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All about Games in a Box

Issue #1 2012 founded 1981

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EDITORIAL

T he oldest known dice (actually, onedie only) come down to us from theSumerians, who were apparently

very keen indeed on their dice games,according to the art historian and poly-math Erhard Gorys (in Das Buch derSpiele). Even before then, mankind askedthe gods questions using spillikins, bonesor stones. In ancient Rome, the practice ofhelping the divine answer along hadbecome so widespread that various doo-dads were invented to make fudging therolls a little bit harder – such as the dicecup and the dice tower. In the Middle Ages,Chaucer and Shakespeare spoke of thedangers of dicing, and many writers calleddice the work of the devil, so it’s fitting thateven today opinion is sharply divided onthe dear old random number generator(mostly d6). The average board gamebuyer clearly has no issue with them, sinceotherwise we’d hardly see Monopoly, Ludo,Risk or Yahtzee among the all-time best-sellers. Likewise, the German “Spiel desJahres” jury has never been averse to dice,even back when the award began. In halfof the first seventeen prize-winning games,up to and including The Settlers of Catan,there were dice in the box. You’ll also find two dice when you lift

the box lid on Feudality (page 34), whichwould hardly be worth mentioning if thegame weren’t published by Lookout, whountil now had been a dice-free zone.Hanno Girke, the publisher, even saw fit toput a “hazard warning” inside the logo onthe box design, which is a good indicationof how sensitive hard-core gamers can beto such irritants. Intensive gamers mostlylike optimization tasks with a random fac-tor as low as possible, and the most popu-lar mechanic at the moment, worker place-ment, is superbly suited for variations onthis theme. Though optimizer players dolike some dice games as well, such as Titanor Liars’ Dice, these really are outlier cases.If things look different these days, and

the Nuremberg games fair is positivelypacked with dice games (see page 16) andwith dice variants of well-known titles(page 15), then it’s only natural to ask why.This question really has two answers, sincethere are two trends which have little to dowith one another but which combine togive the impression that there is some kind

of general return to the old established ran-domizer. Dice versions of successful titlesare nothing new. As far back as spielbox3/2007, our colleague Edwin Ruschitzkawrote an article asking whether dice gameswere the new card games. At the time wesaw dice games of Risk, Settlers andAlhambra, though it would be three yearsbefore there was a real Carcassonne dicegame to match the faked-up picture thataccompanied the article. One reason whyall the big games publishers are jumpingon the bandwagon is the new trend for sim-plicity of play – at least, that’s how theyread the omens now that Qwirkle has wonthe “Spiel des Jahres” red pawn. The othertrend has to do with games houses being(ho-ho!) risk-averse, especially when timesare hard, as they are in the games marketright now – even more than usual. Risk canbe minimized by publishing dice games,which are usually a smaller and less costlybreed. Thanks to China’s factories, diceright now are hugely cheaper than theywere twenty years ago. If your new dicegame can also surf the wave of a successfultitle, so much the better, even if that successwave is beginning to break. Thus, this trendwill hardly lead to great innovations.Feudality, too, is sadly not packed with

the innovations necessary to make hobby-ist gamers think again about dice. Luckilythere are such innovative games – think ofKingsburg or Roll Through the Ages,which is temptingly close to Yahtzee andmay be the ideal gateway game to make areal hobbyist out of a casual gamer. A lotof games houses are hoping that dicegames can make their number come up,and they really should embrace the oppor-tunity. Dice are the common denominatorfor simple and more demanding games.It’s true enough that the big houses aren’tmaking big bucks with the complex gamesright now, but there’s a broad rangebetween these two extremes where agame can make its home – especiallywhen a gifted designer can help a gamealong. Just don’t try to help the dice along.As the German games writers HelmutSteuer and Claus Voigt wrote (in rororo-Spielebuch), the really interesting thingabout a die is that you never know whatnumber is going to come up next.

Matthias Hardel/sw

The common denominator

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1 I 2012

I CURRENT06 I Small is Beautiful

International Toyfair, Nürnberg 2012

I INTERVIEW12 I Now with the Blue Triangle

Uwe Rosenberg 14 I Ystari Threefold

Cyril Demaegd

I SPIELBOX EDITION30 I Pirates & Diplomats

New Options for Navegador

I A LOOK BACK31 I Slow and Steady

The Success of David Parlett

I REVIEW04 I Pearls on Tracks

Indigo20 I Unashamedly a

Gamers' GameOra et Labora

22 I A Full Evening’s GameDie Siedler von CatanAufbruch der Händler

24 I Race for Six Feet UnderVillage

26 I One More Amusement ParkConey Island

28 I No Good Without WoodRapa Nui

34 I In a Dice FrenzyFeudality

36 I The World is Key to VictoryArcanum

38 I Basically, It’s a Dice Building GameQuarriors

42 I Stalemate? Never mind!1812 The Invasion of Canada

44 I Dealing With a Red Herring?Upon a Salty Ocean

I PORTRAIT40 I The Art of Infotainment

spieltrieb!

I FOR KIDS47 I Super Rhino!47 I Die Schatzkammer von El Mirador48 I Großer Optikbaukasten48 I Twiga Trick49 I Mirakel

I AT A GLANCE50 I Tuareg51 I Kalimambo52 I Jagdfieber53 I Siebenpunkt

I STANDARDS53 I Contact54 I Short notes56 I Tweaks and Variations

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no real railroader would design rail con-nections in such a peculiar, winding way.

I Alone or in cooperationEach player has three sides of the

board to use as a portal, removing gem-stones from the board and collectingthem. As the number of players increasearound the hexagonal board, the numberof shared portals increases. With twoplayers, each gets one portal. With three,you will need to share one of the exitswith another player. Finally, with four,you will not have any portals solely foryourself. Sharing a portal impacts thestrategy used to play the game. In thetwo-player game, each fights to achievethe best result, and with three or fourplayers, you negotiate with allies. Inother words, the gemstones do notbelong to the person that maneuversthem off the board, but to the player(s)owning the portal they leave. To keeptrack of two players gaining a gemstonefrom a shared portal, the publisherstreated us to a second set of stones, at the

A t the outset, the quilt is stitchedwith gems in different colorswith varying values. The six valu-

able ones are placed in the center andthe other six “cheap” ones are distributedto the gaming area’s corners. Our mainaim is to collect these gemstones by mov-ing them along paths to the very edges ofthe board. There, we find imaginary por-tals, each three hexes wide. All playerseither have their own or share it withanother player. The paths are found on hexagonal tiles,

which show three separate sections of apathway – straight, gently turning, orsharply bending – that leads from one tilecorner to the other. Each tile fits to anyother one, no matter how you turn them.They form a network of paths, which inthe course of its formation, takes a moreor less winding shape. The rules are extremely simple: Each

player picks up a face-down path tile andplaces it on an empty space. There is noneed to connect to anything (eventhough in practice, this is what most peo-ple do). If the tile borders a gemstone, itis moved right to the end of the recentlybuilt path. Done.All players aim to direct the stones

towards their own portals, which theother players will try to prevent by divert-ing the stones. The outcome depends onthe path tiles you have currently at yourdisposal. At the game’s end, which comesabout as soon as all gemstones have beencleared away, players count up the theirgemstones’ total value. The winner is theone with the highest sum. For a game byReiner Knizia, this is a surprisingly simpletally. As far as the game’s theme, Indigocould have easily been a railroad game;the gemstones move along the gamearea as if they were on tracks. However,this would have been implausible since

We have a gaudy blanket in front of us, of Indian origin, embellished with trims,little gemstones, and ornaments. The lavish border frames a game area quiltedwith hexagonal spaces. Our hands touch the shiny satin and ... hang on, this isnot a blanket at all, but cardboard. However, it is quite striking how it was pos-sible to design such a gorgeous abstract game board from hexes. And why is thegame set in India? Because indigo, the deep-blue colorant for which this gameis named, is sourced from indigofera plants, native to the Indian subcontinent.

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ready bythe side of theboard. Oneplayer takes thegemstone from theboard, and the othergets a corresponding onefrom the supply.All gemstones are collected behind

individual player screens to disguise whois currently in the lead. After all, I helpanother player gain points by moving astone through “our” common portal, andthat player should not be the one in thelead. Meanwhile, it is possible to hinderother players with whom you do not sharea portal. If a gemstone threatens to fallinto the hands of the other players, thenplace a tile that makes two stones collide.Both stones are taken off the board andno one collects them. Luck is involved in the game whenever

a random tile is drawn and placed. If youlike a more tactical approach, you mayuse the variant offered by the rule book:

Indigo

*** Children as co-op players: absolutely essential!

So, what is Indigo? A distinctly easy adult game (indicated by the suggested agerange “8 and up”) or a demanding kids’ game (which would normally be marked as“6 and up”)? My impression is that Ravensburger aims too high for its age range. Atfirst glance, there are several indicators for a grown-up game: the abstract design,the four large-scale rule pages, and a crib sheet for each player. In practice, it provesto be child’s play. In this game, it is almost impossible to make mistakes: The task iseasy and the tactical possibilities are limited. You have only one tile (or two with thevariant) to choose from, place it on the board, and the stones zoom along the newpath. Additionally, ganging up on the lead player is minimized by the screen hidingthe exact gemstone count for the players. Some adults lack the spatial skill for thebest path, whereas kids sometimes show an astonishing comprehension. Indigo is anabstract game, but children have enough imagination to fill it with life. Particularlyattractive is the element of team playing, when two players share a portal. Mostadults will use logic and protect their own interests. However, children negotiatetheir next move, enter alliances, and leave them again if forced by necessity. PlayingIndigo in a child-like style is so gripping that adults would want to join in. Withoutthis type of play, it is a somewhat banal experience.

Pearls on Tracks

REVIEW

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Reviewer Playing appealKMW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Udo Bartsch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5L. U. Dikus*. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7Matthias Hardel** . . . . . . . . . . . . 7Harald Schrapers*** . . . . . . . . . . 6

* After all, it should also be a feast forthe eye, but should always be playedwith choosing one of two path tiles forplacing.** Even if it were just basic training for18xx.*** see box.

IndigoRavensburgerReiner KniziaE. Freytag, W. Pepperle2–4about 8 and upabout 20–30 minutesabout 25 €

Title: Publisher:Designer:Artist: Players: Age: Duration:Price:

Players have two tiles at their disposal atall times, and choose which one to place.

I Anything but trivialTile placement games that build a net-

work of paths or tracks from square orhexagonal tiles are not a new invention,and are found one way or another inthe publishers’ product lines. There areeven games that employ the exact samepattern of pathways as Indigo. The earli-est was Psyche Path (Funtastic, 1968)that concededly used several colors.Another, Tantrix from the year 1988, hadan entirely different objective and wasdesigned more like a brain teaser. With Indigo, Reiner Knizia created a

remarkably entertaining family gamethat you can explain in a few seconds andwill be easily understood by others. It ismagnificently simple, but not trivial.Indigo scales well and is equally fun withtwo, three, or four players. It shows thefirst-class workmanship of the publishersand the editors. The game’s rulebook,design, and presentation are perfect.Well, is there anything wrong with it? No!

KMW/cs

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Don’t take any risks – that could be this year’s motto of the Nuremberg Toy Fair, at leastwith regard to the big new titles. Wherever possible, companies worked on a small scale,and continued tried and tested product lines. New interpretations using dice are particularly“in” – colleagues from the daily press would call it a trend. The offerings in box format are, on average, a size smaller and lighter, mainly due to Qwirkle, the current “Spiel des Jahres,” that set newmeasures in this respect. Our overview of the new releases begins with adult games, in alphabetical order by company.After those, remakes, spin-offs (game families and expansions), dice games and abstract games follow.

ing the start and destination of a race. Ifa player travels the fastest from Dakar toWalvis Bay, for example, he receives twocoins and three points. All players stop-ping in Dakar place one of their markerson the expedition card, and obtain a littleencouraging reward: the first of them to

reach Walvis Bay pockets a bonus. Sincethis is a game by Michael Schacht, theindividual turns are carried out quickly.And since it’s illustrated by Vohwinkel,Africana looks awesome. -ub

eggertspieleThey say that behind every strong man,there is a strong woman. And behindevery juggler, is a patron. If you supposethis might be an allusion to the Germanex-president and his fiscal friends, thenyou are totally wrong, of course. This isabout Spectaculum, and thus about trav-eling people, not to be confused withspongers and supplicants. These travelingpeople cheerfully roam about the country,while the string-pullers in the backgroundcash in. The string-pullers? That’s us: We

buy and sell artist cards of the four jug-gler troupes as profitably as possible. Theprice per card fluctuates; it depends onwhat locations the jugglers visit. This issomething that, literally, lies in the play-ers’ own hands. Each player has three col-ored pieces, randomly drawn and keptsecret, for the upcoming round. He placesthem on the gameboard, expanding thedistribution area of the jugglers of thatcolor. If he puts chips on particular places,then the price of the respective colorincreases or decreases, or an immediatedividend is declared, or a penalty is due.In the end, the richest player wins, andthe charlatans are left to their fate. Asimportant as they consider themselves,they are nothing but our marionettes. Ifthe trend turns around and a playingcolor becomes overused or unpopular,then we drop it and turn to another party.

Ah, it used to be so narrow and over-crowded on these awful public rondels,where everybody was allowed to laparound the circle as he wished. First andforemost, such familiar standard rondelsprovided, by far, too little room for indi-viduality. But now, no more of thisenforced conformity! Milestones giveseach player a rondel for his own, individ-ual arrangement. The bottom half of therondel is, and remains, the same for allplayers; here you find spaces where youstop and give up resources in order toerect various buildings on the game-board. The bothersome castle is also onthe bottom part of the rondel; the playingfigure stops there on its circular courseand pay exorbitant charges. This provokesa protest movement from the players, ofcourse. Emigrating to Monaco is notwithin the scope of the rules, but nobodycan keep you from markedly, slowly mov-ing your figure on its track. The upper halfof the rondel is supposed to show fields

AbacusspieleIt is the late 19th century; the Africancontinent is, for the large part, unex-plored. A “closed book” (that is to say, abook of seven seals), one might think, ifthe gameboard didn’t prove otherwise:two books, zero seals. One of the books

lies north of the equator, the other onesouth of it. We know their functionalityfrom Valdora: The books are stacks ofcards that the players buy from (providedthey’re visible), and they flip over as in afolio. This is not entirely for free, though,since there is a flip-over tax in Africa. TheNorth book contains cards that are to bechanged into points and into cash some-where in the south; for the South book, it’sthe other way around. Consequently,Africana sends our pawns across thecontinent, sometimes up, sometimesdown. We move ahead by means of travelcards, which have to match the color ofthe destination. And to assure that eachindividual player doesn’t just play alongfor himself, five expedition cards arealways on display for all players, indicat-spie

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Small is BeautifulInternational Toyfair, Nürnberg 2012

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that give the player resources. However,you first have to acquire these fields inthe form of cardboard tiles and lay theminto the rondel; otherwise, there is noth-ing in the upper half. If you comply withcertain specifications, then you’ll alwaysmake some extra profit. Finally, on theshared gameboard, players primarilybuild roads as well as market places orhouses. Roads need to be there first,because they open up new building areas.All players extend the same road. Onlymarket stalls allow for junctions. None ofthe objects scores a fixed point value.Numbers on the gameboard, which arecovered bit by bit, indicate the amount ofthe reward. -ub

Hans im GlückMore than one year ago, an advert inspielbox promised “Land ahoy!” ButSanta Cruz (see picture below) had to be

fine-tuned longer than expected, in viewof its scoring system. Now, Marcel-AndréCasasola Merkle’s latest work has beenreleased.

We place several dozen tiles on markedplaces on a fictional tropical island.Whereas the tiles in the interior remainface down for the moment, the tiles at theshore are displayed face up from the start.To begin with, we land at a coastal loca-tion, place the building required there,and immediately earn the victory pointsshown. All tiles that are adjacent to aroad or river connection are revealed.Then we play a hand card and carry outthe associated action.

A ship allows us to come ashore again.We spread out by playing road cards andriver cards. The latter even let us skip overlocations, provided the chosen tile lies atthe same river. If one plays a scoring card,all players who meet the criterion indi-

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helpers so that we can collectcombinations of wares andclimb up to the top of the statusindicator, step-by-step. The firstlevel costs two of the samewares of any kind, and the sec-ond, one piece of jewelry andone fruit. Farther up, the require-ments become more demand-ing, with the fifth level being thegoal. On my turn, I play up tothree of my hand cards. If I playfewer than three, then I get newcards or gold as compensation.Cards allow me, for instance, tobuy up an entire boatload ofwares. A portion of the wares areface down, so we don’t alwaysfind what we’re looking for. But fortu-nately, there are cards that help us out –for example, by allowing us to trade wareswith the supply or sell wares for gold. TheShaman does the best tricks; if I play him,I may – as an exception – pay with gold tomove up one level, which is especiallyfavored for bypassing difficult combina-tions of wares. This pay option is anuncertainty, though, because some cardscoming up randomly in the stack blowout the Shaman’s campfire, and if there isanything that Shamans dislike, it’s ablown-out campfire. Until another cardbrings the flames to a blaze again, theShaman is not approachable, not evenwith loads of gold.

And since everything in Africa seems tobe about only business, business and

business, Targi is set here, too. However,it’s farther north, where men wear a kindof veil and an old acquaintance frombeautiful Catan – the robber – makestrouble. Each round, he moves at leastone space along the sidelines created by16 cards. At regular time intervals, hetakes goods or, as a substitute, victorypoints from the players. When he finishesone lap, the game ends. Besides this, therobber gets in our way, since we use theouter spaces to place our three figures,and occupied spaces are forbidden. Eachsideline space stands for an action that aplayer is allowed to carry out later.Beyond this, the position of his figures onthe sidelines defines two cards in the inte-rior part of the playing area. These givehim goods or gold, or they are tribal cards

cated on this card get points, e.g., three oreven six points for each settlement alongthe river, if they have at least one buildingthat provides wood.

Since all scoring cards in the players’hands will be played at some point, thetrick is the right timing. Do I first focus onexpanding or do I score early, in order tomake free-riding more difficult? In thefirst round, we have to discover the build-ings and resources on the tiles and thescoring cards in circulation. In the second(and final) round, the tiles remain wherethey are, face up, and each player gets anadditional scoring card from the stockand may remove one scoring card fromthe game. If I watch carefully whoexpands how and where, I may guessfuture scorings. -cc

KosmosPick up vocabulary with Kosmos.“Jambo,” as we learned in 2004, means“hello.” After eight years, this rolls off thetongue easily; therefore, it’s time for thesecond lesson, this time in Swahili to Eng-lish, English to Swahili: Waka Waka!,which means, “Do it!” In this case, Rüdi-ger Dorn and Michael Menzel are theones who did it. And since author Dornadopts some elements of play from hisJambo, it is only fair that graphic designerMenzel copies some of his beautiful illus-trations from that game as well. So wecelebrate a reunion with our old friends:the drummer, the psychic, the tribal elder.Again, they hire themselves out as our

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tion manual is more com-prehensive than the actualgame rules. In City Alarm,two parties with differentobjectives fight againsteach other. The thieves tryto loot ten packs of moneybefore the police can con-fine them to prison. Onyour turn, you choose aface-down LEGO brick andreveal it. If it shows pips,you move a figure of yourparty the correspondingnumber of spaces on theroad network; if a train isdepicted, you let one ofyour figures jump to the

subway station of your choice. Only whenall bricks showing pips lie face up are theyturned over again and mixed anew, sothat one can better assess the possiblemoving range in certain phases of thegame. If a thief stands in front of a build-ing, the LEGO die determines how valu-able the loot is, and whether the policecan protect a building from an assault byusing the helicopter. In a variant, theprison is attached to the playing area,and a thief can liberate an imprisonedbuddy if he stands right in front. -cc

Lookout GamesAgricola takes off! No worries, theupcoming offspring is not at all a star-farer version transporting pigs into space.Not yet. To begin with, theattempt at offering a widerrange of the company’s hit,and generating an easierapproach, begins in quite aconventional manner: a two-player game named, DieBauern und das liebe Vieh.The title says what the gameis about: the farmers andtheir cherished livestock.And what it is not about.Food? Eliminated. Off-spring? Eliminated. Qualifi-cations? Gone as well. Youfocus exclusively on thesheep, pigs, cows, horses,the meadows, stables and –the other player. Being atwo-player game, DieBauern und das liebe Viehprovokes more confronta-tion: In addition to the

known Agricola conflict of wanting totake everything at once, there is now thenasty desire of snatching everything atonce away from the opponent.

Both livestock farmers have three work-ers, whom they place in turn. Twelveaction spaces are available. As usual,some of them are gradually filled and tryto entice the players with even morewood or still more sheep if nobody isinterested after a while. As in Ora et Lab-ora, it is possible to buy landscape stripsin addition to your own area. Since fencesare pretty rare, buildings are also helpfulin partitioning the different pastures;their outer walls are considered demarca-tions, too. Feed troughs have the effectthat more animals fit on one farm space,and that is good because, in the end,many animals score many points. -ub

Murmel SpielwerkstattIn Grosse kleine Welt, up to eight play-ers take over one country each and pro-duce brand-name T-shirts and roastedcoffee there. As in real life, the startingconditions are very different. WhereasCameroon begins with 30 oro (the playcurrency), five cotton fields and no goods,the U.S. has four times as much capital atits disposal, plus several units of raw cot-ton, factory T-shirts and green coffee.

During the production phase, you buyseeds, if you have enough cash on hand,and improve your products in factoriesand offices. These means of production

that cost goods or gold, but produce vic-tory points and a bonus. Once cards in theinterior area have been used, they arecleared away and refilled from the stack;the sidelines stay put. The finishing trick,at the latest, proves that Targi is one ofthe more demanding games in the Kos-mos two-player series: The scrupulousTuareg doesn’t just throw tribal cards hehas acquired into the desert sand, butputs them down neatly in three rows infront of him. And only identical or onlydifferent card symbols in completely filledrows score points in the end.

“The steak is the goal” is the subtitle ofGrill Party, and even vegetarians willhave to admit that a tofu wurst wouldhave sounded much worse in this slogan.However, the steak alone isn’t the goal inthis game. Each player gets a set of taskcards, which read, for instance, that thereis to be “more fish than anything” or“more corn than wurst” on the sharedgrill. Each player holds four of these cardsin his hand. On his turn, he may exchangeone grill item from the grate for one fromhis supply. After that, he plays out alltasks he has completed and draws othercards. The first player to have workedthrough his pile wins. Two grill spicesrefine the game: Nobody is allowed to ful-fill the same task that another player hasjust discarded. And if a player doesn’twant to trade with the grill because it’snot convenient at that moment, he cantrade with somebody else – which mightnot be convenient for that player. -ub

LEGOThe concept “build first, then play”remains untouched, so that the construc-spie

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First World countries turns out to be onlyan artificial one in the game.

In her high-school diploma paper in2009, the Swiss Martina Hupfer devel-oped a game adaptation on the subjectof international trade and the WorldTrade Organization. While the Swissorganizations “Erklärung von Bern” and“Alliance sud” acted as publishers, theMurmel Spielwerkstatt (see publisherAndreas Rudin in the photo on the left)took care of the production. Meanwhile,the author is studying education, and is inan advanced training course at theteacher training college in Zürich; she rec-ommends her game to teachers for use inschools. -cc

Pegasus“This is just as in Dominion” is the new“This is just as in Catan” and even gets ahigher hit rate. The genes of EminentDomain suggest paternity of the deck-building game, too. Race for the Galaxywas obviously involved as well. Eachplayer starts with the same set of cards,acquires additional cards, shuffles themin, draws five cards for his hand on eachturn, and makes the best of it. This time,however, the cards serve mainly to triggerand reinforce the roles.

