Opinionated Gamers 2024 Essen SPIEL Quick Takes
We’ve started a tradition of writing a group document with very short takes on the games that we play. Of course, you’ll not get as much info as in a full review, but as our reviews likely won’t start for awhile, you can at least get a glimpse into what we think about certain games. The OG writers can leave their initials at the end of a comment if they want attribution…
We’ll post this to the blog every few weeks to give some thoughts on each game. I’ll sort them alphabetically and likely start at a random letter each time so that games later in the alphabet can be “first” from time to time.
1am Jailbreak – we played this and halfway thru everyone just looked at each other and was like “where’s the game here”?
3 Chapters – so far, one of my favorites from Spiel 2024. We’re playing on German cards, and while there is certainly a bit of text on the cards, they are generally easy to translate, or easy enough to figure out with your phone and Google Translate. This adds a trick taking round to what is otherwise Fantasy Realms. But getting this additional chapter (where you also score the same cards that you have drafted) makes the concept so much better. A sure keeper – DY
Agent DOG – I like the shenanigans of semi-hidden movement and dramatically affecting other players that this new version allows. I think this version is better than the original, even if it does add some complexity.
Arctic – set collection game where you build a single stack of cards (made up of six different animal types) and you score for your single longest consecutive streak of cards for each animal. The card on top of your stack tells you how many cards you draw, how many you play next turn, etc. Maybe lasts a little longer than I want the game to go.
Back Stories – Ugh. The only way to succeed seems to be by stealing things and hurting people. Some will enjoy this game but it’s not for me – which is a shame because I like the card driven storytelling. – MJR
Beutezug – We checked the rules after our first game to make sure we didn’t miss some crucial step. 5 out of 5 dentists agree that we played by the rules as written, and 3 out of 3 gamers agree that it felt like we had missed something.[ This one was a stinker! I agree with the above sentiment that Shel and I thought we had missed something in the rules. – DG ]
Bungu Squad – It’s a kids’ game (tic-tac-toe) with kids’ tools (scissors, gluestick, eraser, tape) and kids’ lessons (sharing is caring). Not a game you should think too hard about and that’s the way it should be enjoyed.
Camargue- Play a tile, you must continue a path and cannot cut off any paths. Score the product of the size of the color blob multiplied by the number of sides your tile touches. Tiles have a fixed orientation so the decision making is pretty easy, you don’t have to rotate the tiles around to see where they go. Having a hand of three tiles tries to make it into a strategy game (opposed to Carc where you simply make the best of what you have), but there might not be enough game here to want that. It was a fine thirty minutes though it didn’t feel like there was much of a game arc.
Camargue – Played this with 2 players and it fell completely flat. Few decisions and very random. It felt like tile draws completely determined the outcome, not the decisions one might make. – DG
Castle Combo – Fun little drafting game where you buy cards from the market and add them to a 3×3 grid. Each card has its own scoring criteria, and some offer special actions that happen when you buy/place them. This will be a must buy whenever Pandasaurus gets it here. DY
Charidice – yahtzee of sorts, any dice you don’t use are scored by the next player. Bonus at the end of the game for giving away the most points. It worked fine.
Context – a cooperative game where you use words to try to mark spaces on a 7×7 grid. It is fine, but definitely group dependent. I also think that it may have been done a little better by an obscure Japanese game, the name of which eludes me now. This game is at least in wide circulation and not out of print, so it is at least obtainable.
Dot zombies – another card/tile laying game. One player is a zombie, the rest are survivors. Survivors play a card, continuing all paths. Zombie player plays, still continuing paths, and then flips over all orthogonal neighbors to zombies. There are a few cards with special abilities. Zombie wins if survivors cannot legally play. Survivors win if they can play all their cards. They cannot communicate with each other.
