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Andrea Ligabue
Italy
Modena
Italy
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While most of my writing on BGG News has been game previews, this post is my first periodical round-up of what's happening in Italy. In such posts, I'll mostly focus on things that could be interesting for all BGG users (i.e., previews, interviews, new releases), but sometimes I'll include news about the Italian localization of games or gaming events in Italy.
Ares Games: Micro Monsters
The first family game from Ares Games arrives in stores starting April 30th: Micro Monsters from Francesco Nepitello and Marco Maggi, a funny dexterity game that's a revised edition of the old great X-Bugs! Here's a game summary:
Quote: Four armies of alien micro-monstrosities clash in a challenge to the last jump, fighting to close their rival monsters’ dimensional gates in an exciting contest of strategy and dexterity.
Micro Monsters presents four armies of horribly cute little aliens, each of them with special powers: the green, reptile-like wheeled Autogators; the bossy, brass-bolted Bigbears; the fuzzy, free-floating Finbacks; and toxic, tremor-triggering Turboturtles. A match between two players can be played under fifteen minutes, while three or four players’ games last no more than half an hour on average.
Albe Pavo: from Sake & Samurai to Beer & Vikings
After the success of Sake & Samurai and an expansion released during PLAY: The Games Festival, Albe Pavo's next release will be Beer & Vikings, a standalone game that will also be fully compatible with Sake & Samurai. Here's extra info about the new release that I was able to get from Matteo Santus, the game's designer.
1. As in real life, the effect of beer will differ from the effect of sake.
2. Vikings, as you might expect, will not be able to use iado but will become berserker with different effects.
3. The game will include funny Valhalla cards, a new add-on that could also be integrated with S&S. The cards will include Unloved Valkyrie, The Ticket for Valhalla, Fenrir's Fur, and the Drakkar in flames, something that shouldn't be missed from any Vikings' story.
4. The game will include new weapons, such as a battle axe that can also be thrown.
5. Moving will include the rules for charging, something Vikings are used to.
6. All the cards will differ from those in Sake & Samurai, both in theme and in effects.
7. Vikings will have new abilities.
All in all, this might be enough to consider Beer & Vikings a new game.
Albe Pavo: Winter Tales
I have an early version of the rules for Winter Tales in hand: 37 pages for the Italian version. The game genre is along the lines of Fabula, mixing boardgame elements with storytelling elements. The first six pages describe the setting and the character backgrounds, helping to set the right mood.
The players will be divided in factions: Spring (Fairy Tales), Winter (Soldiers of Autumn), and the Writer. Spring and Winter will fight along three Memories, and the Writer wins if the conflict ends with no winners or losers. Each player will control 2-4 of the 14 characters depending on the number of players. Each character – including Alice, Pinocchio, and Snow White (in a new dress you're not used to seeing) – has a deep background and special abilities. The game board displays the village with its plazas and streets, and locations have different effects on the game.
Missions are displayed on the game board, with players trying to use "narration cards" to resolve these missions. The rules about how cards are used, how missions are resolved, and how resolved missions are used to create Memories that influence the continuation of the game look really fine and seem to mix well both storytelling and "regular" gaming.
When the game is close to being finished, I'll be back with a full preview.
Cranio Creations: Sheepland
Cranio Creation has announced its July 2012 release: Sheepland by Simone Luciani and Daniele Tascini for 2-4 players.
After going through the rules, I think Sheepland looks like a nice easy-to-learn game. During your turn, you can do three actions choosing between moving the shepherd, moving a sheep, or buying a terrain tile. Moving the shepherd to an adjacent space is free, while moving elsewhere costs money. You also have to place a fence in the space you move from, and since you can't enter a terrain already occupied by a fence, you have to think carefully about when and where to move.
You can move a sheep from a space adjacent to your shepherd to another space adjacent to him.
You can buy a terrain tile of one of the terrain type adjacent to you.
In the end, you'll score points according to the terrain tiles you have and the number of sheep occupying this kind of terrain. A black sheep worth two points moves randomly during the game.
The game looks intriguing. If I'm able to grab a preview copy, I'll be back with a more detailed preview.
Ghenos Games: Wild
Ghenos Games has just published Wild Oltrenatura, a game based on the television series of the same name, and like that series, game play is based on extreme environments like Kenya's savanna, Namibia's desert, Colombia's jungle, and Alaska's forests and ice.
The object of the game is to meet as many animals as possible and, of course, to survive in the different extreme environments. Wild Oltrenatura, which includes rules in both Italian and English, looks like a family game, with the game being recommended for 2-4 players, ages 8 and up.
During your turn, you have to decide whether to move 1-3 spaces (consuming water and energy) to receive an animal card or special natural resource benefits, feed (discard an animal card to get energy back), or rest (to recover one energy, water or health). Players can challenge opponents to take over their animal cards, and the game ends as soon as one player has explored all four environments.
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• Michael Schacht's Africana – released in Germany from ABACUSSPIELE in early 2012 and due in the U.S. from Z-Man Games in May – is now available for play online at Schacht's own Boardgames-online.net. Notes Schacht when announcing this release, "In this most complex implementation so far, the focus is on a good interface."
• Schacht has also released an online solo version of his 2012 Ravensburger release 5 vor 12 as Lucky Numbers Extra, with the puzzles requiring an increasing number of moves as the player progresses.
• The eighth annual game designers' meeting at the Swiss Museum of Games takes place May 5-6, 2012. GameWorks' Sébastien Pauchon, one of the hosts of the event, describes the special Saturday afternoon presentation as follows:
Quote: Didier Bonvin, multimedia journalist, and Manuel Rozoy, game designer at Ubisoft France and former editor-in-chief of the late JsP magazine will talk about "Video games / board games: a strange love affair". Didier will tell us about the various attemps of video games to get closer to board games through the last three decades, while Manuel will tell us about similarities and divergences between designing video games and board games.
Check out this online flier for more details about the event.
• Technology in action! If you want to purchase a specific game, particularly an out-of-print title, you might want to look at the BGG Auction Aggregator, which compares the wishlist on your BGG account against an aggregated list of games being auctioned on BGG.
• I've received the following open letter from a PR agent and present it unedited, aside from added links and minor punctuation and formatting changes.
