Nürnberg 2012 Re-View: 94 Pictures of 36 Games

My Nürnberg 2012 experience was – well – cold (18 degrees below zero Celsius). The days at the fair went by fast: I shot video interviews for SAZ (Spiele-Autoren-Zunft, or the Game Designer's Association, with over 400 members worldwide) featuring game designers talking about special aspects of designing board games. Additionally I shot interviews by the German Games Archive with people who knew Alex Randolph in person; these clips will become part of an exhibition about Randolph at the Games Archive at Nürnberg starting in May.

Since I also had appointments and meetings, there was not too much time to run around and take photos, but in the end this post will hopefully add informative visual material (and more) regarding upcoming games – some of them perhaps not yet on your radar. So take your time...

(This report goes in alphabetical order by publisher, then by game.)

ABACUSSPIELE

Africana by Michael Schacht looks like Valdora taking place in Africa, but with only two books...

Zooloretto Würfelspiel looks like, feels like, plays like Zooloretto, but is faster and with players checking rolled dice animals on their zoo sheet.

alea

The most valuable info so far about these two games is in this post on BGG News from Rob Harris.

Saint Malo, by the deservedly successful game designing couple Inka and Markus Brand (with two kids who have already designed two games of their own – see below), combines resource management and city building with drawing on your city map with erasable markers. There are also dice added, so you have a "push your luck" element and the danger of pirates destroying (erasing?) some stuff. Saint Malo was displayed as a prototype with first sketches for everything.

In Vegas by Rüdiger Dorn, you roll your dice, pick all of one value, place them onto the matching spot, and try to get majorities in each of those. That's it as far as the game was explained to me at the booth, making for another game establishing "combine two mechanisms, including one dice-rolling mechanism" as THE game designing formula of 2012.

Asmodee

Divinare by Brett J. Gilbert was presented in a mock-up version with tarot cards, trompe-l'oeil coffee cups, and some typical French character cards. Different, intriguing.

The Island is the newest version of the Escape from Atlantis game by Julian Courtland-Smith with a couple of differing rules regarding building and destroying the island – in this case with two-dimensional hex-tiles.

Drei Magier Spiele

Peek-A-Boo! (Spiegel Spukschloss) is another 3D-kid's game with mirrors, presented in a whole staged set with a suit of armor and so on...

eggertspiele

Milestones by Stefan Dorra and Ralf zur Linde looks like a neat combination from them once again, with one larger map with a road-building grid (looking like TransAmerica in the middle ages) and a rectangular "Rondel"-like player board to chose your actions that's built up modularly with tiles. The game was presented only as a mock-up, so Spiel 2012 – I am waiting!

Spectaculum is another (rather abstract) Reiner Knizia game, specifically a family-friendly stock-holding game taking place in the world of jugglers and clowns. I hope I will have the chance to play a prototype when seeing Peter Eggert the next time.

Hans im Glück

Besides another 57 (or so) expansions for Carcassonne, the main game was Marcel-André Casasola Merkle's Santa Cruz. Players explore an island – and turn around tiles with some surprises. Cards in their hands offer them certain places to score (e.g., all villages besides a river, all spots close to the volcano), but the scoring is performed for all players. Since players are forced to score all cards in hand, this is a question of timing.

Once explored, all the players' pieces are removed and the second round on the island – already explored, but again empty – starts. So will you do better the second time, now that you know the island? Probably yes – but even more probably, you will again make mistakes and will be screwed by your opponents.

Honorable mention: Hans im Glück's policy of showing a portrait of the game designer with info about him or her as a person on the back of the box. I want to see more like that!

Kosmos

There's a new edition of Colorio with easily interchangeable cardboard strips for the colors underneath the chips.

Einfach Genial: Das Würfelspiel (Ingenious Dice Game) is one of the new Dice Game Line titles from Kosmos, with a cubic box used as a dice cup.

Board Game: Einfach Genial: Das Würfelspiel

Kraterschreck im Mondversteck was shown as a completed game – and Alien Ansgar was looking at you, kid.

Board Game: Kraterschreck im Mondversteck

Lakota by Philippe Proux is a "simple" game component-wise. Kosmos picked it up eight years after its first edition as Tasso and added a "native American" theme.

Spinnengift und Krötenschleim is a kid's game by Klaus Teuber with some hidden ingredients, some plastic cauldrons – 3D for kids is a must, it seems.

Board Game: Spinnengift und Krötenschleim

Star Trek Catan with the USS Enterprise instead of roads. Seems that the design was developed using warp 9 to get finished as quickly as possible. Some of the cards show interesting special abilities...

Targi, the first game of designer Andreas Steiger, was presented in a final state. It's a two-player quick worker placement game on a flexible "map" created by cards. Interactive, confrontational stuff for gaming couples...

Waka Waka: Jambo as a board game with additional mechanisms and twists, plus extraordinary illustrations.

Libellud

Dixit Jinx, with cards more "easy" and semi-abstract than the usual Dixit surrealistic rabbit horror.

Dixit 3 with an extra helping of more "typical" Dixit surrealistic rabbit horror.