Duck and cover – make a 4×3 grid of numbers, then draw cards from an action deck. If you can see the number drawn, either move it adjacent to any other card or move orthogonally to cover another card. At the end of the round, score points for your visible cards. Do it three times and have the least points. It’s definitely a different direction than Path of Civilization…
Endeavor Deep Sea – Sea conservation is the in thing this year. This is a remake of Endeavor/Endeavor Age of Sail with a more palatable theme(at least to me). I must say they did a nice job of adapting the mechanisms. Getting to the fifth level techs which give end game points seems daunting after one play so I’m up for the challenge. Thumbs up after first play.
Falling – Worker placement and resource conversion without enough new to grab me. There’s an interesting tempo problem for players to solve as the castle crumbles and your workers return to trigger bonuses, though.
Fifty Fifty – Described wittily by another gamer as “1 Nimmt!”. With a weird interrupt action where you can play a card if you’re exactly 50 away. And, thankfully, in case you can’t figure out those numbers, the +/- 50 value is printed right on the card for you. Sheesh.
Fishing – A fabulous game that I have been wanting since Gathering of Friends 2023. It’s a trick taking game where you score points if you win tricks. If you don’t win tricks, you’ll likely be rewarded with new cards from the upgrade deck – all of which are better than the base cards you start with. Such a cool interplay between wanting to win tricks now versus having a bad hand or two to build up the bonus cards. Trying to figure out the timing can be tricky. DY
Flip 7 – Pairs deck with random targeted event cards.
Floresta – Plant your trees and watch out for fires! We liked the modular board of 9 two-sided tiles which add variety going forward. Every round you play a card, either placing one of your trees or a piece of your watchtower. The forest boards all have different scoring and restrictions on placement. The watchtower boards have end-game scoring and often include some benefit. Then you have to fight fires with your fire truck – getting points – and possibly lose points if your trees are threatened. Solid, if a bit fiddly at times. DG
Gift craft – a one round drafting game. Lasts about ten minutes. Pretty simple. Draft resources. Spend them. Score points. It’s fine for the length of time it’s on the table. I will prob play it a few more times, if only to see what the different plushie pets do with their unique special abilities.
In The Ashes – A cross between Gloomhaven & a Fighting Fantasy book… I’m still pretty early in the story but I’m enjoying it. (Wish the “I’d given up on life until this fantastical thing happened” trope wasn’t the starting point, but that quickly fades into the background.)
Kabuki Tricks — Supposedly designed to give players more control, but ends up creating more chaos bc all players have too much control in the moment. Felt like another TT I wasn’t fond of but can’t recall which
Kaki Lima: KL – A game about placemaking in urban environments. This one is based on Kuala Lumpur. The background and production in this self-published title are both marvelous. The gameplay is very bland. It inspired me to buy a book on the subject of Kaki Lima.
Krakel Orakel – Excellent take on a drawing game where you must follow the lines that are already on the sheet followed by a line of full-table cooperative Codenames. The communication needs to be a bit more free, in my opinion, to make it truly fun.
Kronologic: Paris 1920 – one of the (many) logic games that seems to come from France. If you love this sort of thing (Turing Machine, Archaelogic, etc) then you’ll love this too. If you’re meh on the genre, well, it’s more of the same.
Lama cadabra. It’s LAMA but with slightly more rules. Not sure the game wants to be more complicated, but I’m sure there’s an audience for this. (changes?…)
LotR Duel for Middle Earth. Is it the One Game to Rule them All? Well, that might be extreme, but it’s a really good game, and prob the best 2p game i’ve played in awhile. It’s 7W:Duel re-skinned, but the theme integration is amazing, as is the modular/moving scoretrack that has the Hobbits racing to the end with the Nazgul chasing them as well. Amazing how much game they can fit into 30 minutes here.
Magic Maze Tower – It’s not a game. For a very particular crowd, it could be a brain-y experience playing together. For me, it’s a (yawn) solo puzzle.
