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Tweets from FIJ 2017 in Cannes, France: Cities of Splendor, Batman: The Boardgame, Otys, The Grizzled Campaign, Dragon Ball Z: The Board Game, and More

Tweets from FIJ 2017 in Cannes, France: Cities of Splendor, Batman: The Boardgame, Otys, The Grizzled Campaign, Dragon Ball Z: The Board Game, and More
From gallery of W Eric Martin
The 2017 Festival International des Jeux took place in Cannes, France on February 24-26, and between my young assistant and myself we took more than three thousand photos of the games, publishers and people at the show. Admittedly many of those photos were taken in bursts of thirty or forty until I taught m.y.a. a few more things about the camera, but we still ended up with an overwhelming number of pics, many of which I've shared on the BGG Twitter account and many more of which await sharing.

Here's a round-up of some of the pics I've already published on Twitter and the BGG Facebook account. Many of the items shown below still need proper BGG database listings, but those will have to wait a little longer unless designers and publishers in the know want to submit them now.

•••






Let's start with one of the most anticipated games known before FIJ opened: the Cities of Splendor expansion. I'll post a more detailed overview of this expansion separately, but note that the artwork shown here is obviously placeholders. To explain more than what's in the tweet, each player has a set of these five cards, and as soon as you've collected cards that match the totals shown on them (e.g., five green cards), you flip over the card and gain the special power shown on it for the rest of the game. Gold tokens are worth two of the same color instead of just one, for example, or you get to take a token from the reserves before buying a card.





The most anticipated game not known (at least to me) prior to FIJ was Batman: The Boardgame from the team that created Conan: Frédéric Henry and Monolith Editions. We recorded a long overview of this design, which uses the same core system as Conan, with some changes both for the multiplayer game and a new approach to two-player games; in this latter set-up, each player has their own control panel, with one controlling villains and the other heroes.







My son Traver was all over the place with his picture-taking, but some turned out just right (after cropping), with him sometimes setting up shots beforehand. He told me later that this one was inspired by The Hunger Games, which we're reading now while traveling.



Giant-sized displays were to be found all over FIJ 2017, and I encourage more publishers to make use of these eye-catchers at future conventions. When people are playing at such a display, you're no longer demoing the game to just those playing, but to dozens of passersby, many of whom stop to stare because the gameplay is more visible and dramatic.











We recorded 30-40 game overview videos at FIJ 2017. I'm not sure of the count as we kept recording, then moving on. The show runs late, with the exhibit hall open until 21:00 on Friday and 20:00 on Saturday, with an after-hours demo space for game prototypes — the Off — starting at 22:00 and running until 04:00 for four evenings.

Yes, the prototype space is open more days than the convention itself. Nadine Seul, the general commissioner of FIJ, told me that the Off has been running for at least ten years, and it started as a side happening during other events before blossoming into the huge happening that it is today. I recorded a walkthrough of the Off as well, but I need to add a voiceover track as we kept getting odd feedback in that space while having no such troubles in the lower floors where the exhibitors were located.











In most cases games are universal and can be played by all, but when you have a speed reaction game based on your ability to recognize characters in a French-only manga, some players are going to have an advantage over others...



















I have since been informed that speculoos shakes can be had in the U.S., albeit perhaps under a different name. I have been missing out on these for years, alas.



More pics to come on Twitter in-between a few off hours in Cannes. I'll post another round-up in this space as well, along with the final videos from Spielwarenmesse 2017 and more pics from NY Toy Fair 2017. I'll be at PAX East on March 10-12, 2017. Perhaps I'll see some of you there!

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