Quote: The Connect-4 Conundrum By Jeanne and Michael Strongin, April 27, 2012 We are Ned Strongin's children, writing in response to a series of articles and interviews in which Howard Wexler has been taking all of the credit for creating the Connect-4 game. From our observation, Howard's self-promotion seems to have begun in earnest a few years ago when Ned's health was deteriorating and has continued more aggressively after Ned's death last year shortly before his 92nd birthday. We can't sit quietly and see these claims made without challenging them any longer. Though our perspective is very different from Howard's, we believe it is factually accurate based on existing documentation, discussions with our dad from the time Connect-4 was licensed until his death, and our own personal observations. We feel it's our responsibility to set the record straight since Ned isn't around to speak for himself. In the early 1970s, Ned Strongin, an established independent toy designer, formed a company with Howard Wexler called "Strongin & Wexler Corp.", owned equally by him and Howard. Ned was a street smart, informal, self-made businessman who had not graduated high school and had pretty much always been his own boss. Howard was a formally educated Ph.D. who insisted on being addressed as "Dr. Wexler" and who came to the partnership with a large corporate mindset after having worked at Hasbro for several years. Because Ned had reservations about having a partner (particularly one with such a different background and business style), he kept his already existing company, Ned Strongin Associates, together with its existing toy designs, office lease and employee artists, designers and model makers, separate from the newly formed Strongin & Wexler Corp. Their partnership was short lived and would have been considered a failure except for one thing: it produced Connect-4. Strongin & Wexler Corp. licensed Connect-4 to Milton Bradley (which was later acquired by Hasbro) in 1973. Ned and Howard dissolved Strongin & Wexler Corp. shortly thereafter. To this day: (a) Connect-4 continues to be owned equally by Ned Strongin Creative Services (the successor in interest to Ned Strongin Associates) and Howard; (b) Hasbro continues to manufacture and sell the original version of Connect-4, expanding upon and updating it with a variety of spin-off versions, thereby maintaining its uniqueness and relevance; and (c) royalties from such sales continue to be shared equally between Ned Strongin Creative Services and Howard. These are undisputed facts. Ned always acknowledged that the initial idea for Connect-4 was Howard's, but told us that Howard presented Connect-4 to him as a horizontal game, like checkers, to which he said "the world doesn't need another board game, let's make it vertical" – and really isn't that the underlying uniqueness of Connect-4? Ned's design process was collaborative in nature. The centerpiece of Ned's office was a big white round table, where Ned and his artists, designers and model makers would present and discuss ideas. Some of these ideas came from him, some from one or more of his employees and some from one of the many independent designers who came to him with unfinished ideas who didn't have the expertise or wherewithal to complete them and bring them to market. By the end of a discussion the resulting product was often a true collaborative effort. Connect-4 was redesigned and developed by Ned and Howard via this collaborative process until a final design was agreed upon, artwork was produced, a model was made and Connect-4 was presented and licensed to Milton Bradley. Ned was active in the toy business through the late 1990s, including all discussions and negotiations with Hasbro regarding a variety of Connect-4 issues that arose over the years. During that time he was responsible for the design of many other successful toy products through that same collaborative process. If our dad were alive today, he'd get a chuckle out of Howard's Connect-4 claims. He'd tell us to leave it be, the truth is the truth, anyone old enough to care already knows the truth and the 50/50 ownership and royalty split speak for themselves. Nevertheless, we believe Ned Strongin's contributions to Connect-4 should be acknowledged and hope this letter promotes that in some way.
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• Toy Vault has announced that Richard Borg's Abaddon has a U.S. street date of April 30, 2012. The English rules can now be downloaded from this page on BGG.
• Designer Klaus Teuber will "launch a series of articles with insights and background story from an upcoming 4th quarter product", according to U.S. publisher Mayfair Games.
• Designer Stephen Tavener's Crosshairs has been released by Spanish publisher nestorgames. Here's a short description of what seems to be an equally short game:
Quote: Crosshairs is a combinatorial game with a strong WW1 aerial combat theme. Players each have a squadron of planes and move all of their planes each turn. Movement consists of either a climb (increasing the height of the piece) or a dive (losing height to make a sequence of moves). Pieces are captured when they are in the line of fire of two or more enemy planes. Clouds block line of fire and provide strategic cover during play.
If a player is reduced to having only one game, he's shot from the sky (i.e., is eliminated from the game). A player wins when he reduces the only remaining opponent to only one plane. Games are brutal, fast, and fun.
• At Spiel 2012, Belgian publisher Flatlined Games will release a new game from designer Philippe Keyaerts (Vinci, Evo, Small World, Olympos), a game in which players program two robots to harvest gems and bring them back to their bases. Robots don't fight, but they can push one another, steal gems, and use an expense account to order drinks for themselves. Okay, maybe not this last thing.
While the game's design is complete, the game itself lacks a name. Says Flatlined's Eric Hanuise, "We have a few ideas, but I'm sure you have lots of ideas, so we're calling for help. This is not a contest, but we will, of course, find a nice way to thank the best entries. If you think you have a great name for this game, let us know! You can submit your name on this form."
• Dutch publisher White Goblin Games has changed the title of José Antonio Rivero's Congo: Expedition to Africa 1884 to Expedition: Congo River 1884 following the development of a second game design set in Asia that uses similar mechanisms. As Rivero stated in a press release, "We were looking for a way to connect the two games with each other. In the end, what these two games have in common is the adventurous need to go on an expedition in, what is for western travelers, exotic territories. It was an obvious choice for us to connect the games in the title, just like there's Tikal and Tikal II. With the subtitle, we'll make clear where in the world the expedition takes place in each game." Expedition: Congo River 1884 is scheduled to debut at Spiel 2012 in October.
• Warning, somewhat self-promotional item: According to BGG ad guy Chad Krizan, BoardGameGeek is going to sponsor one or two counter sheets for Ogre: Designer's Edition, the mega-giant release from Steve Jackson Games that is currently running up its "most funded board game" status on Kickstarter like Chamberlain running over the Philadelphia Warriors New York Knicks. Players are offering suggestions for what they'd like to see on these sheets, with ye olde flat Ogre counters being a crowd favorite, and these sheets will eventually be sold on the BGG store.
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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In my role as editor of BGG News, I run across many, many new games that are not in the BGG database. As an obsessive completist, this makes me sad. While I add some of these games to the database – typically when I'm writing a news item that references them – I'm unable to keep up with the flow of new games, especially when information about the games isn't in English. I can handle French and German to some degree, and Google Translate is an awesome pal to have at your side, but still – the games, the games! They keep coming!!
Thus, I've created a Geeklist in which I plan to dump basic info about games that I run across in one manner or another, with the hope (oh, please please please) that someone will want to follow up on the bare bones info to find out enough about a game to submit it. The Geeklist in question: Add These Games to the BGG Database!
In addition to games that need individual pages, I'll post other projects that enterprising BGGers might want to take on.
I've previously tried to outsource such work on a separate BGG blog – Not Necessarily the News – but I think it makes more sense to post such information in a Geeklist format as I can add new titles more easily, follow comments from others, remove titles that have been processed, and otherwise keep it up-to-date – or as up-to-date as I can make it given all those blamed games that keep coming out!
Thanks much for any help you choose to provide!
