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Spiel 2015 XVII: Japon Brand Blitz — Sheep & Thief, Eight Epics, Vampire Radar, Tank Hunter & More

Spiel 2015 XVII: Japon Brand Blitz — Sheep & Thief, Eight Epics, Vampire Radar, Tank Hunter & More
Board Game: Sheep & Thief
• Japon Brand brings a wide variety of games to Spiel each year from many Japanese designers/self-publishers, and while I've covered a number of those titles in previews on BGG News, I was quite a ways from covering everything, so here's a hurricane of short videos that give a taste of what each game has to offer, starting with the card-drafting game Sheep & Thief from Yuichi Sakashita of Power9 Games.





Board Game: Tank Hunter 2e
• I know little of the second edition of Atsuo Yoshizawa's Tank Hunter — and its Cmdr and Jäger standalone/expansions — from Arclight as the only copy I've seen had all the cards in Japanese. That limitation in my abilities thwarts me in many ways.





Board Game: Vampire Radar
• Yuji Kaneko's Vampire Radar from Kaboheru is a fun one vs. many design in which the solitary vampire tries to destroy all of the hunters before being taken down by silver bullets.





Board Game: The Arabian Pots
• With The Arabian Pots from GIFT10INDUSTRY, designer Takashi Hamada had a specific goal: Create a game that could be played by both sighted and non-sighted gamers equally. Thus, he created a game that relies on sound perception and memory, one that comes with elaborate plastic pots as components.





Board Game: The Mystery of Dattakamo
• The Mystery of Dattakamo is another Hamada design from GIFT10INDUSTRY that matches his goal of allowing sighted and non-sighted gamers to play at the same table, this time in a party game that relies on the sense of touch and one's ability to think creatively.





Board Game: Pani-High!
• Pani-High! from designers Koipara-Shibucho and Takatsugu Nakazawa and publisher Zenfami Kyokai is an intense game of "take that" set in a high school, which seems like an ideal setting for "take that" actions as players fight for control of different locations.





Board Game: Hanafuda
• Hanafuda isn't a game, but is instead a deck of 48 playing cards that can be used to play many different games. Such is the problem of a game database that has evolved over time; if it helps at all, we do have a family of games that can be played with hanafuda cards. In either case, here's a small introduction to them:





Board Game: Idol Conclave + Million Hit Chart
• Idol Conclave + Million Hit Chart from Kazuhide Takaumi and Madoriya combines two games in one box, both of which involve players being part of an idol group and wanting stardom, although one game handles this cooperatively and the other doesn't.





Board Game: Eight Epics
• Seiji Kanai debuted his card and dice game Eight Epics from his own Kanai Factory at Tokyo Game Market in May 2015, and this game gives each of the 1-8 players a different character to use to manipulate die rolls in order to achieve the right combinations needed to strike down one disaster after another.





Board Game: Fram R'lyeh
• I've already posted my own overview video on rerasiu's Fram R'lyeh from BakaFire Party, a bidding/trick-taking game that hits the winner of each round with negative points equal to the successful bid, thereby challenging each player to crawl out of a hole of their own making by winning the right treasures at the right time.





Board Game: Reidemeister
• The second BakaFire Party title at Spiel 2015, with both actually debuting in May 2015 at TGM, is Reidemeister from BakaFire and Koipara-Shibucho, a real-time puzzle game in which players must first determine which rope or set of ropes they need to solve the presented challenge before actually attempting to solve said challenge.

I've played Reidemeister a couple of times, and while I enjoy this type of game, some people intensely dislike the challenges presented within, going so far as to watch everyone else first to see whether they fail before bothering to try to solve the challenge themself. Maybe that'll teach me not to spring real-time games on folks I don't know that well...

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