello to my wife. By the way, she also designs all of our shirts, the kepi I am wearing and some other gimmicks for Kulkmann’s G@mebox. Moreover, she has also designed a cool boardgame shirt that can be bought at her booth or via her Hauptsache Pottsache Shop. Oh, and the feasts lasts until Sunday evening.

Click on image to enlarge!

Click on image to enlarge!

But now, let’s leave good old Kettwig and let’s have another day at SPIEL:

Traditionally, Saturday belongs to the families. For me the fair feels totally different on that day than in the two days before, because there are a lot of children everywhere and, of course, they are much more interested in family games than the hardcore gamers we have mainly seen on Thursday and Friday. I also came with my younger sun today. Although he is only 11 years old, he is already an experienced player (no wonder as a child of a long-standing reviewer like me). That’s why we will today see a mixture of medium and family games. Let’s immediately start at Horrible Guild:

Overview: Evergreen
Horrible Guild (booth 3F112)

The new game by Hjalmar Hach is focused on the ecosystem of trees. Seeds must be sowed to grow trees on the planet, and to make this planet green and beautiful. The sun, as the natural source of light, plays a major role in this growth. So, it is more than wise to take heed of the current position of the sun that circuits the planet in quarters every round, when you sow your plants. Big trees cast long shadows on smaller trees and seeds behind them – depending on the position of the sun -, and shadows are not really good to participate from the light of the sun.

Ah, wait a minute: sowing and growing trees, Hjalmar Hach, the role of the sun in the game…. That sounds familiar to my ears. And yes, there had been a similar game some years ago: the eye-catching Photosynthesis from BLUE ORANGE, a unique game, but yet no regular guest on my table. I have often wondered why. To be honest I am not sure about that, but I think the elaborate set-up with all those trees on your personal board is one reason for that.

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The set-up of Evergreen is less complex. In contrast to Photosynthesis, there is not only one planet. Instead, each player gets his own planet board, divided into several sections of different colours, called biome. Every round there one more biome card than the number of players is laid out as a display. When it is your turn, you choose one of these cards that gives you the biome type on your planet where you can develop the ecosystem. Four different actions are possible, next to the trees you can also plant bushes and water places on the free spaces on your planet. Bushes are great to connect group of trees (for more victory points in the scoring phase) without overshadowing the trees behind them. Water on the other hand, obviously has advantages for adjacent trees when you choose a grow action.

Each card you choose has also a bonus action that let’s you improve your abilities. For instance, you might be enabled to additionally grow one or more of your trees. The benefit of those bonus actions improves when you repeatedly choose the same bonus action during the game.

Each round one card remains. But this card is not in the least unimportant. Moreover, this card is placed aside and from now on the associated biome is more fertile, and thus more valuable in the scorings. As said, after your turn, the sun moves one step further around the board and determines the light direction, and thus the shadows of your trees for the following scoring phase.

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Evergreen looks great on the table. I especially love the wooden trees and bushes that perfectly fit the notches on the game boards. This makes the handling much easier than the many cardboard trees in Photosynthesis.

My impression after the introduction of today: Evergreen is the faster, catchier Photosynthesis, an even further developed version of an already excellent game. Hats off!

The other new title from HORRIBLE GUILD is named The Great Split. In this game, you split your new cards every round before you put them in a wallet that is given to your neighbour. Your neighbour then decides which half is passed back to you and which will be added to her or his hand. With this cards you can then add valuables to your collection, as we are collectors. All the different valuables score differently, so you have to find a strategy that permanently has to be adjusted to score most victory points. I have to try this game more often to tell you about the fun factor and the long re-playability, but at the moment I think it will be a funny fast drafting game, even for larger groups.

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There are also some news from Similo, the small funny card game in which players have to guess a character card out of 12, just with the help of playing cards from the lead player as clues. The player only states if there are similarities or if there are not.

Many of you will know the game, because there are already more than six different versions of the game on the market. If you don’t know it, you can read my review of Similo.

There are two new versions of the game for this SPIEL. First of all, a Harry Potter version, and then a really great thing: HORRIBLE GUILD asked a lot of the other publishers if they would like to participate in a version with the titles of the new games for this SPIEL. A lot of publishers took the chance. As a result, the SPIEL’22 Similo Board Games version comes with 46 unique cards with the title of new games released at SPIEL’22. Beyond that, the game is given as a bonus to every purchase of a related game here in Essen for free. What a great idea!

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As I had expected, the halls were considerably more crowded today. Here in North-Rhine-Westphalia we have holidays, but that’s not true for all states here in Germany. Besides the fair is multilingual and there are always a lot of visitors from abroad. And I guess there won’t be holidays everywhere, so the weekend is a good chance to come to SPIEL for a lot of people.

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Click on image to enlarge!

The Gallery where a lot of the food services are located as well as the areas for small children were also quite crowded. However, at some of the booths that were kind of besieged during the last days you could find almost nobody. Of course, I am speaking of the heavy games this time:

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Click on image to enlarge!

We have started the day with an Italian publisher, so let’s continue with the next one, especially as this one was merged with the first one before they split about 10 years ago…

Overview: My Shelfie
Cranio Creations (booth 5A105)

CRANIO CREATIONS is always a blackbox before the novelties for SPIEL are revealed. On the one hand they are producing funny (and quite unusual) children and family games like Walls of York, Jungle Race and A Tale of Pirates. On the other hand there are titles for the experienced players like Barrage, Golem and Newton.

This year’s highlight at SPIEL is a light game called My Shelfie in which players are asked to put their favourite items back in a book shelf after a change of flat.

I was introduced to the game by Arianna Santini, the art director of the game. First of all, I had to make her a compliment, because the game is really outstanding for a family game. The shelf is physically and haptically a head-turner on the table and all the components that you put inside your shelf are nice to look on.

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The game is about organizing your bookshelf. There are personal and common goals to gain victory points. Similar to Connect Four you throw items from the living room, where you unpack all of your precious objects, into your bookshelf to arrange a good order. But that seems to be easier than it is. Although there is no interaction, you are limited in your options, because you always can only take an item from the living room when it has at least one side free. And there are some challenging score mechanisms to be met before you claim victory.

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My Shelfie is a nice, but easy family game. Of course, it does not have the depth of Barragge or Newton. You must keep that in mind when you are trying the game. But it seems to be an appealing game for adults with children of 8 years and older. I personally left a lot of my stuff for the bookshelves in the moving boxes after my last house moving. A few years after, I had some mold issues in my cellar, and I had to throw away a lot of the stuff. That would not be good for any scoring…

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Next to My Shelfie CRANIO CREATIONS have come to SPIEL with some smaller card games, both of them funny party games:

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Moreover, three expansions for their expert games were offered here in Essen for the first time. A completely new board for Barrage with more water available, an expansion for Newton and new missions for Mystery House. So, in the end, every player should get happy at CRANIO CREATIONS this year…

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Time was passing by, but still there were so many people in the halls that it was difficult to find tables for me and my son to play another game. This offered the opportunity for us to walk around and see what I had missed the other days.

I have to admit that I sometimes regret the times before I became a reviewer, because I usually have no time to have a look at all the other booths that are only slightly envolved in boardgames. But I am always fascinated in the art of painting, be it a miniature, be it illustrations in books or in pictures or the manas or the colouring pictures. At SPIEL you can find them all. And some guys are up to do the painting job despite all of the noise and the crush of people. I definitely take my hat off to you, guys!

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Click on image to enlarge!

Click on image to enlarge!

Since 1996 a lot of things has changed. Frank and I are now old veterans and can tell a lot about the history of the fair, the development and fall of small and large companies, and we know a lot of people. So, it is a kind of family gathering for us with a growing family year after year.

Stopover: We Love Games (booth 5K119)

Another example for this growing „family“ is last year‘s coincidence with Michael Lohde Andersen, the illustrator and designer (in one person!) of Biotopia. Our co-author Lutz Wildt made contact with the designer just because of some advertisements on the internet. Once again that was a lucky find, because the game was a big success in and was even nominated for a boardgame award in his home country, Denmark.

Lutz and I met with Michael at the entrance of SPIEL’21. He had no booth and the cooperation with WE LOVE GAMES was only some days old. Lutz had really a good sense of smell of smell. As a result, Michael and his publisher are now back at SPIEL’22 with a booth of their own and they are permanently explaining and playing his game.

With every success of a game, the need of an expansion is discussed. And so, Michael sent us a setting copy for an expansion a few months after SPIEL’21. I did some playtesting together with my son and soon after the expansion was realised and we were listed in the rulebook as playtesters. That‘s worth a photo with the author, isn‘t it?