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• Alderac Entertainment Group has started posting previews of the factions in Paul Peterson's Smash Up, highlighting four cards from the pirate faction with four more cards scheduled to debut on Friday, April 27 and the rules becoming available in June, according to AEG's Todd Rowland.
• Designer Tony Boydell passes on word that his Snowdonia – due out Spiel 2012 from Surprised Stare Games Ltd and available for test plays at UK Games Expo in May – will now be published in partnership with Lookout Games in English and German.
• In the second half of 2012, Ravensburger will release SingStar: Das Brettspiel, an adaptation of the SingStar video game series in which players sing existing songs and are scored based on how well they do. Andrea Meyer is credited with the design, which should come as no surprise given her track record with Freeze, Hossa! and multiple Hossa! expansions. She lives to perform!
• Wydawnictwo Portal has posted the cover image of Ignacy Trzewiczek's The Convoy, which "will be published in PL, ENG, DE and FR editions", according to the publisher.
• On Opinionated Gamers, Dale Yu has posted a looong description of Friedemann Friese's Fremde Federn, the next title in Friese's "Friday" project that is currently scheduled for release at Spiel 2012 from his 2F-Spiele.
• Richard Launius' Defenders of the Realm: Battlefields hit Kickstarter the other day and is already more than halfway to the post. Here's a description of the game based on an overview I received at BGG.CON in 2011:
Quote: Defenders of the Realm: Battlefields is set in the world of Richard Launius' Defenders of the Realm, but is a stand-alone, non-cooperative game in which players compete against one another either one-on-one, two-on-one, or two-on-two. One side represents the Dark Lord's invading army, while the other plays the heroes defending the realm.
Fourteen battlefield cards are included in the game, and three are laid out at random over which the sides will compete. Players take turns playing cards onto one of the battlefields in play in order to build up enough strength to claim that battlefield card. (Players hold seven cards with two players, five cards with four, and eight vs. four/four with three.)
Each battlefield card bears a special power that the winner of that card receives as a reward, such as "Remove all cards from one battlefield", "Choose the next battlefield to activate", and "Force the loser to give up one won battle".
The first team to claim any five battlefields or three battlefields of the same color wins.
(KS link)
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Ted Vessenes
United States
Somerville
Massachusetts
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Design on The Phoenix Syndicate started over five years ago on a cross-country car trip from Los Angeles to Boston. My wife Rebecca and I were moving east due to a job I'd just taken, and it turns out that the American southwest is very boring to drive through, so we started talk about games to pass the time. (My comments are in black and Rebecca's are in red.)
Rebecca loves networking games like Ticket to Ride, and I'm a sucker for games with modular boards, so the question came up as to whether it was possible to make a route-building game with a dynamic board. Making each hex tile a different planet and setting the game in space seemed like a natural fit, and that idea never really changed. The obvious mechanical issue to solve is that if you create static objectives – e.g., connect tiles A and B – you might end up with some boards where this objective is ridiculously hard and other boards where it's almost trivial. So some mechanism must be in place that balances the effort-to-reward ratio for these objectives, which became the contract cards in the final version.
We came up with two ways of tackling this problem in the initial design. First, each contract card would list three planets instead of two. This lets the game award different point values for connecting one, two, or three locations in the network, which provides much better granularity than a simple binary test of whether two locations are connected. Second, the contracts would be selected from some kind of a draft board each turn. Whichever contracts were not selected would acquire resources on them as an incentive to take them in the future, such that eventually even the worst of contracts would be worth taking.
We also recognized early that we wanted each planet tile to have links out of it, with each link listing half of the resources required to connect to the adjacent tile. And because all planets need to be reachable and it's possible for a tile's random placement and orientation not to have any links into it where both sides match up, we knew that unmarked edges of each tile would need an implicit high cost.
Last, the game needed some mechanism that gave players resources so they could build these routes. Thematically we liked having planets in your network provide resources so that players might have to decide about building to get better resource acquisition versus building to complete contracts. It seemed obvious to make the collect action provide resources from one planet. Bigger networks then provide more options but not necessarily more resources, which should prevent snowball victory problems. We also made moons give one less resource per opponent present, so that connecting to a remote planet could be a resource benefit in some cases.
And that was the initial game. There were no action cards, no guilds, and no bonus points for completing the most contracts of a given color. Oh, and you started with only one initial planet instead of two, which made initial bootstrapping brutal in a particularly puzzlish way.
A very early prototype of the planet tiles
Rebecca: That was the initial concept for the game, but much of our road trip was spent determining the link costs and production distributions. I had just received my Ph.D. in Algebraic Combinatorics (i.e., the math where you count things) and found this to be a very interesting question. Once you decide how many links you want on a tile (5, 4 or 3) you've implicitly determined a classification of planets (Primes, Colonies, Outposts). We wanted there to be some balance and symmetry in the resource structure without everything being identical.
We started by generating all the unique link configurations for a tile. For instance, there are four different ways to put three links on a hex that are distinct under rotation. I still have our old notebook where we drew out all the configurations and calculations. Having only four Outposts would not work well from a gameplay standpoint, so we put a lot of thought into how many tiles and planets of each type we needed and how to obtain that distribution in a mathematically elegant way. From the start, we intended purple and red to be slightly rarer in the galaxy, but to get the numbers to look pretty we found we needed to make blue a bit more plentiful as well.
As you probably can tell, I found this part of the design interesting. In short, the distribution of planet and moon pairings, link layouts, size, and colors were all chosen with gameplay, color balance, and mathematical elegance in mind. We did something similar with the contracts, although those underwent a few more revisions.
Initial playtests were promising, in that the basic networking mechanism was interesting and the market mechanism really did balance the power level of good contracts versus bad ones. There were some issues, too, of course. The major issue was that there was only one point source: completing a contract. If someone consistently completed her contracts for three points and you fell behind for one turn, it was virtually impossible to catch up. Furthermore, all points information was public, so you had a sinking feeling that the only way you could win was for them to make a mistake. What's more, the game had only one strategy as well: complete all three planets on each of your contracts.
A lesser issue was that turns could be really long and intense. On each player's turn, she acquired resources, then expanded her network, and then had to take a new contract and pay bribes. That's more than double the thought that goes into a current turn, so the entire pacing felt much slower. So on and off for the next five years, all the remaining tweaks were focused on addressing these two issues: the game having only one strategy and turns taking too long.
The first list of planet names that weren't just letters
Early on in testing, we added the idea of awarding a distribution bonus for the most contracts of a certain color (plus another for most colors). Since your final three contracts aren't cashed in until the end of game, everyone's final score is unknown until after the last turn. We also wanted to give players some way of acquiring more contracts while being less able to complete them well, so there would be a strategy based on quantity (bolstered by distribution points) in addition to the standard quality strategy (scoring the maximum points from each contract).
