Campos: I liked this little tile laying abstract well enough as a quick filler, but others I played with felt they didn’t have enough control when playing with four. The tiles consists of three hexagons of four possible colors joined in a triangular formation. In the first phase of the game you can play two tiles or one tile and a scoring card. The scoring cards all work the same way: if the largest region of one designated color is bigger than that of a second color, you score points equal to the size of the largest region of a third color. Once all the tiles are out or one player has played all of his or her scoring cards, you tear down the board. Now each player can remove two tiles or remove one and play a scoring card. I think even with four there was room for planning, but there’s not anything to be done if you don’t have scoring cards for the strong regions; even defensive play can be difficult as you must remove tiles from the edge. As I say, it was quick and I’d be happy to play again, but it wasn’t anything special.
Key Market: This was probably my favorite game of the weekend, maybe running neck and neck with London. It seems to be Richard Breese’s Agricola, with farming, special powers, workers demanding to be paid, upgradeable housing, and multiple scoring categories. I think it’s a fair comparison, but don’t let it scare you if you love or hate Agricola; Key Market shares lots of ideas but plays very differently. You play for eight “seasons”, each of which gives bonuses or penalties to production of certain resources (determined at random at the start of the game, except for winter, which always produces only wine). In the first phase of a season you move your workers (and perhaps add a new one) and collect your goods. Once everyone has done that, you take one or more goods to market, where prices are determined by a simple supply and demand track. During both of these phases you have some opportunities to trade sets of different goods for certain upgrades: guild membership and advancement (which offers points and special powers), turning your house into a manor (for points), and, once you have a manor, retiring workers for points at the cost of losing the actions or bonuses they might provide. In the final phase you must pay workers if you want to keep them on the fields; sometimes it’s better to lay off a worker at this stage if you see he’s not going to be productive next season. It all flows nicely, and the various guild powers (not every guild is used in every game) promote multiple paths to victory. Ani- and vegimeeples are basically expected in this type of game now, but they’re still nice, and the Juliet Breese artwork is lovely. I definitely plan on picking this one up.
Kaigan: Apparently Tadataka Ino was a famous cartographer who spent 21 years mapping the coastline of Japan. Who knew? In this game you direct teams of his assistants, visiting various sectors of the island and committing wanton acts of cartography (the basic unit of cartography work being of course the wooden cube), often joined by your opponents and sometimes even by by Ino himself. The main mechanism is a kind of programmed actions scheme, where you take turns laying out action cards in rows until one row looks so attractive you claim it yourself. The theme is neat and everything works very well, but I am notoriously bad at games in which you have to make an enticing but not overly generous offer to your opponents, so more than one of my action card placements inspired a politely pitying remark of “Interesting.” So it’s not my type of game, but I think it’s well done and many others will like it.
Namibia: The oil drilling game Giganten has neat bits: sturdy plastic oil derricks, oil barrels, delivery trucks, and black squares representing the oil itself. These pieces work well in that game; they have no business being in this game, which is about mining gold, silver, copper, and diamonds in the title country. Yet here they are, failing to represent what they’re supposed to and taking up entirely too much space on the small game board. Apparently this is the second published game to emerge from some contest to use these bits in a game; while I think such contests can be a nice creative exercise, when it comes time to publish and sell the game you owe your customers appropriate bits. The game itself is a workable economic sim, but no one in my game found it particularly inspiring. While it was mostly just generically “blah”, I think I can put my finger on two particular weaknesses: The supply and demand tracks for the various minerals are kind of fiddly but the overall effect doesn’t produce a lot of tension in the timing of sales, and the money versus VP trade off is opaque and again does little to inspire tension. Plus, shouldn’t a game called Namibia have giraffes?
London: Yep, played again, my only repeat of the weekend. London was easily the hit of Lobster Trap; there was often more than one game going on and at one point I saw as many as four. I liked it better the second time, even though I lost badly. The mostly tactical approach I took the first time buried me in poverty as my opponents worked strategies to carefully manage theirs. But I was happy to see what they did and how they found clever ways to make their cities run efficiently. London is probably also destined for the collection; I just regret not preordering to get the upgraded bits.
Mord Im Arosa: Probably the weirdest game I played, and a nice way to close out the con. You’ve got eight rectangular boxes in gradually descending sizes stacked ziggurat style. Each is completely open on the bottom, and each has a small square hole at the top, with the holes seemingly congruent and perfectly aligned all the way down. You’d think that if you dropped a cube in the top, most of the time it would fall straight through to the bottom. Wrongo! It could end up on any floor, I guess due to clipping edges on the way down and bouncing and the magic of chaos theory. And if you listen carefully to the bounces, you can (sometimes) make a reasonable guess as to where it landed. That’s the game, really, dropping cubes in the top and trying to guess where they went. The theme is a murder mystery, so the game starts with two red cubes that represent the victims. Once these have been located, the floors on which they were found are marked and players whose cubes are found on or near those floor score points. The game ends once ten of one player’s cubes have been found – the points are totaled and low score wins. It’s pretty random, but it’s fun. Definitely not an everyday game, but perhaps just the thing pull out when you’re in the mood for something different.
Overall it was a fun event. I got to try lots of new games, though apparently some of the Essen releases that were supposed to be there got held up in customs, so I guess I’ll have to wait until one of the winter events to try Troyes, Florenza, and some of the other buzz magnets. Thanks to Pitt, Tery, Mark, and the gang for putting it on.
