SPIEL '19 VI: From Livestream to Videos — The Castles of Burgundy, Zona, Ab durch die Mauer & Noch mal so gut!

SPIEL '19 VI: From Livestream to Videos — The Castles of Burgundy, Zona, Ab durch die Mauer & Noch mal so gut!
From gallery of W Eric Martin
At SPIEL '19, the BoardGameGeek team ran a livestream for more than forty hours over five days in which we featured a new game every five to ten minutes courtesy of that game's designer or a publisher representative or, in a couple of cases, me.

We've now chopped that livestream into bits and started posting those videos on the BGG Express YouTube channel, with 24 videos to date in our SPIEL '19 playlist, with another dozen scheduled to go live today, and with that playlist total probably topping three hundred once everything is out the door.

Let's highlight a few of these videos, starting with the final game overview we shot at the fair: my presentation of the new edition of The Castles of Burgundy from Stefan Feld and alea. As I note in the video, the publisher didn't have a representative available to go on camera and we really wanted to present this new edition to the BGG audience, so as I did with Carpe Diem at SPIEL '18, I managed to get a sample copy from parent company Ravensburger so that I could present the game on camera myself.

In another mirroring of 2018's Carpe Diem, Ravensburger ran out of copies of The Castles of Burgundy extremely early on Thursday. As a Ravensburger representative relayed to me, "There were production delays, and stock was driven up from Ravensburg." Copies of the game are also being air-shipped to BGG.CON 2019 for the game's debut in the U.S. This representative notes that the publisher is looking to overhaul production guidelines to avoid such rushes and shortages in the future.





• At SPIEL '19, Polish publisher Rebel transformed its booth into a bunker to promote the apocalypse-based Zona: The Secret of Chernobyl from Maciej Drewing and Krzysztof Głośnicki. The game has a great look to it that stood out from other apocalypse-based games in its promotional material, and now we can learn something about the game itself, too.

Board Game Publisher: Rebel Sp. z o.o.






Ab durch die Mauer from Jürgen Adams and Zoch Verlag won the InnoSpiel award for game innovation in a ceremony during set-up day at SPIEL '19. If you're not familiar with this design, which was released in the first half of 2019, now you can see it in action to discover the hidden secret of ghosts: magnets.





• I had played Noch mal so gut! from Inka and Markus Brand and Schmidt Spiele a couple of times prior to SPIEL '19, but not enough to do a decent overview video, so I had carted the game with me to SPIEL to get more experience, but the first chance to play it actually came when I was waiting to board my flight to Frankfurt and ran into roll-and-write master Suzanne Sheldon. Turns out that she had acquired the game at the fair, but not yet played it, so I offered to teach.

Here's a "great" shot of me checking the English rules midgame to clarify which special powers require adjacency and which don't:

Slouching on camera always makes you look your best. As for the gameplay, you can get an overview here:

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