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Videos from Spiel 2014 XVII: ZhanGuo, Elysium, Illegal, Te Kuiti & Helvetia Cup

Videos from Spiel 2014 XVII: ZhanGuo, Elysium, Illegal, Te Kuiti & Helvetia Cup
Board Game: ZhanGuo
• What's Your Game? typically publishes one game each year — such as Vasco da Gama, Vinhos and Madeira — that makes a splash with those who prefer more involved modern strategy games, and for 2014 that title is ZhanGuo from designers Marco Canetta & Stefania Niccolini.

I first posted about the game in May 2014 in a round-up of games shown at the Herner Spielewahnsinn event in Germany, and even then you could tell from a glance at the board that ZhanGuo was a WYG title, even if you knew nothing else about it. Strong, consistent graphic looks across a publishing line can be a good thing if you plan to release games of a similar nature year to year.





Board Game: Illegal
• To contrast with the title above, let's jump to designer Christophe Boelinger, who goes all over the place with his Ludically publishing brand, from Dungeon Twister 2: Prison to Differences, from Earth Reborn to Sarena. For 2014, he released Illegal, a party game for 5-9 players who are dealing in some of the most questionable items that you'll find for sale.





Board Game: Te Kuiti
• And to cement Boelinger and Ludically's reputation for hopping all over the place with the games that it releases, he showed off a prototype for William Baldwin and Jim Harmon's Te Kuiti, a two-player asymmetrical game that Ludically will release in 2015. Yes, this was one of the few prototypes that snuck onto camera in the BGG booth at Spiel 2014.






Board Game: Helvetia Cup
• Whoops, here was another one, specifically an overview of the second edition of Crittin and Largey's Helvetia Cup from Helvetia Games, which had just launched on Kickstarter prior to the opening of Spiel 2014. That campaign was cancelled in early November 2014 and is now being retooled for relaunch at a later date. In any case, we recorded the video, so I'm posting it!





Board Game: Elysium
• Okay, at this point I'll concede that we demonstrated more prototypes than I had realized, but I'm glad that we got Elysium — from designers Brett Gilbert and Matthew Dunstan and publisher Space Cowboys — on camera in the BGG booth because at Gen Con 2014 Croc had given me an overview of the game and it sounded great, but he wanted to hold off on a video since Black Fleet was new on the market at that show. Don't step on your own feet, right? Give each release a chance to enjoy the spotlight before you swing it onto something else.

The gist of the game, for those who don't want to suffer through the unfortunately poor sound in this video, is that you're trying to earn the favor of Olympians. In each of the five rounds of the game, you're going to claim characters from the central playing area by using your colored tokens; each character card has one or more colored squares on it, and to claim the character you must give up a token matching one of those squares. Each character has different abilities, and you'll ideally combine these abilities in good ways to earn gold and victory points. To earn victory points, though, you need to give up your characters, thus losing those combinations you worked to acquire.

What's more, Elysium includes characters that align with eight Olympian gods, with the characters for a particular god generally working well together — but only five groups of characters are used in a particular game, thus allowing you to change the nature of the game simply by swapping one group of characters out for another.

All in all, this game sounds right up my alley — with stunning cover art to boot — and I'm looking forward to seeing it in print in early 2015.

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