New Game Round-up: Three More at Nürnberg 2013 – Lookout's Bremerhaven, Paolo Mori's Augustus & Attia and Ystari Together Again

Bremerhaven is a clearly structured but complex economic game about the famous harbor town in the north of Germany. Each player builds his own unique harbor and tries to reach the highest combination of money and prestige by the end of the game.

Each round, players are trying to get the most influence on the action fields they want to use. Since you place your influence cards face down, you have to watch closely what the other players might want to do. (You can even place more than one card on one spot.) The options are varied: Get a new ship with new goods into your harbor, close a new contract, change the values of the four different goods, improve your influence card-hand, expand your harbor, buy a new building, or simply rise in the nautical ranks to get more money. But you have to be careful: Every ship and every contract will stay in your harbor only for a short while. (The transporters and trains are waiting!) If you fail to coordinate the incoming and outgoing goods, you might have to pay penalty for not fulfilling a contract!

Bremerhaven ends after a defined number of rounds, and the rules include both a short version and solo rules. Visually the game will be in the vein of Le Havre.

Spyrium is set in an alternate world, an England set in a steampunk-based universe. Players build factories, needing workers to manage the production of a commodity previously unknown to use called "Spyrium". Producing Spyrium in one factory, then processing it in the next results in victory points (VPs) for that particular player. Alternatively, Spyrium can be purchased, but the material is rare and expensive, and players are constantly scraping for money.

Only those who from the beginning of the game manage to increase their regular income or their base of permanently employed workers (who can be used again and again to raise money) will be flexible enough to get their hands on the important end-of-game buildings to generate many VPs.

The circular nature of the game is flexible as each player can decide for himself when to move out of the placement phase and into the activation phase. With the two tracks in the game, those involved with delivery during the worker phase can then be used to raise money, to purchase an adjacent card, or to work on their own in an idle factory. All of these things are important, but in the end only the player who has dealt best with the lack of money, workers and Spyrium will win.

After the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, his adopted son Gaius Octavius ​​decided to return to Rome. Through his political ambitions, he had built up a good reputation and in 27 BC he received the right to speak first in the Senate. Now, carrying the title of Augustus, he has been proclaimed Roman Emperor, with that Empire divided into provinces.

In Augustus, the players represent Augustus in the provinces and must build the provinces economically and politically, fulfilling objective cards in order to receive credit for doing this. Players draw mobilization tokens from a bag, and if these tokens are present on their objective cards, they can place a legion on a corresponding field shown on one of their target cards. Fill all of these fields with legions, and the objective card is complete, with the player receiving a bonus and drawing a new objective card. Whoever first completes seven objective cards becomes Consul at the side of Emperor Augustus, dispatching all other players to farthest provinces in the Empire where they must live on berries and drink river water.