Rebecca: Part of the early reasoning behind distribution bonuses was to reward players who diversified their networks. It also supported what I think of as an Outpost-based strategy. Since the contract color is the color of the Prime, one approach is to get to one Prime, then take contracts only of that color. Since Primes are easy to get to and about a fifth of the contract deck are in each color, this is a relatively easy-to-implement strategy. However, there are only six Outposts, so being at two Outposts means you'll have at least one planet on a third of the contracts across all colors. This means you can potentially earn more points on distribution.
The first idea was to try a scoring system in which completing three planets was worth 3 points, two planets was worth 2 points, and one planet gave you a token you could use to draw another contract later (while keeping the first contract for distribution points). At least there was some semblance of a quality versus quantity strategy, though it still felt bad to cash in contracts for only two of the three planets.
Rebecca: It took us awhile to completely address this issue. Players need to be able to get contracts at different rates so that they can find a strategic balance between doing well with a few contracts and doing the minimum on a large number of contracts. It's the classic quality versus quantity trade-off.
The major breakthrough we had was separating the different parts of the turn onto action cards. On each player's turn, she would choose to collect, build, or contract, then flip that action face down. All three actions refreshed once all three were face down. This helped offload the computation complexity of each player's turn.
However, it still had the same basic problem that players acquired contracts at roughly the same rate as one another. We couldn't make each action available on every turn, or players wouldn't take contract early in the game and would take nothing but contract in the late game. There was also the issue that players need to spend more time acquiring resources than spending them. Since a collect will net a player four or five resources, and even the expansion of a single route costs six resources on average, the game needed more resource acquisition actions.
We needed a wide variety of resource production, so we gradually went from three actions (collect, expand, contract) to six, with every action providing some way of acquiring resources. For example, we gave the expand action an initial acquire and a higher bribe (net +3 resources) instead of no acquire and a bribe of 0 (net +0 resources). The gamble action was added for two reasons. First, it's important players get more than one contract every five actions or so. And second, it adds hidden information to the game, so players can only estimate how many contracts of a color are needed to win distribution points. Without any hidden information, a player with a good memory or a piece of paper can work out exactly how much is needed at the cost of everyone else's time, and that's just no fun.
Rebecca: Splitting the game turn into action cards and adding actions is part of what I think really makes the game work. Gamble went through many revisions, and I like how it now plays. Early in the game I'm often looking for direction in how to build my network or need just one more resource of a color, so I'll gamble for one contract. Later in the game I'll want to take advantage of my network or flesh out my color distribution, so I'm willing to forgo the two resources to gamble for three.
Our publisher Chris Cieslik at Asmadi Games had the insightful idea of setting the bribe cost on the contract action to be the number of unflipped actions you had, then to have contract refresh them. This idea solved three problems at once: It prevents players from doing nothing but selecting contract in the late game, it forces players to take contract in the early game, and it guarantees players will have different numbers of contracts at the end of the game.
Rebecca: This is what I think pushes the game up the Euro-strategy scale. Everyone has the same actions and same number of turns, but your action choices determine both the cost and accessibility of your later actions. I've seen players do well playing a methodical game of using every action before contracting with a bribe of 0. I've also seen great games in which a player minimizes the number of times he takes a connect action and carefully manages resources in order to maximize the number of contracts he gets. It's fascinating how different strategies approach the action reset question.
This was roughly four years into design. At this point, the basic game system was in place. We made a few other small but important tweaks in that time. Colonies start with a bonus point, the resource trade rate is 3:1 instead of 2:1, and the contract deck only includes contracts on which all three planets have different colors. (If you don't include that last one, players end up with almost no solid resource production because they are too specialized. Then they don't do well or have fun, but aren't sure why. Eventually we realized it was the contract distribution.)
Rebecca: Contracts having three different colored planets was done early in the game design, but even then the contract deck had all possible Prime-Colony-Outpost combinations that met those criteria. We found that deck size to be too large and too variable, so we added additional constraints (like the Outpost moon color never matching the Prime) to trim the deck while keeping the underlying symmetric balance intact.
Our playtests were going well, but players still wanted a little more in the way of strategic variety. The basic game thought process was still about maximizing the quantity and quality of contracts you completed. Our solution to this was to add guilds. At the beginning, all we knew was that they were an alternate or supplemental point source. Their use would not be required to win the game, but some winning strategies could focus on guilds. How many points they were worth or how players could join was to be determined.
Rebecca: It should be noted that the strategic variety requests came from our hardcore playtesters, who by this time were very familiar with the game.
We tossed around a number of guild scoring systems, but discarded most of them for either being too complicated or rewarding the same plays that improve contracts. It's not a strategic option if it doesn't actually change your strategy! The one thing that worked was awarding players points equal to the number of planets they had infiltrated, so the blue guild is worth four points if you've infiltrated four blue planets by the end of the game.
Rebecca: This is a different strategic direction since all the planets on a contract are different colors, so going to an extra blue planet doesn't increase the value of a contract. Being on three blue planets might help complete contracts for distribution, but it will depend on which blue planets you are at.
This worked well for the most part, but presented two challenges to solve. First, the value of joining a guild is constant, so players have an incentive to join guilds as late in the game as possible (when the opportunity cost of losing resources is at its lowest). So the cost to join needs to start cheap and get expensive as the game goes on. And second, the red and purple guilds were much worse than the others (and the blue was a bit better) because there are few red and purple planets and one extra blue planet. We tried making a combined red/purple guild (too confusing), awarding a bonus point for joining these guilds (too fiddly), and adding Sabean Core as an extra red/purple planet (doesn't help enough). In the end what worked best was creating separate cost tracks to join each guild, and making the red and purple guilds cheaper than the others.
Very early concepts for the planets
Rebecca: We did keep Sabean Core, however, to replace an asteroid tile. The link costs for Sabean Core are slightly higher than the asteroids, but the planet itself potentially adds more purple and red. Since it's not on any contracts, this change didn't affect the contract distribution, while still supporting the red and purple guilds.
Players also needed some way to join guilds, which is where the scheme action came from. Previously we tried an action called Fence, which let you cash in contracts for bonus points, but it didn't create interesting game play. We kept the concept of cashing in contracts for scheme, but made it an alternate source of resource acquisition. The opportunity cost of cashing in a contract earlier is traded for always getting six resources, possibly from a world you don't yet control. Then infiltrating a guild during the scheme action gives the player the option of trading resources in the present for some number of points at end of game. And as a bonus, if they take this option they'll have additional strategic direction.
Rebecca: Scheme (or Fence) went through so many revisions. Being able to convert a difficult contract into six resources (even without an agent there) and possibly some points is very useful to certain strategies. Other strategies use it to fund their Guild bribes. It's one of those actions that's very flexible.