Magic Number Eleven – A two player football tactics game. It strikes a wonderful balance between simulation and simplicity. It assumes the players are already on the field and when you, the manager, place a card on the field it is like giving a direct instruction. It’s a clever way of distilling soccer.
Mini dinosaur – a racing and betting game from Taiwan. You get a hand of cards that you can’t change the order of. Either play the leftmost card in your hand of dinosaur cards or play a betting card. Go until one of the five dinosaurs has five card played. Then score any played betting cards. Surprisingly good.
Mini Dinosaur – Really enjoyed my one play of this quick distillation of betting/racing games. Biggest surprise so far for me, although I’d like to play again and see some other betting cards to see if they are all as entertaining as the ones I was dealt. – RP
My little first sale – a really cutest price setting game. Was a lot of fun for twenty minutes. Margins are quite small for each sale so you really have to max out your sales. Bonuses for the most of each type of thing sold.
Number chain – kinda like uno. Cards are all 2 digits, your next card must start with the last number of the previous. It is possible to play multiple cards on a turn – two different formats – either play all that match same rule AB -> BC, BD, BE or chain where AB -> BC -> CD -> DE etc.. You can play a bomb if you play a run of three cards (42-43-44 for example).
Orapa Mine – logic game where one player places 5 shapes on a grid and then the other players race to guess the position and color of those blocks. They shoot a beam into the grid, and it bounces around, taking on the color of the things it hits. Unfortunately I think that everyone should have their own set of blocks to work with but the game does not provide those pieces. Or maybe a sheet that gives you more space to write notes. I suppose you could make your own sets. Like psychic pizza, I’m never quite sure how I feel about games where one player has to be the facilitator. Might be best at 2p where each player is both a facilitator and a guesser.
Panda Spin – it’s like Tichu on steroids. Seriously, I’d probably not even think of showing this to someone who isn’t comfortable with shedding games already. You get dealt a hand of cards, all on the easy side. Play a shedding game. As your plays are beaten, take those beaten cards back into your hand, but now flip them over to the stronger side. Yes, there’s more to it than that, but the permutations and strategies available are what make the game.
Pixies – A cute game where you draft cards to fit into a 3×3 array. (That really feels like a theme here in 2024, the 3×3 array). The game works well, but this moves into the keeper category due to the wonderful art design and the diminutive box.
Power Grid: Bremen/Manhattan – Visually very different maps compared to all the previous maps. Both of these maps are single cities, in Bremen you are connecting districts and in Manhattan you are connecting buildings. There are no direct connections as per other maps. In Bremen each district (city) has a single cost and you pay that from any adjacent district. In Manhattan if you connect an adjacent building (city) to your network there is a zero connection cost, otherwise pay 5 Elektro for each one you skip over.
Qwords. Roll dice, get to choose letter from two of them. Write them in a 5×5 grid. Score up to one word per row and column, with a bonus for getting a scoring word in all ten lines. Works just fine, about as much fun as you can expect for filling in twenty five letters in a grid in relative silence.
Rebirth – Soothing like a shoulder massage. It’s just smooth Knizian sailing with a few breaking waves of territorial conflict. There aren’t many games these days that are this chill while also allowing you to remove other player pieces from the board.
Reef Project – Another Sea conservation theme. This was also a thumbs up. There are mission and objective cards and 2 tracks to score. You can build up your crew for resources and to earn points.
Rikka – an intro mahjong game that uses dominoes.. No suits here – just ranks. No pung / kong. Just draw a tile and then decide to discard or score. If you like mahjong it is super simplified. If you wanted to introduce someone to the game, it might be good for that. There is a bit of interesting timing as everyone else can also try to score if they are able with a discarded tile from the table.
Saer – Simple, clever, and tricky area control game played with cards. This is always a booth I try to to hit because even if the game is not a hit, it’s at least interesting.
SAS Rogue Regiment – A playable WW2 “top secret missions against an AI German enemy”… but the rulebook was organized by a grognard with organizational issues. (Various elements of the rules were scattered in different spots – thankfully, there’s an index, but I’m guessing this one will have a decent-sized FAQ pretty quickly.) Also would have been really nice to have a flow chart of the action to keep everything humming along.