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Of course a success of a game does not only deserve an expansion, a successor is needed. And Michael has delivered. Ocean is the name of the new game. Ocean comes without any rulebook, you can only download them. The explanation for this is the environment, because every small detail counts for saving our planet. You see, a lot of publishers care for the environment, although there is still a lot of plastic in the game industry. So, here is a first picture of Ocean, again a card game, designed and illustrated by the same author. I am sure that Lutz or I will tell you more about the game soon, for now you must trust in the picture:

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It was already 4 o’clock after this stopover and finally my son and I found the one or other table to play some games:

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Click on image to enlarge!

Click on image to enlarge!

Click on image to enlarge!

And finally, we also matched up with Frank for a final photo for today:

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When you go to SPIEL with your son, it will be a completely different experience. Today, I had this experience. It was family day at SPIEL and the focus changed from expert games to family games. One more day to come, so stay tuned, sign the guestbook and enjoy the read for another day’s coverage live from the convention halls.

Yours, Ralf

So here we go, it’s SPIEL Saturday!!

Walking down my street and towards the holy halls, I expected that today could be expected to be the most crowded day of the whole show. And indeed there was a big crowd waiting in front of the entrances, so that many people actually had been able to come here despite the act of sabotage which had mysteriously cancelled all railroad traffic north of North Rhine-Westphalia this morning.

Yesterday some of you will have noticed that one big new release was missing on my visit to the booth of CGE. However, I didn’t skip Starship Captains because I preferred to have a coffee with Jana, but actually I had a much better arrangement for this morning. So, entering the halls a bit earlier and heading straight for the booth of CGE, I teamed up with game designer Peter B. Hoffgaard for a demoing of his new game. However, we were quickly joined by a couple from Belgium, and so the proposed demo turned into a full-sized expedition into space.

Review: Starship Captains
CZECH GAMES EDITION (booth 1D139)

People dressed in Gold, Blue and Red running through narrow corridors? Beaming to planets and going on all kinds of incredible missions? To boldly go where no man has gone before? No, this are not the voyages of starship Enterprise, but instead game designer Peter B. Hoffgaard is sending a bunch of freshly promoted Starship Captains out into space, trying the best with their refurbished star cruisers and their rookie crew to explore new planets, survive difficult missions and establish good contacts with different galactic factions.

With the gameboard depicting a newly discovered galactic sector, the players use their starships to travel between the worlds, always trying to collect Mission cards which will provide various in-game benefits and count for Victory points when the game is over. For performing all kinds of actions, the players have to activate crew members, and at the beginning of the game each player has two ensign figures of each class in his crew:

• Red: leadership and piloting
• Yellow: weapons, tactics and security
• Blue: research and engineering

Finally, there is one cadet figure dressed in Grey, and even though the colors and classes do not fully correspond with the Federation dress code on board of the USS Enterprise, it’s quite easy to guess that the performance of a specific action requires the use of a corresponding crew member. So, for example a player needs to spend a Red ensign for moving his ship, a Yellow ensign to battle pirates, or a Blue ensign to acquire a new Tech card. Grey cadets are not really of much use for all these actions on board of the ship, but at least they can do repairs and participate as dummies on planetary missions.

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A very important concept in Starship Captains is the fact that crew members spent on actions are not discarded, but instead all used figures go into a waiting queue outside the Ready room where all unused crew members are waiting. In the game a round usually ends when all players have used up all crew members in their Ready room, and now all but the last three figures of the queue will be returned to the Ready room, being available for use in the new round. So, it matters greatly in which order a player uses his crew members for his actions, because an action early in a round means that the crew member will be quick to return for the next round, whereas the last crew members used in a round will be stuck in the queue. The only exception here are Androids. These special figures serve as a one-time joker when sent on a mission, and they can be gained from Tech cards or by other rewards which can be collected in the game.

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As mentioned before, a very lucrative possibility to collect both rewards and Victory points is to send a ship’s crew on a mission, and for this the player first must use one or more Red crew members to navigate his ship to a planet where he wants to take a Mission card. On the way to the planet the ship may be faced with pirates, but these either can be passed or removed by spending a Yellow crew member to perform an attack action. Either way, the player’s ship will suffer damage to one of it’s cargo bays from passing or fighting the pirates, and even though the ships cannot be destroyed, collecting too much damage is cumbersome because the cargo bays are used for storing artifacts and tokens of defeated pirates. Artifacts may be used for bonus actions, whereas tokens of defeated pirates are worth victory points, so having all cargo bays blasted away is not really useful.

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Arriving at a planet, the player must send a certain number of crew members on the mission which he wants to complete. The Mission card depicts whether one, two or three crew members must be sent, and if the player just want to collect the card for Victory points the colour of his crew members will not be of importance. However, every crew member slot on a Mission card actually shows a class colour, and if a player spends a crew member of a matching colour he will be able to collect the bonus rewards which are associated with this slot. For example, medals can be earned by placing matching crew members, and these medals then can be used to promote crew members to the rank of commander or to retrain them to change their class.

Three medals must be spent by a player to promote one of his ensigns to commander. Commander figures retain their class colour, but they will be marked with a promotion ring to distinguish them from regular ensign figures. Commanders are really useful because of their versatility – they can activate two rooms (actions) on board of the spaceship during the same turn, and on a mission they are allowed to earn double mission rewards. Alternatively, a commander can also order an ensign of his class or a cadet to come from the queue to the Ready room, and this is quite useful for influencing the line order in the queue or when several figures of the same class are needed.

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Blue engineers can be used for researching new Tech cards, and whenever a player researches a tech he may take a card from the central Tech display and place it in a Tech slot of his spaceship. These Tech cards provide all kinds of extras, ranging from new actions which can be performed on board of the ship to ability boosts which increase the effects of standard actions or Omega techs which will provide additional scoring options for the game’s end. So acquiring Tech cards is a great way to unlock more efficient actions and windfall effects, but first the players will have to overhaul their ships because a good portion of their tech slots is already damaged at the start of the game. However, once they are operational, newly placed Tech cards will provide attractive permanent bonuses, and even additional one-time effects can be triggered by observing bonus symbols when placing new Tech cards in a specific order.

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Another important reward from missions are advances which can be earned by the players on the three tracks of the galactic factions. The factions are the Tincan androids, the Ni’an pirates and the Cooperative (the players’ fleet high command), and advances on the faction tracks means that the players will rise in esteem with each of these factions. Once again, this gives the players a possibility to collect rewards like medals or android figures which are printed on the faction tracks, but the players also will earn a lot of Victory points by befriending these factions. Furthermore, the first players to reach a certain zone on a faction track will trigger a special event which will apply to all players, but this event will not come as a surprise because the Event card associated with each faction will be revealed at the start of the game.

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Missions for adventure, pirates to fight and the galactic factions to improve their diplomatic skills – the players will have to excel in each of these activities in order to become the best Starship Captains of the fleet. The game puts a very strong emphasis on timing, because the possibility to perform certain actions during a turn always depends on the availability of matching crew members. Here it is really important to think ahead, keeping an eye on the waiting queue of crew members in order to see which crew members will be available in the next round. So thinking at least one round ahead is mandatory, but of course best plans may fail if a competitor actually is faster and beats a player to a Mission card or a Tech card.

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Indeed Starship Captains is a game where a keen eye for optimization is absolutely necessary. However, this optimization exercise is greatly boosted by the range of available actions, the awards and ability improvements which can be earned, and by the atmospheric density of the whole game. The design crew from CZECH GAMES EDITION has outfitted this game with rather cute and cool artwork, crew members with different individual poses, and even double layered startship boards which greatly help to keep all components organized. With all these elements coming together, Starship Captains can be enjoyed to the highest degree, challenging the players to participate in a quite unique and entertaining contest to become the best captain of the fleet. Despite some seemingly well-known mechanisms, I think that Starship Captains is one of the most unusual games to be released here at the SPIEL!

For me, this a strong contender to become my game of the fair, and this opinion actually was shared by Goele and Ion from Belgium. So, it’s our recommendation that it’s absolutely worthwhile to give this game a closer look if you should visit the SPIEL tomorrow!

Boy, it was really getting crowded today. My expectations were true, and so lots of people actually were filling the halls this morning. In the last few days I have talked to a few people from the industry, and everybody expects that the turnover for games will not fall back far behind last year’s numbers in this winter. In the last two years Covid has given the boardgames’ sales a considerable boost, and this years it is expected that the economic crisis caused by the Russian war will lead people to re-focus their expenses, spending less money on high-priced goods and voyages, and more for decorating their home and doing things with their family. So, so sort of boardgame-cocooning is expected to happen, and so it’s no wonder that the halls are quite full today!

Playtesting session: Radlands
ROXLEY GAMES (booth 4B104)

Coming to the booth of Canadian publisher ROXLEY GAMES, I kept an eye open for getting a free table to playtest Radlands, I have already been here yesterday, but every time I passed the booth all tables had been taken. Better luck this time, and after 5 minutes of waiting I could sit down together with a guy from Switzerland to get an introduction to Radlands.