There are five roles in the game. Onyour turn, you select a role card from thebank. This initiates – as in Glory to Rome– the corresponding action phase, inwhich all players can participate, pro-vided they play the same kind of cards.The more cards of the same kind playedat one time, the stronger the action. Theinitiator receives a “boss” bonus, ofcourse. In addition, he keeps the gift cardfrom the bank – whether he wants it ornot. If you often choose the same role,then you’ll swamp your hand with thesame kind of cards. The object is to takeplanets in possession, because that’swhat counts in the end. The differentroles serve the purpose of exploring theplanets and, in the second step, addingthem to one’s sphere of influence – eitherpeacefully (“Settling”) or in a militaryfashion (“Conquering”). Role #4 regulatesthe production on the planets and thesale of goods for victory points, whereasthe fifth role increases the variety ofcards. If you own planets, then you mayadd one of the strongest technology cards(“Researching”) to your deck. Each ofthese cards provides several symbols at a

are unequally distributed as well. Thepoor countries initially have no salesoffices at all, for example. Therefore, theyare compelled to offer their raw materialson the market in order to get money. Allplayers simultaneously place their offers

on a clearly designed stock market boardat a freely chosen price. If they find abuyer, then the goods are sold, and insome cases, only after the prices havebeen improved. As for sales, there is nostipulated fixed order. After that, eachcountry provides its own population witha certain amount of consumer goods – ifit doesn’t succeed, strikes are imminent,paralyzing the factories and offices.

At the end of the second and fourthrounds, a “minister’s conference” dis-cusses rule changes, without any formalrestrictions. If no consensus can bereached, the majority principle will applynext time, and this can become very dan-gerous for the industrial countries thatare in a minority. In particular, there areno provisions regarding the granting ofcredit and their conditions; a (moderate)regulation would be of utmost interest tothe poorest countries. After six rounds,each country compares its cash on handand its goods in stock with its initial situ-ation. Whoever improved by the largestpercentage (!) is declared the winner, sothat the seemingly initial advantage of


your playing side and build in one or twomosaic tiles, which give you points imme-diately. After that, you refill the rondel.You can vary the placement by usingsundry action markers; after their use,however, you have to turn them over. Toregain full flexibility, you have to miss oneturn. You earn points for connected areasof tiles of the same color, and if your ownworkers form a contiguous group; thisdepends on the orientation of the mosaicpieces. The acute shortage of manpowergets even worse since – as in Carcas-sonne – workers can’t be used elsewhereuntil a construction phase has been com-pleted and scored.

If you try to optimally attune youractions to the three scoring levels, then

you’ll realize quickly that the overviewand overall view (understanding) can betwo different things.

Hissing sounds emanating from theneighboring table indicate that peopleare playing the game of Escape, a cooper-ative real-time adventure by KristianAmundsen Østby that makes for clammyhands and hot dice. Two to five adventur-ers play Indiana Jones, collecting magicgems in a temple in order to break openthe lock at the exit door before the build-ing completely collapses. To this end, allparticipants act simultaneously, usingtheir five symbol dice. Even though eachplayer carries out his own tasks, it may benecessary to go to another player’s aid ifthat player has been put in an awkward

time to support different roles and some-times also scores victory points, or it canbe played as an action card with a specialeffect. -ub

Queen GamesIn Maharani, Wolfgang Panning turns thetwo to four players into mosaic tile layersdoing the finishing work on the famousTaj Mahal. In terms of the concept, heopted for the idea of providing visualequity in a tile-laying game by givingevery participant the same view fromabove. To this end, the gameboard is struc-tured in a rotationally symmetric mannerand has a rotatable rondel in the center.

This rondel serves to supply buildingmaterials. On your turn, you orient it to

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spielbox: Your new game, Farmerama,from Ravensburger, looks like a mixture ofOra et Labora and Agricola. How did itcome into being?Uwe Rosenberg: Ravensburger decidedto release a board game based on theworld-famous browser game of that nameand was looking for an expert in agricul-tural games. So they commissioned me tohave a look at the digital model. Afterplaying the on-line game several times, Ifirst developed a board game version, butthe company found it much too complex.So I dismissed this idea for the moment,but kept it in mind for future publications.Instead, I presented four other, quite dif-ferent concepts to Ravensburger. A mix-ture of two of them matched the editor’sideas, so I used them to craft a target-ori-ented fifth draft. Then, in cooperationwith the Ravensburger team, this versionwas completely revised and slimmeddown two more times, so that the finalproduct ended up considerably simplerand easier to grasp.sb: The rotating rondel of Farmerama isvery similar to the one in Ora et Labora.Does it have the same function?UR: The rondel, per se, is my current pas-sion. I would like to discover and perme-ate the microcosm of the rondel in games.I intend to try it out in every possible vari-ation. A rondel section that is turnedupside down until you can “harvest”something, should be called a “TimeWheel” – that’s what Folker Jung called it

when he used it for the first time in Circle. Without knowing this, I developedit as well; I hadn’t heard about this beforeRavensburger pointed it out to me. Inaddition to the central rondel, each playerhas his personal time wheel in Farme -rama, which triggers stockbreeding and

harvesting. In contrast, the rondel in Oraet Labora is an “accumulation wheel.” Thelonger the players go without choosing aspecific product, the more that willbecome available. At present, I’m devel-oping a new game in which actions,instead of resources, are accumulated inthis manner. One could categorize it as akind of Le Havre for two players. It’s not100-percent certain yet whether it will bepublished by Lookout.

sb: Why is that? Isn’t that your company?UR: In the beginning, there were three ofus. I developed the games, Marcel [Casa -sola Merkle] did the graphic design, andHanno [Girke] was in charge of the busi-ness matters. But now, for a long time, hehas been the sole owner, and I’ve beenthe house and farm author, so to speak.sb: And what function does the centralrondel in Farmerama have?UR: Since Farmerama had to be easy tograsp, I reduced the rondel there to apanel that indicates who has what yields.The wheel shape helps connect the begin-ning and the end of a common chart, sothat one could call it an “infinite table.”sb: How is the balance between tacticsand luck in Farmerama?UR: Principally, the player who bundlesthings up better and more effectively, anduses an action several times, will win.

There are almost no external randomelements. But since all players play anaction card at the same time, one per-ceives that the luck factor is stronger dueto the imponderables of the other players’actions. This is indeed important for agame that claims to work well in families,because in this case, it’s always the samepeople who play together. If it just camedown to the different abilities of the par-ticipants, it would always be the sameones who win or lose.

This spielbox interview was conducted

by Christwart Conrad.

Uwe Rosenberg – Now with the Blue Triangle


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situation from which he can no longerfree himself. Whoever manages to get outmay hand over one die to one of the com-panions still inside the temple. A CD isincluded; it is supposed to work as a timerand fuels the suspense with a fittingsoundtrack. -lud

RavensburgerUwe Rosenberg (see also the interview),who happily and successfully uses agri-cultural themes in his creations, trans-formed the on-line game Farmerama intoa board game. The players have five dif-ferent possible actions. At the same time,they select one action card and reveal it.Following a classic production chain, theyhave to seed, harvest and feed animals.The animals’ progeny correspond to vic-tory points. -cc

What are striking about this year’s gamesare revisions of titles that got only mini-mal distribution before. Only a few copiesof the Japanese Grimoire (One Draw, seealso issue 1/11, p. 36), presented at theSPIEL ’10, were available at the JaponBrand booth. The enhanced version fromSchmidt, Grimoria, is lavishly equippedand has an impressive graphic design. Itcontains a hardcover spell book for eachof the magicians (now, up to five). By put-ting a bookmark in their grimoire, all play-ers mark, simultaneously and secretly,which spell they have chosen. In addition,the total number of the spell determines

the order of evalua-tion; spells chosenby several playersare principally en -acted after thosethat only one magi-cian picked. Com-pared to the originalgame, the board hasbeen optimized andmany features anddetails have beenmodified. Spells, forexample, are now –irrespective of themoment they wereplayed – effectiveduring the wholeround instead ofonly from the startof the evaluation. This entails that thedevaluation of a spell is also effective ifseveral players have chosen the samespell. Now the game no longer ends whena player has acquired a specific number ofcards, but after a specified number ofrounds.

Lakota (Kosmos) was originally pub-lished six years ago, under the name ofTasso – not in Germany, though, but inPortugal. Each of the up to six playerstries to get rid of his squared sticks asquickly as possible. You can either putone stick on the gameboard, or atop twoother sticks that have been already laidout and don’t yet carry any other stick. Inthe latter case, you take another turn. So,if you want to prevent giving others an

advantage, you place a stick a sufficientdistance from the others. At some point,this is no longer possible since the playingarea is limited.

In our fair report four years ago, wedescribed the two-player game StackBack. It has considerable similarities withTasso, as almost the same rules apply tothese two games. However, the sticks dif-fer in length and color. Here, sticks of thesame color may not touch and not havethe same stick underneath. The playingarea consists of two square fields thathave a distance of a bit more than onelength of a small squared stick.

Similarly, minor efforts have been donewith the rules of Der grosse Wurf(Ravensburger). In this game, players roll

Remakes

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player loses. Now, the Ravensburger edi-tors cleverly reversed the object of thegame, thus increasing the arc of sus-pense. This way, Der grosse Wurf fol-lows the top game Liars Dice and mightcause quite a stir as its younger brother.

Ystari reached back to two classics frompast decades. Dominique Ehrhard andDuccio Vitale’s trading and conquestgame set in the Mediterranean, Serenis-

sima, formerly released by Eurogames,will be published in a new version (seealso the interview with Cyril Demaegd).Sherlock Holmes Détective Conseil, areworking of the “Spiel des Jahres” titlefrom 1985, has already come out inFrance. Logical errors have been cor-rected, for instance, by modifying theorder of information; plus, one chapterhas been added. In just one month, 5,000

the dice in the box inlay – the “DiceArena” – and hope for identical numbers,since they get these dice back. Dice show-ing a special symbol are removed; all oth-ers stay put in the arena. A player whohas no dice left is eliminated, and the lastplayer to survive through all rounds, wins.At the SPIEL ’09, author Dieter Nüßle pre-sented his self-published Bleichwiese, butwith one considerable difference: the last

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spielbox: In most Ystari titles, the letters“Y” and “S” appear somewhere. Why?Cyril Demaegd: This came up acciden-tally. After the first titles had beenreleased, a fellow player realized this con-nection, and I found it so funny that I’vedeliberately kept up this practice sincethen. Meanwhile, it becomes difficult,though, to find fitting titles, and so Iwon’t stick strictly to this stipulation. Any-way, this only applies to Ystari’s basicproduct line.sb: What other product lines are there,then?CD: So far, we have two more. First, thereis “Ystari plus.” In this series, we mainlyrelease games by our foreign colleagues,whose products I distribute in France.These games are adoptions that I hardlyinvest any development work in. Agri-cola, for example, is a mere translation.For Magister Navis, I developed a two-player version, plus a variant for threeplayers, that increases the tension on theboard that is too large for this number ofplayers. However, I would have found itpresumptuous to publish the games withmy modifications; therefore, I’ve put myideas only on my website (www.ystari.com).sb: And why is Québec part of the “Ystariplus” series?CD: This game comes from abroad, too,released by the French-Canadian com-pany Le Scorpion Masqué. Consideringthat Ystari is not distributed in Germanydirectly, but through our partners, it isactually somewhat unusual that our dis-tribution line appears in your country.This exceptional situation is explained bythe French-language origin of the game.Ystari Vintage is our retro line, in thescope of which we republish great classicsthat I like very much. Currently, Die

Fürsten von Florenz and Taj Mahal areamong them.sb: And what series will Serenissima beincluded in?CD: In this case, it’s difficult for me todecide. Since I think very highly of this

game, it would actually be a great classic;but since we made a lot of changes, itdoesn’t quite fit in that line.sb:Why did you make changes, and whatis different now?CD: In the 1990s, when Serenissimacame out, it was outstanding. But in themeantime, a lot happened and gamesdeveloped further. The author, Domi -nique Ehrhard, contributed a few veryinteresting ideas to improve the game.The order of play, for instance, is muchmore dynamic now. There are no phasesany more, but an activation rondel, indi-cating which galley (that now shows anumber) has its turn; its owner thenchooses an action. Special dice are usedto decide the outcome of fights. Thegame does not end after a fixed numberof rounds; instead, a progress marker isadvanced on a time scale by means of

cards, so that the exact moment the gamewill end can only be estimated. Victorypoints have been abolished, and in theend, it’s the richest player who wins.sb: How do you explain the success ofSherlock Holmes Criminal-Cabinett?CD: When the game came out more than30 years ago, the time was not yet ripe forit. Now, players who don’t know anythingabout the former edition tell me that theyperceive the game idea as fresh andnovel. The concept is very different fromthe usual game. It has strongly coopera-tive aspects, and has some resemblanceto the fantasy books that continue thestoryline in different directions, depend-ing on the reader’s decision – just withoutthe references to page numbers. We call itan “UPO,” an Unidentified Playing Object.sb: A year ago, issue 1 of the Ystari Mag-azine came out, a free 20-page magazinewith news and information about Ystari.When will you publish another issue, andwhat is the intent behind it?CD: It was actually a crazy idea. I just feltlike telling something. And of course, Ialso want to use it for advertising in anintelligent fashion. This is something Iwant to implement not only on the web,but also in a permanent medium such asa magazine, which you can physicallytake in your hands and take anywherewith you in order to read it unhurriedly. Ididn’t and still don’t want to compete atall with the established games maga-zines. Regrettably, I was misunderstoodby the makers of JSP [the French gamemagazine that recently ceased publica-tion]. I’m still uncertain as to when thenext issue will come out, because such anundertaking is very time-consuming, asyou certainly know from your own experi-ence.

This spielbox interview was conducted

by Christwart Conrad.

Ystari Threefold


copies have already been sold – a big suc-cess for the small company.

Christwart Conrad

Financially secure, loyal and easy toseduce: Complete collectors are the com-panies’ favorite customers. And favoritesneed to be pampered, so that they get agleam in their eyes as soon as they learnthat they are allowed to buy not just oneCarcassonne expansion in 2012, butseven! At the price of only six. Mini Car-cassonne comes in the same box size asThe Count of Carcassonne and is avail-able in various flavors such as The Flier,The Ferries and The Robber. Each edi-tion holds nine tiles, plus some woodencomponents. One each of the tilesbelongs to a seventh set that, conse-quently, the fan pockets entirely for free ifhe buys all the minis… An amazing giftfrom heaven; that’s why the set is fittinglycalled Crop Circles.

Meanwhile, the Catan familyannounces strange flying objects. In StarTrek Catan, the hopelessly outdatedmaterials from the 20th Century on earthhave finally served their time. Nobody inouter space uses retro substances such aswood and bricks. Trekkies, modern andauthentic as they are, trade “Dilithium”and “Tritanium” and use these resourcesto build spaceships instead of roads. Set-tlements become space stations; since therobber has accepted a position withTargi, in the meantime, the vacant posi-tion is occupied by a Klingon ship. Whatmakes the settling in space most differentfrom the terrestrial one is: Each playergets a character card, e.g., “Sulu” or“Spock,” that he may use for minor specialprivileges once or twice during the game,after which he trades it for another cardfrom the stock.

Generally speaking, the motto of theyear 2012 seems to be: We’ve played it allbefore – but not yet with dice! Theattempt at turning Bohnanza into a dicegame seems especially extravagant; afterall, the original wit of the game has a lotto do with the order of cards in the play-ers’ hand and the haggling that resultfrom this. And what can one say: no cards,no card order. Nevertheless, Uwe Rosen-berg manages to keep up the element ofsimultaneous acting in Würfel Bohn -anza. Using seven dice, which show the sp

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beans in different arrangements, playershave to roll combinations in order to com-plete the orders on their harvest card, oneby one. After each roll, at least one diehas to be set aside. Everybody, even if it’snot his turn, may use the results of the rollfor himself. The probabilities, statedeverywhere, and the order structure showthat a statistician has run amok here. Theorders have been arranged in such a waythat a player can complete no more thanthree combinations per round. Therefore,it would be stupid to collect beans for afourth combination when setting a dieaside, and in this special case, the stupid-est bean farmer won’t reach the top of thebeanstalk.

When it comes to varying one’s ownoeuvre, the master of alltransformations andman of a game’s thou-sand faces, the greatKnizia, must be consid-ered. Keltis – Das Wür-felspiel, in good Irishtradition, is about chas-ing cloverleaf-shapedpieces ahead on five col-ored tracks. It’s not sur-prising that the five col-ors can be found on fivesides of the dice as well.You may roll twice, butthen you advance ononly one of the tracks.You have to choose oneof the colors rolled. If you land on a spaceshowing a symbol, then you gain a bonus.And the sixth side of the dice? It showsthe wishing stones. If you roll two ofthese, then you get a wishing stone tile.And to own as many of these as possible,is – as in Keltis – very desirable.

In Einfach genial – Das Würfelspiel,players check off the six symbols on thescore pad as evenly as possible. You rollyour dice up to three times, but without theoption of setting dice aside. You may makecheck marks on your own pad only if youroll the same symbols that are showing onthe dice in front of the other players; allplayers’ results stay put for one round. Andthis little trick suffices to ingeniously carryover a fundamental element of the tile-lay-ing game into the dice game: the benefitgained from other players’ results.Die Tore der Welt – Das Kartenspiel

follows the board game more closely thanwas the case in Die Säulen der Erde – Das

Kartenspiel. At the beginning of a round,players draw an event card, read it outloud, carry out the respective action, andthen orient the card in such a way thatevery player receives income. Or, morecorrectly, might receive. Because, again,we are confronted with microelements ofmedieval methods of torture. In the boardgame, players discard one card every timethey used an action card. In the cardgame, it’s quite similar. If, for example,cloth is allocated to you as income, thenyou play an action card that defines howmuch cloth you get; in this case, the texton the card would be insignificant. Alter-natively, you may execute the action indi-cated on the card, in which case youremain without cloth. You collect com-

modities in order to exchange them forother commodities or victory points, or topay your duties and avoid penalty pointsat the end of the two chapters.

Since dice game distillates should bequicker than the original, our zoo inZooloretto Würfelspiel has rather aprovincial dimension and fits on a sheetof a tear-off pad. The crocodile enclosureprovides just enough space for one ani-mal. The lions can boast about having themost space available – five lions fit intheir royal area. For each animal housedcorrectly, you get one point. Being thefirst to fill an enclosure gives you bonuspoints; overstuffing results in pointdeductions, though coins can compen-sate for minus points. As before, the ani-mals get to us by truck. On your turn, youroll two dice and place them on any load-ing platforms, or you roll your truck intothe zoo and present the animals withtheir nice new home.

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all in all, two types oflandscapes are stillfewer than three. Con-sequently, there arefewer complete areasto develop than inMondo, and so thescoring emphasizesother things ratherthan the many land-scape areas. Homosapiens, as the engi-neers of culture, con-sider roads very impor-tant, for example.Especially if they arelong and connect winebarrels to the tavern.And mankind finds

mankind important. Especially if menform majorities and are smart enough tobuild the corresponding village, whichqualifies the respective group for scoringin the first place. And Homo sapiens likevariety; that’s why there are now fourinstead of two world boards per player inthe game. What mankind doesn’t like atall, though, is thinner cardboard for theplayer boards. Because mankind alwayswants everything: thick and still more.

Udo Bartsch

Dice are the embodiment of luck-depend-ent games and send a chill down anystrategist’s spine. But since alea, Ravens-burger’s prestige subsidiary, deals withdice in its two new releases, we can actu-ally consider it an overall “dice trend” ofthis year’s spring. Saint Malo is reminis-cent of Roll through the Ages. Instead ofa notepad, however, this game comeswith boards on which we mark the resultsusing a wipe-off pen. With tactical skills,we build our town, using the symbolsrolled, but we must be wary of the pirateswho destructively stand in our way. Ithelps to protect ourselves with a townwall.

Even more luck-dependent – as itsname suggests – is alea’s Vegas. Ban-knotes of astronomical values lie on thetable next to the six game mats. Only diceshowing the same number can be put onthe corresponding mat. The player whohas placed the most wins. On the aleacomplexity scale, Vegas just barelyreaches the first of ten levels.

The dice game maniais ultimately topped byMensch Ärgere DichNicht – mal Anders.Finally, the dice gameon the dice game! Thetiny gameboard looksas if it had been washedin excessively hot water;the shrunken circuitmeasures only 24spaces, and not eventhe little starting housesfit on the cardboard.Our pawns have tofreeze and wait next tothe gameboard until a“six” catapults theminto the mercilessfootrace. Normally, a “six” will be rolledquickly, since players always roll four diceand arrange them – as in Can’t stop –into two sets. One of the two dice pairs isused to move a pawn; the second may beforfeited unused.Das Ligretto Fussballspiel, not

related by blood or marriage to FussballLigretto from 2006, has been publishedright on time for the year of the EuropeanSoccer championship, which alreadymakes a significant difference to its pred-ecessor released in the year of the worldchampionship. The second important dif-ference is: In Fussball Ligretto, the fanshad to be able to read, whereas DasLigretto Fussballspiel requires mentalmath. Five field cards, showing numbersup to 25, are laid out between the oppo-nents. Each player or team works from leftto right. Cards with values from one to tenhave to connect to the field so that theirtotal exactly equals the current field cardvalue. The players play their hand cardsas quickly as possible, forming two dis-card piles. Only the top card of a pile maybe played. A player who manages to drib-ble all the way to an opponent’s goalthen has to shoot into it, which is simu-lated by a little puzzle-style task.Dixit Jinx is the card game on the card

game. The 71 picture cards, printed onboth sides, show abstract images, e.g.,yellow spots on a red background. Nineimages at a time are displayed in a 3x3square. By means of a location card, theclue-giver is allocated an image and givesthe other players a hint. For instance,“Uhm, yellow spots on a red background.”Each of the other players points a finger

at one of the pictures. As soon as oneplayer guesses correctly, the round ends.This guesser gets one point; the clue-giverscores points for all the incorrect guesses.In the example mentioned, it’ll probablybe zero. So, as in Dixit, it is crucial to makevery vague statements. Even astrologers,investment consultants and doctors canstill learn something from this game.

Donald X. Vaccarino is a man whochurns out expansions faster than butter.As with Dominion, he seems to have quitea few things in the mix for KingdomBuilder. Again like Dominion, the expan-sion follows a motto. In KingdomBuilder: Nomads, the new victory pointconditions immediately take effectinstead of the end of the game. The“Ambassador” means that a player scoresone point whenever he builds a settlementadjacent to an opponent’s settlement.Four new gameboards provide more loca-tions and special functions, as can beexpected, but – instead of castles – thereare nomad spaces with nomad tiles. Theseare stronger than the location tiles, butthey may be used in the game once only,i.e., on your very next turn. Thanks to anadded player color, Kingdom Builder:Nomads can be played with five people;and knowing Mr. Vaccarino, that certainlywon’t be the last of it.Mondo Sapiens shows vividly what

happens after humans have subdued theearth. Clonk! The animal world becomesstunted, and there are just two, instead ofthree, types of landscapes. Contrary toreality, however, the desert disappears inMondo Sapiens, whereas the forest gets aperiod of grace for now. That is nice, but

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Tipover (ThinkFun) is pretty close to theabove-mentioned game in terms of visualappearance and content, the differencebeing that here one player, undisturbedby others, may try to solve more and moredifficult tasks. His alter ego, in the form ofa plastic figure, uses differently high pilesof crates to proceed; it tips over thesepiles in such a way that it can get to thered target crate without touching theground. Originally developed by James W.Stephens as an on-line game, Tipover isnow available in a new edition with 40fresh tasks.Swish, by Gali Shimoni and Zvi Shalem,

comes from the same company. It con-tains a set of transparent cards showingone dot and one hoop each in differentcolors and different positions. Two to sixparticipants simultaneously try to spotcombinations of at least two cards on dis-play that, one laid on top of the other,show every dot encircled by a hoop of thesame color. To this end, the cards may beturned according to their specific feature,as known from On The Dot by DominiqueBodin (Cocktail Games, 2006); in thatgame, however, each player solves a com-mon task using his own set of cards.

