Once more, the SPIEL fair at Essen has come to an end. It’s been a few intense days of looking, meeting, and, of course, playing. I changed tack this year and let the fair sweep me one way or...
Once more, the SPIEL fair at Essen has come to an end. It’s been a few intense days of looking, meeting, and, of course, playing. I changed tack this year and let the fair sweep me one way or the other, sitting down at whichever empty table had an interesting-looking game. Thus, I did not play so many games I had put on my list before – often only checking out the visuals and chatting with the folks at the booth.
Speaking of folks: SPIEL becomes more and more about the people for me. Since I’ve started this blog, I’ve met a lot of great folks who share my passion for history, board games, and history in board games. Unfortunately, most of them live pretty far away from me – but SPIEL offers an opportunity to meet at least some of them – be that again or for the first time! Thus, I was very excited to huddle with my colleagues from Boardgame Historian, with the folks from Skellig Games and Spielworxx who brought forth Weimar, my latest board game obsession, and with my fellow blogger Michal from The Boardgames Chronicle. I hope to see you all again soon – many plans are already in the making!
On to the games! This year, it happened that I played a lot of “pairs” – games which are similar to one another. So, here they are – complete with an assessment which one I preferred!
Pair I: The Historical Epics
The very first game I played at the fair was one which has recently arrived at my home already – Weimar (Matthias Cramer, Capstone Games/Skellig Games/Spielworxx). In all fairness, I did not plan on it. I passed by the Skellig Games booth in the morning to say hello to the crew there (including designer Matthias Cramer, who was in the process of teaching the game to four people), and then moved on. When I passed by the booth on my way back from another one 15 minutes later, three of the four seats at the Weimar table had emptied. I could not let that happen, so I stepped in. The other two seats were soon taken by other prospective players, and we spent a pleasant test round in which the Republic almost went to shambles and was only saved by the Communist Party’s selfless decision to reduce poverty instead of enlarging their parliamentary base. My friend A. who has played Weimar with me before remarked that it is a perfect game for testing at the fair: If you only play the first round (of up to six in the full game), you still get a full experience in which almost anything can happen – there is certainly no initial warm-up phase there as in so many other games!
Matthias Cramer (second from the right) explaining the game to three prospective players.
The other historical epic which I played was Carolingi (Christoph Cantzler/Sebastian Freudenberg, Sea Cove Games). It’s always a special pleasure to have a game taught by the designer, and Sebastian Freudenberg had a great way to convey his game – starting straight away, teaching as we went (but in a very structured way), and with a lot of historical context on the side. Very impressive! The game itself gives you a sense of urgency early on – at least in the shortened scenario for the fair. Players will be in reach of victory almost from the get-go, and pulling it off depends as much on your planning (always hampered by the caprices of the action bag) as on your cold-bloodedness. As Sebastian Freudenberg pointed out, players always feel like they play the action tile which would allow them to claim victory if the conditions are met one round too late. Not so A., who saw his chance and seized it right in the second year (of ten at max) of our struggle. Hail to the new emperor of the Franks!
The action tiles placed on the wheel of seasons in the foreground will affect what’s happening on the map.
If I had to pick one of them: Weimar.
Pair II: The Social Deduction Games
I like (yet don’t love) social deduction games, but I rarely ever have the crowd for them. (Exception: ClioCon this year.) The fair, of course, remedies that, and so I was delighted to try out Feed the Kraken (Maikel Cheney/Hans Joachim Höh/Tobias Immich, Funtails), which does not only have the familiar setup of good team (sailors, who want to sail northeast) vs. hidden bad team (pirates, who want to sail northwest), but also a third party (the cult leader who wants to sail due north to sacrifice the ship to the Kraken). The course is charted by the captain and lieutenant who secretly pass on one of their two direction cards to the navigator, and then enacted by the navigator selecting one of these cards. If the ship sails northwest to the pirate isles, that can mean a lot of things – the navigator is a pirate, the captain or the lieutenant are pirates, or maybe just all of them were stuck with a bad hand of cards (it’s not so rare to end up with four cards for a westerly course). Thus, picking up clues on who is on which team is possible, but not easy… which sets some limits to how often you want to mutiny against the captain because they AGAIN appointed a navigator who is CLEARLY a pirate.
I am a dumb bunny and did not take a picture of the awesome-looking special fair edition with which we played. Thus, you are stuck with this picture of the cover. ©Funtails.
Among Cultists: A Social Deduction Thriller (Stefan Godot, Godot Games) takes a different approach: Instead of small tidbits of information spread out to one or another player, everybody sees (almost) everything and can draw their conclusions from that. Which investigator went where and when, meeting which other investigator while doing what? A skilled player (so, someone with strong memorization and logic skills) can figure out from that who is likely to be a cultist. Somebody with a pea brain like mine has to rely on talking their way through things – which, as I happened to be inscribed in the cult of an unnamed horror, consisted of trying to build a reputation as an industrious contributor to the common cause. I might have overdone that in the beginning, because my selfless act of checking somebody’s pulse to see if they were still alive (and blaming the murder on the guy they had been around before) just resulted in a large polarization between my scapegoat and myself, in which the group decided to lynch me. Not good. However, my fellow cultist saved the day by going on with his sneaky murder work and finally turning the tide against an entirely innocent bystander in a second vote. The unnamed horror was pleased. All was well.
I am still a dumb bunny, so I only took this picture of the very beginning before characters had dispersed into the various rooms.
If I had to pick one of them: Feed the Kraken.
Pair III: The Surprise Hits
Games with a religious theme are often, well, preachy. Not so To the Ends of the Earth (Sungwoo Hyun/Minwoo Hyun, Baccum) – a pleasantly sober game on spreading the gospel through the eastern Mediterranean. Maybe it’s because of a secret ingredient: Gambling! Players bet on the value of the next card coming up (higher or lower than the cards on display), until action points (in the form of cubes) roll out like you’re winning at a slot machine. Spending those points is mostly procedural – you convert cities, and, finally, build churches (better save some of your cubes to upgrade them!). None of that is too cerebral – and it doesn’t have to be. A good game at the end of a long fair day.
Almost the entire eastern Mediterranean has been converted (white cylinders) with only a few outposts of heathendom (black cylinders) remaining. The players – especially the orange one – have also built a lot of churches!
The second surprise hit is even more surprising. I am typically not too fond of dice-chucking games, and neither miniatures nor Norse mythology have this irresistible lure on me as for so many other gamers. Battle of Gods (Ole Steiness, Mood Games), however, is exactly that: Players maneuver their miniatures of Norse gods and giants around each other trying to bonk the other mythological beings over the head by rolling the right combinations on their dice. That amounts to a fast-paced 20-30 minute game in which there is a pleasant little amount of planning and a generous helping of pushing one’s luck – should you try to re-roll dice to make for big combos or rather be content with the solid, but uninspired mix of healing, moving, and punching? Going for victory points directly is also a promising strategy – as my opponents found out when nimble Freyja kept out of trouble just enough to churn out VPs and deliver the final blow with a neat combination of powerful action cards. I imagine this is a good game to play over a beer, and if you are on the receiving end of the godly bonks, you can challenge your friends for a rematch straight away.
Those plastic figurines are so large that they can barely be called “miniatures” anymore. In the foreground: The Freyja player board, complete with my nifty combination of dice for a big attack/VP combination (with two more dice which just yielded another VP on the board)… thus amassing the 10 circular VP tokens required for victory!
If I had to pick one of them: Battle of Gods.
What do you think of these games? Anything up your alley? And if you’ve been to SPIEL or would have liked to go – what are your highlights?