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Even with us recording for ten hours, Lincoln and I covered only a tiny fraction of the new games being shown at Game Market, but ideally we have a nice sampling of what was at the show, starting with this overview of Masaki Suga's passtally from the doujin group analog lunchbox. This tile-laying game for 2-3 players fits nicely into the category of games like Metro or Tsuro in that you're trying to create the longest path possible because your score each turn is based on the tally of the tiles you pass through, with the height of a tile also being a scoring factor. What's more, you can move your scoring targets around the perimeter of the playing area, which means that opponents have a harder time cutting off your scoring since you can move to fresh ground.
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I'll mention that we have both of these titles coming for purchase to the BGG store, but we have only 25 passtally and 10 Coffee House because that is literally all the copies that analog lunchbox still had in reserve. Lots of non-JP game publishers who visited Game Market were swarming over both titles, so perhaps you'll see new editions of these games down the road in any case.
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Now Bodogeimu has released Savannah Smile from designer Fuji, a 2-5 player design in which you attempt to anticipate how animals will move around the playing area and where you should set up your camera at which time so that you can take pictures of them — and during the game, you literally take pictures of the animals, such as the one showing on the video thumbnail that I took during our demo. The giraffe is just barely visible in the background, so more points for me!
I know that some folks don't like players using phones during tabletop games, but this idea is an inventive integration of the phone into the gameplay, plus you now have souvenirs after playing to show off to others and share on social media. I can't imagine this game not being picked up by certain media-hungry publishers...
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Which brings us to Oink Games, which apparently made the leap from doujin to professional publisher several years ago. Oink Games had the first SPIEL-style booth at Game Market that I saw, and the publisher maintains a consistent look to their games that wows fans and makes their releases instantly recognizable. Oink has been releasing a new title at each Game Market, and this show saw the debut of Moneybags from designers Jun Sasaki and Yoshiteru Shinohara, a game that challenges you to tip the scales in your favor and somewhat literally so given the metal coins that you'll fight over in this game.
• The appearance of Moneybags in Tokyo was something of a surprise as at the Osaka Game Market just one month earlier, Oink Games had released Zogen, a real-time game by Christoph Cantzler and Anja Wrede that challenges you to rid yourself of microorganisms, whether by playing them legitimately onto a shared discard stack or by cheating your way to victory under the lazy eyes of your opponents. Perhaps we should now get in the habit of anticipating a new game from Oink at every show, although I'm not sure that principle will hold true at Gen Con 2018 in August — or will it?
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The gameplay is kind of a head-spinning combination of Patchwork and RoboRally in that players first draft polyomino pieces from a circular display, then assemble those pieces into a square grid, with that grid representing your robot for the "robot wars" game to come. You want to draft pieces that have turns and other actions that will benefit you during the war to come, but you also must fit all of those pieces into your grid, and the direction that you place a movement arrow in your grid will be the direction that you can move your robot in the future, so you need to take care!
Once everyone has finished building, you then enter the arena portion of the game, with everyone trying to keep their robot alive as long as possible while pushing others out of the ring and damaging them.
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