SPIEL 2016 I: Colony, New York Slice, Capital, Mea Culpa, Meeple War & Phalanxx

• For reasons unknown to me, Bézier Games typically kicks off our game demonstration livestream at SPIEL, and this was the case once again at SPIEL 2016, with Ted Alspach showing off the company's die-rolling, tableau-building post-apocalyptic game Colony.

• Despite our general policy of featuring only those games available at SPIEL during our livestream, we broke that rule for the second(!) game covered: Jeffrey D. Allers' New York Slice, this being a new version of Allers' Piece o' Cake, a.k.a. …aber bitte mit Sahne from 2008 that Bézier Games plans to release early in 2017. Bézier was announcing the title that day, so hey, news coverage and game preview in a single go.

• Polish publisher Granna and designer Filip Miłuński feature more than four hundred years of Warsaw history in the drafting, tile-laying game Capital.

• It's not often you hear the phrase "You could Ned Flanders your way through it", but Andreas Preiss from Zoch Verlag has employed that phrase in his overview of Mea Culpa, a game in which you sin in order to gain income to absolve your sinning. A game engine based on life!

• One, two, three, four, I declare a Meeple War, but in a boxed format from Blue Cocker Games with no counting being involved.

• One of the things that doesn't get said enough is how amazing it is that so many designers and publishers can present their material on the BGG livestream in a non-native language, as with designer/publisher Bernd Eisenstein from Irongames, who here presents an overview of the dice-drafting and management game Phalanxx. I can comprehend menus and sort of read rulebooks in a couple of non-English languages, but if I couldn't use English in a presentation or interview at best I could mime the actions of a game.

Note that I plan to feature a handful of game demonstrations from our SPIEL 2016 coverage on BGG News each day until all 200+ videos have been published. To see them all, please head to the SPIEL 2016 playlist on the BGG YouTube channel.