Siberian Manhunt – very good 2p cat and mouse hidden movement game. The crashed pilot trying to escape plays a kind of Dead of Winter encounter and gathering game while hiding from the KGB player who has a market of powers on a conveyor belt. The highest tension game I’ve played this year.
Skull Queen – The bidding plank is excellently utilized during play and the special cards highlight and amplify that mechanism in a wonderful way instead of distracting with “ooo, special power over here.”
Spectacular – Chilifox’s main release has everyone puzzling away on their own boards, attempting to place animals (hexes of 4 colors) and food (dice in those 4 colors) in score best. Personal hexes/dice are complemented by small boards of ‘common’ hexes/dice that pass around the table clockwise. Players draft 1 hex or die from their supply and 1 hex ordie from the common board and add them to their boards. Quick and fun (plays up to 6 in 20-30 minutes!). DG
The Glade – Perhaps clever, but my eyes couldn’t read the tiles well enough to form the patterns needed to form “sets.” I’m fairly certain that with some visual practice, I could play better. As it is, I was frustrated more than I had fun.
Trick 100 – The Pechvogel of the year
Unconscious Mind – This is a big heavy Euro. An interesting theme and fantastic imagery on the dream cards which is superficially introduced into the game play. The game play is solid resource management. I’m thinking the first play through you are so concentrated on the mechanisms you don’t have time to admire the cards but maybe on the second play through you can role play the dreams a bit more.
Up or Down? – another game using a deck of single-numbered cards – this time, there’s a clever card drawing mechanism which helps you to build three piles of cards going either up or down (a bit like in The Game). Scoring is based on both the number of cards in a pile and the highest number of cards of the same colour. This feels old school. We played with two and it was fast and enjoyable. It will never be the main course, but it’s a solid filler. -MJR
Up or Down? – There are hints of other games in here, and just as the K&K alchemy works wonders, so too does their lifting of concepts from other titles. I haven’t formed a complete opinion but one thing is certain: I want to play this one more. Much more.
Very bad lands trex – get a single card, decide to keep or swap it, see who has the worst one. About half of the cards (numbered 1 to 12) have special abilities. Someone dies each round, the game ends when someone loses 3 lives and goes extinct. Everyone else wins.
Wilmot’s Warehouse – a game that when described sounds like it will never work and wouldn’t be any fun, but in actuality, it is one of the more compelling games I’ve played this year – I’m probably at a dozen plays now? In short, pick a random tile on it, they all have pictures/icons on them. Place it somewhere in a 7×7 grid. Tell a story to help you remember where it is placed (likely using nearby items), then flip the tile over for the rest of the game. Do this for about 35 tiles. Then try to identify each and every tile at the end and see how fast you can do it. So, really, is that a game you want to play, and does it sound fun? Don’t listen to your inner voice and just try this da*n game. You’ll likely love it, just like I do. [- I played a pre-production copy of this in April and was really dubious – and then was utterly sold! Such a fun game. We loved the storytelling element. -MJR]
Yahxa. Draft 3 cubes. Build a pyramid. Look down and score points for largest contiguous blob for each of five colors. Also three bonus cards. Hey did I mention it’s quick
Zero to hero – a TT game which uses wooden tiles instead of cards, a Scan deck. You can’t read the scoring chips which is an issue. There were fixes for scoring tiles but they don’t seem to be analogous to the bad ones that we replaced. Nothing quite sure what the distribution of them was supposed to be. It’s fine for a TT game, but I’d really prefer cards.
We’ll be back in a few weeks with more quick takes, and as always, we’ll continue reviewing the new releases!
