Echt Spitze was one of the games that was on my SPIEL 2022 list – I have been a big fan of the other games in the Schmidt Klein & Fein line, so this was something that I wanted to check out. Also, it doesn’t hurt to have a SdJ winning game author either!
Run Animals, Run!! is a game on this year’s SPIEL list from Taiwan Boardgame Design – though it appears to have been initially released in 2017. In this game, which is subtitled “Zoo of Depression”, players represent various animal species in Taiwan, fighting for survival in the forest while facing the threat of human destruction. Players try to complete their individual missions to score points, and the game ends when a player has reached 20 points (thereby winning the game) or when a player’s graveyard is filled or their species goes extinct, at which point players compare point totals to see who has won.
This may seem like an odd post to lead off the end of this week with. Friday, I’ll post my biannual piece about titles I’m looking forward to at Tokyo Game Market (TGM) – which takes place on Saturday and Sunday. This time, I’ll (finally) be going in person! For this first trip, I’m expanding Friday’s piece into three separate articles. Friday’s will be what it usually is. Tomorrow I’ll talk about various parts of my preparation – such as how I research which games I’ll buy and what my packing plans are. But today, we’re going to talk about the TGM catalog.
This probably seems like an odd place to start, but there are some captivating bits of the catalog from afar, and I had to know what it was like. What role it could play in preparation. Traditionally, I’ve seen advertisements for each booth at the fair posted to Twitter. They look something like this:
For a long-tail chaser like myself, my mind wonders at what sort of stealth titles may be in the catalog from booths which aren’t on Twitter or don’t add their information to the Game Market website.
Perhaps in the west, the catalog is best known as your admission ticket to TGM. It is available at local game stores and other such places in the weeks leading up to the show. Traditionally, the ticket to the show was built into the cost of the catalog and entrance to the show was simply holding a copy of the catalog aloft as you walked in with throngs of others doing the same.
At this point in a pandemic, things are different. Tickets are now electronic. The catalog comes with a big yellow warning that it is no longer a ticket.
But let’s find out what’s inside!
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Advent calendars are a well-entrenched tradition in Germany. Each October when I head to Essen for SPIEL, the stores are already jammed packed with Advent calendars of all types. The first printed Advent calendar originated in Germany in the early 20th century with Gerhard Lang. When Gerhard was a little boy his mother made him a calendar with 24 small candies attached to cardboard, one for each day before Christmas. Lang grew up to operate the Reichhold & Lang printing company where he printed the first Advent cardboard calendar with 24 little pictures. A few years later, the company printed the first calendar with the little doors that everyone loves to open. The first chocolate Advent calendar appeared in 1958, but it was in 1971 that Cadbury joined the race and launched its own version in the UK. Cadbury produced Advent calendars intermittently from 1972 to 1986, but it wasn’t until 1993 that they finally became a mainstay.
Well, thus far in its short existence, Unexpected Games has provided the gaming public with games that are well…. unexpected. Their first game was The Initiative, and this game was hailed as a breath of fresh air to the co-op puzzle solving genre. Thinking about what to do as a follow-up, as stated in a designer diary, “Not only did I need a good game, I needed something unexpected. One of our studio’s guiding principles is to create new experiences that do not supplant games that already exist, but offer something fresh and exciting. For our second title, it was essential that the game provided a different experience than The Initiative. I worried that releasing another cooperative puzzle-solving game as our sophomore effort would typecast the studio into making “only those types of games”. I had always wanted to do a game with a courtroom theme, so I took some time to explore this idea.” And, the result is Voices in My Head – which we reviewed earlier this year.
Tokyo Game Market: Preparation
For the first time, I’m preparing to visit Tokyo Game Market (TGM). As this posts, I’ll be in Tokyo, visiting the board game shops in Akihabara and Nakano, meeting up with some friends I haven’t seen in more than 20 years and others which I’ve never met.
I want to start with this video Eric did with the founder of Game Market, Zyun Kusaba, talking about its origins. He was involved in founding Japon Brand and, notably for me, the most zealful judge of the recent Trick Taking Party design contest in Japan – playing all 87 of the entries!
Much of my preparation will be the same as always – the research on which games exist and which I want to purchase – and some of it will not. Namely, figuring out how to get my games home! When I went to SPIEL in 2017, I was able to rely on various blogs Dale had written over the years and his guidance on (a) punch everything (b) nest everything (c) bring extra baggies (d) remove rulebooks for languages you don’t need. But so much of that is not applicable to Game Market. Few titles need punched, almost nothing can be nested, and there is typically only one rulebook – and while it’s not in a language I speak, it’s my only copy of the rules! But, more on packing later.
I want to start with my spreadsheet. I do all of my TGM prep through a single spreadsheet and I started using it for the Fall 2018 TGM. There’s a tab for each TGM; they are color coded in a few ways (genre, buy, maybe buy, pass), include the title in two languages, a brief description of why I’m interested, booth location, cost, and three columns for links to information on the game: gamemarket.jp, Twitter, and bodoge.hoobby.net (though that last one I don’t use as much anymore). After a TGM is over, the titles I didn’t buy may find themselves moving elsewhere – titles that are delayed get moved to a new tab for the next TGM in 6 months; titles I “should’ve bought” get moved to a list of older titles that I’ll search for used copies of.
(Somewhat unrelated to TGM, the spreadsheet also contains a tab for frequent Japanese language words/phrases I find myself needing, such as the difference between face up and face down, less than and less than or equal to, in your hand and at hand.)
Here’s a brief shot at where my spreadsheet is one month out from TGM. I started it in April when a handful of titles were delayed and hadn’t made it (with one of those titles delayed from the previous Fall.) It’s currently 80(!) lines long. At present, 35 of those are titles I’ve decided to buy, 5 are things I’m picking up for friends, 5 or so are already confirmed not to make it and will be moved to the sheet for next May, and 2 are in the “likely pass” purgatory where I haven’t quite decided if I will buy them or not, but strongly leaning towards no.
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