Essen 09 – First Thoughts

I am just back from the Internationale Spieltage 09 in Essen. The phrase of the weekend has been, quite simply, “so many games”. When I get time, I’m going to add full reviews (as far as I can recall) of all the games, as well as my experiences on the convention itself, but here I’m just going to jot down some initial thoughts. Particular highlights for me were Comuni (a 2008 game), Dominion: Seaside and the presence of the English version of Agricola: Farmers of the Moor from Z-Man games.

Read on for a list of all the games I’ve played over the weekend, and a couple of words on them.

All in all, Essen has been an amazing experience, topped off with some excellent dunkel in the Rüttenscheider Hausbrauerei, and I’m already looking forward to 2010.

Thursday

Steam, Tzaar, Yinsh, Titanic, Batt’l Kha’os, Krysis, At the Gates of Loyang

Steam is excellent fun, with more to it than most train-based games I’ve played, Interestingly, we only played the basic version, so look forward to playing the standard rules.

I’m not, in general, a fan of the more abstract games; I like a theme and good tie-in. Tzaar and Yinsh, then were possibly not my first choices to play, but I found them reasonably fun. Yinsh is effectively an evolution of reversi/othello, using 3 axes of movement instead of 2, and a slightly different laying/winning mechanism. It was nice. Tzaar, which was this year’s offering from the GIPF project starts by laying out discs on an isometric grid. Each player (black and white) has 3 types of piece. The object of the game is to remove all of 1 type of the opposition’s pieces, or prevent them from being able to move. You can “upgrade” pieces by stacking them, but this will obviously remove a piece of one your types. I won both games I played quite quickly, which I don’t think would happen again now my partner knows my tactic; which was to target the piece type with the lowest number of discs. Fairly quick to play, and reasonably interesting… for an abstract game .

Titanic is less a board game, and more of a logic puzzle, but has kept us amused for a good while .

Batt’l Kha’os is a very interesting tile-laying game, but at €20 was too steep for me. This is a shame, I’m going to keep an eye out for this one at a lower price.

Krysis I liked, and would like to play more of. The plastic gems are nice pieces, and the artwork is very cool. It also plays quite quickly, but retains enough depth to keep it interesting.

I also picked up a copy of Loyang on Thursday, which we played a couple of hands of during the evenings. It’s a lot lighter than Agricola or Le Havre, and I’m a fan of the huge complex game style those games embody. Loyang is still a very good game however, though it lacks somewhat in player interaction in the 4-player game. I also feel the granularity of the scoring isn’t fine enough, though this may just be because I haven’t played enough rounds to know how much money above a point on the scoring track is a “good” score. All in all, still a very good game and well worth getting.

Friday

Rise of Empires, Dominion: Seaside, Priests of Ra, CirKis

At first glance, Rise of Empires looks like a risk-style game, with obviously more depth. As the game wore on, however, it became clear that there is very little need for warring between players (though you can go down that route if you wish). There’s a lot going on in this game, and as soon as we were done, I could see so many ways to improve/refine my game. I hope to play this one again sometime.

One of my main criticisms of the excellent Dominion is that I don’t feel it’s very closely tied into its theme. I’m big on themes, and it’s always been a bit of a let-down. The added player interaction in Dominion: Intrigue seems, from the few hands I’ve played, to improve the base game but not really contribute much to tie it down to the theme. For me, Dominon: Seaside addresses this issue far better. You can really feel like you’re being a pirate when playing the Pirate Ship cards. Looking forward to many more hands of this, now I have bought it. This game must have been one of the most-played at Essen – I saw it at at least 4 separate stands.

Priests of Ra was fun, but I can’t see as it differs too greatly from the original to be honest.

CirKis was… fine, didn’t really float anyone’s boat in our group.

Saturday

Factory Manager, Havana, Samurai: The Card Game, Tobago, Rotterdam: Masters of Trade

It took us 3 attempts to complete a game of Factory Manager, and that doesn’t count trying to find a spare table. This one generated a lot of buzz, and it seems justified. Very good fun, and not too long once you know the mechanics. Not sure as to how many available strategies there are, but that will only become clear with time. I agonised over whether or not to pick up a copy, but as a friend did, I’ll just play his copy. Theme works very well.

Havana is a card game in the Cuba world. We only played 1 hand, which was reasonably quick, ~30 minutes. Good fun, but a bit steep at the €25 Rio Grande were charging. I’ve still not played Cuba, so I don’t know how it compares.

I have not played Samurai, so I can’t really compare, but we tried a hand of Samurai: The Card Game at the Rio Grande stall, and really enjoyed it. It’s a card game, as opposed to the tile-laying original, but from reading up, it seems they are very similar. Obviously there are only 4 edges to the cards, compared to the 6-edged tiles, and there are no ways to alter the layed cards once played. An interesting scoring mechanism, and at 30-45 minutes a good short game.

I have to admit, Tobago has taken me a bit by surprise. Initially, we played a round because the board looked cool. Once I’d read the rules though, it looked pretty simplistic, although the theme tie-in is excellent. The other 3 in my group really enjoyed it, however, and having played again, I’m starting to see the attraction. The idea is to “search” for treasure by laying “clue” cards which narrow down the possible hexagons on the board until only one remains. This is then where the treasure is. There are multiple treasures available, so it’s not a first-to-the-treasure wins scenario. We bought a copy and will be playing this one some more.

Masters of Trade was a “oh there’s a spare table” find. We didn’t even realise initially that we were playing the expansion. I probably enjoyed this one more than the rest of the group; the theme tie-in is very good, and there’s more to the game than we played through in our single game. Not sure if there’s enough for me to buy it though.

Sunday

Comuni, Wings of War, Opera, Last Train to Wensleydale

Comuni was an excellent surprise. We headed over to play Ad Astra, but all the tables were full, so we sat down at a Comuni table instead. I’m glad we did. Although this was a game from 2008, it was still being pitched this year. You build up your city in 4 different categories (defense, architecture, religion and treasury), and then use this city to generate income. 4 times during the game, Italy is attacked. You can either commit your troops to Italy, or to your own city. It requires faith in your other players, but by committing to Italy, the sum of all the players’ troops sent to defend the country are used to repel the attack. It’s an interesting mechanic, and all 4 of us were very impressed with this game.

Wings of War… fine, good for a laugh to fill half hour, wouldn’t buy it.

Opera was one of the busiest games at the fair, and nigh-on impossible to find a table for. We managed to book in at the author’s stand for a 3-round (of the 9 in the game) intro. The game is centered around buying opera houses in various cities and getting operas to play there. There’s a market mechanic to buy unrated composers and make them more famous. The theme tie-in is excellent, and it was a shame we only got 3 rounds in – especially as I didn’t fully understand the player-order bidding in the first round. One of our group bought a (signed) copy, and I hope to get a full game in soon.

Last Train to Wensleydale is a new train game from Martin Wallace, the author of Steam. This was our final game on the Sunday, and was not set up at all. There was also no-one available to explain it to us and the set was missing various pieces (which we took from the other copy on the stand). This probably tainted our view, but the setup for this game is pretty involved and takes quite a while. It also results in a very messy board. Once we’d played through a single round, we’d picked up the mechanic well enough. Seems interesting, but not a classic, but by this point we’d had 4 solid days of gaming and it wasn’t the optimum way in which to test the game. Maybe one to try again sometime, but with so many more obviously awesome games available, I wont be rushing back to this one.