Could it be that the Ravensburger mar-keting department got inspired by thesuccess of the “Easy play” games fromSchmidt Spiele? Be that the case or not,the renowned company with the blue tri-angle has now started its own “EinfachSPIELEN” series so that every customerinstantly knows what he can expect (evenwithout English knowledge) and, ideally,takes this as information and a challenge:

just play, play easy... In addi-tion to a dice game, two tile-laying games start off theseries; all of them are editedby Stefan Brück, who is alsoresponsible for the ambitiousalea label.

Reiner Knizia’s Kreuz &Quer is reminiscent of Take itEasy. Accordingly, it providesabsolutely equal opportuni-ties without casting out therandom factor. Any tilerevealed is binding for eachplayer; he immediately placesit on his own board in such away that it precisely extendsalready laid-out pipe sec-tions. Unconnected edgepieces give you minus points,

Last year, Schmidt released a new seriesof dice games equipped with a fancy dicetower. Now other companies follow.Amigo forgoes the elaborate tower andsuggests instead that the square box beused as a dice cup. Piraten Kapern, atranslation of the Israeli Treasures orTrouble, contains eight symbol dice andover-exaggerates the distribution ofpoints. For a three-of-a-kind, you may jotdown 100 points on the score pad; for aneight-of-a-kind (extremely rare), 4,000points. One or 40 points would be morestraightforward, but less impressive. Dicewith skulls count zero; they may not bethrown back into the dice cup. The play-ing card that is flipped over at the begin-ning of each turn makes for variety: Itgives you a minimum task, an additionaldice symbol, or the chance to add mon-keys and parrots you have rolled as ananimal unit.Wanzen Tanzen (also from Amigo)

seems somewhat more refined. It con-tains five common dice, five bug cardswith up to five minus points, and taskcards; I need to complete the tasks byrolling the right dice (combinations), andif I succeed, I get victory points. If I wishto re-roll the dice, then I get one baby bugtoken; if I give up on a task, I have to taketwo. These baby bugs, however, are aproblem only if I collect five of them. Inthis case, I get the fully grown bug minuscard, and besides this, the other playersput all the baby bugs they received so farback into the middle of the table. Rake inplus points or avoid minus points? Eitherone might lead to the win.

Bugs are also representedamong the six animals inthe very simple game Wür-felwurst (Kosmos). It con-tains symbol dice as well asanimal dice. Players try toroll as many animals of onespecies as possible, and mul-tiply these by the lowestnumber dice thrown. Onesausage counts 1 – exceptin the case of four sausages,where they count 7.Step by Step (Schmidt)

comes with six ordinary dice,plus a board, chips andmany pieces. Here, afterrolling the dice, you have toannounce whether you wantto roll higher or lower num-

bers for the rest of your turn. If you suc-ceed, then you may advance in the cho-sen column on the gameboard. If youwant, then you may continue – until youpossibly founder on the recognizableCan’t stop mechanism and lose every-thing you’ve won. Harald Schrapers

In a time when it is considered obligatoryto have a dice version follow almost everysuccessful board game or card game, it isdownright refreshing to deal with theseplatonic polyhedrals free from their func-tion as random generators. QBQ (Huch!& friends), which stands for “Questionbehind Question,” provides an opportu-nity to do so. Developed by a team of fourstudents at a university in Sweden duringa four-week project under the title“Design is a Game,” it is supposed todemonstrate the problems that usuallycome up with the increase of staff in anexpanding enterprise. So much for theory.

During play, the two or four partici-pants have to move their cubes – four, ini-tially – from one edge of the gameboardto the opposite one. For this, one cube ata time is relocated in such a way that itstill keeps side-by-side contact to anothermember of its group. Since this is notrestricted to just one level, players canerect towers; such a tower, tipped over,can strike opposing cubes that are in theway and split up the group of thosecubes. Before you move, you may placeanother cube, but smaller groups makeslow progress until they are connected.

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In Gravitas, both players get their ownset of number tiles with values from 1 to3, and can shove them, one at a time,onto the board at any place. In doing so,they are allowed to change the positionof already placed tiles, but it is forbiddento push them off the board. At one point,a player scores for continuous rows ofthree or four tiles of his color, and atanother, for all tiles that don’t lie on theedges. In the so-called number game vari-ant, all groups of two or more tiles withthe same number are scored; in this case,a group with all four tiles of one numbercounts double. A neutral tile with thevalue of zero always serves as the focalpoint.

Pushing is the essence also of Repelloby Arne Holmström (Piatnik); here, how-ever, the objective is pushing opposingplaying pieces off the board, since thislets you collect points. Leaving one pieceof your own color behind, you can moveso-called stacks as many spaces as thenumber on the first space that the chosenmoving direction indicates; at the edge ofthe gameboard, they ricochet along theangle of incidence. If your turn endsdirectly next to another piece or stack,then you may choose which of them isrepelled one space; this can cause chainreactions that you try to use cleverly.

Christoph Cantzler, the author of RiffRaff (Zoch), impressively demonstrated,at the company’s booth, what shakyground the participants of this game areon. Despite the heavy swell, they try hardto stow away their eight cargo pieces ofdifferent shapes and sizes on the smallwooden boat. Utmost caution is advisedso that no part of the load starts slidingand falls overboard. If you don’t reactquickly enough to catch such items, thenthey go into your inventory, to the otherplayers’ amusement. The technical requi-sites of this load of loading fun are a card-board wave crest with a wooden Cardanjoint on top.

Dexterity is also required in 4 GewinntTower (Hasbro). Here, the original task ofcleverly arranging four chips of one’s owncolor into a continuous row is reduced tobeing the first to fling this amount of chips,with the help of a catapult, into a funnel;from there, they slide into a tower whosewindows indicate the score. L. U. Dikus

All International Toyfair Nürnberg report:/sbw

as indi-cated on the tiles. If,in a moment of distress, you placetiles upside down (in effect, downsideup), then you get minus points as well.However, four minus points might rightlymake you feel like a topnotch contact-maker and let you deride connection-seekers with eleven or more minus points.

An optimal lay-out is also demanded in5 vor 12 by Michael Schacht; a game thatis reminiscent of Racko (MB, 1956) andFinito (Schmidt Spiele, 2008). Playersplace randomly drawn tiles with numbersfrom 1 to 20 on the 4 x 4 spaces of theirown board in such a way that ascendingnumber sequences are generated in eachrow and column. Relocation is notallowed; replacement is, but it slows aplayer down. Tiles that are useless to aplayer can be put face up on the face-down stock, and in most cases, there willsoon be another player who is interestedin them.

A joint series from Pegasus and Ger-hards Spiel und Design comes out withtwo new games as well. Sia Doble followsSia Sola, a compilation of superb logicsolitaire challenges by Oliver Schaudt.With the help of his co-author HendrikSimon, he transferred the movement prin-ciple to a two-player game. A playingpiece may move to an adjacent unoccu-pied space only if there is a little piece, aso-called buoy, on one of the two intersec-tions at the end of the dividing line. Thisbuoy floats to the unoccupied intersec-tion on the line that has just beencrossed, as if it were sucked into the surg-ing swell. This enables a player to makenew moves, but excludes others at thesame time. The object of the game is to

get two of three playingpieces to the opponent’sbase line in this tricky way.Puzzle of Oz was

invented by David Parlett; itcan be played solitaire or withtwo players. Starting with thefour corner spaces of the star-shaped gameboard, playersplace randomly drawn playingpieces in five colors in such a waythat these pieces don’t end upnext to other pieces of the samecolor. As soon as this is no longerpossible, the game ends. In the two-player game, the player who has thecolor of the last piece drawn loses, nomatter which of the players drew it. If itis in the neutral color, then the playerwho drew the piece loses.Dieter Stein’s Mixtour, another new

game from Gerhards, starts on an emptyboard. On your turn, you either place apiece on an unoccupied space, or move apiece or a tower of several pieces straightacross unoccupied spaces to anotherpiece or tower, provided the distance trav-eled matches the number of pieces on thetarget space. You are allowed to divide atower and move just its upper section.Since the movement of pieces is notrestricted to pieces of your own color, ful-filling the winning condition requires tac-tical maneuvering; as soon as a tower offive or more pieces has been built, theplayer who owns the topmost piece of thistower wins.

The two new thinking games by ReinerKnizia, released by Intellego, are madefrom wood, too. The objective of the wildbuilding activities in Singapur is to get aview of more houses from your own sideof the gameboard than from the otherside. Both building tycoons avail them-selves from a joint stock of face-downblue and red blocks worth from one tonine, four of which are always at their dis-posal. If a block of the chosen color with alower value has already been laid out,then the new block has to be put on topof it. Otherwise, any unoccupied spacecan serve as building ground. In terms ofits task setting, the game is reminiscent ofCityscape by Sjaak Griffioen (Pin Interna-tional, 2001); in that game, however,blocks of different sizes can be placed atthe players’ discretion, and the intendednumber of visible houses in each row isdetermined freely.



B eing the guiding principle for theBenedictine order of monks, “Oraet Labora” means “Pray and Work.”

That tells you what this game is about:you are running a medieval, monasticeconomy. Within the monastery there is adesire for books, chalices, reliquaries andthe like, but if these wishes are to be met,the monastery and its surrounding areaneed to be producing the necessary mate-rials, contain the necessary craftsmenand be generating sufficient wealth. It isa multi-layered economic system, andyour job is to build and manage it.

Each player begins with a small boardrepresenting their initial holding of

land. It is dividedinto ten card-sizedspaces, half ofwhich begin as for-est and moorland.During the courseof the game you willbe looking to clearthese to harvesttheir resources andto create space forbuildings. One ofyour main aims inOra et Labora is toacquire a collec-

tion of buildingsthat work well

together. Of theremaining five spaces,two are vacant andthree already containbuildings in the form ofa clay mound, a farmand the cloister office.

These initial holdings give you access tofood, fuel, some building materials andmoney, but, as in Agricola and Le Havre,there is more to gaining any of them thansimply saying, “I’d like some clay this turn,please.” In those games supplies of eachresource build up in spaces on the boarduntil someone decides to take them.When this happens, the supply falls tozero before being reset to a basicamount at the start of the nextround. It is essentially the sameidea in Ora et Labora, but insteadof piling up counters in spaces,you have a dial on which sitmarkers representing eachresource. A pointer is then movedat the start of each round, and thisrecords both the game’s progress and theamount currently available for eachresource. It is less fiddly than the old wayof doing things and also more flexible, asthe addition of a “joker” marker to theothers on the dial gives the system a neatway of providing an extra supply of what-ever is currently the most desirable item.

On each of your turns you take a singleaction chosen from a list of three options.The first is to fell trees or cut peat. This issimply a matter of removing the relevantcard from its space on your board. It givesyou the current supply of wood or peatand creates a new empty space on whichyou can later build.

The second option is to erect a build-ing. A number of these are available fromthe start of the game, and others areadded as the game proceeds. For each ofthem there is a required mix of building

A friend of mine described this new game from Uwe Rosenberg as “Agricolameets Le Havre,” and for a short description that can’t really be improved, as itgives you a quick and reliable indicator as to whether or not this is the sort ofgame that will interest you. If you liked those two, it is almost certain that youwill like this one as well. It is the same sort of game, and quite a few of the ideasin it will be familiar to you from those earlier Rosenberg successes. However, youshouldn’t go from there to conclude that “derivative” implies “superfluous.” Asthe same friend went on to say, there is nothing wrong with a designer reusingideas, especially when they are his own, provided the final result feels fresh andnew, and that is the case here. Ora et Labora is clearly its parents’ child, but thechallenges it presents are both different and interesting.

REVIEW

materials, and you submit them to get thebuilding. There are four building materi-als in all -- wood, clay, straw and stone --and three of them are among the basicresources you can get from your initialboard. The fourth, stone, is harder tocome by in the early part of the game, butcan still be gained from the Stone Mer-chant and the Builders’ Market. Later, asthe monasteries expand their reach, theywill gain access to quarries, and supplieswill become more plentiful. The other keypoint about buildings is that, with

very fewexceptions, there is only one of each. Youcan use other players’ buildings but willhave to pay the owner.

I Hiring Brother CuthbertThe third is to place a clergyman into a

building and thereby activate it. If it isyour building, you use one of your ownmonks; if it belongs to another player, youpay them and use one of theirs. There aretactical consequences that follow fromthe difference between the two situa-tions, but they are not major ones, and myguess is that the thinking behind this ruleis that if your monastery wants a new reli-quary, and if the best craftsman for thissort of work is Brother Cuthbert from theneighbouring Cistercian monastery, thenrather than send one of your own people

Ora et Labora

Unashamedly a Gamers’ Game

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the game gives you. Another concerns themonastery itself. Buildings fall into twotypes: secular and monastic. The secularones, which are mainly to do with every-day goods, can, subject to a few terrainrestrictions, go anywhere, but the monas-tic ones have to be part of a single, con-nected monastery complex. So in additionto the spatial juggling you have to dowith the settlements, you also need toensure that your monastery has room inwhich to expand. Neglect that, and youwill miss out on the opportunity to obtainbuildings that not only have high eco-nomic values, but ones that producemany of the most valuable artefacts. UweRosenberg does not like to make life easyfor his players.

Ora et Labora is unashamedly agamers’ game. There is a lot of informa-tion to take in; the challenges it sets aredifficult; and the playing time at 2-3hours is, by the standards of Germangames, long. If your taste is for light, shortand uncomplicated games, you shouldgive it a wide berth. You are not part of itstarget audience, and I doubt you’d enjoyit. Like Agricola, it does come with a setof rules for a shorter version of the game(with a playing time of about an hour),but where in Agricola the shortened ver-sion was described as a “family game,”here all that is claimed is that it is shorter.However, for those like me whose prefer-ence is for heavier fare, Ora et Labora isnot one you should even think aboutmissing. This is a game with a good mar-riage of theme and mechanisms, rich lay-ers of strategy to be explored and, despitethe re-use of ideas from its two predeces-sors, a wonderful freshness. It is a magnif-icent achievement and, in my view, thebest new game of 2011.

However, having handed out that acco-lade, I should

also point

with differing mixtures of forest, moor,etc. The other two are coast and moun-tains, both of which open up new possi-bilities for what you can build -- shipyardsand harbours on the coast; quarries in themountains. You can buy an extra land tileas part of your turn, but the cost goes upas the supply diminishes and so gettingwhat you want at a price you can afford isanother of the problems that the gamesets.

I A fleeting chance to settleAll scoring happens at the end of the

game, and there are three parts to it. Thefirst is for money and high status goods,

and the second is for the economicvalue of your buildings. The third isfor your settlements. These are vil-lages, hamlets and market towns,and they are what give Ora et Laboraits distinctive flavour. Four times dur-

ing the game, rounds acquire an extraphase. These are the points when thenext batches of building cards becomeavailable and they are also the pointsat which you have an opportunity toadd a settlement to your board. Set-tlements take the form of a specialset of cards, each of which has apurchase price in units of foodand fuel. The chance to buy is afleeting one, so you need tohave been planning ahead for

several rounds: deciding which one youcan afford to buy and where best to put it.Settlements are like buildings in havingeconomic values but unlike them in nothaving special powers. These are notplaces where you send your monks. How-ever, they are vital because of that thirdcomponent of the scoring. Each buildingand each settlement has, in addition toits economic value, a second “settlementvalue,” and in the final tally, for each ofyour settlements, you add to yourscore the settlement value bothof the settlement itself and ofeach building or settle-ment that is directly adja-cent to it.

Planning to get valu-able settlements intogood locations withhigh-scoring buildings

next to themis one of the

tough chal-lenges that

along to his workshop, you pay Cuthbertto make the reliquary for you. Of greaterimportance is the fact that the buildingmust be one that is currently unoccupied.Each player has three monks, and once amonk has been placed into a building, hestays there until all of his colleagues havealso been placed. So once a building is inuse, it is likely to be a few turns before itis again available. Buildings are only acti-vated at the point when the clergyman isplaced; you can’t use them by merelyleaving someone there.

There is a great variety of buildings, butthe function of most of them is to enableyou to convert one type of item into

another. For example, in the French sce-nario (there is also an Irish one) there is awindmill, and sending someone here willenable you to convert up to 7 units ofgrain into flour and straw. On a subse-quent turn this flour could be sent to thebakery to be made into bread, which canthen be sold. Clay, which at the start ofthe game you will just see as a buildingmaterial, can, once the cloister workshophas been built, also be used to makeceramics.

Mention of money brings me to thenext main component of the game: land.Your initial allocation is probablybetween a quarter and a fifth of what youactually require in order to score well,so you will need to buy more. Itcomes in the form of tiles, whichyou place next to your initial one.There are four patterns. Two ofthem look rather likeyour initial tile, but

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may be a little surprised to learn thatthere’s a Kontor not just in Amsterdam,but also in Lisbon, Dublin and SaintPetersburg. It takes two to three hoursto meet this victory conditions whenyou’re playing a full game with tentokens’ worth of wares, so there’s also ashorter beginner variant with only sixtokens, which doesn’t use the WesternEuropean part of the board.

This means that the board in front ofus shows the continent of Europe,covered with the old familiarhexes, from Lisbon to Bucharest,from Palermo to Oslo. We startoff by settling somewhere inCentral Europe, where we estab-lish our first three warehouses,thereby gaining access to the hexes

that can provide us – if the dice areon our side – with the old famil-iar resources of wood, wool,grain and ore, but also with salt.So far, so good, the warehouses

are just like villages. But in addi-tion to resource production, ware-

houses also control how and wherewares can be housed.

At set-up, we line up at the edge ofthe board all the warehouses that willbe built during the course of play, andthen place a resource under each ofthese. Only when a warehouse is builtonto the board is the ware beneath itfree for delivery. It still needs to betransported though, which is why webuild our trade routes.

Trade routes look a lot like streets, butthey are more than just lines linkingone village or town to another –there’s actually traffic on these

N ow we are invited to set out onthe road with them as medievalmerchants and traders – the

title Aufbruch der Händler (AdH)means something like “The Traders SetOut,” though your guess is as good asmine what any eventual English-lan-guage edition would be called. It’s aninvitation well worth accepting, sincewhile there’s not much in the gamethat’s entirely new, there are interestingvariations and refinements.

I’ll grant you that all the games inthe Catan line have their similarities,but then, that’s exactly what makesthem Catan games. We build over ormarch across the hexes, and we rolldice to obtain resources; we collectcards accordingly, we swap and tradethem; we spend cards to buildroads, villages and towns. Weexpand our territory and earnthose all-important victorypoints almost without trying.That’s enough explanationthough; there can’t be a spielboxreader out there who doesn’t know atleast the bare bones of the Catan gameengine.

This new Catan variant AdH israther different. This time we’renot even trying for victorypoints, rather the aim of thegame is to offload our wares.The first player to place down

all his wares in oneof the Kontors – thewarehouses – ofmedieval Europehas won the game.Hardcore gamers

Yes indeed, it’s back to Catan once more! There must be many a gamer whogroaned loudly when Aufbruch der Händler appeared. As we all know bynow, the good people of Catan soon found their island realm just a little toosmall for them. They took to the sea and conquered other islands. Even thiswasn’t enough for their ambitions, so that they headed off for the cities,such as Nuremberg (in the German-only Die Siedler von Nürnberg) orancient Rome. They blasted off into outer space (and again, German gamersare ahead of the rest with Star Trek Catan); they even settled the Stone Age.

A Full Evening’s Game

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out that certain aspects of the productionfall short of Lookout’s normal high stan-dards. The all-important player aid,

which tells you what all the buildingsdo, when they become availableand how much they cost, has been

printed on paper rather than oncardstock. I have read that this wasnot the publisher’s intention, but ithappened and you, as the purchaser,

will have to deal with it, either by gettingthem laminated or by buying some A5-sized plastic sleeves. Those with less than20/20 vision may also have problemswith the size of the print on parts of theplayer aid and will certainly have diffi-culty reading important information onthe building cards that are in front oftheir opponents. As you become morefamiliar with the game, your knowledgeof the cards will make this problem goaway, but in the short term you might findit helpful to prepare a supplementaryplayer aid. The game does come with aseparate booklet giving detailed informa-tion on all the buildings for both scenar-ios, but this is too big to be used as aquick reference. What beginning playerswould find helpful is a short summarytelling them what buildings are availableand what they do. With that they wouldbe more aware of the range of opportuni-ties that are available and thus will bebetter placed to formulate a good strat-egy. Stuart W. Dagger

REVIEW

Reviewer Playing appealStuart W. Dagger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Udo Bartsch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9Christwart Conrad . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8Stefan Ducksch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9Matthias Hardel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9Wieland Herold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8Alan How . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Ora et LaboraLookout GamesUwe RosenbergKlemens Franz1–4about 12 and upabout 120–180 minutesabout 43 €


Die Siedler von Catan Aufbruch der Händler


roads, in the form of the Kaufmannszüge,the caravans. These are fueled by salt,with one card’s worth taking you alongthree roads. When a caravan has reachedan empty warehouse belonging toanother player, it can deliver one of itswares there.

We should now mention the mer-chants, Händler, whose job it is to foundthe new warehouses. They can leap fromplace to place without needing to use theroads, but they have to spend grain.Unlike the caravans, merchants vanish offthe board once their job is done and haveto be bought back from your reserve stockevery time.

I Gold standard defaultsEssentially, that describes all the game

innovations of AdH, but there’s one moredetail I mustn’t forget to mention:gold. We get gold coins wheneverwe found a warehouse in a portcity. Mechanically, this is acounter-balance for the fact thatwaterfront warehouses havefewer resource-producing hexesaround, so that the builder can expect toget fewer resources through the game.Gold is also the default result of the dicerolls – if a roll leaves us without any actualresource, we receive one gold instead.

Gold is more than just second best, it’sworth something in its own right. Twogold coins buy any one resource youneed. This makes the gold coin that weget as a prize for linking a new city intothe trade route very welcome indeed.However, in AdH, just as in any otherCatan game, good things come to thosewho wait, meaning that first you mustspend wood and ore to open up newtrade routes, then send new merchantsoff on their travels with wood, wool andgrain, or put a new caravan onto theroads with wood, ore and salt.

Thanks to gold, AdH doesn’t depend asstrongly on player-to-player trades andcard swaps as vanilla Settlers. However,since you need your rivals’ warehouses ifyou are

to get ahead, playersdepend on one anothernevertheless. When sev-eral warehouses arestanding close at hand ina compact core area, as atthe beginning of thegame, it’s all about speed.The real challenge of thegame lies in not ending upas a permanent runner-upat this stage. You can alwaysfind an empty spot to build your own ware-house, but it’s much harder to find anempty warehouse belonging to one of yourrivals where you can offload your wares.Obviously, you should not build your ware-houses right under your opponents’ noses.

A merchant who strikes out to the fur-thest corners of Europe needs to invest a

certain amount of grain. Inreturn, though, an oppo-nent who wants to trekout there to deliver aware will need to

spend a salt or two todo so – quite apart from the

fact that he’ll also need to build thetrade routes or pay the toll (1 gold perroad you travel that is not your own) tomake the delivery. However, there are alsodangers in driving your rivals out to theedges of the continent. These far-flunghexes don’t have their own pre-printedyield numbers, but are only assignednumbers (as cardboard chips) once anadjacent warehouse is built, and there arenot as many of these chips as there arefree hexes – and they’re up for grabs. Itmay well happen that you are sittingpretty on a 5 or a 9 somewhere out on theedge, then one of your rivals swipes itfrom you, with no possibility of redress. Apainful blow to your resource production.

