Game: Höyük

Thread: Spanish Language Cards

dirkgent001 — 2008-11-18T20:50:32+00:00

This is just a heads up to all you Spanish language gamers!

I'm working on Spanish Language cards of the colored set I released before. Aspect cards, Event Cards, and Turn Sequence guides are being translated.

Here's a look at some sample cards:

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Howitzer_120mm — 2008-09-15T22:39:14+00:00

Original Black and White Cards set 3 (with permission from designer)

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Howitzer_120mm — 2008-09-15T22:38:57+00:00

Original Black and White Cards set 2 (with permission from designer)

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Howitzer_120mm — 2008-09-15T22:38:39+00:00

Original Black and White Cards set 1 (with permission from designer)

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Howitzer_120mm — 2008-09-15T22:38:13+00:00

Original Black and White Ovens (with permission from designer)

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Howitzer_120mm — 2008-09-15T22:37:54+00:00

Original Black and White Houses (with permission from designer)

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Howitzer_120mm — 2008-09-06T16:03:08+00:00

Original Card Sheet to sort the cards (with permission)

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Howitzer_120mm — 2008-09-06T16:01:20+00:00

Original Black and White Destroyed Houses (with permission)

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Howitzer_120mm — 2008-09-06T16:01:19+00:00

Original Black and White Pens (with permission)

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Howitzer_120mm — 2008-09-06T16:00:17+00:00

Original Black and White Shrines (with permission)

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dirkgent001 — 2008-04-15T16:51:53+00:00

Sample Cards for the Custom colored set, with blessings from the Designer

Thread: Hoyuk : An award and a new version on print&play

peio — 2007-09-12T20:33:59+00:00

Hoyuk is a construction game where players build a replica of an ancient city using square pieces representing houses. The game is played without board, directly on the table. Hoyuk is a 2 to 4 players game age 12 and up.

On July 15th 2007 the game Hoyuk won the first prize at a game design contest in France. This contest is held during a game festival in Parthenay, France. The public is invited to playtest and grade the prototypes. In the meanwhile, a jury composed of several professionals of the gaming industry also test and grade the games. Eventually, both grades are combined for each competitor, and the highest average wins ... which did Hoyuk !

This award is the result of more than 1 year and a half of testing and modifications. The game is still available freely on my website for print&play.

I just uploaded a short presentation (2 pages, pdf) featuring the very last version of the game released this month. You can find it on my website or access it thru the game description on BGG.

Thanks for reading.

Thread: Uncovering an ancient city

ahoodedfigure — 2007-08-08T08:30:16+00:00

This article assumes basic familiarity with the rules. It's a combination of strategy and session, but I put it into session since it's directly tied to a specific game I played. I also used the term settlement instead of block, for some reason.

I managed to play the game, but it wasn't with the three or four players that the rules say, just two. The game lasted about as long as the suggested playing time for 3-4 players, incidentally.

This was the first time I played, against an experienced player, so I accepted that not all of the possibilities of play were going to be apparent to me right away. The more I learned about it, the more I realized there was a good bredth of strategic possibility. I also began to realize that if anyone's interested in playing a two-player variant, there might need to be some modifications, as it becomes a race between you and the other player. The possibility for inhibiting the other player's advancement is great, and perhaps the chance of a leader hindered by two other players might help balance things out. Still, our final result was close, so I'd have to play the game in two-player more to cement this impression.

We began with a central settlement that grew to be our largest. The disasters we did suffer were all of the "smallest settlement" and "least equipped" variety until the very end, allowing the starting settlement, and a later thriving settlement next to it, to balloon and score a cards for both players.

Building with the disaster cards in mind is one of the keys to a successful city. Once you familiarize yourself with the various possible results you can figure out where it's best to invest your resources. As the game progresses, it becomes more obvious which disasters will turn up (unless you wind up going over six turns, when the disaster cards are reshuffled). In our case, once the little settlements were hit by disasters twice, it was easier to build them with confidence, using them to prohibit progress of the larger settlements through aggressive building tactics.

You also need to bear in mind balance, as focusing too much on one settlement or one aspect (height, family size, shrines, etc) will deplete the card stacks without allowing you the chance to better choose which cards you would take and predict which cards those would be. The cards are how you score, and picking cards of the similar type becomes more and more important as your ability to play more and more each turn increases.

In our session I focussed a lot on height, which was pointed out later to be a rather expensive method of gaining cards, since you need to build one tile on top of a another, negating the tile below, while still only getting credit for every tile still showing. It did pay off for me, but I wound up depleting the "height" card stack, forcing me to stick my used cards back in that stack during the refresh period to maintain my point income, and even my monopoly on height came to an end when my opponent, empowered by all the cards he'd gained from the other advancements (shrines and pens, especially), managed to build the highest single structure in the game. While his having the highest building didn't have any additional effect, it showed me how not spreading out my resources lead to my being overtaken even in what I viewed as my specialty.

I also invested in some ovens, but because I was busy refreshing the height stack, eventually the ovens didn't pay off for me in the final round of play because the stack was exhausted. Given that the final score was 57 to 59, maybe if I'd kept better watch of my other investment I might have been able to pull ahead.

I enjoyed the game. I think it might be better for the designed requirement of 3 or 4 players, but I think the 2 player angle needs to be explored more before I'm sure of this. Given that I had fun with it, I can see it possibly working for two. At first I was wary of the non-grid building style, but what struck me was the attention to theme that free building allows: when you build in these chaotic formations, it looks more like an archaeological dig of an ancient city when you're done, and makes me wonder if maybe some of those strange house placements we see in pictures of ancient cities might have been done due to competition between families. I also liked that it forces the players to work together in a way, as the families in a given city don't benefit very much unless they build side by side.

I will definitely play this game again.