Cocktail didn't have a public stand at Spiel 2014, but a funny thing happened on the way to Essen. Coup designer Rikki Tahta of La Mame Games contacted me prior to Spiel to ask whether he could buy a copy (as I had posted on the Spiel 2014 Preview that I'd have a few copies on me for purchase) and in short order he volunteered space at his booth for Body Party. "Really?" said I. "Sure," said Rikki, "and I don't care about making anything. Just let me know how many you can get me, and I'll take things from there."
In the end, Cocktail Games delivered 96 copies to Rikki, he played the game with his family at some point during the convention, he sold them all shortly thereafter, then he donated the profit from the sale of Body Party to a charity group that he works with. Man, what great people you run into sometimes! Riches, riches, everywhere!
In any case, here's an overview of the game, shot on the final day of Spiel 2014 when my voice was absolutely destroyed:
• For a complete change of tone, let's turn to Gothic Invasion from designers Alexander Boucharelis and Lefteris Iroglidis and publisher Storyception Games, which sets Romans against Goths and...that's all I got, although I do like the idea of doing game mash-ups to get Gothic Body Party: "Touch your nose ring to my ankh tattoo."
• And we'll radically change tone yet again to look at Age of Soccer from the design team of Araim, Choudri, Choudri, Pambos and Rahim and first-time publisher Legend Express. The cover looks a bit...odd for a game about soccer, but that's because players call upon ancient deities for assistance during the game, with those deities possibly rewarding you with divine powers. It's a different take on ye olde football game, that's for sure.
• This is now an interesting challenge, although the variety of subject matter used in games is thankfully wide enough that you can easily punt your attention across vast fields and up somewhere completely unexpected based on where you were previously. Thus, Steam Donkey from designers Gary Dicken, Steve Kendall and Phil Kendall, a.k.a. Ragnar Brothers, with this being a card-based building game with a steampunk feel and special characters on hand who help one or another of you as they please.
• From steampunk, we'll jump to the smooth digital world of Whacky Wit Mini from designer Norman Sommer, which is a smaller version of his Whacky Wit, with both of them being analog versions of the Pac-Man arcade game. Lincoln, who handles a lot of the video recording details at Spiel, took home a large Whacky Wit in 2013 and now he adds its little cousin to his collection.
• To end, we'll head over to Krzysztof Wolicki's The Lord of the Ice Garden from RedImp Publishing, which is based on a novel series of the same name from Jarosław Grzędowicz. I can't do justice to the summary already presented on the BGG game page (which I had edited in Sept. 2014 in the pre-Spiel frenzy but did not recall due to said frenzy), so I'll reprint that:
Players impersonate the scientists struggling for the domination over The Coast of Sails and also for staying on Midgaard, because soon after them another person arrives to this world: Vuko Drakkainen, highly trained agent, whose task is to find the members of scientific expedition and send them back to Earth — or as a last resort make them vanish. Will the players, as powerful gods, allow him to do it?
From the first turn, the players are tossed in the middle of war. They will feel the adrenaline, fear, pain and the heat of a battle. They will smell blood and sweat, hear the clash of arms and the moaning of wounded and dying.