Playing most often with my wife, we are both not deterred by games with a post-apocalyptic setting, as long as they are nicely done and offer some thrilling sessions especially for two players. This is something I hoped to find in Radlands, because I derived from the Kickstarter page that it might be an elegant but quite brutal confrontation game. So, I took a seat and joined a battle of two clans, with each clan trying to eliminate the three camp cards of the other player’s clan in order to win the game.

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There are three rows for three cards on each players’ side of the battlefield, and in the last row the camp cards of the players are placed. In the rows between the players can deploy units, cards coming from their hand for which they need to pay by spending water. Water is the general currency for actions in Radlands, and each turn a player gets a meagre amount of 3 water units which he can spend on deploying and activation units. There is a possibility to save one unit by the end of a turn for the player’s next turn, but otherwise it’s both useful and necessary to spend the water in order to get units both for attacking and for defending against the other player’s attacks.

Many units have a capability for attacking, and usually this means that water must be spent to activate the unit. This is not possible during the turn of its deployment, and so units usually must survive until the player’s next turn in order to first use their abilities. When attacking, some units only can cause damage to other units, while others actually can attack both units and the opposing player’s camp cards. However, targets may not be freely chosen, but only undefended cards may be the target of an attack. So, units in the first line of the battlefield must be attacked first, then units in the second line, and only if the battlefield column doesn’t contain units anymore the camp card on a player’s baseline can be attacked.

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However, direct attacks against camp cards will be difficult to perform in Radlands, and instead the players must rely on using the special abilities of their camp cards and units to gain the upper hand. Here the cards available in the game offer a good variety of special effects, ranging from sniper attacks to the recruitment of generic Punks or other niceties like additional card draws or repairs to a damaged camp card. Cards must not even be played on the battlefield to be used for an effect, because each card also bears a small symbol which allows the player to play the card from his hand for a one-time effect. However, all resources scarce in this post-apocalyptic hell, and so cards are not replenished on a large scale. Instead, a player only draws one new free card at the beginning of his turn, and this shows that all cards must be wisely in order not to run out of resources. In a time of need, new cards might be bought for two water each, but this is almost too expensive to afford, especially since you don’t know what you will get.

Using their units to attack and for their special abilities, the conflict between the players will begin almost right away, because it’s best not to let the opposing player gain the upper hand by deploying too many units. However, the game begins to be really interesting when it comes to the use of event cards which also can be found in the deck. These events are one-time effects as well, but with a much stronger punch than the card symbols which you can trigger by discarding. The effects of events are much more considerable, and so for example a Famine actually forces both players to discard all but one of their units. This opens up powerful options indeed, and exactly this event helped me to recover in the demo game which I have played here at the SPIEL, because my opponent had been able to deploy six units while I was down to one.

Something really nice about the event cards is the fact nearly all events aren’t triggered right away, but they actually have a delayed trigger which means that the cards will only trigger one, two or three cards after their initial deployment. This is quite nicely simulated by playing the event into a timer column at the side of the playing area, and at the beginning of a players turn he moves all his events one step upwards, activating an event which would reach the other player’s side of the battlefield. So, the opponent actually sees what is coming, and while I am not sure whether the game contains a card which is able to cancel an event, there are possibilities to delay the event, putting in backwards in the activation column. In addition, the opponent can use the information what is going to happen to adapt his strategy, possibly performing a desperate and costly attack with his units before they are removed by the event.

Taking the whole concept of events a bit further, a player also may chose to activate his raiding team. This is something like a permanently available event card, and when activated the card will force the opponent to damage a camp card of his choice. While it is hard to take out a camp card with the raiding team alone, a clever activation sequence of events and the raiding team plus the use of card abilities may trigger devastating combo effects.

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Radlands was able to fully deliver what I expected of this game. It was brutal and incredibly clever. The timing aspect which I described brought a completely new dimension into this battlefield confrontation game, and a fact which I really liked was that the battle raged back and forth until my opponent finally gained the upper hand. There are quite a few powerful cards in the deck, but likewise players also have a chance to counter an oponent’s move with good cards of their own. However, there inevitably comes a point when one player will run out of resources, and then one or two well-placed blows of his opponent will prove to be fatal.

This is actually a great confrontation game for two players, offering much more strategic depth than would be presumed on first sight. The different uses of the cards compliment the strategic options quite nicely, and if you aren’t deterred by the thematic setting Radlands certainly is a game to check out!

Continuing on my zigzagging course through the crowded halls, I came upon the booth of LUCKY DUCK GAMES where an advertising column reminded me that I wanted to check out Tidal Blades: Banner Festival, a game which I had seen on Wednesday at the New Games Show. This game wasn’t just nicely to look at, but actually my wife Nicole and I are very fond of the Tidal Blades universe which has been created by DRUID CITY GAMES, the makers of Tidal Blades – Heroes of the Reef.

Usually the creation of new game worlds is common to be found in role-play games where the authors can release many resource volumes to slowly build and enrich an every-growing universe for the gamemaster and the players. However, such a “world-building” approach is unusual when it comes to classic boardgames, at least when you leave aside expansion games like Zombicide or Decent which put out lots of add-ons which all add to the same playing mechanism. Normally stand-alone boardgames are created with its own thematic background, and so it’s interesting to see that DRUID CITY GAMES from Los Angeles have teamed up with Mr. Cuddington, a team of artists and world builders, in order to create a gaming world which can be used as a thematic background for different stand-alone boardgames.

Review: Tidal Blades – Heroes of the Reef
DRUID CITY GAMES

So, for today I would like to invite you to dive with me into the universe of Tidal Blades, a water world which is constantly threatened by monsterous creatures getting through the Fold, a dimensional barrier which has been erected around the main city of Naviri and its surrounding islands. To fend off these dangers, the Navirians are in constant need of heroes, the Tidal Blades who dare to venture out and keep the creatures at bay. However, before going on adventures the heroes need to be found and trained, and furthermore there is much to discover about the Navirians, their ways and their islands, and so this setting offers ample of opportunities for games which explore different parts of the Tidal Blades universe.

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For me, it started when my attention was drawn to this line of games by the Kickstarter campaign for Tidal Blades – Heroes of the Reef, the first game to be released in the Tidal Blades universe. Two factors where my main driver here: for one, the artwork created by the Mr. Cuddington team is stunningly beautiful, at least from my perspective because I really like the blue-toned island world which reminds me a lot of Disney’s animated movie Atlantis. In addition, I have always been fond of strategic dice games because a good combination of luck and mitigation possibilities usually doesn’tt fail to keep me entertained for many gaming rounds. So, when discovering Tidal Blades – Heroes of the Reef it were these two factors which made me proceed and get a deluxe copy of this game.

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In a way, Tidal Blades – Heroes of the Reef really is the best possible entry point for this new universe, because the game focuses on the tournament in which young Navirians compete to become new Tidal Blades, warriors which will later defend the city against the monstrous creatures. Each player takes the role of a character participating in this tournament, and the player characters have to travel between different arenas in order to participate in challenges which will improve their tournament ranking and train their different character traits.

The Challenge cards available at the arenas require the players to roll combinations of specific symbols using their character’s dice pool, and for each matching symbol rolled the player may increase the corresponding trait of his by one step. The following character traits exist:

• Focus gives the number of dice which a character may roll in a challenge.
• Resilience defines how many used dice can be refreshed and upgraded after a round during nighttime.
• Synergy allows a character to gain new, unique skills.
• Spirit can be used to play and boost Stunt cards, one-time effects which give the players beneficial extras.

In addition, if all symbol requirements of a Challenge card were met, the challenge has been passed by the character, allowing the player to collect the Challenge card and keep it for the game’s end scoring.

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However, the challenges are only part of the things which are offered to the characters travelling the Navirian islands. Arriving at the islands with the arenas, the players are allowed to chose an action space there before trying to complete a challenge, and these action spaces will provide them with things like additional dice, fruits which can be used to temporarily increase the number of allowed dice during a challenge, or shells which can be used for beneficial effects when it comes to re-rolling or changing the face of a rolled dice. So it’s not only a matter of chosing which arena to visit next, but there is a bit of worker placement because of the action spaces connected with each arena.

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To make things even more tricky, an elder Tidal Blade travels between the islands in his role as Judge of the tournament, and when a character performs well on a challenge in presence of the Judge, additional tournament points can be earned. This means that players have to keep a constant eye where it is most profitable to go for a challenge, because a good combination of gains and trait increases will help them to develop their characters.

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When it comes to character development, it is not only the characters’ traits which can be improved, but the players also will get opportunities to upgrade dice in their character’s pool. So, the characters generally start with Novice dice which show all four different trait symbols, but these dice may be upgraded to Initiate, Elite and Guild levels in order to focus on rolling specific trait symbols or even multiple symbols. This will provide a great boost to completing specialist challenges, and in turn this will also advance the character’s traits to levels which provide additional victory points. Dice upgrade can be gained on various action spaces, by purchasing market cards and – quite important – during nighttime, because a character’s resilience trait also is used to determine how many dice can be upgraded at the end of a round.

