It’s Friday.

I don’t care if Monday’s blue
Tuesday’s gray and Wednesday too
Thursday I don’t care about you
It’s Friday I’m in love

Yes. I’m love with Essen Spiele. Reading the Geekbuzz I’m looking forward a full day of game. At 9:05 we were already sitting at Offshore tables, before the arrive of people from the company. Quickly went through the rules and ready to drill!!!

The game was really fun. We all three enjoyed it a lot and I really think it could work better in 4-5 players thanks to the “collaborative drilling” rule.

The game is about pumping oil from the North Sea and selling it. There are several nice mechanics including the drawing tiles from the bag to simulate the uncertainty of drilling. Great game. Francesco 113, Caterina 112 and me far below. It’s not easy to be father of two gamer–kid

Next game was Dadaocheng and it was a real surprise. It’s a resources management game with a cool mechanic to get cubes. In the middle of the map there is a 4X4 grid with tiles in 4 different colors. During your turn you can move and/or flip two tiles. 3 tiles of the same color in a row provide 1 cube: 4 two cubes. Than you flip the used tiles.

Cubes are used to move on 7 tracks on two different boards: houses and ships triggering effects, giving special buildings or end of game points. You can’t take more than 3 cubes in the beginning and you have to use all. Improving your storage capability is one of the way ti victory.

Simple but challenging with many way to score. Really nice.

Than I went to the International Gamers Awards Ceremony at BGG booth. It was the 20th edition and we awarded Lincoln from Wallace and Root from Cohole.

Just the time to say hallo to friends in the committee and I’m back in the first line fighting for a seat.

Caterina was reading the rules Med Rush at Artipia booth.

It was a real time collaborative game in line with last year Kitchen Rush

Quick, furious and fun but nothing really new if you already played kitchen rush.

House Flippers was another real time game where you have to use resources (cubes), produced using hourglasses in different colpirà, to get cards used to have more cubes and finally buy objective cards. To win you need to have six of a kind or 3 sets of three or 2 of each of the four different objectives.

You start with a grey hourglass but during the game you can get brown, yellow and red hourglasses. The game is fast and nice but nothing really new.

In the gallery I met a big red Meeple. I was really pleased so I took a picture.

There was time to try Road to Rome a nice prototype. The game was about building roads to connect cities to Rome. Any new connected city will grant you some points, according to the road you need to travel and a resource. In the end of the game you will score the best connected cities in each area and bonus for different collected resources and also for having 2 or more resources of the same kind.

It was good and fun to play.

Caterina really liked Museum and so we stopped for a 4-player game with two French people. The game is a set collection card game where you need to have sets of cards of the same colors or with the same symbols and finally arrange for you exposition.

The game works really good and it is quite thematic thanks to many small rules, event cards, that really fit the theme. We really liked and probably we will buy the deluxe edition with all the expansions or we will wait for the upcoming Kickstarter campaign.

The last two games played were Squire and Skytopia.

The first one was a tile collection game where you have to arrange exhibitions. The only things I really liked in the game was the simple but well built market mechanism determinating the prices of the different tiles.

Skytopia was a combo-game dice placement game. We didn’t really liked it but was not a bad game.

Our final votes

Offshore: Francesco 8.5, Caterina 8, me 8.5

Dadaocheng: Francesco 8, Caterina 9, me 8

Med Rush: francesco 8, caterina 7, me 6.5

… Francesco is sleeping now … we will miss his votes now …

(Updated on Sunday morning with Francesco’s votes)

House flippers: Francesco 8, Caterina 7.5, me 6.5

Road to Rome: Francesco 8, Caterina 7.5, me 7.5

Museum: Francesco 6, Caterina 9, me 8.5

Dust Tactics: Francesco 9.5

Squire: Francesco 7.5, Caterina 6, me 5.5

Skytopia: Francesco 6, Caterina 4, me 5

See you tomorrow in the Messe

Good play

Francesco, Caterina and Andrea