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Opinionated Gamers 2024 Essen SPIEL Quick Takes – Part 1 (28 Oct 2024)
Opinionated Gamers 2024 Essen SPIEL Quick Takes
We’ve started a tradition of writing a group document with very short takes on the games that we play. Of course, you’ll not get as much info as in a full review, but as our reviews likely won’t start for awhile, you can at least get a glimpse into what we think about certain games. The OG writers can leave their initials at the end of a comment if they want attribution…
We’ll post this to the blog every few weeks to give some thoughts on each game. I’ll sort them alphabetically and likely start at a random letter each time so that games later in the alphabet can be “first” from time to time.
1am Jailbreak – we played this and halfway thru everyone just looked at each other and was like “where’s the game here”?
3 Chapters – so far, one of my favorites from Spiel 2024. We’re playing on German cards, and while there is certainly a bit of text on the cards, they are generally easy to translate, or easy enough to figure out with your phone and Google Translate. This adds a trick taking round to what is otherwise Fantasy Realms. But getting this additional chapter (where you also score the same cards that you have drafted) makes the concept so much better. A sure keeper – DY
Agent DOG – I like the shenanigans of semi-hidden movement and dramatically affecting other players that this new version allows. I think this version is better than the original, even if it does add some complexity.
Arctic – set collection game where you build a single stack of cards (made up of six different animal types) and you score for your single longest consecutive streak of cards for each animal. The card on top of your stack tells you how many cards you draw, how many you play next turn, etc. Maybe lasts a little longer than I want the game to go.
Back Stories – Ugh. The only way to succeed seems to be by stealing things and hurting people. Some will enjoy this game but it’s not for me – which is a shame because I like the card driven storytelling. – MJR
Beutezug – We checked the rules after our first game to make sure we didn’t miss some crucial step. 5 out of 5 dentists agree that we played by the rules as written, and 3 out of 3 gamers agree that it felt like we had missed something.[ This one was a stinker! I agree with the above sentiment that Shel and I thought we had missed something in the rules. – DG ]
Bungu Squad – It’s a kids’ game (tic-tac-toe) with kids’ tools (scissors, gluestick, eraser, tape) and kids’ lessons (sharing is caring). Not a game you should think too hard about and that’s the way it should be enjoyed.
Camargue- Play a tile, you must continue a path and cannot cut off any paths. Score the product of the size of the color blob multiplied by the number of sides your tile touches. Tiles have a fixed orientation so the decision making is pretty easy, you don’t have to rotate the tiles around to see where they go. Having a hand of three tiles tries to make it into a strategy game (opposed to Carc where you simply make the best of what you have), but there might not be enough game here to want that. It was a fine thirty minutes though it didn’t feel like there was much of a game arc.
Camargue – Played this with 2 players and it fell completely flat. Few decisions and very random. It felt like tile draws completely determined the outcome, not the decisions one might make. – DG
Castle Combo – Fun little drafting game where you buy cards from the market and add them to a 3×3 grid. Each card has its own scoring criteria, and some offer special actions that happen when you buy/place them. This will be a must buy whenever Pandasaurus gets it here. DY
Charidice – yahtzee of sorts, any dice you don’t use are scored by the next player. Bonus at the end of the game for giving away the most points. It worked fine.
Context – a cooperative game where you use words to try to mark spaces on a 7×7 grid. It is fine, but definitely group dependent. I also think that it may have been done a little better by an obscure Japanese game, the name of which eludes me now. This game is at least in wide circulation and not out of print, so it is at least obtainable.
Dot zombies – another card/tile laying game. One player is a zombie, the rest are survivors. Survivors play a card, continuing all paths. Zombie player plays, still continuing paths, and then flips over all orthogonal neighbors to zombies. There are a few cards with special abilities. Zombie wins if survivors cannot legally play. Survivors win if they can play all their cards. They cannot communicate with each other.