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But times are dangerous, and so our prospective heroes will not only participate in the challenges, but also will have to deal with some monsters which have found a way to get through the Fold. So, instead of going to an arena, a player also can send his hero to the outer reefs where the monsters are appearing, and here the heroes skills will be put to a real test. Fighting the monsters is comparable to participating in a challenge, because the monster cards show combinations of symbols which must be rolled in order to defeat the monster. Usually these fights are tougher because more symbols need to be rolled, and ofter it requires the attacks of several heroes to defeat a monster completely. Quite intimidating is also the fact that a player will loose all of his character’s dice which were dedicated to be used in this combat. However, even though it may sound strange to upgrade dice just to lose them after battle, there are many possibilities to deal with this. So, many monsters will provide nice benefits to all players who helped defeating them, and furthermore the players actually can get bonus dice which are available just for the combat. These dice are gained by learning the three combat styles which are associated with the monsters, and the combat styles will be learned and increased by completing challenges in the three different arenas. So, the combat styles and the associated bonus dice actually may help the players to avoid spending their most advanced dice in a combat, allowing them to return quickly to the arenas to continue learning and improving their skills.

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As you can see, many things in Tidal Blades – Heroes of the Reef wrap around and come together, and I think I have rarely seen a dice game with so many tactical options available to the players. Even though fighting the monsters is a good way to victory, there are other options and ways available to the players, and here Tidal Blades – Heroes of the Reef really shines with its almost perfect combination of luck and strategy. The decisions taken by the players always matter in multiple ways, and so there are a lot of tough choices to be taken. For example, fighting a monster will have the costs and benefits outlined above, but on the other hand the decision not to fight a monster is not easy either. Of course the dice and the action now can be used for additional training or for gaining some resources, but if the monster survives and gets to attack, all characters who have not helped in the defense will be penalized as well. So, can a player count on his competitors to drive the threat off, or is it better to take the lead, loose some hard-earned dice and become hero of the day? Tough choices indeed.

Review: Tidal Blades: Banner Festival
LUCKY DUCK GAMES (booth 5D115)

For my wife Nicole and me Tidal Blades – Heroes of the Reef was like a vortex which has drawn us into the universe of Tidal Blades, a world full of wondrous creatures and stories to be discovered. As hinted above, the team of Mr. Cuddington did a wonderful job in creating and illustrating this thematic setting, and so Nicole and I were very pleased to learn that new games in the Tidal Blades universe were in development. Even better still, a new game is released just here at the SPIEL 22 convention, and so the new game Tidal Blades: Banner Festival from LUCKY DUCK GAMES will take us back to the city of Naviri and its cute inhabitants.

Looking at the background story, Tidal Blades: Banner Festival takes place shortly after the tournament in which our heroes became to the new Tidal Blades. The inhabitants of the city now are enjoying the Banner Festival, a time where merchants from all over the isles come to the city to sell exotic goods and when there will be spectacular watercraft races at Lamara Stadium in the city center. Our heroes are present in this game as well, but they are mingling with the crowds, visiting market stalls and enjoying a bit of relaxation before setting out on dangerous missions in the Fold. So, the players will face a different challenge in this game, and instead of training heroes they will become merchants who are trying to generate most fame for their trading house by selling extraordinary goods to an astonished crowd and by sponsoring the racers which compete at the stadium.

No dice are rolled in Tidal Blades: Banner Festival, but instead the player actions are determined by a trick-taking mechanism in which the players play Market cards of different values and colour suits. The game plays for a total of three rounds, and each round is comprised of seven or eight bouts in which the players always play one Market card from their hand. There are four coloured suits of Market cards, and the ten cards in each suit have values ranging from “0” to “9”. When all players have played a card, these are revealed simultaneously, and the player actions now depend on the relative ranking each each card in comparison to each other.

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So, the player with the highest-ranked card will be allowed to move the watercraft which is sponsored by his trading house for a number of spaces corresponding to the value of the card which was played. The racing track can be found in the middle of the gameboard, and it’s the aim of the players to have their watercraft complete as many laps as possible, because each completed lap will increase the player’s profits (score) at the game’s end. However, it’s also useful if the players succeed in moving their crafts to stunt spaces, because this will gain them a Goya Star Fruit, the traditional season’s gift during the Banner Festival. These fruits will create additional profits, because the inhabitants of Naviri are keen to get these rare fruits. Whenever the fruit pool is empty during the course of the game, the players will convert all their fruits into profits, with the player who has collected most fruits being allowed to convert them on a 1-to-1 base, whereas all other players only get a 1-for-2 trade rate.

But let’s get back to the Market cards. Players who have played a mid-ranking card will not do anything with their watercraft, but instead they will place banners on the market stall spaces of the four docks of the floating market. The spaces on the docks have different placement requirements, and the banner must be placed on the first qualifying space, gaining the player the benefit printed on the space (Goya Star Fruits or the placement of an additional banner on the same space). If the card played by the player does not match the requirements of any space on the current dock, the player’s banner is placed at the last space of the dock, the Banner Tower. No immediate benefit can be gained from this, but in contrast to the other dock spaces the banners from the towers will not be removed at the end of a round. This is important, because all banners will be scored after each round, and the player with most banners on a dock will get most profits. Here the placement of banners on the tower is of double use, because the banners are not staying on the board after the scoring, but the tower space actually is the final space of two docks at the same time, and so the banners placed there are counted for the majority in both docks.

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Quite tricky is the fact that players do not freely chose at which dock they may place a banner, but instead the start player always places a Trading Gate at one of the four docks before a bout is played. Banners will only be placed at this dock, and in addition the current dock also defines the ranking of the different coloured suits of market cards. So, depending on the gate’s position, cards of the same value never have the same rank, but instead the different colours are used to determine the final card ranking for the bout. As you can see, this Trade Gate adds and additional layer of consideration when it comes to the question which Market cards the players should play during each bout, and this feature alone takes the general approach of trick-taking to a whole new level.

Finally, we have not yet examined the action which will be available to the player who has played the lowest ranking Market card. Here the player’s action actually depends on the card’s value, because the cards of every value will trigger a different type of card action. Some of these actions are related to a movement of the player’s watercraft, whereas others will create additional profits or provide some Star Fruits depending on the number of a player’s banners on the current dock. Really spectacular are the effects which are triggers by card values “8” or “9”, providing the player with additional tower banners or a nice end-game bonus, but you can imagine that it will be difficult to play such a card successfully as lowest ranking card during a bout. It’s trick-taking after all!

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Players who like Tidal Blades – Heroes of the Reef might be a bit surprised to see that Tidal Blades: Banner Festival is a totally independent game, but to my opinion this is exactly the special charm and attraction which comes from the Tidal Blades universe. It’s not an expansion with new heroes or challenges, but instead Tidal Blades: Banner Festival explores a new side of this world, and the game certainly stands well on its own right. While a trick-taking mechanism actually is one of the oldest design approaches which can be taken for a cardgame, designers JB Howell and Michael Mihealsick quickly leave the traditional path of play and take. Instead, several layers of possible player actions and scoring options have been arranged around the central trick-taking mechanism, and with these elements falling into place the game actually feels more like a boardgame than like a cardgame. While it may seem logical to go for high value cards to move the watercraft, it’s not guaranteed that a player actually will get a suitable hand of cards, and so he has to adapt his strategy for the current round on the hand of cards which he was dealt. This is exactly the point where Tidal Blades: Banner Festival shines most, because players can make good profits with any hand of cards if they just play their cards with a good timing, and this certainly is a big difference to other trick-taking games where some lucky card dealing almost automatically determines the outcome of the round. This versatility makes Tidal Blades: Banner Festival a quite unique game, and with its thematic and graphic continuity the game truly integrates well into the Tidal Blades universe.

Preview: Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders
DRUID CITY GAMES / LUCKY DUCK GAMES

But are two games enough to make a universe? Well, not really, and so DRUID CITY GAMES actually has the next Tidal Blades projects already in the pipeline. In April 2022 they have finished the Kickstarter campaign for Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders, and before newcomers and fans of Tidal Blades get frustrated by reading about this project, let me point out that it is still possible to make a Late Pledge!

Once again, this project will not bring an expansion to the existing games, but instead two new and independent games will be added to expand the world of Tidal Blades even further. Looking gorgeous with lots of miniatures and lavishly decorated map books, Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders now will see our beloved heroes enter the Fold in a series of missions (scenarios) in order to end the monster threat. So, this time there will be a real adventure game, not a dungeon crawler but a world crawler because the players will get to explore a lot of different locations. The campaign page promises that the game will feature a unique combat system and dynamic character progression, and there will also be the possibility to explore the city of Naviri and interact with many of its inhabitants. On the story side, the preview of the mission book and the map books look very promising, and there will even be a reunion with the city’s former defenders, the last generation of Tidal Blades which vanished into the Fold 15 years ago. To be honest, Nicole and I can’t wait to get our hands on this game!

