Written by Dr. Leisl Grimm, and published in 2024 by Got Games Books
Review based upon a copy provided by the publisher
The hook for this book is laid out clearly on the back cover. “Most books about board games are boring. This is not that book.” While I don’t agree that most books about board games are boring, I was curious to see how this book would stand out.
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The EXIT series was one of the original puzzle-game franchises to hit the market when the escape room game craze took off a few years ago. To date, my family and I have been able to play all of the ones released here in the US, and this is a series that we continue to look forward to future installments. While there are many worthy competitors in the genre, the EXIT series is possibly the best known of the bunch – due in part to the initial set of games being awarded the 2017 Kennerspiel des Jahres award. Continue reading
For those of us not lucky enough to be in Essen during Spiel, there’s always the question of what the hot new games are this year. One of the favorite ways of judging this are the ratings posted by Fairplay Magazine. We thought we’d pass on the final lists from the fair. This year, they separated them into two categories: Connoisseur and Expert Games, and Children’s and Family Games. The games are rated on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 is best. In each category, a game needs to receive a minimum number of ratings in order to get ranked, but there is also a second list of “Hidden Gems”, for games that received a smaller number of ratings. So here are the games that made the lists for 2024.
Connoisseur and Expert Games (minimum 13 ratings)
Connoisseur and Expert Hidden Gems (5-12 ratings)
Children’s and Family Games (minimum 22 ratings)
Children’s and Family Hidden Gems (11-21 ratings)
Piles of people in the fair today but the sun shone brightly and everyone seems relaxed. I left the halls at 5pm and there was still plenty of activity; a bunch of people streamed in around lunch time.
Sparks is a new game from Alion – Dr O which is yet another publisher run by Kristian A Øtsby and Kjetil Svendsen, both of whom authored the game with two other designers. Sparks is a 45 minute medium-weight game where many actions are done simultaneously by all players – an achievement in itself! The game theme is to develop robots which are obtained in the beginning and then later refilled from a deck, and then can be completed by drafting dice from a common pool. The dice sometimes have to have specific colours or specific numbers, and there are cute little gear tokens which allow some dice manipulation as well as various other free actions.
Ok this is my final day at the fair. Here’s some quick thoughts on what I saw.
Forest Shuffle won the A La Carte award. I know a lot of people play it online but for those that play with actual cards, take advantage of the new phone app that makes scoring easy.
Continue readingEssen Friday:
Slightly calmer day than yesterday, at least until lunchtime when the madness returned.
Games played:
Rebirth – the new Reiner Knizia game in the same vein as Babylon or Samurai, firstly an enormous thumbs up for the production of this game – the most beautiful components for tiles, castles and citadels and a gorgeous double sided board showing Acptland and Ireland. We played the Scotland side which is more of a family game – I was told the Irish side is more for gamers, with slightly different rules. Rebirth is a tight game, in which every turn you draw one of your tiles and then figure out where to place it on the board. You get to see your tile for your turn starts so you were spent all of the game completely engaged as you are either watching what your opponents are doing, I’m trying to figure out where to play your next tile. The tiles themselves so one of three things either an energy a crop, or a number of houses. The energy and crop tiles are used to make chains around the board, the object being not only to score one point for every item in your chain; but also to use your tiles to surround castles at the end of the game the castle themselves are gonna score 5 points Each so trying to control as many of them as possible is important. A neat and simple way of tiebreaking is given to you on a little player eight card. The house tiles are what you place inside your castle spaces, these are actually settlements which are 12 or three in size as soon as the settlement has been completed with tiles it scores, and there is a majority game here each as the person who placed the tile/s with the most houses on it will win and score the majority points rather than the second of third points. If you can control an entire settlement by yourself, you gain all the points, and this can be pretty significant.
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