SpieleWahnsinn 2011: Nürnberg releases, Prototypes & Agricola of Future Past

The SpieleWahnsinn in Herne, Germany is a small, local annual game convention – but since you can always meet authors and publishers showing off new prototyes there and I had not yet seen any of the new releases presented at the 2011 Nürnberg fair, I didn't have to think for too long when a friend asked whether my girlfriend Christine Wübbena and I wanted to accompany him and his team to the convention held May 20-22, 2011. (He and his teammates were playing in the finals of the German Boardgaming Championships.)

We reached Herne on late Friday evening. At the Spielezentrum, where we were given the opportunity to sleep, we met the members of several other teams and the staff of the German gaming website Cliquenabend, who were visiting Herne to gather impressions of both prototypes and games in production.

While our friends were playing the finals on Saturday, we had the chance to look around and try some of the new games that had been presented at Nürnberg in February 2011. We tried Stefan Feld's new game Strasbourg, released by Pegasus. It felt like a well-designed auction game that very much depends on timing, and I kind of liked it. Unusually for a game designed by Stefan Feld, it included no destructive mechanism causing loss or other trouble, something common in earlier games from him from Notre Dame to Macao.

We also tried the new cooperative game Yggdrasil presented by Z-Man Games and Heidelberger which was nice, but outclassed by the new Lord of the Rings: The Card Game. That game was a thrilling experience and a safe buy for us as we played it several times within the next three days.

Meanwhile, the boardgaming championship that was taking place in a museum nearby had to deal with a two-hour-delay due to software problems. Finally, the 36 teams started with a game of Firenze, followed by eggertspiele's Pergamon and Amigo's Blockers. The delay unfortunately forced the organizational staff to cancel the final game planned for the event, Abacusspiele's Airlines Europe, a re-implementation of Alan R. Moon's classic game. Chief-organizer Peter Janshoff therefore proclaimed Airlines Europe would be one of the games for the 2012 qualification rounds.

After those three games, the title went to the Aachen Fantastics team with 44,5 points, followed by Die Münchener Vier and Meister der Magie, which were tied for second place (42 points). Our friends ended up in the middle of the field, place 18 out of 36.

The evening closed with the German soccer cup final (Schalke vs. Duisburg, 5:0), a game of Pergamon which I really enjoyed and a match of Poison as a little downer.

With our departure scheduled for noon on Sunday, we had only a bit of time that day to look at prototypes shown by eggertstpiele and Lookout Games. The prototypes that eggertspiele tested were in a very early stage and they decided not to publish one of them yet, but Santiago de Cuba, a new game in the Cuba/Havana family, and a prototype called Das Dorf ("The Village") seemed quite interesting on first look.

We also went to Lookout Games to chat with Uwe Rosenberg. Uwe showed us what he considered the final version of his new game Ora et Labora, which is scheduled for release at Essen in 2011. He said it's a game that shares the complexity of his Le Havre with a system that relies on combos of buildings for special abilities and victory points. He has also developed an elegant new stock mechanism, using a wheel to show the availabilty of the 16 different resources. Uwe hopes that this will make the decisions more intuitive compared to the huge resource piles you faced in Le Havre.

Finally, he showed us the prototype of a new Agricola game with the working title Agricola: Cave Farmers. It's a complete redesign that substitutes the card decks with a set of buildings and adds the ability to purchase weapons and send your farmers on quests to gain further resources. It looked very interesting, but as it's still in development Uwe told us that the game won't be published before Spiel 2012, and perhaps even later.

We finished our visit to the convention with a game of Zoch's Crossboule, a version of pétanque using coloured baggies instead of boules to make it playable on every surface. It was great fun and became the first outdoor game we ever bought. Let's enjoy the summer!

(My apologies to Jörg for not publishing this report earlier as it was one of many things that fell in the gap while I moved to a new home. —WEM)