Essen Friday:
Slightly calmer day than yesterday, at least until lunchtime when the madness returned.
Games played:
Rebirth – the new Reiner Knizia game in the same vein as Babylon or Samurai, firstly an enormous thumbs up for the production of this game – the most beautiful components for tiles, castles and citadels and a gorgeous double sided board showing Acptland and Ireland. We played the Scotland side which is more of a family game – I was told the Irish side is more for gamers, with slightly different rules. Rebirth is a tight game, in which every turn you draw one of your tiles and then figure out where to place it on the board. You get to see your tile for your turn starts so you were spent all of the game completely engaged as you are either watching what your opponents are doing, I’m trying to figure out where to play your next tile. The tiles themselves so one of three things either an energy a crop, or a number of houses. The energy and crop tiles are used to make chains around the board, the object being not only to score one point for every item in your chain; but also to use your tiles to surround castles at the end of the game the castle themselves are gonna score 5 points Each so trying to control as many of them as possible is important. A neat and simple way of tiebreaking is given to you on a little player eight card. The house tiles are what you place inside your castle spaces, these are actually settlements which are 12 or three in size as soon as the settlement has been completed with tiles it scores, and there is a majority game here each as the person who placed the tile/s with the most houses on it will win and score the majority points rather than the second of third points. If you can control an entire settlement by yourself, you gain all the points, and this can be pretty significant.
The fly in the ointment of all of this is that you cannot at all control what tells you pick up so you have to make the best that you can of the tiles that you draw. The game is intriguing very immersive and beautifully done and we were all very impressed with it. On top of the above elements there are also citadels if you put a towel next to Citadel you get to draw an objective card. Some of these just give you points, but most of them are giving you an objective such as having the most settlement of size one, or having the most castles, et cetera. They drive the game and can be worth significant points at the end.
Overall, a lovely game and we each got a copy.
Shackleton base is a 2 hour game by Fabio Lopiano and Nestore Mangone – a pair who were doing a couple of games together recently. It’s published by Sorry we are French. This one is a game based around sending missions to the moon and settling bases there. The author of clearly made an effort to research the Artemis project which is actually aiming to land astronauts back on the moon again, and what’s nice about the game is it also includes elements where you interact with companies which are involved in commercialising the moon, and mining resources from it. I got a very quick explanation of this game at the show, and it looks like a nicely thought-out game with lovely components. One to check out if you like complex games!
Bloom is a Wolfgang Kramer game from The Game Factory aimed at 10 and up in which you start with 10 number tiles (on nice wooden blocks). On your turn you draft 2 blocks from a display or blind from the pool; alternatively you discard a block because at game end leftover tiles count against you. The aim of the game is to create a sequence of blocks which are numerically separated by a maximum of 1 number eg 23, 25, 27. The blocks have flowers on them and when u declare a set of blocks you place them face up in the table and score the number of flowers, taking the corresponding point rule. The twist is that there is only one of each scoring rule except for the low ones so it is a race to take the higher ones. There are a few jokers in the game but otherwise it seemed that you need a lot of luck to create satisfactory sequences. The winner of the game got lucky with tiles worth 5 points each whereas in my play I made a 10 time sequence but scored 14 points as most had just one flower on. I didn’t think the game really worked too well which is unfortunate as the game pieces were lovely – maybe there was a mistake in the rules explanation but I couldn’t find it.
3 of a kind is a great Party game from Weird Ciry games. Players collectively choose three adjectives while one player chooses a category. Then players write down a word or words which describes the category using each of the adjectives. You score points if you match words with other players and some pretty weird words will come out – a real laugh. I also really appreciated the box design and card organisation and lack of plastic.
Charidice published by NSV is their new dice and notepad game. Here you roll dice and re-roll like Yahtzee, looking for dice in sequence or in sets of identical numbers. When you are happy you score the dice according to a scale; but can donate unused dice to another player who scores them. Note down the amount you donated because the player who donated most gets bonus points at the game end. Simple and sweet.
Other news: several games had already sold out today including 2Fs Trick taker Fishing (German copies still available) and Kelp from Wonderbow games which I had my eye on. I did pick up Terminus from Upside Down games which I have already played and loved; both Game Brewer releases – Bone Wars and Algae; – as well as the wonderful Civolution from Deep Print, a copy of Tom Lehmann’s Chu Han, Amigo’s new trick taker Combo up, and Playte’s Sardegna by Stefan Dorra. Many more to check out tomorrow!
