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Videos from Spiel 2014 III: Ivor the Engine, Dino Race, 7 Wonders: Babel, Mascarade Expansion & Ca$h 'n Guns Second Edition

Videos from Spiel 2014 III: Ivor the Engine, Dino Race, 7 Wonders: Babel, Mascarade Expansion & Ca$h 'n Guns Second Edition
Board Game: Ivor the Engine
• Time for another handful of game demonstration videos recorded in the BGG booth at Spiel 2014, starting with the ever-loquacious Tony Boydell and his Ivor the Engine from Surprised Stare Games. Not having grown up in the UK, I'm unfamiliar with Ivor but the passion exuding from Boydell in his Ivor designer diary on BGG News has convinced me that I should search out the tales of this little engine to supplement all the Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck stories that I've been feeding to my youngster.





Board Game: Dino Race
• Ares Games' Roberto Di Meglio is normally on video talking about big games of his, such as War of the Ring and The Battle of Five Armies, but Ares releases a range of titles including the seemingly gentle Dino Race from designer Roberto Grasso, which I had previewed in a video shot at Spiel 2013 and which is now available. (I almost wrote "finally available", but I hardly think a year's advance notice merits a "finally". After all, many other games are in the cooker for a much longer period of time, such as...)





Board Game: 7 Wonders: Babel
• Okay, Antoine Bauza's 7 Wonders: Babel expansion from Repos Production hasn't been in the works that long, but it sort of feels that way to me as I was able to play a non-final version of it at Gen Con 2013 and the game felt complete to me at the time.

Funny thing, though, is that Repos tests and tests and tests its products to both look for odd interactions — which is certainly something to watch out for, what with 7 Wonders having so many add-on bits and pieces — and test how easy its designs are to be used. The look of the Babel tower pieces at Gen Con 2013 differed from the look of those pieces in a preview at Spiel 2013 and from how they looked at Spielwarenmesse 2014 and how they finally appeared in print in Essen. The law cards in the second half of the expansion made a similar number of transformations, and I believe that Thomas Provoost mentions one such change in passing in this video.





Board Game: Mascarade: Expansion
• A somewhat easier expansion to produce — or Repos Produce, as the case might be — was Mascarade Expansion, which introduces thirteen new characters to the bluffing role-driven game from designer Bruno Faidutti. I find it amusing that I've seen many "serious" gamers dump all over the Mascarade base game as being terrible when the base game has sold tens of thousands of copies and equally many people love it, terrible actually being a synonym for "not to my taste", of course, but somehow never coming out of people's mouths in that format.





Board Game: Ca$h 'n Guns: Second Edition
• Speaking of things that are "not to my taste" — well, not me my, but some people's my — we have the second edition of Ludovic Maublanc's Ca$h 'n Guns, which debuted at Gen Con 2014 and is now in the hands of European gamers, too. This new edition of the game features the same core gameplay as the original edition from 2005 — shoot other people to "discourage" them from taking stuff that you'd prefer to have in your hands — while changing many of the details around "shooting" and "taking stuff".

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