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As was the case at BGG.CON Spring in 2016, I played a small number of games multiple times while sampling a few other titles, most of which I had brought with me. We once again had all of the Spiel, Kennerspiel, and Kinderspiel des Jahres nominees set up for sampling in a special part of the main room, and as soon as I walked in and saw folks looking over the SdJ-nominated Wettlauf nach El Dorado, I knew that I had to jump in and teach them — and play in the third seat, of course — having already played a half-dozen times and recorded an overview video about the game.
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Immediately after this game, I played with others on a medium-difficulty set-up, and I inserted myself in multiple other game sessions over the next thirty hours to correct rules that folks were getting wrong. No, you don't keep the barriers between tiles face down. Yes, you can remove a barrier during your turn and continue moving. No, you don't put two explorers on the board unless you're playing with only two players. Yes, you can use a card with a higher number to move across multiple spaces. I'd say that playing games at a convention invites such rules confusion and the potential to have poor outings due to confusion, but plenty of people mess up rules at home as well. I know that I have more than once, but at least in this case I could catch mistakes on the fly and (ideally) allow players to absorb the game as intended.
I played twice more on Saturday night with Lincoln and Nikki from Game Night (since they intend to play all the S/Ke/Ki nominees on camera and wanted to get experience with the games ahead of time) and with one of the members of the Kinderspiel des Jahres jury. Fun times, and in one game I even managed to strip my deck down to almost nothing, snagging two "Wissenschaftlerin" and managing to strip nearly all the gold from my hand by the time I was a tile-and-a-half away from the goal.
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My entire deck
Seikatsu from Matt Loomis, Isaac Shalev, and IDW Games is a tile-laying game that plays in a few minutes, with players laying down one of their two tiles in hand each turn to score points immediately by matching nearby birds and to score points at the end of the game by placing matching flowers in the rows that a player sees from their perspective. Belying the prettiness of the design, you need to embrace your inner jerk to block others from nailing down high-valued flower rows, ideally scoring something for yourself in the process.
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What green sees, others do not
BGG owner Scott Alden was interested in playing Paolo Mori's Ethnos, and despite the sour taste left after my initial playing in April 2017 (or perhaps because of it), I wanted to play again to see what would happen.
The gameplay is straightforward: On a turn, either pick up a card from the draft pool or top of the deck, or play a band of cards that feature the same race or color, discarding all other cards in hand. I asked not to have both centaurs and elves in the game since in that initial playing, the powers of those races — centaurs: play another band after the first, and elves: hold onto X cards with X = size of the band played — led to few cards being discarded into the draft pool, which led to us top-decking for three-quarters of the game.
Thus, we ditched the elves and played with centaurs, giants, trolls, wizards, halflings, and skeletons — and wouldn't you know it, the exact same thing happened again. Perhaps not nearly as often, mind you, but we were top-decking roughly half the time, which led me to wonder how this game is getting as much love as it is. The owner of the game, who didn't play with us, said that he thought it was a fine design while admitting that they top-deck a decent percentage of the time as well. As before, I like the idea of Ethnos more than the finished product, but I'm game for more playings to see whether my opinion changes.
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Following that, Scott was eager to teach Julien Prothière's Kreus from Sweet Games and CMON Limited, a cooperative game with Hanabi-like elements that Scott has fallen in love with, playing it ten times in one night.
Your path to victory is relatively clear: Form a planet, and supply it with one of each of the four elements. To do this, though, you first need to play a comet and atmosphere and supply them with elements, after which you can play a rainbow, mountain, river, or wind, with those also needing elements to exist. Complete three of those and ideally you can move down to the next level — fish, bird, flower, tree — with those allowing you to complete the planet.
All the cards are in players' hands at the start of the game, including aggression cards that can sack elements on incomplete nature cards or prevent elements from being played, and on each turn, each player must choose a card and put it before them face down, after which cards are played in clockwise order. Scott describes this as a "smoke signal" game in that you need to read the players before you and after you in turn order to determine what they might be playing because — and this is the important thing — you are not supposed to communicate at all! The game does include a number of tokens, which varies as you play from 3-6 players, and you can use these tokens to reveal a card or swap a card (blindly) with another player, but you must use them sparingly and you recover them solely when a nature card is played.