Finally, at the same Kickstarter it is also possible to get Tidal Blades – The Roleplaying Game, a huge sourcebook and the necessary extras to start creating your own RPG adventures in the world of Tidal Blades. While my own days and an RPG adventurer and game master are more than 30 years gone, this game has made me curious. The project page displays that the sourcebook is based on the Cypher System, a flexible game engine which has received praise and acclaim for its elegant fast-paced game play, the intuitive character creation and a supposedly unique GM-friendly design. I truly cannot imagine a “rules-light” system with a 400-page sourcebook, but there are experience reports that the system is sophisticated and very flexible at the same time. There is less focus on numbers and a tight GM control of all elements, thus leaving more room for nice story elements and creative ideas, increasing the narrative engagement of the GM and the players alike. Coupled up with lots of beautiful artwork, I am still on the edge to add this book to my pledge and get the dust off my old GM throne…

With this look into the future I would like to finish today’s trip to the Tidal Blades universe, but not without giving you a final treat. During the first Kickstarter campaign, DRUID CITY GAMES offered a printed Lore and Artbook which has now been made available for free download. So, if you are curious to see and read more about this magnificent gaming universe, you can head onwards to the DRUID CITY GAMES dropbox and download the Artbook there!

Stopover: The Dead Eye
PLEASANT COMPANY STUDIO(booth 5K122)

Someone I was really happy to see was my friend Rob van Zyl from PLEASANT COMPANY STUDIO. Unforgotten and still in good use for my wife and me is his gothic dice chucker Ancient Terrible Things, and I haven’t seen Rob since well before the Pandemic. I remember that he has shown me on a previous SPIEL his prototype solo game The Dead Eye, and this year he was finally back to present the finished game.

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The game is about a desperate trek to find a sanctuary in an apocalyptic wasteland, and the player is constantly challenged with tough decisions when turning over new cards from his deck. Cards either can be placed aside as resources, or they can be kept in order to try to fulfil their resource costs and gain a benefit. However, if a player doesn’t own enough resources when keeping a card, there is always a risk that the following cards which need to be turned will not list more resources but event triggers. If too many event triggers are revealed, the kept card will not provide a benefit but actually cause some detrimental effect and then is discarded.

During the course of the game the players try to collect beneficial cards which give them different items, and these may help them to gain Waypoint cards in the later game. These waypoints will help to win the game by finding a sanctuary, but the way to get there is a tough solitaire challenge. And by the way, the game’s title The Dead Eye is well chosen also as an artistic statement. Rob wanted his game to have a distinct retro look, and so he did not only draw dark and foreboding artwork to set the thematic style for the game, but he actually chose to do 3D-graphics to enhance the visuals. Wearing glasses, additional 3D glases are always a challenge for me, but looking at the cards in the crazy way revealed some quite stunning effects.

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Rob also told me that Ancient Terrible Things will be back next year in a new edition, including a ship dice tower and generally with more streamlined rules which allow quicker gameplay and some interactive effect. The game will be available for preorder via Kickstarter next spring, but owners of the 1st edition will be give the possibility to get an upgrade pack.

With this chance meeting my day at the SPIEL 22 ended, but there was actually one more highlight waiting for tonight. Nicole and I were visited for dinner by our friend Daniel Schlosser from 2ND GATE GAMES, and after a delicious dish of spinach dumplings we actually ended the day as it begun – with another round of Starship Captains!

See you tomorrow – it’s already the final day!

Sunday - 9th of October 2022

SPIEL 22 – Last Day!!

This was quick! We have already reached the last day of this year’s SPIEL, and while I am writing this report the exhibitors and publishers are already dismantling their booths. The games are back in the boxes, the tables are stowed away, and the trucks are being loaded – there is always a mixed feeling when I am writing my final report. On the one hand I am just glad because this nighttime typing requires a lot of stamina, and after a week of reporting and conventioning my batteries are running on auxiliary power. On the other hand, there is always a bit of wistfulness because it’s somewhat strange to go back to “normal” mode after these happy days full of friends and gaming. However, what exactly is normal anyhow? After all there are many games to play and friends to see in the weeks and months to come, and so a good part of the SPIEL feeling will last even without the show. But enough of this sentimentality, let’s take a final dive into the halls!

Those of you who have followed my reports for many years will know that SPIEL Sundays often are something special for me. It’s Ladies' Day and so my wife Nicole usually joins me for the last leg. Of course we are going to keep this tradition and Nicole will join me in the halls for the first time since 2019. However, she still had some work to do this morning, and so I had two hours which I had planned to check out a very special game.

Introduction: Hegemony – Lead Your Class to Victory
HEGEMONIC PROJECT GAMES (booth 5E130)

The game Hegemony – Lead Your Class to Victory originates from a very successful crowdfunding campaign and it will be delivered next year. Normally I rarely report on games which are only demoed here at the SPIEL, but my friend Vangelis Bagiartakis had convinced me that I just needed to check his new game out. To be honest, I am very glad that I did, because this game is quite unlike anything I have played before.

Please be aware that I can only give a very rough description here. I have neither played the game, nor have I been able to experience a full game in demo. After a bit more than 90 minutes the group of players which I had watched here at the show had been explained the major part of the rules by Vangelis, and they had finished the first full round of the game. It really takes a good amount of time just to teach this game, but this is due to the finely interwoven mechanics which must be fully understood by the players to experience the full potential of Hegemony. I am sure that even the first game will not be enough to get a full grip on all possibilities, but this is no problem at all because this game is also a very special experience.

In Hegemony, the game simulates with astonishing depth how a state and society works. The players take control of four classes in Society – the Working Class, the Middle-Class, the Capital and the State itself. These are the major stakeholders behind policies, economic interests, and social agendas, and each player tries to influence these factors to match the interests of their class. So, for example the Working Class player will want to increase the wage level and reduce costs for medical treatments, whereas the Capital player wants to earn as much money as possible, thus trying to prevent wage increases and the state from taking to much from him. The Middle Class follows a mixed agenda based on economy and social interests which it shares with the Working Class, whereas the State player tries to keep all classes at an even degree of happiness, thus providing good living conditions for everyone. This sounds utopian and quite realistic at the same time, and indeed it’s incredible how well the functioning of a whole country seems to be simulated in this game.

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All classes have asymmetric actions and targets, and during their turns the players either will perform an action of play a card from their deck. As indicated, the actions depend which class a player controls, and so Capital and Middle-Class players can open up new enterprises; recruit unemployed workers and start producing resources, whereas the Working Class will try to provide new workers, educate existing workers and keep their part of the population well cared for. Quite interestingly, almost every action performed by a player will have an effect on the classes of other players, so for example the recruitment of workers by the Capital class will lead to the Working Class player, and possibly also the Middle Class player, earning income in form of wages during the production phase. So, many things which the players can do actually will bring along something positive for somebody else, but this is only one of the things where Hegemony is a good reflection of society, economy and social engagement.

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The things get really interesting when it comes to the passing of political bills. There are 7 fields of politics in which the players have distinctively different agendas. For example, the State player and the Working Class player will want a high level of taxation to get enough state funding, for example for social projects and for opening job opportunities in the administration, whereas the Capital player will prefer a low level of taxation to decrease his operation costs. Other fields are things like the cost of education and for medical treatments, immigration policy or the wage level, and each of these fields has three manifestations, ranging from socialism to neo-liberalism.

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The current situation in each field has one or more effects in the game and is immediately linked to the playing mechanics. So, let’s say we have a low wage level which means a neo-liberalist orientation – this means that the Working class player will have the lowest possible income for his workers in all enterprises and in the state-owned administration. Naturally this is something the Working Class player will want to change, and during the course of a round he can actually propose a bill which may change the situation in this political field by one step away towards his own position – a high wage level. When the round is over, there will be general elections, and now there will be votes on all political fields where a bill has been proposed by a player.

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For the performance of the voting procedure, the players first will have to declare their class’ position regarding the bill, and then voting cubes in the three class colours will be drawn from a bag, with each colour meaning either a YES or NO vote according to the position declared by the player. The majority of votes means that the bill is either accepted or rejected, but before the final count the players actually can make a secret bid with highly valuable influence cubes in order to try to change the result indicated by the cubes which where drawn from the bag. Influence cubes are generated in different ways by the players. The Capital class can open up media companies, the Working class can try to form state unions if they have enough workers in a type of companies, or the State player (who has no voting cubes himself) can gain some influence by State-owned media.

