Review – Space Cadets: Dice Duel

Posted on October 15, 2013 by Mark Jackson
Designer: Geoff & Sydney Englestein
Publisher: Stronghold Games
Players: 4-8 (officially – though I’ll argue that it works for 2-3 as well)
Time: 30 minutes
Ages: 14+ (officially – though my 8 year old does just fine with it)
Times Played: 4 (with review copy provided by Stronghold Games)

SCD-box-front-1024x957In the interest of truth, justice & the American Way, I need to start this review out with a disclaimer: I’m a huge fan of Geoff Englestein, both as a designer (The Ares Project, Space Cadets) and as a podcaster (Game Tech segments on The Dice Tower, Ludology). So I approached Space Cadets: Dice Duel with a great deal of anticipation…

…and I was not disappointed. What is promised – a 30 minute game of frenetic real-time warfare chock full of dice for two teams – is exactly what the game delivered. Well done, Geoff & Sydney (Geoff’s daughter, the co-designer on this project). Continue reading →

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Dale Yu: Essen Preview – Relic Runners (Days of Wonder)

Posted on October 14, 2013 by Dale Yu

Relic Runners

  • Designer: Matthew Dunstan
  • Publisher: Days of Wonder
  • Players: 5
  • Time: 60 min
  • Ages: 10+

 Times Played: 3 (with preview copy provided by Days of Wonder)

relic-runner-front-box

 As soon as I heard about the newest Days of Wonder release, Relic Runners, I was immediately interested in the game.  I have always felt that DoW produces a top quality game, and they definitely take their time in choosing their games.  Having spoken with Mark Kaufman (the VP of Sales and Marketing for DoW) over the years, I definitely get the sense that Days of Wonder is quite comfortable waiting for the right game to come along.  If that means that they miss an Essen or GenCon, that’s no big deal…  This strategy seems to have worked well for them – many of their releases are veritable franchises now: Ticket To Ride, Memoir 44, Small World, etc.

 Their newest game comes from a relative unknown, Matthew Dunstan.  As far as I can tell, this is his first professionally published game – from my crack research through the Boardgamegeek database.  However, this relative lack of experience has not prevented Mr. Dunstan from designing a quality middleweight game that has gone over quite well here.

The game is played on a jungle map on the board.  Scattered on the board are 12 different temple sites and 8 ruin sites.  There is a basecamp located in the center of the board, and pathways that connect all the temples, ruins and the basecamp together.  Some of the pathways are rivers, and there is a toolbox token placed next to each of these waterways.  Each player has an individual board where they keep their supplies as well as keep track of their advances on three different toolbox charts.

  Continue reading →

Posted in Essen 2013 | 3 Comments

Dale Yu: Essen Preview – Austrian Game Museum

Posted on October 13, 2013 by Dale Yu

Every year, the Österreichisches Spiele Museum has a stand at Essen where they promote their museum and the annual Vienna Game Fest which traditionally occurs a few weeks after Essen (obviously, in Vienna).  The focus of the booth is usually their annual magazine – Spiel für Spiel – which is a printed recap of all the new games available at the fair that year.

This year, the magazine has just gone to the printer. This year’s edition will feature information on over 650 games!  The cost is only 5 EUR and it is available in both English and German versions.  I have always found this to be a great resource, and I make sure to pick up a copy every year.  Invariably during the year, there will be one or two games that I’ll find in the magazine that I missed at the fair!  The previous edition, the Games Companion 2013 is now available as a free download on http://www.gamescompanion.at/

GbG2014_web

In addition to their wonderful print magazine, they usually have some sort of special game release – generally an expansion though sometimes a full game.  The cost is usually minimal – a small monetary donation to a charity, or in some years, you simply agree to wear a sticker for the day advertising their upcoming festival.  In either case, the cost is way below the value of the game or expansion. This year – the Austrians have two special games on offer: Continue reading →

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Essen 2013: Teach a Gamer to Fish…

Posted on October 12, 2013 by Mark Jackson

Bild für die Haba Firmenfamilie…and he’ll own a copy of Haba’s award-winning game Kayanak for the rest of his life.

Well, that is, if he picked one up before it went out of print a few years ago.

Now, thanks to the wonderful people with the yellow boxes (aka Haba), Kayanak is back in print!

You may ask yourself, “Self, how did I get here?” (Yes, I love the Talking Heads.) You may also ask yourself, “Self, why is Mark yammering on about a reprinted kids game?”

Well, because it’s just the best kids game ever – at least according to my Kid Games 100, published on my personal blog back in 2009. In the subsequent years, there’s been some great new games for kids (any self-respecting gamer parent should acquire copies of Monster-Falle and The Magic Labyrinth), but Kayanak is still my numero uno.

Kayanak won the 1999 Kinderspiel des Jahres (for the German-challenged among us, that’s “Children’s Game of the Year”) but that’s not why I love it so deeply. (Heck,  Beppo der Bock won the Kinderspiel and I don’t feel a bit bad about off-loading it via a math trade.)