I really like how Acquire, Gamble, Scheme, Contract Board, and 3:1 resource trades are such different ways to get goods. Sometimes when we mention that Syndicate was partly inspired by Ticket To Ride, people think that set collecting might be a game mechanism; however, our good production mechanisms are quite different. One option is to build routes using only the goods of planets/moons in my network or explore a nearby world just for its resources. If I'm short a single good, I might try my luck at gambling or take the more expensive 3:1 trade that doesn't cost me an action. I could instead decide to scheme a contract away to get colors from a planet where I don't have agents, forgoing the potential for additional points. Sometimes the colors on the contract board will determine which contract I choose. The game is set up so that players have choices in how they get goods; they aren't at the mercy of the train deck or die roll to get certain resources into the system.
Last, there was some discussion as to whether the complexity of guilds was suitable for an initial play of the game, or if they should be added into later plays (similar to the action cards in Agricola). We tried both ways, but in the end they stayed. Even with the option of infiltrating guilds, The Phoenix Syndicate is slightly less complicated than Endeavor and Macao, two excellent games that didn't need a "training wheels" mode.
Rebecca: I'd say The Phoenix Syndicate is "less complicated" from a rules or teaching perspective as there are fewer things for a new player to track than in, say, Endeavor. Strategically, it feels to me on par with Macao (one of my favorites), without a deck of unique ability cards. One thing I like about The Phoenix Syndicate is that I feel like I can see how my choices are affecting my strategy.
For more details on game play, you can download the not-quite-finished-as-we're-awaiting-final-artwork rulebook (PDF) or check out the Kickstarter project which ends in early May 2012.
Ted Vessenes
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• Not sure what to choose during game night? Perhaps this handy-dandy "How to Choose the Perfect Board Game" flow chart will allieviate your worries:
(HT: That other Eric Martin)
• In a Tasty Minstrel Games newsletter, TMG's Michael Mindes writes, "I am doing an 'Ask Me Anything' on Reddit on Friday April 27th, 2012 from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. PDT (GMT -7)... For those of you not on Reddit, this will be a discussion where I field questions from anybody and everybody that wants to ask one." I'll confess to being "not on Reddit" and my efforts to find an appropriate place to link to failed; I did, however, run across Asmadi Games' Chris Cieslik "ask me anything" post, so perhaps I'm just an old fuddie-duddie and not hep to what the youngsters are all doing these days. (Bonus EM reference: Reddit's general manger is named Erik Martin.)
• Can you compare board game genres to music? BGG user Martin G – full name presumably Erig Martin G – has done so in a blog post on BGG. I disagree with many of the classifications in the original post, but I suppose that's the magic of argument and differing points of view. Lots of fun comments in the thread, many of them way above my level of music knowledge (which consists mostly of how to search for bands on Pandora).
• Tom Vasel – whose name is nothing like "Eric Martin" – has posted nominees for the Dice Tower Gaming Awards, with nominees coming from games released in 2011. With A Few Acres of Snow on the nominee list for game of the year, I expect to hear more grumbling from Jesse Dean given his commentary on reviewer neglect in praising a broken game.
As an aside, and to put more "Eric Martin" in this Eric Martin-free item, I have now fully grasped the fact that I'm in no way a member of the Cult of the New, as I sometimes picture myself. Perhaps I was at some point, glomming onto new games every few weeks as I attempted to gain personal experience with every release and build a mental catalog of what's out there, but those days are clearly in the past as I've played precisely one of the games nominated for "game of the year" on the DTGA list and I have strong interest in playing only two of the remaining nine titles. Of the first 200 games out of nearly 1,000 items listed as 2011 releases on BGG, I've played 22 of them. Who knows? Maybe that 11% playing rate still pops me into Cult of the New status for some, but given the number of games being released, I don't see how it's physically possible to play a huge percentage of them – much less play them enough times to meaningfully get a handle on which ones rise above the rest. Maybe that's just me, though...
Wed Apr 25, 2012 12:58 pm
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David Sirlin
United States
California
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Casual versus(??) Hardcore
"Casual" and "hardcore" can be a false dichotomy. Which one is World of Warcraft, for example? It's pretty casual friendly, and yet it's not at all casual to the hardcore raiders who spend literally more hours than a full time job at the game. Likewise, Puzzle Strike is pretty casual friendly, having kid characters, a pink box, and fairly easy rules. At the end of this post, I'll talk about the casual side of Puzzle Strike, and the several ways we're really turning up the casual appeal even more in the future, but for now, I want to tell you purely about the hardcore side – about Puzzle Strike as a serious, competitive, tournament game. Make no mistake, one of the missions of the game is:
Quote: For Puzzle Strike to be the best competitive deck-building game there is.
Okay, great mission and all, but how do we accomplish that mission? Let me tell you all that's gone into making that happen, and the challenges we've faced along the way. Here are the criteria that have always been at the heart of the project:
-----• Asymmetric design
-----• Player interaction
-----• Quick access to the meat of the game
-----• Strategically interesting dynamics
-----• Exciting moments built into the system
-----• Balance of "viable options during gameplay"
-----• Fairness of the asymmetric choices
Asymmetric design
In Puzzle Strike, you start by choosing a character. Each character has different abilities, allows for different gameplay, and appeals to different player personalities. I've been involved in competitive scenes for games for a long time and the excitement added by having a cast of characters from which to choose is enormous. The two-player version of the base set alone has 55 different character matchups, while the expansion brings that to 210 different matchups. There are so many nuances to knowing how to play all these matchups differently that symmetric games feel flat by comparison. Even apart from the big gameplay advantages of asymmetric games, there's a boost to the player community by having so much to debate and explore. Different characters also allow different players to find their personal playstyle in at least one of the many options.
Though your opinion may differ, to me a symmetric game would be a non-starter here, as in not eligible to even be considered as the best deck-building game for pure competition.
Player interaction
There's a reason to have games with low player interaction. Maybe you'd rather all play a mostly solitaire game without having the "harshness" of directly competing. Even in games with low direct interaction, there can be indirect forms of interaction. That said, this is not a great recipe for a real competitive game. The more player interaction there is, the more opportunity there is to display the kind of skill that should matter in a competitive game. A game with literally zero player interaction would still require skills, of course, and those would probably be the skills of optimization. It's just that a race of several non-interactive players optimizing is a missed opportunity when instead we could have a game of very high interaction, allowing for maneuvers and counter-maneuvers.
I've heard the terms "contested" and "uncontested" skills used, here. Uncontested skills are the kinds your opponent can't do anything about. In a video game like Street Fighter, that would be the part where you perform a difficult combo, for example. Contested skills are the kinds your opponent CAN do something about. In Street Fighter, the example would be getting at just the right range to do your move because your opponent can move his own character to affect that range. While uncontested skills can certainly exist in a good competitive game, the focus really needs to be on constested skills – at least if long-lasting tournament play is the goal.