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This are just some very rough examples for possible conflicts of interest between the Classes and the mechanics of the game. Gameplay itself is actually much deeper, with a resource market, different types of citizens, state loans and social programs and so on. It’s not possible to describe this in depth within this report, but I think I have given you a first overview of the quite high potential of this game. In fact, the designers Varnavas Timotheou and Vangelis told me that the game was not just meant as a highly sophisticated simulation of the operation of a social society, but actually it is also designed as a learning tool to allow insights into the organization of a state and the roles played by the major stakeholders. From what I could derive while watching the game today, the game does is able to deliver quite well on this goal, because despite the width and depth of the rules many mechanisms work quite intuitive BECAUSE they are shaped in a way to model political interaction and economy in real life. Usually you can do in the game what you can do in in reality. An amazing experience.

As I told you, the crowdfunding campaign for Hegemony – Lead Your Class to Victory is already finished. However, the team is taking last minute pledges, but these must be made in the next two or three days.

The morning had passed very quickly in this fashion, and so I made my way home to see whether Nicole was back. Outside in the courtyards the sun was shining and the weather was like summer, and after the long days in the halls I am actually longing for a bit of fresh air. However, while I go to my lunchbreak and to get Nicole, let’s see what Ralf has been doing on this final day!

It’s Sunday, last day at SPIEL and the last day for our daily reports. After all that years I am still overwhelmed when the convention opens its doors, overwhelmed by all those new titles and overwhelmed by the sheer mass of people. A good fair it was, a fair with nearly no more COVID-restrictions except the mask. The SPIEL feeling is back despite of the mask. Tables are full all day long, people are playing, laughing and buying like hell, and we are among them reporting for you.

Since Facebook and Instagram have evoked so many influencers we are not longer the only ones taking photos and telling you about the gems from the fair. And maybe we are also not so quick anymore as a lot of this newbies. Definitely we are now older than most of the other reporters here in Essen. Frank has already announced our 30th anniversary in a few years. Let’s stick it out until them or maybe even longer…..

Back on the fair on Sunday means an easy day for me. All my scheduled meetings are done, most text is written, and the fair is slowly calming down. A lot of the hotties are sold out by now, in some cases there are very limited copies still available.

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Sunday at SPIEL means also meeting friends. A good chance to make same smalltalk, discuss things and talking about current and future projects. A regular stop for me is the booth of JUMPING TURTLE GAMES since their success of the funny card game Baby Blues some years ago. Her I met Tom Delmé for a talk about what’s going on:

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Stopover: Jumping Turtle Games (booth 1B129)

First of all Tom showed me this year’s novelty Draghan O Dodo! to me. It’s a push your luck game in which players fill the nest of our dodos before the eggs are eaten by hostile enemies. Cards can be played to a seven dodo nests, but every new card you play to extend the hatch rows must be of a higher rang than the one before. Alternately you play a card from your hand and one from the draw pile.

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If you are unable to place the card from the draw pile, the hatching is unsuccessful and you have to add the longest hatching row to your hand. A successful hatch is a hatching row of 5 or more cards, four of the cards are added to the discard pile and the rest of cards form your victory points. That’s more or less the default game. But there are many (7) variants that expand the game to make it challenging and interesting for the long-run. Additionally, there is a solo mode and even a solo campaign to play the game alone.

I asked Tom if he likes playing solo. He explained that in the past solo games were more or less good for learning the rules, but they didn’t wake any feelings. That changed in the last years, because the solo modes are getting more complex. It’s the same that I have experienced. I usually wake up early and I like to play solo at this early time. I think I will do this even more often in the future, because of the great solo campaigns in many games.

We also discussed about old times of our youth. We both were already gamers with the age of 15, but many of our friends were only interested in Monopoly or Risk at that time. It was difficult to find any fellow players. Convincing your friends to play more complex games (not to be compared to what we are calling complex nowadays) was usually no good idea. I was lucky, because SPIEL was never far away from my home and Frank was already my friend and we used every free time to play games like Junta and Axis & Allies.

Speaking of complex games turned our discussion to The Warp, a game that I have told you about in the year before COVID and that is now just ahead of delivering. Producing in China is always a risk, many publishers can tell you a thing or two about it. Tom had a lot of pre-productions that didn’t fit to his ideas. Sometimes things didn’t match or components were missing or wrongly packed. But the day for the final production is now in sight, hopefully before Christmas, but at the latest for the beginning of the new year. Here in Essen, they had a final prototype, and I took a photo for you to see what it looks like:

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Not only games can be bought at the fair. A lot of replacements and aids are offered like dice, sleeves and meeple. A new market has arised for inlays, because many publishers nowadays dispense with any inlays in their boxes apart from plastic bags. If this is now a contribution to sustainability or plain and simple a matter of costs, I don’t know. But it is a new chance for suppliers, because many gamers want to store their components safe and sorted. A new trend are boxes for your minis, especially if they are painted this might be a good idea.

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Stopover: Brain Games (booth 2A141)

BRAIN GAMES is a constant exhibitor since their blasting SPIEL debut with Ice Cool some years ago. This year they took it much easier and – next to their known products – only demonstrated two new card games. I had a try of Karakum in which we put up a camel train and take camel cards from the market for this purpose.

But there are two conditions: first of all you have to buy the necessary resources of which we take two new ones every turn. Additionally, a camel can only be placed adjacent to the right-most camel of your line if either the colour or the value of the camel matches. Otherwise, you have to store this camel next to your train until you play a card that enable you to add it to your train.

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Karakum turned out to be a very easy resource management and card placement game. It’s designed for gamers of ages 8 and up, but I would even recommend it for five-year-old.

I also asked for future plans of BRAIN GAMES and learnt that there are indeed up to five new games planned to be released next year. I am already curious about that, but for this year I left the booth and had a walk around to find some refreshing new ideas.

I don’t way, but I was in mood for some music. Maybe the talking noise was no longer bearable for my ears, maybe it was because I had heard some rap songs this morning. However, my wish was fulfilled soon after, when the green booth of OINK GAMES caught my eye:

Playtesting: Hey Jo
Oink Games (booth 5G115)

The award winning Hey Yo is a surprising small game in which we are members of a beginning rap crew trying to keep stroke to record our first number one hit. Next to the beat cards with two tonsures on every card, the game comes with a pen, a score sheet, markers and bonus chips and an innovative tiny rhythm-making machine. All you need to play the game in this small gamebox!

All cards are divided among the players at start-up and a hand of four cards form our initial hand. On their turns the players add one of their cards to the song that is placed as a line of beat cards on the table. It’s the aim of the players to play the same symbol on both tonsures until it is closed by a matching punchline (that you also find on some of the cards).

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All that would be quite simple, if time were not the limiting factor. Normally you would now have a sandtimer or a stopwatch to measure the time, but Hey Yo has this funny small rhythm machine, obviously one of the features for winning the award. I must confess that this really catapults the game to a higher level. Starting by a command of the lead player, this machine begins to play and it won’t stop before you press the button again.

Whenever you hear a beep, the next card must be played, not earlier, not later. You groove into the song and play the game at the same time. But still, you are asked to find matching cards. It’s not difficult to play any card, but under pressure it’s not taken-for-granted that you will find the best card. There are always two tonsures to be considered.

At the end of the song, you score points for any symbol that matches the punchline. If you reach enough points with your playing group, you will level up, take out some of the cards and try to reach the same amount of victory points under worse conditions.

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With Hey Yo OINK GAMES has arrived in the European boardgame market once and for all. The Japan publisher has a stimulating new sight on boardgames. At the ceremony on Wednesday, the publisher explained that this has to do with the Japan market that is even more focused on the digital game industry than in the rest of the world. But boardgames are getting more interesting for the Japanise gamers too. With Hey Yo they have proven that the rest of the world participate from this growing market as well. A tiny game, but a great fun!

With time passing by, we had to hurry to find some last gems. A lot of games we left out. Good games for sure, but we had to choose. So, here is my last choice for this SPIEL, a game with a long history and unfortunately not delivered yet. But a very promising performance here in Essen:

Introduction: Adventures in Neverland
Black Box Adventures (booth 5D106)

I spoke directly with Bart about his newest game. He told me about the long designing process and the production problems he had. But now, he is quite confident that the game will be delivered around the turn of the year.

In this unique story-driven adventure game, 2-4 players take on the role of a main character in the world of J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan”. The original game was created by Belgian designer Vicky Swers, and visualized with stunning artwork by Dutch artist Frederick van de Bunt. I think you get a rough idea from the pictures I took. Although this is the deluxe version of the game, the normal retail version will have the same artwork.

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The game tells a story for each unique character. But the characters interact a lot in the game and thus influence each other’s story. For example James Hook could walk to a location where he draws a card that let him choose between two alternatives. Peter Pan is also present and could interact with Peter Pan’s story, so an alternate text would be read out as if Peter Pan wouldn’t have been there.

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I spoke directly with Bart of BLACK BOX ADVENTURES who were also co-creator of the game. He explained that he is often asked wether the game would be comparable to Legends of Andor. On the one hand it is, but you have much more possibilities to find your own way, there are more choices to be made and there is a lot more story in this game. In the game the players explore the world of Neverland and there are so many different stories to find that no game will ever be the same. The game system provides competitive as well as cooperative play. But, for each variant, although there is always a winner, the story is the main element of the game and not the competition.

