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Spiel ’04
Notes on the 2004 games fair by Pevans
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This is my report of the new board games launched at the 2004
Spiel games fair. There's quite a lot in this article, so you
can use an index to find the bits you want. Or just read it as a
narrative. You can also read or print the PDF version (you will need Adobe Reader to do this – it is free from Adobe).
Main Index: Intro / Page 2 / Page 3
/ Page 4 / PDF version (.5 Mb) / Conclusion
/
 Introduction
I enjoyed Spiel as ever. It is
always refreshing to see the enthusiasm everybody (customers,
publishers, designers, journalists at al) brings to the show. Not
to mention all the new games. Experience has taught me that it
just isn't possible to see everything at Spiel. Scour the halls
for the four days of the show and still someone will tell you
about a great game that you missed. Nowadays I don’t even try.
Particularly this year when another hall has been added to the
show, making it bigger than ever, and I only had two days to do
the rounds. So this report is very selective: it covers just a
few of the 400+ new games that were on show. But then, I was only
one of 149,501 visitors!
I have been adding to these notes
as I have played games since Spiel. I shall continue to do this,
so keep an eye out for new versions of this report.
As always, I must give my usual
disclaimer. I often describe games by referring to other games.
This is not meant to imply that one game is a copy of another,
it’s simply a quick way of getting across what the game is
like.
 2F Spiele
2F Spiele had no new game this
year as designer Friedemann Friese has been busy. Not least with
the new editions of Funkenschlag (as Power Grid)
and Finstere Flure (as Fearsome Floors) with Rio
Grande Games. Power Grid is a terrific game – improving on
the already good Funkenschlag – and Finstere Flure
is a strong favourite at Swiggers games club, so I recommend both
games.
Abacusspiele
Abacus had several new games, as
well as Michael Schacht’s Hansa, published earlier this
year. Moguli is a two-player abstract designed by Reinhold
Wittig and published in a nice wooden edition. Uwe Rosenberg has
come up with a new pizza-themed card game, which can be played on
its own or as an expansion to Mamma Mia!. It’s called
Sole Mio. As a fan of the original game, I’m interested to
see how the new game works. There’s also a new edition of Ein
Solches Ding (Urs Hostettler), which is a neat game in which
players build up a list of characteristics until it’s clear there
isn’t any " such thing" . As the game is entirely text, this
edition is really only going to work for German speakers. The
same applies to Wie ich die Welt Sehe (How I See the
World) from the same designer. This sounds similar to Apples
to Apples as players pick one of the several answers
available to a specific question.
Adlung
As expected, Adlung Spiele had a
selection of new card games from a variety of designers. The most
interesting of these was Im Auftrag des Königs (On Behalf
of the King), designed by Lorenz Kutschke. Players compete to
complete knightly quests and thus win the favour of King Arthur.
They have to improve their abilities to successfully complete the
quests and this means competing with the other players for the
available action cards. Not too demanding, I suspect, but it
sounds interesting. Teamwork (Michael Andersch) is a card
game version of the parlour game where two players, speaking one
word each in turn, try to describe something to the rest of their
team. The remaining new games seem to be aimed at children.
Flix Mix is a pattern-matching game from Bernhard Naegele.
Geister und Gespenster is a ghost-themed game by Eugen
Wyss. Oups is a memory game by Karsten Adlung.
alea
Ravensburger subsidiary alea used
their space to show the prototype of their new game for next
Spring. This was Louis XIV by Rüdiger Dorn – subtitled
intrigue at the court of the Sun King. It’s a card game in which
the players – courtiers at Versailles – try to get the King’s
ear. There was a lot of competition to try the game and I didn’t
get a chance to do so. It was received well by those who played
it, so I look forward to seeing the production version early in
2005.
 Alea’s production games this year
were Wilko Manz’s Fifth Avenue (English language version
from Rio Grande), which I found disappointing, and San
Juan (another Rio Grande publication in English), the card
game developed by designer Andreas Seyfarth from his earlier
board game, Puerto Rico. Stefan Brück, main man at alea,
was very pleased to be awarded " Card Game of the Year" for San
Juan by Fairplay magazine.
Amigo
Spiel + Freizeit
Der Untergang von
Pompeji (The Downfall
of Pompeii) comes from Amigo. " Escape from Pompeii" might be a
better English version of the title as that’s the theme of this
board game from Klaus-Jürgen Wrede. The immediate attraction is
the conical volcano in one corner of the board. Yes, you get to
chuck your opponents’ bits into it! (Sound effects are optional.)
The first stage of the game has everybody placing wooden cubes in
their colour around the city. Then Vesuvius erupts. Now you move
your cubes out of the city and spread lava tiles across it.
Whoever saves the most pieces from the destruction wins.
 The game encourages players to
think carefully about where they’re placing their cubes in the
first place. And then to plot their moves in the second part –
there’s a clever movement mechanic, which provides some tactical
options. For me, the thinking doesn’t match the fairly
lightweight theme in what is meant to be a fun game. I can see
that the game is aimed at the family market, but I’m not sure
throwing my nieces and nephews into the volcano will go down too
well!
Geschenkt is an addition
to Amigo’s fine line of card games. Designed by Thorsten Gimmler,
this is a minimalist game. It consists of a set of cards,
numbered 3-35, and some chips. Players get 11 chips each and 24
cards are selected at random to make the playing deck. The first
card is turned up and the first player has a choice: take the
card (and any chips on it) or put a chip on it and pass the
decision to the next player. Who then has the same decision to
make and so on. When all the cards have been taken, the players
score the values of their cards as penalty points less the number
of chips they have. However, anyone with a run of consecutive
cards (12-13-14, for example) only scores the lowest card.
This is a fiendish little game.
With only two-thirds of the cards in play, you cannot be sure
that any gaps between your cards will be filled. The first
impulse is to avoid high value cards at all costs, but they can
be attractive once they have a few chips on them. And there’s
always the chance of stringing together a run that means only one
of them scores. Aagh! The game reminds me strongly in style of
that other great simple filler: 6 nimmt!. However, this
game has a higher skill level. Or, at least, it appears to
have…
Talking of 6 nimmt!, the
co-designer of that game, Wolfgang Kramer, has come up with
Tanz der Hornochsen (Dance of the Ox-heads – which are the
symbols on the cards in 6 nimmt!), a board game version of
the game. This sounds very silly, but the charm of 6
nimmt! is that it plays very quickly. I’ll be surprised if
this has transferred to the board game.
Another re-working from Amigo was
Razzia!, a card game version of Reiner Knizia’s Ra.
The game has been re-themed to gangsters instead of Ancient Egypt
(presumably by the other credited designer, Michael Menzel), but
is virtually identical to the original game. Apart from the
different physical components, the only difference is the absence
of ‘disaster’ cards, which players don’t want. This may make it
more acceptable as a family game, but I’d rather play the
original.
Other new games from Amigo
were:
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Bohnaparte by Hanno
Girke and Uwe Rosenberg – a further expansion for Rosenberg’s
classic card game, Bohnanza
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Die Weinhändler by
Claudia Hely & Roman Pelek – a tactical card game of wine
trading, which sounds interesting and
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Saboteur by Frederic
Moyersoen – a card game about Dwarves digging tunnels and
hunting for gold.
Click here for the next page of my Spiel '04 report
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