By the time you’re listening to this, we’re probably already in Vegas for Dice Tower West! We’re going to hang about all day playing games – which naturally leads to the question of what we’re going to play? These are the games we came up with! Before we bite off more than we can chew, we talk about Ghost Lift, Cities, and I, Napoleon.
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Timecodes:
02:31 – Ghost Lift 08:13 – Cities 14:06 – I, Napoleon 24:40 – Dice Tower West anticipated games 26:05 – Biblios 27:04 – Feya’s Swamp / Kaivai 28:26 – Cheese Thief 29:03 – Habemus Papam 31:15 – Wroth 33:33 – Greed Incorporated 35:39 – Dark Pact 38:45 – Secret Tribe 39:52 – Eternal Decks 41:03 – All In: Predictions 42:04 – Cthulhu: Dark Providence 44:14 – Robo Rally Dice
Thank you to Heart Society for generously letting us use What’s On Your Mind, Kid? from their album Wake the Queens.
Before the fall fair and convention circuit is coming to an end, I had the opportunity to attend Süddeutsche Spielemesse (Southern German Game Fair) in Stuttgart. As when I went last time, it was a pleasant, laid-back experience.
The game fair is part of a conglomerate of hobby and leisure related fairs which are all held over the same long weekend in neighboring fair halls. As the ticket covers all fairs, you are free to explore everything. That’s great if you go as a group or family with differing interests: Your creative-minded daughter can get all inspired at the arts & crafts fair, your animal-loving son will try to make friends with the cats, rabbits, and camels at the animal fair, your gourmet spouse samples their way through the food fair, and then everybody meets at the game fair because you all love board games. Right?
These folks will go to the board game fair later and play Camel Up.
With that setup, Süddeutsche Spielemesse’s target audience is broad, from the hobbyist to the very casual gamer. Consequently, you’ll find a lot of games outside of the hobby board game niche – from classics like chess and go over sports games to role-playing games. The exhibitors are usually either vendors (game test opportunities are rare), clubs looking for new members (like many of the role-playing clubs), or, my favorite, the big gaming island run in the middle where you can just borrow a game and play it free of charge which gives Süddeutsche Spielemesse a certain convention feel.
At this point, it is tradition that the gaming island remains open until 10pm on Friday, allowing for a beautiful evening of gaming. I met with a friend there and we played three different two-player games:
Northern German cities Hamburg and Altona try to outdo each other – yet while the usual victory point collecting occurs, these only matter if the game runs its full seven rounds. And it is much more likely that one of the cities will decisively outdo the other in one of the four areas of competition (alliances, ships, lawsuits, and prestige) and score an instant victory. With such a plethora of instant victory conditions, you will always feel the thrill of chasing one yourself and being threatened with another by your opponent.
Yes, that’s a concrete floor… all tables were taken already. I report that I am still young and springy enough for this kind of gaming (at least for 45 minutes).
In our game, we both started conservatively, getting a little bit of everything. Then my friend made a play for the alliances and was only one of them short of victory… but I could stave off defeat and counter-punch with ship dominance. I guess more experienced players would be at each other’s throat from the get-go which should make for exciting gaming and high replayability (at a very moderate complexity).
Two players chart their path up a mountain built from a shared supply of tiles, each of which has a unique combination of a color (indicating its row) and number (indicating its file). Thus, you always know that a tile you took cannot be accessed by your opponent – and vice versa. This kind of very abstract game with almost-perfect information is usually not up my alley, and Solstis proved no different. We were both unenthused by its mix of logical planning and high randomness in the rare case of placing a nature spirit. However, each play only took 10 minutes, so we didn’t spend much time to gain the valuable knowledge of what’s not our jam.
Table time! That’s a pretty solid path up the mountain, and you can see a lot of nature spirits in the middle – but one of them (the red one) is the evil spirit of vengeance.
Maybe our highlight of the fair: Agent Avenue pits its two players against each other as retired secret agents trying to catch each other. To unveil the other’s identity, they enlist their suburban neighbors, all of which are anthropomorphic animals, from daredevil wolves over codebreaker owls to double agent vixens. The recruitment comes by “I cut, you choose” – but as one of the two cards the active player offers to their opponent is face-up, the other face-down, there is a spy-appropriate amount of bluffing and deduction. Pair this with a varied, but not overwhelming amount of instant victory/defeat conditions and card effects, and you have a light, but tense contest which resolves in no time at all (we played three times in 40 minutes).
My green figurine is being pursued by the blue one. So far, my crew of agents is decidedly sub-par – the double agent on the left is only effective when you have two of them (numbers on the left), the sentinel on the right also kicks in at two and three, whereas the daredevil in the middle will lose you the game once you collect three of them.
Any games of these that sound like your cup of tea? Have you attended any cool local conventions or fairs recently? Let me know in the comments!
Before the fall fair and convention circuit is coming to an end, I had the opportunity to attend Süddeutsche Spielemesse (Southern German Game Fair) in Stuttgart. As when I went last time, it was a pleasant, laid-back experience.