I would say, this has been an excellent final stop for me at SPIEL’22.

Frank and I teamed up with Lutz after this for a final photo.

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Sad but true, SPIEL’22 is over now. I would have liked to play lots of other games. From my personal list I missed Plan B from HANS IM GLÜCK, Sabika from LUDONOVA, Beer & Bread from DEEP PRINT GAMES and Dorfromantik from PEGASUS.

But, in the end, I ended up with a loot of so many games that I am not sure if there is time to play them all until next year.

I thank you all for your loyalty. I hope you have enjoyed our coverage and I am sure we will be back next year again. Meanwhile you can regularly check our Internet Magazine for the newest reviews about a lot of the games we have spoken about.

Stay well, play games not war and remember: SPIEL’23 is already ahead of us.

My very best regards!

Yours, Ralf

And here comes the final: It’s Ladies’ Day!

One of the best things in life is that my wife Nicole shares my love and enthusiasm for playing boardgames, and she doesn’t only support this whole SPIEL convention report operation by holding the fort and keeping me supplied, but she also likes to add her own very special pick of games to our SPIEL booty. So, as she has did for many years, this afternoon Nicole accompanied me into the halls, looking out for some games which might meet her taste.

For me such a convention visit with Nicole is always a big adventure, since she usually picks out games which I might have skipped or not even noticed. While our tastes are similar, she often likes picks out games with a special thematic background, and I can promise you already at this point that she once again had a good hand in chosing some quite outstanding games to take home.

Due to Nicole’s job as an animal health practitioner it’s quite fitting that games about animals are her piece of cake. When I first saw Wild Serengeti with its herd of wooden animals, I thought that the game might be a a dazzler because I have seen more than once that a richly equipped game sometimes comes with mediocre rules. However, Nicole instantly was taken by Wild Serengeti, and so we had a go to see what would come of it.

Playtesting session: Wild Serengeti
KOBOLD SPIELEVERLAG (booth 2A142)

As it seems, many countries have a famous zoologist who has brought first documentaries about African wildlife into the living rooms of families in the 1960’s and 1970’s. In England there was Sir David Frederick Attenborough, whereas in Germany we had Professor Bernhard Grzimek whose famous documentary film Serengeti May Not Die had won the Academy Award for the best Documentary Feature in 1959. In these times the documentaries were like a window into an exotic world, and I still wonder at the patience and persistence which these conservationists must possess in order to film animals in their natural environment.

Being released after a successful Kickstarter campaign, Wild Serengeti now puts the players into the director’s chair, challenging them to follow the footsteps of their famous predecessors in order to produce the greatest wildlife documentary which was ever filmed. So, gathering their film equipment and setting off for Africa, the players arrive at the Serengeti in the hope to film spectacular scenes of wild animals like no one has seen before.

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Each player starts his trip into the wild with a hand of Scene cards, depicting animals and situations which the player wants to film in order to gain victory points. To fulfil the requirements listed on these cards, the players have to arrange animals on the main gameboard, a 7x7 square patch of the Serengeti with plains, river, forest and mountain terrain. Taking one action per turn and paying the required costs, the players either place new animals from the reserve onto the gameboard, they may swap the positions of two animals, they may move an animal up to three squares into another empty square or they may take additional Scene cards from an open display.

After performing the action, the active player can check whether some the animals on the gameboard are arranged in a way which matches one or more of the Scene cards on his hand. There are three general types of Scene cards:

• In Terrain scenes the animals need to stand on certain terrain types.
• Straight-line scenes require an ordered horizontal or vertical line of certain animals (although there may be empty spaces or other animals in between).
• Adjacency scenes mean that some animals need to be positioned in the spaces around one specific animal.

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So, there is a lot of movement in the savannah, and it’s not only the spectacular outfit with wooden animals and a colourful gameboard which makes Wild Serengeti stand out. It’s is exactly this very straightforward main playing mechanism of place-and-score which contributes to the game’s high degree of appeal, because this approach is traditional, comprehensible and challenging at the same time. Game designer Gunho Kim has taken this well-known approach of building patters and scoring to perfection, and in this respect Wild Serengeti is a perfect example how long established playing mechanisms can be revamped to match all expectations of modern boardgamers.

However, it’s not only the game’s backbone of place-and-score which has been carefully worked out by Gunho Kim, but this central mechanism actually is embedded into some additional rules which give the game a great feeling of completeness – things feel just right. So, a certain degree of pressure is created for the players due to the fact that they have to spend money for their actions, and so the placement and movement of animals doesn’t continue forever, but instead the game plays over a restricted time of 6 rounds in which the carful choice of every action really matters. In addition, the Scene cards are not only collected for victory points, but instead a number of different icons and scoring conditions can be found on the cards. Cards with “Like” icons can be collected for the game end scoring, whereas cards with “Plant” icons can be scored during the game if a Scene card with a scoring condition for plants is completed. Other symbols like “Bait” or “VFX” icons allow a player to collect the corresponding resources at the beginning of each round, and these may be spent for additional animal movements or to ignore a terrain requirement when it comes to completing of a Scene card.

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A further challenge is added by the fact that Scene cards and “Animal” icons can be collected for two awards ceremonies which happen after the 4th and the 6th round. At the beginning of the game two types of animals were randomly chosen, one for each award, and the player with most completed scenes featuring this animal (plus collected “Animal” icons on all his scene cards) will gain additional victory points during the awards ceremony. All this provides for many different scoring strategies which the players may pursue, and it’s certainly a sign for the versatility of Wild Serengeti despite its seemingly traditional general approach.

Another factor which I really like is the fact that there are some dramatic changes on the gameboard before the 4th, 5th and 6th round. When preparing for these rounds, a Migration card is drawn, showing spaces on the gameboard from which all animals will be removed. This provides for a high degree of tension in the second half of the game, because the situation on the gameboard cannot be “frozen” in favor of a player who has been successful in the first rounds. With the migration events, all players still have a chance to catch up because existing patters on the gameboard will be shaken up, and this is a great addition to keep the game balanced and interesting.

The rules of Wild Serengeti blend together to form an almost perfect playing experience, and there is even a possibility to deepen the long-term strategic approach by using an optional deck of Specialist cards which offer additional possibilities for the end game scoring. Normally I am not a big fan of abstract scoring games, but Wild Serengeti actually offers a perfect combination of abstraction and thematic coherence which involves the players right from the beginning. This is no dazzler at all, but a highly recommended addition for almost every game collection, and KOBOLD has done well to setup a crowdfunding campaign to create a German edition of this gem. It will be interesting to see how Wild Serengeti will perform in the 2023 game awards.

Today we were actually quite lucky with the general number of visitors. While the show was crowded, it was not nearly as overcrowded like yesterday, and so we could not only march on quite fluently, but we were also able to spot free tables here and there, giving us the opportunity for some introductions and playtestings along the way.

Stopover: Untamed: Feral Factions
GRUMPY OWL GAMES (booth 5K125)

Nicole’s next find was Untamed: Feral Factions, a quite small cardgame which I remembered for having seen it as a prototype. It must have been around 2018 that this games was demoed here at the show, and now - after a successful crowdfunding, the game was out and available.

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It is a two to three players battle game (more with a second box) in which each of the players takes command over three different factions of animals. The game features nine factions in total, and they can be mixed to form player decks in every possible combination of three decks. Each of the factions has its own distinct units and abilities, so that the playstyle differs from faction to faction. We have experienced a similar approach in Crystal Clans from PLAID HAT GAMES, but here the possibility to mix the different factions is even greater.

Each of the factions has a Stronghold, and it’s the aim of the game to take down all three of an opponent’s Strongholds. Using their animal and item cards, the players try to launch attacks on the other players’ units and Strongholds, and while such an approach is not new Untamed: Feral Factions features the interesting mechanics that the cards in a player’s deck can not only be played in a normal fashion, but they can also be placed face down in order to function as Power cards. These cards mut be tapped in order to play other cards, and so the players have to chose carefully which cards to use for power and which cards they should play. Even more, cards which have been used or defeated go into a player’s Support pool. From here the cards can be used once more to trigger support effects on other cards in play, but after this support action the cards are finally removed from play.

In recent years Nicole and I have found quite a liking for quick one-on-one card battle games, and here Untamed: Feral Factions fits quite well with Eternal: Chronicles of the Throne and the aforementioned Crystal Clans. All these games share the fact that they are quick to set up but nonetheless nicely thematic and outfitted with great artwork, and so a copy of Untamed: Feral Factions went home with us.

