In The Vale of Eternity, players are tamers who hunt various monsters and spirits to tame them as minions. In this fantasy world, numerous creatures are living in harmony. Among them, dragons are the most valuable and noble ones, and all tamers dream of taming dragons. The player who manages to tame the most outstanding minions wins.
Preview of Justice
Designer: Ren Multamäki
Artist: Sampo Jumisko
3-5 players
45 minutes
Played 3 times at 3 & 4 players
Justice is a hidden role game that uses trick-taking to hide some information while letting you shift levers to your ideal positions.
Theme:
Based on the Dwarven society of Odrixia, the same world as Factory 42 ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/314125/factory-42 ), we are members of the Council of Law and Order.
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Says the publisher: ‘In Oh No, Volcano!, you race to climb and collect ancient treasure while dodging lava! Peril lies ahead on every turn. Play climber cards to move your team of explorers up the face of the volcano, then drop a lava ball from the spot listed on each card. Watch the lava balls rattle and roll down, knocking off any explorers in its path…including your own if you’re not careful! Choose your moves carefully, and be the first to collect all of your treasure.”
Even though we love tracking all the annual board game awards, the results aren’t always that well publicized and we sometimes miss the announcements. But in the interest of “better late than never”, here are how two of these awards played out in 2023.
The Dice Tower Awards are one of the more prestigious ones and has been around for over 15 years. The winner for 2023 is Heat: Pedal to the Metal, designed by Asger Granerud and Daniel Pedersen and published by Days of Wonder. When we summarized the award results for this year, we mentioned that there really hasn’t been any consensus in the results, but Heat has as much of a claim for most honored game of the year as any other, since it was also selected by the Golden Geek and Meeples Choice awards.
There were nine other finalists for the Dice Tower. Here they are, in alphabetical order, together with their designers:
Finally, here are the winners for each of the Dice Tower categories, together with their designers:
Next is the Spiel der Spiele, Austria’s national Game of the Year awards. The winner is Cafe del Gatto, designed by Lena Burkhardt and Julia Wagner and published by Schmidt Spiele. Here are the category winners, together with their designers:
Congratulations to all the winners!
OTLO Stones is an intense brain teaser where up to four players compete to reproduce patterns using two layers of tiles. OTLO Stones challenges your logical skills with multiple levels of difficulty. Each player is given a set of six two-sided tiles with gemstones. Each of these tiles also features one or two holes, providing interesting options when attempting to recreate a pattern of gemstones on a challenge card. The tiles are arranged in two layers, allowing symbols on the bottom-layer tiles to be visible through the holes in the top-layer tiles.
by Ben Bruckart
The Spiel convention in Essen is a great place to see most of the shiny new games for the coming Christmas and gaming season. I still have never attended, but I keep my ear to the ground and my eye on the blogs to find out what games are all the hype and are rating well for trying /acquiring later.
The German magazine Fairplay measures the hotness of games through submissions from attendees at Spiele. They like to publish a list of games that people play and then rate on a 1-5 scale (5 being the top). You can find updates and details on their website [ https://www.fairplay-online.de/ ]. They have kept making regular updates on their webpage and Mastodon [ https://brettspiel.space/@fairplaymagazin ].
BGG still has a greatly diminished presence at Spiele with some crew going, but no livestream.
To be a scout, you just need to register [ https://www.scoutaktion.de/ ] and attest that you are at Spiel and have no conflict of interest. You register online, show their booth that you are a Scout and get activated.
Like last year, this article isn’t going to weigh in on the number of Scouts who participated but just look at the ratings of the top games across the three days and peek at last year’s top games and their BGG ratings. Understanding for a moment that BGG ratings and scout ratings are not the most reliable ways to value games (since people rate games very differently) I still think you can gain some context of how these games are viewed from their ratings. Fairplay has, in the past, seen better ratings for games which were in close proximity to their booth (hopefully obviated some by from people using their website). While more complex games are likely disadvantaged by having longer play times and potentially less reviews, the Fairplay rankings have often given a peak into the mindset of their scouts.
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