Most of these videos clock in at less than three minutes, and I think that's because Katerina, the KOSMOS representative, remembered what happened in 2013 when we visited with a near-dead camera battery and had to whip through games as quickly as we could in order to record them all. For 2015, she raced through the demonstrations, giving what I think is enough of a hook on which you, the potential player, can hang your hat while not getting bogged down in extraneous details.
We'll start with Rüdiger Dorn's Da Luigi, a family-style game in which competing restaurant owners inflict customers — bad customers, mind you — on one another while trying to serve those sitting in their own place.
• Dorn also has a second title due out from KOSMOS in the first half of 2015: Tschakka Lakka: Die rasante Würfeljagd nach dem Tempelschatz. That subtitle succinctly summarizes the game's setting and manner of play, and once you remember those details, you can forget the actual subtitle and just focus on saying "Tschakka Lakka!" over and over again — although if you do that too much, you inevitably start singing this song.
• From a glance at the game board, it's easy to tell that Stephen Glenn's Lumis: Der Pfad des Feuers has some relation to Hex, and your goal is indeed to connect opposite sides of the board before your opponent can do the same, but you do through cardplay that creates towers and flames on the board. I'm hoping to try this out soon as Glenn and I have chatted a bit about the game, and I've enjoyed his past work, especially Rattlebones.
• Klaus Teuber won the 1988 Spiel des Jahres for Barbarossa, a party game in which you create clay objects that are ideally not too easy and not too hard for others to guess what they are. For 2015, he's transformed that design into the faster-playing Knätsel?!, which will be released by KOSMOS in the U.S. in 2015 as Dohdles!
• Alex Putfin's Crazy Time features the familiar "take turns flipping over cards, then race to do something when something specific happens" formula seen in Jungle Speed and other games, but now we're worried about the hours on the clock, the passing of time, and special rules that get added to the game each round.
• Michael Schacht is the designer behind The Big Bang Theory: Das geniale Spiel, in which you use characters from the show in order to collect treasured items, possibly thanks to a paradox or two thrown into the mix.
• My cameraperson John Knoerzer had not heard of Klaus Kreowski's dice game ZomBee before we stepped up to the demo table, and he groaned mightily at the title, but I find it a clever, kid-friendly take on a game trend — plus it opens up thoughts of exciting convention promos!
Okay, maybe not.
• Harry Hopper is the debut title from Florian Nadler, and I can imagine this game's origin at a bar, with people making up rules for how they can flip coasters and what they're trying to target with their flips. Maybe that's just me though...