Videos from Spiel 2014 XXXIV: RYŪ, Artificium, Costa Ruana, EverZone, Altaria & Abraca...what?

Videos from Spiel 2014 XXXIV: RYŪ, Artificium, Costa Ruana, EverZone, Altaria & Abraca...what?

Board Game: RYŪ

• And we're off on an overview of another half-dozen games that the BGG crew saw at Spiel 2014, starting with a preview of RYŪ, a game due out in Q1 2015 from French publisher Moonster Games and designer Kim Satô. (Not Gary Kim as I mistakenly stated on the video after seeing his work all over the place at Spiel 2014. Gah, so embarassing! And I should have recalled who the designer was since I've played and loved Satô's GOSU, which is what had me interested in RYŪ in the first place when I caught word of it way back in 2012.)

Well, with that confession out of the way, I'll note that after filming this video, the four of us played RYŪ and it was a tense and engaging game. While built on a system of collecting and using cubes, RYŪ is actually a racing game since everyone is competing to be the first to complete their mechanical dragons. That goal drives your activity in certain directions, with you trying to be in on as many "cube splits" as possible with the other players (just as you try to trade as often as possible in Bohnanza) so that you can push forward with our construction — yet the more you build, the more that others want to avoid having anything to do with you.

The playing area is essentially a rondel of action tiles, but you can move in either direction around the circle, and your choices of movement — along with the choices of others who may or may not beat you to certain spaces — keeps things highly interactive. It's been a long wait for this game, but this project is far bigger than anything previously undertaken by Moonster, so the finances involved are also far bigger, which means you want those ducks to be orthogonally organized before doing anything crazy.

Board Game: Artificium

• Lifestyle Boardgames is a new game publisher from Russia, and it debuted at Spiel 2014 with Timofey Shargorodskiy's Artificium, which is a boiled-down resource development game similar to how Splendor is a boiled-down economic engine game. Everything is stripped to cards and straightforward trading as well as sometimes players being jerks and taking what you hoped to trade in the near future.

Board Game: Costa Ruana

• In addition to debuting Artificium at Spiel 2014, Lifestyle Boardgames previewed its next release: Yuri Zhuravlev's Коста Руана, which would be pronounced "Costa Ruana" in English. This is another one that I was able to play at Spiel 2014 — in fact, I played almost nothing but releases scheduled for 2015 — and it's a quick-playing, semi-bluffing majority game in which you're trying to place your natives on islands in order to grab treasures, but everyone else is also doing the same thing, so you had best trick them into doing what they don't want to do.

Board Game: EverZone: Strategic Battles in the Universe

• Marco Mingozzi's EverZone: Strategic Battles in the Universe from Winterlair is, as the name suggests, a battle game set in the future in which up to six players create army decks featuring units and support equipment from three races to compete for control across three types of environments, with players trying to put together useful combos when they can and back out of fights gracefully when they can't.

Board Game: Altaria: Clash of Dimensions

• At Spiel 2013, my cameraman John and I ran across Polish publisher Axel at the back end of Hall 3 and recorded an overview of Might & Magic Heroes since Axel wasn't scheduled to present anything in the BGG booth. At Spiel 2014, we did it again, running across Altaria: Clash of Dimensions, although Beth ended up being the one on camera for the interview — well, for most of the time anyway...

Board Game: Abracada...What?

• Hey, since I mentioned Gary Kim in the opener, let's close with his Abraca...what? from Korea Boardgames. I was able to play a few rounds of the prototype at Spielwarenmesse at the start of 2014, and the game was silly fun, with players being ancient wizards who forgot which spells they knew — but they were dead set on wiping out the other wizards on the battlefield so they tried to cast spells anyway, only to sometimes have them blow up in their faces.

For a short description, think competitive magic-based Hanabi with way more talking than during that game. I've played the complete game a couple of times since Spiel 2014 and have greatly enjoyed it.

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