In Puzzle Strike, the "crash" mechanism builds player interaction into the core of the game. You are trying to fill up the other guy's gem pile full of gems, and you do that by "crashing" (breaking) gems in your own pile and sending them to your opponent. He can "counter-crash" to stop those incoming gems. He might want to because doing so actually removes gems from the system, which slightly lengthens the game. Counter-crashing this way also doesn't cost an "action" so that's another reason to do it.
But there are reasons on the other side, too. Simply accepting those incoming gems and crashing on your own turn would require spending an action, but it would also yield a bit of money to buy better chips. And it would NOT remove gems from the system, so if you're in a good rushdown position, this might be a better option.
The point is that this kind of direct interaction is at the forefront of the game. Also, the red attack chips all have big effects on the game, and the blue defense chips have pretty relevant effects, too. You are often faced with decisions how about to respond to your opponent, and whether you should try to disrupt them, rush them down, or hang back and build your own economy. All the *indirect* interaction that's common in deck-building games is still there, too, of course – the part where your choices of which chips to buy depend on which chips you see your opponents buying. Luckily that's not *all* the interaction though.
Quick access to the meat of the game
In Puzzle Strike you start with your three character chips in your deck, so you can play those starting on the first turn. In some games, you start with basically blank cards and it takes more turns to get into the real meat of the game. This might sound like a small point, but in a tournament game, it's important to use every minute of gameplay to its full extent – or to cut that gameplay. If you want to run several games in series, it's kind of boring if the first few turns of all those games take a while to get things going, so it was a conscious decision to give players character chips they can play right away, even before the buys from the deck-building start to kick in.
Strategically interesting dynamics
Of course a game has to be actually interesting to play on a strategic level if it is to be a long-lasting competitive game. In June 2010, I wrote an article about how difficult it was to arrive at interesting dynamics that weren't degenerate. The short version is that the money system, the purple chips that manipulate the gems in your gem pile, and the delicate balance between rushdown, building econ, delaying the game, and ending the game were tough to get right. It's tough because the game system is interconnected, meaning that just about everything affects everything else. It's easier to balance a game if you have some subsystems that can be adjusted without messing up everything else, but if you do manage to get such a dense system to actually work, it means an even richer strategic playground to play in.
I also was the lead designer of Street Fighter HD Remix, and balancing that game was challenging, too. It was based on a game that had been played heavily in tournaments for 14 years, so changing anything about balance at all is a bit like threading a needle. Also, if you change anything about a character to fix a specific matchup, then it will affect all the other matchups. At first glance, it means the system is so interconnected that it's damn hard to work with. But in Street Fighter, it was actually possible to use a lot of tricks to make that balancing challenge easier. By thinking hard enough, many solutions to balance problems in a matchup could have minimal effects on all the other matchups.
One example is Dhalsim vs. Guile. If you aren't familiar with Street Fighter, Dhalsim has stretchy limbs that reach across the screen, while Guile often likes to stay back and throw his projectile called the Sonic Boom. This was a problem, a boring match. One champion tournament player suggested that barely changing the hitbox on one of Dhalsim's stretchy punches would mean the difference between it getting a clean hit against the Sonic Boom and trading hits. And that one change would really improve the gameplay of the match. Changing that hitbox had very little effect on any other match because it meant changing something on the backside of the character in a place where fighting moves don't usually interact anyway.
I'm not sure if you followed that, but the contrast is that in Puzzle Strike, there are usually no such tricks available to us. Every damn thing affects every other damn thing, which means a lot of work on the development end, but also a lot more ability of the player to affect the game with nuanced play than there would be otherwise.
Exciting moments built into the system
That last section might have sounded a bit dry. Although strategy is very important, there has to be excitement in a competitive game. Now that we understand games more than the olden days, I think we know that when making a competitive game, we want to build exciting moments into the system. I don't mean to force them artificially, but to create a game system that we know is likely to generate exciting moments.
In Puzzle Strike, there's a comeback mechanism that's modelled after the very interesting comeback mechanism in the video game Puzzle Fighter. (I was also lead designer of Puzzle Fighter HD Remix, by the way, so it's no surprise I chose this theme for Puzzle Strike!) Anyway in both games, when you have a lot of gems in your gem pile, you are closer to losing in some sense. If your side fills up to the top, you lose. In another sense, you're doing just fine though. One reason is you have more ammunition to fire back at the other player. And on top of that, both games have a "height bonus" that gives you an advantage for having a lot of gems. That means there's a push-your-luck element there, which also helps as a comeback mechanism. In Puzzle Strike, the height bonus allows you to draw more chips per turn the higher your gem pile is – so when you're close to losing, you can do even bigger combos.
Another conscious design decision to increase the drama of the game is WHEN the win condition is checked. The basic idea is that if the various kinds of gems in your gem pile add up to a total of ten or more, then you lose. But you don't instantly lose; this is checked only at the end of your turn. You often go over that limit, then on your turn manage to save yourself and stay in the game. It gets really exciting when your opponent sends you way, way, way over that limit of ten, and you somehow manage to pull off an amazing turn to throw it all back at him. This isn't an accidentaly exciting moment though – it's there on purpose an example of designing excitement into the game system.
Balance of "viable options during gameplay"
In my article series about balancing multiplayer competitive games I talk about the difference between two different usages of the word "balance". Sometimes people mean balancing the set of options available during gameplay. Both symmetric and asymmetric games have to care about that. If there are several kinds of moves you can make, but all of them basically suck except one kind, then that isn't "balanced" in a sense.
Asymmetric games have to deal with that AND then also deal with making sure the different starting options (in our case, all the characters) are fair against each other. Let's talk about that first kind of balance first, though: the viable options during gameplay, regardless of there even being different characters.
The article I linked earlier touched on the challenges of getting this kind of balance to work. After releasing the game, we've had a whole lot experience with it though, and have seen across dozens of tournaments exactly how different strategies are used – or not used – and there has been a threat to the balance of viable strategies we've been facing for a long time. The third edition of Puzzle Strike (and the Puzzle Strike Shadows expansion) make one change – one seemingly small change – that has a huge effect across the entire game to address. But first, what is the problem?
The problem is "mono-purple". That is, the strategy of ignoring most of the bank and buying only the purple chips that directly affect your gem pile. Playing in this way is kind of short circuiting the game, avoiding big swaths of it. That could be fine depending on how powerful such a strategy is. So is it powerful? Well, yes and no. Some characters in the second edition of Puzzle Strike tended dangerously close to mono-purple power, while others used more diverse strats. Then we released the Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack to address that. The situation was much improved, as more diverse strategies were viable than ever.