Despite the restriction, we communicated all over the place, something essential in your first games as you often have no clue over what a legal or smart play might be, why player A is revealing to player B, why someone wants to swap cards, etc. You need that first game under your belt to start having a clue how to play, and even then we were still giving hints and conducting meta-talk about why you might have done such-and-such. We played twice on Friday, then four times more on Saturday with player counts of four, five, and six. As I tweeted at the time, this game is delightful and frustrating magic, and I hope to record an overview video soon as I think you need to see the game in action to fully understand it. I know that I didn't grok it following an explanation at the 2016 Origins Game Fair...
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The closest we came to victory
I should have gone to bed at that point — or perhaps three hours earlier — but instead we had five people for Mark Gerritts' Mini Rails from Moaideas Game Design, which turned into an epic exercise in hate-drafting.
In each of the six rounds of the game, each player takes one share in a company (starting that share at $0) and places one track (adding that colored disc to the network of the same color, with everyone who owns that share either raising or lowering the value by the amount indicated on the cover space. You can take those two actions in either order, with you choosing a disc from those laid out in a path and with the player choices determining the player order for the subsequent round.
The one disc not chosen each round is placed on a separate track, which represents that company paying its taxes. Yay, now it won't be confiscated by the government and its shares (if positive) will have value at the end of the game! If a company doesn't pay taxes, then positive shares are worthless and only negative shares will be counted in your final score.
We tore each other apart and possibly made many bad choices in the short time that we played, with the final scores being 5, 4, 0, 0, and 0. I was tanking similarly in a three-player game played during Tokyo Game Market, so perhaps the margin for victory is slim in all games.
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After breakfast and sleep, I headed to the exhibit hall to see whether I should take pics of anything, despite this being a fun trip and not a work trip, and I had to snap a shot of Pulsar 2849, coming from Vladimír Suchý and Czech Games Edition at SPIEL 2017. Here's a high-level description of the game:
Quote:
Draft dice to explore the universe in Pulsar 2849. Each round, roll dice based on the number of players, sort them based on their values, then draft dice to take actions, such as adding another spaceship to your fleet or visiting (or flying through) an unexplored star system or tagging a pulsar with one of your identity rings or advancing on your personal tech track, which differs from those of other players. At the end of the round, the turn marker advances based on the dice rolled that turn, and when the market reaches the end of the track, the game ends.
Players score points each round based on what they've discovered and explored, and everyone has hidden goals that they want to achieve, while also trying to claim the right to public goals that supply additional endgame scoring.
We'll have a more detailed presentation of Pulsar 2849 during the livestream from Origins 2017 in mid-June, but in general (1) this game is still being developed and CGE won't stop developing until it goes to print roughly one week prior to SPIEL 2017 and (2) after two years of Codenames fever, this design is a more typical CGE release, with a million things to consider all at once.Players score points each round based on what they've discovered and explored, and everyone has hidden goals that they want to achieve, while also trying to claim the right to public goals that supply additional endgame scoring.
(Note that Codenames fever will continue through at least Gen Con 2017 with the release of Codenames Duet, a game that we previewed in March 2017 at the GAMA Trade Show and a game that now differs greatly from that preview. The design had already changed from PAX East and GAMA, with barely a week between those cons, and now it's changed even more, with a campaign system of some sort being introduced. Again, more details at Origins 2017 when the design might finally be solidified.)
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Catan Studio has a nice playmat for Klaus Teuber's Rivals for Catan that it uses at conventions and that might make its way to retail shops at some point.
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Nearly a year after the game's debut, I finally tried Terraforming Mars, the Kennerspiel des Jahres nominee from Jacob Fryxelius and Stronghold Games. I used to play more games at this level of complexity, but I'm a fan of lighter games these days, mostly because I'm unable to get games like these to the table consistently, and if I can't play something multiple times, then I prefer to skip it entirely and focus on games that I will play multiple times. In any case, Lincoln and Nikki wanted to play as part of their Game Night preparation, so we joined another newb and one experienced player and dove in — and yes, I realize that starting a heavy game with a full boat and four new sleep-deprived players at 11:00 p.m. might not be the best idea, but we did it anyway!
