Piles of people in the fair today but the sun shone brightly and everyone seems relaxed. I left the halls at 5pm and there was still plenty of activity; a bunch of people streamed in around lunch time. 

Sparks is a new game from Alion – Dr O which is yet another publisher run by Kristian A Øtsby and Kjetil Svendsen, both of whom authored the game with two other designers. Sparks is a 45 minute medium-weight game where many actions are done simultaneously by all players – an achievement in itself! The game theme is to develop robots which are obtained in the beginning and then later refilled from a deck, and then can be completed by drafting dice from a common pool. The dice sometimes have to have specific colours or specific numbers, and there are cute little gear tokens which allow some dice manipulation as well as various other free actions.

In the four rounds of the game you will become the first player four times, and on those occasions you get to choose which flavour of drafting you will do on the seven dice available. These vary from just taking the three middle dice to drafting three dice and taking two dice from a separate pool and rolling them, taking four dice from the edges of the draft, etc. After you have drafted the other players in the game will each draft one dice. After you have built your robot the robot card is removed and you get a bonus movement up one of four scoring tracks which range up to 30 points, passing over bonuses when you get to certain levels. In the meantime you have the opportunity to improve your robot factory by expending dice not allocated to building robots, and possibly other card powers, to meet a target value – for example you may need to reach the value seven using either several dice or dice and card combinations. The higher you are on the factory upgrade track the more you can improve your end game point scoring since the track gives you multipliers which mutuply the number of helpers you have played in the game. Helpers are a different sort of card, which you also receive at the beginning of the game, and which can only be played by paying cogs, which you will pick up from your robot cards. Upgrading a factory also gives you little bonuses including an energy counter which you can use to activate some of your robots, and special abilities.

All in all Sparks is a nice engine building game which plays extremely quickly and presents you with the puzzle of how to optimise the building of your robots by drafting dice, as well as choosing when and how to go up the tracks. Often you will find yourself chaining a few things together to build multiple robots in your turn and the game is as such a little multi-player solitaire, which might bother some folks. I enjoyed the game.

Slide is a very simple game from Sorry we are French which plays up to 6 players in about 20 minutes. Players start with a set of 16 face down cards arranged in a 4×4 grid and must pick one card to remove. Removed cards go into the middle face up and then players take it in turn to take one card and use it to push their cards into the gap that they made by removing the previous card. In this way, cards slowly get turned up and replaced into your grid. The aim of the game is to cleverly select which cards you remove from your grid in order to get turned up cards of the same value that you are placing in your grid to be adjacent to each other. At the end of the game any card which is in a group of two or more of the same colour gets removed and only the remaining cards score against you  It’s a nice little puzzle which I really enjoyed, this one will be getting a lot of play with families.

The Dungeon, also by Sorry we are French, is a solo game designed to be played every day for a whole year. The game consists of a pad with each page representing one month, and 5 dice  You roll your way through an adventure as your character negotiates the dungeons, fighting creatures and levelling up. It sounds like a very interesting idea and there are plans to do further versions each year.

Suna Valo is the two-player sequel to the lovely game Planta Nubo that I enjoyed so much last year. The publishers, The game builders, tell me that they have learned from the mistakes of Planta Nubo and have significantly clearer rulebook for this new game. The game looks nice, with lovely components and cards and an accompanying novel in German just like Planta Nubo had. The game has some recognisable elements of Planta Nubo, for example in the sense that you have to fill orders for airships, but otherwise is different. In the game you are competing for cards in a way which is reminiscent of key market. Each time a card is drawn, you set a cost by placing cubes from the pool on it. If the opponent wants to take the card, they have to match the cubes that you placed on the card and you receive all the cubes. If you however want to buy the card, you have to match the cubes that you placed on the card yourself, and pay those cubes to the pool. The cards themselves help fill orders and do various other things, including pushing you up one of two scoring tracks. When you buy a card, you remove a component from your player board and this frees up spaces which allow you to move up a second scoring track.  I didn’t actually get to play the game but I had a long look at it with one of the explainers and it does look very nice. 

Sandbag is a new trick taking game from Bezier games themed around air balloons, in which the aim of the game is to not win any tricks. At the beginning of the game players choose and place two cards face up in front of them, as well as turning one over to turn it into a sandbag instead of a balloon. With these cards visible on the table, Trump is determined by the colour of the highest number of cards visible. Because you do not want to win tracks it is of interest to influence what the Trump actually is, and to do that, you can use the cards in front of other players as cards in the trick being played, replacing them with a face down card from your hand which becomes the sandbag. At the end of the game sandbags are worth a point. The game contains rocket cards which are worth -5 points, and therefore help you in your scoring but are also used to avoid winning a trick. The game looks neat and I’m definitely looking forward to playing it.

Games bought today include trick taker Seers Catalog from Bezier, Free Ride USA from 2F, and Galileo Galilee from first-time publisher Pink Troubador.