AdH is a refinement on The Settlers ofAmerica (see spielbox 6/2010), whichappeared in the USA from Mayfair andplays through the great age of railway-building from the East

Coast tothe West. Does that make this a rail-

way game as well? The designer saysno. Klaus Teuber gives us an appendix tothe rulebook containing various tacticaltips and a detailed account of the histori-cal roots of Aufbruch der Händler, whichlie with the great merchant dynasties ofthe Fuggers and the Welsers, as well aswith the Hanseatic League and the mer-

chant houses of Italy. Using thismedieval theme has meant a few

compromises with (today’s)geography, but the end resultis a thoroughly successfulgame. In my view, Aufbruch

der Händler is an engagingevening’s play and could well be the

most challenging Catan variant to date. Edwin Ruschitzka/sw

Reviewer Playing appealEdwin Ruschitzka. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Christwart Conrad . . . . . . . . . . . . 5L. U. Dikus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8Stefan Ducksch* . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7Matthias Hardel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8Wieland Herold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8KMW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8Harald Schrapers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

* Playing appeal rating for the shortgame. The full-length version has someserious down-time.

Die Siedler von CatanAufbruch der HändlerKosmosKlaus TeuberMichael Menzel3–4about 12 and upabout 75–150 minutesabout 35 €

Title:

Publisher:Designer:Artist: Players: Age: Duration:Price:


and they fall under sevenheadings: harvest, family,crafts, market, travel, councilchamber, and church. At thebeginning of each round,cubes are drawn from a bag and then aset number is distributed to each area.Most of the cubes are influence ones, butmixed in among them are a few that rep-resent plague.

I You can’t have all of themOn your turn, you choose an area,

take one of the cubes from it, andperform the action. If the cube is aninfluence one, then you store it forlater use; if it is a plague, then youhave to advance your time marker.The round continues in this way untilall the markers have been taken. This isa mechanism for choosing actions thatI have not seen before, and it worksvery well. A good approach to design-ing strategy games is to presentplayers with a range of desirablechoices, while making it clearthat they can’t take all ofthem. Here you have to bal-ance the desirability of theactions themselves, theavailability of cubes ofparticular colors if yourfuture plans are towork, and the scarcityof cubes of any sort inmany of the spaces.As for the actions

themselves, “harvest”gives you grain,which can be sold atthe mill or useddirectly as a barteritem in various

The picture on the box shows a medieval village. In the center, ayoung couple in their wedding finery gaze lovingly into each other’seyes, while in the foreground, two remarkably clean and tidy youngboys listen with rapt attention to the tales of the old wheelwright,who is also remarkably clean and tidy. In the background is achurch, a windmill, and a horse-drawn wagon. The only thing miss-ing from this Disneyesque scene is the Fairy Godmother. Fortu-nately, when you reverse the box and read what is written under-neath, you find a story that is less dewy-eyed and saccharine. Vil-lage is a game about families competing to make a name forthemselves in a medieval and rural setting.

transactions; “family” is the way to gainthe new family members that you willneed as the old ones die off; and “crafts”is a collection of buildings where you cangain various items such as horses, wagonsand ploughs. Wagons are needed if youare going to send someone off on theirtravels, while horses, oxen and ploughsboost production from the harvest. With

all these “craft items,” thereare two methods of acquisi-tion. Either youcan sendsome-one towork

Race for Six Feet Under

REVIEW

Village

T he idea is that families consist ofmultiple generations. New peopleare born, old ones die, and what

each individual does during their lifetimehas an effect on the well-being and repu-tation of the family as a whole. You standthat much taller if your grandfather wasthe mayor or your uncle the priest.Most of the actions in the game are

paid for using a variety of “currencies.” Inaddition to the obvious one of money,there are four types of influence thatare represented by different colored

cubes, and the interestingone of time, which eachplayer tracks on a small per-sonal board, representingtheir farmyard. The track is acircular one of 10 spaces,and when you undertake anactivity that requires time as

part of its payment, you advance yourmarker. The sting in the tail, and the mostnovel of the game’s ideas, is that when-

ever you complete a lap,one of the older mem-bers of your familydies. The use of time isthus not just a gim-mick, it is helping todrive the narrative,and forcing playersto plan ahead andmake sure that theyhave a new genera-tion lined up totake the place ofthe old.The actionsthemselves aretied to variousareas of themain board,

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you ought to beusing it in the waythat you are usingthe other curren-

cies, efficiently, and yet to becompetitive in the villagechronicle section, you have todo the opposite. It is alsocompletely out of keepingwith the game’s theme tohave a situation where youregard visitations of theplague as being no badthing.Village is a well-pre-

sented game with aboard that makes all thevarious costs admirablyclear. It is also 90% ofthe way towards beinga very good one.Unfortunately, thatlast 10% is a case of the extraingredient that spoils the dish. If theywere going to include the notion of a vil-lage chronicle, then they needed a goodidea to make it work, and to maintain thecoherence of the story. The idea theychose was lazy and bad, which is a shame,as the theme and all the other ideas aregood.

Stuart W. Dagger

track. This final scoring area isthe “village chronicle,” a goodenough idea in itself, but onewhich has been realized in sucha way as to make nonsense of much ofwhat has gone before. The idea is that theachievements of its members bring honorto a family, and to that end, we are givenan area into which are placed the dearlydeparted. It is divided into sections,according to what careers they followedin their life, and spaces are strictly limited.In a 4-player game, there are just 15

spaces. Yougain 4 VP if youget 3 familymembers intothe chronicle, 7VP for 4, and animpressive 12VP for 5. Do the

math, and you will see that this is a verycompetitive section. And how do you getpeople into the chronicle? Simply by hav-ing them die, so this section of the scoringis no more than a race to the grave, whichis macabre.

I Taking care of grannyI come from a family whose attitude

towards its relatives stopped well short ofsentimentality, but even we would haveregarded thinking that went along thelines, “The churchyard is getting full andso we need to get granny undergroundbefore all the places are taken,” as beingsomewhat bad form. Yet, that is preciselyhow you need to think in this game. Theentry criterion of early death, which mostof us would regard as a misfortune ratherthan an achievement, also calls into ques-tion the concept of time as a currency andof plague cubes as a bad thing. The rulebook describes time in this way, and so

there, in which caseyou will be expending

time, or you can buy theitems by using grain in onecase and by certain combina-tions of influence cubes in theothers.The other four areas are the

places where you gain victory pointsfor the market action. At the start of

each round, a number of tiles will havebeen placed in the market, and when themarket day is called, players have theopportunity to takethem. It workson a barter sys-tem, with suchoffers as “6 VPfor a horse and aplough” and “3VP for three bagsof grain.” There is also a time and cube

cost for each transaction, other thanthe first one, by the player whocalled the market day by takingthe cube from this space. As else-where in the game, timing isimportant.The travel section of the

board shows six towns con-nected by a network of roads.Each road shows the cost(wagon, time, cubes) that youmust pay in order to travel along it,

and at the end of the game, you willgain victory points for the number oftowns that your family members havevisited. The other two areas, the churchand the council chamber, also followthis pattern of first sending a familymember there, and then having

them progress, though with these twoit is up through a hierarchy rather thanacross a map. As with the travelsection, there is a cost to bepaid for each advance, and vic-tory points to be gained foryour positions at the end ofthe game.So far, so good. Up to this

point, we have a game whichhas a good story line andmechanisms that are in har-mony both with the story andwith each other. However, wehave not yet finished. Thereis a fifth scoring area, and atthis point, as far as I am con-cerned, the train leaves the

Reviewer Playing appealStuart W. Dagger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Christwart Conrad . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8L.U. Dikus*. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9Wieland Herold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8KMW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8Edwin Ruschitzka. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

* Equally courageous and successfulemployment of the grim Reaper as anatural consequence of ageing anddisease.

Villageeggertspiele/PegasusInka und Markus BrandDennis Lohausen, Hans-Georg Schneider2–4 (for two �)about 12 and upabout 90–120 minutesabout 30 €

Title: Publisher:Designer:Artist:

Players: Age: Duration:Price:

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and quantities of building materials. Themore showmen we convince to set up inthe park, the better our own revenuesbecome.As for how the game operates,

everything is well thought out. Everyplayer has his own board, on whichthe three train cars are shown. Eachcar has four compartments, but onlythree are occupied by performertokens. If a showman leaves a car,vacating the space where the tokenwas, you can see the type of incomegenerated from then on. Dependingon the car, this can either be attrac-tion points – you could just as wellcall them victory points, since theydecide the outcome of the game –or building materials or money. Asthere is always at least one opencompartment in each car, a mini-mum income is guaranteed.The train board also displays

which and how many buildingmaterials we need for the con-struction of our fairgroundstalls. The materials are the red and whitecubes that are drawn randomly from thebag or simply selected.

I Policemen for saleTo build a stall in the amusement park

is one of three “major actions” that wecan take when it is our turn. A second isdeveloping new building lots in the park.This costs money, but also gives us,depending on the area, some sort ofimmediate income. The third possibility isto build major attractions, the kind thatmake an amusement park truly enjoyable:a roller coaster, bumper cars, a wild waterride, and the like. Again, for this we needbuilding materials.We don’t have to pick just one of the

three main actions, we could choose to do

M ichael Schacht has taken up thetheme of the early days ofConey Island, if only in name.

His amusement park could really be any-where. All you need is a gated green lawnthat’s divvied up and transferred onto thegame board. Gradually, the parcels aredeveloped and can then offer up to fourattractions. Well, “attraction” is usedlightly, because at first there can only beminor timewasters set up on the site. Aweightlifter flexes his muscles, an icecream vendor provides refreshment, and afortune teller in her tent promisesglimpses into the future. These charactersare members of showbiz families and arerepresented by us, the players.Each of us has been assigned our own

board, made up of three old-fashionedtrain cars. These are home to

nine representatives ofthe traveling peoplewho want to set upbooths in the amuse-ment park. To con-struct the booths,

we need differ-ent types

The peninsula at Brooklyn’s southern end looks back on an eventful history. Inthe 19th Century – when Coney Island was still an island – the masses discov-ered it as a beach resort. To provide diversions, race courses, carousels, and rollercoasters were built. Establishments of various kinds provided more amusement.Until the Second World War, the area was considered the largest amusementpark in the world. Then the glory faded.

REVIEW

them all and in any order; in principle, wecan only choose each option once a turn,but in certain conditions, we can carrythem out multiple times. There’s more: inthe park, there are individuals who offerup their services for us to use as “sec-ondary actions,” mostly ways to barter.For example, we can buy a policeman and

with his help trade an attraction point fora building material – at any time, as longas the officer is with us. Unfortunately, hecan be bought away from us by otherplayers. But “buy” is the wrong word here,since the money spent doesn’t go into ourpockets, but to the bank.We have to say a few words about the

great attractions. They can only be builtwhere there are already fairground stalls.That is, the big rides displace the smallstalls. The small ones are dismantled, andthe performers return to their homes –with the unpleasant consequence thatthey then reduce our recurring income.Still, dismantling them gets attention,and thus our points multiply. And the per-formers can also be returned to the parkto start fresh somewhere else. Even other

One More Amusement ParkConey Island

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The journalist is alsodesired. With his help wecan buy a newspaper(which, amazingly, doesnot cost money, but abuilding material).Newspapers can eitherget us victory points atthe end of the game, or weuse them during play to repeatactions, a possibility that onelearns to appreciate.There are many opportunities

to earn points, and it pays to fol-low the actions of other players.After all, we are building theamusement park together. Totry out all the different strate-gies will take several games.However, each game takes awhile, too. The box promises aplaying time of 30 to 60 minutes. We’renot the fastest thinkers, but also notbrooders. In nine four-player games, wenever succeeded to play in under 80 min-utes, which is a bit too long for what isbeing offered here. Thus, our enthusiasm,unfortunately, remained restrained.

KMW/sb

Following Zooloretto and Aquaretto,Michael Schacht has once again turned afree time excursion into a game withConey Island. Aside from the theme,though, the new game has nothing incommon with its predecessors. In fact, itwas not originally intended to be about atheme park at all, as Schacht revealed inan interview. Instead, he wanted torebuild Rome after a fire. But Rome isalready the subject of several games onthe market, and the publisher was looking

for a theme that would appeal tofamilies.

The thematic makeover succeeded,and the game components have thehigh quality we by now expect fromArgentum. As we build up ourtheme park, there are many lovingdetails to discover – as long as youhave good eyesight or a magnify-ing glass. And the author has bal-anced the numerous play detailswith each other. The more expen-sive it is to bring a showman intoplay, the more useful the incomethey will generate. The sooner amajor attraction is built, themore attraction points it pulls in.

Still, the life of the travelingpeople in an amusement park isdefined by hardship, with a lackof a little bit of this and a lot ofthat. Revenues are scarce – theauthor has seen to it that youcan only put a little moneyaside for a rainy day. And luck

can play nasty pranks. Namely, in theincome phase, the building materialcubes are drawn blindly from the bag. If itis the wrong color, the performers mustremain in their trailers. It’s a real hasslewhen this happens a number of rounds ina row. The fortune teller and two of hercolleagues allow a player to choose build-ing materials – but only after they haveopened their businesses. And for that, ofcourse, you need the right building mate-rials. The only way out is to invest moneyin the patron, for with his help you canswap building materials. Accordingly, heis highly sought after. And if two playersconstantly draw the wrong color from thebag, it becomes a scramble for the patronand money.

player’sbooths can

be built over – theymust be, sometimes, since the big attrac-tions indicate if the dismantled stallshave to belong to one or more players.Another problem: A roller coaster, for

example, extends over four buildingspaces, and can only be built once fourperformers have set up shop side by side.These four also have to belong to at leasttwo different families. But when it is

finally finished, the coaster brings itsbuilder at least half a dozen attractionpoints.

I No glory for RomeFine, I get it: The big attractions drive

my little people out of the park and ruinmy regular income. Well, then I’ll justsend them to the remote corners andleave them there to set up their stalls,where they will not as quickly – or maybenot at all – be built over. Nice idea, butthe author of the game punishes playerswith this idea by subtracting points foreach booth left in the park at the end ofthe game. To end the game, there are sev-eral potential conditions, only one ofwhich is sufficient to finish things off.

Reviewer Playing appealKMW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Nicola Balkenhol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6Udo Bartsch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5L.U. Dikus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7Stefan Ducksch* . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6Wieland Herold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

* Smooth and round. So much so thatthe game doesn’t spark.

Coney IslandArgentumMichael SchachtDennis Lohausen2–4 (for two: �)about ca. 10 and upabout 30–60 minutesabout 30 €


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In the game, however, there are stillplenty of resources available. Huntersand gatherers procure food from land andsea at any time, so they can make offer-ings when erecting a statue. There isenough wood to cut for the transport ofthese Moai, though sometimes with diffi-culty. On the other hand, the number ofpriests, who provide only glory, increasesnever-endingly. But the end is near, andoften brings a rude awakening.

I Completion by DepletionAll this is realized in an invigoratingly

innovative fashion through an easily com-prehensible card game. For example,when you expand your personal card dis-play, you increase your influence over thevarious inhabitants, and activate themduring the same turn. After you replenishyour card hand at the end of your turn, ascoring round begins based upon themost recently uncovered card of the gen-eral display stack from which you drew.The other players may alsoscore if they havethe same cardtype in their

personal dis-play. Whereashunters andgatherers pro-

vide only one oftheir specifickind of food,lumberjacks,priests and Moaibenefits increasefor each addi-tional one aplayer possesses. Inaddition, a player gets abonus if he has at least two repre-sentatives and the sole majority ofthe scored type.

W hereas the choice of the titlemight be unfortunate, thetheme’s implementation fits

and is felicitous in terms of play. Rapa Nui(better known as Easter Island) is thedesert island in the nearly infinite waterywasteland of the Pacific. Its inhabitantsreduced the tree population to such adegree for moving the monumental stonestatues that it resulted in soil erosion that

destroyed their cul-ture’s agricul-tural founda-

tion.

At first, Reinhold Wittig was understandably indignant finding a game calledRapa Nui among last fall’s new releases from the Kosmos company. The reason:He created his game with the same title in his Edition Perlhuhn product line in2005; it is a dice-placement game that he developed with Ingo Althöfer. Oneyear later, the Giseh company released a version for an extended number of play-ers. The Kosmos editors could have easily looked on-line at Luding orBoardGameGeek to check if this title had been used before and if so, find outwhether it was still subject to work title protection. Considering their long-termgood relationship, however, the matter could be resolved with a formal apology.

REVIEW

A dilemma can develop becauseby determining the type of card tobe scored, you give the next playeraccess to this card – which may ben-efit them. This cannot be entirely pre-vented since players can replenish upto three cards in their hand (they areallowed to lay out more than one cardof the same type). Even the surchargeof one wood for each additional cardseems acceptable.By taking more cards, you accelerate

the expansion of your own display, receivemore choices for the upcoming scoring,and prevent the scoring of the first card(and maybe the second card) picked up.In the two-player game, in most cases, itmakes sense to spoil such possibilities forthe opponent and content yourself with aless useful card. In a game with moreplayers, this strategy results in unneces-sarily impairing your strength in relationto the others.In addition to glory points for Moai and

priests during the interim scorings, eachMoai gives you another four points at theend of the game. The game ends when acompletely depleted column of the gen-eral display has to be replenished, andthe draw pile is used up in doing so(which can be an intentional tactic). Thetypes and amount of stored food are alsoimportant for the final scoring. Since acard type’s value is determined bythe number of them lying on theStone of Sacrifice, players are in apermanent dilemma: The higher

No Good Without WoodRapa Nui

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course of thegame. Keeping count will not be to any-body’s liking anyway, and the face downsacrifice cards increase the uncertainty.So, sacrificing a type of card that may berepresented less frequently increases thistype’s value for the final scoring, or youcan waste valuable cards to improve yourown position, which can lead to com-pletely different results in the final scor-ing.Even though this might be considered

a bit unsatisfying and give rise to goingone better, it is – amazingly enough –nothing that could vitally impair the play-ing fun you had before. L. U. Dikus/sbw

and you have notinvested in just asingle type that turnsout to be worthlessbecause it was the low-est amount sacrificed.The Rapa Nui rules are

easy to comprehend, eventhough the connectionsdo not completely becomeapparent in the first game.It plays briskly and has lit-tle down time,. as all play-ers are involved in all thescorings and have to keep

track of the development of everyone’sdisplay. Since the general display and theorder of cards are different in every game,flexibility and tactical skills are indemand. The game remains suspensefuluntil the end, no matter how many play-ers participate.The technique of determining the scor-

ing by the card(s) picked is a real novelty.In contrast, the principle of deliberatelytaking the first and sometimes also a sec-ond card from different columns andimmediately placing them in one’s per-sonal display previously came up in DasSuper-Blatt by Sid Sackson (F. X. Schmid,1992).The dilemma with the evaluation for

the final scoring is already known fromother games. For instance, in PeerSylvester’s King of Siam (Histogame,2007), a player can increase a faction’sinfluence by sending for one of its follow-ers from an embattled province, weaken-ing this faction there. And if a player in

King’s Breakfast by Alan R. Moon andAaron Weissblum (Abacusspiele, RioGrande Games, 2003) wants to

score, he collects as many cards aspossible of the high-qualitydishes, but not more than the

king.In contrast tothese two refer-enced gameswith their com-plete informa-tion of the rele-

vant limit values, inthis game it is hardlypossible to assess cor-rectly how many dif-ferent types were

offered in sacrifices during the

the number ofthem on the Stone of Sacrifice, the lessavailable to collect for scoring in yourcard display.

I Covert Sacrifice Zealously erecting Moai, which triggers

a round of sacrifices, gives you an advan-tage. Aside from placing your personalsacrifice card face down (other playersplay them face up), you may add onemore card of your choice from the generalsupply. A certain balance can be reachedonly by buying additional sacrifice cards;their initial high price in wood decreaseswith each of your own hunters and gath-erers card of the respective type. Sincefive wood in the final scoring gives youonly one glory point, but cards of themost valuable kind are worth three pointseach, almost every purchase pays off.That is, provided you have enough woodleft no major investment iscoming up,

Reviewer Playing appealL.U. Dikus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Nicola Balkenhol*. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5Udo Bartsch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7Christwart Conrad . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6Matthias Hardel** . . . . . . . . . . . . 6KMW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6Harald Schrapers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

* Even with two players, there is a lot ofluck involved; with four players, however,I feel I have been played.** Appealing to play, even though theoutcome depends on chance to a greatextent. Interestingly enough, tacticalobjectives (majorities in fruit produc-tion) and strategic objectives (highvalues of the fruits stored) differdiametrically. If you strive for a majorityof fruits in order to optimally profit fromthe distributions, you’ll have a lack ofallies: The respective fruit will not be orhardly be sacrificed by the other playersand therefore be worth little or nothingin the end of the game.

Rapa NuiKosmosKlaus-Jürgen WredeMartin Hoffmann2–4 (for two: �)about 10 and upabout 35 minutesabout 15 €


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SPIELBOX EDITION

Navegador: Pirates & Diplomats

This expansion adds two strategic ele-ments to NAVEGADOR. The pirate can useships to plunder colonies on the boardby selling goods from these colonies atthe market. The diplomat, thanks to hisnegotiating skills, is able to use anotherplayer’s colonies and factories instead ofhis own at the market. The pirate pro-vides an additional source of income,especially to players with many shipsbut only a few colonies or factories. Incontrast, if another player has an excep-tionally big market potential, the diplo-mat becomes of particular interestbecause he can use this potential forhimself.

Rule changesIn the beginning, the six playing cards (3pirates and 3 diplomats) are put next tothe gameboard (at the privilege gallery)ready for use; this is called the “Display.”Changes of the game rules apply to threeactions:

PrivilegeIf you are on the “Privilege” space, youmay – instead of taking a privilege – per-form one of the three following actions:• take a pirate from the display and puthim next to your own player’s sheet,with the active side face up. Cost: Take1 of your own ships off the board andput it into your supply;

• take a diplomat from the display andput him next to your own player’ssheet, with the active side face up.Cost: Reduce the number of workers asmarked on the board by 1;

• turn one of your own pirates or diplo-mats from the inactive to the activeside.

MarketIf you have an active pirate or diplomat,you may – in addition to your action – useone of these cards on the “Market” field(and turn it onto its inactive side). Thisallows you to do the following:Pirate: In addition to your factories andcolonies, you may sell one resource eachfrom any un-owned colonies on theboard. The precondition, however, is thatyou have a ship in the corresponding searegion for each colony you use.Diplomat: Instead of your owncolonies and factories, youuse those of anotherplayer. That means you usethis player’s colonies for sell-ing goods, and his factoriesfor processing goods.

Sailing / Navegador cardWhen exploring a sea regionmarked with the token for adouble loss of ships, you takethis token into your supply.

Victory pointsIn the final scoring, the cards count as fol-lows:• each pirate: 1 victory point for each ofyour own ships on the gameboardand 2 victory points for each “double lossof ships” token for that you collected• each diplomat: 1 victory point for eachof your own workers

VariantTo get used to the expansion or simply asa general variant, the number of piratesor diplomats a player may own can belimited to one each.

PD-Verlag and spielbox wish you a lot offun with this expansion, which is based onan idea by Lars Brügging.