I can understand why people like the game — revel in tons of choices! find those combos! — but I feel like the design and production are only 80% complete. When you pick up those initial ten cards, your head is spinning at the possibilities with no clue as to what's good and bad; sometimes you can eliminate cards from consideration since the conditions aren't right to play them — not warm enough, too little oxygen, no cities yet, etc. — but that's a mixed blessing when you stare at a hand of seven of those cards(!) as one player did. That player felt like they started with one hand tied behind their back as nearly everything was expensive or literally unplayable. I'm baffled as to why the game lacks starting hands a là Race for the Galaxy, groups of ten cards that give a helping hard to new players in the first few turns, that give some direction instead of allowing new players to flounder. As is, you feel like you're walking into a firehose, making no progress and finding it hard even to consider what you might want to do. Not the experience I think the SdJ jury would want folks to have when buying a Kennerspiel winner...
The styling of the card art is all over the place (and not in a good way), the font is too small on the cards, the graphic design does nothing to assist gameplay, and the player mats actively hinder you from having a good experience since it's critical to track your production level in six areas and you will undoubtedly hit that mat several times during the game, knocking your cubes higgledy-piggledy and cursing whoever decided not to make these mats out of thick die-cut cardboard. Maybe I'll wait to pick up the deluxe fifth anniversary edition of Terraforming Mars in 2021 when all these issues will have been taken care of.
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BGG admin Chad Roberts had asked me to bring Tokyo Highway, a game from Naotaka Shimamoto, Yoshiaki Tomioka, and itten that I had bought at Tokyo Game Market, so I did and we played in the early hours on Sunday.
In this game, you're trying to place all ten of your cars on your highway, and the only way to place a car is to build part of your highway either above or below a section of the opponent's highway that currently has nothing higher or lower than it — but for the most part (1) you're building your highway solely as an extension of what already exists, which means you have to snake in and out of the loops with all highway sections being the same length and (2) when you build a new column to support that highway piece, the column must be one token taller or shorter than the column from which you're building.
Three times during the game, you can create a column topped with a yellow piece, which allows you to both violate the "one higher/lower" policy and fork your highway either immediately or on a later turn. You continue play until someone places all ten cars (winning immediately) or someone runs out of pieces, in which case the other player wins.
We built tight, spiraling loops, which might have been a mistake as we were burning through column pieces quickly without placing many cars. Then Chad Godzillaed some of my highway, for which the penalty is handing over column pieces to the opponent and soon he ran dry. The game includes tweezers for both players, but I don't know whether using them would make the game easier or harder!
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My final game of BGG.CON Spring 2017 was Downforce, the latest take on Wolfgang Kramer's card-based racing system, which was present in his very first release Tempo, which is more than four decades old!
In the game, players receive a hand of cards, with those cards having one or more colored lines on them; those colored lines represent potential movement for the race car of the matching color. The game starts with players bidding to control one or more cars, using the cards in their hand to bid for cars. This system cleverly eliminates the need for money in the game as you're not going to bid for a color if you have none of that color in hand; at the same time, you reveal a bit of information about your hand to others. Each car comes with a driver who has a special ability, and that ability applies to all cars that you acquire.
Each player must acquire at least one car during the first phase of the game, after which you race, with players playing one card from hand and moving the cars in order from top to bottom of the card they played. You try to choke off movement of cars don't own while ensuring that your cars always have free lances ahead. It doesn't always work out, of course, and the game board is double-sided with a chokier set of lanes on the side not shown below. Good to see this game returning to print!
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The Hyatt Regency had a giant version of Jenga in the lobby, along with the beanbag-tossing game Cornhole, which served to cue hotel visitors in to the goings-on in the basement.
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Someone had created a giant-sized version of Jun Sasaki's Deep Sea Adventure from Oink Games and set it up in the common area of the basement. The psychedelic ocean might be the result of nitrogen narcosis, so take care when diving.
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On Friday evening after dinner, we drove to Madness Games & Comics in Plano, Texas. This is a phenomenally good shop, with a huge selection of titles new and old — sometimes really old due to the purchase of another store's stock! — along with multiple employees who are circling the floor, asking whether they can help, and actually providing help because they know what they're talking about. Highly recommended should you be in the area!
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Having enough games on hand for the moment, I bought the book below as I thought my son would enjoy it. Success, with him already having read it to my wife and his grandparents after I first read it to him. Good to see that I can still pick out things for him at this age, but the teenage years await...
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