Duck and cover – make a 4×3 grid of numbers, then draw cards from an action deck. If you can see the number drawn, either move it adjacent to any other card or move orthogonally to cover another card. At the end of the round, score points for your visible cards. Do it three times and have the least points. It’s definitely a different direction than Path of Civilization…
Endeavor Deep Sea – Sea conservation is the in thing this year. This is a remake of Endeavor/Endeavor Age of Sail with a more palatable theme(at least to me). I must say they did a nice job of adapting the mechanisms. Getting to the fifth level techs which give end game points seems daunting after one play so I’m up for the challenge. Thumbs up after first play.
Falling – Worker placement and resource conversion without enough new to grab me. There’s an interesting tempo problem for players to solve as the castle crumbles and your workers return to trigger bonuses, though.
Fifty Fifty – Described wittily by another gamer as “1 Nimmt!”. With a weird interrupt action where you can play a card if you’re exactly 50 away. And, thankfully, in case you can’t figure out those numbers, the +/- 50 value is printed right on the card for you. Sheesh.
Fishing – A fabulous game that I have been wanting since Gathering of Friends 2023. It’s a trick taking game where you score points if you win tricks. If you don’t win tricks, you’ll likely be rewarded with new cards from the upgrade deck – all of which are better than the base cards you start with. Such a cool interplay between wanting to win tricks now versus having a bad hand or two to build up the bonus cards. Trying to figure out the timing can be tricky. DY
Flip 7 – Pairs deck with random targeted event cards.
Floresta – Plant your trees and watch out for fires! We liked the modular board of 9 two-sided tiles which add variety going forward. Every round you play a card, either placing one of your trees or a piece of your watchtower. The forest boards all have different scoring and restrictions on placement. The watchtower boards have end-game scoring and often include some benefit. Then you have to fight fires with your fire truck – getting points – and possibly lose points if your trees are threatened. Solid, if a bit fiddly at times. DG
Gift craft – a one round drafting game. Lasts about ten minutes. Pretty simple. Draft resources. Spend them. Score points. It’s fine for the length of time it’s on the table. I will prob play it a few more times, if only to see what the different plushie pets do with their unique special abilities.
In The Ashes – A cross between Gloomhaven & a Fighting Fantasy book… I’m still pretty early in the story but I’m enjoying it. (Wish the “I’d given up on life until this fantastical thing happened” trope wasn’t the starting point, but that quickly fades into the background.)
Kabuki Tricks — Supposedly designed to give players more control, but ends up creating more chaos bc all players have too much control in the moment. Felt like another TT I wasn’t fond of but can’t recall which
Kaki Lima: KL – A game about placemaking in urban environments. This one is based on Kuala Lumpur. The background and production in this self-published title are both marvelous. The gameplay is very bland. It inspired me to buy a book on the subject of Kaki Lima.
Krakel Orakel – Excellent take on a drawing game where you must follow the lines that are already on the sheet followed by a line of full-table cooperative Codenames. The communication needs to be a bit more free, in my opinion, to make it truly fun.
Kronologic: Paris 1920 – one of the (many) logic games that seems to come from France. If you love this sort of thing (Turing Machine, Archaelogic, etc) then you’ll love this too. If you’re meh on the genre, well, it’s more of the same.
Lama cadabra. It’s LAMA but with slightly more rules. Not sure the game wants to be more complicated, but I’m sure there’s an audience for this. (changes?…)
LotR Duel for Middle Earth. Is it the One Game to Rule them All? Well, that might be extreme, but it’s a really good game, and prob the best 2p game i’ve played in awhile. It’s 7W:Duel re-skinned, but the theme integration is amazing, as is the modular/moving scoretrack that has the Hobbits racing to the end with the Nazgul chasing them as well. Amazing how much game they can fit into 30 minutes here.
Magic Maze Tower – It’s not a game. For a very particular crowd, it could be a brain-y experience playing together. For me, it’s a (yawn) solo puzzle.
Magic Number Eleven – A two player football tactics game. It strikes a wonderful balance between simulation and simplicity. It assumes the players are already on the field and when you, the manager, place a card on the field it is like giving a direct instruction. It’s a clever way of distilling soccer.
