I know there are people watching this game with interest.

I've just posted a longish article on Gone Gaming about the process of translating this (unofficially!) into English, as well as some thoughts on the game itself.

Any errors or inaccuracies are entirely mine.

Hope this will be interesting for some of you

That was really interesting to read through your process of translating. It sounds like quite a task!!!!

I'm interesting in getting this game but as you say I would also love to see it taken on by an English publisher.

Just wondering how easy or difficult this translation was compared to the many others you've already done? It sounds like it might be towards the more difficult end due to the old agriculture theme...

AB

Thanks, AB.

I have to say, this was a really hard game to translate for three reasons:

1. Working with the rules, you only have partial information. There's just so much in the game, and a lot on the cards that I haven't got to yet.
2. The terminology - as I said, 17th century farming practices are not something I know much anything at all about. I'm sure there's a couple of errors - I found one today, in fact. I'd worried about the word Vorkoster - not in any of my dictionaries, but a Vorkosten is an initial cost. I tentatively used Assessor but saw the card today at Boardgame News and, from the picture, realised it's actually a different verb - vor=before, kosten=to taste, ie a Food taster. (Luckily, I hadn't uploaded the file with that term in it). That's a hazard of unofficial/amateur translations, unfortunately.
3. The sheer length of the rules - I think my docs got to 25 pages.

What was great, and made the translation much easier, was the level of communication with Hanno, who got up each morning to long emails from me asking detailed questions about complex aspects of the game, and who patiently dealt with all of them.


Speaking completely off the top of my head, and with no inside knowledge or industry contacts, I would think it would be a big undertaking for an English publisher, due to the amount of translation and typesetting that would be needed (did I say, 360 cards?). I'd guess that they'd want to see a fairly high level of interest and excitement in the game before they would take it on. I hope someone does, though, as I really am very excited about this one and I think it would get a lot of play.

Well - I am the one to say Thank you, Melissa.
You just took a hell of a task out of my hands and thus provided me with some spare time to do the tutorial.
Allright, now I have to change some of the terms I used to the ones you used, but that's fine with me. :-)

Thanks for your work Melissa!

Hopefully, the file queue won't be too long...

On the stall / stable translation.

Could you not have kept it as stall? It is the proper English word for a place where an individual animal is kept. Having never seen the game maybe it would need to be stalls but I don't like stables for non-equines.

It's tricky, Andy, because the stables allow up to 4 animals - they're not spaces for individual animals.

Happy to discuss what would be a better term - but I'm drawing a blank. I did consider 'Barn' but it seems too big.

For what it's worth, dictionary.com disagrees with us - it gives as the first definition "a building for the lodging and feeding of horses, cattle, etc." - so I think stable is probably OK.

Wow Melissa, this looks like it was lots of work. Hope you enjoy the gameplay.


Why didn't they send you a (low quality) scan of all the cards to look them up when necessary?


dict.leo.org
der Vorkoster - taster (as bodyguard)
It's somebody who has to eat from the food to make sure it isn't venomed.

Regarding some other words mentioned in your blog:
- Ausbildung: training/learning/teachings of any type. School, apprenticeship, study, training on job, ...
And no, "Chief's daughter" or "Lazy student" are no Ausbildung in german, too; it's used in an ironic sense here.
Looking over you list of examples, it sounds like "Tätigkeit" would have been the better german word. But then, it doesn't fit to the fact that you need to have several of them to be able to play some cards.
- Stall: i think stable is the right translation.
- Nährwert: nutrition?
- Anschaffung: purchase?

And this big thing is a 30 minutes game? Now i'm very curious.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/files/boardgame/all?filestate=p...
10 days. 180 items.

I see what you mean - although you often have more than one stall in a shed or stable.

I would call a building for animals a shed. Pig sty and stable are the obvious specialisations which get their own names. Cow shed is the most common usage. I know of no-one who would call a cow shed a cow stable. However shed seems far too prosaic.

BTW - The English Heritage Online Thesaurus says "Stable: A building in which horses are accommodated."

It's a pity that games that'll be out in Essen can't get a bit of a push forward...that'll be 10 valuable days wasted...

10 days delay? That won't do.

Tell ya what.

Rules

Glossary (Playeraid).

Both in PDF format.

I'll take 'em down when they get through the file queue.


(Edit: Files approved, Links removed)

SWEET!

Way.
To.
Go.

Unbeatable

Well, it's more than 300 different cards. And she didn't request it. I sent her everything she asked for. ;-)
But she now has access to our internal forums and can look up all the cards.



I have to disagree. The term Ausbildung was chosen for several good reasons: It's something you have to learn during the game, you have to pay time and food to learn it, and the effect works in most cases until end of game.



It's 30 minutes per player.
A 4-player-game clocks between 90 and 120 minutes.

But looking at these cards, Hanno, it appears that they refer to people, not training or skills. Some of them could be skills that different family members could acquire, but it's awfully hard to learn to be a wet nurse (particularly if you're a man)! That's why when I was talking with Melissa, I thought a better English term might be "workers" or "helpers"--someone you're hiring (with food) to help you out. And, in fact, the one card of these that we've seen (Vorkoster) shows a person in the illustration.

By the way, this is the Essen release I'm most excited about. Uwe has always been one of my favorite designers and it looks like he's tackled something completely different for him and very ambitious. I just hope that with your efforts and Melissa's hard work, I'll be able to play this without an English-German dictionary at my elbow!

Well, don't forget that you start the game with 2 playing pieces - farmer and wife. So it's probably not the farmer who learns how to be a wet nurse, it's his wife. ;-)
If you call them "farmhands" or something similar, players get confused. The only "people" involved is the farmer's family, and you have to pay food upkeep during harvest time for everyone.

Excellent "little" post Melissa. I'm sure you've earned the fame and glory

I had a question on game duration. Is the 30min that BGG says correct? I seems like that's a pretty crazy weight/duration ratio... any thoughts?

Ahh ok, now I get it... seems more appropriate, though 30 min per player seems decent (2 players = 1 hour). Any idea on "scalability"?

I've not played it yet, but it looks like it will work well with the full range of players. Including different sets of action cards for the 3 to 5 player games ensures that key actions are available to all, and (I think) stops the problem where a game works well with lower numbers of players but less well with more.

I'm keen to play a solo game to try it out.