The game fair is part of a conglomerate of hobby and leisure related fairs which are all held over the same long weekend in neighboring fair halls. As the ticket covers all fairs, you are free to explore everything. That’s great if you go as a group or family with differing interests: Your creative-minded daughter can get all inspired at the arts & crafts fair, your animal-loving son will try to make friends with the cats, rabbits, and camels at the animal fair, your gourmet spouse samples their way through the food fair, and then everybody meets at the game fair because you all love board games. Right?
These folks will go to the board game fair later and play Camel Up.
With that setup, Süddeutsche Spielemesse’s target audience is broad, from the hobbyist to the very casual gamer. Consequently, you’ll find a lot of games outside of the hobby board game niche – from classics like chess and go over sports games to role-playing games. The exhibitors are usually either vendors (game test opportunities are rare), clubs looking for new members (like many of the role-playing clubs), or, my favorite, the big gaming island run in the middle where you can just borrow a game and play it free of charge which gives Süddeutsche Spielemesse a certain convention feel.
At this point, it is tradition that the gaming island remains open until 10pm on Friday, allowing for a beautiful evening of gaming. I met with a friend there and we played three different two-player games:
Northern German cities Hamburg and Altona try to outdo each other – yet while the usual victory point collecting occurs, these only matter if the game runs its full seven rounds. And it is much more likely that one of the cities will decisively outdo the other in one of the four areas of competition (alliances, ships, lawsuits, and prestige) and score an instant victory. With such a plethora of instant victory conditions, you will always feel the thrill of chasing one yourself and being threatened with another by your opponent.
Yes, that’s a concrete floor… all tables were taken already. I report that I am still young and springy enough for this kind of gaming (at least for 45 minutes).
In our game, we both started conservatively, getting a little bit of everything. Then my friend made a play for the alliances and was only one of them short of victory… but I could stave off defeat and counter-punch with ship dominance. I guess more experienced players would be at each other’s throat from the get-go which should make for exciting gaming and high replayability (at a very moderate complexity).
Two players chart their path up a mountain built from a shared supply of tiles, each of which has a unique combination of a color (indicating its row) and number (indicating its file). Thus, you always know that a tile you took cannot be accessed by your opponent – and vice versa. This kind of very abstract game with almost-perfect information is usually not up my alley, and Solstis proved no different. We were both unenthused by its mix of logical planning and high randomness in the rare case of placing a nature spirit. However, each play only took 10 minutes, so we didn’t spend much time to gain the valuable knowledge of what’s not our jam.
Table time! That’s a pretty solid path up the mountain, and you can see a lot of nature spirits in the middle – but one of them (the red one) is the evil spirit of vengeance.
Maybe our highlight of the fair: Agent Avenue pits its two players against each other as retired secret agents trying to catch each other. To unveil the other’s identity, they enlist their suburban neighbors, all of which are anthropomorphic animals, from daredevil wolves over codebreaker owls to double agent vixens. The recruitment comes by “I cut, you choose” – but as one of the two cards the active player offers to their opponent is face-up, the other face-down, there is a spy-appropriate amount of bluffing and deduction. Pair this with a varied, but not overwhelming amount of instant victory/defeat conditions and card effects, and you have a light, but tense contest which resolves in no time at all (we played three times in 40 minutes).
My green figurine is being pursued by the blue one. So far, my crew of agents is decidedly sub-par – the double agent on the left is only effective when you have two of them (numbers on the left), the sentinel on the right also kicks in at two and three, whereas the daredevil in the middle will lose you the game once you collect three of them.
Any games of these that sound like your cup of tea? Have you attended any cool local conventions or fairs recently? Let me know in the comments!
The draft’s back! This time it’s card games, and we’re picking the best of what ought to be a staple of any good collection. We love card games, we love drafting games, and you love winning money, so be sure to vote for whoever you think drafted the best set, and you could win a $100 gift card! Before deal everyone in, we talk about Money!, Venture, and Fishing.
If you don’t want to miss an episode, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts/Google Podcasts/Stitcher/Spotify, or add our RSS feed to your favourite app. Reviews and subscriptions really help us and would be greatly appreciated! To download the episode directly, click here.
If you’d like to discuss anything in the episode, please do so in the comments below, visit our BoardGameGeek guild, join our Discord, or Facebook Group! Any feedback is also always helpful. If you’d like to show your support for the show, we also have a Patreon with some fun rewards, and a merch store!
Timecodes:
03:02 – Money! 12:43 – Venture 20:27 – Fishing 28:39 – Card Games Draft 31:15 – Innovation 32:38 – Race for the Galaxy 34:20 – Hanabi 35:27 – Marvel Champions: The Card Game 36:21 – Dominion 37:47 – SCOUT 39:28 – Glory to Rome 40:58 – The Crew: Mission Deep Sea 41:50 – Arboretum 42:12 – Lost Cities 42:57 – Bohnanza 43:57 – Tichu 45:06 – Skull King 47:00 – Res Arcana 48:07 – That’s Not a Hat
Anmelden