Mini dinosaur – a racing and betting game from Taiwan. You get a hand of cards that you can’t change the order of. Either play the leftmost card in your hand of dinosaur cards or play a betting card. Go until one of the five dinosaurs has five card played. Then score any played betting cards. Surprisingly good.
Mini Dinosaur – Really enjoyed my one play of this quick distillation of betting/racing games. Biggest surprise so far for me, although I’d like to play again and see some other betting cards to see if they are all as entertaining as the ones I was dealt. – RP
My little first sale – a really cutest price setting game. Was a lot of fun for twenty minutes. Margins are quite small for each sale so you really have to max out your sales. Bonuses for the most of each type of thing sold.
Number chain – kinda like uno. Cards are all 2 digits, your next card must start with the last number of the previous. It is possible to play multiple cards on a turn – two different formats – either play all that match same rule AB -> BC, BD, BE or chain where AB -> BC -> CD -> DE etc.. You can play a bomb if you play a run of three cards (42-43-44 for example).
Orapa Mine – logic game where one player places 5 shapes on a grid and then the other players race to guess the position and color of those blocks. They shoot a beam into the grid, and it bounces around, taking on the color of the things it hits. Unfortunately I think that everyone should have their own set of blocks to work with but the game does not provide those pieces. Or maybe a sheet that gives you more space to write notes. I suppose you could make your own sets. Like psychic pizza, I’m never quite sure how I feel about games where one player has to be the facilitator. Might be best at 2p where each player is both a facilitator and a guesser.
Panda Spin – it’s like Tichu on steroids. Seriously, I’d probably not even think of showing this to someone who isn’t comfortable with shedding games already. You get dealt a hand of cards, all on the easy side. Play a shedding game. As your plays are beaten, take those beaten cards back into your hand, but now flip them over to the stronger side. Yes, there’s more to it than that, but the permutations and strategies available are what make the game.
Pixies – A cute game where you draft cards to fit into a 3×3 array. (That really feels like a theme here in 2024, the 3×3 array). The game works well, but this moves into the keeper category due to the wonderful art design and the diminutive box.
Power Grid: Bremen/Manhattan – Visually very different maps compared to all the previous maps. Both of these maps are single cities, in Bremen you are connecting districts and in Manhattan you are connecting buildings. There are no direct connections as per other maps. In Bremen each district (city) has a single cost and you pay that from any adjacent district. In Manhattan if you connect an adjacent building (city) to your network there is a zero connection cost, otherwise pay 5 Elektro for each one you skip over.
Qwords. Roll dice, get to choose letter from two of them. Write them in a 5×5 grid. Score up to one word per row and column, with a bonus for getting a scoring word in all ten lines. Works just fine, about as much fun as you can expect for filling in twenty five letters in a grid in relative silence.
Rebirth – Soothing like a shoulder massage. It’s just smooth Knizian sailing with a few breaking waves of territorial conflict. There aren’t many games these days that are this chill while also allowing you to remove other player pieces from the board.
Reef Project – Another Sea conservation theme. This was also a thumbs up. There are mission and objective cards and 2 tracks to score. You can build up your crew for resources and to earn points.
Rikka – an intro mahjong game that uses dominoes.. No suits here – just ranks. No pung / kong. Just draw a tile and then decide to discard or score. If you like mahjong it is super simplified. If you wanted to introduce someone to the game, it might be good for that. There is a bit of interesting timing as everyone else can also try to score if they are able with a discarded tile from the table.
Saer – Simple, clever, and tricky area control game played with cards. This is always a booth I try to to hit because even if the game is not a hit, it’s at least interesting.
SAS Rogue Regiment – A playable WW2 “top secret missions against an AI German enemy”… but the rulebook was organized by a grognard with organizational issues. (Various elements of the rules were scattered in different spots – thankfully, there’s an index, but I’m guessing this one will have a decent-sized FAQ pretty quickly.) Also would have been really nice to have a flow chart of the action to keep everything humming along.