In developing the expansion, though, we were often faced with too small of a design space. We make an interesting character, but then the game system's reward for playing in the boring mono-purple way is a bit too much unless we take specific steps to fight that with various extra clauses on lots of chips that punish such a strategy. It also left us little design space in which to create new puzzle chips. (Those are the ones in the bank that change every game.) If a puzzle chip is too weak, people will ignore it and just buy purples – but purples are so strong that when we turn up the power of puzzle chips to compete, they often have to be so strong as to be game-breaking if they are tuned just a hair wrong. What we need is more breathing room here, more space to create chips that are of a reasonable power level compared to purple chips.
In another article, I talked about how I looked toward Starcraft for an answer to something, and their model of late-game units like Carriers that could smash early game defense sparked me to create uncounter-crashable 4-gems in Puzzle Strike. So again, I looked to Starcraft to answer our troubles here. Our trouble is that a player who buys only purples is trying to end the game as soon as possible; he is doing a six pool zergling rush, or something – but if the opponent holds off this rush, he is no better position. In Starcraft, the rushing player would have a big economic disadvantage, so there is more of a tradeoff in whether to rush. What makes matters worse is that in Puzzle Strike, it's not really even analogous to the rushing player having zerglings. Those are early game units that fade in effectiveness later. (Yeah, yeah they can be upgraded in Starcraft, but that's beside the point.) Anyway, all those purple chips in Puzzle Strike are just as good late as early, so it's like rushing for no economic disadvantage with hydralisks or mutalisks or something that you can win the game with later anyway.
This maneuver needs an economic disadvantage for the system to make strategic sense – and now it does.
The Combine chip (the basic purple chip that combines two smaller gems into one bigger one) now costs $1 of in-game money each time you play it. If you buy and play only this one chip over and over, you are rushing to end the game, but if your opponent buys just one or two to hold you off, he will be able to survive and extend the game. At that point, you will have spent several turns buying low cost chips, while his economy was not really affected, so he will have better tech going into the mid-game.
Along with this change, we also adjusted several other chips to allow for rushdown to still be possible, just in a way that requires actually using your character chips and puzzle chips from the bank. Overall, in high-level tournament play, there's a more diverse set of viable strategies now. Rushing, econ, disruption, and engine-building strats all coexist.
Fairness of the asymmetric choices
Once the game system works, we need to have a set of fair characters – that is, no character can be too good or too weak: Too good is a much worse problem because that invalidates all other characters; too weak is just minorly unfortunate because no one will play that character. After years of iteration based on tournament results, I think we're in good spot now. Twenty different characters(!) that all seem to have their uses in high level play, without any particular one of them dominating too much.
I could go on forever about the balancing process of these characters, but instead I'd rather talk about the goal of even balancing them in the first place. It seems that most game publishers are interested in releasing more and more and more content, like expansions every three months. New, new, new. I'm not interested in that at all, and it actually runs counter to the goal of creating a highly-polished competitive game. Instead of adding more and more, we are zeroing in on a better and better game. Each iteration has been more polished than the last, better gameplay dynamics, and better balance. If we simply add more and more, yeah, that appeals to some players, but it doesn't actually produce something legitimately great. It means instead of fixing whatever issues older chips / cards have, we would be waiting for them to rotate out of tournament play. We'd be forsaking those earlier sets and letting them lie with whatever issues tournament play had uncovered.
I'd rather give you all the very best versions of my games that we're able to produce, at that given moment. And with years of development effort now spent on making Puzzle Strike Third Edition (plus the Shadows expansion!) the best competitive game it can be, I can truthfully say that this is the best version we've produced so far, by a big margin. I look forward to seeing the competitive scene grow, and for years of Puzzle Striking to come.
You can also play Puzzle Strike at FantasyStrike.com for free, by the way. Some players have logged THOUSANDS of games of Puzzle Strike, and there are tournaments all the time, in addition to casual play. Thanks to the entire community of players who have all contributed to refining the game into its current awesome state.
•••
While it's nice to know that the game holds up at that level of play for expert tournament players, not everyone even cares about that. I mean, is it fun in the first place? How does it fare with more than two players?
Free-For-All Mode: Second Edition
In Puzzle Strike Second Edition, the four-player mode has player elimination. If your gem pile fills up, you're out of the game and the other players continue. Also, you can't choose who you crash to; you must always crash to the player to your left. ("Crash" means break gems in your own gem pile and send them to another player's gem pile.)
There's a reason the second edition worked this way and a reason why the third edition doesn't. Regarding player elimination, while it's not a desirable feature really, it's better than a system with "lame duck" gameplay. That term refers to a player who has no possible way to win a game, but who is somehow still in the game. For example, in a deck-bulding game in which you collect victory points and where the game ends when the stack of victory point cards is empty, it's possible for one player to be far enough behind that he cannot possibly get enough VP to win, even if he got all the remaining VP cards. Whenever you have a lame-duck player, you are inviting kingmaker. In other words, if you have a player who can't possibly win anymore, you are inviting the problem of that player making moves that will affect which *other* player will win. And beyond that, it's just a stupid feeling to be in a lame-duck situation.
Player elimination solves that problem. In Puzzle Strike Second Edition, if you're not out yet, you can still win. In order to reduce the downtime after you're out, the final crash that puts you over the top "overflows" and can possibly knock out other players at the same time. And besides that, the game is usually pretty fast anyway.
Then there's the other point: in Puzzle Strike Second Edition you can crash only to the left, not to anyone you want. If you could crash to anyone you want, the optimal strategy is both obvious and stupid: You should form a pre-game alliance with someone, and agree to gang up on the other players to eliminate them one by one, then face off with your "partner". Any free-for-all game with targeted attacks faces this problem, and I think any thoughtful design has to do something to prevent or minimize it. Hence your inability to choose your target in the second edition.
Great, so what's the problem? The problem is that even though player elimination and forced target selection solve real problems, a lot of people just don't like those things. Also, even though the game usually ends quickly after someone is eliminated, there are unfortunately times where it can drag on much too long.
Free-For-All Mode: Third Edition
With the Third Edition (and the Shadows expansion), I wanted to get rid of player elimination, but somehow not introduce the lame-duck problem and somehow avoid the problem of pre-game alliances, too. This was actually a tough nut to crack, and I think it took over a year to really figure out.
Now, the game ends at the same time for everyone whenever anyone's gem pile fills up. At that point, the winner is the player with the lowest gem pile. (If there's a tie, there's a tie-breaking procedure where everyone takes another turn.) Also, you can crash gems to any player you want, and you can even counter-crash to "save" other players from losing. The dynamics that result from this are non-obvious, somewhat bizarre, and quite interesting.