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A game which we would have loved to take home right away was La Bête, a game about the terrible Beast of Gevaudan which was also the topic of the French blockbuster movie Brotherhood of the Wolves (Le Pacte des loups). We liked the film so much that we had investigated the historical facts on which the movie was based, and now Nicole and I were thrilled to see that a one-against-many asymmetric hunt game based on the story would be released soon. French publisher MULTIVERS is convinced that the game will be doing quite well in the French game awards next year, both because of the story and the mechanics. Indeed, going back 13 years the Werewolf-themed Luna Llena from Spanish publisher GEN-X GAMES has been a quite unusual but thrilling boardgame based on a similar story, and if this new game really can live up to its momentous name then we will be in for a surprise next year!

But now, let’s go for the final playtesting session of this year’s SPIEL. Taken captive by the artwork, Nicole picked out Tribes of the Wind for a demo round. Once again I smiled at the similarity of our taste in games, because it’s a game which I also noticed at the New Games Show on Wednesday.

Playtesting session: Tribes of the Wind
LA BOITE DE JEU (booth 3B111)

When I first saw the cover and component graphics of the new game Tribes of the Wind by LA BOITE DE JEU, I was instantly reminded of the popular anime movie Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds by Hayao Miyazaki. And indeed, during a discussion on Boardgamegeek designer Vincent Dutrait revealed that the movie really was one of his inspirations for Tribes of the Wind, and so it’s no surprise that the topic of environmental pollution and the destruction of life are parts of the game’s background story.

In Tribes of the Wind, the players take the roles of clan leaders (or guides as they are called here), being responsible for small communities of humans who have survived a global environmental catastrophe in a few sprinkled patches of woods which escaped the apocalypse unscathed. From these sanctuaries the players set out with their Wind Riders, clan members which are used to cleanse the pollution, plant forests and found new villages on the remnants of human civilization. And no, apart from the quite beautiful artwork which hints at the former civilization, Tribes of the Wind is no adventure game with fights against mutants or discoveries of ancient technologies - instead, the game is all about taking actions which can be boosted by clever timing and hand management and by collecting windfall effects (no pun intended). So, despite the post-apocalyptic approach you will get a solid Eurogame.

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The basic path of action is quite easy to outline. The spaces on a player’s board must first be cleansed from pollution to found villages. At the same time the players must collect water tokens, because the water is necessary to place a forest token at the space which has been decontaminated. Once the forest is there, the player can start to move Wind Riders from his capital to the forest, and if a certain number of Wind Riders have arrived at the forest, a new village will be founded, causing a bit more pollution to adjacent spaces and forcing the player to return all Wind Riders from this space to his capital.

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This may sound pretty straightforward, but things get interesting when it comes to the question which action a player should take. Each player has a hand of 5 Element cards, belonging to four classes of elements which can be distinguished by their colours. As an action, a player can play an element card in order to take the action listed on the card (remove pollution, gain water, gain Wind Riders etc.), but the efficiency of the action often depends on the other cards in the hands of the player AND his neighbours. As indicated, the different element cards can be distinguished by their colour, and the colours are seen not only on the cards’ fronts but also on their backsides, and so an example for an action may be that a card may allow a player to take as many water tokens as there are water element cards on his hand AND the hands of his neighbours.

Cards are discarded once they are used, but instead of randomly drawing a new card, a player’s hand is refilled by chosing a new card from an open display, so that the player actually has a good degree of control which colours he will add to his hand to make future actions more efficient. Especially the fact that actions may also depend on cards held by neighbouring players adds a quite fascinating element of timing and quasi-interaction, because there is always a degree of speculation whether a certain action should be taken or whether the card should be withheld for the player’s next turn in the hope that the player’s neighbours will have even more beneficial elements on their hand.

The players can boost their progress even further by chosing and placing forest tiles with beneficial technologies like Wind Turbines or Wind Portals. The former avoids any new pollution when a new village is founded on that space, whereas the letter serves as a shortcut for Wind Riders, allowing a player to move Wind Riders from his capital directly to a space containing a Wind Portal. All this makes the player actions more efficient, and efficiency is necessary because the game’s end is triggered by the first player to found his fifth village, and that player also receives bonus points for being the first player to reach this goal.

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An important way to score additional victory points are the Village cards. When a player builds a village, he may take a Village card from an open display, and this card can be used either for an instant benefit or to gain victory points when the game is over. To gain victory points, the players have to fulfil the objective listed on the card, and this often depends on the layout of the forests and villages on his player board. So, it’s not only important to remove the pollution and start planting and building, but the players also should keep an eye on the available village cards in order to plant forests and build villages on spaces which will allow them to score victory points through the village cards.

In addition, the layout of forests on a player board also may trigger the unique special powers of a player’s guide character. Here a player can chose between different special power cards, and once activated these cards will give a nice boost to one of the standard actions, options for resource trading or small bonus actions.

As you can see, Tribes of the Wind truly is a game with a clear focus on windfall effects. Just taking standard actions is not enough to win this game, but instead all elements of the game are finely interwoven so that well-timed actions can result in quite nice bonus effects. Triggering and using these bonuses is essential to be successful - as well as keeping an eye on the neighbouring players in order to play element cards with the best possible timing to maximize the gains. With these parts falling into place, Tribes of the Wind truly shines with its unusual approach to engine building, and it is certainly one of the outstanding releases of 2022. As it seems, this was not only recognized by Nicole and me, but actually Tribes of the Wind was also one of the top games in the final ranking of the Game Scout Action from Fairplay magazine here at the SPIEL.

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With Nicole and me leaving the show with our haul of games, we are finally approaching the end of this year’s SPIEL report. Looking back at the games which I have played and carried home in the last four days, I think that the choice of available games this year was much better than last year, even though it must be taken into account that last year many publishers had problems due to the pandemic production backlog. For example, A.D.E.L.E. from Spanish publisher DMZ was a game which I took home with me this year, but actually it had already been presented for demoing last year.

This actually underlines the ever faster spinning publication frequency on the boardgames market, and I already have commented in previous years that I think that just too many good games are published every year. It’s just not possible to keep an overview over the market, and even worse is the fact that publishers barely can take the time in order to be proud of a fresh release. The boardgame fanbase sometimes seems to be overly hungry for ever more games, and although my own games booty this year looks quite mad I can assure you that each and every of these games has been chosen quite carefully to play and enjoy in the months to come. I fear that many of these games will ask for a place in our small collection, and this in turn means that other possibly must go. These will be tough choices indeed!

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The game which I liked most in the last four days actually was Starship Captains from CZECH GAMES EDITION, closely followed by War of the Ring: The Card Game from ARES. Starship Captains shines both with it’s simple but elegant playing mechanism and its humorous artwork, and it is also a game which can be learned quite quickly despite a moderate set of rules. Quite excellent is the combination between the use and availability of crew members and possible boosts and boni which can be gained especially from new technologies, and this is certainly a game which will hit our table again quite soon.

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Once again Nicole and bid you farewell, and we hope to see you all back here next year! Please stay safe and healthy wherever you are, and let’s all hope that our current problems with war, inflation and energy scarceness can be solved soon! Let’s keep our fingers crossed!

Greetings from Essen!

Nicole and Frank

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If you want to have a look at our coverages of previous conventions, follow these links. But you should bring along some time, especially if you want to read the newer reports...

• The "SPIEL 21": Online was yesterday - Back in Essen to celebrate 25th Anniversary!
• The "SPIEL.digital": The pandemic (Covid) year - SPIEL goes digital
• The "SPIEL 19": Another year and still more games
• The "SPIEL 18": Bigger team - more games
• The "SPIEL 17": Shift change at the Gamebox!
• The "SPIEL 16": The Gamebox celebrates its 20th Anniversary!!!
• The "SPIEL 15": M.U.L.E.s in sight!!!
• The "SPIEL 14": The dicerollers strike back!
• The "SPIEL 13": New halls - same show?
• The "SPIEL 12": Beware of The Maya Calendar - the last SPIEL before Armageddon?
• The "SPIEL 11": 7 Wonders - but only one SPIEL!
• The "SPIEL 10": The Polish landslide!
• The "SPIEL 09": One convention to rule them all!
• The "SPIEL 08": Bigger than ever!
• The "SPIEL 07": Meeting lots of friends at the SPIEL 2007.
• The "SPIEL 06": Still growing! An even longer report from all convention days.
• The "SPIEL 05": Back at home! Once again living 500 meters from the convention.
• The "SPIEL 04": A shortened stay at Essen, but still all essential coverage.
• The "SPIEL 03": No excuses in 2003! Full coverage on all convention days.
• The "SPIEL 02": Bejing city traffic and late planes. I barely made it to the SPIEL in 2002.
• The "SPIEL 01": our report from 2001 - 5 days at the con...
• The "SPIEL 00": Once again, you will get daily reports from the SPIEL in Essen !
• The "SPIEL 99": The missing year! Frank was studying in Newcastle and missed the SPIEL.
• The "SPIEL 98": Images, stories and more from Essen '98. For the first time with daily updates!
• The "SPIEL 97": our report on the 1997 convention.