Example of how to use a pirate with the “Market” action

Red owns the colonies and factories as shown below. If Red usesthe pirate for the “Market” action, he can additionally sell 1 sugarfrom Bahia (there is only one colony) and 1 gold from Guiné(here, he has only one ship). So, all together he can sell 2 sugar for50 Cruzados each plus 3 gold for 40 Cruzados each. In addition,

he can use the orange-colored factory to process spices; in thiscase, he gets another 30 Cruzados. This amounts to a total of250. If the player had 2 ships in Guiné, he would have been ableto sell 2 additional gold, i.e., 5 overall.

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The Success of David Parlett

author of 21 books, among them the Pen-guin Encyclopedia of Card Games (1979);Family Card Games (1984, written by Par-lett under the pseudonym P. R. Jackson);the Oxford History of Board Games(1999); the Oxford A-Z of Card Games(2004); plus revised and repackaged edi-tions and foreign editions in Spanish,Hungarian and Japanese (as well as aGerman translation of two games on hiswebsite, published by Bambus Verlag in2008). He authored a series of “Teach

Yourself …” books forcard games, and haswritten what someconsider the mostcomprehensive book

of solitaire (patience) games ever pub-lished (The Penguin Book of Patience,1979). As a film enthusiast, he takesgreat pride in staging card games forperiod dramas in film and television; hetaught various actors Whist, Pope Joanand Bezique for their performances inBBC-TV productions and stage plays. This

consummate, mild-mannered Britishgame researcher even looks and sounds alittle like Michael Caine, his favoritescreen actor (both are from South Lon-don). Yet David Parlett is known the worldover primarily for a singular achievement:Hare and Tortoise. But more on thatlater….David Parlett is an inexhaustible writer,

having penned many articles in additionto his books. He began writing in 1972for Games and Puzzles magazine, shortlyafter it premiered. By then, he hadalready designed what he calls his mostsuccessful card game, Ninety-Nine, whichwas produced in 1968, and is now in thepublic domain (which is often the casewith games using generic cards). He hasinvented dozens of card games since. Hecites Bugami as probably the best of hisother games. Another recent favorite isParity, which, like many of his games, ison his website, but has never been in

B ut it’s more than just his love ofgames and his inventiveness thatmake David Parlett a most fasci-

nating person. His interests – and talents– cover such individual things as themusic of composer Sir Arnold Bax(1883–1953); the poems that made upCarl Orff’s choral work Carmina Burana,which he translated into, as he put it,“singable English verse;” and the novelsof Jane Austen, which he reread, notingdown all the mentions of card games.According to Parlett,her novels are “rich inreferences to cardgames and she evi-dently knew what shewas talking about.” He also enjoys pho-tography – which he called a “quicker,less messy” substitute for the painting hestill dabbles in. He continues to do pen-and-ink landscape sketches.However, his Renaissance nature aside,

David Parlett is most recognized for hisambitious work in games. He is the

Whatever you say when you talk with David Parlett, don’t mention rabbits andturtles! If you do, you’re sure to get a terse lecture on how a rabbit is consider-ably different from a hare, and a turtle is a far cry from a tortoise. And he’s aman who should know: His 1973 Hare & Tortoise game has been on the marketnearly 40 years.

Slow and Steady

“I wish I had discovered GO

at a younger age.”

Here to be seen in print for the first time:The Hare & Tortoise prototype

A LOOK BACK

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about May ’74.” He “invented it in Octo-ber and finalized it in November”! TheBoardGameGeek website calls Hare andTortoise “a cunningly designed race tothe finish…. It’s a very clever exercise inarithmetic which David Parlett has fash-ioned into an entertaining and uniqueperennial favorite.” More than two millioncopies have been sold in at least 10 lan-guages and various editions, includingslight rules variations with each newrelease. Parlett says that in terms ofappearance, the 1978 Ravensburgergame, Hase und Igel, which became thefirst ”Spiel des Jahres” (Game of the Year)winner in 1979, was his favorite. “TheWaddington’s one was not a good design,and the early Gibsons was a pale imita-tion of the original design.” However, thearrangement of the racetrack in the 1987Gibsons game (repeated by ABACUS in2000) is one Parlett considers far betterthan the original track layout of 1974 and1979.The idea of Hare and Tortoise is based

on the Aesop fable in which the tranquiltortoise winsbecause the rapidrabbit – I mean, hur-rying hare – takes anap, the moralbeing: slow andsteady wins therace. In Germany,

the Aesop story is not as well-known asthe Brothers Grimm fairy tale about thehare (“Hase”) and the hedgehog (“Igel”),in which the hedgehog beats the hare.What’s interesting is that in the Grimmtale, the hedgehog succeeds byscheming (his wife impersonateshim and periodically enters the

race ahead of the hare).The design of the playingpieces was to allow thefigure of the tortoise tobe used also as thehedgehog, since thiswas the preferredform in someEuropean coun-tries. The factthat Americanscalled the charac-

ters a turtle and a rabbitalways annoyed Parlett. (Maybe

print. “You can’t publish card games with-out ’theming’ them. I like abstractgames – very simple rules – but you can’tmarket these; allyou can do is showthem on your web-site and let peoplemake their own.”He prefers card

games that can beplayed with ordi-nary playing cards – classics like Crib-bage, Sixty-Six, Piquet, Spades and Skat.He plays bridge, but thinks “it’s vastlyoverrated and played by some of themost irritating people in the world.” Heis president of the British Skat Asso-ciation, and has been playing thisthree-player German nationalcard game for 50 years; hisfirst games book wasTeach yourself CardGames for Three. Parlett prefers card

games to boardgames, abstractgames to themedones, and depthover complexity.“I don’t like com-plicated games,” heremarked. “I want to be ableto read the rules before play-

ing the game, not while playing it.” Andas a historian, he’s not particularly inter-ested in modern games – “except abstractones, because they’re timeless,” he adds.His favorite abstract game is Pentomi-noes, by Solomon Golomb (mathemati-cian inventor of polyominoes, the inspira-tion for the computer game Tetris). All this interest in games began, David

Parlett conjectures, when, at about ageseven, he saw a set of Dominoes with col-ored pips in his cousin’s compendium ofgames. By the end of 1973, at the age of34, he was negotiating with companiesfor the sale of Hare and Tortoise. “Thedecade of the 1970s was the golden eraof games in the U.K., but then it faded.Britain (now) gets swamped with U.S.imports, and the small, backstreet Englishcompanies are here today and gonetomorrow. For my money, the best gamesare the ones published in Germany.”

Hare and Tortoise was initially pub-lished by Intellect Games, a British com-pany that didn’t survive very long. Thegame is dated 1973, but “it was only a

few days before Christmas that theyaccepted the game, and we signed a con-tract. It wasn’t actually published till

“I think DRAUGHTS or CHECKERS is one of the mostunderestimated games in the world. ContinentalDRAUGHTS on a 10 x 10 board makes use of a ’long king’ that moves like a bishop in CHESS; themove makes for a better game.”

A lot of ideas up his sleave:Parlett at Game Authors Meeting, Göttingen, 2010


The Ravensburger edition of Hase undIgel that came out in 2008 reintroducedthe layout that first appeared in 1987,

and changed the rules for what occurswhen landing on hare squares, the oneelement in the game open to chance(“jugging the hare”). Parlett reacted tovarious players’ comments, especially tosuggestions made by Hare and Tortoise

this article will finally correct that!) “Rab-bits are nauseatingly cute, cuddly andgregarious” Parlett points out, “whereashares are eccentric, individualand tend to be loners. I’m moreof a hare than a bunny myself.”

Hare and Tortoise uses aclever device to govern move-ment: with carrots as the energyforce, the more spaces you wantto go, the proportionally more carrots youhave to spend; e.g., it costs 1 carrot tomove 1 space but 10 carrots to move 4spaces. Your position in the race deter-mines how many carrots you can earn.But you can’t finish if you have too manycarrots left. And then there are the lettucecards….The mechanism for the game was

derived from an earlierunpublished prototype,“Space Race,” which wascreated around the time ofthe first moon landing, butwas deemed too compli-cated at the time. As he wasplaytesting the mechanism,the “slow-but-steady” ideaand hare and tortoise themecame into mind. “Trouble is, itlooks like a children’s game,but it isn’t,” Parlett com-mented. “This has been a con-stant criticism [of the game]for all the years of its exis-tence.”

Hit the market in 1974:The first edition made by Intellect

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aficionados in an on-line Google news-group. According to Parlett, these mod-ifications “make it, as far as I’m con-cerned, the definitive edition.” Aredesigned English-language edi-tion by Gibsons Games wasreleased in the U.K. in 2010. Thislatest version, in keeping with thegame’s abstract principles, hasbeen graphically redesignedand, around the racetrack,uses sketches that depictfamous English landmarks,including St Paul’s Cathe-dral and Blackpool Tower.Though Hare and Tor-

toise premiered fourdecades ago, Parlett hasn’t given up onthe idea of inventing another hit. “I havegot at least half a dozen games waiting

for the right publisher to comealong,” he reports. He stillplaytests his games with Bar-bara, his spouse of 45 years,whom he calls, “a very percep-tive and valuable games tester-cum-guinea pig.”

I asked David Parlett whether hethought the slow and steady sale of hisgame over decades was an analogy of thestory of the hare and tortoise itself. Hisreply: “Well, now that you mention it.…”

Bruce Whitehill

“Of games I didn’t invent, I thinkCARCASSONNE is my favorite modernone. I would have made it illegal tobuild tiles around an empty area.”


is just like Settlers!” , then shameon you. This is how my fellowgamers constantly bugme, too. It is simplynot true. [Editor’snote: Besides, it wouldbe more appropriate toshout: “This is just like Crude /Mcmulti!”] With Feudality, weget resources or victory pointsfrom the selected tile on our personalFiefdom Management Card instead of ageneral game board. The buildings haveno victory point value, instead they gainyou something when they are one of theselected “point of action” spaces. What

also count are sundry buildings, char-acter tiles, and our fortificationthat when developed from a fee-ble tower to a castle, results infour victory points as a “point ofaction” selection. Since 12 to 14

A s Barons, we extend our fiefdom,each on an individual gameboard comprising eight by eight

spaces (however, we build on only seventimes seven spaces). Here we place ourkeep (four spaces), with its buildings andtroops serving as our defense. Addi-

tional tiles with forests, farmers, oriron ore mines are placed onto ourmeadows, hills, and the river, ifpossible, in a way for them to pro-vide us with resources. At thebeginning of his turn, the activeplayer rolls two eight-sided dice,and at the coordinate intersec-

tion space of the resulting numbers(called a “point of action”), and theeight spaces adjacent to it, all play-ers with buildings there willhave exactly one harvest.Should you now be

inclined to exclaim: “But this

It seems that Lookout Games has trendsetting qualities: Half a year before theNuremberg Toy Fair brought on a veritable dice game flood, this publishinghouse presented a dice-based development game called Feudality. Lookout, ofall publishers, where until now they avoided dice like the plague! Here, Ameri-can author Tom Wham puts forward a kind of ultralight Kings & Things thatincludes some chaos qualified to split up game groups forever.

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points (depending on the numberof players) are required to win,the game could draw quickly toan end. In practice, though, thisdoes not happen.

Feudality is slow. It says, “60 to90 minutes” on the box, and this isabsolutely correct, but it could be less.The reason is that in Settlers of Catan,buildings may last for all eternity, but

their “feudal” half-life can be quitelimited. There are these incrediblybrutal event cards that signalclearly that we are not taking partin a planning and developmentgame, but in a chaotic dice frenzyand clubbing match. Hordes ofbandits raze our fortifications,dragons are a welcome means todestroy a neighbor’s tiles, and the

king is a pernicious nag, whose moodswings may cost us a few resources (if weare lucky, but usually more). There is littleto nothing we can do to defend ourselvesfrom such evils.

I Divine bombardmentShould our barony survive Fortuna’s

bombardment, each player can reinforceit by paying resources during the pur-chase phase to obtain a couple of tiles.Another option during this phase is to for-

In a Dice Frenzy

Feudalherren / Feudality

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conditions, all players lose up to threevictory points by an event card,and the end pushes furtherforward into a dimdistance: This sig-nals a clear alarm.Planning anddevelopment game fanssimply cannot take it whenattacks on a player lead-ing by a wide margin have no hopeof success. They ascribe it to gamedesign and not to their own, earliercommissions or omissions. The diceserve as an excuse at all times. Bottom line: It is questionable if

the people at Lookout Games didthemselves a favor by giving up the “nodice please” policy for Feudality.

Stefan Ducksch/cs

when the result is an odd number. Wemay heal or cast a spell to save them,which means repeating our survivalthrow.Unfortunately, the German rule book is

not watertight. Is it possible to own sev-eral granaries in order to save rations?Does the stonemason need a quarrynearby? Do we need to do sur-vival rolls for our units aftertournaments? How does awar work after a futileattempt on Fiumaccio? Toexhaustively clarify allthese matters you need torefer to the BGG forums orsuch. It would have been better to have a

comprehensive rulebook that covered allsituations. Feudality fans will think differ-

ently. They will use common sense toovercome ambiguities becausethey are focused on having fun.Then the game plays fluidlyand quickly, the playingtime remains within thelimit, a re-match is possible,and even games with five or

six players lift the spirits. Inthis case, Feudality proves just

right for the reasons that it is blatantlyunfair, abrasive, and quite chaotic. Mycolleague Michael Knopf wrote inanother review a long time ago: “Youneed to like it, and then you will like it”.This putative platitude is also a direct hitwhen it comes to Feudality, as the gamewill divide opinions.

I Are the dice at fault?The great majority of my fellow players

would describe themselves as belongingto the Lookout target group. And

when exactly do these playersdiscuss an early termination inalmost half of the games? Notuntil the very latest, whenjust before reaching victory

tify our keep and – particularly important– increase the numbers of our troops bymen at arms (strength 1), archers (2) orknights (3). Next, the active player pickstwo “Baronial Actions.” Two of the actionsgain victory points by starting a hanky-panky with the queen or sabotaging aneighbor’s building. Another one allowsyou attack another player. As with almostevery action in this game, dice are rolled,and a victory point quickly changes handsfrom the loser to the winner. Finally, youmay thrash one of the fictitious, neutralstates of either Santa Paravia (14 defensepoints) or Fiumaccio (19). The latter gainsyou two victory points, a move that willusually be tried in the last push towardswinning the game.

I Right in the beak!The active player ends his turn by sup-

plying his units with rations,and then the next playertakes a turn. This way, thepower balance shiftsto and fro. The victorypawns creep along thevictory point track, unitedas one, until one lucky fellow

is favored by the dice,enabling him or her to lurch

ahead. However, duringless peaceful rounds,that leading playerwill regularly get apunch on thenose! In themeantime, there istile resource pro-duction, place-ment optimization,

and lots of dicerolling: for the bandits, giants, dragons,rations, and random acts of sabotage.Even more dice rolling occur during andafter attacks! After an attack, rolldice to make a survival throw foreach of our units, who are discarded

Reviewer Playing appealStefan Ducksch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Udo Bartsch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6L.U. Dikus*. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6Matthias Hardel** . . . . . . . . . . . . 6Wieland Herold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6KMW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6Edwin Ruschitzka*** . . . . . . . . . . 7

* Heavy lightweight.** Old-fashioned, but entertaining anda welcome break from all the too seriousoptimization games.*** Nice – and I seriously mean it!

FeudalherrenLookout GamesTom WhamKlemens Franz, Tom Wham2–6about 10 and upabout 60–90 minutesabout 35 €


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acter cards, called the MajorArcana, and 56 Minor Arcana infour suits – pentacles, chalices,swords and wands – with valuesfrom 1 to 10 and the four courtcards of Jack, Knight, Queen andKing. The mystery that has longshrouded these cards helped in

creating the names, for in Latin"arcanus" means something likehidden or secret. Accordingly, theauthors have named their newgame Arcanum.

The minor arcana cards give thegame its basic structure. The foursymbols and colors stand for thefour noble families who want tocontrol the fate of a medievalcity. The players (three to five)use the Tarot deck to influencethe future of the noble houses,who are competing three timesin a prestigious race.

In the noble metrop-olis, there are ten loca-tions in which the chesspieces can be moved. Inaddition to King andQueen, there are theknave (pawn) and thehorse (knight). If a corre-sponding court card isplayed, the correspondingfigure may be placed inany location. If a numbercard is played, a court fig-ure of the correspondingcolor must be relocated toa location with the samenumber. In each case,the color card deter-mines which noblehouse marches forwardon the prestige racecourse.

T he Tarot game has its origins in thehomeland of the authors. Since the18th Century, the 78 cards havehelped people find their personal

path in life. The basicstructure of a tarotdeck is always the

same: thereare 22 char-

With a deck of rummy cards, the armies of Frederick the Great fightbattles (Friedrich, Histogame), and the African bean game Mancalais well suited for Roman civic matters (Trajan, Ammonit). Whereverone looks, classics are at work. The Italian game designer AndreaChiarvesio, who is responsible for, among other things, Kingsburg,and his co-author Pierluca Zizzi, have used a complete deck of Tarotcards and several chess pieces to create an entirely new game. Do notworry, it doesn’t get too esoteric – but if you want, you can use the carddeck for divination.

REVIEW

At the sametime, wise use ofthe individuallocations bringsadditional pointson the prestigepoint path. To the

left of the city location numberthere are symbols that refer to the color ofthe noble or the type of figure. A particu-larly lucrative space is location 10: ifsomeone places a blue horse there, hisknights and their swords move forwardfour spaces.

I Betting for the pay-offWhile controlling the race through the

minor arcana represents one key elementof the game, the big reward beckons inthe form of victory points. In order to getthese to flow freely, we get to the otherkey element: to play minor arcana cardsas hidden influence cards. Each turn,players hide at least one color card, whichacts as their bet on the outcome of theprestige race.The betting action is supplemented by

the city spaces. To the right of the citynumber are listed the impacts on cards inhand, possible bets and points. Interest istherefore high in securing additionalchances to hide cards. This is only possi-ble in locations 7, 8 and 9, so they are inspecial demand. Because the first scoringhappens after just three rounds, it makesquite a difference if someone can placethree or six betting cards.This initial description shows that a

player’s fate is largely determined by thecards in hand. Everyone starts with fourminor and one major arcana card. Onecard has to be placed for the initial bet;another will be played for the control of acourt figure. So, whoever doesn’t have a 7,8, and 9 in hand and is also lacking a

Arcanum

The World is Key to Victory

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cial Tarot cards forArcanum. I hopehe was not respon-sible for theRoman numerals,which were printedpartly upside down.The game plan isatmosphericallydense, combining thevarious effects of play and scor-ing together skillfully, even ifviews of the city locations offersome confusing symbols. Thiscauses great difficulty for manygroups playing the game for thefirst time. It is thus recommendedto start with a shortened game of sixrounds to get a feel for the city spacesand card effects. I don’t recommendplaying with the full complement of fiveplayers, as Arcanum plays better withthree or four – and they also rarely exceedthe estimated play time of 90 minutes. IfI had to pull out of the major arcana decka fate card for this game, then, itwould be number 16, the Tower,which stands for unexpectedevents and for disorderly condi-tions that lead to sudden changesthat will occur in the foreseeablefuture. This way, I can still hope asignificant revision and streamliningof the whole is on the way.

Wieland Herold/sw

horserace or stock marketgame. What makes Arcanum takesome getting used to – and that some-times leads to significant dismay – is, ulti-mately, the diversity and randomness ofthe control offered by the different cardsand game spaces. It can take awhile for aplayer to complete his turn. The cards inhand have to be assessed, first in terms ofthe city spaces one would like to play in,then in view of the final score and place-ment on the race course. Everyone alwaysforgets the exact effects of the majorarcana cards, so the rules need to bebrought out again and again.

I Playing solitaire on the sideTo understand all of the game’s ramifi-

cations takes time. It’s important not toforget that playing a card brings forwarda noble house and also the effect of therespective city space. With five players,the start player – who, after the firstround, needs to pass along the startplayer token – will not get a turn untilafter eight of his opponent’s moves.That's enough time to play a game of soli-taire on the side. To be fair, there aresome locations that have an impact oneveryone, and maybe someone wants toremember, too, who sponsored a particu-lar noble house. Nevertheless, the Tarot-theme leads to some unnecessary bloat-ing. The game is therefore somewhatcomplicated, even though in its basicstructure it is simple, catchy and veryimpressive.It is important to praise graphic artist

Patrizio Evangilisti, who designed the spe-

court fig-ure that can beplaced in any location has tohope for the best from the draw deck andhope that he has placed a bet on the righthorse.One last hope may lie with the major

arcana card a player may play on his turn.The 22 cards all offer special advantages,things like immediate victory points ornew cards to influence the nobles’ race,the ability to block certain locations or tosecretly place minor arcana cards. Partic-ularly strong is card #21, The World.Played early, it can gain a player 14 vic-tory points, which would be tough toovercomethrough intermediate scoringrounds.At the beginning of every turn, a player

gets a normal card draw, which can beeither three minor arcana or one majorarcana. A large part of this choice comesdown not only to control of the court fig-ures but also to betting interests, sinceinfluence on the running track is second-ary, and it is more important to havemajority interest in the houses leadingthe race.After the third, sixth and ninth rounds,

scores are calculated. Whoever has themost interest in the victorious noble fam-ily gets 16 victory points (for the losinghouse, there are just 8 points). Sharehold-ers in the second and third place houseswill also be rewarded. At the end of theninth round, whoever stands furthestalong the city wall victory point trackmust have had card #10 (the Wheel) or#19 (the Sun), cards that, next to #21,foretell special happiness and success inthe Tarot deck.The ideas that have the two Italian

authors have put into the game are, infact, quite logical. They led to a conceptthat could have been brought to life as a

Reviewer Playing appealWieland Herold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Christwart Conrad*. . . . . . . . . . . . 5

* Inappropriately large format. Appeal-ing concept, but not fully developed.Effects of the major arcana too arbitrary.Playing a third round after the first twobrought no progression, it felt almostlike having started all over again.

ArcanumLo ScarabeoA. Chiarvesio, P. ZizziPatrizio Evangilisti3–5about 12 and upabout 90 minutesabout 30 €


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rolled to represent creatures. Players acti-vate the creatures by paying the associ-ated price with points (called Quiddity,which were also rolled). Moreover, theQuiddity currency can be used to buy newdice from the supply in the middle of thetable.

I Reasonably faithful transfer of principlesAt the end of a turn, used dice and

remaining dice in the active pool aremoved to the “used pile,” and activatedcreatures and spells remain in the “readyarea” in front of their owners (spells enter

Success is attractive: Dominion is a great success and therefore attractive tomany game designers. But what exactly is that certain something so many peo-ple seem to enjoy? Part of the appeal is certainly the opportunity to build a newdeck of cards and test it against competitors. There is also the thrill of findingthe right point in time for a sudden change from deck building to collecting vic-tory points. However, the thing that Dominion seems to lack in the eyes of somegamers is some lightness, as luck does not play a large role in the game. Well,and interaction is practically non-existent. And then there is the constant shuf-fling of cards ...

