Simon’s Saturday Report for Essen SPIEL 2024

Posted on October 6, 2024 by Dale Yu

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.

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Dale’s report from Spiel 2024 – Saturday

Posted on October 5, 2024 by Dale Yu

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.

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Simon’s Report from Spiel 2024, Friday edition

Posted on October 5, 2024 by Dale Yu

Essen 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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Dale Yu: Review of Intent to Kill [Essen SPIEL 2024]

Posted on October 5, 2024 by Dale Yu

Intent to Kill

  • Designer: Artur Khodzhikov
  • Publisher: Hobby World
  • Players: 2-4
  • Age: 16+
  • Time: 60 minutes
  • Played with review copy provided by publisher

Intent to Kill is a thrilling detective noire game in which you will find yourself in the middle of a police investigation. You can take the role of a notorious serial killer, while the other shall become an experienced detective following the tracks of a criminal.

The game is different for each of these roles: the murderer has to plan every step while hiding their motive; the detective has to collect evidence and question witnesses — but not all of them are truthful…

A new murder is committed each round. The detective can move around the blocks and question civilians that might have useful information. The murderer can intimidate civilians to stall the investigation. The game ends after the fifth murder.

Use your actions and abilities efficiently, the detective has to find the murderer among civilians and determine their motive by analyzing the murders. If the detective fails, the murderer wins.

The game allows for many ways to enrich gameplay — when you get comfortable with the basic rules you can combine different motives, add new components and play through scenarios. Once you have enough practice, you will be able to rediscover the complexity of the game: our game tests show that a truly intense battle begins when experienced players that have mastered both roles go against each other.

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Dale Yu: Preview of Hegemony of Faith [Essen SPIEL 2024]

Posted on October 5, 2024 by Dale Yu

Hegemony of Faith

  • Designer: Yen
  • Publisher: Gamefly Studio
  • Players: 4-8
  • Age: 12+
  • Time: 40-60 minutes
  • Copy provided by publisher / Taiwan Boardgame Design

Hegemony of Faith is a card and party game for 4-8 players, every player’s main purpose in the game is to find a way to collect the most believer cards and become the only winner.  Each player takes on the role of a sect leader, with unique skills and abilities – each player is dealt two skill cards at the start of the game and gets to choose which one they want for the game; and the identity of the card remains secret until the time when you need to use it..

 

Players start the game with 3 Follower cards and 6 Action cards.  On a turn, players draw up their Hand limit of 6 Action cards, then take 2 actions (must be different):  Play a strategy action card, play a mental attack action card, play a physical attack card, or discard any number of action cards from their hand.   All of the cards have unique actions – read the card and do what they say.  When there is a fight, players pit their Believers against each other.  There are five different types, and each type can defeat two other types (as well as being able to score a bonus against one of those two in a Faith war).  It’s essentially an Rock/Paper/Scissors/Lizard/Spock system.

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Forest Shuffle Wins DSP *and* a la carte Awards

Posted on October 4, 2024 by huzonfirst

Essen is not only the place for releasing new games, but also where some annual gaming awards are announced each year.  Traditionally, the IGA awards are formally presented during the fair and both the DSP (Deutscher Spiele Preis) and the a la carte (best card game, as presented by Fairplay Magazine) give their results during this time.  Surprisingly, the same game won both awards!

In the past, the DSP tended to honor heavier games (as opposed to the other major German award, the SdJ’s, which focus on family games), but that hasn’t been the case recently.  Last year, the family-friendly Planet Unknown won and this year’s award went to an even lighter game, Forest Shuffle.  This tableau-building card game was one of the Kennerspiel recommended games and has now won the DSP.  Congratulations to the game’s designer, Kosch, and to the publisher, Lookout Games.  Sky Team, the SdJ winner, was the runner-up, followed by The White Castle, Darwin’s Journey, and Too Many Bones.  Magic Keys was selected as Best Children’s Game, to give it a second award to go with the Kinderspiel it won earlier from the SdJ jury.  Here are the top 10 finishers in the DSP voting, together with their designers and publishers:

  1. Forest Shuffle (Kosch) – Lookout Games
  2. Sky Team (Luc Remond) – Scorpion Masque
  3. The White Castle (Sheila Santos, Israel Cendrero) – Devir
  4. Darwin’s Journey (Simone Luciani, Nestore Mangone) – ThunderGryph Games
  5. Too Many Bones (Adam & Josh Carlson) – Chip Theory Games
  6. Revive (K. Ostby, E. Svensson, H. Meissner, A. Wermlund) – Aporta Games
  7. Harmonies (Johan Benvenuto) – Libellud
  8. Obsession (Dan Hallagan) – Kayenta Games
  9. Keep the Heroes Out! (Luis Brueh) – Brueh Games
  10. Nucleum (Simone Luciani, David Turczi) – Board&Dice

Children’s:  Magic Keys (Markus Slawitscheck, Arno Steinwender) – Happy Baobab

As mentioned, the a la carte award goes to the best card game of the year.  With the announcement just the day before that a card game had won the DSP, it’s not too surprising that the same game captured this award as well.  So once again, congratulations to the team behind Forest Shuffle.  Second place went to Cabanga! and third place went to Trio (previously known as nana, which earlier in the year won the As d’Or award from France).  Here are the a la carte top 10, together with their designers and publishers:

  1. Forest Shuffle (Kosch) – Lookout Games
  2. Cabanga! (Michael Modler) – Amigo
  3. Trio (Kaya Miyano) – Cocktail Games
  4. Passt nicht! (Thomas Weber) – Schmidt Spiele
  5. 5 Towers (Kasper Lapp) – Pegasus
  6. Dragonkeepers (Michael Menzel) – Kosmos
  7. Odin (Yohan Goh, Hope Hwang, Gary Kim) – Helvetiq
  8. Sides (Cedrick Caumont, Francois Romain) – Captain Games
  9. Ku-Ka-Konig (Reinhard Staupe) – KENDi
  10. Knarr (Thomas Dupont) – MM-Spiele

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