Author: Bill H

Essen aka ‘The Spiel’ is the biggest game fair in the World. Over 700 games are released there every year, to flood the market for Christmas time and beyond. Its really tough for customers and retailers to try and pick out the ones they think will be hot from such a crowded market. Here are a few that are rising to the top as well as a couple that are about to be released that had nothing to do with Essen at all.

Above and Below

A worker placement game combined with a story telling element. Above you ground you assign your workers to build rooms, get resources and to generally get smarter to make the best village. Below ground you explore caverns and will read paragraphs explaining what has happened to you as you do this and the options available, with certain risks and rewards. Beautiful art and a very original concept.

T.I.M.E Stories

I’m going to let the Publisher explain this one as its even more unique than the last one and also even prettier!:
T.I.M.E Stories is a narrative game, a game of “decksploration”. Each player is free to give their character as deep a “role” as they want, in order to live through a story, as much in the game as around the table. But it’s also a board game with rules which allow for reflection and optimization. At the beginning of the game, the players are at their home base and receive their mission briefing. The object is then to complete it in as few attempts as possible. The actions and movements of the players will use Temporal Units (TU), the quantity of which depend on the scenario and the amount of players. Each attempt is called a “run”; one run equals the use of all of the Temporal Units at the players’ disposal. When the TU reach zero, the agents are recalled to the agency, and restart the scenario from the beginning, armed with their experience. The object of the game is to make the perfect run, while solving all of the puzzles and overcoming all of a scenario’s obstacles. The base box contains the entirety of the T.I.M.E Stories system and allows players to play all of the scenarios, the first of which — Asylum — is included. During a scenario, which consists of a deck of 120+ cards, each player explores cards, presented most often in the form of a panorama. Access to some cards require the possession of the proper item or items, while others present surprises, enemies, riddles, clues, and other dangers. You usually take possession of local hosts to navigate in a given environment, but who knows what you’ll have to do to succeed? Roam a med-fan city, looking for the dungeon where the Syaan king is hiding? Survive in the Antarctic while enormous creatures lurk beneath the surface of the ice? Solve a puzzle in an early 20th century asylum? That is all possible, and you might even have to jump from one host to another, or play against your fellow agents from time to time…In the box, an insert allows players to “save” the game at any point, to play over multiple sessions, just like in a video game. This way, it’s possible to pause your ongoing game by preserving the state of the receptacles, the remaining TU, the discovered clues, etc. T.I.M.E Stories is a decksploring game in which each deck makes anything possible!

504

That’s right 504 games in one. The game is divided into 9 modules, and to play you select 3 of them which will determine the theme, play mechanics and winning conditions. A flip book is used to explain how each set works. Modules consist of the following:

Module 1: Pick-Up & Deliver
Module 2: Race
Module 3: Privileges
Module 4: Military
Module 5: Exploration
Module 6: Roads
Module 7: Majorities
Module 8: Production
Module 9: Shares

Its an epic idea and the fact he (Friedemann Freese) got it to work is stunning.

7 Wonders Duel

This is probably going to be the best selling game from Essen. Its a 2 player only version of 7 Wonders which uses many of the ideas of the original game, but not the main one. No card drafting occurs, players take from a display of face-down and face-up cards arranged at the start of a round. A player can take a card only if it’s not covered by any others. Players now trade with the bank and as they get dominance in a resource the cost rises for their opponent. A player can win 7 Wonders Duel in one of three ways. Each time that you acquire a military card, you advance the military marker toward your opponent’s capital, giving you a bonus at certain positions. If you reach the opponent’s capital, you win the game immediately. Similarly, if you acquire any six of seven different scientific symbols, you achieve scientific dominance and win immediately. If neither of these situations occurs, then the player with the most points at the end of the game wins.

The Big Book of Madness

Bored magic students open a book they shouldn’t and release a bunch of nasty monsters. A co-operative game in which you must build your element deck to acquire spells and cards to help your fellow players, all the while trying to fight of the monsters who are slowly driving you MAAAAAAAAAAD!

Epic

Magic the Gathering on steroids! Its not a CCG, but you will be able to expand it. You only get to play ridiculously powerful cards and don’t need the manna to do it either. Its from the people who brought you Star Realms, but its not Magic, so please don’t play it as such or you’ll be sad.

Mombasa

The big Euro of Essen that is slowly climbing to the top of the pile. In Mombasa, players acquire shares of chartered companies based in Mombasa, Cape Town, Saint-Louis, and Cairo and propagate trading posts of these companies throughout the African continent in order to earn the most money. Mombasa features a unique, rotating-display hand-mechanism that drives game play. Each round players choose action cards from their hand, then reveal them simultaneously and carry out the actions. These cards are then placed in a discard pile, and the previously played cards recovered for the subsequent round. Each company has a double-sided company track, so games will vary quite a lot based on which tracks are revealed and at which companies they are placed.

Coming to the cafe in a big group? No idea of what to play and don’t want to end up playing Cards Against Humanity or the Resistence again? Well here is a list of great games that will play upwards of 8 and rated by difficulty to get going with. I’ve ignored some of the more popyular games such as Dixit, Concept and Avalon as they are already fairly well known.

Difiiculty Rating (DR):

1 – Two minutes to read the rules and get going
3 – This may take 10 mins of rules reading to get going with
5 – Best to have already read the rules at home before you get here

Cash and Guns

(4-8 Players, DR = 3)

Its a Mexican Standoff. A bunch of loot is in the middle of the table and everyone is going to point guns at each other to try and get them to back down. You can’t load your gun with a bullet every time though. The question is, who’s bluffing?

