Over the next few months, instead of going with my Three Games articles, I am going to take a look at my collection and try to discuss why certain titles survived the great purge of 2019. During this process I may take a look at some games that didn’t survive, but only as a measuring stick for what did survive. Since I am silly, like a lot of gamers, I use Ikea Kallax shelves to display the games that we own. This makes it pretty easy to break things down cube by cube, so that’s what we’re going to do, twenty-four cubes, plus a top shelf for games that don’t fit in the cubes, over the course of a few months. I hope you enjoy!
If you are a BoardGameGeek user, you can also follow along on the Geeklist I created.
Times played: 3, on review copy provided by publisher
In Queenz, “you’re a famous beekeeper and compete with others for fame and prosperity. Bloom your fields, attract as many bees as possible around your hives, and produce the best honey of the country!”
The game is played on a garden board with a 6×6 grid of spaces where different colored orchid tiles will be placed – some of these tiles have 1-3 bees on top of the flower though the vast majority of them have no bees on them at all. There is a gardener token which stands at the edge of the board, highlighting a certain row or column that it borders. Each player gets their own player board, 3 beehives and 5 Honey pots, one of each color of orchid. A bunch of polyomino shaped field tiles are shuffled and a group fo 5 tiles is placed near the board..Continue reading →
Designer: rikkati (りかち) Players: 1 Times Played: 14 EN Rules: Google Drive PDF
In January 2019, my friend kumagoro held an exhibition titled これはトリテなのか (Is this a trick-taking game?). Designers submitted games that pushed the boundary of what could be considered both a game and a trick-taking game. マストフォローソリティア (Follow-the-Suit Solitaire) was one of the entries. There were quite a few entries (you can buy a bound copy of the Japanese rules here), and at least two of them have received commercial releases, including Zimbabweee Trick.
In general, when kumagoro holds such events the games use a standard deck of cards, or a subset of one, and maybe a few other components, but they’re intended as something you can play at home. For this one, I’ve linked to the EN rules Kazuma made at the top; you need a standard deck of cards and one joker.
Designer: るりるり (ruri ruri) Artist: るりるり (ruri ruri) Publisher: るりるりゲームズ (ruri ruri games) Players: 1 Times Played: 7 on a purchased copy
As I explore my unplayed るりるりゲームズ (ruri ruri games) titles, working on translations and adding games to the boardgamegeek database, I remembered this solitaire trick-taking title. I had first tried to learn how to play around the holidays last year, but was stumped on a few bits in the rules -including important pieces, such as how to win or how a trick is resolved.
The rules for るりるり games are always quite short, but that’s partially because of the terse manner in which they’re written and a lack of redundancy. As an example, the rules for card play simply say “May follow”. It is assumed to some degree that you know this means that the start player chooses a card to play, and then each player in turn also chooses one, with the highest ranked card, regardless of suit winning. In the case of 悪霊退治, even that last part must be implied, as the rules don’t specify how to determine a winner.
(There’s also a certain acknowledgment I feel compelled to make here towards the concept of games that, with purpose, haven’t fully fleshed out the corner cases or more significant parts of the rules. While we’re aways off from such a Sol LeWitt Conceptual Art game making a debut at GenCon or Spiel, I have purchased several such games in the last year. This is all to say that I don’t take it as a given that the rules will be complete, nor is it necessarily a pockmark.)
I have the rules for one other solo trick-taking game, and it feels…like a “Solitaire” game -that is, as you’d use the word in a casual setting and were referring to Klondike. It feels related to that niche, accessible and traditional. Almost a folk game.
This, uh, is something different. It feels much more modern and designed.
It has cards you need to satisfy (e.g. 4 cards from one suit; 3 cards with the same rank). It has cards whose suit can be seen on the back. You start with only 2 colors in the deck. You add a 3rd to the shuffle for the second hand, and a 4th for the third.
Below are our reactions to the Spiel des Jahres (SdJ) and Kennerspiel des Jahres (KedJ) nominations. The awards were announced this morning, and the complete list of nominated and recommended games can be found here.
The Spiel des Jahres jury announced their nominees and recommendations this morning. Congratulations to the nominees!
We’ve listed them below, but we’ve only put in the names of the German publishers (or what we assume is the German publisher). Links are to our past reviews.
One important bit of news from this morning (assuming a correct translation): some games released in March 2020 will be eligible next year, as they couldn’t be played enough due to the pandemic. Also out this morning, Essen Spiel ’20 is cancelled.
Brandon Kempf – Surviving the Purge 24
Over the next few months, instead of going with my Three Games articles, I am going to take a look at my collection and try to discuss why certain titles survived the great purge of 2019. During this process I may take a look at some games that didn’t survive, but only as a measuring stick for what did survive. Since I am silly, like a lot of gamers, I use Ikea Kallax shelves to display the games that we own. This makes it pretty easy to break things down cube by cube, so that’s what we’re going to do, twenty-four cubes, plus a top shelf for games that don’t fit in the cubes, over the course of a few months. I hope you enjoy!
If you are a BoardGameGeek user, you can also follow along on the Geeklist I created.
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