REVIEW

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the game from there at a later time). It isessential not to confuse these areas,which is the same as the “discard” and“action cards played” area in Dominion.The used and newly bought dice remainin the “used pile” until the bag does notyield a full set of six dice for the next turn.Then, the dice remaining in the bag aretaken out first, the “used pile” ones areput inside, the bag is shaken, and the“active pool” is replenished to six. In thisway, the Dominion principle of card deck-building is faithfully transferred to dice. Quarriors has a new, interactive ele-

ment. The activated creature dice willattack, in turn order and in succession, allactive creatures of the opponents. In yourturn, you total the attack points shown onyour creature dice. The defending playercounters with his creatures, one after theother. Each creature has its own defensevalue, and when the opponent comes upwith an equal or a higher number ofattack points, the beaten creature goesinto the owner’s “used pile”. However, the

Quarriors

Basically, It’s a Dice Building GameTM

(Quote from the Box)

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L ightness, fighting, only a few cards(which do not need to be shuffled bythe way), and a touch of that Domin-

ion feeling: Quarriors offers all of these.Special dice (130 in all) take over the roleof cards, and only a selection is used ineach game, which seems familiar enough.Our group of gamers is carried off into afantasy world instead of the Middle Ages,and equipped with a cloth bag and a setof dice instead of cards. In the center ofthe table, there are basic resource cardsand matching dice, spells with their dice,and randomly-selected creature cards,with their associated dice. A cardboardpanel tracks the victorypoints. What happens next is

easy to understand forthose who playedDominion. In a turn, sixdice are drawn from theindividual bag and

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However, all will beequally amazed by thegame components: so manydifferent dice in such a smallmetal box, and creature andspell cards drawn with a love

for detail. Okay, not all thesigns on the dice areeasy to decipher, as theyare quite tiny. And if youare not familiar with the

creature cards, you will haveto pick them up repeatedlyto study the details (anoverview of the crea-tures and spells wouldhelp, but is not pro-vided). Finally, a real

shortcoming is that therulebook does not give upon the idea of introducingits own “language”, which takesgetting used to at first. However, oncethis hurdle is cleared, all questions can beclarified, at least with some goodwill ininterpretation. All in all, Quarriors is theoriginal adaptation of an original gamingprinciple, and if you accept that luck in adice roll may sometimes be against you,you cannot go wrong in buying a copy.

Nicola Balkenhol/cs

The greatestdifference bet -ween the gameslies in the luck

that dice

bring in Quarriors.Too few Quiddity areuseless, as are too many,and too few creatures inhibitprogress, while too many have thesame effect. When you keep rolling lownumbers of Quiddity, you will not be ableto upgrade your resource pool with valu-able, but expensive, super-creatures fromthe “wilds area.” Then, your weak crea-tures will be constantly wiped out by thestrong ones of your opponent, and agame may end very fast with a huge dif-ference in victory points. Frustrating! Theminor adjustment mechanisms offered byQuarriors are no real help here. When-ever you score a creature, you may discardone die from your “used pile.” It is obviousthat one of the less potent dice will bitethe dust: one with a small average num-ber of Quiddity. With this method, youoptimize your dice pool. Some dice offerthe chance for a re-roll, while others allowretrieval or re-rolling of a die from yourused pile. While all this helps to limit theimpact of luck, it is frequently notenough.

I Disappointed with unluckydie rollsNow who might enjoy Quarriors?

Gamblers like the speed of the game, thepressure to make decisions in the face ofthe current (sometimes meager) rolls, andthe challenge to make the best of it. Theyare annoyed by the fact that the crea-tures’ abilities are hard to memorize, asthey are so confusingly phrased. Thisleads to frequent debates about the inter-pretation of some abilities when crea-tures engage in battle. Dominion fanshave an advantage in the aspect of Quar-riors that allows them to build a powerfuldeck, but become disappointed withunlucky die rolls that prevent them fromachieving optimal outcomes.

defensevalue of the “dead”creature will be deductedfrom the original attack value for whenthe next player’s creature gets attacked.This increases the chance of survival forany subsequently attacked creature. Forexample: attack 5; defense with the firstdie 2; defending creature dies. Secondattack 5 minus 2, thus 3; defense 4;attack repelled. The procedure is repeatedwith all players that have active creaturesin their display. A creature die that sur-vives the round will generate victorypoints for its owner. A player that firstreaches a certain victory point threshold,depending on number of players, wins thegame. Drawing, performing actions, improv-

ing your resource pool with new acquisi-tions, then discarding: This is the Quar-riors gaming rhythm. But while in Domin-ion, players play more or less forthemselves (and are only watched bytheir opponents), Quarriors has a built-ininteraction element: attacking!.

Reviewer Playing appealNicola Balkenhol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Udo Bartsch* . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4L.U. Dikus** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6Matthias Hardel*** . . . . . . . . . . . 6Alan How . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7Roman Pelek**** . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

* Half-baked.** DRAGON DICE hits DOMINION – rightbetween the eyes!*** Nice, but sadly, frequently overbefore it properly starts.**** Appealing idea, but at the end ofthe day, far too dependent on luck.

QuarriorsWizKidsMike Elliott, Eric LangJ. Lonnee, Chris Raimo2–4 (for two: ? )about 12 and upabout 30 minutesabout 40 €


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and discover time and time again in theirprojects.At the same time, in 1995, the now 42-

year old Nicole Stiehl did some practicaltraining with a protestant city youth rec-tory of Wiesbaden. The vicar there neededa planning game themed on local politics,and the young trainee was expected todesign it. After all, she did have her train-ing in games pedagogy. However, Nicole

felt overwhelmed and looked for helpfrom her lecturer Meyer. The team Meyer& Stiehl was founded, and developed itsfirst joint project called 2005 – An denSchalthebeln der Macht (The Machineryof Power), played by more than 350youths over three months across theentire country. The aim was to encourageyoung people to exchange views andreflect about their ideas of an ideal home-land. In the game, they played the roles oflocal politicians, and took on this workfrom their perspective in an innovativeand creative way. Since 1995, the authorsconstantly developed their creation.Nowadays, it can be run computer-assisted, but whatremains cru-cial is thedirect exchangebetween theyoung players,who try out Anden Schalthebelnder Macht withthe background oftheir local district. In Dietzen-bach, the game is played for atleast six weeks each year. At theend of that period, the partici-pants meet up with their localpoliticians to present their results,

which are then tested for suitability bypolitics (www2.dietzenbach.de/JUZ/Schalt hebel). This is probably the mosteffective way for a game to engage in thereal world with the aim of improving it. The design of development games for

educational work is going to be a main-stay for Meyer and Stiehl, who foundedtheir own publishing company, spieltrieb,three years later with this aim in mind. ForTill Meyer, there is no better medium thanthe game, as it enables, “trial actionsclose to reality free from the fear of seri-ous consequences … The game uses a freezone where entirely new rules can beapplied, new roles taken on and new

behaviors tried out. Moreover,compared to other educationalmethods a game is process-ori-ented rather than result-ori-ented. Of course everyone is

also happy to win a (pedagogical) game,but the learning happens during theprocess leading to this result, not throughthe result as such.” With this in mind, thetwo invent a series of experimentalgames: Hinter dem Horizont (1997,Beyond the Horizon), a discussion gameabout politics and forms of government,commissioned by the German institutionBundeszentrale für Politische Bildung(Federal Agency for Civic Education);Kinderechte (1999, The Rights of Chil-dren), an action game for kindergartenkids; and

PORTRAIT

spieltrieb

T he 53 year-old graphic designerTill Meyer felt committed to thisobjective, even before launching

his own publishing house. The emphasison play, however, did not come aboutautomatically. “My abilities are quitediversified,” he claims, “I make music,write stories, I painted, and then decidedto study graphics. During my studies Ialso imported Italian motorcycles.”Rather coincidentally, via a lec-turer organizing a seminarabout games design, he metgames publisher Franz Scholles,for whom he made a number ofgames. Among them was also the Eine-Welt-Spiel, which Meyer designed and

employed in intercultural educa-tional work in the Jugendbil-dungsstätte (Youth Training Cen-ter), Dietzenbach. Meyer was soimpressed by the game’s effect onyouth groups that in 1985, hedetermined, “This is it, that’s what Iwould like to do in the future!”Since this time, Meyer worked as a

speaker for games pedagogy and a semi-nar leader in the German federal state ofHesse. At the same time, he continued hisgraphics studies, which he successfullycompleted in 1991. It was in his role as agames pedagogue that he first metNicole Stiehl, who within the frameworkof her studies of social pedagogy, wantedto broaden her horizon with games peda-gogy. She then designed Colony as a finalproject during her further studies with TillMeyer. Nicole was enthusiastic about thepossibilities that playful approachesoffered to pedagogical work. For her, “it isfascinating that people learn and developwith little effort during gaming, that thegame offers them an opportunity to gainvaluable experience, which is not neces-sarily provided by real life,” whereas itsimpacts are quite noticeable in the realworld. This is what they both hope for,

Till Meyer and Nicole Stiehl have followed their play instinct for 16 years. Theyare, however, no addicts, and gambling for big money is not their aim. Rather,these two count on the play instinct of others, and use it as a driving force fortheir sophisticated publications that are meant to create learning effects. Theirpublishing house considers its products as “media of intercultural learning.”

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valuable experience, which is not necessarily provided by real life

The Art of Infotainment

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which she created with funding by theEuropean Union. The complex educa-tional game allows a thorough and pro-ductive discussion of colonialism. WhatColony is to Nicole Stiehl, the puzzlegame Eynsteyn (1997) is to Till Meyer.“We can now barely remember most ofthe many self-made variants. Once wemade a felted game board, then one fromsimple cardboard in a triangular box. Myr-iads of game pieces were covered in sprayglue before we had to cut them outneatly. A couple of years ago they evenmanufactured six games from real stone,with solid sandstone or granite gameboards.” Since 2010, this long-sellinggame is available in a professionally man-ufactured version. Eynsteyn is a tactical tile placement

game for two players. Classically, just likein Twixt, the borders of the game boardneed to be connected by uninterruptedlines. The charm here is the dual use of

the resulting connections.Within the setting of “Connec-tion Games,” Meyer’s idea isa veritable pearl. Last yearwith Jets, he realized a

long-cherished project around a futur-istic car race with photovoltaic ves-sels. Important for both authors wastheir creation Wolfsspuren (2003,Wolves Tracks), which was initiallycommissioned by the outdoorcompany Jack Wolfskin. Thisgame provides an insight into thecomplex social structures of a pack ofwolves. Wolfsspuren was nominated forthe Deutscher Lernspielpreis (GermanEducational Games Award) in 2004. Overall, Meyer & Stiehl can look back

on a production of more than 50 produc-tions. Their view is to look ahead optimisti-

cally, and they have at least eight newprojects lined up for 2012. They continuewith the objective to “inform in an enter-taining way,” as it is formulated by NicoleStiehl. “We will continue to presentsound, serious work, mostly with a con-nection to reality – and with this task wewill carry on successfully,” adds Meyer.They are committed to following theirplay instinct with a high aspiration, whichmakes no big money, but connects play-ing and learning in a meaningful way.

Wieland Herold/cs

ply printing a special logo onto a card-board box does not create a good game,”is Meyer’s opinion. His aspiration, evenwith these promotional games, is forthem to “continually require new reflec-tions and tactics…The suspense has to bekept up. A game that has nothing new tooffer after you have played it once will ofcourse soon be put aside.”At least of equal importance nowadays

is the commissioned work of board andcard games for various institutions. Spiel-trieb undertakes the overall production ofgame ideas by other designers. Amongthose are editions like Das Buch & DasLeben (2003), a communicative cardgame for the Lutheran church congrega-tion in Wiesbaden, or Waimiri, which wasnominated for the Deutscher Lernspiel-preis (German Educational GamesAward) in 2006: a communication gameabout the effects of bauxite mining inBrazil. So far, the most successful has

been Keep Cool (2004), a board gameabout climate change, created in closecooperation with the Potsdam Institutefor Climate Change. Its fourth print runwill be published soon. On behalf ofSchulen ans Netz e.V. (Schools On-line),there has also been an equally popularon-line version of Keep Cool, availablesince 2008. Even museums are among their cus-

tomers: The Rietberg Museum in Zurich isdedicated to the art and cultural historyof Asia, Africa, America and Oceania.Patolli is the first game published by themuseum, on the occasion of a Mexicoexhibition in 2010.

The fourth pillarof spieltrieb is theirown creations. Bothowners are enthusi-astic gamers andgame designers,who occasionallyuse their own pub-lishing house tooffer their ideas to

the market without any outside influ-ences. This particularly applies toNicole Stiehl and her firstling Colony,

Bananen-Rallye (2001) about the subjectof fair trade for the Sozialamt (Social Wel-fare Office) in Wiesbaden. They also designed Plato (2002), a

game of history investigation, for theJugendbildungswerk (Youth EducationCenter) of the Offenbach district, andIntegrate (2007), an experimental gameabout the integration of young people inEurope, for the Jugendbildungsstätte(Youth Education Site) in Unterfranken(Lower Franconia). They also use theirexperience with planning games for in-house training in subjects such as market-ing and corporate communication. Here especially, the balancing act of

the team becomes obvious, where theprogressive political approach goes alongwith earning a living, and therefore pro-motional games form another means ofsupport for spieltrieb. As early as 1996,they created A-Klasse (A-Class) for thepresentation of the new A-class MercedesBenz. 2003 brought about theboard game Global Player forthe in-house training of theSchott Glass company inMainz, and Windschatten, acycle race for Gerolsteiner, with the cardgame for the drinks company being pro-duced in a print run of 160,000 copies. Since 2007, Navigon, dealing with nav-

igation systems, is in use as an in-housetool for the company NAVIGON. For theteam, it is important to offer new gamingconcepts, even in this area. “There areheaps of games that just follow well-known concepts, but why should a cus-tomer obtain the 50th copy of Monopoly,

the 200th version of a mem-ory game orthe 1000thadaptation ofLudo. Sim-

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trial actions close to reality free fromthe fear of serious consequences

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gets to draw cards onceand once only. However,that doesn’t mean thatyou will sit there for afull four-hour game andonly make eight moves,as we shall see.

Blue always begins,since the US Army wasthe aggressor after all.Then you grab fromthe linen baggie todetermine player orderafter that. As soon as all five forces havebeen drawn and have moved, the grabbag is filled back up, and the next roundbegins. This unpredictable order of playgives the game a high replay value, espe-cially in two-player games.

I Theaters of warThe force which is in play must play a

movement card, and may then use bothof its remaining cards in hand as actionsor events to help decide an outcome, aslong as these cards are indeed actioncards. Movement cards determine bothhow many armies can be moved, and howfar. This is where the alliances are notice-ably imbalanced. Adding the Americans'number of armies to their movement allo-wance usually yields a five, while theCanadians, Brits and Indians aresomewhat less mobile. This is a deliberatemechanism to counterbalance the geo-graphical facts and the unequal size ofthe alliances, and it works beautifully. Allfive decks also contain a couple of specialcards such as Ambush, Force March, etc.,and some movement cards that let forcescross water; the lakes and rivers divide upthe board into three more or less distincttheaters of war.

T he game itself could almost be cal-led unnecessary – in fact, I didn’teven want to buy it. The historical

background didn’t hold much appeal forme, nor did I even like the look of thegame. The gameboard comes in an oddchoice of colors, showing huge great terri-tories chopped up with irregularly-shapedborders, the bruise-blue stretches belowbeing American while the pale pink bitsabove are British. Then in between comeLake Erie, Lake Ontario and the Saint Law-rence River. The forces massing at the bor-ders are not the usual cardboard chips orstand-ups that you see in typical consimgames, but simple wooden cubes in fivecolors. What’s more, you only get twelvecards per player, which seemed to me fartoo few for an interesting card-driven con-

sim. So, a simple straightforwardgame? Not in the least!

Knowing what to leave out isoften an art in itself, and it’s an artthis game’s designers have tho-roughly mastered. There’s less self-restraint on show in the playernumbers. The game takes a maxi-mum of five players, with oneeach controlling the British (red),the Canadian militia (yellow),the Indian tribes (green), the USArmy (blue) and the US militia(white). The first three forcesfight against the last two, butalthough all partners in an alli-

ance win or lose together, this is by nomeans a two-player game in disguise.

A full game of 1812 The Invasion ofCanada lasts from three to eight rounds,which can be two to four hours. There arealso two short scenarios included, alt-hough since I haven’t played them I shallnot comment. In each round, every player

The United States have grown considerably since their foundation, and not justbecause of manifest destiny and the opening of the West. The Louisiana Pur-chase added the lion’s share of what are thirteen different states today, Alaskawas bought from Russia. Texas was annexed once it broke free from Mexico,while Spain had to surrender Florida, and when the USA invaded Canada in1812 it must have seemed that American rule over the whole of the North Ame-rican continent was assured. It was a good moment to take a bit of land from theBrits, since they had their hands full with a war against Napoleon – though thiswas only one reason for what has often been called an unnecessary war. The his-torical summary of events appended to the rules of 1812 The Inva-sion of Canada is well worth reading.

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The decisive twistthat makes 1812 The Invasion ofCanada a true multi-player game,and what makes it a great game allround, is the fact that an army consistsof all the cubes that are on a particularspace. This means that Blue can bringalong as many White cubes from A to B ashe chooses, and then later in the roundWhite can also move the blue/whitearmy onward from B to C. Then, whenbattle is joined – as it frequently is – everyplayers rolls dice for their own forces, no

matter whose turn it is in theround. This means thateveryone at the table isnearly always caught up inthe action. Every force has its own

stock of battle dice, whichare all differently colored,and also all have differentdistributions for the threecustom symbols – Hit, Fleeand Command Decision(which is actually a blank).The British army will neverbreak and flee, and they hit animpressive 50% of the time.

The US Army are just as fine shots as thelobsterbacks, but they also have one Fleesymbol on each and every die – when Fleecomes up on one’s die, one own unit hasto leave the battlefield, but comes backnext round as reinforcements. Canadianand American militia are functionallyidentical, and they hit or flee one-third ofthe time, while the Green (Indian) diceonly have one Flee per die, but like theBrits, three blank Command Decisions.Roll a blank and you can choose whetherto move your unit (matching color only,remember) to a neighboring space orleave it where it is. This gives you the abi-lity to save units that are fighting a losingbattle, to regroup, or even to move themover to another battle entirely – if it’sbeing fought next door. It’s astonishingwhat meaty tactical decisions this simplerule opens up in practice.

On the other hand, there’s no sense tal-king of tactics if the dice won’t let you.I’ve never played agame yet where atleast one seeminglycertain victory vanis-hed in the gunsmokebecause the troopswere fleeing the

1812 The Invasion of Canada

Stalemate? Never mind!

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ance is well ahead. Of course, youdon’t always have one of these inhand at the time. On the other hand,since Truce counts as a movementcard, sometimes you have to play itdown even if you don’t want to, ifyou don’t have any other movementcard in your hand – which, remem-ber, is only three cards.

Few cards in hand, dice, randomplayer order. Nobody could claim that1812 The Invasion of Canada is short onthe unpredictable. In my experience, thereally interesting and engaging problemscome precisely from the mixture I’ve des-cribed here, from grasping the constraintsand using them to your own advantage.Though I would never have expected itfrom this game, I felt thoroughly drawn into all six of the games I have played so far,even if the tides of war swept us hitherand yon for four hours and then at theend it was a stalemate anyway. After all,the historical events also ended in a sortof stalemate – U.S. rule somehow neverdid extend right across all of North Ame-rica. Matthias Hardel/sw

the red dice that there are.If on the other hand thearmy were made up ofthree Yellow, three Greenand two Red cubes, then

all eight dice that the allies possesscould all be used in that engagement.

White and Blue reinforcements comeinto play way off down to the South, buthappily from one space in the East andone in the West, and each of these spacescan provide troops of either color. Yes, youthen have to march your cubes all the wayup North, but since the colors mix toget-her almost automatically, that meansthat both allies can cooperate to get theunits moving. The size of the blue territoryonly really becomes a problem if theenemy has penetrated and managed tospread out far and wide – but the Indianplayer is pretty much guaranteed to beable to do this, thanks to special cards.This means that the USA must prevent aCanadian breakthrough at all costs, espe-cially on the isthmus between Lake Erieand Lake Ontario. Also, it’s not a goodidea to leave cities on the lakeshore wit-hout a garrison, even if you desperatelyneed the cubes elsewhere.

I Take towns to win Although the game is only in its third

round on the picture below, you can seethe U.S. headed for defeat. This isbecause while the British are weak, theyhave taken six towns in enemy territory,which is what counts at the end of thegame, which occurs when one alliancehas played out all of its Truce cards. Eachdeck of cards contains one of these, andyou are well advised to play them downwhen your own alli-

battlefield in droves. Ifthe enemy forces alsohappen to be scoring hitafter hit, even battle-har-dened soldiers can becrestfallen. But that’sexactly what gives this game its fine fla-vor, especially with more players, whenyou have to put up with your allies’ grum-bles as well as your enemy’s mockingremarks.

The uncertainty over how battles willturn out is not just about fun however.Since nobody knows how many units arereally needed to be sure of winning anengagement, this means that there arehard decisions to be made, making upmuch of the tactical appeal of 1812 TheInvasion of Canada. How many cubes tomove and where to move them ought tobe a straightforward problem, but here itcan reveal unexpected depths of play.Especially since Canadian and Americanforces will give different answers.

The Canadians have the simpler job, bythe nature of things. Their red homeregion is shallow and thin, meaning thatthey don’t need to march long distancesto defend it, and reinforcements arriverather quickly, but beware! It’s irksomethat fresh British troops always land wayover to the East in Montreal, while newIndians arrive in the middle of the board.As attrition takes its toll, this means thattroop colors can become fatally separatedout if you don’t take active steps to keepthem mixed – remember that mixedarmies have much greater mobility, andnot just that. For instance, if eight Redcubes are on their own in a battle, thenthey can certainly hit more reliably thattheir Yellow and Green allies, but a one-color army like this will only have two diceto roll – because that’sall

Reviewer Playing appealMatthias Hardel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

1812 The Invasion of CanadaAcademy GamesBeau Beckett, Jeph StahlJerek Noco�n2–5 (for two: �)about 12 and upabout 120–240 minutesabout $59

Title:

Publisher:Designer:Artist: Players: Age: Duration:Price:

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landlubbers could decide to go short onsalt and leave the whole seafaring forwhat it is!Players fish for cod and herring; when a

boat goes to sea, the salt immediately isconverted into one of the two kinds, atthe choice of the player, who undoubtedlykeeps an eye on the prices at the marketfor this or the next round. Apart from thefluctuations on the market, each roundtile shows the weather at sea, and ifplayers can expect pirates or abad catch. These are mostlyminor discomforts, but aplayer doesn’t want torun into them too often;each time a ship is caughtat sea during a storm, it perma-nently loses cargo capacity, andprobably salt that could have beenconverted into fish.

I Fisherman’s friendsIn the city, various buildings make the

fisherman’s life lighter; at the end of around, a player who has taken influenceat the Light Tower may remove all dam-ages on any one ship inflicted by storm orpirates; at the Warehouse, the storagecapacity gradually can be enlarged, from6 to 15 to 30 goods, that can hold a mixof salt and fish. The Chapel of Saint

T he game board shows the estuaryof the Seine at which Rouen, themost important French port of

transit for the distantly situated Paris dur-ing the early 16th century, is convenientlyset for game purposes at the Strait ofCalais/English Channel, with a smallinset to depict the Atlantic Ocean. Severalimportant buildings of the town standout enlarged, and have larger or smallerspaces next to them, where players cantake influence during the game. Thepresence at these buildings either

gives players benefits duringthe five-round game, or itscores at the end of the game; itdarned looks like Puerto Rico

being explained here!Each player has his own small board on

which he keeps track of the stock in hiswarehouse and the cargo of his ships;players already own a first ship that isloaded with three salt from their saltmine. Salt is necessary to pickle thecaught fish in order to offer it in preserved

state on the market; prices changeevery round, but playershave an insight what thechanges will be for the nextround. If a good price canbe made for salt, then thisitem too can be sold;

Romain offers protection against abad catch, and the Church ofSaint Maclou protects the skip-pers against pirates, but onlyfor those who have gone tochurch there! All thisstorm and pirate stuffmay sound like anold Parker Brothersgame, but considerit preliminaryshelling as the game isexplained in more depth now!A table lists the possible actions: sail-

ing, city, port, or market. These actionscost from 0 to 10 money, and since therichest player wins at game end, it con-stantly is a consideration for each player

whether an action still isworthwhile for him. Eachplayer starts the gamewith a minimum of 10money on the score track.From this track, he pays forall actions in a round --until he has passed. When

all players have passed, a round isover. At the start of a round, each kind ofaction costs 0 money; the first player per-forms the action, and advances themarker to the right. This action will costthe next player who chooses it 1 money,thereafter 2, and so on. When the markeris at 10, the action will continue to cost10 money.Now for the deliberations: “Shall I go

sailing against high costs, or will I waituntil the following round, when it ischeaper to sail again? But when I wait,another player might arrive sooner than

It’s not a cheerful atmosphere that is shining upon us from the box of Upon aSalty Ocean; illustrator Lamberto Azzariti set the sinister scene of Death inVenice rather than that of a hard-working, busy fleet earning its income fromfishing on the Atlantic Ocean, and turning it into money at the port of Rouen. Incontrast, the atmosphere on the playing board is a lot friendlier; the sketchybuildings of the town give the game a fun and friendly character. So what will itbe: a difficult process filled with obstacles or an uncomplicated pleasure ride?