First, you can't really even make a pre-game alliance with someone. If you both decide to double-team another player, whichever player in this alliance has a higher gem pile total will realize he shouldn't allow that killing blow to happen, or he'll just lose. In fact, ANY time a player is about to have his or her gem pile filled to the top, that player ALWAYS has another "friend" in the game. Whichever other player doesn't have the lowest gem pile really wants to save the poor player who is about to cause the game to end. Who you're "friends" with necessarily shifts over the course of the game, depending on how poised you are to win when someone else causes the end-game condition.
I urge you to give it a try. I will say that the feedback from playtesters on this mode was pretty consistent. Almost every one of them said, "This mode sounds terrible", then they played, then they said "This is great, I'm never playing the player elimination mode again." Ha! Perhaps it would have been better marketing-wise to have a mode that played terribly but *sounded* like it would be good. I will settle for the other way around though!
2v2 Team Battle Mode
This mode is pretty self-explanatory. Have you played Two-Headed Giant in Magic: The Gathering? It's pretty much like that – and it's nice to have someone on your side when you're trying to have a good time.
Custom Clockwork Mode
In Flash Duel: Second Edition, I put in a mode where you can draft your own character by mixing and matching chips from different characters. People really liked that, so it's in the new Puzzle Strike as well. Enjoy!
Panic Time
You can never get 100% of the people to agree on anything, ever. That is, until this rule. It is the first time in human history that everyone agreed that a thing was good.
The "Panic Time" rule simulates in a puzzle game when time is running out and the pieces are falling faster. It exists to end games that are going too long. When stacks of chips in the bank run out, players have to ante 2-gems instead of 1-gems. If the game goes a bit longer, Panic Time turns to Danger Time in which they must ante 3-gems. If it goes a bit longer than that, Deadly Time activates where they must ante 4-gems – which are *un-countercrashable* in Puzzle Strike!
95% of the reason this rule exists is for new players, and 5% is for experts. Sometimes new players struggle to build a good enough deck to finish each other off. (Often they buy too many money chips because that is a good strategy in other deck-building games, but not in Puzzle Strike.) To help address that, the rulebook now gives basic advice on how to play effectively. But more than that, the Panic Time rule will kick in and help you end the game if your deck is getting too bloated to do the job effectively.
When good players play, Panic Time rarely kicks in – like I said, it's mostly for beginners – but when it does kick in during expert play, the experts are thankful. Once in a while, two experts have the opposite problem as the beginners. They each manage to build such efficient and amazing decks that they stay exactly equal and struggle to finish one another off. While this is rare, it's really stupid when it happens, and players will even skip playing the mega-powerful Master Puzzler chip in this situation because all the good chips it could get them are already gone from the bank. When experts do manage to reach this kind of deadlock (and again, that's not often), an end-the-game force from Panic Time is welcome.
Components
The Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack came with extra components: playmats and screens to hide your chips on the table. Even though these things aren't necessary, they sure help. And just as importantly, they look cool. It's just more fun when there's some extra visual appeal to a game.
The screens each teach a different game rule using amusing 8-bit character art, and if you don't like holding a bunch of chips in your hand, they offer an alternative:
The playmats are now boards in Puzzle Strike Third Edition and Puzzle Strike Shadows:
A lot of reviews said that after playing with those components, they couldn't imagine playing the game without them. Okay, fine – they come right in the box now! And also, the box is bigger so there's even more space to hold the extra components.
•••
If any of this sounds good to you – the intense competitive game, or the new multiplayer modes and extra components – get in on the Kickstarter project for the Puzzle Strike Shadows expansion as well as the Puzzle Strike Third Edition base set.
Thanks!
Sirlin
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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• The UK publisher Ragnar Brothers will debut a new game at the 2012 UK Games Expo, held May 25-27, and as is sometimes the case with the Ragnars, the design is perpendicular to past releases. Here's a short description of Anyways from the publisher:
Quote: Anyways is a fast-paced, interactive word game in which players place one letter at a time from their hand onto the board, while trying to maximize their score. Words score in every direction: horizontally, vertically and diagonally; forwards or backwards. In other words, Anyways! Players choose whether to restock their hand from the consonant bag or the vowel bag, and letters vary in value. There is a unique scoring system for this unique game. The tiles are solid wood and in black with colored letters, making for a stylish display!
• Writing from Alan Moon's somewhat industry-only gaming event The Gathering of Friends, blogger/cartoonist Debbie Ridpath Ohi shows a couple of pics of game components from City of Horror, due out from Repos Production (with Asmodee distributing) in time for a Gen Con debut in August 2012.
• In a another blog post from TGoF, Ohi shows off Ultimate Werewolf: Inquisition, an apparently forthcoming title at Spiel 2012 from Bézier Games and "Legend Dan Hoffman". I expect Bézier's Ted Alspach to send me a breathless email chock-full of superlatives and virtual pats-on-the-back about this title in the near future because that's just the kind of guy he is...
• Belgian publisher Flatlined Games sold out of the first edition of Ken Rush's Rumble in the House – all 2,900 copies – in just three months following its debut at Spiel 2011, but as of late April 2012 the game is back in print once more, with a slightly larger box to keep everything flat and the lid closed during shipping. While the first edition contained rules in five languages, the new edition comes in two versions: one French/Dutch and the other English/German/Spanish.
• Fantasy Flight Games has announced a new expansion for Battles of Westeros – the House Baratheon Army Expansion, due out Q2 2012.
• French game news site TricTrac details some of the changes in GOSU2, the recently announced reboot of GOSU from Moonster Games. Each of the goblin cards will have some combination of seven icon-oriented powers, with those powers existing in both regular and MAX versions. The "vision" power, for example, has you draw five cards and keep one at the basic level, with MAX allowing you to keep two cards. Destruction either lets you destroy a free card (basic) or swap the position of two cards on the same level, then destroy a free card (MAX). The «link» ability mentioned in the previous announcement involves the addition of a card to one's army. Cards have link icons on all four sides, and as you add a card to your army, you're linking it to one or more existing cards, which grants your cards power in various ways.
• TricTrac also notes that Perepau LListosella's Sidibaba, which publisher Hurrican debuted at Spiel 2011, has now reached retail stores in France after publication delays caused by production errors. Asmodee is handling distribution of the title in the U.S., as noted in this February 2012 news item, but the previously announced April 2012 release date is likely pushed back a tad since the game is just hitting French stores now.
• Two titles from Queen Games – Kimmo Sorsamo's Kairo and Donald X. Vaccarino's Kingdom Builder: Nomads – have been released in some parts of the world (Kairo in France, Nomads in the UK) and are undoubtedly making their way to parts of the world yet unblessed with these particular titles – or maybe they're not and Queen will force people to order each new release in 2012 from a separate country in order to encourage inter-continental oneness and gamer unity across borders. That sounds like a reasonable business plan, right?
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