AMIGO Welcomes 2019 with Bulls, Llamas, Dwarves, and Multiplication

AMIGO Welcomes 2019 with Bulls, Llamas, Dwarves, and Multiplication
Board Game: 6 nimmt! 25 Jahre
Time to start surveying what publishers will demo at Spielwarenmesse 2019, the annual trade fair in Nürnberg, Germany that attracts all the well-known German game publishers as well as designers and publishers around the world who want to show off upcoming games to the media and make licensing deals in order to release games in this language or that.

AMIGO Spiele always shoots out its press release right at the start of the year, so in the spirit of first come, first served, here's some of what they'll feature, with all of its titles listed here on BGG's early 2019 con preview.

Wolfgang Kramer's 6 nimmt! has been around for 25 years, and to celebrate the anniversary AMIGO has a new special edition of the game — 6 nimmt! 25 Jahre — that includes 28 special action cards. If you're like me, you'll immediately wonder why it has 28 extra cards instead of 25. C'mon, people! If you're like other people, you might think that the inclusion of special action cards in a game as streamlined as 6 nimmt! makes no sense. And if you're like still other people, you might like the sound of the new variant included at the end of this description:

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In 6 nimmt!, you want to score as few points as possible. To play, you shuffle the 104 number cards, lay out four cards face-up to start the four rows, then deal ten cards to each player. Each turn, players simultaneously choose and reveal a card from their hand, then add the cards to the rows, with cards being placed in ascending order based on their number; specifically, each card is placed in the row that ends with the highest number that's below the card's number. When the sixth card is placed in a row, the owner of that card claims the other five cards and the sixth card becomes the first card in a new row.

In addition to a number from 1 to 104, each card has a point value. After finishing ten rounds, players tally their score and see whether the game ends., i.e., whether someone has at least 66 points. When this happens, the player with the fewest points wins!

6 nimmt! works with 2-10 players, and the dynamics of gameplay change the more players that you have. One variant for the game has you use 34 cards, 44 cards, 54 cards, etc. (instead of all 104 cards) when you have three, four, five, etc. number of players. This change allows you to know which cards are in play, thereby allowing you to track which cards have been played and (theoretically) make better choices as to which card to play when.

6 nimmt! 25 Jahre includes 28 additional cards to be used in a new variant. The game now lasts only two rounds, and at the start of play each player receives three special cards. Just before you have to place your number card in a row, you can choose to play one of your cards, with these cards opening a fifth row, moving a previously placed card to a different row, inserting one card between two others, allowing up to six cards in a row instead of five, blocking a row, replacing the card you played, and more.

After all number cards have been played, players tally their scores, keeping any unplayed special cards, then shuffle the number cards and begin a new round. At the end of the second round, whoever has the fewest points wins.
Board Game: L.L.A.M.A.
Reiner Knizia's LAMA — supposedly an acronym for "Lege Alle Minuspunkte Ab", or "Drop off all the minus points" — is another small box card game, something that AMIGO has specialized in for decades. This game is for 2-6 players, ages 8 and up, and plays like so:

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In LAMA, you want to dump cards from your hand as quickly as you can, but you might not be able to play what you want, so do you quit and freeze your hand or draw and hope to keep playing?

Each player starts a round with six cards in hand; the deck consists of llama cards and cards numbered 1-6, with eight copies of each. On a turn, the active player can play a card, draw a card, or quit. To play a card, you must play the same number as the top card of the discard pile or one number higher. If a 6 is on the discard pile, you can play a 6 or a llama, and if a llama is on top, you can play another llama or a 1. If you quit, you place your remaining cards face down and take no further actions in the round.

The round ends when one player empties their hand or all players have quit. In either case, players collect tokens based on the cards in front of them, whether in hand or on the table. Each different number card in hand gets you one white token (worth 1 point) while one or more llamas gets you a black token (worth 10 points). If you played all your cards, you can return one token that you previously collected to the supply. You then shuffle all the cards and begin a new round.

The game ends the round that at least one player has forty or more total points. Whoever has the fewest points wins!
Board Game: L.L.A.M.A.


Board Game: Hochspannung
Hochspannung, which translates as "High Voltage", is a 2-6 player card game that plays in 20 minutes and that you could have possibly guessed was designed by Maureen Hiron based solely on the description below:

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Try to rid yourself of cards quickly in Hochspannung! Distribute the deck evenly among all the players, then lay out one card face up to start the discard pile. Each player takes four cards from the personal deck in hand, and they can draw more cards from it at any time — which may or may not be helpful.

Each card shows a multiplication problem in its center, along with two individual digits in each corner. When the game begins, each player races to complete the multiplication problem on the top card in the discard pile, e.g. 6x9, then play a card on it that has in its corner a number that matches either the first or second digit of the product, in this case 5 or 4. This newly played card has a multiplication problem of its own, and someone will play a matching card on it, etc. Whoever plays all the cards in their hand and personal deck first wins.
Real-time pattern recognition is a hallmark of Hiron's recent designs, and I enjoy her visit to the BGG booth each SPIEL to demonstrate her latest twists on this style of game.


Board Game: Hochspannung


Board Game: Saboteur: The Lost Mines
• Finally, we have the only board game of the batch: Fréderic Moyersoen's Saboteur: The Lost Mines, which is for 3-9 players and which transforms the spirit of the fifteen-year-old Saboteur card game into something new:

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Saboteur: The Lost Mines is a board game inspired by the famous Saboteur card game. While it uses ideas of the basic game, the expansion, and the two-player game, it is also very different.

In this game, players are divided in two clans; each clan contains loyal dwarves, selfish dwarves, and a saboteur, secretly working for the opposite clan. Players have their own pawn, and the dwarves must move over the paths in order to physically reach the four goal cards, one of which contains a sleeping dragon that you don't want to wake, so try to avoid that one, if possible. The (non-dragon) goal cards yield a variable number of points, depending on the displayed, but secret, treasure cards.

Sabotage isn't performed against a specific player, but directly on the board by playing blocking path cards or adding tokens. In this way, the sabotage affects always all players, including yourself. As opposed to Saboteur: The Duel, path cards you play don't have to be linked to your own start card, which offers many more sabotage options. Even so, no player is ever out of the game, either temporarily or permanently.
Be sure to check out this blog again in 2029 for a look at Saboteur: 25 Jahre...

Board Game: Saboteur: The Lost Mines

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