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Dealing with a red herring?Upon a Salty Ocean

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Such con-siderations put a certainstrain on the game: Players will try to cal-culate their entire sequence of actions;most of the times this is possible and thiscan slow down the game considerably,but when reasoning is combined with“going with your gut instinct” attitude, allremains under control.Additional ships can be built when any

player has taken influence both at theshipyard and the Naval Academy; thisdoes not need to be the same player, anda player even does not have a presencethere. He simply pays the costs, 6 moneyfor a caravel and 8 for a carrack, anddivides it between the players that have apresence there. However, a player getsthese ships for free if he has a presence inboth buildings.There are buildings that are nice to

have influence in at an early stage of thegame. At the end of each round, a playerwho is at the Inn receives 2 money, plus 1money for each player that is not in theInn. Investing in the first round for such a

building, when the costs are low,is a prerequisite for such abuilding to be profitable, oth-erwise the player is betteradvised to invest elsewhere.This could be the Great Clock,which allows two consecutiveactions, though they have tobe different. This enables aplayer to enter the harbor andgo to the market in one turn

me,and I will be toolate to sell my fish, and will get alower price for it. Oh wait, he has cod, Ican go fish herring then, and it has thesame price next round – so I have a freehand to make an action in the city; shall Itake influence at the bank then?”

I Wallet endangered Players who act expeditiously and have

a comfortably filled wallet through theirfishing and trading have to be careful. Atthe end of a round, all money above 40 isskimmed and reduced to 40 if a playerhas no presence in the Bank; the samegoes for all money above 80, for which aplayer’s presence in the Vault is necessaryto prevent this confinement.At the end of each round, players

receive salt from their salt mines; theystart with a production of 3, but by takingseparate city actions, the production canbe increased to 12, and is stored in thewarehouse that simultaneously will haveto be extended.Buying salt at the market is a viable

option only when the price has droppedto 1 money; the effort to sail back andforth against rising costs, and having totake another market action to sell thesalt, usually does notweigh against such aninvestment at highersalt prices. But produc-ing and buying salt andconsequently selling itat the market, stayingashore, and goingon aspree is pos-sible as well.


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just before another player, because theprice for a good when selling at the mar-ket always decreases by 1 per 8 goodssold or part of it. Apart from this, the costsfor the second action still have to be paid,with a surcharge of 3 money for the firstplayer that entered the Great Clock, and 5for the second.Because there is only room for so many

players, the choice of what building totake a presence in becomes even more

delicate, and it’s thesekinds of considerationsthat give the game itsexcitement. Each playerwants to build on the

Notre Dame ofRouen, butwhen the actioncosts are higherthan the rev-enues at the end

of the game, theappeal to build here

soon shrinks. Usually thereis a rally between two players for the last,highest and only position scoring 70money at game end. Paying 10 moneyand receiving 15 is a quickly-made calcu-lation then.The starting player for a new round is

the one with the least amount of money,with other players takingtheir turn in increasingwealth. Because the marketusually provides good rev-enues for the first player totrade here, incidentally,towards the end of a round,a reverse race arises whenplayers try to be the leastwealthy person in order tostart the next round. Endingwith a negative score is notimpossible; as soon as a player enters thisdeficit zone, he must pay additionalmoney and consequently takes moredebt. At the end of a round, if a player isstill in debt (i.e. has a negative score),then he must pay 1 more money. Thescore track extends to an arbitrary –22money.It is here that the game runs against its

limits; there is no reckoning for playerswho keep investing and don’t realize theirinvestments in time. It could occur that aplayer is out of the game for one or tworounds because of too many rash actionsin an earlier stage. This results in a severe

ipate in the whole lock, stock, and barrelwith which he might have gained greaterprofits.The numerical additions at the build-

ings, like the sparingly used symbols, aresomewhat confusing at first, but are veryclear once you know what they mean;

there are no problems understand-ing them, a flaw of almost everysymbol used elsewhere. Byadjusting the available spacesat the buildings, the game hasthe same feel when playingwith two players, albeit thatthere still is some more roomfor maneuver; the game’s opti-

mum still is with four players.It doesn’t take long to play five rounds,

and players must optimize quickly; this isa lesson easily learned from Upon a SaltyOcean. Which buildings to occupy, howoften to sail, with how many ships, whatfish to catch and when to sell, each timeremains the question as each game devel-ops differently so there is no fixed strat-egy, which makes for a varied game. But,after the first impression that this is a bril-liant game, gradually the disappointmentsurfaced because the game has too manyloose ends that quickly reduces the initialattraction. This experience ranks thegame in the gray sea of mediocrity, andwith the tsunami of games each year thatare poured over us, Upon a Salty Oceansimply has not enough power to stayafloat. Upon a Salty Ocean has some nice,albeit known, elements that are blendedtogether in a new mix, but these are notup to its promise, ultimately giving thegame its label “missed opportunity.”

Richard van Vugt

limit of his possibilities, as all actionsabove a cost of 0 would drive himthrough the –22 mark. The supply ofcredit should have been settled inanother, more conventional way. As it is, aFAQ on the internet has to settle thisissue, but it gives an unsatisfying feelingwhen a game hits the table and does notfeel playtested to thefullest extent possible.And there is another

issue: During the lastround, players can cal-culate more preciselyhow much each actioncosts, and what its rev-enue will be; often there isonly one other player to consider, andwith this parameter in mind, a longperiod of reflection is taken: “How manyactions can I do and how much money doI need to invest to still go forward inincome?” is pretty much the, uh, pointthen.

I Unbalanced return on investment?The feeling could arise that the earn-

ings from the buildings are not balanced.When, for instance, any player in theNotre Dame is the first to reach the 18-money mark, the Stained Glass Workshop

becomes available, andthe first player who takesinfluence here earns acomfortable 10 moneyat game end. That firstplayer, almost withoutexception, is the nextplayer in turn order,unless this player has tofirst deal with competi-tion, at the market forinstance. But on average,

a player has spent 5 money to performthe Stained Glass Workshop action, gain-ing a profit of only 5 money, which sud-denly is not that much anymore, espe-cially since these buildings earn theirbonus only at the end of the game, and,as said, perhaps more urgent mattershave to be dealt with first. A player has totake 8 actions to earn the maximumbonus of 70 money at the Notre Dame, atan average total cost of between 40 and50 money. A revenue of 20 to 30 still isworth the effort and by no means to besneezed at, but this is a passive invest-ment, and a player did not actively partic-

Reviewer Playing appealRichard van Vugt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Christwart Conrad . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7Matthias Hardel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Upon a Salty Oceangiochix.itMarco PranzoLambertzo Azzariti2–4about 13 and upabout 90–120 minutesabout 39 €



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W hat possibilities does one haveto reduce a card game to itsbasics? For

one thing, you can usethe cards to build ahouse! This idea –maybe as old as classictrick-taking rules – istaken up by the inspira-tional Super Rhino. Towithstand the unavoid-able bending, the cardshave a fold in the middle.

To begin with, playersput down one card as afoundation. One childbends two wall cards insuch a way that theyform a right angle, andsets this up. After that,the child plays one of hisroof cards, adding it on

top as a ceiling. The roof cards havemarks that indicate how the next player

has to position thewalls of the next floor.The children handlethis with a lot ofpatience – some ofthem even relish thatthe lovingly illustratedfurniture standsneatly.

One is surprised justhow high such a towercan grow; therefore,it’s best to start con-structing from theplaying room floor. Onthe table, it can easilybecome too unsteady– not least of all whenthe first child has toclimb on a chair.

Some of the cards have a special func-tion – for instance, requiring that the nextplayer takes an additional roof card fromthe stack. Especially tricky are the roofsshowing a rhino mark; then the player hasto place the title-giving wooden rhino fig-ure there. Gradually, Super Rhino getshigher and higher, which can jeopardizethe structural stability of the buildingconsiderably.

If somebody causes the tower to toppleover, he loses. The child that has thefewest roofs in his hand is the winner ofthis dexterity game that is actually some-times amazing. Harald Schrapers/sbw

Super Rhino! (HABA) by StevenStrumpf and Scott Frisco; for 2–5children, 5+ years; playing time:about 5–15 minutes; price: about 7€.

Super Rhino!

managed all my “rolled” steps withoutincident may I actually move my adven-turer figure along the same route.

For children, it’s not easy to keep trackwithout moving a figure. It works, how-ever, if they use the movement chips tomark the route. The object is to collectthe treasure tiles spread out on theboard. Small tiles and an arrow markerindicate what kind of treasure is currentlyin demand. Timing is essential. If myopponent is also near the desired kind,I’d better aim at the treasure after thenext one. And I should keep the positionof the traps in mind; they don’t change –each space is firmly linked to an audiofile.

It is striking how awkward the design ofDie Schatzkammer is. The discrepancybetween modern electronics on the onehand and, on the other hand, figures thatfall apart and the markers and nine sec-tions of the variable gameboard that con-stantly slip out of place, is tremendous.

In fact, Die Schatzkammer starts out asa very exciting children’s game, eventhough its elegance and its substance interms of play are not particularly terrific.But six-year olds, especially, quickly reachtheir limit, since the game instructions arequite overloaded. There are six differentequipment tiles at the same time, which,when used cleverly, make the treasure-seeking considerably easier. But you haveto check the instructions to see – forexample – how the rope works in order toavoid a trap. If you touch something withthe toystick, it regrettably plays just a jin-gle and, in spite of its occasional talka-tiveness, is not at all helpful in explainingthe rules. Harald Schrapers/sbw

Die Schatzkammer Von El Mira -dor (Noris) by Christian Fiore andKnut Happel; for 2–4 children, 6+years; playing time: about 30 min-utes; price: about 20 € (toystick:about 40 €).

Die Schatzkammer von El Mirador

T he toystick is an electronic devicewith an optical sensor, microphoneand loudspeaker. It resembles the

so-called tiptoi from Ravensburger, buthas a built-in battery and a strongervoice. Now, for the first time, Noris hasreleased a toystick game.

Die Schatzkammer von El Mirador isreminiscent of Minesweeper. But in thiscase, we are not threatened by explodingmines but by pitfalls and guillotines. Thetoystick “rolls the dice” for me, and I runthe corresponding number of stepsthrough the chessboard-like treasurechamber. I scan every space on my routewith the toystick, which tells me whetherthere is a trap or not. Only after having

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T he playful element is a bit lackingin the optics kit from HABA, andthe use of colors is rather marginal

as well. In this respect, Twiga Trick byAnja Wrede and Claudia Hartmann suits

us just fine; it is an observation and mem-ory and touch game that gets its appealfrom the “magic” effect of two color foils.Normally, such foils serve to make hiddensolutions visible; the two authors, how-

ever, use the foils to make blue and redgeometric patterns on a giraffe’s bodyinvisible. Each child has giraffe cardslying in front of him – cards showing theanimal’s head, neck, belly and legs. Twiga

Twiga Trick

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I n September 2011, at the award pres-entation during the Kind + Jugendtrade fair in Cologne, the HABA com-

pany got the “Innovation Award” (whichhas been awarded since 2005) for a prod-uct that is rather atypical for their line.The winning game was a big optics work-shop kit for children from threeto eight years old. Games withoptical effects have a specialappeal by putting our percep-tion to the test. They can turnthe world upside down, dupli-cate or distort it; and phenom-ena that can cause astonish-ment, open mouths andamazed head-shaking at first,lead to new insights and per-spectives again and again.All this applies to Grosser

Optikbaukasten. It contains tenitems from various disciplines,all of which make the worldappear different. There is a Mir-ror Block, with which the chil-dren see themselves and theirsurroundings upside down. The FacetedBlock enlarges and multiplies everythingit is directed to; the Jiggling Block dupli-cates an enclosed pink marble and turnsthe entire glass trough into princess light.A Kaleidoscope is also included, ofcourse. In typical HABA fashion, it’s not a

cardboard tube but a solid wooden cylin-der. You can see truly beautiful shapesthrough this tube; it’s as if a completemovie is playing as you turn the cylinder.This classic, already known to the ancientGreeks, hasn’t lost any of its appeal evenin the 21st century.

The moiré effect, with most differentpatterns, results from the overlay of finegrids. Using the Moiré Block, children canreproduce this effect from an overlaid dotpattern. Turning the disk in the woodenblock becomes a game of patience whenyou try to align all the dots. Playing with

the Prism is appealing, too; it comes withimages on cardboard. Suddenly, shrunkenheads come into being; faces turn intoEaster eggs; and heads seem to float inthe room three-dimensionally.The Cinema Block is also well-received.

When the little ones slowly shove a cater-pillar through its grid, it really seems tomove, just like a bird that begins to flutterand chatter. As the children shove, theblue grid covers partial images so thatanimated picture sequences emerge.It is doubtful whether the big kit is

actually also good for three-year olds; butfrom pre-school age on, children show amore apparent fascination for the materi-als and experiments. Educational andparental guidance is desirable in dealingwith the equipment, which, by the way, isreally solid. Nevertheless, children misssuch simple things as a magnifier in the

overall kit. Magnificationeffects do occur, for example,through the Faceted Block,but only distorted andrefracted. The accompanyingbooklet is very short. Thissquanders a good opportunityto describe various supple-mental activities, such asbuilding a kaleidoscope onyour own, using mirror foil andtransparent paper, or buildinga periscope. These are thingsthat children of elementaryschool age are able to con-struct. The excellent materialshave been justifiably acknowl-edged; but as for the acces-sories, however, it’s lacking the

variety that could lead to real insightsand perspectives.

Getting Things Into PerspectiveMINT skills – capacity in the fields of mathematics, information science and thenatural sciences – are currently highly regarded in educational and social circles.When schools and kindergartens start MINT projects, sponsoring is oftenneeded, and the industry needs to invest in the future, since this future seemsgrim with respect to new blood in math and science. After Kosmos did this, moreand more companies have since addressed the physical and chemical sciencesand, quite in passing, game authors have experimented with physical effects inquite normal children’s games. Typical examples of this are the numerous mag-net games, but also games such as Burg der 1000 Spiegel, which uses opticalelements. Optics and colors are also essential in the games shown below.

Großer Optikbaukasten

Grosser Optikbaukasten (HABA)for 1–4 children, 3+ years (better:5+ years); price: about 39 €.

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and her friends look quite colorful: Up tothe red cheek in the head section, each ofthem is spotted with three red and bluetriangles, circles, squares and stars. Twigawould actually like to be an ordinarybrownish-colored giraffe again, and tothis end, two to four spot-removers areallowed to help her.

On your turn, you take a colorfoil, put it, for instance, on thegiraffe’s neck and take notice ofthe three shapes that disappear.Now you have to feel for thesevery shapes in a bag, take outthe corresponding woodenpieces and, after taking the foilaway, check whether these exactshapes are visible again. If youhave remembered well and havebeen able to select the correctpieces, you may turn the respec-tive card over to Twiga’s brownside – until Twiga has finallyovercome the spotteritis and

returns to her old grandeur.The game proceeds in a more demand-

ing and more frantic manner if all playerssimultaneously have to check whetherthree wooden shapes, randomly drawn inthe beginning, appear in one color ontheir giraffe cards. In this case, the check-ing of the foil just serves to make the laid-

out shapes visible. Here also, the object isto change Twiga back, with the exchangeof the wooden pieces afterwards being animportant governing element. If you wantit more challenging, you may elongatethe giraffe’s neck.When you use the foil, the “aha!” effect

is produced when the blue squares andtriangles suddenly disappear after apply-ing the blue foil but everything else is stillvisible. The two authors, in an experi-enced and skillful manner, implementedthis innovative basic idea in severalgames with increasing difficulty. In TwigaTrick, transparency doesn’t lead to moreinsight, but accomplishes the opposite.The insight occurs on a higher level.

I n the geometry game Mirakel, youcan look behind a mirror using thewondrous reflector – like in Alice

Through the Looking Glass. This reflectoris half-transparent, so that compositeimages can be formed by using cards infront and behind the mirror. This greatidea comes from an author whose lastname, Spiegel, is fateful (“Spiegel” means“mirror”).In Mirakel, players compare cut edges

and mentally mirror and rotate shapes. If

the shapes are simple, even pre-schoolchildren can manage. More demandingfigures, though, are a challenge even foradults. The pairs of cards that the authorshave come up with begin with simplenumerical sequences; they continue withsimple geometric shapes, sometimes with,sometimes without the outlines of thewanted overall shape. For example, theshapes of the 7th set of cards are com-plex, based on the breaking-up of asquare into 32 small triangles. To put the

correct partstogether in such acase is somethingonly for older chil-dren and adults.

Mirakel fostersthe ability to imag-ine the results ofmirroring. If chil-dren want to puttwo cards together,they have to beable to imaginepartial shapes inmirrored positions.At least in thebeginning, check-ing with the trans-

parent mirror is an important and neces-sary control. This is pretty easy with thenumbers, but then very quickly becomesmore difficult. The easiest way is to prac-tice Mirakel as a memory variant. Here, allthe cards of one card set lie on the table,sorted by their backs into two stacks. Onyour turn, you pick two correspondingcards from the two stacks and check theresults in the mirror. Children look closely,and so the game can be used very wellwith elementary school children, at leastfor up to half of the card sets. “You can rec-ognize this easily by the differing gaps inthe shape,” players state for the first sets ofcards. When the gaps increase, the outlinesare missing and one detail is no longerenough for identification. If then, in addi-tion, up and down can no longer be differ-entiated, it becomes really difficult, evenfor adults. This can even be used as train-ing for an aptitude test.

Wieland Herold/sbw

Mirakel

Mirakel (Kallmeyer) by HartmutSpiegel and Daniela Götze; for 1–4children, 5+ years; playing time:about 10 minutes and more; price:about 15 €.

Twiga Trick (Edition Siebenschläfer)by Anja Wrede and Claudia Hart -mann; for 2–4 children, 5+ years;playing time: about 10–15 minutes;price: about 15 €.

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Tuareg

arrangement of the loads can’t be modi-fied afterwards.

The Tuareg players (up to five) startempty-handed and with a small market offace-up goods; and they have camelslying in front of them. On your turn, youcan draw cards from the face-down deck,then select one of them and place it faceup on the market. Or you load a camelwith up to four goods from your hand or

from the market. Stowinggoods on a camel is tricky:The up to four goods of, atmost, two kinds have to belined up properly (only onechange of goods is allowed),water may only be used if it isthe only commodity, and noanimal may carry more thantwo gold.

Besides drawing new cardsor loading, the third possibleaction is to purchase one offour different special cards. Inthe cave, you can hide goodsfrom your hand or from yourown display. This is useful tofend off the thief; with the thief’shelp, his owner is allowed to steala card from an opponent’s display

or hand once. The donkey, like the camels,can carry four goods but the goods on itsback may be varied. Finally, the map isworth two victory points at the end of astage. Each of the special cards cost threedinars. You may pay with cards from yourhand or from your own display. Goods areworth one to three dinars, depending onhow many of a kind there are.

When the goods pile has beendepleted, the first stage ends. Now, eachplayer who has a majority of a type ofgoods gets three to six victory points,

T he nomads of Northwest Africa arecalled Tuareg (an individual of thisethnic group, by the way, is a Targi

or Targui). They live on caravan trade,among other things: They use camels totransport salt to oasis markets, and sell itthere in order to buy other commodities.In the card game of that title fromAdlung, you load millet, gold, salt and

water from the

market (the display), or from the stock(the card hand) onto camels and donkeys.At the end of each of the two stages,when the pile of goods cards has beendepleted, players compare the goods thateach Targi has transported; whoever hasthe majority of cards of a kind gets victorypoints.

Like Bohnanza, the goods cards have adouble function: They are merchandiseand cash at the same time. Another thingboth games have in common is the fixedorder of cards: In Tuareg, camels or don-keys may only be loaded evenly, and the

T he popularity of Chicken Cha ChaCha, the publication of which(courageous at that time) turned

out to be amazingly successful, has giventhe company a strong position in thehumorous-fresh segment, which it servescontinually. This time, players line up theirfigures in a row between two neutral ones

on a circuit of African ambiance. Mambothe rhino is pushing from the back, whileKali, a cross-breed of mole and penguin,leads the group up front. Each playerchooses one of his hand cards, whose val-ues range from 0 to 11, and lays it facedown. All players flip over their selectedcard simultaneously; Kali’s number is

determined by chance. The player who hasplayed the highest card is the first to movehis figure; the others follow, according tothe descending number value. Irrespectiveof the number value played, you alwaysadvance to the front of the group – exceptfor whomever plays zero, their figure staysput on its current space.

depending on how many of that kindthere are overall. A second stage, playedwith the same rules, follows; then thegame ends.

With each card, Tuareg forces you tomake decisions: Do I place it as a com-modity or use it as cash? What goods do Iload on which animal, and in what order?Is the topmost laid-out merchandise par-ticularly valuable and therefore possiblyprone to theft? So, should I wait beforelaying out cards? In abstract terms, thegame is about card management andhaving an eye for majorities. Each playershould keep in mind who is collectingwhat cards and how many cards of a spe-cific kind have already been taken. All inall, these are quite interesting constraints,but nothing new. And, due to the restric-tion of the number of cards, as Adlunggames are known for, the two stages areover so quickly (especially in the five-player game) that players can hardlybuild up a good display. So the outcomeof the game is accordingly dependent onthe luck of the cards.

In terms of its graphic design, Tuareg iswell done. The instructions, however, havea few shortcomings. For instance, theterms “turn,” “round” and “stage” shouldbe distinguished more clearly, and thedescriptions of the functions of the spe-cial cards could be more precise. In short:nice theme, reasonably adapted – butBohnanza is more fun.

Nicola Balkenhol/sbw

Tuareg (Adlung-Spiele) byFrancesco Berardi; for 2–5players, 10 years and up;duration: about 45 minutes; price:about 7 €.

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Kalimambo

TOP GOOD FAIR POOR

AT A GLANCE

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You won’t find a start or finish line;in this race game, the journey is its ownreward. Speed doesn’t matter; what mat-ters is avoiding minus points. If you stepinto one of the six (wooden) dung heaps– heaps not attributable to small animalssuch as ducks or hedgehogs but to ele-phants – you get three minus points. (Inany case, the heaps have turned out smalland cute.)

The rhino is able to dish it out, too. Assoon as the space right in front of it hasbecome vacant, he bolts forward andgives the last one in line a boot thatresults in as many minus points as thenumber of spaces the rhino has moved. Ifthe mole wallows in the elephant dung oris pushed from behind, it passes theminus points to the player who hasplayed the lowest card.

When all 12 cards have been played,the player with the fewest minus pointswins.