Saboteur

(3-13 Players, DR = 3)

You are laying tunnel cards trying to find a route to the gold as a team, but some of you are trying to prevent it. But who? Be too obvious and everyone will bust your stuff to hinder your turns, subtlety is the key.

Time’s Up

(4-9 Players, DR = 2)

Try to get your team mates to name the person on the card, then do it again with one word, then just acting. The names are always the same every round, but the means of communicating change.

Walking Dead Card Game

(3-10 Players, DR = 2)

Simultaneous play makes this game great, plus only 15 mins long. You are laying number cards to try and not put the 6th card in the row and take points. 10 rounds. No, its not very walking dead ish, but still very good.

Good Cop Bad Cop

(3-8 Players, DR = 2)

You are secretly a Good or Bad Cop. One team member is the FBI dude or the Kingpin. If that person is shot your team loses. You slowly deduce who is who by revealing their Good/Bad Cop cards in front of them, however everyone has three, so just because their first revealed card is good doesn’t mean the other two arn’t bad…

Bang the Dice Game

(3-8 Players, DR = 2)

Similar idea to Good Cop Bad Cop, but your actions are determined by dice. The game play is more streamlined than the card version and it only takes 30 mins.

Space Cadets Dice Duel

(4-8 Players, DR = 5)

2 Space ships battle to the death. Two teams. Each one has a captain who assigns limited action dice to the different stations on the ship that control guns/movement/shields etc… You have to work as a team to fight the other ship and the captain has to decide who gets what and when. Its involves a lot of people shouting.

Wits and Wagers

(4-20 Players, DR = 1)

Ask a question that involves a number answer. We all give our guesses, then bet on each others answers getting paid out for whichever was closest.

One Night Ultimate Werewolf

(3-10 Players,DR = 2)

Everyone gets a role which enables a bit of information then we try and figure out who the werewolf is. One guess. Get it right you win, get it wrong the werewolf does. 10 mins a round = awesome.

Spyfall

(3-8 Players, DR = 2)

See review here.

I Hate Zombies

(3-13 Players, DR = 1)

Half of your are human the other half are Zombies. Play Rock/Paper/Scissors to fight each other. The humans all have special powers though. Keep going to You’ve killed all the Zombies or all the humans have been turned. You’ll never play more RPS in the space of 10 mins in your life.

Dr. Reiner Knizia loves the auction mechanic. They are littered everywhere in his games, which is good because he is really good at developing a game around them. Below I will run through some of his more prominent auction games, focusing on the actual auction mechanic used as opposed to the game itself. They are all down here at IBGC to be tried should any of them intrigue you

High Society – This 20 minute beauty has a standard auction. That is, offer a bid and then go around the table raising the offer, or passing. If you pass you cannot bid again. Player who bids the highest gets the property.

The tweak in this game is that you bid with money cards that are fixed in value. $1(million), $2, $3, $5, $8….$20, $25. You cannot bid $16 unless you have the exact mix of cards to make that bid and if you win an auction those cards are lost, leaving you with fewer options to bid with (i.e. if you have a $1, $4 and $20 left and someone bids $7, the lowest bid you can make is $20). Extra evil twist…at the end of the game person with the least money automatically loses 🙁

 

RA – In this game players are given 3 or 4 fixed bidding tiles ranging from 1-16, e.g. 2, 7 and 16. You try to win Egyptian stuff with them (Reiner likes Egyptian stuff) . An auction is once around, so you get one shot at winning and if someone raises you, tough, no Egyptian stuff for you son. However part of your winning haul will be the tile that won the last auction, which will be part  your ‘hand’ for the next round. Part of the valuation you will make in the hauls worth is how good that tile is. Win Egyptian stuff that also includes bidding tiles that are 1’s and 2’s and you won’t be winning much more Egyptian stuff next round.

Dream Factory – This is another standard auction, but this twist is that it exists in a closed economy (no money enters or leaves the game from the original amount). You are making movies and trying to win the stars and directors, but other players will put those stars up for auction and win the money you offered, so if you get in a bidding war with someone over an actor you need you are making another player very rich and able to outbid everyone in a later auction.

Amun-Re – More Egytian stuff up for auction (Reiner REALLY loves his Egyptian games). This one uses a pyramid auction with fixed amounts that you are allowed to bid (0, 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21….). The brutal part of this game is that the number of provinces you are bidding on is equal to the number of players playing, so you will each win exactly one province a round. If someone outbids you, you must bid immediately on a different province. To bid on the original province again, you have to hope that someone outbids you on the new province you just bid on so that you can move your offer again. Once every province has a single bid on it, the auction is over.

Taj Mahal – on the surface this doesn’t seem like an auction, but it very much is. There are 5 things to win and players play cards to try and win 0-5 of them. They can play cards 1 or 2 at a time and each cards is a bid for one or two of the items on offer. If at the start of your turn you are leading the bids for any of the items on offer, you may drop out and take them. However, whatever you bid you lose, even if you win nothing at all…very mean indeed (I’ve seen people go very strange colours in the face playing this game. In fact I think I once bid a tonne of cards and got nothing and possibly had a slight stroke I was so upset).

Modern Art – ALL THE AUCTIONS. In this game you try to win art by doing once around auctions, standard auctions, a secret one time bid auction (put your bid in your hand and everyone reveals at the same time) and name a price auction (as in I set the price and you each get a chance to take the offer. First to accept it, gets it). Truly an auction overload!

Medici – This one involves a once around auction. You each get one chance to make an offer on a set of goods, whoever bids highest gets it, in this case however, you are bidding with your points which you need to win the game. This is one of the worst games in existence IMO, but its one of Jack’s favorite ever….try it to find out which camp you are in (if its Jack’s camp then you are wrong!)