Siberian Manhunt – very good 2p cat and mouse hidden movement game. The crashed pilot trying to escape plays a kind of Dead of Winter encounter and gathering game while hiding from the KGB player who has a market of powers on a conveyor belt. The highest tension game I’ve played this year.
Skull Queen – The bidding plank is excellently utilized during play and the special cards highlight and amplify that mechanism in a wonderful way instead of distracting with “ooo, special power over here.”
Spectacular – Chilifox’s main release has everyone puzzling away on their own boards, attempting to place animals (hexes of 4 colors) and food (dice in those 4 colors) in score best. Personal hexes/dice are complemented by small boards of ‘common’ hexes/dice that pass around the table clockwise. Players draft 1 hex or die from their supply and 1 hex ordie from the common board and add them to their boards. Quick and fun (plays up to 6 in 20-30 minutes!). DG
The Glade – Perhaps clever, but my eyes couldn’t read the tiles well enough to form the patterns needed to form “sets.” I’m fairly certain that with some visual practice, I could play better. As it is, I was frustrated more than I had fun.
Trick 100 – The Pechvogel of the year
Unconscious Mind – This is a big heavy Euro. An interesting theme and fantastic imagery on the dream cards which is superficially introduced into the game play. The game play is solid resource management. I’m thinking the first play through you are so concentrated on the mechanisms you don’t have time to admire the cards but maybe on the second play through you can role play the dreams a bit more.
Up or Down? – another game using a deck of single-numbered cards – this time, there’s a clever card drawing mechanism which helps you to build three piles of cards going either up or down (a bit like in The Game). Scoring is based on both the number of cards in a pile and the highest number of cards of the same colour. This feels old school. We played with two and it was fast and enjoyable. It will never be the main course, but it’s a solid filler. -MJR
Up or Down? – There are hints of other games in here, and just as the K&K alchemy works wonders, so too does their lifting of concepts from other titles. I haven’t formed a complete opinion but one thing is certain: I want to play this one more. Much more.
Very bad lands trex – get a single card, decide to keep or swap it, see who has the worst one. About half of the cards (numbered 1 to 12) have special abilities. Someone dies each round, the game ends when someone loses 3 lives and goes extinct. Everyone else wins.
Wilmot’s Warehouse – a game that when described sounds like it will never work and wouldn’t be any fun, but in actuality, it is one of the more compelling games I’ve played this year – I’m probably at a dozen plays now? In short, pick a random tile on it, they all have pictures/icons on them. Place it somewhere in a 7×7 grid. Tell a story to help you remember where it is placed (likely using nearby items), then flip the tile over for the rest of the game. Do this for about 35 tiles. Then try to identify each and every tile at the end and see how fast you can do it. So, really, is that a game you want to play, and does it sound fun? Don’t listen to your inner voice and just try this da*n game. You’ll likely love it, just like I do. [- I played a pre-production copy of this in April and was really dubious – and then was utterly sold! Such a fun game. We loved the storytelling element. -MJR]
Yahxa. Draft 3 cubes. Build a pyramid. Look down and score points for largest contiguous blob for each of five colors. Also three bonus cards. Hey did I mention it’s quick
Zero to hero – a TT game which uses wooden tiles instead of cards, a Scan deck. You can’t read the scoring chips which is an issue. There were fixes for scoring tiles but they don’t seem to be analogous to the bad ones that we replaced. Nothing quite sure what the distribution of them was supposed to be. It’s fine for a TT game, but I’d really prefer cards.
We’ll be back in a few weeks with more quick takes, and as always, we’ll continue reviewing the new releases!
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About Dale Yu
Dale Yu is the Editor of the Opinionated Gamers. He can occasionally be found working as a volunteer administrator for BoardGameGeek, and he previously wrote for BoardGame News.