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.
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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.
Just a quick report on the day before the convention opens. We managed to pick up “Challengers” from Z-man games – an absolutely excellent game which we played last night.
Firstly let’s talk about value for money. In the days where publishers are charging 60 Euros for a game, Challengers contains not only an enormous number of cards but also 4 player colourful mats in neoprene – all for 40 Euros.
And then the gameplay is as good as I remembered from the prototype. Played over 7 rounds, you swap players each game (you can play up to 12) and play a 5 minute game. Winner takes a trophy and then all players select cards from one of three piles as dictated by a tournament card; taking 5 cards and choosing 2. The idea here is to try to specialise in cards of the same time and to get combos which work together well. Then you can throw away as many cards as you want to whittle down your deck and improve your chances of getting combos.
The game is simple. I start and turn over a card. You turn over cards until their accumulated value equals or exceeds mine. I ”bench” the cards that lost ie I put them in 6 bench slots, putting identical cards in the same slot. Then I turn over a new card and try to beat the last card you played.
There are two things to look out for: if you have too few cards and run out during a game you lose.
If you have too many different types of cards, then once 7 different cards have been benched you lose.
The real twist is in the cards you choose to add and how they work with cards you already took. Some cards once benched increase the value of some of your cards. Some cards are just very powerful but penalise you. Some cards erode the opponents deck. Some cards have a higher value when first played only.
The design of the cards is super and the building of the deck very engaging.
We all loved the game!
For me it’s definitely a contender for SdJ.
-Simon W
We’ve already looked at a bunch of games – so many games you might expect to be on this list – they may have already been reviewed prior to the show! We posted a list yesterday of games that we’ve already reviewed…
There are plenty of games that people are anticipating from the larger publishers; and while I’m looking forward to those games too – I wanted to focus on a few games from smaller publishers that I’m pretty interested in learning more about too. Some of these may not actually be games that I’ll end up bringing back with me; in part because I need to learn more about them! This is a list of games I want to see that may be a bit off the beaten path… There are so many different countries represented at SPIEL, that I’m sure that I’ll also find other wonders during the fair; but these are some of the stands I’m sure to seek out…
Wednesday is the usual setup day here in Essen, and it was quite busy today. Unlike in years past, many of the booths were not quite ready this morning when we walked in. In fact when we walked out of the halls around 6 p.m., many more boots than usual seem to still be in states of construction.
As with most years, the start of the fair for me is the press conference in the morning followed by the new releases exhibition room. This room offers a great chance to see many of the new games of the fair in a room dedicated for the display of these new games. During the first few hours, there is someone from most of the companies there to explain the games to you. However, this room can also be a resource later in the fair, as the games are left out for quiet observation and picture taking.
