x
search
menu

SPIEL 2016 III: Power Grid: The Card Game, Fabled Fruit, Fuji Flush, Undercover, & Guilds of London

SPIEL 2016 III: Power Grid: The Card Game, Fabled Fruit, Fuji Flush, Undercover, & Guilds of London
Board Game: Power Grid: The Card Game
• Designer Friedemann Friese of 2F-Spiele had a packed SPIEL 2016, with two titles receiving a lot of buzz and a third being a light filler that will probably be ignored by gamers but sell more than the other two combined.

At the top of the ticket was Power Grid: The Card Game, this being a standalone game that takes two-thirds of the essence of Power Grid — the auction for power plants and the competition for resources — and ditches the part about building a network of cities to which you need to supply power. Now the game is all about money being earned, so don't think of it as a tie-breaker any more!





Board Game: Fabled Fruit
• Fabled Fruit is a quick-playing, basic worker placement game (in that you have only one worker to place), but the hook of the game is that the actions available to you change over multiple playings. They don't have to change, of course, but that variety of gameplay is inherent to the design. More than 504 combinations of actions are possible, but I'll leave it to someone else to do the math.





Board Game: Fuji Flush
• For a simple game with few rules, Fuji Flush has a fascinating history that Friese has detailed in this GeekList.






Board Game: Guilds of London
• Designer Tony Boydell of Surprised Stare Games gives a masterclass elevator pitch for Guilds of London, which perhaps shouldn't be surprising given the many years he's spent working on the design, but as I've learned from experience not every designer (or publisher) knows how to pitch their games.





Board Game: Undercover
• Here's one example of the hazards of early knowledge: At SPIEL 2015 I shot an overview video of Frosted Games' Undercover with co-designer Daniel Danzer. The game sounded right up my alley — straightforward gameplay with a deduction element — but come SPIEL 2016 I forgot about it completely, not looking for the actual produced game at the fair. Early looks are good, but publishers need to time their hype so that folks are looking for their game at just the right moment.

Related

New Game Round-up: Building Forests, Fighting Rats, Drinking Randomly, & Avoiding Death

New Game Round-up: Building Forests, Fighting Rats, Drinking Randomly, & Avoiding Death

Oct 27, 2016

• We're ten days out from the end of SPIEL 2016, so it's time to start thinking about Tokyo Game Market in December 2016, right?Okay, you might not be thinking about that show, but I am, and...
SPIEL 2016 II: The Matt Leacock Show — Chariot Race, Thunderbirds: The Hood, Pandemic Iberia, and Pandemic: The Cure – Experimental Meds

SPIEL 2016 II: The Matt Leacock Show — Chariot Race, Thunderbirds: The Hood, Pandemic Iberia, and Pandemic: The Cure – Experimental Meds

Oct 26, 2016

• Designer Matt Leacock had four different releases at SPIEL 2016, so instead of trying to arrange demo times with the three publishers involved, we just arranged time with him and let him...
New Game Round-up: Playing with Noir, Being the Law, Driving Ogres, and Telling Stories

New Game Round-up: Playing with Noir, Being the Law, Driving Ogres, and Telling Stories

Oct 26, 2016

• In the first half of 2017, Upper Deck Entertainment will release Legendary: Noir, a 100-card expansion for the Legendary deck-building game set in the Marvel Comics universe, with this...
SPIEL 2016 I: Colony, New York Slice, Capital, Mea Culpa, Meeple War & Phalanxx

SPIEL 2016 I: Colony, New York Slice, Capital, Mea Culpa, Meeple War & Phalanxx

Oct 25, 2016

• For reasons unknown to me, Bézier Games typically kicks off our game demonstration livestream at SPIEL, and this was the case once again at SPIEL 2016, with Ted Alspach showing off the...
Designer Diary: Lotus, or Everything Blooms in Time

Designer Diary: Lotus, or Everything Blooms in Time

Oct 25, 2016

Hi there! We are Jordan and Mandy Goddard. Yep, you guessed it — we are married, and we design games together. We love getting the chance to work on projects together in our free time, and what...
ads