Seasons looked quite different from the prototype presented at Spiel 2011, yet still great and different from everything else. Unfortunately, nobody was around to explain more. We will see.

Lookout Games

Agricola: Die Bauern und das Liebe Vieh, which is not yet in the BGG database, is a half-hour version of the well-known game especially for two players that focuses solely on the animal husbandry aspect of the original game.

Mindtwister

Amber Road, previously presented at Nürnberg 2011, is a kind of resource-managing race game on 17 small boards that's playable in 45 minutes by Grzegorz Rejchtman (designer of Ubongo and Batavia) and Dan Glimne and seems interesting enough to keep on somebodys radar.

One of the 17 boards and the "die"

Murmel Spielwerkstatt

This publisher presented a game hidden from almost everybody's radar. A young Swiss designer – Martina Huber – designed the basic game as a thesis for her high school exam / diploma. An organization trying to develop a better relationship between the Northern and Southern hemispheres (The "Berne Decalaration") picked it up and published it. Murmel presented this at Nürnberg as a distributor, and I was intrigued immediately.

Grosse kleine Welt ("Big small world") is a game capturing in a (positive) educational way basic principles of the "global village", that is, the world's ecomomy.

Using only two resources – cotton and coffee – and some really cute mechanisms like a domestic economy and an interactive economy with conferences twice in the game where players negotiate actual rules for the rest of the game, it offers a 90-minute economical struggle.

The winner of the game is not the player with the most money, but with the best development regarding his starting conditions – which are very different, depending on which country you play.

In these pictures you can see the box, an overview of the components, one of the "create this for being able to do the next step" economy of one country, the global market, some event cards, and one country board.

Pegasus

Panic Station had a new cover on a middle-sized German box, but was otherwise the original game.

Queen Games

Edo by Stfan Malz and his son was presented in a near final layout, yet with only one set of hand-painted meeples of the final design and shape per color. As Altiplano this design won the Hippodice award in the category "feature-lentgh game" in 2010.

Maharani by Wolfgang Panning was displayed in a dummy version, but with an already final laid-out game board. A promising tile-placement game with a lot of interaction.

Urbanization, also shown in a dummy version, was not on my radar. Maybe it should be.

Schmidt Spiele

Grimoria – now with "real" books! The hardcover "action selection" device for each player looks nice and works well, so this small print-run hit from Spiel 2011 will be available for German gamers!

Step By Step by Uwe Rapp and Bernhard Lach is designed around the central idea of pushing your luck by rolling dice, but you decide whether you believe it's possible to reroll a higher or lower result than before. Neat, quick filler.

In Zebra-Schwein, designed by the two kids of Inka and Markus Brand, players roll dice, look at them in secret, and draw a combination of two animals determined by these dice on sheets of paper. The others try to guess the combination first. A kid's and family game with a squeaking plastic pig.

Ystari Games

Serenissima's new design looks quite promising. With components hidden in a locked drawer to be pulled out and shown to interested businessmen, I had to take photos feeling like a secret agent. Well, here they are:

Board Game: Serenissima (Second Edition)

Zoch Verlag

Flossen hoch! is a children's game (ages 4 and up) by Edith Grein-Böttcher. Each player has a penguin and a set of short to long fish. In the beginning, the fish are placed into slots in the ocean's surface, with only the heads being visible. The die is rolled and players have to "catch" fish of the matching color as quick as possible. If you pick a "fishbone" instead, bad luck! When a fish is rolled, each player grabs his own fish; when a shark is coming, all fish of a player's own color should be saved. If successful, the length of the fish is the measure for how far your penguin moves forward on the race track.

Hand aufs Herz is a further developed and expanded version of Julien Sentis' communication game Trigger including 180 cards with four questions each. The twist here: Every card has a kind of theme with linked questions. The different categories of questions and the "touching device" of the heart in the middle of the table made it one of the rare spots at Nürnberg where people had to laugh out loud – even businessmen.

The questions on the cards are nicely divided into sets of four...

Imagine a cardanic hinge – the axis is upright and after going through the body of a ship, it ends p being the mast of a ship. Three spreaders rotate around it to provide balancing space for sailors, mice, bottles, crates. The spreaders are numbered (left or right to the mast, from five to ten), and the upper deck is divided into four quarters numbered 1-4. That's the set-up for Riff Raff.

Each player has the same set of "stuff" and a hand of cards numbered 1-10. Choose one card with the other players, reveal them simultaneously, then place anything you want onto the space of your number. If the players all go to one side, the whole ship will tumble in rather unforeseeable ways to and fro, with one or more items falling off the ship with players trying to catch them quickly. Now, if you imagine this, you can easily guess which game was occupied almost all the time... (At least whenever I was around, somebody trying to carefully place a crate, a mouse, a whatever somewhere on some inclined plane.) Christoph Cantzler has delivered a masterpiece here, IMO.

StreifenToni, the card game derived from the 2011 Kinderspiel des Jahres Da ist der Wurm drin!, offers a similar mechanism of shorter and longer parts of worms, here presented on cards which are placed onto each other and halfway covered...