Kalimambo is easy to explain, but it isnot for everyone – not right away, and insome cases not at all. How can I avoid amisstep? If a dung heap is lying just infront of the leader of the group, it seemssuperficially advisable to play a pretty lowcard. But even that can still be too high.Or that card is the lowest in the currentround and results in penalty points sincethe mutant penguin steps into the dung.The rhino can also get you easier thanyou’d think. It seemed a clever idea of oneplayer in our game group, who was in lastposition, to first hold his ground by play-ing a zero and then, in the next round,trigger a proper kick. But then all the oth-ers played a pretty high card since they

wanted to take refugefrom the raging beast;since Kali accidentallyfell by the wayside andwas therefore rammedby the rhino, our smarty-pants shot himself inthe foot by playing amedium-high card.That triggered greatmalicious joy for theothers.

When it comes rightdown to it, the cardconstellation is hardlypredictable. “This islike rolling dice forthe highest number,”one of the players

groaned; however, he performedbelow average when he deliberatelyplayed his cards completely arbitrarily ina game.

Opinions differ on Kalimambo. You canbet that nobody would want to recom-mend the game to tacticians who havecertain ambitions with regard to winning.If a player has the intent of figuring outthe optimal move in order to overcomethe imponderables, he will fail – to theother players’ pleasure. And in many agame, Kalimambo turned out to be a totalflop. Nevertheless, in my opinion, theamusing games tipped the scales in favor(even though I admit that it was a thinmajority). The more players that partici-pate, the more frequently minus pointsare awarded, and the more there is tolaugh about. Kalimambo is especiallyentertaining with a greater number ofplayers.

The atmospheric graphic design makesit easier for children to approach thegame; thus Kalimambo also proves itself afamily game in the best sense. But it canwell serve as a welcome casual closerafter having played a brain-buster for sev-eral hours. Admittedly, it satisfies primi-tive instincts to laugh at the expense of aplayer who has had bad luck, and todelight in emerging unscathed. Butthings like this are allowed while gaming.

Christwart Conrad/sbw

Kalimambo (Zoch-Verlag)by Antonio Scrittore; for3–7 players, about 8 yearsand up; duration: about 20–30 min-utes; price: about 20 €.


Jagdfieber

all the way we want. Each player is armedwith a set of cards: one hunter, twowolves, three hares, three carrots and onespecial card. All players choose a card andplay it face down.

After that, players reveal their card andscore, according to the motto, “What isthe most dangerous animal in the forest?”A hunter shoots a wolf dead, and the cap-tured card is put to the left on the face-down point pile next to the player’s

lodge. If several playershave played an equallystrong card, the cardsare activated, in clock-wise order, beginningwith the starting player.In case there are stillwolves alive after thehunt, each of themdevours one hare played,and the surviving hares eatthe carrots. Everything thathas not been eaten goes tothe right, face up, next toone’s own lodge. If our ani-mals or carrots survive thenext round unscathed, they

go to the left on our face-down point pile.Before then, however, they make formida-ble targets for the next round of play.

The animal to be eaten is always thenext one in clockwise order; surviving ani-mals are eaten before newly played-outones. This results in some well-known“She thinks that I am thinking …” combi-nations, with interesting and thematictwists. With a Closed Season card, played-out hunters can be convicted of poaching;

I f you answer the question, “What isthe most dangerous animal in the for-est?” with, “The carrot!” you won’t

land in one of the top spots on the PISAtest (Program for International StudentAssessment). That is, would not havelanded until recently, because thatanswer might now be correct – but only inJagdfieber, and only rarely. Normally, first

the hunters shoot the

wolves, then thesurviving wolves chow down the haresrunning around, and finally, the remain-ing hares dig their teeth into the defense-less carrots.

Of course, victory points matter in thislively little card game, presented in a500-copy print run at the SPIEL ’10 bySmiling Monster Games, a small Germancompany from Aachen. It is easy toexplain, and players understand it quickly– in most cases after playing the firstgame, which usually doesn’t proceed at

in this case, they land on our pile asminus points. The successful wolf lovergets a bonus for this. And if the competi-tors are just shooting willy-nilly and wolf-ing hares down, even our carrots may helpus take a trick.

The end of the game is also tricky inJagdfieber. Successful hunters always goback into our hand, which winds up withplayers having different numbers ofcards. When one player plays his last card,the current round ends. Hand cards thencount as minus points. So, at some point,our hunter had better just come across afew harmless carrots and go home to ourhunter’s lodge without having achievedanything so we can get rid of him.

Jagdfieber uses tried game mecha-nisms and combines them in a nice newway. It gets better with each participantnumbering more than the minimum. Withthree players, there is only moderateaction at the table; five players are theoptimal number, making for lots of activ-ity. One game takes less than ten minutes;because of this, the instructions suggestplaying four rounds (four “days of hunt-ing”) and noting down the scores. In mostcases, this is a bit much. One or tworounds keep up the suspense just longenough and are perfect as an eveningender. Stefan Ducksch/sbw

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Jagdfieber (SmilingMonster Games) by StefanZlatintsis; for 3–5 players,about 8 years and up; duration:about 30 minutes; price: about 13 €.

Siebenpunkt

TOP GOOD FAIR POOR

T he Swiss have a strong affinity fortheir native flora and fauna. Someyears ago, in Haselwurz und

Bärenklau (Verlag Murmel in cooperationwith the ETH Zürich), players had to con-sider the living conditions of the fieldcricket and the water-crowfoot, whichthrive only in certain regions. Sieben-punkt, whose publication was initiated bythe Swiss farmers association IP-Suisse,tries to encourage us to observe animals,using quite a different approach in termsof its game mechanism. The 61 cards use

professional photos, some of themimpressive close-ups. Without a doubt,the game proves educational, quite inpassing. In this game, the animals canonly be found in their well-defined habi-tats. The wolf spider requires at leastthree adjacent marguerite meadows plusone insect as food for its well-being.Establishing this animal is rewarded withthree victory points. The seven-spottedladybug, generating the titular sevenpoints, demands considerably more: onebellflower meadow bordered by two

poppy meadows, two marguerite mead-ows and two meadows of any kind, plustwo insects as its basic food resource.

The animals’ demands are put into playby means of 120 Domino-like landscapetiles that each player arranges on his fieldarea into a more or less homogenouslandscape. Using a drafting procedure, allplayers draw three tiles at the same time,choose one and hand the rest to theirneighbor. After the tiles have been allo-cated this way, players place them ontheir own field board, trying to fulfill one


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animal, you should keep an eye onother players’ plans so that it won’tbe snatched out from under you. Oth-erwise, players play along prettycalmly, independent of other players’actions.

In the beginning, the considerationsare quite manageable. If you plant thecherry tree here and bushes next to it,you can attract the lesser horseshoebat but won’t please the barn owl thatinsists on meadows adjacent to thecherry tree. Or you heap up stones nextto an apple tree for the Aciculida landsnail; you hope for a water area, whichyou don’t get hold of, though, and there-fore change your plan in favor of the leastweasel. As more animals become indige-nous, the requirements increase quickly;with the suggested variants, however,players can choose their preferred level ofdifficulty precisely.

Many a player sees these logical-geo-metrical optimizations as work rather thanplay. Unsuitable for frantic or impatientpeople, quick-starters, negotiators or per-formers, Siebenpunkt serves a very distincttarget group: the tinkerers. Unfortunately,the graphic design mars the playing funfor these people. The conditions men-tioned on the cards don’t always matchthe landscape tiles in visual terms; theycan easily be mistaken and in some are sograiny that they can produce a headache– as if you had a 3D stereogram in front ofyou. Clearer images would be the firstavenue for improvement; alternatively a

stylized fruit or flower wouldhave served the purpose much better. Thecards on display should also be recogniza-ble at a distance. If the publisher didn’twant to forgo the excellent animal photos,larger cards would have been necessary.Another problem is that the final check ofwhether each player still safely harbors allhis animals is a pretty cumbersome proce-dure. Most of my co-players refused andwanted to let it go. This is a pity, since, thisway, the hard-earned, well-deserved wingoes underappreciated.


Siebenpunkt (Fata Mor -gana) by Cyril Bucher; for2–5 players, about 9 andup; duration: about 40–80 minutes;price: about 40 €.

or more wishes of the animals laid out inthe center of the table. If a player is theonly one to succeed with an animal, hegets the corresponding card and puts itdown in front of him, face up. If morethan one succeeds, the players involvedmove the card aside and put one of theircolor chips on top, indicating that the ani-mal can be seen in their area. In the nextround, the display is replenished to eightcards, and the simultaneous selectionprocess of three landscape dominoesstarts anew.

Whoever has gained the most points inthe end wins, as one would expect – butonly if the habitat still supports the ani-mals. Since a player may place Dominotiles partly atop one another, he may, indoing so, destroy the landscape requiredfor an animal he has already acquired; ifhe doesn’t provide it with an alternativeby the end, he loses double the associ-ated victory points.

In a variant for advanced players, thelandscape builders start with severalsecret task cards. If somebody generatesan ecological compensation area, such asa standard orchard, a pond or a dry wall,he can look forward to a high reward ofsix to 15 points.

Siebenpunkt demands the utmostattention. You have to carefully balancethe different habitat conditions anddecide in favor of one and against theother. In most cases, you can satisfydemanding requirements only over sev-eral rounds. If you strive for a valuable

Im pres sum spiel boxFounded: 1981.Published by: w. nost heide ver lag gmbh, Bahn -hof straße 22, 96117 Mem mels dorf, Germany. Tel. +49-951-40666 -0, Fax +49-951-40666 -49.Publisher: Dipl. -Kfm. Jens Nost heide.Editor: Mat thias Har del.Assistent Editors: Christwart Conrad (cc),Jochen Corts (lud), Thorsten Heinermann (th).Signed acticles express the opinion of theirrespective authors.Translation: Sybille and Bruce Whitehill (sbw),Corinna Spellerberg (cs), Samuel Willcox (sw),Sebastian Blanco (sb).Publication dates: 7 times per year. Postal address: w. nost heide ver lag gmbh, Bahn -hof straße 22, 96117 Mem mels dorf, Germany.eMail add ress: re dak tion@spiel box. de.Web: www.spiel box-ma ga zin. de.Sales: Jasmin Pfister (vertrieb@nost heide. de).

Ad manager: Bar bara Nost heide ([email protected]). Typesetting and Layout: Mat thias Har del,Christof Tisch.Printers: creo Druck & Me di en ser vice GmbH, Bam berg, Germany.Yearly subscription rates including postage:45,50 € (Europe), 56,00 € (Overseas). Cover price: Individual selling prices in foreigncurrencies are country-specific.Change of address: The publisher is not respon-sible for issue not received due to a change ofaddress. Please contact vertrieb@nost heide. deto report change of address.Ma nu script submissions: The publisherresumes no responsibility for loss or damage formaterial which has been sent without prior writ-ten consent.Registerge richt Bamberg HRB 746ISSN 07216777 Ust. -IdNr.: DE 132 271 195

Ge richts stand: Bam bergCopyright: Entire content is ©2011 by w. nost -heide verlag gmbh. All rights reseved.The Publisher assumes no responsibility forclaims made in advertisements. The informationpresented in spielbox is from many sources forwhich there can be no warranty of responsibilityas to accuracy, originality or completeness. Themagazine is sold with the understanding thatthe publisher is not engaged in rendering pro -duct endorsements or providing instructions asa substitute for appropriate training by qualifiedsources. Therefore spielbox cannot and will notassume responsibility for any actions arisingfrom any information published in spielbox.The use of any trademarks is not meant to beconstrued as a challenge to the trademark hol -ders.spielbox® is a Registered Trademark of w. nostheide verlag gmbh, Reg. No. 3,870,584.

spiel box playing appeal ratingsThe ratings rage from 1 to 10, whereas 1 is theworst and 10 the best rating. Ratings of 1, 2, 3are grades of poor games, ratings of 4, 5, 6 stand

The average rating of the reviewed games inspielbox is well above the to be expected value of5.5 since we focus on recommending games anddisregard really poor ones for review purposes.

for mediocre games, and games with ratings of7, 8, 9 can be regarded as good. The rating of 10is reserved to exceptionally good games, and isto be seen rarely.


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As d’Or in Cannes Awarded

O n the eve of the Games Festivalin Cannes, the As d’Or, theFrench version of “Spiel des

Jahres” (Game of the Year) was awarded.The main prize this year goes to Takenokoby Antoine Bauza, published by Bombyx(formerly Hazgaard) and Matagot.

The Grand Prix, corresponding to theGerman Kennerspiel des Jahres (a specialprize for more complex games), wasawarded to Olympos (Philippe Keyaerts;Ystari). Additionally, the Children’s GameZwerg Riese (Marco Teubner; HABA) tooka prize, and the Special Prize went to theYstari edition of Sherlock Holmes Crimi-nal-Cabinet (by Raymond Edwards,Suzanne Goldberg and Gary Grady).Also nominated:

• Cubulus (Sylvain Ménager; Gigamic)• Fame us (Christophe Hermier; MoonsterGames)

• King of Tokyo (Richard Garfield; Iello)• The Castles of Burgundy (Stefan Feld;alea)

• Mansions of Madness (Corey Konieczka;Fantasy Flight Games)

• Pirates ! (Alain Rivollet; Djeco)• Tier auf Tier: Das große Abenteuer(Klaus Miltenberger; HABA)

• Sandwich (Christophe Raimbault; LeJoueur)

• Tournay (Xavier Georges, SébastienDujardin, Alain Orban; Pearl Games)Of course, the rule that surprise creates

an interest also applies in France. TheSpecial Prize laureate was not even previ-ously mentioned on the list of nominees!That seems somehow familiar. The Ger-man penchant, however, is getting thisawardback in the fast lane once more.

Feedback on Feedback

After the last Game of the Year titles hadreaped their reward abroad long beforethey were accredited in Germany(Qwirkle was available in the USA for sixyears, 7 Wonders was awarded in Franceway ahead of Germany, Dixit had been alaureate there for an even longer time),

the current headstart of 27 years(Sherlock HolmesCriminal-Cabi netwas Game of theYear in 1985) canhardly be topped.However, this con-cept is entirelyirrelevant in termsof commercialsuccess, as in thisrespect the Ger-man jury prize isstill the undis-puted leader.

Until now, the As d’Or – Jeu de l’annéePrix du Jury (Special Prize) was generallyintended for a gamers’ game, as was thecase most recently with 7 Wonders. Byrenaming it Grand Prix, it was linguisti-cally upgraded in a considerable way, andcould one day outshine the main prize. The nominated titles cover all the perti-

nent slots, which differ slightly from theGerman ones, for cultural reasons. Thisway, Mansions of Madness appeals to themartial faction, whereas the foolish Sand-wich lives by its frivolous approach.

Pirates!, completely unknown in theseparts, is somewhat caught between twostools. As the French list of nominees doesnot differentiate between children andadult titles, this game, recommended forplayers from seven years upwards, caneasily find its place at As d’Or. In Pirates!,the “pirate players” take turns placing cer-tain objects on the board, with the targetof getting three in line, and then discard-ing the respective mission card.

Fame us represents the communicativegames category. It modifies the principleknown from Such a Thing (Valley Games,2007) by narrowing down the theme tocelebrities. A vote decides if discardedtraits relate to a star, and an initial, secretallocation of players to a certain teamought to ensure honest answers.

Christwart Conrad/cs

TAKENOKO publisher Hicham Ayoub Bedran (Matagot), ErwanHascoët (Bombyx) and Autor Antoine Bauza (from left)

T his spielbox contains six cards forthe game Navegador (PD-Verlag).If this additional material was

missing from your copy, please [email protected] for a replace-ment. The supplement for the coming edition,

however, will be very difficult to loseindeed, as it is a large punch board ofnew components for Hawaii, a game thatwent down well with all of our critics (seereview sb 7/11). The image below showsthe level of development at the beginningof February.

O ur search for proofreading volun-teers was met with an over-whelming response. We had of

course heard that the volunteer culture isquite pronounced in the Anglo-Saxonworld. However, nobody had reckonedwith almost 50 interested parties gettingin touch. At this point, a huge thank youto all volunteers – also to those whosehelp we are in the end not going to enlist.Our experiment to publish two reviews

about the same game was met with farless enthusiasm. Most people expressed aconcern that they had us much rather usethe space for two games than for depict-ing one game from two perspectives.Some readers showed a strong preferencefor a definite pro and contra vote, but inthis case, the opinion of Stuart Daggerand Stefan Ducksch did not diverge quiteso much anyway. No clear and pro-nounced vote for either the English or theGerman style was discernable from thefeedback we received, but the answersreflected a preference to maintain theblend of translated texts and contribu-tions in the original language. We happilycomply with this wish.

Matthias Hardel/cs

Outlook and Note onthe Supplement

Photo: Guido H

einecke

SHORT NOTES

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French Games Magazine Discontinued

In a multi-page editorial in the last edi-tion, Arneodo set out several reasons whyJSP could not continue. For one, the con-stant delays in the magazine’s produc-tion, over time, bordered on the ridicu-lous. Whereas the authors faithfully mettheir deadlines, the disrespect that themagazine fermented in its own publish-ing house became intolerable. Sadly, lack-ing financial means, a prioritized commis-sioning of in-house employees could notbe guaranteed. As a further internal rea-

son for the shutdown, he added that theeditor-in-chief, Rozoy, had left to take upanother professional occupation.Apart from some explicitly named pub-

lishers, the cooperation with games man-ufacturers left a lot to be desired, as they

complained about negative ratings andconsequently failed to donate evaluationcopies. Furthermore, the pricing policy ofthe on-line games shop did not meet witheveryone’s approval. In addition, Arneodoconsiders a missing games press culturean intrinsic French shortcoming. Helaments the difficult circumstances forthe press in general, and specifically forsmall-scale publications hardly able tosurvive within the product range of thewholesalers. He claims that the advertise-ment business, which has been meageranyhow, has now entirely ground to ahalt; companies prefer to advertisetheir products elsewhere. And finally,the personal load for him became tooheavy to bear, as he was no longerwilling to permanently put inunpaid work during weekends andin his holidays. Even though hesustains the internet presence, itsfuture is entirely unresolved. JSP is not the first games pub-

lication that laid down its armsfor more or less similar rea-sons. The older people amongus will remember the leg-endary magazine Jeux &Stratégie. It is quite sad thatJSP has gone down, particu-

larly for the mainly francophone clientele,and for those of us familiar with theFrench language, who will now no longerbe able to appreciate the sometimesunusual views of our neighbors.

Christwart Conrad/cs

I n December 2003, the French gamemagazine Jeux sur un plateau (gameson a board) first saw the light of day.

After eight years and 77 issues, it was dis-continued in January 2012. The appear-ance of each individual copy, which couldcontain up to 100 pages, had changedrepeatedly over time. Apart from reviews,reports and supplements (as they are alsofrequently available in the spielbox), atleast six pages was paid to a specificgame, its development, and other back-ground information, under the headline“Zoom.” Quite often, the magazine con-tained contests, sometimes a quiz or atask for classical games, like chess, or formodern games. Beyond its name, themagazine covered video games,recently including games playedon the iPad and other tablet PCs.All of this was interspersed withcartoons. In parallel, a websitehad been created, which offeredon-line gaming and an on-lineshop that sold the latest games. From the beginning, the pub-

lisher, Olivier Arneodo, did nothave great financial expecta-tions, but out of a sense ofpleasure and idealism,engaged in this adventure of agame magazine that rapidly grew inimportance. At its peak, they ran 12,000copies and sold JSP at kiosks. In the end,5,000 copies were still printed, of whichthe considerable amount of 4,000 stillfound a buyer.

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turn until the end of the game – so he hasno chance of winning any more.This dilemma of either having to

choose unfavorable resources or runningthe risk of having fewer action disks atone’s disposal can be avoided by notdealing out any dowry to the players. Inthis case, all Helvetians start with sixactions, and this enhances the lastplayer’s scope of action in the first round,compared to the starting player.

Nicola Balkenhol/sbw

B asically, Helvetia is about buildingproduction chains. The better theywork, the more points they gener-

ate. All players principally start off in thesame situation. Who begins, however, canhave far-reaching consequences. In theearly stage of the game, experienced Hel-vetians will do their utmost to collect theirtwo dowry disks (i.e., coins), because theywill have two more actions available tothem from the next turn on. In the four-player game, it might happen that the last

player in the first action round faces thedilemma of being forced to marry into avillage containing resources he doesn’tactually want. If he now forgoes the two“wedding” actions, his opponents can playoff it: In the worst case, his two dowrycoins stay with a player who has acquiredthem by marrying into a village and thenjust blocks them by not erecting any pro-duction buildings, thus making furthermarriages impossible. Consequently, thedoomed player has two fewer actions per

Helvetia: Doing without dowries

the two-player game). Hearranges them in as many pilesas there are players. The lastplayer in the normal order ofplay is the first to select a groupof cubes, then his right neighbor,and so on, until the starting player takesthe remaining resources. After that, theblack bag is emptied, of course.


I f all participants know what matters,then the player who begins has a clearadvantage, and the existence of a

marker that you need to acquire in orderto become the new starting player is anobvious sign of this. In most cases, thelast player in the first round gets onefewer resource than the first player, pro-vided the black cubes are not distributedequally. The following idea for compensa-

tion also enables a slightly fasterapproach for all players, plus moreoptions right from the start:After players have distributed the

resources on the spaces on the board asspecified in the instructions, all availablecubes are put into the black bag with thechurch representatives. The startingplayer draws two cubes more than thenumber of participants (or one cube in

Village: Compensation for the starting player advantage

sarily lose salt if you leave the damagedcargo space empty prior to departure.Pirates attack the first unprotected ship. Ifall cargo areas are damaged, the ship willsink; however, it can be bought lateragain. You can sell even if the price forsalt is at zero, e.g., by using the functionof the treasury office.The face-down event tiles are not shuf-

fled, not even after players have looked atthem secretly, so the first player who hasinvested there may put the looked-at tileaside, and can take it later or foreverleave it.Even a player who has not built on

Notre Dame at allmay build a churchwindow. The townhall rewards the

possession of (up to13) buildings (or,better, actionspaces), amongthem: bank, vault,

Notre Dame, the church windowspace and the town hall itself.


A fter having walked right into thecredit trap once, players canprobably handle the tough credit

limit in the next games. The initial capitalcompensation forthose who go last inthe order of play, how-ever, is meager, con-sidering the inhibitionthreshold is rather lowand won’t preventthem from enteringthe minus range in thefirst round. Anincrease to (at least)three instead of two units ofmoney – in balance to the playerwho has his turn sooner – is justified.The instructions leave many questions

unanswered. For the German translation,the Heidelberger Spieleverlag expended alot of effort and even redesigned some ofthe layout. It’s annoying that the imagesaccompanying the description of theevent tiles have been shifted too far tothe top. But it is even more annoying thatthe original Italian company repeatedly

Upon a Salty Ocean: Rule clarifications and starting player advantage

spie

l box

56

made last-minute changes that could nolonger be included in the rules. Some ambiguities can be resolved as

follows (which partly contradicts theprinted rules but in most cases isn’tcovered):

When the inn and bank payout money, the previous order of

play is maintained in thecase of a tie.You may build a car-

rack even before youhave launched the sec-ond caravel. The otherplayers’ revenues from

the academy or shipyardare lost if the ship

builder has the samebuilding. He pays his coststo the bank; the otherplayers might get less backfrom the kitty in case theamount is rounded down. Aship repair is also possible on thehigh seas, even if the damages havebeen incurred before you acquire thelighthouse. In a storm, you won’t neces-

TWEAKS AND VARIATIONS

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00_U3_az_riogrande121b_en_js 21.11.12 13:52 Seite U3

00_U4_az_zoch121_en_js 21.11.12 13:53 Seite U4

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