Last day at Essen– today the halls were noticeably quieter even in the morning. I had a great day though! First up was a look at Ashes & Amber, a Kickstarter game published, designed and illustrated by David Falla de Acebo – thanks to Dale for the recommendation. I didn’t get to play the game but had a chat with David about the game, the art and well, the general effort he has pout into the game, which he gave up work to create. And boy did he create! the game contains over 700 beautifully illustrated cards, divided into decks that span 5 civilisations.
The game is divided into era and in each era you will build cities in the form of stacks of cards, and can activate the top card in each stack – so the more cities you build the better. As the civilisation draws to a close, many of your cards will turn to ash…can you preserve your most precious cards and especially the Amber card, which passes on through generations? At 40 minutes a player and an age 14+ rating, one assumes that the game will be very intriguing but frankly I was so blown away by the artwork (which David explained is adapted for each era) and the text on each card telling you something of the things depicted on the card that I couldn’t wait to give him my money! The game contains not only the civilisation deck, neatly packaged in boxes, but also special envelopes containing tribe cards and major event mats setting objectives for the game. This game promises to be a wonder in itself.
Next up I checked out Drillers from CGE. CGE had a large queue outside their shop every day, so clearly their business is thriving which is always good to see,. Drillers was getting a lot of interest (some may call it hype?) – so I went along and had a teach of the game (which was very well done). The game is one of chaining many multiple actions together: you play cards for resources, move your mech to dig deep in a mine or excavate along the mine level, revealing various different mined resources of different values as you go along. You must manage your oil supply, drill supply, and movement points on your player board and come up with clever ways to combine these with your cards to optimise your turn, hopefully regularly returning to the surface where you can sell gems on your personal market and use the cash to buy better cards. The game is an interesting mixture of mechanics and the kind of thing I would like,. although I did feel that the turns were \very long and not really interesting for other players due to the limited interaction.
I then had a quick play of Alhambra the card game from Queen. Now I am a bit rusty on Alhambra, a classic game from the early 2000s which won the SdJ – but I was assured that the card game has most of the elements of the board game; which I frankly doubt – but I could be wrong! Nevertheless it is an enjoyable game in which on your turn you either take money cards in 4 different suits or use the cards to buy buildings, which are randomly drawn from a deck and placed under a suit symbol. If you pay exactly the right amount in that suit’s cards for a building, whose price is indicated on the building card, then you get an extra turn. 3 cards are inserted into the draw deck, and when one is reached, you score in turn all buildings, with the polayer in teh majority getting most points. In teh first scoring, only the player with a majority scores; in the second round the second and then the second and third players score too. Points increase each round and the last scoring is when the deck is exhausted. It was a fun light game which will not win any awards.
Also from Queen is Out of words and the expansion, out this year, called Out of words Music and Movies. In the game one player takes a card which has several categories on it and announces or let’s the other players (I don’t know which) choose a category. They then pick one of multiple cards out on the table, each of which has a letter on it, and say a word starting with that letter (eg the category is movies and the movie you read on the clue card is Harry Potter – you take the H from the board and say “Hedwig”. Should the players not get it with that excellent clue (!) then you could for example take the “R” and say “Ron”. As the game continues, the number of letters left on the table diminishes and things get harder until eventually the cards run out – then the team add up the number of clues solved. Looks like a fun party game.
My final play of the show was Kalypso from Upside Down games – a pretty game centered around drafting polyominoes and reconstructing on a sea after a world disaster by placing T-shaped or 2×1 shaped tiles onto a player board made up of many squares of sea or fish icons. (NB: the game can be played cooperatively with slightly different rules and challenges. But I played the competitive version). You can play anywhere on your board; if you manage to place polyominoes onto the board so that 3 of the 4 spaces occupied in a square show one colour, you may build a building of that color on top of it. There are 5 colours and 5 buildings and also monuments, which can be built if you can place 5 matching colored spaces inside a 3×3 grid without more than 2 of them touching. The monuments are worth 11 points; the other buildings are worth 1-3 points but have abilities. Each building is double-sided and you get to choose which side to use – and this is where the game gets very interesting as the side you choose will lead to a second action and of course help you to score points. So during the game you will build wooden houses to house rescued citizens from the sea by collecting 3 wooden symbols on your polyominoes next to each other, build boats with rubber, cast nets out from boats to catch fish for points, build solar arrays and score for adjacent sea spaces; build greenhouses to place gardens and score for adjacent houses, etc.
The game is very captivating and the special (slightly magnetic, I think) material used to ensure the tiles placed do not move on the player mat is pretty cool. There is little player interaction except that each trn you give a player to right or left, depending which round you are on, a weather card which gives them a challenge to fulfill that round to avoid losing points. These could be neat if after a few plays you have time to think about them, which I’m sure you will.
Offering good play, two play modes, and plenty of variety, this was for me a very good polyominoes game.
I hope y’all enjoyed my short Essen articles and – see you next time!
-Simon W
About Dale Yu
Dale Yu is the Editor of the Opinionated Gamers. He can occasionally be found working as a volunteer administrator for BoardGameGeek, and he previously wrote for BoardGame News.
I’ve never played Alhambra: The Card Game… but that sounds a LOT like Stimmt So!, the parent of Alhambra.
Alhambra: The Card Game is indeed a mild redesign of Stimmt So!, which, in turn, is a retheming of the original game in the series, Al Capone. I think the only difference between Stimmt So! and the Alhambra card game is that the latter uses the setup rules from Alhambra to determine each player’s starting money cards.