The Opinionated Gamers

6 nimmt! Brettspiel

• Designer: Wolfgang Kramer
• Publisher: AMIGO
• Players: 2-6
• Age: 8+
• Time: 30-40 minutes
• Times played: 4, with review copy provided by AMIGO

6 nimmt! is one of my most favorite and least favorite cardgames.  What?! Yeah, it all depends on my mood. 6 nimmt! sometimes gives you the illusion that you really have control of your path through the game, while other times, it’s a rollicking randomly capricious game where you just play a card and see what happens.  Heck, at one Gathering of Friends, I once won a game of 6 nimmt! by never looking at my cards and simply playing one at random each round… Regardless of that, it is a game that always elicits laughs, groans and all other sorts of emotions as the cards play themselves out in the rows on the table.

Zoom in Barcelona

• Designers: Nuria Casellas, Eloi Pujadas, Joaquim Vilalta
• Publisher: Cucafera
• Players: 2-6
• Ages: 8+
• Time: 30-45 min
• Times played: 2, with review copy provided by Cucafera Games

Barcelona is a fantastic city which I’ve had the pleasure to visit a few times during my travels. I have many fond memories of walking along La Rambla and seeing the wonderful sights.  When I saw that there was a game coming at SPIEL 2019 themed around taking pictures of the wonderful sights in the city, I had to give it a try. In Zoom in Barcelona, players are competing in a photo contest where they are trying to take the best pictures – but they’ll have to travel around the city to get to the best pictures of city landmarks as well as views of the city skyline.

We’re now a month past Spiel ’19, and on a recent visit to a local game store, I realized that many of the hottest games from the event have hit US shores. To help those who are holiday shopping (or shopping for their collections), I thought I’d offer thoughts on a few more games.

Earlier this month, I posted quick thoughts on 5 Essen 2019 games, including Babylonia, Maracaibo, Paranormal Detectives, Ticket to Ride Map Collection #7, and Vivaldi. This is a sequel article to that one, with 5 new Essen titles.

Before you do anything else, start the music file below. And then, let it be known that you have exactly 4 1/2 minutes to finish reading this review. Which might be hard, because you’ll be dancing along in your chair the whole time…

4 1/2 Minuten

• Designer: Joachim Reif
• Publisher: moses. verlag
• Players: 2-6
• Age: 8+
• Time: 4.5 minutes
• Times played: game: 8, with review copy provided by moses. music: >70 and counting (it’s now my alarm music on my phone!)

4 1/2 Minuten was a game that I knew nothing about prior to Spiel 2019. As you may have read in my No Return review; I usually don’t pay much attention to the games from moses as they are often literary based and almost always in German only. For many of their new releases, EN rules are available online, and the game components themselves are language independent.

No Return: Es gibt kein Zurück!  (There’s No Turning Back!)

• Designer: Marco Teubner
• Publisher: moses
• Players: 2-4
• Ages: 8+
• Time: 20-30 minutes
• Times played: 3, with review copy provided by moses

moses is one of the game companies that I have often walked by at SPIEL, but have rarely stopped at because most of their games tend to be word or story based and generally entirely in German.  This year, No Return was the popular game on their stand, and this one is really a language independent abstract, so there aren’t any language issues. I was actually surprised to find out that they are making a move towards more multi-lingual releases, and in fact, many of their 2019 games have EN rules on the website!