The Opinionated Gamers

Dale Yu: SPIEL 2022 Saturday update 

OK, Saturday always ends up being my last day at the show because I generally leave super early Sunday morning in order to be home by Sunday night in order to make it to work Monday morning.  

Didn’t get to write anything last night as the whole night was spent at the annual Spiel des Jahres dinner, which I am thankful for my invitation each time it comes.  It’s a great event held at the Philharmonie; and it’s a celebration of the year, a celebration of the winners of the three awards, and a nice way to have a meal with friends and colleagues, and then a chance to play some games.

The buffet dinner was standard German hotel buffet food, though certain green haired game designers thought the saltimbocca was a bit dry and was quite confused claiming that the carrots were “greens”.  After the meal, the tables were cleared, and people had a chance to play games.  This goes on into the night, and it is always one of the highlights of my week here.  Many thanks to Bernd Keller from AMIGO to take some time out of his busy night to “teach” us the rules to Sauscharf.  I came in dead last, even losing to Hanno (from Lookout) – but it’s OK, I might lose to him at this game, but i’m gonna kick his butt in our fantasy football matchup this weekend!

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Friday report 

The convention is now in full swing, and I must say that it does feel slightly less crowded than normal. It is unclear how much of this may be related to covid and how much might be related to the fact this is somewhat earlier in the calendar, and we have avoided the school holidays.

The Halls seemed pretty crowded today. We got in early and sat down to Discordia – apparently 9 years in development by Berndt Eisenstein. Set in Roman times, it’s a tile laying and worker placement game with a few twists, one of which is that your job is to emply all workers. You start out with 15 and each round you get more flooding in unless you have covered certain spaces with tiles and other player pieces. The main mechanic is to simply take one of three dice and take an action – either building foundation tiles, building tiles on top of foundations which allow you to employ workers, putting workers on tiles or taking stars which are a kind of currency. When you take a die, if you have tiles which show a matching die they trigger and allow you employ more workers – until they are full.
The game is one of optimising your actions and building up little engines which get you benefits. What I liked was the triggering of a sequence of actions and trying to optimise each turn to get the most out of what is essentially one action. There is more to the thing but suffice to say I enjoyed it; neither of my two playing companions enjoyed it as much as I did though.

After picking up a few preorders and Kickstarters (Barrage Nike expansion, Autobahn, Revive, Oak) I checked out a few Trefl games. The Book of Dragons did not impress. Players take turns to use 1-3 dice to bid on a dragon of their choice; if they win the dice values decrease,  but if they are overbid their dice increase.  Some of the dragons give you optional one-off actions like flipping a die but these seemed unbalanced – for example I has a started card which gave me three extra points for green dragons; plus each green dragon I collected allowed me to increase my dice values by one pip each. Compared to other dragon abilities this felt overpowered. I’d rather play Splendor.

Redraw on the contrary, looks very good. Players choose a word from 27 in the middle of the table and draw it on a sheet which has some pre-written lines on it –  which you must use. If someone guesses the word you pass the drawing to your left and the next player draws on the same card using your drawing without erasing it. Hence, redraw. Looks like it will be lots of fun.
Trefl have also reprinted Santiago very nicely.

In terms of hotness at the fair, there were long queues for Flamecraft which looked attractive and I bought, and Atiwa which is the latest Rosenburg which I avoided as I think he is getting very repetitive.  Revive is also getting a lot of love and I’m looking forward to playing my copy.  We have now played two games of Challengers in the hotel and everyone is buying it. Tomorrow we will play First Rat which is co-designed by the co-author of Coimbra, Grand Austria Hotel and  other favourites so I’m looking forward to that!

Thursday report

First thing this morning, went to the asmodee store, as some of my friends wanted to get a copy of splendor duel. This is reportedly in short supply, so this was very high on the initial to-do list. While they were standing in line to buy the game, I noticed that both Carcassonne and Splendor have new cover artwork.

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