Drop Marbles, Jump Opponents, and Get Caterpillars Home

One of my favorite parts of the annual SPIEL convention in Essen, Germany is visiting the Clemens Gerhards booth on Sunday and spending a few minutes actually playing games — something I rarely do at that show. (Japanese publisher Bouken is my other "can't miss" booth, with both of these publishers showing games that (1) I tend to enjoy and (2) I didn't know about ahead of time. Surprises are fun!)

Clemens Gerhards didn't participate in SPIEL.digital, which makes sense given that its releases are typically abstract strategy games (which do work well online) with boards and pieces from gorgeous hardwood (which would be completely lost online). In any case, I can write a bit about their games here.

• Ingo Althöfer's Galtoni first appeared in 2013 from Edition Perlhuhn, and now it's back on the market. The game is for 2-3 players, ages 5+, and it plays as follows:

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Your goal in Galtoni is to place four balls of your color in a straight line, whether diagonal or orthogonal.

Unlike in other games with this concept, this game has a randomizing element in that the board resembles a Galton Board. Players take turns inserting a ball in one of the openings at the top of the slanted board. As the ball rolls down the board, it hits a series of pegs that deflect it and bounce it around before it lands in one of seven slots at the bottom of the board.

You can play with each player dropping only balls of their own color, or you can have players draw a ball at random from a bag, thereby possibly forcing them to figure out where best to drop a ball of an opponent's color. Two neutral balls are included, and these count toward each player's line.

You can learn much more about the Galton Board here:

• Sascha Schauf's Disci fits into the Halma / Chinese Checkers school of design, with each of the two players trying to get their pieces across the board and into the opponent's starting zone.

You can move pieces individually or jump over a piece to land on the empty space just past it. In doing so, however, you may not enter the large square in the center of the board. What's more, if you end up on a space marked with an "X", you must vacate this space in the next round, even moving backwards toward your starting area, if necessary.

The opponent cannot block you by leaving pieces in their starting zone as those spaces count as filled and will make it easier for you to win.

• Like Galtoni, Raupenrallye from Sascha and Elke Schauf is another re-issue, with the game having been first released by HiKu Spiele in 2010. Now after ten years the game page finally has an image and a proper description. Phew! Updates might not come immediately, but ideally everything will be improved in time.

In any case, here's a description of this two-player game suitable for players aged 6 and up:

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In Raupenrallye, you want to be the first to get your seven caterpillars from one side of the apple to the other. On the apple game board are two lines of holes, with the lines crossing at the core and with each line having three holes on either side of the apple.

On a turn, you roll the four-sided die, and (if you don't roll a 4), you move one of your caterpillars that many spaces, either from the start area next to the game board or from wherever it is on the game board. If you land a caterpillar on the core, you move it immediately to the goal space off the game board. If you do roll a 4, roll the dice again; if you once again roll a 4, you must return one of your caterpillars on the board to the starting space; if you roll anything else, then you can move a caterpillar from the starting space to the core, then an additional 1-3 spaces depending on what you rolled.

If you manage to fill all three spaces on one half of a line with your pieces, you immediately move all three pieces to the goal.

• Designer Fred Horn self-published Fianco in 2005, and now Clemens Gerhards has released a version of its own. (Gerhards has previously released several other titles from Horn, including Parallelo in 2013 and Double Dutch in 2019.)

Here's an overview of how to play:

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In Fianco, which is Italian for "side" or "flank", you want to be the first player to move one of your pieces to the opponent's back line.

On a turn, you move or jump with one of your pieces either forward (whether orthogonally or diagonally) or sideways; backwards movement is prohibited. You must take an opponent's piece, if possible, but only one at a turn. Control over the sidelines is important since pieces there cannot be jumped as easily.

• Finally, we come to Hollerith⁵ from Andreas Kuhnekath, who has created the wonderful abstract strategy games Kulami and Rukuni.

The game is named after Hermann Hollerith, inventor of the punch card tabulating machine, which (as explained in this Smithsonian article) was first widely used in the 1890 United States census so that the results of the census could be calculated far more quickly than in previous years. To use the machine, you'd punch holes into cardstock to record data — this person is married, this person is female, etc. — then you'd feed the card through the machine, which would record the data.

Here's how to play:

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Hollerith⁵ consists of a 6x6 game board with a hole in each space large enough to hold a marble, as well as marbles in two colors and five perforated plates; each plate covers a 3x3 area, which means that four of the plates together cover the entire game board. Each perforated plate has nine holes so that you can see whether a hole in the game board is filled with a marble, but only one or two holes per plate are large enough for a marble to pass through. (These holes are marked as such on the plates.)

On a turn, you push the fifth plate onto the game board, displacing one of the plates already there, then you insert one of your marbles into an unoccupied hollow of the game board. Players alternate turns until one of them forms a row of four marbles and wins. Note that if you cannot insert a marble into an empty space on the game board, you lose instantly.