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For the first time in a long while, I mostly stuck to playing games at a convention instead of interviewing designers and publishers about their new releases, and this was a welcome change from my normal experience of being surrounded by games for days but playing not even a handful of titles — and with the titles that I have played being embargoed since they haven't yet be announced. Instead of trying to dip into every new thing at BGG.CON Spring, I reverted to my con habits of old, that being to play only a few new games but to play them multiple times to try to internalize the nature of the gameplay and build on what I learned with each play. Sometimes I even succeeded at that goal!
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1. Discard any card to add one of your liverymen to the guildhall.
2. Discard a card to move one of your liverymen to a tile bearing the colored guild symbol on that card.
3. Pay the costs on a card San Juan-style to take the action on the card.
After everyone has played cards for the round, you resolve guild tiles that have enough tokens on them, granting rewards to those with the most and secondmost tokens on the tile, then placing one of the majority tokens on that tile as a master — with those masters being required in order to use some cards. Throughout the game, your hand of cards ebbs and flows as you put together combos for maximum impact, and everyone dances through the challenge of determining what to score when as turn order depends on your current score, with those at the back of the line acting last during a round in order to best punch those bullying frontrunners.
I've played three times, but I still want/need to play Guilds with two players as that set-up features a fixed playing area instead of one that grows during the course of the game. Once I do, I can then feel comfortable squawking about the game on camera. Experience matters...
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Early stages of a three-player game
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Finished!
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Four-player game; note how many more guilds have been mastered
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As SdJ jury chairman Tom Felber told me at the show, the 2016 nominee list was a bit unusual as six of the nine nominees were released in the latter half of 2015, which means that many people have already tried them out. Even so, the SdJ jury had brought three copies of all Spiel, Kennerspiel and Kinderspiel nominees to Dallas to make them immediately accessible to all — and this included Imhotep, which debuted in Europe in March 2016 and which won't be released in the U.S. until June 21. All three copies of Imhotep were occupied much of the show, but Thames & Kosmos had rushed me a review copy as well, which meant that I could still play despite this.
After five plays with three or four players, my quick take on Imhotep is "meaner chicken Splendor" — not that the game plays anything like Splendor, mind you. Rather, like that earlier game, Imhotep features four micro-actions that don't seem like much when you view them individually. Once you interlace those actions with those of opponents, however, the competition heightens and you're rarely sure that you're doing the right thing, especially in the early game.
In short, you take blocks from the quarry, load them on boats, then deliver the boats to ports that provide either different scoring opportunities or cards that give you (1) an action-plus on a subsequent turn, (2) an immediate play elsewhere, or (3) an endgame scoring bonus. The gameplay feels somewhat like a truncated Medina in that timing is everything; you want to stuff boats full of your blocks in order to maximize scoring at one location or another, but anyone can move any boat as long as it has enough blocks on it — which means that as soon as you load that triggering block, you might find yourself shunted somewhere useless.
Yes, hurting you costs someone else an action, which might make them less inclined to do so, but they might also be protecting their own scoring opportunities in the same turn. Each round you try to suss out who might be a great hook-up partner for the round, but almost inevitably they disappoint you, leaving you to wait for the next round of boats in order to try, try again.
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First game, first round
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I like big blocks and I cannot lie
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Trying the B-sides, which have different scoring conditions and more to think about
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Victory via tiebreaker!
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Karuba is a SweeTarts game, something you race through quickly before grabbing another and doing it again. For the most part, you focus solely on what you're doing as you lay down paths through the jungle in order to move colored explorers to color-coded temples. Only after suffering a few disappointments do you pay attention to the progress of others and try to keep pace with them in order to break the temple tape at the same time.
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Codenames: Pictures plays the same as Codenames, but with the cards showing images instead of words. Simple, yes? As in the earlier game, the spymaster gives their teammates a single word clue along with a number, then those teammates try to identify the spies on their team. You can now say any word you like, even something like "window" when the card in question clearly depicts a window! Such a clue isn't very helpful, after all, since you want your team to identify several cards each turn, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
Convention goers disagreed on whether Pictures was harder or easier than Codenames, and I think such disagreements relate to temperament as much as they do experience. One fellow walked away as soon as he saw the image cards, for example, but after listening to us play, he admitted that using them might not be as impossible as it had originally seen.
According to Githens, the images are black, white and gray in order to avoid clue-givers being able to use color words as easy clues. The image layout is now 4x5 (as opposed to 5x5 in the original game) in order to make more stuff happen; you're more likely in this situation to hit something positively or negatively instead of whiffing on a bystander. You can easily make this change in Codenames by using the spy layout cards from Pictures (or play 5x5 in Pictures by using the original cards).
Heck, you can also mix the word and image cards however you like. We've already seen plenty of people playing Codenames with Dixit cards, game boxes, etc., and I expect the iterations will only further proliferate with this new edition of the game. Githens says that CGE also changed the layout and made the Pictures cards square instead of rectangular to show that they're not fixed on one particular way to play or one format for the components. As I've stated before, the rules for Codenames are a flexible framework that can be filled with whatever content you can imagine, so don't expect this to be the final iteration of the game...
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Solver's perspective; close to victory...or defeat
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Clue-giver's perspective
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Trying to transmit clues psychically
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Sea of Clouds is a drafting game of sorts, with you taking a share of loot (which consists of one or more cards) during your turn or adding another card to the share. Some cards are poison depending on what you're trying to do in the game — rotten rum, cursed objects, relics that ruin you on their lonesome but become valuable in multiples — so the value of the loot varies widely from player to player, and even over the course of the game once someone cuts off a particular relic type or starts building up a pirate horde for the thrice-a-game boarding party, which is not a party, of course, but a chance for you to steal, swap and gain.
The gist of the game is the "bird in the hand" conundrum, with you not knowing whether the birds in the bush will taste delicious or peck your eyes out, combined with you often not wanting to leave the bird for the next sky pirate.
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Sacrificial monkey on board
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Final holdings: a rancid selection of rum, and a rum selection of relics
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Simon's Cat is an UNO-style rolling-trick game, with you either matching the color or number of the card most recently played or else taking the pile and starting a new trick. The number of cards that you take doesn't matter, only the number of piles that you take, with that player (or players) receiving a blame card at the end of the round. Collect three blame cards and you lose the game.
The hook for this design is a six-suited deck in which each suit has a different range (1-2, 1-4, 1-6, 3-8, 3-10, 3-12), which makes for a fun challenge when you're counting cards during play — not that I was doing that or anything. The piles that you take remain face-up, making it easier for everyone to know what you lack and play into those holes in your hand. I played twice and took home a copy so that I could lay blame on others.
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Randy Scheunemann takes pleasure in my suffering
• I played a few other games as well: Deep Sea Adventure because I wanted to play with those at the table; Steam Time because I saw folks setting up to play, offered to teach, then accepted their offer to join them; I Hate Zombies because the publisher was running a special con version with lots of people and Happy Salmon because ditto; Lanterns and Isle of Skye because I just hadn't made the time before; Deception because I could get away with murder (and did); and Concordia because I knew that I'd probably love the game and someone who already did offered to teach it to me. (Success! Anyone selling a Concordia bundle cheap?!)
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Every Steam Time is a good time
One game that I didn't play but plan to in the near future is Evolution: The Beginning, a streamlined standalone version of Evolution produced by North Star Games that will be available exclusively through the Target retail chain starting around August 2016. More details on this game in a future post.
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Nick Bentley (l) and Dominic Crapuchettes (r) of NSG get eaten by SdJ jury member Martin Klein
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