New Game Round-up: Zoch Verlag - Europe-Bound Enigma & Five Other Enigmatic Boxes

New Game Round-up: Zoch Verlag - Europe-Bound Enigma & Five Other Enigmatic Boxes
Board Game: Enigma
• In April 2013, I posted a video overview of Touko Tahkokallio's Enigma, which was published in 2012 by Finnish publisher Competo and hard to acquire if you didn't live in Scandinavia. Thankfully, the game should soon be much easier to find as German publisher Zoch Verlag plans to release its own version in March 2014. Zoch typically includes rules in multiple languages, and while I don't know whether it will for this title, odds are good that it will. Here's an overview of the game:

Quote:
In Enigma, players are exploring an ancient temple, solving different problems to make their way from room to room.

Problem solving is done simultaneously in four different categories — tangrams, block-stacking, canal-building and balance problems — and those who succeed expand the temple with the problem tile they solved, thus adding a new chain of rooms inside the temple or extending an existing chain of rooms. After placing a tile, a player can occupy a room on that tile with one of his three archeologists as long as no other room of the same color is already occupied in that chain. When the chain is closed — that is, when the chain has no "loose ends" that can be expanded upon — any archeologists in that chain's room return to their players, and players score 1 point for each archeologist they receive. The game ends when somebody reaches 15 points, and the player who has the most points wins.
And if you prefer video explanations, here's the aforementioned video:


Board Game Publisher: Zoch Verlag
• Aside from Enigma, Zoch Verlag has five other titles due out in the first half of 2014, but so far it's released only the barest of details about them. They are:

Cherry Picking, a card game by first-time designer Jeroen Geenen
Leg los!, a communication game by Carlo A. Rossi
Putz die Wutz, a reaction game from Thierry Chapeau that's sure to end up on tons of GeekLists for reasons not relating to the gameplay
Scharfe Schoten, a trick-taking game from another first-time designer, Arve D. Fühler
Zicke Zacke Ei Ei Ei, from chicken master Klaus Zoch with artwork by Doris Matthaus

More details on this handful of games within a month or so as I'll be at the toy and game fair in Nürnberg, Germany at the end of January 2014 and be looking to record preview videos on as many games as possible. By the by, if you haven't checked out the Nürnberg/New York 2014 Preview — with which I'm cataloguing games that will be on display at the toy and game fairs in those two cities — it now features 74 games with dozens more still to be added as I continue to make my way through all of the German publishers before spotlighting those in the U.S.

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