So, why do I like Kayanak so much? In the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “let me count the ways”:

  • the theme (ice-fishing) and the mechanics (using a wooden stick to poke  holes in the [paper] ice and fishing out small metal balls with a  magnet) work together perfectly
  • the components are, as is typical for Haba games, top-notch. In this case,  they not only look good but are extremely functional.
  • The game plays well with 2, 3 or 4 players… and with children as young as four & adults as old as dirt.
  • It’s freakishly fun – I mean, seriously – you get to poke holes in paper  (what kid hasn’t spent most of slow school morning doing that?!), play  with magnets, and pretend to be an Inuit out on a frozen lake. (OK, I  have no desire to ACTUALLY be on a frozen lake, but the pretending part  is fun.) Of course, the new version has you pretending to be a polar bear, which is both more kid-friendly and easier to spell than “Inuit”.

Kayanak gameThe  gameplay is dice-activated: what you roll tell you what you can do (cut  holes, fish, move or a combination of things) as well as how many times  you can do them. The dice also give you opportunities to ice over other  players fishing holes and “melt” portions of the board (making them  impassable).

There’s a  lot of ways to play tactically – and yet, part of the charm of the game  is that the fish (little metal balls in two sizes: regular & “fish  story”) sometimes clump together so that make an amazing haul… and  sometimes you fish in an area that is, sadly, fishless. (Is “fishless” a word? I’m not sure that I care.)

I never refuse to play this with my boys… or at game conventions… or wherever. And that’s why Kayanak is #1.

Posted in Essen 2013, Reviews | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Review: Taschkent

Posted on October 11, 2013 by gamekahuna

Taschkent

Designed by Peer Sylvester

Art by Klemens Franz

Published by Mücke Spiele

 

2-4 players

Ages 8+

60 minutes

 

Reviewed by Jonathan Franklin

Played once

Photo by Harald Mücke

 

What game would you make if it had to include these pieces plus glass beads in three colors, red, green, and blue?

 

In 2009-2010,  MückeSpiele held a competition to design a game with these pieces.  There were 80 entrants in the competition and several of the winners were published.

 

This is a review of one of them, Taschkent.  It is part of an eight part series, Edition Läufer, which means runner in English.  I reviewed another game in the series, Dahschur: Die Rote Pyramid yesterday.  Two other games in the series are Urknall and Exposaurus.  The edition gains its name from the Läufer (runner in German) piece pictured above

 

I have never been to Uzbekistan, but I can say that I had a nice hour in Peer Sylvester’s Taschkent.

Continue reading →

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OPINIONATED GAMERS ROUNDTABLE: ESSEN DESIGNER FORUM Part 3

Posted on October 11, 2013 by Dale Yu

 
Dale Yu – 9:07 PM
This year, the Opinionated Gamers are in an interesting position – normally we report back on the new games from Essen… but this year, we have a number of our writers who are involved in games of their own!  I thought it would be a good idea to get us in a chat room and discuss our new games for a bit.

[Based on the length of the chat, I will split this into at least 3 pieces for the blog, but what is published here is pretty much what we talked about without edits.  If you’ve ever been in a chat room, you know that the conversation gets a bit fractured from the lag.  There are a few places where I have re-ordered the chat to keep the conversations intact (and to make it easier to follow), but I have not changed any of the words of the participants.  The timestamps have not been altered, so you can try to follow my edits if you want.]

 

[Any extra text will also be denoted in brackets, just so you know]
The people involved:

Dale Yu – more of a host than anything else, though I do have a game (Suburbia Inc) which I have developed

Brian Yu – has 2 games coming out from Mattel Germany: Geister, Geister, Schatzsuchmeister, Kronen für den König

Jonathan Franklin – Plunder, from R&R Games

Brian Leet – New Haven, from R&R games

Ted Alspach – Suburbia Inc from Bezier Games (he also happens to own Bezier games)

W. Eric Martin – editor of BGG news.  He has no games that he’ll admit to designing

Jeff Allers – Artifact from White Goblin Games and Citrus from dlp games

 

[START PART 3]

Dale Yu – 9:55 PM
so, jeff – you’ve got two games. where do you want to start?
jeff allers – 9:56 PM
I wish I had more time to co-design with people.

Dale Yu – 9:56 PM
umm, at least one of your games is a co-design!
with Bernd, your game cafe buddy

jeff allers – 9:57 PM
Yes, Artifact goes back to the beginning of our friendship
He just moved to Berlin, fresh off of winning the Hippodice competition on his first attempt

jeff allers – 9:58 PM
We decided to show each other some of our unfinished prototypes
He took a really cool action/market mechanism that didn’t fit in his game and spliced it into my thematic-but-lacking archeology game

Continue reading →

Posted in Essen 2013 | 4 Comments